President Kennedy
speaking to the crowd in Galway during his visit. From Whence I Came: The Kennedy Legacy, Ireland and America
edited by Brian Murphy and Donnacha Ó Beacháin (Merrion Press, €19.95/£17.95)
Joe Carroll
One would think that there is little new to be explored in the Kennedy-Ireland relationship 60 years after John F. Kennedy’s election as the first Catholic President of the United States and its youngest.
But this book based on contributions to the annual Kennedy Summer School in New Ross provides many new insights. It is also a tribute to the school’s founder, the political analyst, Noel Whelan, who died prematurely last year. With another Catholic installed in the White House it gains a topical interest for readers.
The 15 essays are based on revised talks to the school by Irish historians and political figures from the US. The main characters are, of course, Jack and his younger brothers, Robert and Edward but there are also chapters on Barack Obama and the campaign of Bernie Saunders in the Democratic primaries against Hillary Clinton.
Kennedy saga
The less glamorous side of the Kennedy saga is explored by local historian, Celestine Murphy, who has researched the Wexford roots of the overlooked great-grandmother of the president, Bridget Murphy. She met and married in Boston, the ‘first’ Kennedy, Patrick, soon after he emigrated from New Ross in 1849. He died of consumption after nine years of marriage leaving her with four young children. It was thanks to Bridget’s efforts that the Kennedys survived and were launched on the path to the White House. Her grandson, Joe, was the multi-millionaire who made it happen.
Donncha Ó Beacháin spells out how much Joseph spent in bribes, donations and television advertising in getting his son, into the House of Representatives, the Senate and then the White House. There was no way his opponents could match this wealth. As Tip O’Neill remarked admiringly, “Money makes miracles”.
Chances
Joe himself may have weighed his chances of the presidency, but when his patron, Franklin D. Roosevelt, went on to serve a third and a partial fourth term any chance was gone and Joe concentrated on clearing the way for his son. Historian Michael Kennedy considers Joe’s claim that as US ambassador to London in 1939, he played a role in the success of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938 which gave the Treaty ports back to Ireland and ended the Economic War. But there is no evidence he had any impact on the negotiations which were essentially between Éamon de Valera and Neville Chamberlain.
How President Kennedy’s visit to Ireland in June 1963 was filmed is analysed by film historian, Harvey O’Brien, who critiques the four screen versions which ensued.
He insists that overlooked in all versions and apparently by the Fianna Fáil government of the day was that Kennedy in his address to the joint Houses of the Oireachtas was between the lines urging Ireland to play a more active role in the defence of the West against communism.
He digs out a 1952 memo by Mr Kennedy in his senate campaign in which he described Ireland as “an indispensable link in the chain of European defence.” In the build-up to the 1963 visit the then Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, pushed strongly for Mr Kennedy to take an anti-partition line but there was no chance of that. Mr Kennedy was to meet the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, after the Irish visit to discuss a bigger role for Britain in the nuclear defence of Europe. It was not a time to raise the prospect of the ‘dreary steeples’ of Fermanagh.
Felix Larkin asks the question: ‘how good a President was he?’ In domestic policy, he engaged cautiously with the civil rights issue aware of how much he depended on the votes of the bigoted south. But he was spurred into action over the ban on black students at a university in Alabama.
Policy
In foreign policy he showed courage and sure judgement as he dealt with the Cuban missile crisis, the Test Ban Treaty and Berlin. The serial-womanising by Mr Kennedy even as president only emerged in public long after his death, but Mr Larkin says that while reflecting badly on him as a human being it is not “strictly relevant to his standing as a leader or as a president”.
The verdict? He endorses that of the President Kennedy biographer, Robert Dallek, that the thousand days of Kennedy “inspired visions of a less divisive nation and world, and demonstrated that America was still the last best hope of mankind”.
All editor royalties from this book are being donated to the New Ross Community Hospital, a registered Irish charity run by a voluntary board of directors.