Liam,

Though my memories of those tragic days are very vivid, somehow I don't recall any mention of a Catholic missal being used for LBJ's oath taking on Air Force One. The news article above dates from 1967. Was this common knowledge before then? If it had been surely my Baptist relatives would have howled to high heaven.

That Adams chose a law book tells a great deal about the importance of separation of church and state for the founding fathers.

Randolph

I think it was the publication of Manchester's book that brought the issue into the light of the day. "A network of silence, evasion and misstatement arose around the secret use of a missal in the tragic circumstances that marked Mr. Johnson's sudden assumption of the
Presidency".

I know I read about this years ago, but I was only a toddler when JFK was shot, and don't recall this tidbit being the topic of any conversation in the 1960s.

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Far afield of this board, but apropos to your comment:

As for the Adams family, they had an interesting relationship with organized religion. It's fashionable these days in some American circles to try to limit Jefferson's views on religion to Jefferson, but the fact of that matter is that all of the Founders (even including Washington) tended to be opportunistically principled, shall we say. JQA's father had the most interesting career perhaps of all: he apparently felt freed up by leaving national politics - there was yet one further but now forgotten chapter in John Adams' career of public service. In 1820, at the age of 85, he was elected a delegate to a state constitutional convention to review and propose amendments to the constitution he largely wrote (it was his cousin, Sam, who insisted on a lot of the religious clauses in that document, btw). John Adams declined his election to preside over the convention, so that he could pursue two goals: (1) defending the unique three-tier franchise he invented in 1780, and (2) the disestablishment of the Congregational and Unitarian churches (it was a town-by-town thing at that point, after the great rending of parishes over the issue). Being John Adams, he lost both battles (the first, due to the nearly universal tsunami of a more open franchise in that era), but won the war on the second one after his death - in 1833, the churches were disestablished. It's a funny thing, but John Adams became more liberal in some respects as he got older, while Jefferson became in some respects more reactionary (especially when it came to challenges to the established order in Virginia; Jefferson, Madison and Monroe shrank back from championing changes that might have saved Virginia in the longer run - and I write that as a loving alumnus of the University of Virginia).