Kennedy

On the morning of the twenty-sixth of June 1963, two months after a Kennedy state visit to Dunganstown in Wexford and five months before his assassination in Dallas, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, gave a nine-minute speech from the steps of the Schöneberg Rathaus, the city hall of West Berlin, on the political and moral significance of the Berlin Wall. The wall had been built by the East German government in August 1961 to stop the haemorrhage of citizens from the Soviet sector to the Western. Kennedy spoke before a crowd of about four hundred and fifty thousand West Berliners, the largest single audience of his presidency. The speech, drafted aboard Air Force One in the morning with Theodore Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy and the West German interpreter Robert Lochner, ended in the four words Ich bin ein Berliner, which Kennedy wrote out phonetically on the speech card in his own hand and which he checked with Lochner backstage in the mayor's office moments before he went out. The speech is remembered as one of the foundational documents of the Cold War. Kennedy himself remarked to Sorensen on Air Force One on the way home that they would never have another day quite like this one.

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On the late morning of the twenty-seventh of June 1963, four days after the Ich bin ein Berliner speech in West Berlin, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, brought Air Force One down at Dublin airport for a state visit to Ireland that the Department of State had advised against. He had not been expected to spend the time in his great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy's small parish at Dunganstown in County Wexford. He was due, by the Department of State's draft schedule, to spend an hour at Áras an Uachtaráin, an hour with the Taoiseach Seán Lemass, and to address the Dáil; the rest of the visit was to be Limerick, Galway and Cork. He cancelled half the schedule on the morning of the twenty-seventh and went instead to the small farmhouse at Dunganstown, three miles outside the town of New Ross, where his cousin Mary Kennedy Ryan was at the kitchen door. He took his tea with her in the front parlour. He addressed a crowd of about ten thousand on the quay at New Ross at noon, in a speech he had drafted on the flight from Berlin in pencil on the back of a yellow legal pad, and which is, by the assessment of the speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, the speech that meant the most to him personally of any speech he ever gave. He was assassinated in Dallas one hundred and forty-nine days later.

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