It’s Democrat John F. Kennedy who made Santorum “throw up,” the GOP presidential contender told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, with his famous 1960 speech to Baptist ministers trying to assuage widespread fears about his Catholicism in order to become our first, and still our only, Catholic president. Santorum claims that JFK said that “people of faith have no role in the public square,” and urged ABC’s viewers to go read the speech for themselves and see.

So I did. (It’s here.) And not surprisingly, that’s not what Kennedy said at all.

First, here’s what Santorum said about Kennedy:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes you throw up.  What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up and it should make every American…Now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square.

I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.  The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country. This is the First Amendment.  The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion.  That means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square.  Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, no, ‘faith is not allowed in the public square.  I will keep it separate.’  Go on and read the speech ‘I will have nothing to do with faith.  I won’t consult with people of faith.’  It was an absolutist doctrine that was foreign at the time of 1960.

Let me start by saying: Santorum sounds literally hysterical. It’s a troubling sign of the GOP’s desperation that he’s virtually tied with Mitt Romney for the lead in the 2012 primaries. It pains me to actually have to take him seriously.

Of course, there’s no place in Kennedy’s speech where he said “people of faith are not allowed in the public square,” or anything close to that, and Santorum’s saying it three times doesn’t make it true. Here’s one key passage:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

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.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

It is absolutely clear that Kennedy accepts “people of faith in the public square” – his goal is to make a place for people of every faith in our public life. Kennedy doesn’t even go as far as Christian right hero Reagan, who actually said the separation of church and state protects the right of non-believers, too.

Kennedy doesn’t say he won’t consult with faith leaders; he says he won’t take “instruction on public policy from the Pope.” In fact, he confided in and took advice from Archbishop Philip Hannan, whom he befriended when he was first elected to Congress; Hannan gave the eulogy at Kennedy’s funeral. Sadly, Hannan died last September, after a long career as Archbishop of New Orleans, or else he might be able to refute Santorum from experience.

Kennedy doesn’t promise to renounce his own Catholic beliefs or disobey his conscience, either:

If the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

Ironically, Kennedy spoke passionately on behalf of the Catholic Santorum’s right to be in the public square.

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.

Santorum didn’t lose his chance to be president on the day he was baptized. He lost it – if he ever had it – when he lied about our first Catholic president, who just happened to be a Democrat. For shame.

Kennedy met with historian and former White House aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in her 18th century Washington house in the spring and early summer of 1964. At home and at ease, as if receiving a guest for afternoon tea, she chatted about her husband and their time in the White House. The young Kennedy children, Caroline and John Jr., occasionally pop in. On the accompanying audio discs, you can hear the shake of ice inside a drinking glass. The tapes were to be sealed for decades and were among the last documents of her private thoughts. She never wrote a memoir and became a legend in part because of what we didn’t know.

The book is coming out Wednesday as part of an ongoing celebration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s first year in office. Jacqueline Kennedy died in 1994, and Schlesinger in 2007.

The world, and Jacqueline Kennedy, would change beyond imagination after 1964. But at the time of these conversations blacks were still “Negroes” and feminists were still suspect even in the view of a woman as sophisticated as Kennedy, who a decade later would grant an interview to Gloria Steinem’s “Ms.” magazine. In the book’s foreword, Caroline Kennedy faults Schlesinger for asking so few questions about her mother.

As historian Michael Beschloss notes in the introduction, Jacqueline Kennedy once accepted that wives were defined by their husbands’ careers and worried about “emotional” women entering politics. She enjoyed having her husband “proud of her,” saw no reason to have a policy opinion that wasn’t the same as his and laughed at the thought of “violently liberal women” who disliked JFK and preferred the more effete Adlai Stevenson.

“Jack so obviously demanded from a woman — a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman be his wife and look up to him as a man,” she said. “With Adlai you could have another relationship where — you know, he’d sort of be sweet and you could talk, but you wouldn’t ever … I always thought women who were scared of sex loved Adlai.”

