INTERVIEWER: The JFK35 podcast is produced by the JFK Library Foundation, and made possible with the help of a generous grant from the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.
RYAN TUBRIDY: And the plane landed. And what you hear and when you see it is that this plane opened and this human rainbow of color emerged from the door, and anyone who says that they saw him will say, his teeth.
[PEOPLE LAUGHING]
RYAN TUBRIDY: His hair, his eyes.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Hours after delivering his Ich bin ein Berliner speech, President John F. Kennedy boarded a plane, flew two hours and landed in Dublin airport. It was not his first visit to Ireland, but it would be the most meaningful.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: 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 at home. And not feel ourselves in a strange country, but feel ourselves among neighbors.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: I'm Jamie Richardson, and up next, we'll follow JFK around the Emerald Isle and hear about the impact of his travels on him personally, and on the country where his great grandparents emigrated from, in "Let Us Begin" Episode Four: A Homecoming.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: All this will not be finished in the first 100 days, nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration. Nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet, but let us begin.
[PEOPLE CHEERING]
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JAMIE RICHARDSON: In the mid 19th century, the potato famine caused widespread starvation and devastation in Ireland, sparking an unprecedented exodus out of the country. The effects of the famine were still felt by the Irish people more than 100 years later. In his oral history for the JFK Library, Thomas J. Kiernan, the Irish ambassador to the US when JFK was in office, explained how people in Ireland still felt the effects of the Great Famine.
THOMAS J KIERNAN: See the famine, although it happened 100 years ago, remained in the consciousness of the people. The famine and the evictions following the famine on such a huge scale, reducing the population from nine million to four million. Somehow remained alive, for that reason, weren't spoken of. But at the back of the people's minds, there was a feeling of failure. The famine spelled failure.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: But JFK's trip would be a turning point from that sense of failure. His election as the first Irish Catholic to the presidency of the United States was a significant milestone, and he became the first sitting US President to visit Ireland. Colm Tóibín, Irish author and journalist, was there with his father when President Kennedy visited in 2013 at the JFK Library. He described that moment.
COLM TÓIBÍN: He took me out of school so I could witness history. It was when John Fitzgerald Kennedy came back to Wexford as president of the United States. His great grandfather had left County Wexford, and we were from Wexford. And we stood on the quays in Wexford town, and we watched him. And it was an amazing moment. It was a hugely inspiring moment for all of us.
It mattered enormously, and I think it changed our country in many ways. It let us know that anything was possible.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: It was a technicolor moment as a larger than life president stepped off the plane into a rainy day in Dublin. Ryan Tubridy, late night host and author of two books on Kennedy's visit, set the scene in a forum at the JFK Library in 2017.
RYAN TUBRIDY: It's freezing, and the plane landed. And what you hear and when you see it is that this plane opened, and this human rainbow of color emerged from the door. And anyone who says that they saw him will say, his teeth.
[PEOPLE LAUGHING]
His hair, his eyes. You know, I said, yeah, that sounds like a human being to me. But they were different teeth and eyes and hair. And he emerged like Oz came to Kansas. You know? And he came out and everyone, good god, look at that. Rockstar, Hollywood, but yet president. And he was ours. He was Irish Catholic, who would have thought?
JAMIE RICHARDSON: When ambassador Kiernan had first discussed the trip with Kennedy, he'd assumed he would want a break from the intense schedule he would have in his trip to Germany, where he had traveled to six cities in three days. But JFK wouldn't have that.
THOMAS J. KIERNAN: He reacted at once to that rather sharply and said, I don't want to rest in Ireland. I want to go around and meet people. I want to meet plenty of people. I don't want to stay in Dublin. I don't want too many official receptions. I don't want any of the stuffed shirts arrangement if you can avoid it. Just to meet people.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And that's what he did. In a trip that lasted just under 70 hours, JFK crisscrossed the country, where people crowded motorcade routes to see the president. The Kennedy wit was out in full display, joking about the size of his family in the US and Irish Americans in Boston.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: There is an impression in Washington that there are no Kennedys left in Ireland, that they're all in Washington. And so I wonder if there are any Kennedys in this audience. Could you hold up your hand, and so I can see? Well, I'm glad to see a few cousins who didn't catch the boat.
