In his study of Catholic influence on presidential politics between 1960 and 2004, Lawrence J. McAndrews offers a thorough, engaging, and extensively researched study that begins with the victory of John F. Kennedy and ends with the defeat of John Kerry. The contrast between Kennedy and Kerry is striking. While Kennedy assured Protestant ministers that he would make decisions independently of the church, Kerry defended his Catholicism to a skeptical public and lost the majority of Catholic votes to his Methodist opponent. Ironically, part of the reason for Kerry's defeat can be traced to the declining significance of anti-Catholicism in American life. As Catholics became less likely to identify as a religious minority in a Protestant nation, they lost the sense of group loyalty that would motivate them to vote for one of their own. The title of McAndrews's book, What They Wished For, alludes to these unforeseen consequences. While the decline of anti-Catholicism means that Catholic access to political participation in American life is no longer in question, Catholics are less likely to vote as a coherent group in deference to the wishes of the clergy.

McAndrews does not generalize about Catholics as a whole as much as he focuses on political involvement at the institutional level. With its attention to how Catholic organizations used interpersonal networks to exert political pressure, the book could be subtitled the Catholic lobby. Lobbying, however, has negative associations, as McAndrews acknowledges: “The word ‘lobbying’ too often conjures up twisted arms and greased palms. So the Catholic hierarchy would shrink from the term” (334). Nevertheless, as with lobbyists for teachers or environmentalists, representatives of the church advocated on behalf of people who function less like a discrete community than as an interest group whose political positions overlap but are not identical.

This tension between the hierarchy and a diverse laity is evident in the major issues that McAndrews surveys to organize the book's narrative. On civil rights in the 1960s, for example, clerical support for integrating schools created conflict with some segregationist Catholics. While the bishops tended to be on the same page as the first Catholic president on broader ecumenical concerns about peace and social justice, one irony of Kennedy's religious identity was that the representatives of the church were nervous about intervention in what appeared to be a distinctly Catholic issue — contraception. When the Kennedy administration supported family planning policies, the clergy still betrayed a consciousness of minority status in their unwillingness to bring critical pressure. As McAndrews explains, “Because he was one of them, many Catholics pressed Kennedy especially hard on arms control and civil rights. And because he was one of them, they were relatively soft on Kennedy on birth control” (50).

For the rest of the book, beginning with the Johnson administration, the church was free to exert what influence it could without the appearance that it could give orders. This often created tension between church teaching and presidential policy, as with Pope Paul VI's opposition to the Vietnam War. Vietnam, however, revealed divergent views not only between church and state but also between the American church and Rome. McAndrews notes that papal calls for peace were not always echoed among American clergy preoccupied with Cold War dualism. Vocal opponents of the war like the Berrigan brothers remained in the minority while most American Catholics expressed a greater affinity for anti-communism. Catholic support for the war waned under the Nixon administration, but civil disobedience did not become popular as much as anti-Vietnam War sentiment entered the mainstream. Despite the clash over Vietnam, the Nixon presidency marked a turning point in the allegiance of Catholics to the Democratic Party. McAndrews provides detailed accounts of discussions surrounding Nixon's hopes to appeal to a backlash against Johnson's Great Society. Johnson's plans to help the poor had support among the hierarchy, but many lay Catholics took stands that typified ethnic and class identifications. Opposition to a perceived welfare state grew to where white, working-class Catholics were imagined as archetypal “Reagan Democrats.”

As the book moves through presidential administrations concluding with George W. Bush, McAndrews maintains his focus on institutional pressure and describes efforts to articulate a “consistent ethic of life” on issues including efforts to end hunger, welcome refugees, limit nuclear weapons, and oppose American military inventions abroad. Attempts to frame diverse positions as part of a consistent ethic, however, did not always persuade lay Catholics who chose positions as it suited them. Furthermore, the consistent ethic ideal was eclipsed by the prominence of abortion as the most visible Catholic issue.

While Catholic opposition to legal abortion would not capture majority support, it would bring conservative Catholics into common cause with conservative Protestants. Thus, Catholic voting patterns were more likely to be consistent with American partisan politics rather than denominational affiliation. The acceptance of Catholics within the American mainstream leads McAndrews to conclude: “Catholics, for so long on the periphery of American society and politics, have secured their place on the inside of American history. And though it has not been everything they imagined, the view is still much better from there” (382). It is not entirely clear, however, what constitutes “better” in this sentence apart from the mere presence of self-identified Catholics in American politics. McAndrews's book shows that the clergy were not successful in gaining popular support for a consistent ethic of life. Indeed, the tendency of Catholic political views to reflect the broader American public raises the question of whether American Catholicism is a coherent unit of analysis at all. In the end, what might be most valuable about McAndrews's What They Wished For is that it provides a painstaking study of organizational politics that demonstrates how institutional pressure often acts as a social force in its own right regardless of popular support.