John F. Kennedy1961-1963

In 1960, John F. Kennedy became the second Roman Catholic to run for the presidency. The first, New York Gov. Al Smith, ran in 1928 and was the target of anti-Catholic bigotry.
By 1960, nativist and anti-Catholic sentiments in America had tempered somewhat, though a special committee, the Fair Campaign Practices Committee, met to issue a "Special Statement on Religion in the 1960 Campaign." Chief among its recommendations was that "no candidate for public office should be opposed or supported because of his particular religious affiliation."
Kennedy agreed: "Whatever one's religion in his private life may be, for the officeholder nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts -- including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state," he told Look magazine.
But the controversy swirling around his religion forced him to confront the issue head-on in a 1960 speech in Houston: "I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."
He continued: "If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people."