The principal "smear" leveled against John F. Kennedy when he was running for president was that, as a Catholic, he would take instruction from the Pope. Just as Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney told voters earlier this year that he would make decisions independent of the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City, Democratic hopeful John F. Kennedy told voters in 1960 that the Vatican would have no say in what went on in a Kennedy White House.


John and Robert Kennedy, 1963
SIRS Decades

In a statement that appeared to leave him no wiggle room, Kennedy had this to say on the topic:

There is only one legitimate question underlying all the rest: would you, as President of the United States, be responsive in any way to ecclesiastical pressures or obligations of any kind that might in any fashion influence or interfere with your conduct of that office in the national interest? I have answered that question many times. My answer was--and is--"NO."

In discounting concerns of inappropriate papal influence, Kennedy was responding to attacks like the one contained in this pamphlet by "Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State" (AU for short). In attempting to create unease at the prospect of a Catholic president, AU alleged that Catholic leaders routinely used doubletalk to "distort . . . the meaning of the Constitution while still claiming to accept it."

Among the pamphlet's other incendiary claims were that, in Catholic thought,

• the "wall of separation" between church and state was "only a metaphor [or] figure of speech";
  
  
• the First Amendment "was not intended to . . . impose government neutrality between believers and disbelievers" or even to "guarantee freedom of nonbelief";
  
  
• and the Constitution neither prohibited the "expenditure for religious purposes of funds raised by federal taxes" nor barred the "preferential treatment of a particular religion."

The AU pamphlet--the key tenets of which Kennedy appeared to respond to in the passage quoted above--was actually released a few weeks after the Massachusetts senator's famous "Religious Issue in American Politics" speech.

Activity

Given this chronology, to what extent does the pamphlet reflect reasonable concerns about a Catholic occupying the Oval Office, and to what extent is it a cynical appeal to the bigotry of anti-Catholic voters?

Answer this question in 500 words, making specific references to both the AU pamphlet and the Kennedy speech.