The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  That same week, there was another subtle sign of how much life in America had changed for Irish Catholics. The day before the St. Patrick’s Day announcement, Clinton appointed Ray Flynn, the Irish Catholic mayor of Boston, to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican—a position created in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan after decades of rancorous, often bigoted, debate. (In 1969, Nixon broke an eighteen-year hiatus since Myron Taylor’s departure by sending Henry Cabot Lodge as his personal representative to the Holy See.) Before Reagan made his decision, several Protestant denominations expressed their opposition to a U.S. ambassador in Rome, particularly Baptists and conservative Evangelicals, as well as liberal civil libertarians. The Reverend Jerry Falwell opposed it and the Reverend Billy Graham was reportedly cool to the idea. Ironically, the proposal that Joe Kennedy and Count Galeazzi had pushed for years was brought to realization by Republicans such as Senator Richard Lugar, who oversaw the repeal of the 1867 law prohibiting any funding for a Vatican embassy. Lugar said the repeal ended “a discriminatory law against Catholics.”More important, the move eliminated an old sore point at a critical time of U.S.–Vatican Cold War cooperation in squeezing communism out of the Soviet bloc nations.

  Irish Catholics felt similarly slighted in their government’s treatment of Ireland. For many decades, American presidents sent U.S. ambassadors to Dublin who shared Britain’s view of Ireland’s future, certainly not those who were sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause. Jean Kennedy Smith’s selection threatened to change these old alliances and upset many in Northern Ireland and Britain. Conor Cruise O’Brien, a distinguished Irish historian and diplomat,worried that the Kennedys would bring only a simplistic Irish-American viewpoint to efforts for peace in Northern Ireland. “She has nothing to contribute to reconciliation,” said O’Brien. “She’s wholly aligned with one side. The idea that you can get peace in Northern Ireland by catering to the IRA is wrong, and I’m afraid that’s what the Kennedys are after.”

  Ted Kennedy shepherded his sister’s nomination through the Senate and ensured that a political neophyte would not be grilled on her qualifications to head an embassy. When she left America in late spring 1993 as the new U.S. ambassador to Ireland, Jean carried with her a photo from the day of her nomination; it was signed by her brother with the inscription: “For Jean, who is going back in the springtime.”The Boston Globe dourly predicted that Kennedy Smith was “not likely to stir much enthusiasm in Dublin although she is, after all, a Kennedy.”

  On her first day, she traveled to Dunganstown. Although Mrs. Ryan had passed away long ago, her daughter Mary Ann, now near sixty, still lived in the old homestead. So did her young nephew, Patrick Grennan, a tall, handsome young man with auburn hair and a Kennedy-like smile who continued as a farmer and ran a small museum about the American Kennedys in the family’s old barn.“Jean came back here quite a few times, and unveiled a plaque on the wall of the little house, where the original Kennedys lived,” recalled Mary Ann, of the whitewashed stone and mortar edifice where Patrick Kennedy once lived.“I think she feels a link along with her brother, Teddy.”

  With her actions that day, Jean let all of Ireland know a Kennedy had returned in the springtime.

  Chapter Forty

  Principles of Peace

  “There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce “that great past to a trouble of fools,” for we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.”

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1963

  GERRY ADAMS NEVER ATE chocolate chip cookies so good, nor had he ever tasted political success so sweet. Over time, the Sinn Fein leader’s relationship with Jean Kennedy Smith became cordial enough to tease the new American ambassador about those delicious morsels she offered guests.“She claimed to have made them herself—and I have no reason to doubt that— though I have to say I never actually saw her make them,”Adams remembers with a smile. But he held no doubts about her abilities in the corridors of power. After all, it was Jean Kennedy Smith, with her tenaciousness, who had spearheaded the effort to get Adams a visa for his highly controversial trip to America in 1994.

