by Scott Farris
In addition, the Reagans, unlike the Kennedys, were among the minority of Irish who did not immigrate to an American city but instead moved to the Midwest to farm. And the Reagans did not immediately fare as well in their new country as the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds. Reagan’s great-grandfather, Michael O’Regan, as the last name was then spelled, hailed from the village of Ballyporeen in County Tipperary, two counties to the west of Wexford and the Kennedys. O’Regan had toiled as a tenant farmer with no better prospects than Patrick Kennedy, but he immigrated first to London in 1852, where he tried to make a living as a soap maker, before moving on to America in 1857 with his wife, Catherine, and their three children. With his name “Americanized” to Reagan, Michael and his family moved west, settling as farmers in Illinois by 1860. It was Michael’s second son, John Michael Reagan, later also a farmer, who, in 1883, sired John Edward “Jack” Reagan, the father of the future president.
As Reagan noted in his memoirs, one of the perks of being president was that Burke’s Peerage researched his family history and presented him with a genealogy that showed he was distantly related to both Queen Elizabeth II—and John Kennedy. And like Kennedy, Reagan, too, made a sentimental journey to Ireland, visiting the family hometown of Ballyporeen, where they named a pub for him.* Once president, Reagan began to emphasize his Irish heritage, particularly in his relations with another Irish-American politician, House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. While the two were often fierce adversaries, they made it known that “after 6 p.m. . . . [they] liked sitting down to swap Irish stories.” But how deeply Reagan felt Irish is an open question. One reason he forged such a close relationship with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was that he was an intense Anglophile, more sympathetic to the British rather than the Irish position on Northern Ireland. Only in his second term, under pressure from staff, did he in turn pressure Thatcher to moderate her policies in Northern Ireland.
* Kennedy and Reagan’s trips to Ireland during their presidencies helped spur an already brisk flow of tourists from the United States to Ireland. Between 1988, Reagan’s last year in office, and 1998, the number of American tourists visiting Ireland nearly doubled from 2.8 million to 5.5 million, and seventy thousand of these visitors spent more than $30 million tracing their family history.
If Reagan’s early dissociation with his Irish heritage was out of ignorance, Kennedy’s distance from his ethnicity was deliberate. Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was bitter that Irish-American citizens, no matter their successes, were never accepted as social equals in Brahmin Boston. Kennedy, therefore, aped the English in order not to appear Irish, and this identification was passed down to his children. None of the seven Kennedy children who married ended up marrying a person of Irish descent, and despite the family’s Catholic identity, none of the nine Kennedy children ever seriously considered a religious vocation, a rare thing in an Irish Catholic family of that size in that time.
Joseph P. Kennedy bristled whenever anyone referred to him or one of his sons as an “Irishman.” “Goddamn it!” he would exclaim. “I was born in this country! My children were born in this country! What the hell does someone have to do to become an American?” Joe had been educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard, yet during the war a Navy friend of Jack heard a broadcast by Joe on the radio and expressed surprise at his upper-class accent, which led Jack Kennedy to become angry that anyone would expect his father to “talk mick.”
Jack inherited his father’s admiration for things English. He particularly admired the “careless elegance” of the British upper class, with their weekends in the country. His first trip to Ireland in 1947, while a young congressman, was a reminder of how seldom he visited his ancestral home even though he spent a great deal of time in England during the 1930s and 1940s. Despite his roots, the Irish ambassador to the United States described Kennedy as “an English American,” while a friend added, “Many people made much of his Irish ancestry,” but he was “a European . . . more English than Irish.”
Kennedy only warmed to his Irish heritage once he needed the votes of his Irish-American constituents, with whom he had little personal connection despite his family history. “There is a myth that Boston is his home,” the columnist Murray Kempton wrote. “It is only the place where he went to college.” So when Kennedy first ran for Congress in 1946, the Irish Americans living in the Eleventh District, which included Cambridge, Somerville, Charlestown, and part of Boston’s North End, were initially reluctant to support him because of his lack of ethnic pride or identification. But Kennedy was soon engaging voters by simultaneously talking up his Irish ancestry while subtly making fun of politicians who made ethnic-based appeals. “There seems to be some disagreement as to whether my grandfather Fitzgerald came from Wexford, Limerick, or Tipperary,” Kennedy told one audience. “And it is even more confusing as to where my great[-]grandmother came from—because her son—who was the mayor of Boston—used to claim his mother came from whichever Irish county had the most votes in the audience he was addressing at that particular time.”
For the young politician, who in his early speeches rarely cracked a smile, let alone a joke, it was a rare attempt at humor—dry as it was. Kennedy attributed his lack of jollity to his “personal reserve.” But those who knew Kennedy as a friend were unacquainted with this supposed reserve; the Kennedy they knew privately was gregarious, wisecracking, and fun-loving, and this personality slowly emerged in Kennedy’s public utterances, albeit with the discipline he had in everything but his sex life.