There are no spectacular revelations in the Schlesinger discussions and virtually nothing about JFK’s assassination. Kennedy’s health problems and his extra-marital affairs were still years from public knowledge and from the knowledge of aides such as Schlesinger, who would often say he saw no “bimbos” in the White House halls. Jacqueline Kennedy speaks warmly throughout of her husband, remembering him as dynamic and perceptive and free of grudges, an assignment his wife and others took on for him.

Like any powerful family, the Kennedys had complicated relationships with those who shared their lives at the top. They valued loyalty, vision and ingenuity. They hated dullness, indecision and self-promotion, even among their own.

Jacqueline Kennedy dismissed the idea that the eldest Kennedy son, Joseph Jr., would have been president had he not been killed in World War II. “He would have been so unimaginative, compared to Jack,” she said. She contrasted the integrity of Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother and attorney general, with the designs of sister-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Robert Kennedy had begged JFK not to appoint him, fearing charges of nepotism. Eunice Kennedy, meanwhile, was anxious to see her husband, Sargent Shriver, named head of the department of Health, Education and Welfare.

“Eunice was pestering Jack to death to make Sargent head of HEW because she wanted to be a cabinet wife,” she tells Schlesinger. “You know, it shows you some people are ambitious for themselves and Bobby wasn’t.”

Politics means doing business with people you otherwise avoid and Jacqueline Kennedy logged in many hours. She endured dining with journalists and members of Congress who had criticized her husband. She called Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg “brilliant” but added that “he talks more about himself than any man I’ve ever met in my life.” White House speechwriter Theodore Sorensen had a “big inferiority complex” and was “the last person you would invite at night.” She referred to France’s Charles de Gaulle, whom she had famously charmed on a visit to Paris, as “that egomaniac” and “that spiteful man.” Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, was a “prune — bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.”

She was especially hard on Lyndon Johnson, who had competed bitterly with her husband for the presidency in 1960 and became vice president through the kind of hard calculation that the Kennedys became known for: Johnson was from Texas and the Democrats needed a Southerner to balance the ticket. Once in office, Johnson’s imposing personal style and reluctance to speak up during cabinet meetings alienated the Kennedys. They mocked his accent and his manners, while he resented the Kennedys and other “Harvards” he believed looked down on him. Many top aides left soon after Kennedy was assassinated. Robert Kennedy became a public critic of Johnson’s presidency and challenged him for the nomination in 1968.

“Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, ‘Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?’” she recalled. “And Bobby told me that he’d had some discussions with him … do something to name someone else in 1968.”

Historians have described President Kennedy as unemotional and undemonstrative. But his widow recalls him lying on the floor with the kids, watching fitness instructor Jack LaLanne on television. They would follow LaLanne’s moves and at times the president’s toes would touch with his son’s. JFK “loved those children tumbling around him in this sort of — sensual is the only way I can think of it.”

Her closest moments with her husband came during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of nuclear war. She would lie down with him when he took a nap and walk with him, the two saying little, on the White House lawn. Some officials had sent their wives away, but the first lady resisted. Should the bombs fall, she wanted them to be together.

“If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” she remembers telling her husband. “Even if there’s not room in the bomb shelter in the White House … I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too — than live without you.”

Partisan wrangling over presidential vacation time is as old as the Republic itself. The Salon.com War Room Historical Fun Fact Team did some research, and found out what sort of grief past presidents got when they wanted to recharge their batteries:

