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Speaker 1: I'm George Severis and I'm Julia Clair.

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Speaker 2: And this is United States of Kennedy, a podcast about

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Speaker 2: our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week we

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Speaker 2: go into one aspect of the Kennedy story, and today

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Speaker 2: we are talking about the Kennedy family's relationship to Catholicism.

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Speaker 1: The Kennedys remain to this day the most famous Catholic

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Speaker 1: family in America. Some of them, like the family matriarch Rose,

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Speaker 1: as well as Bobby and his wife Ethel, were devoutly religious,

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Speaker 1: while others approached the moral demands of Catholicism a bit

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Speaker 1: more casually.

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Speaker 2: Both in politics and in their personal lives, the Kennedys

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Speaker 2: often faced anti Catholic prejudice, especially in the first half

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Speaker 2: of the twentieth century. Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the

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Speaker 2: Kennedy clan, was snubbed by Harvard's Final Clubs and wasn't

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Speaker 2: offered a single job at any of the Boston banks

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Speaker 2: owned by old money Protestants at the time. These early

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Speaker 2: anti cans Catholic slights motivated him to a massive gigantic

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Speaker 2: fortune and crown one of his sons the first Catholic

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Speaker 2: president of the United States.

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Speaker 1: When JFK eventually ran for president, he was accused of

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Speaker 1: dual loyalty and essentially working for the Pope's interests. The

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Speaker 1: Catholic issue, as it was called, almost cost him the election.

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Speaker 1: He beat Nixon in the popular vote by only one

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Speaker 1: hundred thousand votes.

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Speaker 2: JFK both embraced his Catholicism by appealing to Catholic interest

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Speaker 2: groups and distanced himself from his religion by passionately defending

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Speaker 2: the separation of church and state publicly, most notably in

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Speaker 2: a nineteen sixty speech at a meeting of Baptist ministers

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Speaker 2: in Houston, Texas.

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Speaker 1: To help us untangle the Kennedy's relationship to Catholicism, were

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Speaker 1: joined today by someone who knows quite a lot about

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Speaker 1: both Catholicism and American power, the co host of one

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Speaker 1: of our favorite podcasts, Know Your Enemy, and former editor

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Speaker 1: at Commonweal magazine, Matt Sitman. Matt, Welcome to the United

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Speaker 1: States of Kennedy.

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Speaker 3: I'm very happy to be here talking with all of

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Speaker 3: you about the Kennedy clan.

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Speaker 1: We are so excited to have you. George and I

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Speaker 1: have been texting back and forth about questions we want

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Speaker 1: to ask you, and first of all, for those who

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Speaker 1: may not be super familiar with your background, we are

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Speaker 1: of course having you here today to talk to us

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Speaker 1: about the Kennedys and Catholicism, and we would love for

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Speaker 1: you to situate yourself in the world of Catholicism and

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Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about your background with the faith.

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Speaker 3: I'm happy to do that. And you use the word situated.

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Speaker 3: I'm actually literally in Rome, in the Eternal City right

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Speaker 3: now recording this, so I.

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Speaker 4: Thought it was very wel that.

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Speaker 2: Yes, we planned that.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we actually we have a really big udget.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: I meant to ask you where to expend some of

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Speaker 3: my dinners and whatnot.

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Speaker 4: You'll email me that. Yes.

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Speaker 3: But I'm a Catholic myself. I was not raised Catholic.

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Speaker 3: I was raised in a fundamentalist Bible Church Christian Church.

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Speaker 3: That the word fundamental would be their self description, not

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Speaker 3: my pejorative. And it's funny because it's basically the most

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Speaker 3: anti Catholic form of Christianity I could have been raised with.

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Speaker 3: I don't know what in a Freudian sense, you know,

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Speaker 3: the Kennedys are great patients as well to examine, you know,

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Speaker 3: in a Freudian sense. I don't know if this was

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Speaker 3: something you know, thumby in my nose, at my parents,

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Speaker 3: or you know, what psychologically was going on that drew

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Speaker 3: me to the Catholic Church. I'm gay too, so you know,

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Speaker 3: not the most gay friendly organization in the world, but

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Speaker 3: also it is one of the gayest.

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Speaker 4: I can say that now having been a Catholic for

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Speaker 4: ten years. Oh yeah, it's more fitting than some of

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Speaker 4: your listeners might guess.

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Speaker 3: And previously to doing the podcast, I co host Know

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Speaker 3: Your Enemy full time. I was an editor for over

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Speaker 3: six years at Commonweal magazine, which is now it's over

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Speaker 3: one hundred years old. It was founded to be kind

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Speaker 3: of the Catholic New Yorker, and it's commonly described as

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Speaker 3: liberal Catholicism. And I think, you know, one thing that's

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Speaker 3: interesting with John F. Kennedy's Catholicism is its relationship to

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Speaker 3: American democracy. And I think, you know, in a lot

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Speaker 3: of ways, when I call Commonweal a magazine of liberal Catholicism,

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Speaker 3: it's liberal in the sense of like left of center

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Speaker 3: in the current you know, political landscape, but it really

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Speaker 3: is liberal in the sense of liberalism as a political philosophy.

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Speaker 3: Liberal democracy, being you know, pro liberal democracy in you know,

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Speaker 3: seventy five years ago as a Catholic in the United

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Speaker 3: States was not the tradition that the Church was offering

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Speaker 3: you exactly. So the magazine I worked at was long

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Speaker 3: kind of concerned with how Catholics in the United States

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Speaker 3: relate to liberal democracy, the modern world, religious freedom, pluralism,

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Speaker 3: things like that that in the old world in Europe,

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Speaker 3: the Catholic Church was not known for being typically on

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Speaker 3: the side of it's very much.

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Speaker 1: Sort of a Vatican to publication.

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Speaker 4: Yes, if you look in our subscription numbers.

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Speaker 3: The high water mark for Commonweal really was in those

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Speaker 3: years after the Second Vatican Council, where a lot of

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Speaker 3: the things I just mentioned the Church's relationship to religious pluralism,

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Speaker 3: even right liberal democracy, things like that. Those were where

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Speaker 3: the Church opened up to the modern world a bit

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Speaker 3: and reckoned with some of that. And Commonwill was the

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Speaker 3: magazine that explained that to American Catholics, I think more

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Speaker 3: than any other.

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Speaker 1: That's so interesting just for the listener's own education. By

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Speaker 1: disclosed my prejudices immediately. I was born and raised Catholic,

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Speaker 1: baptized in the faiths had my first Communion confirmation, and

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Speaker 1: then I actually went the opposite of that, where I

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Speaker 1: dabbled in Evangelical Christianity in college for a minute and

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Speaker 1: encountered some truly, as you mentioned, very anti Catholic bias

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Speaker 1: within Christianity, which I think a lot of people who

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Speaker 1: are not Christian or maybe who don't understand like interdenominational tensions,

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Speaker 1: probably wouldn't expect or wouldn't understand. And then I have

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Speaker 1: come back into the fold. I consider myself Catholic and

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Speaker 1: I will until I'm dead.

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Speaker 2: To definitely evangelical Christianity. And college is, I'm sorry to say, Julia,

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Speaker 2: a really unique form of mental illness that I did

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Speaker 2: not know. College is, you know, when you dabble in

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Speaker 2: atheism and then you come back to Christianity.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, no. I was not well and I know it,

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Speaker 1: and now I'm back and I'm normal again.

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Speaker 2: It's funny. Before we started recording, Julia was talking about

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Speaker 2: being raised Catholic and I was like, oh, you know,

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Speaker 2: I was raised Greek Orthodox, and Julia was like, well,

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Speaker 2: it's very similar. And I found myself, almost without realizing it,

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Speaker 2: being like, no, it's not.

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Speaker 4: It's where you're talking about the.

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Speaker 2: Intra Christianity sort of differences are so pronounced when you

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Speaker 2: grow up in a specific faith. I mean I didn't

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Speaker 2: even grow up super religious, but it was just because

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Speaker 2: my family is Greek and because I partly grew up there.

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Speaker 2: It was a huge part of my childhood going to

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Speaker 2: church and having religious classes in school. There was a

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Speaker 2: you know, in every school in Greece there's no separation

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Speaker 2: of church and state technically, so there's a priest that

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Speaker 2: teaches the religion class that's in full Orthodox priest garb,

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Speaker 2: the like all black, sort of simple. It seems so

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Speaker 2: different than the like ostentatious, like dragginess of the Catholic Church,

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Speaker 2: and you sort of stress those differences because you want

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Speaker 2: to believe that your thing is somehow unique.

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Speaker 1: Okay, you say dragginess, I say superior aesthetics.

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Speaker 2: Well, I mean I have to say I will agree

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Speaker 2: there that you know, the Catholics really knew what they

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Speaker 2: were doing aesthetically. Matt. One of the things that has

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Speaker 2: honestly been a huge topic of conversation between Julia and

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Speaker 2: me since we first thought of booking you is that

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Speaker 2: when we were sort of like, okay, what has know

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Speaker 2: your enemy done? About the Kennedy's in the past. We

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Speaker 2: started looking into old episodes and we found this episode

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Speaker 2: about this book called The Kennedy Imprisonment by Gary Wills.

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Speaker 2: And I'm ashamed to say neither of us. Despite the

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Speaker 2: fact that we've read and or skimmed many Kennedy books

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Speaker 2: in our time doing this podcast, somehow this one had

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Speaker 2: never crossed our desk, and we've both been we've been

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Speaker 2: eating it up.

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Speaker 3: It's the best book ever written about the Kennedy's. It's inveritible.

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Speaker 2: And I find that with kind of I don't want

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Speaker 2: to call it a pop history book, but with non

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Speaker 2: academic history books like this, either it's super super dry

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Speaker 2: or it leans into the mythology so much that you're like.

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Speaker 1: What, even it's too eligised.

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Speaker 2: Exactly, yes, and he has a way of actually sticking

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Speaker 2: to facts, but then also unexpectedly bringing Fucot into it

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Speaker 2: when you don't expect, and you're.

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Speaker 4: Like, whoa, yeah, like the grass of the chapter, right.

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Speaker 2: Yes, I think it is. But even just like the

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Speaker 2: fact that it's funny you already mentioned Freud, like the

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Speaker 2: fact that the chapters are called like the Father, like

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Speaker 2: it's so juicy in this way without being tabloid. So

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Speaker 2: I wonder. I mean, I'm sure it's been a while

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Speaker 2: since you've actually read it, but can you talk a

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Speaker 2: little bit about coming to that book and how it

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Speaker 2: changed your view of the Kennedy's writ large.

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Speaker 3: Yes, it's a very memorable book that I read, in

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Speaker 3: the sense of it was the first one I really

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Speaker 3: read at the start of the pandemic, when we you know,

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Speaker 3: the lockdowns, you know, shelter in place, everyone's staying in.

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Speaker 3: I was in New York City, in Manhattan, so for

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Speaker 3: some reason, I'm not sure why I decided to read

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Speaker 3: that book. And to be honest, it's interesting Common Will.

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Speaker 3: Despite super officially you might think, oh, Common Will and

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Speaker 3: Gary Wills have a lot in common.

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Speaker 4: Gary Wills is a Catholic writer.

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Speaker 3: He's still alive, he's living, he's I think ninety one,

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Speaker 3: are about to turn ninety one, and there's a biography

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Speaker 3: coming out of him, I think in the next year

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Speaker 3: or two. I'm very excited for that. But Gary Wills,

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Speaker 3: you had this long fascination with the Kennedy's. He was Catholic.

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Speaker 3: Of course. Gary Wills got his start at a magazine

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Speaker 3: founded by another Catholic William F. Buckley Junior National Review

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Speaker 3: in nineteen fifty five. YEA, and the Kennedys and the

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Speaker 3: Buckleys were kind of like Bizarrow World reflections of each other.

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Speaker 4: There was a bit of rivalry there.

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Speaker 3: I think you can read Joan Diddyon taking pot shots

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Speaker 3: at the New Frontier, the Arthur Schlessinger look alikes she

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Speaker 3: saw laughing at a John Wayne movie in the theater.

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Speaker 3: You know, the anti Kennedy sentiment was strong. In fact, Wills,

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Speaker 3: about ten years before he published The Kennedy Imprisonment, wrote

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Speaker 3: his great book, Nixon Aganista's Right kind of Nixon on

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Speaker 3: the campaign trail in nineteen sixty eight through his election

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Speaker 3: as president. And one of the things I love about

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Speaker 3: The Kennedy Imprisonment is he said, you know, I always

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Speaker 3: kind of have to give Nixon credit for hating the Kennedys,

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Speaker 3: Like that's the one thing he would grant Richard Nixon

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Speaker 3: was he was right to sort of have this, you know,

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Speaker 3: blood feud, hatred of the Kennedy's as the rich kids

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Speaker 3: who you know, Nixon had a chip on his shoulder

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Speaker 3: about them.

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Speaker 1: I mean he had a chip on his shoulder about everything.

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Speaker 4: Yes, that's true.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, the Kennedy family would fall under the category of everything,

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Speaker 3: which is what you know bothor Richard Nixon. This book

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Speaker 3: came out, I think in nineteen eighty two, the Kennedy Imprisonment,

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Speaker 3: and it's in between Nixon and Aganista's and then in

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Speaker 3: like ninety or ninety one Lincoln at Gettysburg, which you

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Speaker 3: want to Pullitzerpriz for So I always say this is

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Speaker 3: Will's at the height of his powers, and I think

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Speaker 3: your reaction to the book gets at that because it's

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Speaker 3: such a compelling unfolding of an argument in such an

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Speaker 3: orderly way, like watching Will's mind at work is fascinating

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Speaker 3: and it is kind of Freudian. But I would also

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Speaker 3: say this is where you see Gary Wills. He's even

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Speaker 3: more so he's Shakespearean. And I think that combination of,

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Speaker 3: you know, stripping away the mythology of the Kennedys without

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Speaker 3: lapsing to outright cynicism or just like total deconstructions, there's

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Speaker 3: something Wills always strikes that balance just right for me.

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Speaker 3: And it's because he's Shakespearean and not freud in a sense,

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Speaker 3: and therefore he's de mythologizing without.

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Speaker 4: Being totally deconstructive.

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Speaker 3: Maybe that's the term I want and I should say,

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Speaker 3: though Will's for all his classical learning. He is a

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Speaker 3: PhD in classics from Yale. You know the most I

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Speaker 3: can't imagine.

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Speaker 4: I haven't. I don't know if I have enough time to.

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Speaker 3: Read all of Gary Wills's books, let alone all the

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Speaker 3: books he read to write them.

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Speaker 4: Right.

