Abstract
Julie Nixon woke her father, vice president and Republican nominee for president Richard M. Nixon, on the morning after his defeat in the 1960 presidential election to ask, “Daddy, why did people vote against you because of religion?” The elder Nixon responded by repudiating this view of the election results, which Julie had heard reported on television. “Julie, people do not vote for one man or the other because they happen to be Jews or Catholics—or Protestants, as we are. They vote for a man because they believe in what he stands for or because they like him as a person.” This story, recounted in Nixon’s 1962 memoir, Six Crises, portrayed the religious issue as irrelevant to voters.
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Notes
Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1962), 392–393, 366–367.
Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 226.
Theodore C. Sorensen, The Kennedy Legacy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1969), 97.
Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 2003), 701–702.
Robert Wuthnow, “Understanding Religion and Politics,” Daedalus 120 (summer 1991): 1–20.
Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since 1938 (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1980), 165–168.
Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism Past and Present (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 32.
James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 308–309.
Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 319, 281.
Thomas Maier, The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings: A Five-Generation History of the Ultimate Irish-Catholic Family (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 519.
Quoted originally by journalist Arthur Krock, but also appeared in Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1981), 61.
James S. Wolfe, “The Religion of and about John F. Kennedy,” in John F. Kennedy: The Promise Revisited, ed. Paul Harper and Joann P. Krieg (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 287.
John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), esp. 166–188.
Mark S. Massa, S. J., Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 131. Emphasis in original.
Mark S. Massa, S. J., Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Crossroad, 2003), 99.
E.g., Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
Robert P. Lockwood, ed., Anti-Catholicism in American Culture (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2000)
William A. Donohue, The Deepest Bias: Anti-Catholicism in American Life, one-hour-video-cassette (New York: Catholic League, 1996)
Andrew Greeley, An Ugly Little Secret: Anti-Catholicism in North America (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 1977).
Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
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© 2004 Thomas J. Carty
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Carty, T.J. (2004). Introduction: The Unresolved “Catholic Issue”. In: A Catholic in the White House?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8130-1_1
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