• 1793 George Washington invents the tradition of the “presidential vacation” when a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia leads him to spend November in Germantown. Despite Washington’s immense personal popularity, Aaron Burr is rumored to have made a joke involving the color yellow and Washington’s false teeth.
• 1830: Andrew Jackson invites all free men to accompany him on “The People’s Vacation.” Tens of thousands of rowdy citizens converge on Niagara Falls, bringing with them copious quantities of highly alcoholic rum punch. Fistfights and brawls soon break out, culminating in the burning and looting of the city of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. The incident nearly leads to a war with Britain. “Jackson’s so-called Vacation has made a National Lampoon of the presidency,” says one partisan newspaper.
• 1865 After four grueling years of bloody war and tremendous personal tragedy, President Lincoln decides to take one lousy night off and go to the theater to see a show.
• 1905-1909: Teddy Roosevelt spends entire second term on safari in “the dark continent.” Responds to criticisms from Democrats by claiming he’s expanding America’s vital Strategic Ivory Reserve. Embarrassingly, vacation leads Roosevelt to forget to run for reelection in 1908.
• 1923 Upon learning that President Calvin Coolidge had been out of Washington on vacation in Marion, Ohio, for a week, Dorothy Parker’s less clever sister is reported to have remarked, “How could they tell?”
• 1936 President Franklin D. Roosevelt takes a much-needed therapeutic trip to Warm Springs, Ga., where he had founded the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. Father Coughlin calls him a tool of the international Jewish Banker Communist conspiracy, though it is unclear whether or not this was related to the vacation.
• 1961 The Kennedys popularize taking vacations without hats when they’re seen not wearing hats in Hyannis Port. Southern “Dixiecrats” in Congress take to the floor to denounce not wearing hats as a violation of States’ Rights, specifically Georgia’s law calling for Negroes seen in public hatless to be fined or imprisoned.
• 2001 George W. Bush takes August off. A group of particularly critical political opponents responds by murdering thousands of Americans.

The first Camelot drama out of the chute is “The Kennedys,” the controversial miniseries that was canceled by the History Channel under pressure from Carolyn Kennedy and historians, who argued that the channel should at least make some effort to root the story in, well, history. This was a quaint argument, since the History Channel abandoned history long ago in favor of ice-road truckers, gator wrestlers and other reality sideshows. But the network owners were sufficiently embarrassed by the ruckus to dump the series. “The Kennedys” then took a long, downward trip through television’s alimentary canal, ending up in some dark cavity called the Reelz Channel. The six-episode series begins plopping out on Sunday.

“The Kennedys” is a hatchet job pure and simple. The saga is produced by Joel Surnow, which is sort of like Mel Gibson making “The Anne Frank Story.” Surnow is the right-wing, Dick Cheney fluff boy who brought us “24,” the show that told America not to adjust its dials, that the Constitution was now obsolete. The Camelot noir miniseries, which wallows in mobsters, mistresses and self-medication, is basically the Kennedys as Sopranos, minus the good writing and direction. The early reviews have not been kind, even in the normally charitable Hollywood trade press. “The whole thing,” Variety gagged, “plays like a bad telenovela filtered through a ‘History for Dummies’ text.”

All right, I admit, I’m a little bitter. I had a dog in this fight, a rival Hollywood project. I’m the author of a 2007 bestseller about the Kennedy brothers that tells the story of Robert Kennedy’s secret quest to solve JFK’s murder. My book, “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” focuses on the brothers’ heroic struggle with the national security state to ease America away from the nuclear brink and end the Cold War. I show that Bobby Kennedy became the country’s first conspiracy theorist after his brother’s assassination, immediately suspecting that the same CIA and Pentagon officials with whom they had bitterly dueled were behind JFK’s murder. Bobby realized that he couldn’t bring President Kennedy’s killers to justice unless he fought his way back to the White House. RFK’s presidential campaign in 1968 was not only a fight for the soul of America — a country poisoned by war and racial strife — it was a breathtakingly bold, and ultimately fatal, confrontation with his brother’s assassins.

This, to me, is the most dramatic story to tell about the Kennedys. They tried to save America, and they were killed by the Saurons who have kept our country in a permanent state of fear and war for the past half-century — virtually my entire life. It’s a grand epic, as old as ancient Rome, as beautiful and horrible as Shakespeare.