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Speaker 3: It's incredible just kind of how prolific he is and

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Speaker 3: how learned he is. But this book on the Kennedys,

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Speaker 3: it does not shy away from the good gossip. You

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Speaker 3: know about sat So you mentioned the father, but the

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Speaker 3: father's sexual you know, adventures trying to sleep with the

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Speaker 3: women that the boys were sleeping with out of some

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Speaker 3: you know, it's extremely fucked up.

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Speaker 2: That was one of the number one things, the relationship

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Speaker 2: of the Kennedy men to women. Obviously people know that

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Speaker 2: JFK had affairs and that there were rumors whatever, But

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Speaker 2: I don't think I had realized how like cults like

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Speaker 2: the environment was. I mean, they were raised to believe.

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Speaker 2: The JFK generation, Joe's children were raised to believe that

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Speaker 2: women are like objects to be passed around. Joe would

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Speaker 2: want to participate and sort of be involved with his

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Speaker 2: son's girlfriends and lovers. I mean, it really was way

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Speaker 2: more crazy than people realize.

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Speaker 3: It's just deranged. I don't think people recognize just how much.

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Speaker 4: Sex there was.

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Speaker 3: Like, yeah, to say John Kennedy had affairs. JFK had

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Speaker 3: affairs really is not even scratching the surface of what

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Speaker 3: he got up to. It seemed like some of the

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Speaker 3: people around him, like secret service members, his aides, picturing

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Speaker 3: women was almost a full time job for them. It

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Speaker 3: seemed like a different one almost every day. It's seemingly

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Speaker 3: or that would have been the dream, you know. I

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Speaker 3: think some of them stuck around more long term affairs, right,

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Speaker 3: But I mean the number was just insane, frankly, And there's.

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Speaker 4: A lot you could say about, you know, what was

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Speaker 4: John F.

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Speaker 3: Kennedy's personal faith as a Catholic, or what was Bobby's,

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Speaker 3: what was Teddy's, what was the dads? And we can

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Speaker 3: talk about all of that. But I think in some ways,

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Speaker 3: as I was thinking about some of this again, to me,

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Speaker 3: it's always the Catholicism of the Kennedys is most fully

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Speaker 3: expressed in the people you don't see in their mythologies,

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Speaker 3: which is the women. And I do think that is

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Speaker 3: a function of their Catholicism in a profound way. I

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Speaker 3: mean Will's talks about Rose Kennedy is almost being in

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Speaker 3: a clister, within a nunnery of convent, within their domestic arrangements,

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Speaker 3: sometimes even at their vacation home, right having her own

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Speaker 3: little cottage on the beach she would go to and

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Speaker 3: live in almost by herself. So there's a way in

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Speaker 3: which I think the most conspicuous elements of the Kennedy's

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Speaker 3: Catholicism often do relate to women. But the people in

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Speaker 3: the Kennedy family you don't know that much about, or

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Speaker 3: you don't hear that much about, are the women. And

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Speaker 3: I can't think that can be separated from their Catholicism, frankly,

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Speaker 3: especially that era, that vintage of Catholicism pre Vatican to

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Speaker 3: very old school that was very much in play totally.

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Speaker 1: I was actually talking to George about this right before

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Speaker 1: we started recording, which was it seems like a lot

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Speaker 1: of times when we talk about the Kennedys, we are

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Speaker 1: just talking about.

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Speaker 2: The men, three or four of them.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, we're talking about Joe, Jack, Teddy, Bobby. But in

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Speaker 1: terms of their relationship to Catholicism, it seems like the

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Speaker 1: ones who were most strictly held to the principles of Catholicism.

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Speaker 1: It was the women in the family, yes, in a

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Speaker 1: way that the men just simply were not, and that

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Speaker 1: I'm sure was both a function of the time and

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Speaker 1: a function of this particular family itself. This was just

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Speaker 1: a very patriarchal in the truest sense of the word family.

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Speaker 1: And it's funny because Joe, and you can correct me

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Speaker 1: if I'm wrong about but Joe's relationship to the Catholic

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Speaker 1: Church was entirely political. From all accounts. It seems like

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Speaker 1: he had no real spiritual interior life and treated Catholicism

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Speaker 1: the way that he treated women and the way he

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Speaker 1: treated anything else, which was as a political pawn, as

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Speaker 1: a means to an end. And I thought that was

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Speaker 1: really interesting. But yeah, the women who were held to

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Speaker 1: the highest standards of being a good Catholics quote unquote

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Speaker 1: were the women.

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Speaker 3: And often were held to that standard by themselves, like

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Speaker 3: they did their duty would have been I think the

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Speaker 3: language right, and that duty they understood it in terms

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Speaker 3: of the obligations imposed upon them as women, mothers, wives

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Speaker 3: by the Catholic faith.

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Speaker 2: We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after

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Speaker 2: this break.

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Speaker 1: And we're back with more United States of Kennedy.

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Speaker 2: I'm just thinking about the times we have talked about

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Speaker 2: Catholicism on this podcast. We had an episode on Kathleen

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Speaker 2: Kennedy and it was such a big controversy within the

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Speaker 2: family that she ended up marrying a non Catholic and

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Speaker 2: depending on who you ask, people say she was disowned

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Speaker 2: by the family. Other people say that's exaggerated, But the

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Speaker 2: point is that there was a real fracture in the

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Speaker 2: family and it's so crazy to imagine what a big

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Speaker 2: controversy it was that she wanted to marry this man

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Speaker 2: that she, by all counts love. And meanwhile, as you're saying,

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Speaker 2: there's a team procuring various loose women for JFK to

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Speaker 2: have affairs with inside the White House, and that is

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Speaker 2: not seen as contrast to his faith. But Julia mentioned

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Speaker 2: Joe Kay, I want to start kind of at the beginning.

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Speaker 2: I want to start at Joe Kennedy. So to me,

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Speaker 2: it's interesting that the Kennedys are so synonymous with the

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Speaker 2: Catholic Church and the American imagination because from what I

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Speaker 2: understand and correct me, if I'm wrong. Joe initially really

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Speaker 2: wanted to assimilate in Wasp culture. Like so much of

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Speaker 2: his initial thirst for power was because he was, in

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Speaker 2: his mind rejected from the country club set.

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Speaker 3: Literally, Yes, yeah, I mean I think there was a

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Speaker 3: point in time where he wanted to join the beach club,

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Speaker 3: you know, where people would summer, you know when summer

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Speaker 3: is a verb and not a season, the kind of

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Speaker 3: elite rich person but therefore mostly Protestant club and he

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Speaker 3: couldn't write, and like that was a chip on his shoulder.

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Speaker 3: There's a story of him going back to his college reunion,

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Speaker 3: right and being kind of booed or his stat like

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Speaker 3: these little slights to him, whether it was his college

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Speaker 3: reunion or joining the elite social club beach clubs, those

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Speaker 3: kinds of things, he didn't get what he wanted, right,

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Speaker 3: And this was a man who got what he wanted

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Speaker 3: most of the time, and wanting one of his sons

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Speaker 3: to be president is a kind of elaborate revenge fantasy

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Speaker 3: on his part for all the slights of the high

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Speaker 3: society types, the Boston Brahmins who wouldn't accept him.

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Speaker 4: And his eye Irish Catholic clan.

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Speaker 3: That's a major factor in the whole story of the

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Speaker 3: Kennedy's as we've come to.

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Speaker 1: Know it, and I think, as George alluded to, it's

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Speaker 1: so funny that this is the most famous Irish Catholic

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Speaker 1: family in America in the last hundred years, and Joe

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Speaker 1: so badly wanted to distance himself from that because he

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Speaker 1: saw it as like a personal hindrance and only came

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Speaker 1: to embrace it when it became politically useful to him.

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Speaker 1: But exactly as you were saying, he was rejected by

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Speaker 1: the WASP in Cohasset, Massachusetts, he was denied the position

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Speaker 1: he wanted in the Roosevelt administration, the Secretary of the Treasury,

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Speaker 1: and then his second choice was ambassador to England, which

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Speaker 1: is again, as an Irish person, what's a bigger stab

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Speaker 1: in the back.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well, their relationship with England is funny because

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Speaker 2: there was a part in the Will's book in the

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Speaker 2: very beginning where will Is is saying that the children thought

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Speaker 2: of Joe's relationship to sex as very English or something.

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Speaker 4: It was.

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Speaker 2: I'm trying to remember the exact phrasing, but it was

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Speaker 2: like very randy. Yeah. It was something about how it's

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Speaker 2: ironic that the Keunries are considered this iconic Catholic family

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Speaker 2: because he always thought of himself as having a very

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Speaker 2: sort of English disposition, and I do think that was

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Speaker 2: also part of him wanting to be this cosmopolitan, worldly

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Speaker 2: connector of people who was above specific ethnicities and religions.

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Speaker 2: But in terms of Catholicism in America, because obviously, if

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Speaker 2: we fast forward to the JFK election, a huge hindrance

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Speaker 2: for him was the so called Catholic question, and people

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Speaker 2: thought he asked some sort of dual loyalty to the

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Speaker 2: Catholic Church and to America. But before that, what, in

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Speaker 2: your opinion was the status of the Catholic Church in

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Speaker 2: the American imagination sort of leading up to that, like

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Speaker 2: from the forties through the sixties, Like, yes, there was

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Speaker 2: prejudice against Catholics. What were the stakes?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, in some ways I mentioned already you can look

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Speaker 3: at the particular face of any individual Kennedy and see

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Speaker 3: what's going on there. But I think the more interesting

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Speaker 3: questions are about the moment that the Kennedys and their

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Speaker 3: Catholicism met with the history of our country and especially

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Speaker 3: the history of Catholicism. And it one of my favorite

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Speaker 3: lines of Gary Wills is the reign of the Two Johns,

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Speaker 3: meaning John the twenty third, who was the pope who

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Speaker 3: called the Second Vatican Council. We've described that a little

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Speaker 3: bit already, but one of the phrases associated with it

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Speaker 3: is throwing up the windows of the church, throwing up

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Speaker 3: open the windows so that the church can look out

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Speaker 3: and the world can look in. And it was at

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Speaker 3: the Second Vatican Council where again religious freedom, religious pluralism,

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Speaker 3: human rights, the world democracy, how the Catholic Church related

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Speaker 3: to the Jewish people right or were all reformulated and

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Speaker 3: reworked and adapted and updated in a way in the

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Speaker 3: Second Vatican Council, which was you know, we're talking late fifties,

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Speaker 3: early early sixties. So as America is electing its first

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Speaker 3: Catholic president, the Catholic Church is literally calling the bishops

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Speaker 3: and cardinals from all over the world to convene on

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Speaker 3: Rome and deliberate about the very matters I was just discussing,

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Speaker 3: among others. So it's a very interesting moment. And the

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Speaker 3: phrase the Reign of the Two Johns, I've always loved that.

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Speaker 3: It's one of Will's great flourishes, I think, But it

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Speaker 3: was also interesting to me that an important figure at

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Speaker 3: the Second Vatican Council, especially when it came to religious freedom,

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Speaker 3: was the Jesuit priest and philosopher John Courtney Murray. And

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Speaker 3: when Kennedy gives his speech in Dallas or Houston, Texas.

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Speaker 4: Sorry, something else happened in Dallas.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, no spoilers.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, when Kennedy essentially hauls is asked in front of

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Speaker 3: these Baptist ministers in Houston, Texas, you know, when he's

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Speaker 3: running for president and says, no, Pope's going to tell

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Speaker 3: me what to do. The separation of church and state

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Speaker 3: is absolute. Essentially, that was how he kind of cut

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Speaker 3: that knot right. The Pope's not going to influence. Separation

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Speaker 3: of church and state is absolute. You have nothing to

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Speaker 3: worry about with me. One of the you can overplay

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Speaker 3: his advisory role. But it was John Courtney Murray that

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Speaker 3: Teddy Sorensen called up the Kennedy speech writer and read

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Speaker 3: that speech to him to get comments from. So one

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Speaker 3: of the major theological advisors at the Second Vatican Council,

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Speaker 3: a major American Catholic theologian, John Courtney Murray, was you know,

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Speaker 3: the Kennedy people were soliciting his advice, asking for notes

435
00:22:26,960 --> 00:22:30,879
Speaker 3: essentially on this major speech. A former Commonweal editor, John Cogley,

436
00:22:31,000 --> 00:22:34,399
Speaker 3: I think, was another reader of that speech. So there's

437
00:22:34,440 --> 00:22:38,320
Speaker 3: not just like the timings, not just fortuitous or providential

438
00:22:38,320 --> 00:22:41,879
Speaker 3: as you might view it, but actually there are links,

439
00:22:42,080 --> 00:22:45,160
Speaker 3: very particular links in terms of people that were connected

440
00:22:45,200 --> 00:22:48,440
Speaker 3: to both, you know, one John's reign, the Pope John

441
00:22:48,560 --> 00:22:52,080
Speaker 3: his reign, and President Kennedy his reign. There's actually material,

442
00:22:52,160 --> 00:22:55,000
Speaker 3: a personnel based links between them in very interesting ways

443
00:22:55,040 --> 00:22:56,720
Speaker 3: as well.

444
00:22:56,960 --> 00:23:01,000
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is a really interesting parallel because two was,

445
00:23:01,160 --> 00:23:04,880
Speaker 1: as you said, kind of the Catholic Church, the oldest

446
00:23:04,920 --> 00:23:07,960
Speaker 1: institution in the world, like stepping into the twentieth century.

447
00:23:08,640 --> 00:23:12,240
Speaker 1: And I think the JFK presidency was seen as such

448
00:23:12,280 --> 00:23:14,800
Speaker 1: as well, because he was young, because he had young children,

449
00:23:15,240 --> 00:23:19,320
Speaker 1: because he had this kind of new sensibility, the new frontier.

