by Thomas Maier
FAR MORE THAN a matter of politics, Kennedy’s visit celebrated what it meant to be Irish, both for those living in Eire and in far-flung places such as the United States. Before the Dail, he reminded listeners of Ireland’s ancient history, its arts, its writers and philosophers. He quoted John Boyle O’Reilly (“The world is large when its weary leagues two loving hearts divide / But the world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side”) and James Joyce—still banned as scandalous by most of Ireland’s politicians and Catholic priests—who described the Atlantic filled with famine ships as a “bowl of bitter tears.” He summoned memories of Ben Franklin’s trip to Ireland in 1772 to seek a joint alliance with the Irish in a quest for “more equitable treatment” by the British. He reminded how Daniel O’Connell, Ireland’s fabled liberator, was influenced by George Washington. “No larger nation did more to keep Christianity and Western culture alive in their darkest centuries,” Kennedy declared. “No larger nation did more to spark the cause of independence in America, indeed, around the world. And no larger nation has ever provided the world with more literary and artistic genius.” As proof, he quoted George Bernard Shaw, who, speaking as an Irishman summing up his view of life, said other people “see things and say:Why? . . . But I dream things that never were—and I say:Why not?” Shaw’s encapsulation of the Irish spirit—what Kennedy called “that remarkable combination of hope, confidence, and imagination”—would become a familiar refrain associated with his own family.
For a small nation feeling bruised and inconsequential, his words were a boost to their collective morale. As he journeyed from place to place, Kennedy’s enthusiasm and good humor became infectious.“I don’t want to give the impression that every member of this administration in Washington is Irish—it just seems that way,”Kennedy jested before a crowd at City Hall in Cork. He introduced them to “the pastor at the church which I go to, who is also from Cork—Monsignor O’Mahoney. He is the pastor of a poor, humble flock in Palm Beach, Florida!”The president’s entourage,well aware of the affluent, suntanned parishioners in Palm Beach, laughed heartily at that insider’s joke.
Kennedy seemed to enjoy each stop on his whirlwind tour. Before an academic reception at St. Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle, he teased about the difference between Trinity College, the Harvard-like institution in Ireland favored by Protestants, and National University, the one attended historically by Catholics. “I now feel equally part of both and if they ever have a game of Gaelic football or hurling, I shall cheer for Trinity and pray for National,” he vowed. As a special favor, he jumped out of his official car to greet the mayor of Galway’s eighty-two-year-old mother, and signed his name to an old American history book for her. When 320 schoolchildren of the Convent of Mercy, dressed in green, white or gold, formed the Irish flag in a nearby field, Kennedy came over to them in thanks, and at his request, they sang “Galway Bay.” In Limerick, a gray industrial town along the River Shannon, he asked some Fitzgeralds, who claimed to be related, to stand up and be recognized by the crowd.“One of them looks just like Grandpa,” he said with astonishment to his sisters about a white-haired man in the audience, “and that is a compliment.”To Dubliners as he departed, Kennedy bid farewell almost lyrically: “I can imagine nothing more pleasant than continuing day after day to drive through the streets of Dublin and wave, and I may come back and do it.”
The warm reception by throngs of people, stretching their arms and hands to touch his own, left an indelible mark on this Irish-American president. He seemed to savor each Celtic song, each step dance performed for him and occasionally could be seen joining in himself by humming or tapping his feet. In Limerick, he recalled the verses of a song—“Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourneen, come back aroun’ to the land of thy birth. / Come with the Shamrock in the springtime, Mavourneen.” Someday, he promised, he, too, would “come back in the springtime.”
Whatever magic Kennedy hoped for in Ireland had taken its effect. On his last day, Kennedy admitted “it is strange that so many years could pass and so many generations pass and still some of us who came on this trip could come home and—here to Ireland—and feel ourselves as home and not feel ourselves in a strange country, but feel ourselves among neighbors, even though we are separated by generations, by time, and by thousands of miles.”At Shannon Airport, the presidential jetliner ready to take him back to America, Kennedy pulled out a piece of paper and recited lines he had scribbled down from a poem that De Valera’s wife had shared with him:
’Tis it is the Shannon’s brightly glancing stream,
Brightly gleaming, silent in the morning beam,
Oh, the sight entrancing,
Thus returns from travels long,
Years of exile, years of pain,
To see old Shannon’s face again,
O’er the waters dancing.
