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• No one allowed to stand — all must have seats; • No one in the vestibule or choir loft; • No pictures taken inside the church; • Rope of three pews on the epistle side immediately in front of the last three; • Have the kneeler down in the middle roped-of pew; • An usher must stand in the middle aisle at the mouth of the presidential pew while he's receiving Communion. "Te Mass will be ofered for you and your needs, both spiritual and temporal, personal and ofcial," Maloney wrote to Kennedy. A s the days ticked down toward the president's arrival, the U.S./Russia/Cuba/Berlin situation continued to deteriorate. While no hard evidence existed that anything but defensive anti-aircraft missiles were being installed in Cuba — a shot-down U-2 in China and bad weather had kept the spy planes grounded since early September — the threat of a full U.S. blockade had Castro warning that "rivers of blood would be spilled." In Berlin, with many witnesses watching, East German soldiers shot and killed a refugee trying to swim to freedom across the Spree River. On the Courier-Journal's Oct. 10 editorial page, political cartoonist Hugh Haynie drew the heads of Castro, Khrushchev and Mao on the bodies of three pigs in a barnyard, with "farmer" Kennedy standing behind a fence, clothespin on nose. Te caption read, "Which Bay of Pigs We Push Him Into Next, Comrade?" As newspaper stories noted the last month's drop in the president's publicapproval rating, from 67 percent to 62 percent (much of it in the South due to the administration's handling of the University of Mississippi incident), House candidate Snyder described Kennedy's foreign policy as "wish, watch and wait." Morton called it "downhill diplomacy." Snyder boasted on Oct. 10 that Morton would carry the 3rd District by a 32,000 to 35,000 majority, "and I won't be too far behind." (He would win by 2,565 votes. Morton took 52.8 percent of the state's votes.) According to the Courier, blaring school bands from Butler, Southern and Central high schools greeted Kennedy at the airport on Oct. 13. Tree other bands, from Manual, Trinity and the University of Louisville, were on hand for his Freedom Hall speech. He didn't follow the original script written by Special Counsel Teodore Sorensen (now in the Kennedy Library collection); instead, he presented a feistier version prompted by Senate campaign literature he'd seen for Morton and George Romney of Michigan, father of Mitt Romney, which omitted the use of the word "Republican." Te omission was understandable, Kennedy said, given that huge majorities of congressional Republicans had voted against the Housing Act of 1961 (urban renewal, residential aid for the elderly), the Fair Labor Standards Act (raising the minimum wage to $1.25), and a failed bill that would have provided federal aid to elementary and secondary public education. "Tat is why I am here tonight," he said, "because I don't want to see the 88th Congress stand still for two years in the most difcult and dangerous and also the escape ladder to the roof of the old Catholic Charities building on Brook Street (since razed)," he recalls. "And he was up on top of that empty building the whole time, I think. "Tere was a confessional in the back of the church, and on the side where the priest sat, a Secret Service man opened the door and there's a guy sitting in there — a street person. I think he had had a libation or two. Tey unceremoniously got him out of there. Tey moved him out — he was gone!" Among the Mass attendees was Marlow Cook, who, when he was elected in 1968 to succeed Morton in the Senate, became the frst Roman Catholic to win a statewide election in Kentucky. Te 87-year-old Cook, who now lives with his wife Nancy in Sarasota, Fla., remembers the service as low- Did Kennedy really put a Franklin in the collection basket? Well, says Cieslik, "One of my family reports that the president took some bills from his pocket and peeled off one that was different from any that she was accustomed to use." most promising time in the history of our country. . . . Can you tell me one single piece of constructive legislation that has been suggested in the last 30 years by the Republican Party? Because I can't. I can tell you what they are against, but what are they for?" S aint Mary Magdalen was closed as a parish church long ago, in 1995, but it had lost most of its parishioners before Kennedy's '62 trip here. "It's been broken into, vandalized. It's just very sad," says archivist Cieslik. "At that time of the president's visit it was not much of a parish," says Jack Hanrahan, "because the expressway had wiped out the houses of anybody who lived in the area." (In 1962 the road only reached to the hospital area; the I-65 bridge wasn't fnished until late 1963, when it was named in honor of Kennedy after his assassination.) But Mary Magdalen became a single-day star on a drizzly Oct. 14 for its 10:30 a.m. Mass. Crowds lined the Brook Street sidewalk and the roughly 300-seat church was packed with parishioners, local admirers, and the families and relatives of chancery employees and clergy. Earlier that morning, Hanrahan had gotten a taste of security measures. "A Secret Service man scurried up the fre- key and unembellished. "It was an ordinary Mass," he says, except "we all had to stay where we were until (Kennedy) got out." "It is reported that the president put a hundred-dollar bill in the collection basket, but I have not verifed this," says Cieslik, who was a seven-year-old at the time. "One of my family, however, reports that the president took some bills from his pocket and peeled of one that was diferent from any that she was accustomed to use." When the Mass ended, says Hanrahan, "they moved him out pretty fast" to the red presidential convertible, and by 11:15 JFK was in the air and on his way to Niagara Falls. What Kennedy didn't know then, and what the American public wouldn't know until eight days later when he announced it in a nationwide televised address, U-2 planes had taken photographs of launch equipment and missile trailers for ofensive ballistic missiles that Sunday. Kennedy, who got back to Washington after midnight on Monday, was informed about the missiles when he woke up on Tuesday. It was the beginning of a 13-day U.S.-Soviet standof that would bring the world to the edge of nuclear war. Postscript: Te pew that Kennedy occupied at St. Mary Magdalen was removed and now sits in the main-foor hall at the Maloney Center on Shelby Street in the Shelby Park neighborhood. 10.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 65