450
00:23:20,240 --> 00:23:22,320
Speaker 3: He's a little line zrot in that sense, like it's

451
00:23:22,320 --> 00:23:24,440
Speaker 3: a little hard to make the bigot an attack stick

452
00:23:24,480 --> 00:23:27,680
Speaker 3: because you look at him, right, this handsome guy in

453
00:23:27,840 --> 00:23:30,200
Speaker 3: Kennedy's case, right, the cute kids running around and zoa

454
00:23:30,280 --> 00:23:33,400
Speaker 3: On's case, lovely guy, beautiful wife, etc. It's a little

455
00:23:33,440 --> 00:23:36,040
Speaker 3: hard to make the bigotry stick. When that's who you're saying,

456
00:23:36,119 --> 00:23:39,439
Speaker 3: is this odious, nasty person. It just is a little

457
00:23:39,640 --> 00:23:43,159
Speaker 3: I think Kennedy's appearance and the marketing around it, and

458
00:23:43,240 --> 00:23:46,920
Speaker 3: the youthful, yes, new fresh, this isn't ADL. Stevenson running

459
00:23:46,960 --> 00:23:50,320
Speaker 3: for the third straight time, right, that really mattered in

460
00:23:50,400 --> 00:23:53,280
Speaker 3: terms of shedding I think, or at least repelling some

461
00:23:53,320 --> 00:23:56,359
Speaker 3: of the anti Catholicism. But there's a line I wanted

462
00:23:56,400 --> 00:23:59,560
Speaker 3: to share about this in particular that I thought was

463
00:23:59,600 --> 00:24:03,280
Speaker 3: really in and it was by Peter Steinfels, who's another

464
00:24:03,320 --> 00:24:06,560
Speaker 3: former editor of Commonweal and after that the New York

465
00:24:06,560 --> 00:24:09,239
Speaker 3: Times religion reporter for a couple of decades. But he

466
00:24:09,280 --> 00:24:12,160
Speaker 3: published a book in two thousand and three, a People Adrift,

467
00:24:12,240 --> 00:24:15,080
Speaker 3: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. But

468
00:24:15,160 --> 00:24:18,680
Speaker 3: he formulated the Kennedy moment in an interesting way, and

469
00:24:18,720 --> 00:24:22,560
Speaker 3: I'll just read it. Here's Peter Steinfels. So suddenly, between

470
00:24:22,640 --> 00:24:26,320
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty five, all the residual stress

471
00:24:26,359 --> 00:24:30,880
Speaker 3: points between Catholicism in America's public ethos seemed to collapse.

472
00:24:31,400 --> 00:24:34,320
Speaker 3: The campaign of John F. Kennedy for President had first

473
00:24:34,359 --> 00:24:38,119
Speaker 3: revealed how much of the old suspicions remained alive, but

474
00:24:38,200 --> 00:24:42,080
Speaker 3: Kennedy's victory rendered all that anachronistic. The liberating effect on

475
00:24:42,119 --> 00:24:47,320
Speaker 3: American Catholicism was enormous, And I liked that formulation that

476
00:24:47,359 --> 00:24:50,879
Speaker 3: the Kennedy candidacy at first revealed how much of this

477
00:24:50,920 --> 00:24:53,800
Speaker 3: bigotry remained, but then once he won, how much it

478
00:24:53,840 --> 00:24:55,600
Speaker 3: seemed to put that behind us in a way as

479
00:24:55,640 --> 00:24:56,120
Speaker 3: a country.

480
00:24:56,359 --> 00:24:56,560
Speaker 4: Now.

481
00:24:56,560 --> 00:24:59,320
Speaker 3: Whether how much that actually happened or not, it's interesting,

482
00:24:59,400 --> 00:25:02,320
Speaker 3: but that formulation it's true. I mean, you can look

483
00:25:02,359 --> 00:25:05,200
Speaker 3: at Eleanor Roosevelt dipping her tone to the water of

484
00:25:05,240 --> 00:25:07,840
Speaker 3: anti Catholicism a bit because she wasn't sure Kennedy was

485
00:25:07,960 --> 00:25:11,080
Speaker 3: a good liberal or good enough liberal. Right, anti Catholicism

486
00:25:11,160 --> 00:25:14,159
Speaker 3: was said, Oh, this is the last acceptable bigotry in

487
00:25:14,200 --> 00:25:16,760
Speaker 3: a way its conservatives like to say that, especially which

488
00:25:16,800 --> 00:25:19,440
Speaker 3: it's not true. But like the fact that you could

489
00:25:19,440 --> 00:25:21,359
Speaker 3: be well into the middle of the twentieth century and

490
00:25:21,400 --> 00:25:26,040
Speaker 3: anti Catholicism be a live issue in a campaign, right,

491
00:25:26,200 --> 00:25:28,600
Speaker 3: that was true. It really was a problem for Kennedy.

492
00:25:28,680 --> 00:25:31,960
Speaker 3: He worried about his advisers worried about it, and as

493
00:25:31,960 --> 00:25:34,600
Speaker 3: I mentioned, took him going down to Texas of all places,

494
00:25:34,600 --> 00:25:36,840
Speaker 3: in front of these Baptist preachers and saying, the Pope

495
00:25:36,880 --> 00:25:38,760
Speaker 3: ain't going to tell me what to do. Like that

496
00:25:38,960 --> 00:25:41,359
Speaker 3: was it? I think he did have to do that.

497
00:25:41,440 --> 00:25:44,840
Speaker 3: Actually it was his you know Obama's Jeremiah Wright speech.

498
00:25:44,920 --> 00:25:46,520
Speaker 2: Well, I was about to say, I mean, the quote

499
00:25:46,520 --> 00:25:49,879
Speaker 2: you read has such clear echoes of Obama's election in

500
00:25:49,920 --> 00:25:53,720
Speaker 2: the sense that the kind of most optimistic possible narrative

501
00:25:53,760 --> 00:25:56,680
Speaker 2: at the time was that the election exposed all the

502
00:25:56,800 --> 00:26:03,080
Speaker 2: racism that still existed, but his victory transcended that, and

503
00:26:03,280 --> 00:26:06,400
Speaker 2: officially we are in a post race America. And much

504
00:26:06,480 --> 00:26:09,399
Speaker 2: like JFK, he was also young. He also had young kids.

505
00:26:09,440 --> 00:26:12,399
Speaker 2: I mean, the parallels are quite striking, just in the

506
00:26:12,480 --> 00:26:15,159
Speaker 2: sense of the mainstream media narrative. I think there's totally

507
00:26:15,160 --> 00:26:16,800
Speaker 2: many other differences otherwise, meen.

508
00:26:16,800 --> 00:26:19,600
Speaker 3: Right, and how quickly that narrative collapsed. I mean, thinking

509
00:26:19,640 --> 00:26:22,880
Speaker 3: about it, So, Kennedy is assassinity. He's elected in nineteen sixties,

510
00:26:22,920 --> 00:26:27,159
Speaker 3: the first Catholic president nineteen sixty three, he's assassinated nineteen

511
00:26:27,200 --> 00:26:31,520
Speaker 3: seventy three. Is Row versus Wade, right, Like, yeah, Catholicism, Well,

512
00:26:31,520 --> 00:26:32,520
Speaker 3: we got this thing settled.

513
00:26:32,560 --> 00:26:34,800
Speaker 4: Religion, politics, We got it. Everything's fine.

514
00:26:35,040 --> 00:26:38,240
Speaker 3: And then within a decade, right of his assassination, an

515
00:26:38,240 --> 00:26:41,360
Speaker 3: issue that was seen as a Catholic issue, abortion right

516
00:26:41,440 --> 00:26:45,520
Speaker 3: becomes a major major flashpoint in the culture Wars, or

517
00:26:45,560 --> 00:26:47,840
Speaker 3: kind of the onso of the culture wars, even right,

518
00:26:47,880 --> 00:26:51,000
Speaker 3: and it was suddenly yeah, maybe assuming there's a little

519
00:26:51,000 --> 00:26:55,320
Speaker 3: too easy relationship between your Catholicism and secular liberal democracy

520
00:26:55,359 --> 00:26:56,399
Speaker 3: in the United States.

521
00:26:56,800 --> 00:26:59,199
Speaker 4: You know, those celebrations were a bit premature.

522
00:26:59,520 --> 00:27:02,159
Speaker 1: We have I've only had one Catholic president since JFK.

523
00:27:02,960 --> 00:27:03,600
Speaker 2: That's true.

524
00:27:04,320 --> 00:27:06,439
Speaker 1: This is so crazy, and I want to say, I

525
00:27:06,480 --> 00:27:10,520
Speaker 1: do not think these two are equal comparisons, but we

526
00:27:10,600 --> 00:27:14,160
Speaker 1: have one more Catholic president than we have had black presidents.

527
00:27:15,840 --> 00:27:16,199
Speaker 4: Yeah.

528
00:27:16,520 --> 00:27:18,800
Speaker 2: I have a friend whose favorite party question is do

529
00:27:18,840 --> 00:27:20,960
Speaker 2: you think we will have an Italian American president or

530
00:27:21,000 --> 00:27:23,680
Speaker 2: a gay president first? And I'll just leave that. I'll

531
00:27:23,680 --> 00:27:25,480
Speaker 2: just leave that with the group. I want to say

532
00:27:25,480 --> 00:27:27,720
Speaker 2: before we get it. I know we're sort of historically

533
00:27:27,760 --> 00:27:31,160
Speaker 2: now we're post JFK victory, But before we keep going,

534
00:27:31,240 --> 00:27:33,399
Speaker 2: I do want to talk a little bit about the

535
00:27:33,440 --> 00:27:37,040
Speaker 2: election itself and sort of the Catholic question, because I

536
00:27:37,040 --> 00:27:41,080
Speaker 2: think the Kennedy's dealings with both the Church itself and

537
00:27:41,200 --> 00:27:45,280
Speaker 2: Catholic groups during the election really have defined the relationship

538
00:27:45,359 --> 00:27:48,840
Speaker 2: they would have during the rest of the dynasty to

539
00:27:48,920 --> 00:27:51,800
Speaker 2: this day. And so I wonder if you can talk

540
00:27:51,800 --> 00:27:55,119
Speaker 2: a little bit about the specifics of the anti Catholic attacks,

541
00:27:55,200 --> 00:27:59,479
Speaker 2: both from Republicans and Democrats and people running against Kennedy,

542
00:27:59,640 --> 00:28:02,600
Speaker 2: what that look like, because it's a type of prejudice

543
00:28:02,600 --> 00:28:05,680
Speaker 2: that I think people in our sort of age group

544
00:28:05,840 --> 00:28:08,399
Speaker 2: didn't grow up with, so it seems very foreign to us. Like,

545
00:28:08,760 --> 00:28:12,000
Speaker 2: I know there were accusations of him having a dual loyalty,

546
00:28:12,160 --> 00:28:14,120
Speaker 2: Like what were the attacks like at the time.

547
00:28:14,800 --> 00:28:16,280
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a good point, George.

548
00:28:16,280 --> 00:28:18,440
Speaker 3: It seems a bit quaint in some ways to haul

549
00:28:18,480 --> 00:28:22,679
Speaker 3: out kind of arcane theological slurs and that's your nasty

550
00:28:22,680 --> 00:28:25,520
Speaker 3: contribution to public discourse. But I think it is essentially

551
00:28:25,520 --> 00:28:29,000
Speaker 3: a dual loyalty charge that the Pope was, and especially

552
00:28:29,320 --> 00:28:32,920
Speaker 3: this was more true in the years preceding Kennedy's running

553
00:28:32,920 --> 00:28:36,679
Speaker 3: for president, before the Second Vatican Council, where the Pope

554
00:28:36,840 --> 00:28:39,960
Speaker 3: was considered a monarch of sorts, not just like an

555
00:28:39,960 --> 00:28:42,680
Speaker 3: authoritarian in a neutral sense of that word. I guess

556
00:28:42,760 --> 00:28:45,200
Speaker 3: like leader of the church, the decider in the Catholic Church,

557
00:28:45,400 --> 00:28:49,040
Speaker 3: but literally a kind of monarch who had terrestrial power

558
00:28:49,400 --> 00:28:51,200
Speaker 3: right then the papal states, and then when that was

559
00:28:51,240 --> 00:28:54,000
Speaker 3: taken away from him, he was hold up prisoner in

560
00:28:54,000 --> 00:28:57,040
Speaker 3: the Vatican, they called it that period of time until

561
00:28:57,240 --> 00:29:01,120
Speaker 3: the latter Entreaty which created Vatican City. Right, that's why

562
00:29:01,120 --> 00:29:03,280
Speaker 3: the Pope is the head of the Vatican City. For decades,

563
00:29:03,320 --> 00:29:06,160
Speaker 3: he wasn't. He was essentially stuck in the Vatican not

564
00:29:06,200 --> 00:29:08,960
Speaker 3: knowing what to do. So he was a monarch in

565
00:29:09,000 --> 00:29:10,880
Speaker 3: the fullest sense of the word for much of the

566
00:29:10,920 --> 00:29:13,520
Speaker 3: Catholic Church's history, at least in the West and in

567
00:29:13,560 --> 00:29:18,240
Speaker 3: Europe the past few centuries, millennia, whatever. And so this

568
00:29:18,400 --> 00:29:21,880
Speaker 3: was a religion that supposedly didn't believe in liberty of conscience. Right,

569
00:29:21,920 --> 00:29:24,400
Speaker 3: as a Catholic, you couldn't have the same relationship to

570
00:29:24,440 --> 00:29:27,000
Speaker 3: your faith that certain kinds of Protestants did, a kind

571
00:29:27,000 --> 00:29:30,520
Speaker 3: of freethinking religious liberty. You know, you can't dictate what

572
00:29:30,600 --> 00:29:34,080
Speaker 3: someone really believes deep down inside sort of thing. It

573
00:29:34,120 --> 00:29:36,480
Speaker 3: was the dual charge that the pope would essentially the

574
00:29:36,520 --> 00:29:39,560
Speaker 3: pope who was the John F. Kennedy's real dictator, right,

575
00:29:39,640 --> 00:29:40,800
Speaker 3: the real person telling him.

576
00:29:40,720 --> 00:29:42,920
Speaker 4: What to do. He would be taking orders from.

577
00:29:42,840 --> 00:29:47,040
Speaker 3: The pope, if not literally directly, then you know, indirectly

578
00:29:47,040 --> 00:29:50,680
Speaker 3: in the sense of implementing Catholic teaching or being unbound

579
00:29:50,760 --> 00:29:51,880
Speaker 3: by it in a certain way.

580
00:29:52,440 --> 00:29:53,600
Speaker 4: And yeah, so it.

581
00:29:53,680 --> 00:29:55,720
Speaker 3: Was kind of a dual loyalty charge that he would

582
00:29:55,720 --> 00:29:58,280
Speaker 3: be unreliable, that he wouldn't be the liberal. Because this

583
00:29:58,360 --> 00:30:00,680
Speaker 3: is kind of the period of time too. Liberals in

584
00:30:00,720 --> 00:30:04,600
Speaker 3: the Democratic Party really are surging, right, this is post

585
00:30:04,640 --> 00:30:08,040
Speaker 3: Hubert Humphrey's intervention in the nineteen forty eight convention. Right,

586
00:30:08,080 --> 00:30:11,640
Speaker 3: this is after Adlai Stevenson had already run twice a

587
00:30:11,720 --> 00:30:14,560
Speaker 3: champion of a certain sort of liberalism, as the party

588
00:30:14,640 --> 00:30:18,000
Speaker 3: is coming around on civil rights and the freedom struggle

589
00:30:18,040 --> 00:30:20,560
Speaker 3: of African Americans, right, all this is kind of happening,

590
00:30:20,960 --> 00:30:25,800
Speaker 3: and suddenly this guy, as the Democratic parties embracing its liberalism,

591
00:30:26,120 --> 00:30:30,040
Speaker 3: this is the guy who has ties to the old worlds,

592
00:30:30,120 --> 00:30:34,200
Speaker 3: dodgy authoritarian religion that's out of the mainstream of American

593
00:30:34,240 --> 00:30:35,040
Speaker 3: public life.

