by Thomas Maier
By April 1998, all sides had agreed to what became known as the Good Friday Agreement. It called for a new Northern Ireland Assembly that would be composed of Protestants and Catholics, and for “exclusively democratic and peaceful means” of resolving future disputes. The agreement outlined ways for the IRA and Orange extremists to get rid of their terrorist weapons, methods for the release of political prisoners and the administering of police and justice. The Irish Republic would also drop its territorial claim on Ulster—the call for a unified Ireland contained in its constitution, one of the last vestiges of De Valera’s rule.
The violence didn’t end. Weeks after the signing, twenty-eight people died in a bomb blast in Omagh, Northern Ireland, perpetrated by dissident republican militants. Yet the fragile settlement survived even this outrage and provided a realistic framework for peace.
AS THE GOOD FRIDAY Agreement neared its conclusion, Jean Kennedy Smith announced her plans to retire and return home to America. Many of the same sectarian hatreds in Northern Ireland still existed, but her presence had made a significant difference in a hopeful pact that could end the suffering, a peace that might last.
At Aras an Uachtarain in Dublin in July 1998, the Irish president, Mary McAleese, and the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, conferred honorary Irish citizenship on Jean Kennedy Smith at a ceremony that reflected her family’s historic link between the two countries. It was the same place where De Valera had given a garden party in 1963 for her brother, the first American president to visit Ireland. The nation that her Kennedy and Fitzgerald ancestors felt compelled to leave, an Ireland suffering from famine and oppression,was now a land enjoying prosperity to an extent not seen before in modern times. The role of the Kennedys—and by extension the role of all Irish-Americans who cared about the fate of their ancestral homeland— played a significant part in these improvements.
Though this ceremony paid tribute to the departing ambassador, McAleese noted that it was, in a sense, a recognition of the Kennedy family’s contributions to the Irish-American saga. It was fitting that “we should complete the circle begun almost 150 years ago when Patrick Kennedy of New Ross sailed for the United States,” McAleese said.“To his children and grand-children he handed a baton of love for Ireland. Today we are proud to hand his outstanding and distinguished descendant the highest accolade we can offer.” Jean, who for much of her life had stayed in the background while the family’s men took the limelight, appeared deeply moved. Without her, the visa for Adams probably would never have been issued, and the peace process would surely have been delayed for several more years, if not for another generation. She thanked them and, unassumingly, said she felt fortunate to have played a “small part” in this pivotal era in Irish history.
Before she left, the seventy-year-old ambassador stopped by the family’s ancestral homestead in Dunganstown once again to pause and reflect on all that had happened. “My great-grandfather’s brother never left,” she explained. “And his great-grandson, Pat Kennedy, is a farmer in Wexford. I visit him and we talk. We always have a chuckle about what would have happened if his great-grandfather had gone over, and how life would have been so different.”
Jean paid tribute to other parts of the Kennedy story in Ireland. In County Wexford, she attended the bicentenary anniversary of the 1798 Wexford uprising, another dramatic episode in the struggle of Irish Catholics for religious and civil liberties and their freedom from Britain. Kennedy ancestors were among those pikemen who fought at Vinegar Hill with the United Irishmen. At a memorial parade, Jean saluted those who marched in memory of the dead. She was presented with a bronze pikeman for her prominent role in the peace process. To the crowd, she recalled how Jack had always sprung to life whenever the rousing “Boys of Wexford” song was played. “Jean Kennedy Smith, so bright, so alive, so evidently enjoying the celebration, talked of her brother and his affection for the Boulavogue song and its memories,” wrote an attending reporter for the local republican newspaper. “History coalesced.”That same year, other Kennedys honored Ireland’s past and the promise of its future. In Boston, the family awarded a special “Profile in Courage Award” to the Irish peacemakers in a ceremony held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Hume, Adams,Trimble, David Ervine, leader of the Protestant paramilitary force, Monica McWilliams of the Northern Ireland Womens’ Coalition representing women of Catholic and Protestant faiths, and Mitchell were all praised for their tireless work toward the Good Friday pact. The late president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, said the award recognized “the fear they overcame in reaching out to their historic enemies in the spirit of peace.”
