To adapt from Lloyd Bentsen: We remember Jack Kennedy, and Sarah Palin is no Jack Kennedy. And she doesn't mind. In her new book she takes issue with John F. Kennedy's famed 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. JFK said:

I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.

I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views -- in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

According to NPR:

Palin writes that when she was growing up, she was taught that JFK's speech reconciled religion and public service without compromising either. But since she's revisited the speech as an adult, she says, she's realized that Kennedy "essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are."

She praises Mitt Romney, a Mormon, for not "doing a JFK" during his campaign for the 2008 GOP nomination. "Where Kennedy seemed to want to run away from religion, Mitt Romney forthrightly embraced it," she writes. She attributes the gulf not just to the difference between the men, but to the distance the country has come since 1960. Now, she says, America is "reawakening to the gift of our religious heritage."

You can read the full text of JFK's speech here. Did he make a case that religion is so private as to be irrelevant, as Palin wrote? Or was his point that he would not allow pressure from the Catholic hierarchy lead him to make decisions that violate his conscience?