594
00:30:35,200 --> 00:30:35,360
Speaker 4: You know.

595
00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:39,080
Speaker 3: Just it was I think not just ves digital or

596
00:30:39,200 --> 00:30:42,800
Speaker 3: lingering anti Catholicism or the anti Catholicism that prevailed, especially

597
00:30:42,800 --> 00:30:46,719
Speaker 3: before the Second Vatican Council. It was a Catholic running

598
00:30:46,840 --> 00:30:48,720
Speaker 3: at this moment, not just in our history, but in

599
00:30:48,760 --> 00:30:52,000
Speaker 3: the Democratic Party's history and where the trends were going

600
00:30:52,480 --> 00:30:54,800
Speaker 3: in the party at that time. It's liberalism, it's more progressive,

601
00:30:54,800 --> 00:30:59,040
Speaker 3: embracing more progressive positions. Kennedy's Catholicism was considered a problem

602
00:30:59,080 --> 00:31:01,640
Speaker 3: and precisely in relationship into that too, and that's why

603
00:31:01,680 --> 00:31:04,040
Speaker 3: someone like Eleanor Roosevelt want to mention her dipping her

604
00:31:04,080 --> 00:31:06,440
Speaker 3: toes into I think people eventually just came out and

605
00:31:06,440 --> 00:31:08,200
Speaker 3: said it, Yeah, I'm a little suspicious of this guy

606
00:31:08,200 --> 00:31:10,840
Speaker 3: because he's in not so many words, perhaps, but that

607
00:31:11,000 --> 00:31:12,320
Speaker 3: was behind that so much of it.

608
00:31:12,360 --> 00:31:13,440
Speaker 4: I'm pretty certain.

609
00:31:13,640 --> 00:31:15,720
Speaker 1: We're going to take a short break, stay.

610
00:31:15,440 --> 00:31:32,440
Speaker 2: With us, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.

611
00:31:33,120 --> 00:31:36,200
Speaker 1: So before Vatican two is important to remember that a

612
00:31:36,200 --> 00:31:38,720
Speaker 1: lot of Catholic masses, I think most of them were

613
00:31:38,760 --> 00:31:39,560
Speaker 1: still in Latin.

614
00:31:40,160 --> 00:31:42,120
Speaker 4: Yes, they were not in the vernacular yet.

615
00:31:42,360 --> 00:31:45,400
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so that was another big thing. I think

616
00:31:45,440 --> 00:31:49,200
Speaker 1: that really added to the scary mythos that the way

617
00:31:49,240 --> 00:31:53,560
Speaker 1: that it occupied non Catholic trinds that like their church

618
00:31:53,640 --> 00:31:56,200
Speaker 1: services are in a dead language, what are.

619
00:31:56,080 --> 00:31:59,080
Speaker 3: They saying, and have you ever read John Adams from

620
00:31:59,120 --> 00:32:01,560
Speaker 3: the Founding Generation shows up to a mass and it's

621
00:32:01,680 --> 00:32:06,880
Speaker 3: just like all this hocus pocus, the trembling, the weird languages,

622
00:32:06,920 --> 00:32:11,080
Speaker 3: the incantations. You know, there was something esthetically and viscerally

623
00:32:11,640 --> 00:32:15,520
Speaker 3: kind of alien to it. And I've often thought, too,

624
00:32:16,000 --> 00:32:18,560
Speaker 3: what was it like? What did most Americans think when

625
00:32:18,960 --> 00:32:22,240
Speaker 3: Cronkite It's cronkite Cronkite announced his death right?

626
00:32:22,600 --> 00:32:25,360
Speaker 4: It says, we've heard that a Catholic priest gave John F.

627
00:32:25,440 --> 00:32:26,440
Speaker 4: Kennedy glass rights.

628
00:32:27,800 --> 00:32:30,320
Speaker 3: When had the term last rites been used on like

629
00:32:30,400 --> 00:32:34,400
Speaker 3: a major network news broadcast even you know, we knew

630
00:32:34,480 --> 00:32:37,480
Speaker 3: this guy was essentially had been killed, had been assassinated

631
00:32:38,200 --> 00:32:40,640
Speaker 3: because of the Roman.

632
00:32:40,400 --> 00:32:42,880
Speaker 4: Catholic rite that had just been performed.

633
00:32:43,240 --> 00:32:45,280
Speaker 3: That itself was so strange probably for a lot of

634
00:32:45,320 --> 00:32:48,800
Speaker 3: Americans or even oh they got that the Catholics busted

635
00:32:48,800 --> 00:32:52,400
Speaker 3: out their magic oils and ointments and incantations one last time,

636
00:32:52,440 --> 00:32:55,200
Speaker 3: hoping to save their boy. You know, I'm sure some

637
00:32:55,200 --> 00:32:56,239
Speaker 3: people really did think that.

638
00:32:56,560 --> 00:33:00,360
Speaker 1: Sure, definitely, and especially before Vatican Do, there was there

639
00:33:00,760 --> 00:33:02,960
Speaker 1: and there still is even after Abatikan too. There's something

640
00:33:03,120 --> 00:33:08,480
Speaker 1: very insular about the Catholic Church, definitely more so before

641
00:33:08,520 --> 00:33:12,240
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, but there was something that for a

642
00:33:12,280 --> 00:33:15,000
Speaker 1: lot of non Catholics felt very cloak and dagger about it.

643
00:33:15,240 --> 00:33:18,240
Speaker 2: This is a really imperfect comparison, so bear with me,

644
00:33:18,360 --> 00:33:20,560
Speaker 2: but I just remember, for example, when Mitt Romney was

645
00:33:20,600 --> 00:33:23,800
Speaker 2: running for president, there was this question of like, he's

646
00:33:23,880 --> 00:33:27,200
Speaker 2: part of this cult like religion that is unfamiliar to

647
00:33:27,680 --> 00:33:31,320
Speaker 2: the vast majority of Americans, and they have weird customs,

648
00:33:31,320 --> 00:33:34,400
Speaker 2: and he wears Mormon underwear. I mean, and I think

649
00:33:34,440 --> 00:33:35,719
Speaker 2: because Mormon is pretty good.

650
00:33:35,720 --> 00:33:38,040
Speaker 4: George. Actually I like that comparison.

651
00:33:37,680 --> 00:33:40,000
Speaker 2: Because I think Mormonism is still more not to be

652
00:33:40,040 --> 00:33:41,600
Speaker 2: sort of normanive about it, but it's still a more

653
00:33:41,640 --> 00:33:44,760
Speaker 2: sort of marginal religion obviously than the Catholic Church, which

654
00:33:44,760 --> 00:33:46,360
Speaker 2: is one of the biggest religion in the world. I

655
00:33:46,400 --> 00:33:50,160
Speaker 2: think it was much more acceptable to theorize about that

656
00:33:50,280 --> 00:33:52,840
Speaker 2: and joke about it on late night TV. And I

657
00:33:52,880 --> 00:33:55,760
Speaker 2: don't necessarily think we look back on that being like, wow,

658
00:33:55,800 --> 00:33:58,680
Speaker 2: we were so close minded about Mormons, but it was

659
00:33:58,920 --> 00:34:02,040
Speaker 2: it was an acceptable will form a prejudice, rightly or

660
00:34:02,040 --> 00:34:05,040
Speaker 2: wrongly that you could sort of be like, well, he

661
00:34:05,280 --> 00:34:08,720
Speaker 2: seems normal, but he's doing all these weird things.

662
00:34:09,000 --> 00:34:12,240
Speaker 1: I actually think that that's a really apt comparison, George,

663
00:34:12,400 --> 00:34:16,120
Speaker 1: especially for pre Vatican to Catholicism, because in the same

664
00:34:16,160 --> 00:34:19,240
Speaker 1: way obviously this was long before mass media as well,

665
00:34:19,760 --> 00:34:22,920
Speaker 1: but in the same way as the Catholic Church was

666
00:34:22,920 --> 00:34:28,200
Speaker 1: like very closed and impenetrable from the outside, the Mormon

667
00:34:28,280 --> 00:34:31,239
Speaker 1: Church to this day we don't know what goes on,

668
00:34:31,320 --> 00:34:34,200
Speaker 1: like non Mormons do not know what goes on inside

669
00:34:34,280 --> 00:34:37,160
Speaker 1: of the Mormon Temple. We are able to read things,

670
00:34:37,200 --> 00:34:42,120
Speaker 1: but they have never allowed to go in the temple

671
00:34:42,480 --> 00:34:45,120
Speaker 1: to film a service or anything like that. So I

672
00:34:45,160 --> 00:34:48,160
Speaker 1: think that's actually a really good comparison, and.

673
00:34:48,280 --> 00:34:52,080
Speaker 3: The not knowing breeds both the kind of curiosity and

674
00:34:52,200 --> 00:34:56,120
Speaker 3: the salaciousness of someone this Although George, I was thinking

675
00:34:56,120 --> 00:34:58,480
Speaker 3: that you were describing Romney. Do you remember he voted

676
00:34:58,480 --> 00:35:03,120
Speaker 3: to impeach Trump times because the Constitution is divinely ordained

677
00:35:03,239 --> 00:35:06,080
Speaker 3: and Trump violated, like Mormon's believe the founding is this

678
00:35:06,160 --> 00:35:10,239
Speaker 3: kind of divine event, right. I'm not exaggerating or you know,

679
00:35:11,040 --> 00:35:12,640
Speaker 3: trying to make fun of I'm saying it was very

680
00:35:12,719 --> 00:35:15,719
Speaker 3: interesting that Romney actually, to me, the most interesting things

681
00:35:15,760 --> 00:35:16,720
Speaker 3: that he said it out loud.

682
00:35:17,120 --> 00:35:21,600
Speaker 2: Mm hm, yes, completely. That's such a different reaction to

683
00:35:21,680 --> 00:35:26,239
Speaker 2: being called a religious fundamentalist to Kennedy's, whose instinct was

684
00:35:26,280 --> 00:35:28,120
Speaker 2: to be like, actually, I'm going to make a huge

685
00:35:28,480 --> 00:35:31,239
Speaker 2: momentous speech about the separation of church and state. I'm

686
00:35:31,239 --> 00:35:34,839
Speaker 2: gonna I'm gonna let not. He didn't go the route

687
00:35:34,880 --> 00:35:37,840
Speaker 2: of being like, actually, my Catholic faith is the reason

688
00:35:37,880 --> 00:35:39,719
Speaker 2: I want to be president. He was like, no, it's

689
00:35:39,800 --> 00:35:41,680
Speaker 2: it's a part of me. But I basically I'm gonna

690
00:35:41,840 --> 00:35:44,000
Speaker 2: I mean, the embeasson separation of church of state is

691
00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:45,600
Speaker 2: almost like saying it's something I'm not going to bring

692
00:35:45,640 --> 00:35:47,319
Speaker 2: into my job. I mean, yes, I believe these things,

693
00:35:47,320 --> 00:35:48,399
Speaker 2: but I'm not going to bring them into my.

694
00:35:48,400 --> 00:35:51,000
Speaker 1: Job, which, by the way, is what mid Romney had

695
00:35:51,000 --> 00:35:53,799
Speaker 1: to do when he was governor of Massachusetts. I'm from Massachusetts,

696
00:35:53,880 --> 00:35:57,319
Speaker 1: and that was a big thing for people in Massachusetts.

697
00:35:57,360 --> 00:35:59,040
Speaker 1: Obviously it's a pretty liberal state.

698
00:35:59,120 --> 00:36:01,400
Speaker 4: And this is where Romney and Kennedy aren't.

699
00:36:01,719 --> 00:36:04,839
Speaker 3: I mean, the comparison is very apt at one level,

700
00:36:04,840 --> 00:36:08,120
Speaker 3: but at another met Romney I can't see inside his heart,

701
00:36:08,160 --> 00:36:10,200
Speaker 3: but he seems like a very faithful moment to me

702
00:36:11,239 --> 00:36:13,800
Speaker 3: in a way that we cannot say that about Kennedy

703
00:36:13,800 --> 00:36:16,840
Speaker 3: and his Catholicism. And even you know, when Kennedy was elected,

704
00:36:16,840 --> 00:36:19,040
Speaker 3: there is the jokes it might have been Wilfrid Sheed,

705
00:36:19,280 --> 00:36:21,359
Speaker 3: a Catholic writer, sause we've yet again been.

706
00:36:21,280 --> 00:36:22,880
Speaker 4: Deprived of our first Catholic president.

707
00:36:23,040 --> 00:36:26,880
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and even Jackie Kennedy once said something like, ol,

708
00:36:27,600 --> 00:36:30,520
Speaker 3: Jack doesn't take this seriously. And this is Bobby he

709
00:36:30,840 --> 00:36:32,680
Speaker 3: you know, he elected him president.

710
00:36:32,800 --> 00:36:35,520
Speaker 1: Might but yeah, like that just said basically, it's like,

711
00:36:35,600 --> 00:36:39,759
Speaker 1: it's too bad about all the Catholicism accusations because Jack

712
00:36:39,840 --> 00:36:42,680
Speaker 1: is such a poor Catholic whereas Bobby never misses a

713
00:36:42,680 --> 00:36:44,000
Speaker 1: Mass and prays all the time.

714
00:36:44,200 --> 00:36:46,280
Speaker 2: And not only that, but then even within the family,

715
00:36:46,320 --> 00:36:48,520
Speaker 2: Bobby is sort of seen as the weird ones because

716
00:36:48,520 --> 00:36:51,200
Speaker 2: they are religious. Yeah, it's like, oh, they have all

717
00:36:51,200 --> 00:36:53,200
Speaker 2: these kids running around and they're always praying.

718
00:36:53,680 --> 00:36:54,600
Speaker 4: And I think it's fair to.

719
00:36:54,520 --> 00:36:57,719
Speaker 3: Say Bobby is the one who womanized the least, if

720
00:36:57,760 --> 00:37:00,920
Speaker 3: at all, and was not a drunk. You know, he

721
00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:04,320
Speaker 3: might have had a weak stomach. That's why the father

722
00:37:04,600 --> 00:37:06,640
Speaker 3: and Jack didn't drink as much as they might have.

723
00:37:06,640 --> 00:37:07,600
Speaker 4: They had weak stomachs.

724
00:37:08,000 --> 00:37:11,600
Speaker 1: Teddy was the drinker, yes, which Gary Wills forgives him

725
00:37:11,640 --> 00:37:13,640
Speaker 1: for for alms theological reasons.

