American Experience

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the First Catholic President

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The conventional view is that after Joe Jr. died, Joe Sr. immediately turned to Jack and said, okay, you're now going to be the first Catholic President of the United States. The process was so much more subtle and complicated than that. For one thing, Joe Jr.'s death was so devastating to Joe Sr. Some friend of his said it was the most severe shock ever registered on a human being that he'd ever seen. He went into a depression. He couldn't get out of his room during the day. And only gradually did life reassert itself when he began to hope that maybe in this family something more could go on to answer his dreams for the family. On Jack's part, he saw the depression that his father was suffering. He wanted to reach out and help but he didn't know how. There was no way he thought he could be what Joe Jr. had been to his father. So the two of them circled around each other, I think for years, with Jack wanting to satisfy some need of the father's, the father wishing Jack could satisfy it but the father never could see Jack at that point as a politician. He was shy, he was withdrawn, he was happy-go-lucky, he was having too good of a time, he was undisciplined. And Jack surprised him. Jack decided, I think, to go into politics at first to make his father happy. Only later did he realize it was what he wanted for himself and suddenly he was good at it. And I think Joe Sr. was a surprised as anyone. There's a wonderful scene where at one point Jack was talking on a square, I think Maverick Square in East Boston and suddenly the father sees this kid is good, in fact I believe he's better than Joe Jr. ever would have been because he had that wry sense of humor that Joe Jr., who was so serious, never would have brought to it. But it was only time that allowed Joe Sr. to reevaluate his whole sense of this second child who he had never thought very much about in terms of ambition for the future.

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