The executives at Lionsgate, one of the bigger independent studios in Hollywood, saw it the same way and they optioned my book for a TV miniseries in 2008. They treated “Brothers” as a hot property, the ultimate political thriller. Joining forces with a high-profile producer — Sid Ganis, then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — and an A-list TV writer, the studio began aggressively pitching “Brothers” to TV networks. Jon Hamm — the star of Lionsgate’s hit series “Mad Men” — was chatted up as the perfect JFK. No wardrobe changes necessary.

The traveling “Brothers” road show roamed all over the entertainment capital. Because of the industry names attached to the project, we got high-level meetings at HBO, Showtime, ABC and Starz, among other stations of the Hollywood cross. At one point, Todd Haynes was interested in directing, before peeling away to do “Mildred Pierce.”

There was buzz, there was excitement, there was love in the room. And then nothing. Chris Albrecht — the programming wizard who had made HBO not just television (“The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” etc.) and then resurfaced at Starz — talked about making “Brothers” the centerpiece of his first season at his new network home. Albrecht was all Roy Cohn, hooded-eye intensity, and fuck-’em-let’s-do-this swagger. And then, he had a sudden change of heart. The fearless TV mogul didn’t want to compete with the Joel Surnow miniseries, or at least that was the explanation. In Hollywood there are always murky back stories.

Yes, I know — “It’s Chinatown, Jake” — get over it. There are a million sad stories in Naked Hollywood. But something seemed rigged here, as one network after the next turned down “Brothers” — something political under the surface. Oliver Stone, whom I met somewhere along the way, told me in a matter-of-fact tone, “‘Brothers’ will never get made in this town.” Stone knew something about the subject. His “JFK,” released back in 1991, was the last movie to offer a deep and brave interpretation of the Kennedy tragedy. For his efforts, Stone was so savagely pilloried, he still hasn’t fully recovered his reputation or — it seems to me — his political self-confidence.

Apparently, Stone knew what he was talking about. Now, three years after Lionsgate bought the rights to “Brothers,” my book is an orphan in Hollywood, owned by nobody but me. Meanwhile, a slew of other Kennedy projects have rushed forward. A low point in my Hollywood tragicomedy came when the screenwriter of the widely reviled Surnow miniseries, a man named Stephen Kronish, tried to defend himself against the rising chorus of criticism by citing “Brothers” as one of his sources. This is the very definition of adding insult to injury.

Now, in addition to Surnow’s “The Kennedys,” Matt Damon is preparing to play Bobby in yet another bland biopic; Leonardo DiCaprio is working on a Kennedy conspiracy movie based on Lamar Waldron’s books — heavy tomes that propose such a convoluted explanation for the JFK assassination that they make “Inception” look linear in comparison; and, worst of all, Tom Hanks’ Playtone company is preparing an assassination miniseries for HBO based on celebrity prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s massive phone book, “Reclaiming History,” which took a whopping 1,648 pages to argue that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by himself, and was still unconvincing.

For the past 50 years, every Kennedy drama except Oliver Stone’s has fallen into the same predictable categories. They are either safe — i.e., weepy valentines to the suffering, stoic family — or sleazy (see Surnow above). When filmmakers do screw up their courage to dig a little deeper, they invariably end up blaming the Mafia for killing Jack and changing American history. Yes, the mob played a role in Dallas. But the crime lords never participated in anything this epic without their overlords — the CIA, their longtime partners in crime.

Here’s my advice to the viewing public as the Kennedy mudslide begins. Run, and don’t look back. There is nothing you need in these movies and TV “events” to understand the true Kennedy story.

This is all you need to know. The Kennedys died for a reason. They died because they told America that our enemies were human, like us, and loved their children too. They died because they vowed to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and because they told the generals who wanted to launch a nuclear war over Cuba that they were mad. While Barack Obama outsources his presidency to Wall Street, the Pentagon and the CIA, John Kennedy tried to tell his fellow citizens that we must no longer dominate the world.

This is what you need to know. The Kennedys died for America’s sins.

The Zapruder film, this is not. (Thankfully.) Rather, it’s a fascinating and melancholy look at an American icon during his last hours.