So Kennedy’s brand of Irish wit was generally confined to the wry and often self-deprecating quips, ripostes, and bon mots that might best be described as Shavian, for Kennedy shaped his jokes to enhance his reputation as a genteel intellectual in the mode of such Irish wags as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. It was therefore unsurprising that Kennedy chose to quote Shaw during his 1963 address to the Irish Parliament, saying, “George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life. Other people, he said, see things and . . . say ‘Why?’ . . . But I dream things that never were—and I say: ‘Why not?’”
Kennedy strove to project urbanity, whether his remarks were off the cuff or prepared ahead of time. And while he had marvelous writers at hand during his presidency, including Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy was himself talented with words, both structurally and with regard to imagery. Schlesinger recalled how he prepared some remarks for Kennedy to deliver at a White House dinner honoring American Nobel Prize winners that contained what Schlesinger himself termed a “belabored” paragraph on the many talents of Thomas Jefferson, which included architecture, anthropology, and the violin, among many others. Kennedy, Schlesinger recalled, took the rambling material, rewrote it, and toasted the Nobel laureates with one of his most famous epigrams: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Another well-remembered bon mot was his observation that “Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.” Receiving an honorary degree from Yale in 1962, Kennedy was able to subtly remind the audience of his own intellectual credentials, telling the audience, “It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and Yale degree.”
Kennedy also understood the power of self-deprecating humor to deflect criticism. The film PT-109 was released while Kennedy was in the White House; the motion picture and attendant publicity prodded critics to renew the charge that Kennedy’s allegedly deficient seamanship caused the incident, during which the boat he commanded was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. When a little boy asked him how he had become a war hero, Kennedy replied, “It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat.” Aware that his wealth set him apart from most Americans and that many people believed he was a puppet of his controversial
father, Kennedy mocked the supposition in a speech he gave at Washington’s Gridiron Club in 1958, when he was running for reelection to the Senate. Kennedy read a purported telegram from his father: “Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary—I’ll be damned if I’ll pay for a landslide.”
But Kennedy, who in prep school had once formed a group he called the “Muckers” that liked to flout school rules, most enjoyed puncturing the absurdity of politics and political decorum, which he especially excelled at during his legendary televised news conferences. He recognized the impression these events made on viewers, and he ensured his presidential news conferences were televised live so that America could watch their quick-witted commander in chief in action. Even while a candidate, Kennedy would take the risk of being funny in these exchanges, such as this one while campaigning in Alaska:
Q: Senator, you were promised a military intelligence briefing from the president. Have you received that?
A. Yes, I talked on Thursday morning to General Wheeler from the Defense Department.
Q. What was his first name?
A. He didn’t brief me on that.
And there was this exchange in California, while his opponent, Richard Nixon, was recovering from a knee injury:
Q: Senator, when does the moratorium end on Nixon’s hospitalization and your ability to attack him?
A. Well, I said I would not mention him unless I could praise him until he got out of the hospital, and I have not mentioned him.
Kennedy was so buoyed by public reaction to his use of humor that he ensured even private remarks were publicly circulated if they were believed to be particularly witty. Chairing an early meeting of the National Security Council, Kennedy opened a folder filled with briefings on pending world problems and asked; “Now let’s see, did we inherit these or are these our own?” To a group of summer interns working in the White House, Kennedy quipped, “Sometimes I wish I just had a summer job here.” Told by a reporter that the Republican National Committee had adopted a resolution condemning Kennedy’s presidency as a failure, Kennedy laconically responded, “I assume it passed unanimously.” Asked whether he would want his new Postmaster General to possess a business or a political background, Kennedy replied, “There are other fields still to be considered, including even a postal background.”
Kennedy enjoyed quips that brought attention to his unusually attractive wife. Exhilarated by the reception his French-educated and French-speaking wife received on a state visit to Paris, Kennedy “introduced” himself to the French press with the quip, “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” In Fort Worth, Texas, the morning of his assassination, Kennedy apologized to a waiting crowd that Jackie was late coming down from her room, saying, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her longer but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”
Despite his cultivated humor, Kennedy was neither pompous nor pretentious; he was not above even occasionally using Irish dialect, such as the joke he told during his 1958 Senate campaign of an Irish woman who was asked what her husband had died of: “Sure, and he died of a Tuesday. I remember it well.”
That type of timeworn humor was more Reagan’s territory, where hoary stories were often used to make a point, much as Lincoln had done more than a century before. If Kennedy’s humor invoked Shaw and Wilde, then Reagan preferred a broader humor in the vaudevillian style, whose comics, as Reagan himself once noted, were “almost without exception . . . Irish,” adding, “Their wit and humor that made them comedians, they came by naturally and honestly.”
Reagan believed he came by his own humor naturally and honestly from his father, who had a “wry, mordant humor. He was the best raconteur I ever heard, especially when it came to the smoking-car sort of stories.” And Reagan attributed his father’s humor to his Irish roots, saying that Jack Reagan “was endowed with the gift of blarney and the charm of a leprechaun. No one I ever met could tell a story better than he did.”