When speaking of Ireland, the Kennedys usually framed their message in the context of their own family experience. Ted Kennedy said their personal history was “certainly a factor” in efforts by Jean and himself to bring about peace, despite the considerable political risks. “It made us want to think big and dare to try new things that might cause a breakthrough, such as encouraging President Clinton to grant Gerry Adams a visa,” he noted in comments for this book.
At the University of Ulster in Derry in early 1998,Ted started a speech in similar personal terms, by calling attention to two sets of parents—one Catholic and the other Protestant—whose sons were killed in the conflict but were now working for some resolution. Kennedy noted the “apt coincidence” of the peace accord’s occurring on the two-hundredth anniversary of the United Irishmen Rebellion, and praised all those who had “taken risks for peace.” Mentioning various threads of history interwoven between the Irish and the United States, Kennedy said many of the estimated forty-four million Americans of some Irish ancestry were Protestant, not Catholic, yet they all learned to live together and prosper in America’s diversity. He warned of those “who seek to wreck the peace process” by political violence. “Like so many of you here, my family has been touched by tragedy,” the senator said, his Irish audience surely knowing its cause.“I know that the feelings of grief and loss are immediate—and they are enduring. The best way to ease these feelings is to forgive, and to carry on—not to lash out in fury, but to reach out in trust and hope.”
In closing,Ted read from a recently discovered letter his father wrote privately in 1958 to a friend whose son had died. Joe Kennedy was long gone but he was still a presence in the Kennedys’ lives. To his Ulster audience,Ted reminded them of his eldest brother, Joe, who died in World War II, and his eldest sister, Kathleen, killed a few years later in an air crash. They needed no reminders of Jack and Bobby. Then Ted shared his father’s words about dealing with such sorrow:
There are no words to dispel your feelings at this time and there is no time that will ever dispel them. Nor is it any easier the second time than it was the first. And yet, I cannot share your grief because no one could share mine. When one of your children goes out of your life, you think of what he might have done with a few more years and you wonder what you are going to do with the rest of yours. Then one day, because there is a world to be lived in, you find yourself a part of it again, trying to accomplish something—something that he did not have enough time to do. And, perhaps, that is the reason for it all. I hope so.
Too many sons and daughters of Eire had been lost in the troubles. Now, the American senator urged, was the time for them to seek a lasting peace in Northern Ireland.
Chapter Forty-One
Legacies
AN AIR OF ANTICIPATION always surrounded John F. Kennedy Jr., as if he were the long-awaited heir to some fabled legacy or the son of a fallen chieftain. Countless media stories and interviews suggested, without fail, that he, too, might rise to power and lead a grateful nation. In fin-de-siècle America, pop culture transformed the Kennedys into a brand name, marketed by the media as a family drama with endless sequels. John-John was the little boy who had grown into a handsome, amiable young man while a nation watched. His full story, though, had yet to be written.
Upon graduating from Brown University in Rhode Island, he traveled around, v
olunteering for a short time with Mother Teresa’s organization serving the poor in India. “The three days I spent in her presence was the strongest evidence this struggling Catholic has ever had that God exists,” he later said. When John dabbled in theater in the 1980s, he took a part in Irish playwright Brian Fiel’s Winners—a drama in which Kennedy’s character remains lost at sea with his female companion until their dead bodies are found. Instead of show business, however, Jackie Kennedy encouraged a career in the law for her son. John eventually landed a job in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, prosecuting run-of-the-mill crimes. At the 1988 Democratic Convention, John excited the crowd with a speech about his father’s legacy. His appearance set off rumors that he’d soon follow in his father’s political footsteps. “He said he was interested but still too young,” recalled Pierre Salinger, his father’s old spokesman.“He told me that he had an idea that he should go into politics in the next century.”