[PEOPLE LAUGHING]
And made good. I was wondering if you could perhaps let me know how many of you here have a relative in America who you would admit to, if you'd hold up your hand.
[PEOPLE CHEERING]
I don't know what it is about you that causes me to think that nearly everybody in Boston comes from Galway.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And JFK's poetic side came out as well. He was no stranger to quote verse or literature in his speeches, and he incorporated Irish poetry and song in his remarks around the country. In what would later become a poignant moment, he quoted "Comeback to Erin," a song about a person who misses their sweetheart who had left Ireland.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: Last night, somebody sang a song which says the words of which I'm sure you know.
Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourneen.
Come back, Aroon, to the land of thy birth;
Come with the shamrocks and spring-time of morning.
This is not the land of my birth, but it's the land for which I hold the greatest affection. And I certainly will come back in the springtime. Thank you.
[PEOPLE CHEERING]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Though JFK would not return to Ireland, he carried fond memories of the trip with him when he returned to Washington. To learn more about where he went and what he did, I'm happy to speak with Dr. Catherine Healy. Catherine is the historian in residence at EPIC, the Irish emigration Museum in Dublin, and recently created an exhibit on JFK's trip. Catherine, thanks for being here.
CATHERINE HEALY: Thank you for having me, Jamie.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So JFK's 1963 visit to Ireland was a milestone for him personally and for the nation, but the story began a long time before that in 1963. All of his great grandparents emigrated from Ireland to the US. What caused that?
CATHERINE HEALY: Sure. Well they would have emigrated in famine times, the Great Famine that hit his country in the 1840s saw over a million leave Irish shores, most of them going to America. And Kennedy's ancestors were among them, and Patrick Kennedy, and Bridget Murphy, both settling in Boston in the 1940s.
And his maternal great grandparents, who Thomas Fitzgerald and Rosanna Cox. So Kennedy, in many ways, is the closing of a chapter that begins with the Great Famine.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And how close a relationship did JFK and his family have to Ireland prior to this visit? What did he know of the old country growing up?
CATHERINE HEALY: He would have been aware of the, and he spoke of the discrimination that would have been faced by Irish Catholic immigrants in previous decades. And of course, that continued in his own lifetime, and his own life was possibly not affected to the same extent as a privileged white man living on the East Coast.
But there was a basic affection there for Ireland. He visited Ireland before his 1963 visit and met some of his relatives there. But I suppose it was a sentimental kind of connection rather than anything more solid, and in many ways, his coming here as president was a turning point in his identification and to Irishness. And that was something that was discussed by diplomats at the time, the significance of his time here in strengthening his connections to Ireland.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And when did JFK make the decision to go to Ireland? Was there any resistance from advisors about going? He was just coming off of Berlin, which is such an important Cold War international relations visit.
CATHERINE HEALY: Sure, yeah. Yeah, there were sensitivities, I suppose, about the length of time that was being proposed for this Irish trip. I suppose to take you back to how the conversation started, you had Thomas J Kiernan in Washington at the time as the Irish ambassador, and he made a keen from the beginning of Kennedy's presidency that he'd be very welcome to visit, and there are all sorts of efforts made to strengthen the relationship with Kennedy. There was a Kennedy coat of arms presented to him on St Patrick's Day in '61, and Kiernan and Kennedy did get on quite well. And it was Kennedy himself who raised the possibility of an Irish trip, but he was conscious again that it would need to probably be combined with a number of other stops to justify it.
So yeah, an official invite was issued on the back of that, and as you say, he arrived in Ireland on the very same day that he made that famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech in West Berlin.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And this seems kind of like a fun trip as you kind of alluded to before. But was there any political or strategic motivations behind the trip as well?
