On a sweaty September evening in Houston, John F. Kennedy stood at the lectern in a downtown hotel facing the gravest threat to his presidential campaign.
Arrayed before Kennedy in the opulent ballroom were roughly 300 of the South’s most respected protestant ministers. They had invited the young senator from Massachusetts into their lair to do the nearly impossible: disprove their accusations that Kennedy’s Catholic faith, and his ostensible allegiance to the pope, would undermine religious freedom in the United States. Kennedy knew that he was unlikely to convince the men in the room, but he hoped that by confronting his detractors head-on he might defuse the kind of anti-Catholic sentiment that had doomed the White House bid of New York Gov. Al Smith a little more than three decades earlier.
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