After his mother’s death, John entered another career that his father had once pursued—journalism. With backing from the Hearst organization, he founded a magazine called George, dedicated to chronicling the confluence of politics and culture. As his father had done in the 1940s, John used his role as a journalist to learn about the world and converse with important leaders. Politics flowed in his blood but he was determined to express his interest in creative, often ironic ways. In June 1997, John ventured across the Atlantic for a difficult interview with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams—then the bête noire of the peace talks. Several months before Kennedy’s visit, Sinn Fein had been ousted from the negotiations after a February 1996 IRA bomb ripped through London’s crowded Canary Wharf, killing two and injuring several others. The Clinton administration placed the responsibility for this deadly blast at Adams’s doorstep. Hoping to be invited again into the talks, Adams undoubtedly realized the value that a high-profile media interview with JFK’s son and the Irish ambassador’s nephew would have in Washington.
John checked in at the Shelbourne Hotel, where his parents had once stayed, rather than stay with his aunt at the ambassadorial residence in Phoenix Park. John had visited Ireland only once before—the 1967 trip as a child with his mother and sister, Caroline—though he seemed conversant in Irish history and gripped by the ongoing struggle in the north. To the British government’s dismay, this son of Camelot attended the funeral of Patrick Kelly, an IRA solider convicted in England of involvement in a bomb plot against Princess Anne. Kelly died in a British prison after his skin cancer was diagnosed too late and authorities refused his request to be transferred to Ireland. Kennedy made no comment at the funeral, but his presence raised many eyebrows.
The next day, John boarded a train to Belfast, where two Sinn Fein officials, Richard and Chrissie McAuley, met Kennedy at the station and showed him the city. “We were his tour guides for the day,” remembered Richard McAuley, Adams’s press spokesman. They walked through the downtown markets area, where extensive numbers of British troops were patrolling, giving the visiting American the impression of Ulster as an occupied nation. Kennedy learned that the military were nervous about the possibility of another summer of sectarian rioting during the “marching sea-son”— when Protestants paraded in the streets to mark William of Orange’s 1690 victory over King James II, the exiled English Catholic monarch, at the battle of Boyne. As Kennedy later explained in his George article: “Catholics are deeply offended by these triumphant displays, especially when the processions pass through their neighborhoods. The marches are a reminder of more than 800 years of English persecution.” Later during his Belfast tour, Kennedy went over to Milltown Cemetery for a look at the graves of the Irish hunger strikers who died in 1981 protesting their treatment as political prisoners. “I remember Kennedy remarking how young they were when they died, and how tragic the loss of so many men had been,” McAuley said. By day’s end, they wandered into the Felons Club, a pub in West Belfast often frequented by Sinn Fein and former IRA members. John raised a pint with his escorts.
The soft-spoken magazine editor absorbed the sights, sounds and emotions of embattled Northern Ireland as though he were a native. Back home, like most Irish-Americans of his generation, John showed only faint glimmers of interest in Ireland. He rarely alluded to himself in ethnic terms, and most considered him a true-blue New Yorker, if not the all-American male. Yet months earlier in New York, Richard McAuley had accompanied Adams when they were first introduced to young Kennedy, who showed a distinct receptivity to the republican view. During their discussions, John compared the discrimination facing Catholics in Northern Ireland to the 1960s plight of blacks during the civil rights struggle in the American South. Perhaps Kennedy’s words were a bit of overstatement to convince Adams to sit for an interview, but the Sinn Fein leader, whose own life sometimes depended on his judgments of men, thought he was sincere. The Kennedys he’d met all shared a similar interest in their family’s heritage. “Like many Irish-Americans, they have a very strong sense of their Irishness,” Adams explained. “Not only do I think politically conscious Irish-Americans have a sense of discrimination— because, after all, that’s why they are in the States in the first place—but they are also motivated by public service, and feel a need to do something about it.”
