Although the 1956 convention contretemps between Senator Kennedy and Mrs. Roosevelt played out in the privacy of her Chicago hotel suite, after she refused to back his impromptu run for the vice-presidential nomination, public tiffs awaited the pair as the 1960 nomination race neared. Eleanor Roosevelt was simply unwilling to accept that John Kennedy might become the new face of the Democratic Party. To her, he was too young, too inexperienced, too libertine, too ambitious, too moderate (especially on race and McCarthyism), too Catholic, and, worst of all, too close to his father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, whom she abhorred. She had tried to convert her husband to her brand of progressivism, but she made few efforts to do the same with JFK. He attempted to win Eleanor’s support—or at least earn her respect—but to no avail. Instead, their mutual grievances about each other multiplied.

In mid-1959, Eleanor testified in favor of an increased minimum wage before Kennedy’s Senate labor subcommittee, and JFK literally turned his back on the former First Lady, chatting with his staff during her statement. Labor lobbyist Esther Peterson was taken aback. She had arranged for Eleanor to appear on the Hill at the hearing, and in Peterson’s meetings with JFK over the previous decade, she appreciated that he listened to her, unlike most of Congress’s male members. But the lobbyist found his treatment of Eleanor offensive. “It was rather tense at that moment because of the relationship between the senator and Mrs. Roosevelt,” she said. “I was annoyed with him the day she testified because here was this grand old lady, and he didn’t come down and go through the niceties with her that one would expect, the respect, I think, that was due to her.”

In addition to Kennedy’s impertinence toward Eleanor, hearing-room spectators who disagreed with the former First Lady voiced their disregard for ER and her family. “I remember the dignity of this marvelous woman standing up to some of the remarks that they made about her and her children, confronting her as she was walking down an aisle,” Peterson reported. “I remember her saying in answer to a ‘hate’ remark, ‘Hate is a strong word. Do you really want to use it?’”

To her, he was too young, too inexperienced, too libertine, too ambitious, too moderate (especially on race and McCarthyism), too Catholic, and, worst of all, too close to his father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, whom she abhorred. 

Perhaps Eleanor didn’t hate Kennedy, yet his impudent behavior that day stiffened her opposition toward him, and ER’s capacity to forgive and forget had diminished over the years. Despite her father’s and brother’s alcoholism, which pained her, she never stopped loving or caring for them. But Katie Louschheim, director of women’s activities for the Democratic National Committee in 1960, described ER as “obdurate”: “Mrs. Roosevelt, interestingly enough, I think quite late in life developed a very strong obstinate streak that you could not deal with. First of all, she had a relationship with President Kennedy’s father which left its mark. And no matter what was said it could not be dislodged from her mind. . . . And she just didn’t have any use for his son, and she couldn’t believe that there could be any disassociation from generation to generation, which was very narrow minded of her, but was rather typical.”

Some politicos feared that Eleanor was just anti-Catholic enough to oppose Kennedy’s White House aspirations. Yes, Mrs. Roosevelt had supported Al Smith, the first and only Roman Catholic to lead a major presidential ticket, but he had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928. JFK realized that he had to unify the Democratic Party to avoid a similar fate.

Joe Lash, Eleanor’s friend, confidant, and biographer, believed that “somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was part of her Protestant heritage” and that she wasn’t immune to fears of “popery” so common among Protestants during her formative years. In 1959, when JFK sent a young Jewish lawyer, Lester Hyman, to speak to Eleanor about a possible Kennedy nomination, she commented, “We wouldn’t want a pope in the White House, would we?” Perhaps ER responded so frankly because she didn’t know that Hyman was a JFK emissary.

Joe Lash, Eleanor’s friend, confidant, and biographer, believed that “somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was part of her Protestant heritage” and that she wasn’t immune to fears of “popery” so common among Protestants during her formative years.

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr., another Eleanor ally, observed, “Old New Dealers cherished an ancient and ardent suspicion of Kennedy’s father. And his candidacy touched uglier strains in the liberal syndrome, especially the susceptibility to anti-Catholicism.” When a brazen University of Virginia law student asked former President Truman, “What’s going to happen when the pope moves into the White House?” the equally edgy Missourian responded, “It’s not the pope I’m afraid of; it’s the pop!”