726
00:37:13,719 --> 00:37:14,760
Speaker 4: His will was bound.

727
00:37:14,920 --> 00:37:17,480
Speaker 3: You know, he's an addict, like there was an Augustinian

728
00:37:18,080 --> 00:37:21,320
Speaker 3: original sin, like this is a man afflicted by forces

729
00:37:21,320 --> 00:37:24,479
Speaker 3: he cannot himself dominate or control. And so drinking meant

730
00:37:24,480 --> 00:37:27,359
Speaker 3: that when Teddy fucked up, he was not doing it

731
00:37:27,400 --> 00:37:31,920
Speaker 3: consciously intentionally in a way that Gary thought John or

732
00:37:32,120 --> 00:37:33,040
Speaker 3: other Kennedies might have.

733
00:37:33,239 --> 00:37:34,759
Speaker 2: No, that's a very good point, and I don't want

734
00:37:34,760 --> 00:37:37,319
Speaker 2: to get too carried away with the vignettes from the

735
00:37:37,320 --> 00:37:40,960
Speaker 2: Will's book, but I think the fact that Kennedy was

736
00:37:41,560 --> 00:37:45,200
Speaker 2: such a true delicate man, like he couldn't drink, he

737
00:37:45,239 --> 00:37:48,640
Speaker 2: couldn't eat anything complex. But it really puts into relief

738
00:37:48,920 --> 00:37:52,600
Speaker 2: just how as you're saying intentional and calculated, all his

739
00:37:52,760 --> 00:37:55,879
Speaker 2: sins were, you know, to go Catholic mode. I mean,

740
00:37:55,960 --> 00:37:59,360
Speaker 2: he is so calculating in his actions. And there's a

741
00:37:59,600 --> 00:38:03,120
Speaker 2: chilling and where they talk. He talks about how Kennedy

742
00:38:03,560 --> 00:38:06,319
Speaker 2: would show up to a woman's like hotel room and

743
00:38:06,360 --> 00:38:10,480
Speaker 2: have two eggs that he would the father. The father

744
00:38:11,360 --> 00:38:15,279
Speaker 2: Joe would show up and would have two eggs that

745
00:38:15,360 --> 00:38:18,399
Speaker 2: he would write on the shell, how he needed them

746
00:38:18,440 --> 00:38:20,879
Speaker 2: prepared so that they wouldn't upset his stomach. I mean

747
00:38:20,960 --> 00:38:23,680
Speaker 2: to be sort of like a badass playboy and be like,

748
00:38:23,760 --> 00:38:26,440
Speaker 2: I'm not drinking and I require my eggs to be

749
00:38:26,480 --> 00:38:29,200
Speaker 2: soft boiled for exactly three and a half minutes. It's

750
00:38:29,320 --> 00:38:30,000
Speaker 2: so crazy.

751
00:38:30,360 --> 00:38:34,040
Speaker 1: I'm here to fuck and eat soft boiled eggs ethnically exactly.

752
00:38:34,960 --> 00:38:36,440
Speaker 4: I mean the stories of the father.

753
00:38:36,680 --> 00:38:38,200
Speaker 3: I want to get this in, because he was showing

754
00:38:38,280 --> 00:38:40,279
Speaker 3: up at these hotels often to try to sleep with

755
00:38:40,480 --> 00:38:43,399
Speaker 3: women that his sons were also involved with, right, and

756
00:38:43,560 --> 00:38:46,080
Speaker 3: the story of him bringing some this is the Father again,

757
00:38:46,280 --> 00:38:50,600
Speaker 3: Hollywood starlett on a transatlantic cruise with him and his family,

758
00:38:50,719 --> 00:38:54,759
Speaker 3: and like yeah, yeah, glorious Swanson, right, and like she

759
00:38:54,840 --> 00:38:58,160
Speaker 3: had her own cabin and Kennedy's actual wife had hers, right,

760
00:38:58,239 --> 00:39:01,160
Speaker 3: And it was kind of like, No, the brazenness of

761
00:39:01,200 --> 00:39:03,880
Speaker 3: it is what I'm getting that is kind of remarkable.

762
00:39:04,320 --> 00:39:07,840
Speaker 3: He fother a sense of untouchability, and even his sons

763
00:39:07,880 --> 00:39:09,760
Speaker 3: had to learn this the hard way that they could

764
00:39:09,760 --> 00:39:12,640
Speaker 3: not for the sake of their political careers do this

765
00:39:12,680 --> 00:39:16,200
Speaker 3: because it's pretty much confirmed, right that John F. Kennedy,

766
00:39:16,400 --> 00:39:19,760
Speaker 3: one of his dalliances with was a Nazi spy. Yeah,

767
00:39:19,800 --> 00:39:22,160
Speaker 3: and like they were very worried. Dagger Hoover's going to

768
00:39:22,320 --> 00:39:24,080
Speaker 3: record you. He's going to take this, He's going to

769
00:39:24,120 --> 00:39:26,920
Speaker 3: record all this. They're paranoid by that. And they were

770
00:39:27,360 --> 00:39:31,920
Speaker 3: convinced that there was footage tapes recording somehow that proved

771
00:39:31,920 --> 00:39:34,759
Speaker 3: that John F. Kennedy, before he ran for president, had

772
00:39:34,760 --> 00:39:38,200
Speaker 3: an affair with the Nazi spy. So this is a

773
00:39:38,239 --> 00:39:39,800
Speaker 3: Nazi honeytrap kind of situation.

774
00:39:39,960 --> 00:39:44,200
Speaker 1: This is such a labyrinthine topic. And the thing that

775
00:39:44,239 --> 00:39:47,080
Speaker 1: I kept thinking about, both in doing research for this

776
00:39:47,200 --> 00:39:52,560
Speaker 1: episode and also skimming through the Gary Well's book, is that, yes,

777
00:39:52,640 --> 00:39:56,080
Speaker 1: this is the most famous Catholic family in America, and

778
00:39:56,160 --> 00:40:01,360
Speaker 1: all the men are sort of identifiable by their mortal sins.

779
00:40:01,560 --> 00:40:04,759
Speaker 1: In a way, they're like sins of the flesh, you know.

780
00:40:05,719 --> 00:40:10,080
Speaker 1: Jfk was lust, Bobby was Raths. He wasn't a womanizer,

781
00:40:10,160 --> 00:40:14,359
Speaker 1: but he had a nasty temper. Joe had, like all

782
00:40:14,400 --> 00:40:18,960
Speaker 1: of them, basically pride, lust, envy, and Teddy was an

783
00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:25,560
Speaker 1: alcoholic and arguably responsible for a woman's death. He was

784
00:40:26,040 --> 00:40:32,880
Speaker 1: he was Yeah, I don't know, I don't know why

785
00:40:32,920 --> 00:40:35,759
Speaker 1: I said, I'm trying to protect myself. From legal the

786
00:40:35,840 --> 00:40:41,600
Speaker 1: case is closed. But fine, that's right. Well, he's never

787
00:40:41,640 --> 00:40:45,920
Speaker 1: dead in my heart. As a Catholic from Massachusetts.

788
00:40:45,080 --> 00:40:47,880
Speaker 3: I know my old boss, a Commonweal Paul Vllman, anytime

789
00:40:47,920 --> 00:40:50,360
Speaker 3: I'd say something bad about Teddy, he'd flip out at

790
00:40:50,400 --> 00:40:53,360
Speaker 3: the lunch table. Okay, but do you know what actually

791
00:40:53,360 --> 00:40:56,000
Speaker 3: set him off more than anything? I once said, Hey,

792
00:40:56,719 --> 00:40:58,800
Speaker 3: there's a this is true. This is a bumper sticker.

793
00:40:58,800 --> 00:41:01,120
Speaker 3: But there's a great bumper sticker. My guns have killed

794
00:41:01,120 --> 00:41:02,719
Speaker 3: fewer people than Ted Kennedy's car.

795
00:41:03,080 --> 00:41:05,680
Speaker 1: Right, I remember it, and which I.

796
00:41:05,600 --> 00:41:07,759
Speaker 3: Hate to admit it, that that does go pretty hard.

797
00:41:07,760 --> 00:41:11,600
Speaker 3: It's an amazing bumper sticker, and it is literally true.

798
00:41:11,640 --> 00:41:14,399
Speaker 3: But that's what's set off my Kennedy loving friends when

799
00:41:14,400 --> 00:41:14,880
Speaker 3: I mentioned that.

800
00:41:14,920 --> 00:41:19,400
Speaker 1: Okay, well, my first question was about the mortal Sins

801
00:41:19,520 --> 00:41:24,000
Speaker 1: and how they became so associated with those and if

802
00:41:24,040 --> 00:41:26,839
Speaker 1: you think that that's coincidental or do you think that

803
00:41:26,880 --> 00:41:31,279
Speaker 1: the fact that they were Catholic heightens that contrast? And

804
00:41:31,360 --> 00:41:34,400
Speaker 1: my second question was specifically about your old colleagues at

805
00:41:34,440 --> 00:41:39,200
Speaker 1: Commonwheel being very defensive of the Kennedys and why you think.

806
00:41:39,040 --> 00:41:43,640
Speaker 3: That was Well, you know, I suspect the interest in

807
00:41:43,719 --> 00:41:46,919
Speaker 3: their sins is heightened in a way because of their Catholicism,

808
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:49,160
Speaker 3: in ways I probably can't prove. If you asked me

809
00:41:49,200 --> 00:41:50,919
Speaker 3: to prove this in a certain way, I'm not sure

810
00:41:50,960 --> 00:41:53,560
Speaker 3: I could. You could probably trace certain statements where there's

811
00:41:53,560 --> 00:41:56,120
Speaker 3: something lurking, you know, But I do think that's part

812
00:41:56,160 --> 00:42:00,359
Speaker 3: of it, and not necessarily unfairly. I mean that part

813
00:42:00,360 --> 00:42:02,759
Speaker 3: of the drama of the Catholic Church that drew me

814
00:42:02,840 --> 00:42:06,320
Speaker 3: to it is their understanding of human beings is like flawed,

815
00:42:06,400 --> 00:42:10,600
Speaker 3: sinful creatures who nevertheless are capable of finding grace and

816
00:42:10,640 --> 00:42:15,720
Speaker 3: redemption somehow. Even Kennedy's right, So I'm agreeing with your premise,

817
00:42:15,880 --> 00:42:18,759
Speaker 3: and I do think it is interesting that, yes, they're

818
00:42:18,800 --> 00:42:21,160
Speaker 3: known for those sins, but I'm not even sure. Again,

819
00:42:21,200 --> 00:42:23,959
Speaker 3: after reading the Will's book, you'll probably agree. Most people

820
00:42:24,000 --> 00:42:26,360
Speaker 3: don't know the deaths of them, right, And I feel

821
00:42:26,360 --> 00:42:30,239
Speaker 3: like with Kennedy, John Kennedy and lust I believe this

822
00:42:30,320 --> 00:42:33,839
Speaker 3: was in the Robert Dallak biography, But Kennedy's sins led

823
00:42:33,880 --> 00:42:36,839
Speaker 3: to his death or were a factor in his death

824
00:42:36,920 --> 00:42:39,560
Speaker 3: because one of the women he'd brought to the White House,

825
00:42:39,600 --> 00:42:42,400
Speaker 3: they were in the White House pool and Kennedy slipped

826
00:42:42,400 --> 00:42:44,200
Speaker 3: and threw out his back and so he had the

827
00:42:44,280 --> 00:42:46,880
Speaker 3: day he was shot in Dallas, he had on this

828
00:42:47,000 --> 00:42:50,600
Speaker 3: back brace that meant he couldn't duck. So after you

829
00:42:50,719 --> 00:42:53,240
Speaker 3: first see him hit, after you first hear the shot,

830
00:42:53,440 --> 00:42:56,840
Speaker 3: he couldn't duck to dodge the second or third bullet

831
00:42:57,000 --> 00:43:00,280
Speaker 3: or the magic meanderings of the single bullet. Either way,

832
00:43:00,560 --> 00:43:03,640
Speaker 3: the fact that he was made upright by his back

833
00:43:03,680 --> 00:43:06,680
Speaker 3: brace and couldn't duck out of the way, some people

834
00:43:06,719 --> 00:43:09,759
Speaker 3: have suggested that was a contributing factor and why the

835
00:43:09,800 --> 00:43:13,080
Speaker 3: assassination was ultimately fatal one the attempt.

836
00:43:13,560 --> 00:43:18,840
Speaker 2: Isn't that crazy? I know, you really can't write this stuff.

837
00:43:18,960 --> 00:43:21,960
Speaker 2: Every time I think we're over mythologizing the Kennedys and

838
00:43:22,440 --> 00:43:25,240
Speaker 2: reading too much into everything, then I hear a story

839
00:43:25,320 --> 00:43:28,239
Speaker 2: like that and I'm like, no, there's something there now.

840
00:43:28,440 --> 00:43:31,080
Speaker 3: I had to say in the current political season, where

841
00:43:31,080 --> 00:43:35,200
Speaker 3: and every time somebody says, ugh RFK Junior's selling his

842
00:43:35,239 --> 00:43:38,960
Speaker 3: family's legacy, I know he's the fulfillment of it. Like

843
00:43:39,040 --> 00:43:42,880
Speaker 3: this guy's not to train anything. He's epitomizing and fulfilling

844
00:43:43,320 --> 00:43:46,959
Speaker 3: all the horrible things that the Kennedys have done. Said

845
00:43:46,960 --> 00:43:49,840
Speaker 3: inflicts it on our country totally over the past few decades.

846
00:43:50,080 --> 00:43:53,840
Speaker 2: One of the real aha moments I had while reading

847
00:43:53,880 --> 00:43:57,000
Speaker 2: this book was just how trumpy Joe Kennedy was. It's

848
00:43:57,000 --> 00:43:59,920
Speaker 2: this crazy thing because in the public imagination, let's say

849
00:43:59,920 --> 00:44:03,239
Speaker 2: you think of the Kennedy's as almost opposite to the

850
00:44:03,360 --> 00:44:06,600
Speaker 2: Trump machine. You're like, the Kennedy's are statesmen, and they

851
00:44:06,600 --> 00:44:09,759
Speaker 2: are patriots, and they're elegant, and they're well dressed and

852
00:44:09,800 --> 00:44:11,840
Speaker 2: all this stuff. And in fact, and Trump.

853
00:44:11,640 --> 00:44:14,640
Speaker 4: Put his name in front of theirs on the Kennedy Center. Yes, yeah,

854
00:44:14,680 --> 00:44:14,880
Speaker 4: I know.

855
00:44:14,960 --> 00:44:18,160
Speaker 2: It's so crazy. It really is the end of history stuff.

856
00:44:18,560 --> 00:44:20,200
Speaker 4: The Leasons writers are so lazy.