When Adams attempted similar rhetorical flourishes during his magazine interview, John Kennedy challenged him. “Though his charm is disarming, it is difficult to unfasten his thinking much beyond the rigid nationalist dogma that underlies so much of Sinn Fein’s politics,” Kennedy described skeptically.“His answers, while lengthy, are hardly ever personally revealing.”As a thoughtful questioner, John asked about Sinn Fein’s links to the IRA and quizzed Adams about “allegations of shake-downs in order to force people to tow the Republican line.” Near the end of their interview, Kennedy asked Adams why, outside the Irish community in the United States, any American should care about Northern Ireland. Adams referred to the kind of political violence with which his interviewer was painfully familiar.
“The U.S. can be a very progressive force in this situation,” Adams replied. “I was moved when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when your father was killed. . . .You know, if it isn’t right to be discriminated against in the United States, well, then it shouldn’t be right here.”
THE BUZZ OF FUTURE political office, perhaps even the presidency someday, remained with John Kennedy as he settled down and married at age thirty-five, about the same time in life that his father wed. Carolyn Bessette, his elegantly beautiful, blonde-haired wife with high-fashion friends and tastes, appeared the perfect companion. The couple lived in New York, where rumors speculated that John might run in 2000 for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in New York (a post later won by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton) or perhaps some high office at a later date.
In July 1999, John Kennedy still spent much of his time on George, his fledgling enterprise. He worked until late one Friday summer evening when, near dusk, he took off in a private plane with his thirty-three-year-old wife and her sister, Lauren. In the twilight, they headed towards Hyannis Port, where the next day they planned to attend the wedding of John’s cousin, Rory, the last of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s children. A large white tent was set in place on the grounds of the Kennedy compound and most of the guests had already arrived for the celebration. Family was important to this generation of Kennedys, just as it was for their parents and grandparents; indeed, family was perhaps the most consistent ideal among them.
After a certain point, John’s absence became worrisome. A few inquiries revealed the awful truth—his plane was missing. Coast Guard boats and helicopters combed the Cape Cod shoreline, past the beaches where Jack and Jackie Kennedy had once strolled with their son. As the hours stretched into days, a potential rescue mission for survivors turned into a recovery effort for remains of the aircraft. President Clinton ordered the federal search to continue beyond any hope of a miracle. It was a personal gesture to the Kennedys as well
as an appropriate response by a nation horrified that their slain president’s son was dead. On the third day, all three bodies were found submerged in the plane, located at the bottom of the ocean. Dreams of restoring a lost Kennedy presidency were gone.
DAN RATHER STARED somberly into the camera. “The Kennedy name has attracted the spotlight in this country,” Rather announced, “but this family, which has often basked in fame, had also felt the glare of the spotlight at moments of tragedy . . . ”
As the vintage film clips of Camelot flashed on the screen, the CBS anchorman narrated the familiar melodrama. Rather made his name in network news during the 1963 tragedy in Dallas. Now, he played master of ceremonies to a network news program devoted to the death of the president’s son. Once more, the Kennedy deathwatch had begun for the American public, a ritual once stately and reverential, now macabre and almost prurient. Celebrity—once so avidly sought by Joe Kennedy’s publicity men—had long ago stripped this family of their privacy. The outpouring of public emotion confirmed the degree to which so many Americans, often with little or no family of their own, identified with this large clan.
Outside the Manhattan couple’s apartment, bouquets of flowers and cards were placed at its entrance as if it were a shrine. Strangers congregated and lit candles in memory of a man they had never met.“We’ve become a rather lonely nation in spite of our communicative skills,” observed Mike Barnicle, a Boston columnist, during a nationally televised show outside the funeral services.“We don’t know our neighbors,we don’t know the people upstairs. But we know the Kennedys. And whether you like them politically or not, they are a universal bond that extends across this country and, I think, perhaps the world.”