The New Deal’s creator, FDR himself, may have possessed a more open mind on religion than his wife. She once mentioned to him that spiritualists frequently wrote to her about conversations they’d had with the dead, a notion she found absurd. Franklin cautioned his wife to appreciate others’ spiritual beliefs, especially if unfathomable experiences couldn’t be disproved: “I am interested [in] and have respect for whatever people believe, even if I cannot understand their beliefs or share their experiences.”

Yet Mrs. Roosevelt certainly embraced religious liberty as part of her husband’s Four Freedoms and in her own contribution to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More likely than fears of an actual papal takeover of the presidency were Eleanor’s concerns that a Catholic president might sway policy in favor of his church, particularly by diverting tax funds to parochial schools. In her liberal mind, this possibility would violate the 1st Amendment’s ban on religious establishment. Such a deep-seated worry made her especially skeptical of Kennedy’s quest for the nomination. She had already gone toe-to-toe on the issue with Francis Cardinal Spellman, who happened to be a close friend of the Kennedy family. In fact, the Kennedys had turned to him for advice and as a go-between to the Vatican when JFK’s sister Kathleen married an Anglican during World War II.

More likely than fears of an actual papal takeover of the presidency were Eleanor’s concerns that a Catholic president might sway policy in favor of his church, particularly by diverting tax funds to parochial schools.

Eleanor had drawn the ire of Catholic leaders as far back as the 1930s, when she expressed sympathy for the leftists in the Spanish Civil War, and she continued to counter Francisco Franco’s victorious fascist regime. As a representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights, she successfully scuttled the normalization of relations between member countries and Spain. The Catholic hierarchy had also opposed her ties to groups like the American Youth Congress, with its communist influencers, and her support of birth control.

After World War II, as the Iron Curtain descended on Eastern Europe, creating Soviet satellite nations that suppressed religious freedom, Spellman became vehemently anticommunist. It was Mrs. Roosevelt’s endorsement of Congress’s Barden bill, a proposed policy that would provide federal funds to public, but not parochial, schools that escalated the Roosevelt-Spellman conflict. ER had already clashed with the cardinal over her opposition to the church’s efforts to expunge anti-Catholic articles from New York City’s public school libraries. Yet their primary battle emerged from Spellman’s advocacy of federal funds to support parochial education. In June 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt penned a response in her daily newspaper column calling for strict separation of church and state. Religious freedom, she argued, allowed Americans to establish private schools to promote their spiritual beliefs, but government should not fund them. Likewise, public schools should be free from religious influence.

Eleanor’s historically based op-ed nevertheless prompted a public salvo from Spellman, who condemned her as anti-Catholic, un-American, and unworthy of motherhood. In response, she wrote a personal letter to the fiery prelate, refuting his ad hominem attack: “I assure you that I had no sense of being ‘an unworthy American mother.’ The final judgment, my dear Cardinal Spellman, of the worthiness of all human beings is in the hands of God.”

Religious freedom, she argued, allowed Americans to establish private schools to promote their spiritual beliefs, but government should not fund them. Likewise, public schools should be free from religious influence.

The controversy prompted responses among religious and secular leaders as well as rank-and-file Catholics. Pope Pius XII privately ordered the cardinal to pursue a truce. The former First Lady and the cardinal exchanged public letters agreeing that government aid to religious institutions must remain within constitutional boundaries but that “auxiliary services” (like reimbursed bus fare) for parochial school students (not directly for schools) might fall within those lines. Soon after, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in her column that the cardinal had made a pilgrimage to Val-Kill for a rapprochement. They chatted pleasantly, and she hoped that her peaceful country retreat provided an antidote for Spellman’s toxicity toward her. In addition to pressure from the Vatican for the cardinal to initiate a cease-fire with the former First Lady, he also realized that his ill-considered personal attacks on the most admired woman in the nation reflected poorly on him and his church.

Eleanor found Spellman’s feigned friendship completely insincere, especially because he failed to apologize for his vitriolic letter. She suspected that her opposition to sending American ambassadors back to Franco’s fascist Spain constituted the real source of the prelate’s attack on her. On this, ER and JFK were in complete alignment about Spellman. Both despised the prelate. “He so obviously was against Jack,” recalled Jacqueline Kennedy. “How could you like him? And his little mincing ways. You know, he was trying to just slit Jack’s throat all the time and wouldn’t be a help.”

Lash’s conclusion that Eleanor harbored subconscious anti-Catholicism may be overstated, but no one could blame her for maintaining a suspicion of the church’s misogynistic leaders who had treated her so disrespectfully. As the religious issue became more prominent in the 1960 presidential nomination race, she maintained her liberal stance, asserting that “a man should be judged on the question of his fitness for a job and not on what his religion happens to be.”