857
00:44:20,360 --> 00:44:25,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, But Joe and then even JFK himself had bad

858
00:44:25,320 --> 00:44:27,880
Speaker 2: taste esthetically. It was Jackie who had good taste, Like

859
00:44:27,960 --> 00:44:30,920
Speaker 2: Jackie was interested in high art and fashion and all

860
00:44:30,920 --> 00:44:34,200
Speaker 2: this stuff, and JFK was sort of Trumpian in his tastes.

861
00:44:34,280 --> 00:44:37,640
Speaker 2: He was much more like in your face, like you know,

862
00:44:37,760 --> 00:44:38,800
Speaker 2: Golden White House.

863
00:44:39,160 --> 00:44:42,640
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, And I mean, frankly, I mean, either of

864
00:44:42,680 --> 00:44:44,880
Speaker 3: you can disagree with this, but I could totally imagine

865
00:44:45,000 --> 00:44:47,840
Speaker 3: John F. Kennedy saying what Trump said on the Access

866
00:44:47,840 --> 00:44:48,640
Speaker 3: Hollywood take.

867
00:44:49,280 --> 00:44:50,960
Speaker 2: I mean if he didn't say it out loud, then

868
00:44:51,040 --> 00:44:52,680
Speaker 2: certainly that was his ethos.

869
00:44:52,920 --> 00:44:55,480
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was that sense of having the right, yeah,

870
00:44:55,680 --> 00:44:57,920
Speaker 3: complete to do this, to win, having.

871
00:44:57,960 --> 00:45:00,520
Speaker 1: That sense of like it was his birthright.

872
00:45:00,239 --> 00:45:01,960
Speaker 4: Yeah, which affected his governance too.

873
00:45:02,640 --> 00:45:06,280
Speaker 1: I think there's definitely a good comparison between what George

874
00:45:06,280 --> 00:45:10,920
Speaker 1: initially said, Trump and Joe Kennedy, in particular because Joe Kennedy,

875
00:45:11,360 --> 00:45:14,799
Speaker 1: much like Trump, so upset that he had all of

876
00:45:14,840 --> 00:45:19,480
Speaker 1: the material assets of what should make for a high

877
00:45:20,239 --> 00:45:26,279
Speaker 1: status man, but he was rejected by high society and

878
00:45:26,320 --> 00:45:32,080
Speaker 1: that is clearly such a fundamental original wound within Joe,

879
00:45:32,280 --> 00:45:34,719
Speaker 1: and I think it is that way with Trump too.

880
00:45:35,080 --> 00:45:37,640
Speaker 1: The difference with Trump being that he was born into it,

881
00:45:38,000 --> 00:45:42,040
Speaker 1: and so it makes Trump even angrier that, yeah, you know,

882
00:45:42,120 --> 00:45:45,920
Speaker 1: he was born into wealth but still is rejected.

883
00:45:45,440 --> 00:45:48,799
Speaker 4: By like, yes, yes, he's the outer borough guy.

884
00:45:49,080 --> 00:45:52,279
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, exactly. The other similarity which I hadn't thought

885
00:45:52,320 --> 00:45:55,280
Speaker 2: of is the obsession with Hollywood and with show business

886
00:45:55,440 --> 00:45:58,520
Speaker 2: like Joe Kennedy really, I mean, his later career was

887
00:45:58,560 --> 00:46:02,120
Speaker 2: spent as a Hollywood producer, and he had this obsession

888
00:46:02,200 --> 00:46:05,799
Speaker 2: with getting an advance basically like a screener of like

889
00:46:05,880 --> 00:46:08,840
Speaker 2: the new movie that hadn't come out yet and having

890
00:46:08,960 --> 00:46:11,520
Speaker 2: screenings in the White House. I mean, I know that

891
00:46:11,600 --> 00:46:16,160
Speaker 2: Marilyn Monroe connection is way overstated, and we've heard theories

892
00:46:16,160 --> 00:46:18,839
Speaker 2: that it never happened, or it only happened once, and

893
00:46:18,880 --> 00:46:21,080
Speaker 2: you know, people love to mythologize it more than it

894
00:46:21,160 --> 00:46:25,680
Speaker 2: maybe deserves. But it's an example of the Kennedy men's

895
00:46:25,880 --> 00:46:30,960
Speaker 2: obsession with starlett's and Hollywood actresses and singers.

896
00:46:31,000 --> 00:46:34,040
Speaker 3: And like Trump, there's such gossip queens awesome, Yes, like

897
00:46:34,280 --> 00:46:37,239
Speaker 3: these accounts of JFK in the White House kind of

898
00:46:37,280 --> 00:46:38,880
Speaker 3: wondering who Frank Sinatra's fucking is.

899
00:46:38,920 --> 00:46:40,640
Speaker 4: At the same goal, he is like.

900
00:46:40,880 --> 00:46:43,799
Speaker 3: The rumors and gossip about the starlets and actors and

901
00:46:43,840 --> 00:46:46,440
Speaker 3: singers and you know, celebrities, Hollywood types.

902
00:46:46,760 --> 00:46:48,799
Speaker 4: Totally like that. That is one of.

903
00:46:48,719 --> 00:46:51,400
Speaker 3: The one of my favorite parallels between these two families.

904
00:46:51,560 --> 00:46:54,120
Speaker 2: It's funny how everything sort of old is new again

905
00:46:54,200 --> 00:46:54,839
Speaker 2: in this weird way.

906
00:46:55,040 --> 00:46:57,800
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more United States and Kennedy after

907
00:46:57,880 --> 00:47:15,080
Speaker 1: this break, and we're back with more United States of Kennedy.

908
00:47:15,640 --> 00:47:17,759
Speaker 2: All right, So you mentioned RFK Junior. You know, we

909
00:47:17,760 --> 00:47:20,040
Speaker 2: always talk about how the two most high profile Kennedy's

910
00:47:20,080 --> 00:47:22,799
Speaker 2: now are Arek Junior and Jack Schlossberg, and both of

911
00:47:22,840 --> 00:47:24,840
Speaker 2: them are like archetypes that have been there since the

912
00:47:24,920 --> 00:47:28,399
Speaker 2: Joe Kennedy generation, the sort of hot young dumb one

913
00:47:29,600 --> 00:47:33,120
Speaker 2: and the kind of dangerous power hungry you know, like.

914
00:47:33,120 --> 00:47:35,399
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like that, uh huh and the hot ones

915
00:47:35,480 --> 00:47:38,799
Speaker 3: kind of like a normy live exactly exactly, Yeah, throwing

916
00:47:38,880 --> 00:47:40,400
Speaker 3: some resistance red meat to people.

917
00:47:40,480 --> 00:47:41,399
Speaker 4: But yeah right.

918
00:47:42,000 --> 00:47:45,160
Speaker 2: And also much like so many of his ancestors, like

919
00:47:45,200 --> 00:47:47,759
Speaker 2: really thinks it's his birthright to be. He's just he's like,

920
00:47:47,760 --> 00:47:50,240
Speaker 2: I'm running for Congress. I don't really have a big

921
00:47:50,440 --> 00:47:53,120
Speaker 2: statement about it, but like, come on, just vote for me.

922
00:47:53,560 --> 00:47:53,920
Speaker 1: It's me.

923
00:47:54,440 --> 00:47:54,719
Speaker 4: It's me.

924
00:47:54,920 --> 00:47:59,240
Speaker 2: Yeah, truly, his campaign slogan is it's me. But I'm wondering.

925
00:48:00,080 --> 00:48:03,239
Speaker 2: Julia had this question of like, of are the Kennedy's

926
00:48:03,360 --> 00:48:05,680
Speaker 2: bad Catholics? So I want to credit her for writing

927
00:48:05,719 --> 00:48:07,360
Speaker 2: that question, but I want to add to it, like

928
00:48:07,480 --> 00:48:10,120
Speaker 2: are they bad Catholics? And where do we stand on

929
00:48:10,160 --> 00:48:10,680
Speaker 2: that question?

930
00:48:10,800 --> 00:48:11,040
Speaker 4: Now?

931
00:48:11,120 --> 00:48:14,120
Speaker 2: Like with this current generation, how do you see their

932
00:48:14,200 --> 00:48:16,760
Speaker 2: evolving relationship to Catholicism?

933
00:48:17,520 --> 00:48:19,480
Speaker 3: Can I give a bit of a wind up to

934
00:48:19,480 --> 00:48:22,040
Speaker 3: this answer? Please don't go all right. This is an

935
00:48:22,040 --> 00:48:25,120
Speaker 3: interesting question because that actually I've thought a lot about

936
00:48:25,480 --> 00:48:27,880
Speaker 3: in the years since Biden ran for president, and you know,

937
00:48:27,920 --> 00:48:30,800
Speaker 3: he was mourner in chief, kind of like this almost

938
00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:34,960
Speaker 3: genuinely stereotypical Irish Catholic going to every damn funeral and

939
00:48:34,960 --> 00:48:37,160
Speaker 3: giving her awake, you know, and giving the speech right

940
00:48:37,200 --> 00:48:40,080
Speaker 3: like that was extremely Irish Catholic. And he's kind of

941
00:48:40,080 --> 00:48:44,440
Speaker 3: the very last gasp of a very interesting generational story

942
00:48:44,480 --> 00:48:48,120
Speaker 3: where you'd go back pre Vatican too, like thirties, forties,

943
00:48:48,320 --> 00:48:52,160
Speaker 3: even into the fifties, Catholics lived in enclaves right, kind

944
00:48:52,200 --> 00:48:54,400
Speaker 3: of their own neighborhoods. There was the Italian parish or

945
00:48:54,400 --> 00:48:57,560
Speaker 3: the Irish parish right in your town or city where

946
00:48:57,600 --> 00:48:59,560
Speaker 3: you know, the kind of the ethnic Catholic groups would

947
00:48:59,560 --> 00:49:02,759
Speaker 3: go to mass, right, there was still some of that segregation.

948
00:49:02,880 --> 00:49:07,920
Speaker 3: Then you'd go to Loyola, right, or Georgetown or Gonzaga.

949
00:49:08,440 --> 00:49:10,640
Speaker 3: And then by the time it's the sixties or seventies,

950
00:49:10,640 --> 00:49:13,600
Speaker 3: maybe you've got your PhD at Columbia or an Ivy

951
00:49:13,680 --> 00:49:17,040
Speaker 3: League school, and this kind of moved from ethnic enclaves

952
00:49:17,160 --> 00:49:20,880
Speaker 3: and the immigrant church into the middle class and mainstream

953
00:49:20,960 --> 00:49:24,040
Speaker 3: of American society. You know, think about if each or

954
00:49:24,040 --> 00:49:26,239
Speaker 3: someone went to Georgetown. Now you don't think of them

955
00:49:26,239 --> 00:49:30,080
Speaker 3: as like, oh, you must be the kid of some immigrants, right,

956
00:49:30,120 --> 00:49:31,400
Speaker 3: who went to the Catholic school.

957
00:49:31,480 --> 00:49:31,600
Speaker 4: Right.

958
00:49:31,640 --> 00:49:34,479
Speaker 3: So even Catholic institutions have kind of matured in a way,

959
00:49:34,920 --> 00:49:36,520
Speaker 3: and so I think in some ways it's hard to

960
00:49:36,520 --> 00:49:40,319
Speaker 3: look back for people our age, like viscerally get you

961
00:49:40,360 --> 00:49:43,719
Speaker 3: know what a live question. Candy's Catholicism was as we described,

962
00:49:43,719 --> 00:49:46,799
Speaker 3: and this partly because you know, as the Peter Steinfelds

963
00:49:46,840 --> 00:49:49,759
Speaker 3: quote I began us with. You know, his campaign for

964
00:49:49,800 --> 00:49:53,479
Speaker 3: president revealed the bigotry that still remained, but once he won,

965
00:49:53,560 --> 00:49:56,520
Speaker 3: it seemed like that faded away and the Catholic kind

966
00:49:56,520 --> 00:49:59,560
Speaker 3: of emergence into the middle class in mainstream, away from

967
00:49:59,600 --> 00:50:02,680
Speaker 3: the margins, the ethnic enclaves and such, that that was

968
00:50:02,760 --> 00:50:05,720
Speaker 3: kind of, you know, happening full speed ahead.

969
00:50:06,040 --> 00:50:08,000
Speaker 4: And then we see it's a little more complicated than that.

970
00:50:08,239 --> 00:50:08,400
Speaker 4: You know.

971
00:50:08,760 --> 00:50:11,759
Speaker 3: For one thing, there's like the school prayer decisions the Catholics,

972
00:50:12,280 --> 00:50:15,360
Speaker 3: you know, that took very very Protestant Bible readings and prayers.

973
00:50:15,560 --> 00:50:17,600
Speaker 3: Like the kind of the relationship between Catholics and the

974
00:50:17,640 --> 00:50:20,200
Speaker 3: American mainstream. There's the Kennedy part we've been talking about.

975
00:50:20,400 --> 00:50:23,719
Speaker 3: But there's also like public schools became way less Protestant

976
00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:26,680
Speaker 3: in a formal official sense, and so this kind of

977
00:50:26,680 --> 00:50:30,160
Speaker 3: idea that Catholics were joining the American mainstream and the

978
00:50:30,200 --> 00:50:33,200
Speaker 3: kind of bigotries and old suspicions and hatreds would fade.

979
00:50:33,320 --> 00:50:35,239
Speaker 3: That's been true to some extent. I mean, how much

980
00:50:35,239 --> 00:50:38,920
Speaker 3: do we hear about Bobby Kennedy's Catholicism or Jack Schlosberg's.

981
00:50:39,000 --> 00:50:41,080
Speaker 2: It's funny you mentioned the Jack Schlosborth thing. Is funny

982
00:50:41,080 --> 00:50:44,440
Speaker 2: because actually I was reading one of his parients is Jewish?

983
00:50:44,520 --> 00:50:44,680
Speaker 4: Right.

984
00:50:45,000 --> 00:50:47,960
Speaker 2: I think he was maybe confirmed and raised Catholic. Don't

985
00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:49,120
Speaker 2: quote me on that, but I think I read that

986
00:50:49,160 --> 00:50:51,000
Speaker 2: in one of the articles you read about him. But

987
00:50:51,040 --> 00:50:54,600
Speaker 2: it's funny. I was talking about him to someone else

988
00:50:55,120 --> 00:50:57,319
Speaker 2: and they were like, is he Catholic because of his

989
00:50:57,360 --> 00:50:59,600
Speaker 2: last name obviously, and we were both like, oh, I

990
00:50:59,600 --> 00:51:02,760
Speaker 2: think he raised Catholic, but maybe he's Jewish. It's crazy

991
00:51:02,800 --> 00:51:05,280
Speaker 2: to think about it, Kennedy, that we wouldn't know whether

992
00:51:05,360 --> 00:51:07,879
Speaker 2: he's Catholic. And he has been, you know, this kind

993
00:51:07,920 --> 00:51:09,960
Speaker 2: of funny figure in pop culture now for like a

994
00:51:10,040 --> 00:51:12,520
Speaker 2: year and a half and we didn't even know whether

995
00:51:12,560 --> 00:51:13,799
Speaker 2: he was Catholic or not.

