46 GERALD P. FOGARTY
the usual channels of communication ran parallel to that of the
bishops in the Council that he had convoked. How decisive a
role he played in the missile crisis is difficult to determine, but
his plea for peaceful negotiations in the midst of a council that
he had conceived to be pastoral seems to have been the catalyst
needed to ward off an impending nuclear holocaust. His inter-
vention in the crisis also did not spell an end to the possibility of
hostilities between East and West. But his policy of being open
to the East— Ostpolitik, as some dubbed it—continued under his
successor, Paul VI.
On June 21, 1963, on the fifth ballot, Giovanni Battista Cardi-
nal Montini was elected pope and took the name Paul VI. In keep-
ing with the custom initiated by Roosevelt, Kennedy appointed
a delegation of four, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Vice Presi-
dent Johnson had led the American delegation to the funeral of
John XXIII. On June 30, the new pope was crowned, the last pope
to observe this rite. On July 2, Kennedy had a forty-minute audi-
ence with him—the first time a sitting president had met a pope
and an indication that the anti-Catholicism that would have sur-
rounded such an action in 1960 had abated.46 Paul, for his part,
continued his predecessor’s policy toward Eastern Europe and re-
cruited for that policy some of the most able Vatican diplomats in
history, notably Agostino Casaroli, who later became secretary of
state under John Paul II.47
But East-West tensions persisted, and Paul VI continued to
seek peace, even as the United States continued the war in Viet-
nam, which the American government saw as a surrogate for the
Soviet Union. Johnson, who became president following the as-
sassination of Kennedy in November 1963, sought to maintain
good relations with the pope and even made a special visit to
- Ibid., July 3, 1963.
- Hebblethwaite, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (New York: Paulist Press, 1993),
492–94.