On this, ER and JFK were in complete alignment about Spellman. Both despised the prelate.

Even if Eleanor ultimately had no qualms about Jack’s Catholicism, she still mistrusted him and much preferred another candidate. At the end of Adlai Stevenson’s second unsuccessful presidential run in 1956 against incumbent Dwight Eisenhower, for which she had labored “to the point of exhaustion,” Eleanor, then age seventy-two, vowed that she would never again “take a personal part in a presidential campaign.”

[…]

When prominent historians Arthur Schlesinger Jr. of Harvard and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia, along with a slew of other liberals, declared in a June 1960 New York Times ad that they would support the most likely nominee, John Kennedy, Eleanor was livid that previous Stevenson supporters were abandoning the best man for the job. She felt certain that Adlai, and no other candidate, could defeat Vice President Richard Nixon handily in 1960. Moreover, she knew no one better than the former Illinois governor to address Cold War tensions or attract the Free World’s respect. Mrs. Roosevelt vowed to remain neutral until the presidential convention, to be held in Los Angeles that July, but she wrote that the “ordinary Democrat” supported Stevenson. Her loyalty to Adlai pushed ER to abandon her public neutrality, endorse him (despite his exasperating vacillation), and join New York’s Draft Stevenson movement. Kennedy’s victories in all seven of the primaries he entered, out of the sixteen held by the party, however, persuaded her by June to admit that Kennedy “had the greatest chance for the nomination.”

With three of her sons, Franklin Jr., James, and Elliott, supporting Kennedy, she initially decided to skip the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles so as not to draw attention to the family’s schism. Franklin Jr. had been instrumental in JFK’s primary win over Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in predominantly Protestant West Virginia. Appearing throughout the Mountain State, FDR Jr. resurrected warm memories of his parents’ concern for the underprivileged during the Great Depression.

Kennedy’s victories in all seven of the primaries he entered, out of the sixteen held by the party, however, persuaded her by June to admit that Kennedy “had the greatest chance for the nomination.”

New Deal programs had literally saved the lives of the unemployed and homeless. Eleanor had visited West Virginia coal-mining camps and even descended into an Appalachian mine, a unique feat for a woman in the 1930s. She also championed Arthurdale, intended to be a model community for poverty-stricken miners and farmers in northern West Virginia. 

Despite Franklin Jr.’s support for Kennedy and his regular efforts to persuade his mother to switch her allegiance, Eleanor didn’t budge except on attending the Democratic convention. She arrived prepared to advocate that she was still “Madly for Adlai.” “I think if we really want to win in November, we will nominate a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket,” she proclaimed to a cheering crowd.

[…]

Yet Kennedy’s juggernaut couldn’t be derailed, even by the party’s First Lady–turned-power-broker, and JFK won the nomination on the first ballot, though it took the entire alphabetical roll-call of states for Wyoming to put him over the top. Eleanor departed the convention immediately and a day earlier than she had planned. Disappointed with the outcome, she initially refused to take a phone call from the new presidential candidate, who tracked her down at the Los Angeles airport. When she relented, Kennedy asked directly for her support. “Mr. Kennedy,” she replied, “you have a son of mine on the East Coast [Franklin Jr.], a son of mine on the West Coast [James], and third son, Elliott, working for you. You do not need me.” She told JFK that he need not bother calling her and could send messages via his friend Franklin Jr.

She arrived prepared to advocate that she was still “Madly for Adlai.”

[…]

JFK’s friend, artist William Walton, who chaired Kennedy’s New York presidential campaign, recalled one of their tactics to unite the Empire State’s Democratic Party. “The main thing [is], we’ve got to get Mrs. Roosevelt,” Walton told Kennedy, stating the obvious. In addition, Kennedy wanted Eleanor to swing her New York Committee for Democratic Voters to his camp. JFK asked Walton to contact Mrs. Roosevelt’s secretary about a possible meeting. He received a “warm” response and an invitation to meet with her during the senator’s visit in just a few days to celebrate Social Security on August 14, 1960. Eleanor was always delighted to see a new generation continue her husband’s New Deal legacy, and she began to accept the fact of Kennedy’s candidacy. Now she wanted to see what concessions she might extract from him.

The stage was now set for the two antagonists’ dramatic Hyde Park meeting.

Excerpted from Reconcilable Differences: The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt published by University of Virginia Press ©2026