![]() ![]() Romney, on the other hand, is swimming against the tide: his faith remains far more alien than Catholicism was to Kennedy’s fellow Americans in 1960. Kennedy’s election was a culmination, not a catalyst. By 1960, Roman Catholics had spent a century making concessions to American culture. Only 32 years before Kennedy’s narrow win, the Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith was torpedoed by a whisper campaign that insinuated he planned to invite the Pope to live in the White House. ![]() But the truth is that the integration of a religion into American life is the work of decades, not a single presidential election. ![]() ( MORE: Read TIME’s Cover Story, “The Mormon In Mitt”)Ī Mormon moment would mean a sudden instant in which America collectively grows up, reexamines its prejudices, learns more about a foreign faith, and realizes that its adherents are not so different after all. Mitt Romney would like to be Kennedy in this scenario, bringing America to a Mormon moment just as JFK brought American to its Catholic moment both the candidate and the media have made the comparison incessantly. ![]() The Kennedy machine managed to “turn the election partially into a referendum on tolerance versus bigotry,” and the hapless Nixon found himself holding the bag for bigotry. Follow to his memoirs, Richard Nixon believed that he lost the 1960 election because his opponent, John F. ![]()
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