Upon his return home, Kennedy couldn’t stop talking to friends and family about his experiences in Ireland, sometimes staying up past midnight. He wrote a formal note of thanks to Lemass, and, to De Valera, he called the trip “one of the most moving experiences of my life.” He told Jackie about his visit to the Kennedys’ ancestral home and urged her to go to Ireland with him some day soon. He practiced speaking Gaelic with Ted’s Irish-speaking nanny and he decided to give his family’s new vacation home in Virginia the name “Wexford.” Eunice, aware of her brother’s delight, planned to give him a recording of “The Boys of Wexford” for that Christmas, 1963. Repeatedly, he showed films of his trip to Jackie, Bobby and some of his oldest pals. “All we are getting here still is his Irish visit,” moaned Red Fay to another of their friends. “Every time we call at the White House, Jack brings the conversation back round to it and invariably shows the film which I have now seen for the sixth time.”
Bobby recalled that his brother seemed to show these films “every night when he got home. Everyone had to go in and watch the movie.” Later, upon reflection, Bobby agreed that the Irish trip was “I suppose the happiest time of his administration.” Nearly forty years afterward,Ted could still remember its emotional resonance for his brother.“He appreciated Ireland even more,” recalled Ted.“He loved the time he spent there and the people he met. He was deeply touched by the warmth of his reception. He had always valued Irish traditions, and their love of poetry and literature and music, but now he felt a very special bond.”Ted also spoke of his brother’s insistence on showing the film of his trip.“Jack enjoyed it so much he invited everyone to gather with him the next night to see it again,” he recalled. “But by the third night, when he still wanted to see it one more time, he and I were the only two people sitting down to watch.”
The Kennedy family crest that De Valera presented to him was engraved on a Waterford crystal bowl with the help of Dot Tubridy, who worked for the glass company. In a note accompanying the bowl, she inscribed,“Don’t forget—this is where it all began.” That bowl sat on the president’s desk, Tubridy recalled four decades later, as “a reminder of his Irishness—he took it for what it meant.” Jackie took the “O’Kennedy” crest and made a seal ring, which her husband later told her he had used mischievously—in sealing a letter to the Queen of England.
In Ireland, Jack Kennedy seemed to rediscover something in himself. For a president who got elected by proving himself more American than the next and avoiding ethnic or religious entanglements as much as he could, the trip to Ireland was like a coming out party. As his sister Jean remembered four decades later, “It was a wonderful trip for the President, obvi ously it would be a high point of anyone’s life, especially his. Coming back, the first Catholic, so young, the first Irish Catholic—it was obviously very moving.”What so many bigoted Americans shunned in John Kennedy and found repulsive—his Irish Catholicism—he now embraced with remarkable ease, gracefully displaying his affections to the world in a three-day extravaganza. Journalist Pete Hamill, who vividly remembered JFK’s 1963 visit to Ireland, described Kennedy “often more Harvard than Irish, but he w
as more Irish than even he ever thought.” Most of the American press misconstrued the whole venture. The New Yorker magazine dismissed the Irish sojourn as a “psuedo-event” and other correspondents suggested that it was nothing more than a public relations stunt. In observing the enigmatic JFK—that media creature who usually revealed little about himself— the press failed to recognize the significance of what Kennedy’s friends and family later recalled as his most treasured moment of the presidency. The long “emerald thread” of Irish emigration to America, as Kennedy once called it, had been tied together symbolically with this president’s visit to his ancestral homeland. In a sense, the wild geese had come home.