996
00:51:14,120 --> 00:51:16,600
Speaker 1: But it's so funny too to add on to that

997
00:51:16,600 --> 00:51:20,600
Speaker 1: that they still not only are they still Catholic, there's

998
00:51:20,640 --> 00:51:25,120
Speaker 1: still Catholic royalty in a way because in the beautiful

999
00:51:25,400 --> 00:51:29,840
Speaker 1: piece that Tatiana Schlossberg wrote about her cancer diagnosis, she

1000
00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:32,879
Speaker 1: talks about one of the nurses being kind to her

1001
00:51:33,200 --> 00:51:35,480
Speaker 1: and not batting an eye when she pulled out a

1002
00:51:35,600 --> 00:51:38,799
Speaker 1: rosary and holy water that had been blessed by Pope

1003
00:51:38,840 --> 00:51:43,719
Speaker 1: Francis himself. And where I think about the fact that

1004
00:51:43,760 --> 00:51:46,880
Speaker 1: Teddy was given his first communion by Pope Pius the twelfth,

1005
00:51:47,640 --> 00:51:50,560
Speaker 1: which is, as my friend Cassie said when I told

1006
00:51:50,560 --> 00:51:52,120
Speaker 1: her this so de malicious.

1007
00:51:52,719 --> 00:51:58,439
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, that's an incredibly great insight, Julia, that I think,

1008
00:51:58,520 --> 00:52:02,120
Speaker 3: especially the death are the Kennedy's good Catholics?

1009
00:52:02,200 --> 00:52:05,320
Speaker 4: Well, no, but none of us are. That's the point.

1010
00:52:06,120 --> 00:52:08,240
Speaker 4: I mean. I am not gonna sit.

1011
00:52:08,120 --> 00:52:09,799
Speaker 3: Here, you know, my boyfriend just came in the door,

1012
00:52:11,120 --> 00:52:13,319
Speaker 3: you know, at our apartment in Rome. Here, I'm not

1013
00:52:13,360 --> 00:52:16,480
Speaker 3: gonna hurl stones at anyone right and from this glass house.

1014
00:52:16,800 --> 00:52:19,400
Speaker 3: But that is partly the point of Catholicism that we

1015
00:52:19,440 --> 00:52:23,240
Speaker 3: are sinners. We are bound in ways that the expose

1016
00:52:23,239 --> 00:52:24,560
Speaker 3: of our freedom can't overcome.

1017
00:52:24,600 --> 00:52:27,480
Speaker 4: We are flawed, tragic, tragic, that's the word.

1018
00:52:27,400 --> 00:52:30,160
Speaker 3: Always associated with the Kennedy's and I do think the

1019
00:52:30,200 --> 00:52:33,960
Speaker 3: place of death. I mentioned the last rites that the

1020
00:52:34,040 --> 00:52:37,720
Speaker 3: Kronkite newscasts announcing Kennedy had died, that was in the mix.

1021
00:52:38,280 --> 00:52:40,640
Speaker 3: I do think there is something to that that the

1022
00:52:40,680 --> 00:52:44,640
Speaker 3: death hauntedness of the Kennedy family is also related to

1023
00:52:44,640 --> 00:52:47,960
Speaker 3: its Catholicism in ways that I find much more like

1024
00:52:48,040 --> 00:52:50,759
Speaker 3: productive and interesting than some of what we've been discussing.

1025
00:52:50,960 --> 00:52:54,160
Speaker 3: You know that they are so associated with tragic death

1026
00:52:54,480 --> 00:52:58,799
Speaker 3: that I think Catholicism is, among other things, it's a

1027
00:52:58,800 --> 00:53:01,840
Speaker 3: cradle to grave religion. And you're on your deathbed, you

1028
00:53:01,880 --> 00:53:04,800
Speaker 3: will get last rites. The priest will say a funeral

1029
00:53:04,840 --> 00:53:07,000
Speaker 3: mass for you, so you know you don't have to

1030
00:53:07,080 --> 00:53:10,160
Speaker 3: grieve from scratch. Mourning is one of the things the

1031
00:53:10,200 --> 00:53:13,360
Speaker 3: Catholic Church does extremely well. As we just saw. You

1032
00:53:13,400 --> 00:53:16,360
Speaker 3: mentioned Pope Francis. I mean the scenes of millions of

1033
00:53:16,400 --> 00:53:19,360
Speaker 3: different kinds of people from all over the world gathering

1034
00:53:19,400 --> 00:53:21,239
Speaker 3: to more in Pope Francis and then be there for

1035
00:53:21,320 --> 00:53:25,520
Speaker 3: the election of Pope Leo. Death and rebirth are the

1036
00:53:25,520 --> 00:53:28,359
Speaker 3: metier of both Christianity and general and the Catholic Church

1037
00:53:28,400 --> 00:53:30,520
Speaker 3: in particular, and they do both really really well.

1038
00:53:31,200 --> 00:53:33,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, as someone who was

1039
00:53:33,560 --> 00:53:37,920
Speaker 1: raised Catholic in a very Catholic state as a child,

1040
00:53:37,960 --> 00:53:40,440
Speaker 1: I remember going to so many funerals and wakes and

1041
00:53:40,480 --> 00:53:43,359
Speaker 1: that was not something that culturally you would keep your

1042
00:53:43,440 --> 00:53:46,600
Speaker 1: kids home from. I know, yeah, I realized that that

1043
00:53:46,760 --> 00:53:49,759
Speaker 1: is not something that like everyone experienced, but it was

1044
00:53:49,800 --> 00:53:51,120
Speaker 1: like a social event.

1045
00:53:51,920 --> 00:53:54,120
Speaker 4: And it isn't that interesting.

1046
00:53:54,239 --> 00:53:55,560
Speaker 3: I Mean, one of the things I've thought a lot

1047
00:53:55,600 --> 00:53:59,000
Speaker 3: about is whenever a pope dies, it's so striking to

1048
00:53:59,040 --> 00:54:02,799
Speaker 3: me that you see his frail little body, right because

1049
00:54:03,040 --> 00:54:04,800
Speaker 3: they've been old and sick for quite some time. The

1050
00:54:04,840 --> 00:54:09,040
Speaker 3: last popees has died, frail body, feet sticking up, pale face,

1051
00:54:09,440 --> 00:54:13,239
Speaker 3: pale hands. You see that that's not hidden, And there's

1052
00:54:13,280 --> 00:54:18,160
Speaker 3: a strange parallel away with like how public like John F.

1053
00:54:18,200 --> 00:54:19,359
Speaker 4: Kennon'ssassination is.

1054
00:54:19,680 --> 00:54:21,560
Speaker 3: Most people have probably who have looked into it all

1055
00:54:21,600 --> 00:54:26,000
Speaker 3: have probably seen some kind of photo of the event itself,

1056
00:54:26,120 --> 00:54:29,359
Speaker 3: or like an autopsy photo or something that is a

1057
00:54:29,360 --> 00:54:33,719
Speaker 3: bit bloody and death related in some way. And these

1058
00:54:33,800 --> 00:54:38,040
Speaker 3: very published, very public family, they've died very publicly as well.

1059
00:54:38,719 --> 00:54:41,120
Speaker 3: And there's something interesting to that because it's very Catholic

1060
00:54:41,200 --> 00:54:43,279
Speaker 3: in its own way, not by their choosing and choice,

1061
00:54:43,280 --> 00:54:45,439
Speaker 3: but there is something very Catholic about saying this is death.

1062
00:54:45,719 --> 00:54:49,600
Speaker 3: We have bodies and we die, yeah, and we're not

1063
00:54:49,640 --> 00:54:51,279
Speaker 3: going to hide from that or run from that.

1064
00:54:51,440 --> 00:54:53,360
Speaker 4: So it's kind of something that the most famous Catholic

1065
00:54:53,360 --> 00:54:53,680
Speaker 4: family the.

1066
00:54:53,719 --> 00:54:56,840
Speaker 3: United States is also the family most famous for the

1067
00:54:56,840 --> 00:54:59,360
Speaker 3: tragic deaths of its leading men, right.

1068
00:55:00,080 --> 00:55:02,439
Speaker 2: Yeah, which only adds to the mythology of them being

1069
00:55:02,480 --> 00:55:06,799
Speaker 2: this like outsized American. The two things that are most

1070
00:55:06,840 --> 00:55:09,879
Speaker 2: associated with are well, I was about to say sex

1071
00:55:09,920 --> 00:55:11,960
Speaker 2: and death, but I guess I would say sex, power,

1072
00:55:12,000 --> 00:55:14,000
Speaker 2: and death are the three things that Kennedies are most

1073
00:55:14,000 --> 00:55:16,000
Speaker 2: associated with. And I mean sex and death are like

1074
00:55:16,040 --> 00:55:17,799
Speaker 2: the two Catholic obsessions.

1075
00:55:18,000 --> 00:55:20,160
Speaker 4: You know, that's right, definitely.

1076
00:55:20,120 --> 00:55:21,279
Speaker 2: So it really makes sense.

1077
00:55:21,680 --> 00:55:23,960
Speaker 1: I wanted to go back because I think we got

1078
00:55:23,960 --> 00:55:26,000
Speaker 1: lost in the sauce a little bit because there's simply

1079
00:55:26,040 --> 00:55:27,319
Speaker 1: so much to talk about here.

1080
00:55:27,520 --> 00:55:27,840
Speaker 2: There is.

1081
00:55:28,239 --> 00:55:30,399
Speaker 1: I could talk to you for three hours about this

1082
00:55:31,040 --> 00:55:35,200
Speaker 1: as a death and sex obsessed Catholic myself. I wanted

1083
00:55:35,239 --> 00:55:38,719
Speaker 1: to go back to your colleagues at Commonweal Magazine and

1084
00:55:38,800 --> 00:55:43,360
Speaker 1: being defensive of the Kennedys, because I have found that

1085
00:55:43,920 --> 00:55:47,200
Speaker 1: in both in my own family, my own Irish Catholic family,

1086
00:55:47,800 --> 00:55:51,960
Speaker 1: and you know, in different parts of very Catholic Boston,

1087
00:55:52,080 --> 00:55:58,320
Speaker 1: the Greater Boston area, there is either a completely worshipful

1088
00:55:58,680 --> 00:56:03,040
Speaker 1: veneration of the Kennedy or a treatment of them as

1089
00:56:03,239 --> 00:56:06,000
Speaker 1: not like us. I'm reading a book right now by

1090
00:56:06,000 --> 00:56:09,200
Speaker 1: Michael Patrick MacDonald which is like a memoir of Southey

1091
00:56:09,440 --> 00:56:14,359
Speaker 1: in the seventies, and Southee was obviously very conservative, all

1092
00:56:14,360 --> 00:56:19,040
Speaker 1: white Catholic Irish, and they hated Ted Kennedy. And my

1093
00:56:19,120 --> 00:56:22,880
Speaker 1: grandmother was in that tradition a very I didn't know

1094
00:56:22,920 --> 00:56:25,760
Speaker 1: my grandfather, but I know he was too. They hated

1095
00:56:25,760 --> 00:56:30,400
Speaker 1: the Kennedys because even though they were so representative of

1096
00:56:30,480 --> 00:56:33,960
Speaker 1: Irish Catholic Massachusetts, they were also seen by a certain

1097
00:56:34,000 --> 00:56:37,359
Speaker 1: group of people as like interlopers. They didn't actually grow

1098
00:56:37,440 --> 00:56:41,600
Speaker 1: up in Massachusetts, and they were bad Catholics, and they

1099
00:56:41,640 --> 00:56:45,000
Speaker 1: just weren't like the rest of us. So I'm interested

1100
00:56:45,080 --> 00:56:47,360
Speaker 1: if you could speak to that push and pull a

1101
00:56:47,440 --> 00:56:51,880
Speaker 1: little bit and maybe talk about where your colleagues at

1102
00:56:51,880 --> 00:56:54,279
Speaker 1: Common Wheel kind of fell on that spectrum.

1103
00:56:54,840 --> 00:56:58,000
Speaker 3: Sure, I mean I mentioned it was my boss, Paul Ballman,

1104
00:56:58,360 --> 00:57:01,319
Speaker 3: great boss. I love Paul, but he's you know, in

1105
00:57:01,360 --> 00:57:04,040
Speaker 3: his seventies now. So I do think there's a generational

1106
00:57:04,080 --> 00:57:07,480
Speaker 3: aspect and the comparison as you were describing this, it

1107
00:57:07,520 --> 00:57:09,880
Speaker 3: reminds me of the way some white women relate to

1108
00:57:09,920 --> 00:57:13,560
Speaker 3: Hillary Clinton. They very much identify with the generational struggles

1109
00:57:13,600 --> 00:57:16,440
Speaker 3: of a woman striving for professional success in a hostile,

1110
00:57:16,440 --> 00:57:21,040
Speaker 3: male dominated world, right and politics especially. I think there's

1111
00:57:21,040 --> 00:57:24,280
Speaker 3: something that people who just won't hear any you know,

1112
00:57:24,400 --> 00:57:26,280
Speaker 3: that's the tell, right, They just I don't want to

1113
00:57:26,280 --> 00:57:29,080
Speaker 3: hear it, right, they don't want the mythology disturbed. And

1114
00:57:29,080 --> 00:57:33,640
Speaker 3: I think it's their identification with it comes from generational struggle,

1115
00:57:33,880 --> 00:57:37,040
Speaker 3: you know, being old enough to have a bit of

1116
00:57:37,240 --> 00:57:40,920
Speaker 3: actual experience with the American anti Catholicism, knowing a bit

1117
00:57:40,920 --> 00:57:43,920
Speaker 3: of that, or maybe their parents or grandparents especially experienced it.

1118
00:57:44,160 --> 00:57:47,680
Speaker 3: Maybe they're only one or two generations away from immigrant parents.