CATHERINE HEALY: There was talk in the American press at the time that this was a very deliberate ploy, I suppose, to shore up support for a potential second presidential campaign among Irish American voters. I mean, some of his advisors felt that he had as many Irish American votes as he needed at this point in time. I think it primarily was, I suppose, a personal journey for Kennedy, but there are politically significant moments interspersed in his appearances.
His address to the Joint houses of the Oireachtas or the Irish Parliament being a particularly important one. Kennedy is keen to encourage Ireland to become a little bit more interventionist potentially in its foreign policy, and to join in the fight against communism. There are frequent references to the Cold War in that speech at the Oireachtas.
Ireland is, of course, a neutral country. Was then, and remains neutral. There were tensions over that at that point in time, although they skirted over I suppose in the course of his visit. But the fact that Kennedy meets Taoiseach Lemass at the US embassy residence in Dublin, and is really seen to endorse the direction that Ireland is heading in at this point of time is confirmation that Ireland is still in that western camp, even if it did remain outside of NATO.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And I did want to bring up, he was, JFK, was the first foreign leader to address the Oireachtas the Irish Parliament. What was kind of the motivation for that, or what was his speech about? What was the purpose of that?
CATHERINE HEALY: I think, yeah, the reason I suppose hope that he was given that honor to be the first foreign leader to address the Oireachtas. I mean, it comes down obviously to the fact that he's the first serving US President to visit this country. He's also the first Irish descended Catholic to enter the White House. And that speech is a very significant moment in Irish US relations. You have to bear in mind that by 1963, Ireland is a changing country. You've got a new economic policy and opening up the island to free trade, protectionism being abandoned, and Ireland is becoming increasingly internationalist in its outlook.
And Kennedy really commends the strides that have been made since independence. He talks about the peaceful revolution that has been undertaken in the decades preceding his visit, and the impressiveness that Ireland has stuck to its old cultural values in doing so. It's a speech that goes down very well with politicians in Dublin at the time.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And you kind of mentioned that Ireland's changing at this point. So where was, I mean, obviously grew up lots of privilege on the East Coast, as you mentioned. He was president of United States. What was the country that he was seeing and traveling around at this point?
CATHERINE HEALY: Yeah. I mean, the change I suppose is primarily being seen in urban areas in Ireland at the time. And you have factories, and office buildings opening up. You have more and more cars even on Irish roads, and which would have been a rarity even just a decade before. And more and more young people staying at home. So there's a new, I suppose, dynamism about the country. But I mean, that's not to I suppose overstate the progress that had been made.
Kennedy was still representative of this kind of cosmopolitan modernity that, to a lot of people in Ireland, still felt quite out of reach. And there's an Irish author, Colm Toibin, from Wexford who spoke a few years ago about his memories of seeing Kennedy passing his motorcade through Wexford town, and how struck he was by his tan. You'd never seen a man so tanned before. It was before the days of Irish package holidays to Spain.
So I suppose there was that binary feeling of, he's one of us, and yet he's also what we aspire to be.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And so just looking at photos and film footage at the Archives here at the JFK Library, you see the size and enthusiasm of the crowds. There's just people all along the way, just so excited, and JFK himself seems so happy. Can you explain the significance of his visit for the Irish people at the time?
CATHERINE HEALY: I think the fact that Kennedy comes from farming stock on both sides of his family, and that he is ascended to the highest office in the land. It's a celebration of the success of the Irish diaspora, this visit is. And yeah, I suppose it's a mirror of how well the Irish have done abroad, and as you say, Jamie, you can see that excitement and the sense of occasion in those photos so clearly.
But I suppose, yeah, there were cracks that needed to be covered up over the course of these few days, all the same. The motorcade route that Kennedy would have gone through in Dublin, and would have been just a few streets away from tenements in Dublin's inner city that in which thousands of people lived in pretty acute poverty.
And two tenement buildings had collapsed in the weeks and prior to his visit. Four people had died, so yeah, there's, I suppose, the sense of celebration, but at the same time there's I suppose a more complex story of the transition that Ireland is going through at this point in time.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And he went to a number of cities around the country, and participated in all kinds of different events. Was there one stop that was more significant that stands out for you as you were researching the trip?