When Lemass visited Washington in mid-October, Kennedy rolled out the red carpet, intent on returning the courtesies paid to him in Ireland. At a state dinner, one of his last in the White House, Kennedy arranged for a night of Irish music played by the U.S.Air Force bagpipe band followed by a private party upstairs, where Gene Kelly sang and danced for the guests. With little inducement, Teddy Kennedy got up and carried a tune. That night, the band made sure to play the president’s favorites from his trip— “The Wearin’ o’ the Green” and especially “The Boys of Wexford.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Ritual of Mourning
“Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man die in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear Is the worst man has to fear.”
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
JOE KENNEDY’S SPIRIT seemed imprisoned. In his wheelchair and rolled out by a nurse onto the open porch of his Hyannis Port home, the old man sat silently in a red bathrobe and watched his son’s presidential helicopter arrive and ascend into the distance from the same green fields where his family once played.
In December 1961, months after that sine qua non moment of his son’s inauguration, the aging patriarch suffered a devastating stroke that sapped the strength from his arms and legs. The fulsome, cocksure smile of the former ambassador to the Court of St. James was now atrophied and empty-looking. He had made millions on Wall Street and talked of running for the White House himself as Roosevelt’s successor; he had been a patron of bishops and the Pope’s confidant, the most influential American Catholic of his era. Yet now Joe Kennedy existed in his own form of purgatory, an active mind trapped inside a broken body, patronized and pitied more than feared. Only his blue eyes still seemed alive.
When the president came home for a visit, he tried to cheer up his father. But Jack’s own pained eyes sometimes gave him away. “It was dis- tressing to him, as it was to everybody, to see my father in that condition when he’d been so active and able,” recalled Bobby Kennedy about his brother’s reaction. “He [Jack] was almost the best with my father because he really made him laugh and said outrageous things to him. My father used to just sit out there Friday afternoon waiting for the helicopter to arrive, and so he used to get excited and then Jack used to come over and spend some time with him.”
Before leaving on Sundays, the president kissed his father gently on the forehead and bid him goodbye. Then Joe Kennedy watched from the porch as his son flew away.“He’s the one who made all this possible, and look at him now,” Jack commented to an aide, on what turned out to be his last visit to Hyannis Port in October 1963.
AN AWARENESS of life and death never left Jack Kennedy. Unlike most young men, he had carried with him, certainly since World War II, a sense of mortality, both of his own and of those closest to him. The biblical adage from St. Luke that his mother had so often pointed to in their youth—“To whom much is given,much will be expected”—seemed almost Faustian in its divine administration. The Kennedy family, seemingly so blessed by God, endured the tragedies of Joe Jr. and Kathleen during the 1940s in a way that Jack never forgot. Kathleen’s vibrant personality remained transfixed in his memory. After his triumphant presidential trip to Ireland, Jack made sure to stop briefly, privately, at Kathleen’s grave at Chatsworth, England, where he knelt and prayed. He watched as Jean, with a bouquet of red and white roses picked in Ireland, placed them by her sister’s headstone. Death at a young age, he once wrote, gave his older brother’s life “a completeness . . . the completeness of perfection.” During the PT-109 accident, he’d witnessed death and barely escaped his own. During his 1947 trip to Ireland, Jack appeared sickly and soon collapsed in a London hospital, gravely ill from Addison’s disease—what appeared to be his own death sentence. Before his risky 1954 spinal fusion operation, a priest administered the last rites of the church, yet once again he won his life-and-death gamble. Over the next decade, his illnesses and pain were covered over in Florida tans, a masking wit, and public talk of vigor, courage and physical fitness. In private, though, an air of fatalism pervaded Kennedy’s outlook about his own future. He didn’t indulge himself in Irish melancholy or a cursing of the fates. Instead, he steeled his soul for what he felt was to come.
