JFK doesn't strike out Sorensen's "Jesus" reference

Theodore Sorensen in his book Kennedy describes JFK's response to Harry Truman's July 2, 1960 blast at JFK as unready for the Presidency. Truman had said "Senator, are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or that the country is quite ready for you in the role of President?...[We need] a man with the greatest possible maturity and experience...May I urge you to be patient?" (Sorensen sees "or that the country is quite ready for you" as implicitly raising the matter of JFK's religion as well as his experience, though Truman always claimed his opposition to JFK's candidacy was rooted in suspicion of Kennedy's father, not his religion: "It's not the Pope I'm afraid of, it's the pop.") Anyway, according to Sorensen (Kennedy, Bantam Books edition [1966], p. 172):

"We flew on July 4 to New York for his own televised news conference. After dismissing Truman's other contentions ['Mr. Truman regards an open convention as one which studies all the candidates, reviews their records and then takes his advice.'] he demolishded the age argument with such force that his supporters were grateful to Truman for providing such a highly publicized occasion. He mentioned his eighteen years of service and expressed his willingness 'to let our party and nation be the judge of my experience and ability.' But, if 'fourteen years in major elective office is insufficient experience,' he said, 'that rules out all but three of the ten names put forward by Truman, all but a handful of American Presidents, and every President of the twentieth century--including Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman.' And if age, not experience, is the standard, he went on, then a maturity test excluding 'from positions of trust and command all those below the age of forty-four would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, Madison from fathering the Constitution...and Christopher Columbus from even discovering America.' (He wisely struck out the one other name I had on this list, Jesus of Nazareth.)"

OK, it's hard for me to imagine any politician--let alone one as shrewd as JFK--not immediately seeing a red flag and cutting out the reference to Jesus. But let's say JFK is tired and leaves it in. At this time, his victory at the convention was likely, but not quite assured. (See
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/1f78cee90165d362 for a scenario by which he still could have been stopped at the convention.) Could the "Jesus" reference derail him, especially given that hostile newspapers would have headlines like JFK COMPARES SELF TO JESUS or KENNEDY SAYS HE'S MORE MATURE THAN JESUS?...

(As someone pointed out when I raised this question in soc.history.what-if some years ago, if the reference had been left in, the resulting controversy might at least have deterred John Lennon from making a somewhat comparable statement in 1966... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_popular_than_Jesus)
 
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I suspect if you LIKE a politician to begin with, you would probably accept the comparison without much rancour, or even thought, since it's not directly insulting toward Jesus, and only blasphemous if you really sit down and analyze it theologically("Wait a sec, Jesus isn't just another good guy like Columbus and Jefferson"). People in the Bible Belt burned Beatles records when Lennon said they were "...more popular than Jesus Christ". They didn't burn Norman Greenbaum albums when he sang "Never been a sinner, I never sin", even though Greenbaum was implicitly elevating himself to the status of Jesus.

That said, if you WERE someone who was bothered by Kennedy's Catholicism, but maybe in the process of getting over the prejudice, and then Kennedy said that, you might be inclined to jump off of his bandwagon. But even then, it might help if someone sat down and explained why the comparison was offensive.

And as a thought-experiment, if you were an Appalachian Democrat supporting Humphrey because you hated Catholicism, and Humphrey made a similar comparison of himself to Jesus(ie. not directly insulting, but theologically problematic if you really analyze it), I don't think that would make you abandon Humphrey.
 

Cook

Banned
Kennedy ran a campaign of very carefully being the non-Catholic Catholic candidate: yes he was catholic by birth, and even attended mass, but that did not affect his political decision making. As it was, his campaign was damaged in late October by some Catholic bishops publicly forbidding their parishioners, in fact any Catholics, from voting for any candidate that did not follow the church's teaching on the issues of abortion and birth control; it resulted in a late surge for Nixon that almost cost Kennedy the election.
Had Kennedy left in the Jesus reference then he would have been doomed as 'The Vatican's Candidate' and would definitely have lost the election.
 
Kennedy ran a campaign of very carefully being the non-Catholic Catholic candidate: yes he was catholic by birth, and even attended mass, but that did not affect his political decision making. As it was, his campaign was damaged in late October by some Catholic bishops publicly forbidding their parishioners, in fact any Catholics, from voting for any candidate that did not follow the church's teaching on the issues of abortion and birth control; it resulted in a late surge for Nixon that almost cost Kennedy the election.
Had Kennedy left in the Jesus reference then he would have been doomed as 'The Vatican's Candidate' and would definitely have lost the election.

Cook:

You may very well be correct. But just out of curiousity...

What do you think would be the result if a candidate with no religious baggage answered a question about his youth and inexperience with the Jesus comparison? Say, a white-bread Methodist in 1960 had said something like that.
 

Cook

Banned
What do you think would be the result if a candidate with no religious baggage answered a question about his youth and inexperience with the Jesus comparison? Say, a white-bread Methodist in 1960 had said something like that.

His opponents would say it showed that he lacked the maturity, judgement and gravitas for such a responsible role; they would double down on the youth and inexperience issue.
 
His opponents would say it showed that he lacked the maturity, judgement and gravitas for such a responsible role; they would double down on the youth and inexperience issue.


Quayle tried to point out that he wasn't any younger than JFK. "You're no Jack Kennedy" went down in history as one of the most memorable burns in political history.
 
Kennedy ran a campaign of very carefully being the non-Catholic Catholic candidate: yes he was catholic by birth, and even attended mass, but that did not affect his political decision making. As it was, his campaign was damaged in late October by some Catholic bishops publicly forbidding their parishioners, in fact any Catholics, from voting for any candidate that did not follow the church's teaching on the issues of abortion and birth control; it resulted in a late surge for Nixon that almost cost Kennedy the election.
Had Kennedy left in the Jesus reference then he would have been doomed as 'The Vatican's Candidate' and would definitely have lost the election.

This. On the bright side, we lose Watergate.
 
This may even have effects on Lennon's assassination. If as you suggest, Lennon would have been careful not to make a remark like that after it notoriously costs Kennedy the election, Mark David Chapman loses one of his motives in killing him.

He still would have ended up killing someone because he was crazy enough to think that killing someone of high stature would make him God-like, but he probably doesn't single out Lennon.
 
This. On the bright side, we lose Watergate.

Maybe. Is it possible that Nixon makes many of the same mistakes in 1964 that he did in 1972 and the whole thing goes to hell along the same lines? He’s still Nixon, after all.

If Nixon amps up Vietnam a la LBJ and suffers a Watergate-level scandal in the mid-60s during his second term, this could destroy faith in either the government or the Republicans. We may see that party destroyed as we know it, with the useful remnants matriculating either to the New Democrats or whatever the Dixiecrats turn into. Either way, expect the party of big business not to be able to get as much done when a Reagan figure (maybe Reagan himself) comes along, and if there’s an anti-regulation movement, expect it to be toned down big time.

This, of course, assumes Nixon survives and doesn’t dodge an assassin’s bullet.
 
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