  The Kennedys were determined to help bring about peace in Northern Ireland. When Adams arrived in Boston,Ted Kennedy greeted him publicly, and pushed the Clinton administration for a formal conciliatory gesture toward Sinn Fein—officially banned for years by the American government. Courtney Kennedy Hill took Adams to visit the graves of her father and JFK at Arlington National Cemetery. And Courtney invited the Sinn Fein dele- gation to her mother’s house in Virginia so that Adams could stay overnight and be ready early the next morning for an all-important telephone call.

  At around 8:30 A.M. on October 3, 1994,Vice President Al Gore called Hickory Hill and spoke with Adams, sitting in Bobby Kennedy’s old office at a desk with his photograph on it. The conversation between Gore and Adams was cordial but brief. The Clinton administration—bombarded by opponents of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA—worried about the British response to giving recognition to an organization linked to terrorism. Politically,Adams was still so radioactive that the White House refused to let him meet President Clinton. After much wrangling, it was decided that Gore would make a courtesy call, but not in person. During their telephone conversation, Adams stayed close to the responses he had practiced the night before. Gore informed him that Sinn Fein was no longer a banned organization in the eyes of the American government, and a subsequent cable sent by the White House that day invited Adams to begin a “process of engagement” toward peace. But the Clinton administration remained wary of Adams.

  Over the next four years, the peace effort in Northern Ireland would become one of the highlights of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The bitter struggle had its deep roots in the splitting of Ireland after the 1920s war for independence. Since 1969, “the troubles” had claimed more than 3,200 lives, injured thousands more and tore apart neighborhoods along religious lines. Previous American presidents, including John F. Kennedy, had considered Ulster’s woes as mostly an internal domestic dispute. That view changed dramatically during the Clinton presidency, urged on by the Kennedys, who held considerable sway with this Democratic president. Other politicians and diplomats helped set the terms for peace in Northern Ireland but, as Adams recalled, few were more willing to take the risks for peace than the slim, almost frail sixty-seven-year-old ambassador with virtually no diplomatic experience.

  “Jean Kennedy Smith was exactly in the right place at the right time,” said Adams. “She brought a personal touch, a very progressive openness to the position of ambassador, and she also brought her own influence and the considerable influence of the Kennedy clan. She wasn’t at all reticent when she thought she needed to use that influence to speak directly to President Clinton, the State Department and others as well as the Irish Taoiseach or to us. Her influence was quite considerable, particularly in getting the process started in 1994.”

  WHILE GROWING UP, Jean Kennedy didn’t think much about Ireland. After marrying in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1956 before Cardinal Spellman, Jean worked on behalf of the church and other charitable organizations. After nearly a lifetime behind a private veneer, part of the traditional secondary status accepted by Kennedy women and so many women of her era, Jean slowly emerged with her own distinct impassioned voice, ready to express a controversial view if she felt it right.

  She was no longer the demure, almost girlish sister who had accompanied her brother, the president, on his memorable 1963 journey to Ireland. Her personal tragedies made her more aware of the sorrows in life.“Despite having grown up rich and privileged, there was always a hint of melancholy about her,” observed Boston Globe journalist Kevin Cullen. Some who met her said Jean’s wit could at times appear arrogant and flip.“She’s full of ideas, and she imparts them on anyone within hearing distance,” Ted once explained diplomatically. Her generation d
idn’t wave the Hibernian flags as their grandparents had; they were too busy looking ahead as full-blooded Americans. For Jean, JFK’s 1963 trip was more like a vacation than some personal mission. She doesn’t think the current crop of Kennedys have any particularly avid interest in Ireland beyond that of most Irish-Americans. “We took vacations but there was no burning thing in my family about Ireland—except for the senator and myself,” she insisted. Nevertheless, those who worked with her on the peace process during the 1990s say the ambassador was motivated by her heritage, a personal affinity for Ireland, that she sometimes acknowledged was rooted in her family. “When I looked at my mother, I always saw a bit of Ireland,” she said during her tenure in Dublin.“And I suppose when I look to Ireland, I see a bit of my mother—her faith, her wit, her endurance.” Jean Kennedy Smith’s interest deepened in 1974 when she visited Derry, which was in the throes of violence and protests. She stayed as a guest at the home of John Hume, the leading Catholic politician in Northern Ireland, who advocated nonviolent resistance. The everyday aspects of violence in this scarred city made a strong impression on her. Two years earlier, when British soldiers started firing in his hometown and killed thirteen people, Hume protested by laying down in front of a tank. A ruddy-faced, beefy man with a wave of dark flowing hair, Hume always impressed the Kennedys as sincere and dedicated to peace. He often repeated Martin Luther King Jr.’s adage that “an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.”Over the years,Ted Kennedy relied on Hume for advice, and Jean kept in contact when she visited Ireland, almost every year, as part of her Very Special Arts program for children suffering from mental retardation and other disabilities. Hume’s friendship with the Kennedys would prove crucial in the days to come.

  Hume was the leader of the Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), composed mostly of the middle class. Before Jean’s arrival as ambassador in 1993, he began meeting privately in talks with Adams, whose Sinn Fein party was favored mainly by working-class Catholics. These discussions were suggested by a Belfast priest, the Reverend Alec Reid, part of a grassroots movement of Roman Catholic clergy determined to stop Ulster’s violence and end discrimination against their people. Back in 1988, the two had also met briefly without results. This time, though, Hume was more than ever convinced of Adams’s intentions toward peace, especially his willingness to overcome the militant factions within the IRA who insisted on total British capitulation.

  Shortly after moving to Dublin, Ambassador Kennedy Smith ventured north to learn about the situation firsthand. During her initial trip, she met the mother of a teenage boy, one of several imprisoned without trial on suspicions that they were IRA lookouts. “I saw the suffering this woman was experiencing for her son and as a mother I responded,” Jean later explained. The new U.S. ambassador infuriated London by attending a court hearing the following day for the boy. She talked with another woman in Belfast whose husband had been shot recently. “When the men who killed her husband ran out of the house, her two children ran out after them, screaming, ‘You bastards!’ She was so afraid that they’d shoot her kids too,” Kennedy recalled. “She was extremely brave and I was very moved. She opened up to me because I think she saw me as someone who’s been through it. I think she felt that we had some bond there.”

  Because of the ongoing violence, she couldn’t contact Sinn Fein directly, but a close friend, Irish author and journalist Tim Pat Coogan, arranged for a lunch with Father Reid, who put the suffering into a religious context. Too often, Father Reid had prayed over the remains of those lost souls shot and blown to bits by terror.

  “I’m only interested in stopping the violence,” the priest told her.“I feel the Church should get involved. Even as we’re talking here at this moment, there’s probably someone being killed.”

  Jean was visibly moved. As the priest described each atrocity, she murmured repeatedly,“Awful,Awful.”

  After discussions with Hume, she became convinced she should take a chance on Adams as well.“He [Adams] had been talking with John Hume when I came up there and he is a great friend of our family,” Jean recalled. “I knew John was talking to him and I didn’t see any downside to it, frankly. I didn’t see any point to him stringing me along. So it was very logical to say he was attempting to find some kind of peaceful solution to the conflict there. I just felt that he [Adams] was sincere in his efforts because there was no point in him being otherwise. Misleading me or misleading John would lead him nowhere.”

  GERRY ADAMS’S LINKS to terrorism would give any prudent politician pause. A bearded man with gentle eyes, the eldest of ten from a Catholic family in West Belfast, Adams claimed that he’d never been a member of the Provisional IRA—the organization responsible for much of the bombings and killings—though few believed him. His uncle had been a prominent member of the IRA and political violence became a way of life for his friends and family. As a young man, he was sent by the British to a prison boat off the coast of Belfast, where he was interrogated and beaten, and he wound up spending four years in prison without a trial. It was enough to embitter anyone, part of the rage that kept the gunfire and strife in Northern Ireland going for years. But Adams soon focused his attention on republican politics rather than acts of terror. He realized that much of the discrimination aimed at Catholics was economic, not just political and social. Catholics were often deprived of the stable, well-paying jobs in the region’s strained local economy. With his earnest, professorial style, Adams helped take control of Sinn Fein from an older generation who ran it from the south. In 1983, he was elected as a member of Parliament, but in keeping with his group’s boycott, he refused to serve in Westminster, the home of Parliament.