“Frank, I want you to make sure that they close the coffin when I die,” he instructed Morrissey, morbidly and out of the blue. Morrissey, the family lackey slightly older than Jack, didn’t know how to respond to talk about death, especially from someone who seemed so full of life and passion. But the request came up again, repeatedly, as if Kennedy sensed something in the air. “He seemed to have a premonition about it,” Morrissey remembered, “and he asked that eight or nine times.”The thought that an assassin could be lurking always worried Dave Powers whenever Kennedy appeared in public. Powers particularly feared such at attack when Kennedy went to church— perhaps a gunman in the choir loft or killer waiting in line for Communion at the altar. Kennedy, with his gallows humor, made light of small incidents— false alarms such as firecrackers going off or strangers who came too close— that reminded them all of his vulnerability. “What would you have done if that fellow had a grenade in his hand instead of a mike?” Kennedy asked Powers, after a microphone-wielding broadcaster got past his Secret Service protection. Powers quipped that he’d say a quick Act of Contrition, the Catholic prayer of penance and forgiveness, perhaps the church’s greatest sacrament. Kennedy immediately understood and laughed at his aide’s joke.
For his staff and loved ones, the most disconcerting aspect of Kennedy’s demeanor was that he viewed an early death not as matter of if, but when— an inescapable proposition.“The President took a fatalistic attitude about the possibility of being assassinated by a fanatic, regarding such a danger as being part of his job, and often talked about how easy it would be for somebody to shoot at him with a rifle from a high building,” O’Donnell recalled. In his own memoir about Kennedy, Sorensen claimed that his boss “had no morbid fascination with the subject of death” but accepted the dangers of being president without complaint, “with an almost fatalistic unconcern for danger” as part of the presidency’s risk and as part of his overall embrace of life. “Occasionally he would read one of the dozens of written threats on his life he received almost every week in the White House,” Sorensen recalled. Kennedy shared these premonitions and perceived inevitabilities about death not only with the men around him but with his young wife, Jacqueline, already a mother of two children and pregnant with a third.“The poignancy of men dying young always moved my husband, possibly because of his brother Joe,” Jacqueline Kennedy later recalled. When they were alone together, he often asked Jackie to recite Alan Seeger’s poem, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”—made more poignant by the knowledge of the poet’s own early death. The verse had an applicability, a resonance, to his own life:
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear. . . .
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
If his Irish wit served as a kind of illuminating full moon, leaving all about him in his effervescent glow, John Kennedy’s fatalism existed as its darker side. Fatalism was a birthright of the Irish in America, certainly shared by Kennedy’s ancestors, and by generations of other Irish émigrés who died in transport on famine ships, or suffered an early death from disease, poverty and relentless work in America. Such a dreadful moira was in his bones. Kennedy’s experiences with death only seemed to heighten this consciousness of life’s limits, his determination to squeeze every bit of what earthly existence he may have, an approach expressed in the Latin as carpe diem.
Kennedy’s energies, ambitions and passions—including his extramarital activities, known initially to his intimates and later to the world—seemed part of this complex mix. Sex and death have a curious linkage in Irish Catholic tradition. The Reverend Andrew Greeley, in his prolific writings about Irish-Americans, suggests a strong “duality” in their character, the “strange propensity” to laugh at death and defy it with raucous Irish wakes filled with laughter and sometimes even “life-affirming” sexual activity. “The Irish reaction to death is perhaps the most intricate combination of our pagan past and our Christian past,”Greeley explains.“The corpse is in the house, the mourners are singing and dancing and drinking and telling stories, and out in the fields lovers are having intercourse.‘Fuck death,’ says the Celtic comic.”Among Catholic believers, the finality of death is overcome by a faith in eternal life—in Christ’s promise of redemption for one’s earthly sins bringing about an everlasting communion with God and one’s loved ones in Heaven. After the deaths of Joe Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy, many of the memoriam cards and handwritten letters to the Kennedys, including Jack, embraced and clung to such Catholic beliefs. Perhaps someday in an afterlife, they suggested, all the Kennedys would be back together again, reunited as one happy family, just like those glossy idealized pictures from the 1930s. Without Greeley’s eye for ethnography, several biographers have speculated that Kennedy’s carnality was somehow linked to an impending sense of doom. The closer he came to his Irish roots, the more Kennedy seemed wistfully aware of his perceived fate. At a White House ceremony attended by Irish Ambassador Thomas Kiernan in 1961, Kennedy received a Wexford cup to honor the christening of the president’s namesake son, John Jr., and then listened to the ambassador read a poem for the occasion: