During his years in Rome, Spellman befriended future cardinals Gaetano Bisleti, Francesco Borgongini Duca, and Domenico Tardini.

[vague][6] After the United States entered World War I in 1917, Spellman tried to enlist to become a military chaplain in the US Army, but failed to meet the height requirement.

[11] Later in 1931, with the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in power in Italy, Spellman secretly transported a papal encyclical, Non abbiamo bisogno, that condemned fascism, out of Rome to Paris for publication.

[17] Spellman became an early friend of Joseph Kennedy Sr, the US ambassador to the United Kingdom and the head of a rich Catholic family.

[13] On Pacelli's trip to the United States, he, Kennedy, and Spellman attempted to stop the vitriolic radio broadcasts of Reverend Charles Coughlin.

The Vatican and the apostolic legation in Washington wanted his broadcasts to end, but Coughlin's superior, Bishop Michael Gallagher of Detroit, refused to curb him.

[20] In addition to his duties as diocesan bishop, Pius XII named Spellman as apostolic vicar for the U.S. Armed Forces on December 11, 1939.

[21] During his tenure in New York, Spellman's considerable national influence[22][23] in religious and political matters earned his residence the nickname "the Powerhouse.

"[24] He hosted many prominent clergy, entertainers, and politicians, including the statesman Bernard Baruch, US Senator David I. Walsh, and US House of Representatives Majority Leader John William McCormack.

[13] In 1945, Spellman instituted the Al Smith Dinner in Manhattan, an annual white tie fundraiser for Catholic Charities that is attended by prominent national figures.

[21][25] During World War II, Roosevelt asked Spellman to visit Europe, Africa, and the Middle East in 1943, 16 countries in four months.

[13] During the Allied campaign in Italy, Spellman acted as a liaison between Pius XII and Roosevelt in efforts to declare Rome an open city to save it from bombing and street fighting.

"[21] In 1949, when gravediggers at Calvary Cemetery in Queens went on strike for a pay raise, Spellman accused them of being Communists and recruited seminarians of the Archdiocese from St. Joseph's Seminary as strikebreakers.

[28] He described the actions of the gravediggers, who belonged to the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union of America, as "an unjustified and immoral strike against the innocent dead and their bereaved families, against their religion and human decency.

In 1959, Spellman served as papal delegate to the Eucharistic Congress in Guatemala; during his journey, he stopped in Nicaragua and, contrary to the Pope's orders, publicly appeared with future dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

Spellman canceled Sheen's annual Good Friday sermons at St. Patrick's Cathedral and discouraged clergy from befriending the Bishop.

"The historian Pat McNamara views Spellman's outreach to the city's growing Puerto Rican community as years ahead of its time.

[6] According to McNamara, Spellman's support of Murray contributed to his significant influence on the drafting of Dignitatis humanae, the Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom.

Spellman later agreed to President Lyndon Johnson's requests to send priests to the Dominican Republic to defuse anti-American sentiments after the American intervention of 1965.

He consolidated all parish building programs into his own hands and thereby got better interest rates from bankers, and convinced Pius XII of the need to internationalize the Vatican's Italy-centered investments after World War II; for his financial skill, he was sometimes called "Cardinal Moneybags.

"[32] In 2002, journalist Michelangelo Signorile called Spellman "one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church's history.

Signorile reported that Cooney's manuscript initially contained interviews with several people with personal knowledge of Spellman's homosexuality, including the researcher C. A. Tripp.

According to Signorile, the Catholic Church pressured Cooney's publisher, Times Books, to reduce the four pages discussing Spellman's sexuality to a single paragraph.

They also relate a story that Spellman had a personal relationship with a male member of the chorus in the 1943 Broadway revue One Touch of Venus.

[33][34] Although he had once expressed his personal opposition to demonstrations during the American Civil Rights Movement, Spellman declined J. Edgar Hoover's requests to condemn Martin Luther King Jr.

He had met the future South Vietnamese president, Ngô Đình Diệm, in 1950, and was favorably impressed by his strongly Catholic and anti-Communist views.

After the French defeat by the Viet Minh at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Spellman started urging the Eisenhower Administration to intervene in the conflict.

[13] The illustrator Edward Sorel designed a poster in 1967, Pass the Lord and Praise the Ammunition, showing Spellman carrying a rifle with a bayonet.

"[40] Spellman engaged in a heated public dispute in 1949 with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt when she expressed her opposition to federal funding to parochial schools in her column My Day.