Dead News Day

From the (always thrilling) Times obit section today.

Mr. Gwirtzman liked to tell the story of how as a young operative in the 1960 Kennedy presidential campaign he was asked by Mr. Sorensen to find out how many Catholics had died at the Alamo fighting for Texas. John Kennedy had just visited the site, and Mr. Sorensen thought the Texas reference would be helpful in a speech the candidate was to give in Houston to Protestant ministers who were uneasy about the prospect of a Roman Catholic president. The best Mr. Gwirtzman could come up with was a list of fighters whose names suggested they were Catholics, though he could not say for sure.

Mr. Gwirtzman said Mr. Sorensen, the chief speechwriter, made lemonade out of his seeming lemons. In his address to the ministers, Kennedy said: “For side by side with Bowie and Crockett, died Fuentes and McCafferty and Bailey and Bedillo and Carey — but no one knows whether they were Catholics or not. For there was no religious test there.”