by Thomas Maier
As his sisters and closest aides noticed, President Kennedy enjoyed himself immensely. Jack was genuinely affected by the beautiful land and the warmth of the Irish people. “John Fitzgerald Kennedy barely squeaked to election as President of the United States, but it seemed Thursday that he was King of Ireland by popular demand,” the Boston Globe reported on its front page. The Irish newspapers, with a more historical perspective, stressed Kennedy’s visit as the grand ending for a long and hard journey reaching back to the famine deaths and diaspora of the 1840s. “John F. Kennedy is the symbol of the closing of a chapter of our history,” declared the Irish Independent in Dublin. “After three generations a young man of fully Irish stock has reached the last point of integration into American life—the chief executive post of the nation. The great emigrations to America have come intimately into the lives of most Irish families.”The Cork Examiner wrote that “when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy set foot on Irish soil he made a mark on the history of this country that can never be effaced.”
In his brief remarks at the old family homestead, Kennedy recognized the moment’s import.“When my great-grandfather came to America and my grandfather was growing up, the Irish-Americans had a song about the familiar sign which went: ‘No Irish Need Apply,’” Kennedy recalled to his extended family and the assemblage. “In 1960, the American people took the sign down from the last place it was still hanging—the door of the White House.” In the United States,Kennedy rarely characterized his election as a barrier-breaker. Among the immigrants of Boston, Grandpa Honey Fitz once luxuriated in such resentments, his stock-in-trade as a politician. But that wasn’t Jack Kennedy’s style. In a predominantly Protestant nation, he knew there was still too much to lose politically by pointing out such things. Yet here in Dunganstown, Kennedy felt at home enough to make these connections, to savor his Irish roots and acknowledge his own achievement.
The allotted hour for their visit was almost over. Frank Aiken, the Irish minister of external affairs, busily suggested to the president that they should move along to the next stop in Wexford. Mrs. Ryan would have none of it. “You won’t be hurrying him out of here,” she scolded Aiken.Like some older aunt, she instructed the president to ignore the highest-ranking Irish official in their presence.“Don’t mind that fellow—you don’t have to go yet,” she counseled. No one dared suggest the contrary. Mrs. Ryan wanted the president to plant a juniper tree in her yard, a living reminder of the day, before she’d let him go.
Family relations, more than foreign relations, carried the day in Dunganstown. Some American reporters asked Mrs. Ryan a few perfunctory questions, but the Kennedy family’s vast and troubled history in Ireland remained largely ignored. No one seemed to realize that the U.S. president was visiting the home of a woman who had been active for years with the old IRA’s women’s auxiliary, had once carried weapons underneath her garments to supply IRA soldiers and whose husband had received an IRA memorial when he died. If President Kennedy was aware of Mrs. Ryan’s republican past, he gave no hint of it. But it was very much part of the history of those Kennedys who stayed.
In departing, Kennedy thanked Mrs. Ryan and his cousins for their hospitality and invited them to visit him in Washington. Before he flew off in his presidential helicopter, Kennedy apologized for any hardships his visit may have caused.“We promise to come only every ten years,” he joked.
From this remote farm, the party journeyed to the bustling port town of Wexford, where the English conquest of Ireland first took hold and where Oliver Cromwell once massacred civilians in an arena near the River Slaney. In Crescent Quay, Kennedy laid a wreath at the memorial to John Barry, an Irish émigré who had fought valiantly in the American Revolutionary War, and paid homage to the Irish Brigade, the band of “wild geese” immigrant soldiers, led by Thomas Meagher, who fought at Gettysburg and then Fredericksburg during the U.S. Civil War. This was the same Meagher who led the 1848 uprising in Wexford against the British. “They went into battle wearing a sprig of green in their hats and it was said of them what was said about Irishmen in other countries:‘War battered dogs are we, gnawing a naked bone, fighting in every land and clime, for every cause but our own,’” Kennedy reminded the crowd at Redmond Place in Wexford.