CATHERINE HEALY: Yeah, I suppose the emotional pinnacle would have been his time in Wexford. He went to visit his ancestral homestead in Dunganstown, where he still had distant relatives. And he had an afternoon tea party there, and the photos of that family reunion were printed on the front covers of newspapers across the states and across Britain too. And so I think that was probably the most personally meaningful moment for him.
But also he was particularly struck by his visit to Arbor Hill, which is a site strongly connected to Ireland's struggle for independence, where the leaders of the 1916 rising are buried. And while he was there, he witnessed a guard of Honor by Irish Cadets, and he described it as the finest honor guard he'd ever seen. And he actually requested a footage of that trail when he returned to the States, and the newest class of cadets went to Arlington to stand guard at his grave and when he sadly was killed just a few months after this visit.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And has open any sort of visit or moment in the 60 years since it's taken such a hold of Ireland, or where does JFK's visit stand all these decades later?
CATHERINE HEALY: I think in terms of US presidential visits, Kennedy is still the one that remembered most widely, even with the exhibition that we have now at EPIC, the Irish emigration Museum. And we've had a huge amount of interest from people who still remember seeing Kennedy, hearing of the significance of his visit to their own families. I think, yeah. And it's interesting that subsequent presidential visits haven't received anywhere near the same level of fanfare, because I suppose the notion of an Irish descended president, several of whom have subsequently come to Ireland since Kennedy's visit, that notion is nowhere near as remarkable as it would have been in the 1960s.
So it's, I think it's still probably the brightest chapter in terms of the history of US presidential visits to this country.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Today, how do young people look at JFK? I know in this country, it kind of depends. There's all kinds of different views. Some people don't really know who he is, or people still love him. How are, how do young people today in Ireland look at him?
CATHERINE HEALY: I think he's very well regarded among, I suppose, more politically aware Irish people. I think particularly his record on civil rights is something that has stood the test of time in which a lot of people would still look up to, I suppose, as a model of political leadership. And I think also the lived memory of his connection to Ireland, and what it meant to people of that generation, I think those stories are passed down through the generations.
And my own friends in their early 30s remember hearing stories of the Kennedy visit from their grandparents. So he's a part of Irish folklore, but he's also, I suppose, a political inspiration as well to younger people still.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And I just want to close out with, as you worked on the exhibit at EPIC, was there anything that you learned that surprised you or you kind of saw in a new light about either Ireland at the time, or JFK, or the relation of the two?
CATHERINE HEALY: One thing that I found interesting was looking, I suppose, at international coverage of Kennedy's visit, and the lens that provides on international attitudes of a changing Ireland in the 60s. And had hundreds of international journalists coming to Dublin ahead of Kennedy's arrival, and some of them being sent to Wexford to take footage of kids walking through streets, bare feet and plaguing the Kennedy ancestors at Dunganstown.
And the coverage is carefully monitored by Irish embassies overseas seems as a real test of feeling towards pretty newly and established Irish free state. But and yet the stereotypes come through in a lot of coverage, but there's also a clear sense that this is a country in transition too. So that, it provides a really interesting window, I suppose, on that side too.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Excellent. Catherine, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate the conversation about the trip and in Ireland at the time. Really appreciate your time.
CATHERINE HEALY: Thank you, Jamie.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you.
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During his address to the Irish Parliament, President Kennedy promised a new, stronger relationship and called on the country to play a role in world peace.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: A great Irish poet once wrote, "I believe profoundly... in the future of Ireland... that this is an isle of destiny, that that destiny will be glorious... And that when our hour has come, we will have something to give to the world." My friends, Ireland's hour has come. You have something to give to the world. And that is a future of peace with freedom.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Next time on "Let Us Begin," we discuss how 60 years later, the US relationship has grown since 1963, and whether both countries lived up to the ideals set forth by the president during his visit.
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