1119
00:57:47,680 --> 00:57:50,640
Speaker 3: So that's another part of the Catholicism. We haven't touched

1120
00:57:50,640 --> 00:57:53,440
Speaker 3: on quite as much, but I would say the identification

1121
00:57:53,600 --> 00:57:56,360
Speaker 3: comes in large part to the generational experience, would be

1122
00:57:56,400 --> 00:57:59,480
Speaker 3: my guess, in part because of the reasons we've been

1123
00:57:59,480 --> 00:58:03,200
Speaker 3: describing going through that, watching that unfold, that I think

1124
00:58:03,240 --> 00:58:06,680
Speaker 3: some of the hatred is almost like a narcissism small

1125
00:58:06,680 --> 00:58:10,000
Speaker 3: differences or anytime anyone is a kind of a hate

1126
00:58:10,040 --> 00:58:13,200
Speaker 3: to use this langage with like a trailblazer from a community, Right,

1127
00:58:13,280 --> 00:58:15,400
Speaker 3: it's always some people that community are like, this guy's

1128
00:58:15,400 --> 00:58:18,640
Speaker 3: actually embarrassing or this woman's actually not you know. I

1129
00:58:18,800 --> 00:58:22,480
Speaker 3: suspect the generational aspect of this explains in some ways

1130
00:58:22,480 --> 00:58:23,720
Speaker 3: both sides of that coin.

1131
00:58:24,280 --> 00:58:25,720
Speaker 4: At least that's part of it.

1132
00:58:25,760 --> 00:58:28,080
Speaker 3: The mythos goes so deep, right, it's so part of

1133
00:58:28,080 --> 00:58:30,520
Speaker 3: our political culture now that I think it's built beyond

1134
00:58:30,520 --> 00:58:33,000
Speaker 3: the boundaries of those generational dynamics. So I feel like

1135
00:58:33,040 --> 00:58:36,280
Speaker 3: the strongest feelings and the most heated debates you'd have

1136
00:58:36,480 --> 00:58:39,400
Speaker 3: would be with people from a certain generation about the Kennedys,

1137
00:58:39,480 --> 00:58:41,560
Speaker 3: and not like our colleagues and tears.

1138
00:58:42,080 --> 00:58:50,240
Speaker 1: Yeah. I also think that, particularly in Massachusetts, Teddy became

1139
00:58:50,600 --> 00:58:54,720
Speaker 1: the source of a lot of ire for conservative Irish

1140
00:58:54,720 --> 00:58:59,960
Speaker 1: Catholics because he supported desegregation of the Boston public schools

1141
00:59:00,480 --> 00:59:04,120
Speaker 1: and the word they called forest bussing, and there was

1142
00:59:04,200 --> 00:59:06,600
Speaker 1: no coming back from that for him.

1143
00:59:06,840 --> 00:59:10,360
Speaker 2: You're Hillary Clinton comparison is so funny because you're absolutely

1144
00:59:10,400 --> 00:59:14,000
Speaker 2: right that a certain generation of upwardly mobile professional women

1145
00:59:14,040 --> 00:59:15,880
Speaker 2: really relate to her and therefore don't want to hear

1146
00:59:15,920 --> 00:59:19,200
Speaker 2: any criticisms. But the other side is also true that

1147
00:59:19,240 --> 00:59:22,080
Speaker 2: the people who hate Hillary Clinton as though she is

1148
00:59:22,160 --> 00:59:25,320
Speaker 2: like the literal devil. Of course, she is just as

1149
00:59:25,320 --> 00:59:27,720
Speaker 2: corrupt as any other politician. I'm not disagreeing with that,

1150
00:59:27,800 --> 00:59:31,680
Speaker 2: but the passion of the hatred is also like this strange,

1151
00:59:31,840 --> 00:59:35,880
Speaker 2: outsized thing, and I think ultimately she's probably just as

1152
00:59:35,880 --> 00:59:37,919
Speaker 2: fallible as most American politicians.

1153
00:59:38,040 --> 00:59:38,320
Speaker 4: Yeah.

1154
00:59:38,440 --> 00:59:40,280
Speaker 3: I think he kind of gets to what we were

1155
00:59:40,320 --> 00:59:43,840
Speaker 3: discussing earlier about the Kennedy's being held to the Catholic standard.

1156
00:59:44,280 --> 00:59:45,400
Speaker 4: Interesting ways.

1157
00:59:45,800 --> 00:59:49,480
Speaker 3: You know, so you're some Protestant Southern Baptist person in

1158
00:59:49,520 --> 00:59:53,200
Speaker 3: Texas in nineteen sixty you probably hate the Kennedy's because

1159
00:59:53,200 --> 00:59:55,720
Speaker 3: they're Catholic, right, But then you also say, and they're

1160
00:59:55,760 --> 00:59:59,160
Speaker 3: not even good ones, yo, And the portions are so small.

1161
01:00:00,000 --> 01:00:00,520
Speaker 4: I have to say.

1162
01:00:00,520 --> 01:00:02,280
Speaker 3: It's kind of that weird dynamic, and it's sort of

1163
01:00:02,320 --> 01:00:04,760
Speaker 3: with Hillary Clinton. You know, so many people hate her

1164
01:00:04,840 --> 01:00:08,240
Speaker 3: for misogynistic reasons, right, But then it's also like my mother,

1165
01:00:08,280 --> 01:00:11,400
Speaker 3: who's you know, conservative. You know, I remember one time,

1166
01:00:11,640 --> 01:00:14,600
Speaker 3: I think during the twenty sixteen race, she said, how

1167
01:00:14,640 --> 01:00:16,600
Speaker 3: can she believe that mean about abortion?

1168
01:00:16,960 --> 01:00:17,520
Speaker 4: As a mother?

1169
01:00:18,760 --> 01:00:21,760
Speaker 3: She was like the woman fact that gets held against Hillary.

1170
01:00:21,880 --> 01:00:23,960
Speaker 3: My mother was like, as a woman, how could you

1171
01:00:24,000 --> 01:00:26,560
Speaker 3: believe that about it? But as a mother, how could you?

1172
01:00:26,560 --> 01:00:28,480
Speaker 3: You know, my mom's very conservative. So it was this

1173
01:00:28,520 --> 01:00:30,880
Speaker 3: weird thing where like, the reason most people were hating Hillary,

1174
01:00:31,000 --> 01:00:33,439
Speaker 3: she's a woman, right, that's a big part of why

1175
01:00:33,520 --> 01:00:36,120
Speaker 3: a lot of people don't like her unfairly. There's many

1176
01:00:36,120 --> 01:00:38,880
Speaker 3: fair reasons to dislike her. Those are the reasons I held.

1177
01:00:39,600 --> 01:00:42,280
Speaker 3: But you know, the reason so many people dislike her

1178
01:00:42,400 --> 01:00:45,200
Speaker 3: being a woman is like, for my mom, it was

1179
01:00:45,240 --> 01:00:47,919
Speaker 3: like turned around in this weird way to also hate Hillary.

1180
01:00:47,840 --> 01:00:50,760
Speaker 2: Right, you know, a woman, my mom, who owned Democrat,

1181
01:00:51,320 --> 01:00:54,439
Speaker 2: had a very almost opposite reaction what you're describing. She goes,

1182
01:00:54,720 --> 01:00:56,919
Speaker 2: as a woman, how could she have stayed with Bill

1183
01:00:56,960 --> 01:00:57,640
Speaker 2: after the affair?

1184
01:00:57,920 --> 01:01:00,000
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like, oh my god, it's like you can't.

1185
01:01:00,800 --> 01:01:05,280
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly That's exactly my mom's rationale too. I mean,

1186
01:01:05,320 --> 01:01:07,160
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people who feel that way about her.

1187
01:01:07,320 --> 01:01:09,800
Speaker 1: George and I are criticisms of Hillary Clinton. We just

1188
01:01:09,840 --> 01:01:10,920
Speaker 1: want to say are perfect.

1189
01:01:11,360 --> 01:01:12,000
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right.

1190
01:01:12,040 --> 01:01:13,320
Speaker 4: I would expect nothing less.

1191
01:01:13,400 --> 01:01:16,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're the only people that really grasp the vibe. Yeah,

1192
01:01:16,400 --> 01:01:16,880
Speaker 2: that's right.

1193
01:01:17,680 --> 01:01:19,240
Speaker 4: That's why I agreed to come on the show.

1194
01:01:19,560 --> 01:01:22,960
Speaker 3: I knew you as the perfect Hillary criticizers, your reputation

1195
01:01:23,000 --> 01:01:23,520
Speaker 3: for seed to do.

1196
01:01:23,880 --> 01:01:26,040
Speaker 2: We will be relitigating Bernie versus Hillary next.

1197
01:01:26,040 --> 01:01:28,920
Speaker 4: That's right. Oh. I was hoping we could get to the.

1198
01:01:28,840 --> 01:01:33,000
Speaker 3: Twenty sixteen you because did you remember, on the eve

1199
01:01:33,000 --> 01:01:35,520
Speaker 3: of the New York primary, Bernie went to the Vatican

1200
01:01:35,840 --> 01:01:37,120
Speaker 3: for that conference on labor.

1201
01:01:37,240 --> 01:01:38,640
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I did not remember that.

1202
01:01:38,560 --> 01:01:40,960
Speaker 3: And gave a talk at the Vatican because it was

1203
01:01:40,960 --> 01:01:44,280
Speaker 3: the anniversary of one of the encyclicals of Catholic social teaching,

1204
01:01:44,360 --> 01:01:46,959
Speaker 3: like affirming of unions and labor rights and things like that,

1205
01:01:47,480 --> 01:01:50,480
Speaker 3: and believe it or not, it stirred so many crazy

1206
01:01:50,520 --> 01:01:53,800
Speaker 3: reactions including I won't say who, but a well known

1207
01:01:53,880 --> 01:01:56,520
Speaker 3: religion writer said, is this who was totally in the

1208
01:01:56,560 --> 01:01:59,720
Speaker 3: tank for Hillary? She said, does this violate the Constitution?

1209
01:02:00,680 --> 01:02:01,600
Speaker 4: And I was like a.

1210
01:02:01,600 --> 01:02:05,080
Speaker 3: Fucking Jewish guy giving the talk at the Vatican that

1211
01:02:05,280 --> 01:02:08,680
Speaker 3: definitely does not violate the Constitution or doors. Bernie was

1212
01:02:08,720 --> 01:02:12,120
Speaker 3: not suggesting Catholicism should be the state official religion of

1213
01:02:12,160 --> 01:02:15,000
Speaker 3: the United States. Right, Well, we could have tied it

1214
01:02:15,040 --> 01:02:17,640
Speaker 3: back to the twenty sixteen primaries, but I chose not to.

1215
01:02:18,120 --> 01:02:20,480
Speaker 3: But I leave those little bread crumbs for your listeners.

1216
01:02:20,640 --> 01:02:23,040
Speaker 3: They want to explore that that Catholicism in the twenty

1217
01:02:23,080 --> 01:02:25,320
Speaker 3: sixteen primary, Yes, yes, it all connects.

1218
01:02:25,320 --> 01:02:27,720
Speaker 2: I mean, Bernie saying that Catholicism should be the official

1219
01:02:27,760 --> 01:02:30,200
Speaker 2: religion of America is the funniest possible thing he could

1220
01:02:30,280 --> 01:02:32,880
Speaker 2: do if he wants to make a really amazingly funny announcement.

1221
01:02:33,400 --> 01:02:36,360
Speaker 2: All right, well, Matt, this was this was so much fun.

1222
01:02:36,760 --> 01:02:38,000
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me.

1223
01:02:38,160 --> 01:02:39,640
Speaker 2: I have to say, if nothing, I mean, this was

1224
01:02:39,680 --> 01:02:41,600
Speaker 2: such a great conversation. But we're also just so grateful

1225
01:02:41,640 --> 01:02:44,439
Speaker 2: you introduced this to that book, Be Kennedy Imprisonment, because

1226
01:02:44,440 --> 01:02:47,320
Speaker 2: it really has kind of shifted how I think about

1227
01:02:47,360 --> 01:02:48,120
Speaker 2: a lot of this stuff.

1228
01:02:48,320 --> 01:02:50,920
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, I'm so glad. I want everyone to be

1229
01:02:50,920 --> 01:02:54,600
Speaker 4: Will's pilled, Willy killed, Will killed.

1230
01:02:55,000 --> 01:02:58,640
Speaker 1: His pedagogy is just like it's incredible that's the perfect

1231
01:02:58,680 --> 01:02:59,120
Speaker 1: word for it.

1232
01:02:59,240 --> 01:03:02,240
Speaker 2: Yeah, highly recommend the episode of Matt's podcast Know Your

1233
01:03:02,320 --> 01:03:05,440
Speaker 2: Enemy with Jed here about the book, it's from a

1234
01:03:05,480 --> 01:03:07,920
Speaker 2: couple of years ago. Anyway, Thank you so much. This

1235
01:03:08,040 --> 01:03:08,600
Speaker 2: was so much fun.

1236
01:03:08,600 --> 01:03:09,240
Speaker 4: Thank you, Thank you.

1237
01:03:09,200 --> 01:03:11,640
Speaker 2: For doing it for Rome, and please enjoy you know,

1238
01:03:11,920 --> 01:03:13,360
Speaker 2: joy Carbonara.

1239
01:03:13,040 --> 01:03:16,120
Speaker 4: To celebrate peace, be with you, Mass and also with you.

1240
01:03:19,560 --> 01:03:22,480
Speaker 1: So that's it for this week's episode. We also wanted

1241
01:03:22,520 --> 01:03:25,120
Speaker 1: to take a moment to acknowledge the tragic passing of

1242
01:03:25,200 --> 01:03:30,600
Speaker 1: Tatiana Schlasberg, JFK's granddaughter and Jack Schlossberg's sister. She was

1243
01:03:30,760 --> 01:03:33,200
Speaker 1: just thirty five years old, and you.

1244
01:03:33,160 --> 01:03:35,720
Speaker 2: Can read her beautiful essay from last year about her

1245
01:03:35,800 --> 01:03:39,320
Speaker 2: terminal cancer diagnosis on the New Yorker website. Her family

1246
01:03:39,360 --> 01:03:40,120
Speaker 2: is in Our Thoughts.

1247
01:03:40,600 --> 01:03:43,720
Speaker 1: United States. Kennedy is hosted by me Julia Claire and

1248
01:03:43,760 --> 01:03:44,600
Speaker 1: George Saveres.

1249
01:03:44,920 --> 01:03:47,600
Speaker 2: Original music by Joshua Chipolski.

1250
01:03:47,280 --> 01:03:49,040
Speaker 1: Editing by Graham Gibson.

1251
01:03:48,880 --> 01:03:50,880
Speaker 2: Mixing and mastering by Doug Bame.

1252
01:03:51,080 --> 01:03:53,600
Speaker 1: Research by Dave Ruth and Austin Thompson.

1253
01:03:53,760 --> 01:03:55,360
Speaker 2: Our producer is Carmen Laurent.

1254
01:03:55,640 --> 01:03:57,760
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Jenna Cagel.

1255
01:03:57,960 --> 01:03:59,240
Speaker 2: Created by Lyra Smith.

1256
01:03:59,440 --> 01:04:02,640
Speaker 1: United States to Kennedy is a production of iHeart podcasts.