Before taking off for Dublin, Kennedy went on a mission for his mother’s Fitzgerald side of the family. Outside of Wexford, his motorcade stopped at the Loretto Convent, where Mother Superior Clement Ward, a nun who was Rose’s third cousin, greeted him at the gate along with twenty-seven other nuns. Mother Clement described herself as “the relation nobody knows about.” Mother Clement’s quip was rather clever for, in the days prior to the trip, dozens of Irish people claimed to be long-lost relatives of President Kennedy, the most bitter disputes coming from those with the Fitzgerald surname. In all, the newspapers estimated that Ireland contained eighteen thousand Kennedys and some twelve thousand Fitzgeralds. The president seemed intent on shaking hands with each one.
“There is an impression in Washington that there are no Kennedys left in Ireland, that they are all in Washington, so I wonder if there are any Kennedys in this audience,” he wondered to a crowd in Wexford.
A few hands stretched into the air.
“Well,” the president said with a grin, “I am glad to see a few cousins who didn’t catch the boat.”
KENNEDY’S OWN sensitivities to Ireland’s history, its divided status between the north and the south, were displayed discreetly but consistently throughout his three-day visit, never more so than with the Irish president, Eamon De Valera. Now eighty and nearly blind, De Valera remained the heart and soul of the Irish Republic. His job was largely ceremonial, having given up his powerful post as Taoseich a few years earlier, yet he was the first to shake President Kennedy’s hand when he arrived under gray damp skies in Dublin. For nearly three decades, the Kennedys had known De Valera and, in their own way, remained as fascinated by this charismatic leader as the Irish people themselves. Even in his salutations, De Valera never stopped reminding the world that Ireland was still a divided nation.
“Céad Mîle Fåilte,” said De Valera, a Gaelic phrase meaning “a hundred thousand welcomes.” It was more than an exercise in nostalgia. For years, DeValera’s messianic campaign to bring about one united Ireland also relied, unsuccessfully, upon a return to their native tongue. In his greeting, he invoked the ancient memory of long-lost kings on the emerald isle. “I have thought it fitting that my first words of welcome to you should be in our native language, the language that was spoken by the great Kennedy clan of the Dal gCais, when nine and a half centuries ago, and almost on the spot on which we are now standing, under their mighty King Brian Boru, they smashed the invader and broke decisively the power of the Norsemen,” recounted De Valera, straining to read from his notes. “That language, Mr. President, which has never ceased to be spoken, will, please God, one day soon again become the everyday language of our people.”
For the Irish people, there could be no more disparate image of their fate than these two men together. JFK, the robust Irish-American with his free-flowing brown hair, suntanned face and handsomely tailored business suit, was the very picture of modernity; indeed, he personified a direction that so many young Irish people admired and wanted to emulate. The aged and austere face of De Valera, with his thick eyeglasses and thin wisps of hair,recalled an older time of desperate violent resistance, an unresolved splitting of their country, and a backward, defensive approach to the future. Though gifted in revolution, De Valera proved poor at governance. He insisted on keeping Ireland an agrarian nation without much modern industry. He maintained a dogged indifference to his country’s economic plight, prompting some six hundred thousand people to emigrate from Ireland in 1956 alone, the highest number since the “black 1880s.”
Nevertheless, both men knew and respected what each meant for the Irish. In almost mythic terms, De Valera portrayed Kennedy “as the distinguished scion of our race,” whose election as U.S. president se
emed to embody the dreams of every Irish family who saw their loved ones float away on a ship bound for America. As if fulfilling some ancient prophesy, Kennedy represented “that great country” in the New World where “our people sought refuge when the misery of tyrant laws drove them from the motherland, and found a home in which they and their descendants prospered,” the older man said.“We are proud of you, Mr. President,” he added, as if speaking to a son. During the Dublin Airport welcoming ceremony, Kennedy equally praised De Valera, treasuring him as “an old and valued friend of my father.” He echoed themes of Irish immigration to America mentioned by the New York City–born De Valera, whose own mother was an immigrant. Kennedy suggested that many Irish-Americans “kept a special place in their memories, in many cases their ancestral memory, of this green and misty island, so, in a sense, all of them who visit Ireland come home.”