  Although he was often blamed for the IRA’s murders,Adams was a target of repeated violence himself. His wife and son were once nearly killed when a grenade went off by their home. In 1984, Adams managed to survive after being shot five times. Only his bulletproof flak jacket prevented a fatal wound to the heart. His would-be assassins were linked to the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), the major Protestant paramilitary organization and, in many ways, the Orange counterpart to the IRA. During this time, the UDA was purportedly linked to the Democratic Unionist Party, led by the Reverend Ian Paisley, who had his own long history of anti- Catholicism. A fundamentalist Free Presbyterian with a doctorate from Bob Jones University in the United States, Paisley once referred to the Pope as “the Antichrist.”Within Northern Ireland, Paisley had a larger following than Adams, and perhaps even Hume. Though Protestants comprised two-thirds of Ulster’s population, they felt themselves threatened. The long standing call for a unified Ireland would sever their historic links to the British crown and probably leave the Catholics in charge. With demagogic fervor, Paisley incited Unionist anger against the Irish Catholic minority by appealing to their prejudices and fear. He remained a fierce critic of Adams and Sinn Fein. The year after Adams’s shooting, an assassination plot against Paisley failed.

  Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, while the violence in Northern Ireland continued, Adams increasingly distanced himself from the IRA’s bloody campaign. After one errant IRA bomb killed ten innocent people in Enniskillen, Adams admitted that such an atrocity couldn’t be justified. “Military solutions by either of the two main protagonists only mean more tragedies,” he said in news reports in Ireland. (For years, Adams had been banned from appearing on news programs in Northern Ireland.) Hume took note of Adams’s bold conciliatory words and eventually became convinced that the Sinn Fein leader might hold an important key to peace.

  By fall 1993, Jean Kennedy Smith became convinced that Adams wasn’t anything like her view of the fanatical masked IRA gunmen—as she told one friend,“the kind of people who killed my brothers.” She asked Ireland’s new Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, whether the United States could trust Adams, and he endorsed the notion. Although she wasn’t supposed to go officially to Northern Ireland—diplomatically under the jurisdiction of the U.S. ambassador in London, not Dublin—
Smith says Clinton instructed her to seek out possibilities for peace. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton promised to appoint a special peace envoy for Northern Ireland, but so far in his presidency, he’d been convinced by political advisors that the idea was too premature. Clinton wanted Jean to take another look. “President Clinton had thought of sending over a peace envoy to Ireland, so that had been discussed in my briefings,” she recalled. “I knew that was in the air—whether that was a good idea or not—and it was to be looked at when I was over there, to see whether it was something that could be worked out.”

  FOR HER FIRST Christmas season in Ireland, Jean invited her brother Ted Kennedy and his new wife, Vicki, for a visit. The senator had barely unpacked when his sister floated her notion of getting a U.S. visa for Gerry Adams. The Sinn Fein leader’s eight earlier requests had been rejected. But perhaps, she suggested,Teddy could prevail on the president.“He’s a terrorist,” the senator replied.

  On that holiday vacation together, the Kennedy siblings debated the idea some more during a meal at the home of Tim Pat Coogan. During his distinguished career, Coogan wrote biographies of the two most influential Irish figures in the twentieth-century conflict—Eamon De Valera and Michael Collins. (Smith later appeared in a cameo role in the film based on Collins’s life, directed by Neil Jordan, a frequent guest at the ambassador’s dinner parties.) The writer presented Collins as a brave man who fought for independence and died trying to forge peace; he portrayed De Valera scathingly as an insular, almost fanatical ascetic whose leadership of Ireland kept the nation poor, myopic and doomed to self-destructiveness. During their chat,Coogan suggested that a visit by Gerry Adams to America would place him on an international stage, rehabilitate his demonized image and add enough to his prestige to compel the British to deal more constructively with Sinn Fein. Ted Kennedy remained doubtful.