It was extraordinary praise, for Reagan honed his joke-telling ability while in Hollywood, observing the most famous comedians in the world. He would often linger at Chasen’s, the famous West Hollywood restaurant that was a hangout for such stars as Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Milton Berle, and would watch in awe and wonder at the speed and precision with which they practiced their jokes on one another. “He worked doggedly to emulate their techniques and build up a competitive repertoire,” recalled biographer Edmund Morris.
Reagan collected hundreds, if not thousands, of jokes, which he carefully wrote out on three-by-five-inch index cards but usually then committed to memory for use at an appropriate time. Reagan often said, “That reminds me of a story. But then everything reminds me of a story.” As Morris said, “One could only marvel at their apparent spontaneity.”
Reagan’s self-proclaimed favorites were those stories he said he could “actually prove are told among the Russian people.” These jokes allowed Reagan to demonstrate how even Soviet citizens themselves recognized the many deficiencies of their own Communist system of government. He claimed he even told one joke to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev about an American and a Russian arguing over freedom of speech in their respective countries. As Reagan retold the story, the American tells the Russian, “Look, in my country I can walk into the Oval Office, I can pound the president’s desk and say, ‘Mr. President, I don’t like the way you are running our country.’” And the Russian said, “I can do that.” And the American said, “You can?” [The Russian] says, “Yes, I can go to the Kremlin to the General Secretary’s office, pound his desk, and say, ‘Mr. General Secretary, I don’t like the way President Reagan’s running his country.’” According to Reagan, Gorbachev could not suppress a chuckle.
Reagan was convinced the Soviet Union would collapse internally because economic conditions were so poor for their citizens. So he told jokes about Soviet life to which he thought the average American could relate. It was his way of proving that the two peoples would get along but for the type of government in place in the USSR. One such joke was about the supposed ten-year waiting list if a Russian wanted to buy a new car. Said Reagan, “So there was a young fella there that had finally made it and he was going through all the bureaus and agencies that he had to go through and signing all the papers and finally got to that last agency where they put the stamp on it. The man, then, that had made the final stamp of the paper [and] taken the money said ‘Alright, come back in ten years and get delivery of your car.’ And he said, ‘Morning or afternoon?’ And the fella said, ‘Well ten years from now, what difference does it make?’ He said, ‘The plumber’s coming in the morning.’”
Reagan even joked about living in fear of the KGB: “A fellow . . . went to the KGB to report that he’d lost his parrot. The KGB asked him why he was bothering them? Why didn’t he just report it to the local police? ‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I just want you to know that I don’t agree with a thing my parrot has to say!’”
While most of Reagan’s jokes were prepared—Morris said “he was too cautious to risk repartee” the way Kennedy did—Reagan was certainly sharp enough for the occasional snappy comeback. When he was first campaigning for governor of California in 1966 and a heckler yelled that Reagan had been a lousy actor, Reagan replied, “Hey! That’s why I’m changing jobs!” And like Kennedy, Reagan used humor to deflect attention from his perceived political weaknesses. During his first 1984 reelection campaign debate with challenger Walter Mondale, Reagan performed terribly. His answers were rambling, and he often seemed to be struggling for the right words. There was serious talk that, at age seventy-three, he might be senile. But Reagan swept away those concerns in the second debate with a line that even made Mondale laugh: “I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
Jokes about his own age were a recurring theme. During his f
irst State of the Union address in 1981, he quoted George Washington. Then, as the oldest man ever elected president, Reagan added, “For our friends in the press, who place a high premium on accuracy, let me say, I did not actually hear George Washington say that.” Later, at the 1988 Republican National Convention, Reagan joked, “I can still remember my first Republican convention, Abraham Lincoln giving a speech that sent tingles down my spine.”
But these were jokes with a point. Reagan often loved to tell stories because he loved to tell stories, because, as he demonstrated while waiting to have a bullet removed from his body, he loved to entertain. And if Kennedy appealed to those who thrilled to the repartee of a Noel Coward play, then Reagan appealed to those who skimmed Reader’s Digest for new jokes to share at the next Toastmasters or Rotary Club meeting. “So this husband says to his wife, ‘You know, in the six years we’ve been married, we haven’t agreed on a single thing.’ And the wife says, ‘We’ve been married for eight years, dear.’” Then there was Reagan’s story of the two Frenchmen who were walking down the street and they suddenly stop. “One says, ‘Quick, hide, it’s my wife and my mistress!’ The other Frenchman says, ‘I was just going to say the same thing!’” Ba-da-boom!
That was about as risqué as Reagan got. He said he followed his father’s lead and “drew a sharp line between lusty vulgar humor and filth.” More typical, given his usual audience, was his story of a Kansas farmer who was so proud of the work he had done clearing and planting some creek bottomland that he invited his pastor over for a look. “Well, the preacher arrived and he took one look and he said, ‘Oh, this is wonderful! These are the biggest tomatoes I have ever seen. Praise the Lord! Those green beans, that squash, those melons!’ He said, ‘The Lord really has blessed this place. And look at the height of that corn! God has really been good!’ The old boy [farmer] was listening to all this and he was getting more and more fidgety, and finally he blurted out, ‘Reverend, I wish you could have seen it when the Lord was doing it by himself!’”