FOLLOWING HIS TRIP to County Wexford, Kennedy once again joined De Valera and his wife, Sinead, for a garden party at Aras an Uachtarian, the presidential residence in Dublin, similar in appearance to the White House. Kennedy was a bit anxious about what to expect. Before leaving America, he had conferred with Thomas J. Kiernan, the Irish ambassador to the United States, and asked whether he’d be expected to wear a formal morning suit to this event. “My father wore striped pants, I know, at a Garden Party in Dublin, but a dark suit is . . .” Kennedy began to explain, hesitantly. Kiernan immediately assured him that a business suit would suffice. The ambassador recognized the significance of this trip to the Irish people and was determined to ensure its success. After witnessing the population drop by millions with the mass emigration, his country was searching for such a hero, such a symbolic ending to the diaspora. “Here was a fellow who came from famine stock on both paternal and maternal sides and who had reached the very top in the United States—that was felt throughout the country,” Kiernan recalled. “I think in that sense you could say he wasn’t coming as the king, he was coming as an ending to a bad epoch, a bad century.”
During the early 1960s, Kiernan developed a friendliness with the young American president (they were “on the same wavelength,” in Kiernan’s words) that allowed him to gain a sense of Kennedy’s personality, to view this Irish-American as a combination of forces. Kennedy teasingly described Kiernan, a short wry man, as having “sort of an elfish look about him, but he is very, very good.” In the ambassador’s estimation, the president was clearly an Irishman.“Kennedy was in his blood reactions—which after all were completely Irish on both sides—was Irish in his speed of communication, in his wit, in his debunking—his self-debunking, which is part of the Irish attitude,” he observed. But Kiernan also detected “the Harvard attitude,” more outwardly dominant in his demeanor, part of “those with Irish names in America [who] are still wanting to be accepted as part of the establishment, or at any rate not to be regarded as outsiders.” Borrowing from Carl Jung’s theories of a collective unconscious, Kiernan, with his own brand of analysis, suggested that Kennedy’s reactions as president often reflected this split cultural background. “One could apply that to Kennedy himself, this racial unconsciousness and the reaction coming from it,” the ambassador contended. “The culture superimposed upon it is a hard culture, a culture of living up to Boston’s Harvard, which for an Irish person treated as they were [made it difficult]. . . . Kennedy couldn’t divide that Irish heritage, but what was superimposed upon it made him often wish, as I think it makes many Americans often wish, that they could avoid it. He couldn’t avoid it because it was there in his blood.”
In his dealings with the president, Kiernan continually stressed the Kennedy ties to the old country, even if they were a few generations removed. The ambassador arranged for the Office of Heraldry in Dublin to trace the lineage of the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds and their well-developed roots in Ireland. During one St. Patrick’s Day in Washington, he presented a Kennedy coat of arms to him. For the 1963 trip, the two governments worked together to create an Irish-American Foundation to counter criticism that Kennedy’s journey was merely frivolous. But in their talks, Kiernan mentioned that the issue of Irish partition would arise during his visit, a topic he knew De Valera was bound to bring up.
“The President looked as if another headache had struck him and asked me was he expected to say anything in public,” Kiernan recounted in a memo marked “secret” and sent back to the Irish government. The ambassador told Kennedy that no public statement condemning partition would be necessary but that De Valera and the Taoseich, “prime minister,” Sean Lemass, probably wanted to discuss it privately. Kiernan knew American officials didn’t want to upset their Cold War alliance with the British. Kennedy had turned down an offer from Northern Ireland to visit during his stay, mainly because he didn’t want to raise the partition issue. The president said he viewed partition as an internal Irish problem.
“Well, that is the British line very good,” Kiernan remarked to Kennedy. “But partition was enforced against the wishes of both parts of Ireland by the British. No country cuts itself in two.”
Kennedy seemed taken by the logic of this statement, as if he were suddenly reminded of his own past written observations on the issue. “That is true, of course, it is a British issue,” Kennedy responded.
