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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Graham opposes Kennedy because Kennedy is a Democrat, and also because Kennedy is Catholic. Graham doesn’t believe a person of the Catholic faith should be President of the United States, and he’d invited like-minded Protestant leaders to his villa in Switzerland to strategize how to undermine Kennedy’s campaign.
True patriots, then, had to protect pure white Christian America from the rise of Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and other immigrants. Starting with their often-used slogan “America First,” the Klan always linked American patriotism to white supremacy and their anti-immigrant mission, carrying that message in Klan-run newspapers, pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and even songs.
White supremacy, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, fear of immigrants—for the KKK, they’re all linked together, and it’s up to “native born” patriotic white Americans to fight back.
Kennedy isn’t shying away from it. “Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured,” he begins. “So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again—not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me—but what kind of America I believe in.”
“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” he declares. “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish, where … no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”
“While this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed,” he adds, “in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist.… Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.”
Kennedy’s mention of the Quaker faith is pointed. Nixon is a Quaker—not a common denomination—and Kennedy is highlighting the bigotry of attacking one person’s personal faith but not another’s.
“We have to prove our faith in the equality of all men by practicing at home what we preach abroad,” he declares, “by taking action to establish the full civil rights of every American in this land.