As they discussed the matter, Kiernan pointed out how the British provided more than $100 million a year to the six counties in Northern Ireland, perpetuating the divisions between the Irish, and that a stronghold in Ireland was no longer needed for Britain’s defense in this new age of atomic warfare. If England were to end its financial assistance and express support for a united Ireland, Kiernan said, the moral support for “the junta” in the six counties would soon collapse. “Well, you know it’s very hard,” Kennedy responded.“I can see the British difficulty. It’s very hard to say that on account of the past history.”
Kiernan reminded Kennedy that, as a U.S. senator, he had sponsored a legislative call for the end of partition in Ireland.“You know, you’re one of those who put forward a bill in the Senate,” Kiernan said. “You got 17 votes, I think.”
Kennedy burst out laughing, enjoying the moment at his own expense. “That’s right,” he said.
As both men realized, Kennedy could no longer appease the Irish loyalists back in Boston without regard to the far broader interests of American foreign policy. As president, he was far more cautious, less willing to be seen offending such a close American ally as the British. During his trip to the Free State, Kennedy indicated that he’d be agreeable to listen to a practical, step-by-step plan to reunify Ireland, but only in private. Before Kiernan left the White House, where they discussed other details of the trip, Kennedy reasserted his position.
“Is it understood that I am not to refer publicly to partition?” Kennedy asked the ambassador in a somber, earnest tone. As Kiernan recalled to his bosses back home, “I assured him, to his relief I think, that this was so.”
After the garden party and a state dinner that followed, De Valera talked about Irish reunification while Kennedy listened respectfully. At another private meeting with Taoseich Sean Lemass, Kennedy brought up the partition issue himself and asked whether progress had been made recently. “I said I believed that this is a question which, in the ultimate,must be settled in Ireland, that any form of international pressure would not alter the basic situation,” Lemass recorded in his notes of their meeting. Kennedy suggested that a new Labour Party government at Downing Street might improve the chances of reunification. Though avoiding public discussion of partition, Kennedy repeatedly hinted at his own personal feelings about Ireland’s struggles. “To the extent that the peace is disturbed by conflict between the former colonial powers and the new and developing nations, Ireland’s role is unique,” Kennedy declared in a nationally televised speech to the Dail, the Irish Parliament.“For every nation knows that Ireland was the first of the small countries in the twentieth century to win its struggle for independence. . . . For knowing the meaning of foreign domin
ation, Ireland is the example and the inspiration to those enduring endless years of oppression.” At a memorial service at Arbour Hill, where the executed leaders of the 1916 Easter uprising are buried, Kennedy appeared particularly moved. He stood at attention with Lemass as Irish military cadets performed a drill ceremony, impressive enough so that Kennedy mentioned it repeatedly to his family.“As Kennedy watched the funeral drill of the army cadets when he laid a wreath on the heroes’ graves, he seemed more the deeply moved patriot in his homeland than the powerful President of another country,” Irish writer Joseph Roddy recounted in Look magazine. “In the close-ups on television, he was a man being confronted with the proof of how Irish he really was.”
Kennedy was enthralled by the Irish fight for freedom. In private, he quizzed De Valera about his part in the rebellion and asked why he wasn’t shot along with the other prisoners. Back in 1945, young John Kennedy had written about De Valera’s daring escape from the British jails, but this question lingered in his curious mind. De Valera explained that the British knew he’d been born in New York, and therefore were reluctant about executing an American citizen. “But there were many times when the key in my jail cell was turned and I thought my turn had come,” the old man added. Just as he had done two decades earlier,Kennedy listened with fascination to De Valera’s stories about the civil war and the guerilla-like tactics in the struggles for independence against the British Black and Tans. “If you are weak in your dealing with the British, they will pressure you,”De Valera told him. “If you are subject to flattery, they will cajole you. Only if you are reasonable, will they reason with you, and being reasonable with the British means letting them know that you are willing to throw an occasional bomb into one of their lorries.”As he later told his biographer, De Valera walked away from their meetings believing that Kennedy, if elected to a second term, would act to end the partition and help unify Ireland.