Kennedy · 1963
JFK at New Ross
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.
Some homecomings are private acts conducted in public. A man crosses an ocean his ancestor crossed in the other direction, and the line of four generations folds shut for an afternoon. The advisors call it sentiment and try to schedule around it. The man, if he is the right kind of man, refuses to be scheduled.
THE GREAT-GRANDSON
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was forty-six years old in the summer of 1963, 35th President of the United States, born at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. His great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy had left the quay at New Ross in County Wexford in 1849, on the famine ship Dunbrody, with thirty-eight shillings and a change of clothes, and died of cholera in East Boston in 1858 at thirty-five. Between that quay and the Oval Office lay four generations: a cooper, a saloon-keeper and ward boss, a financier and ambassador, and now a President. The family had done very well in America. None of them, in those one hundred and fourteen years, had gone back to the farmhouse at Dunganstown.
THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE'S SCHEDULE
The Department of State had advised against the visit entirely. Ireland was a small neutral country of no Cold War weight; the President was four days out from West Berlin, where on the twenty-sixth he had stood at the Schöneberg Rathaus and said Ich bin ein Berliner to four hundred thousand Germans. The draft itinerary kept the Irish leg tight and official: an hour at Áras an Uachtaráin with President de Valera, an hour with the Taoiseach Seán Lemass, an address to the Dáil, then Limerick, Galway, Cork. Wexford was a courtesy stop, half a morning, a wreath and a handshake. The President read the schedule on Air Force One between Berlin and Dublin and crossed out the half of it that kept him out of New Ross.
THE MORNING OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH
It is the morning of the twenty-seventh of June 1963. The motorcade leaves Dublin at first light and runs south through Wicklow and Wexford in heavy summer weather, the hedgerows close, the light off the Barrow already hard by ten. At half past nine he turns up the lane at Dunganstown, three miles south-west of the town of New Ross, to the small whitewashed farmhouse his great-grandfather walked out of in 1849. His second cousin Mary Kennedy Ryan, the present occupant, is at the kitchen door in a navy blue dress. There is tea on the table, and Madeira cake, and the front parlour is the same parlour Patrick Kennedy had left. He takes the cup with both hands. He sits in the chair by the window. He stays forty-five minutes, longer than the schedule allows for, and in the inside pocket of his coat are three sheets of yellow legal-pad paper covered in his own pencil hand, drafted somewhere over the Atlantic in the past forty-eight hours, not shown to Theodore Sorensen, not shown to anyone.
A SECOND IN A PARLOUR
Sentiment is the easy word for what happens in the parlour at Dunganstown, and the wrong one. What he is doing, in the forty-five minutes over the cup, is a calculation a President of the United States is not supposed to make in office: the calculation that the small thing is the large thing. The State Department wants him in the Dáil because the Dáil is where the cameras are and the cables go. He has read the cables. He has been in Berlin four days ago and he knows what cables do. But the country that has elected the great-grandson of an emigrant has, he thinks, elected him at least partly to come back up this lane, and the country he came from has, he thinks, waited one hundred and fourteen years for one of them to come back up it. The cup is in his hand. Mary Kennedy Ryan is talking about the cousins. He is not, in the parlour, the Cold War President. He is the great-grandson, and the speech in his coat pocket is in his own pencil hand because no other hand could be permitted to draft it. He leaves the chair at a quarter past ten. He keeps the cup a moment longer than he needs to. He does not say, to Mary or to Eunice or to the staff, what he has decided about the spring of 1964, but he has decided it.
THE QUAY AT NEW ROSS
At noon he is on the wooden platform at the head of the quay at New Ross, by the lower bend of the Barrow, with the Taoiseach Lemass, the local TD Brendan Corish, the Lord Mayor, and his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver. The crowd, by the New Ross Standard's count the next morning, is between ten and twelve thousand, the entire population of the town and the surrounding parishes, the children up on shoulders, Mary Kennedy Ryan in the front row in tears. He delivers the speech at twenty past noon. It runs six minutes. He says that when his great-grandfather left this quay he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith, and a strong desire for liberty, and that all of his great-grandchildren had valued that inheritance. The tone, on every recording of it, is a tone he uses nowhere else on the trip. The crowd weeps. He folds the three sheets back into his coat at twenty-six minutes past twelve.
THE FLIGHT HOME
He leaves New Ross by motorcade at twenty past one for Wexford and Cork, and flies out of Shannon on the twenty-ninth. On the flight home he tells Sorensen that the morning at New Ross was the best day of my life. He says he means to come back in the spring of 1964, as a private citizen, once the re-election campaign is settled, and to bring Jacqueline and the children up the lane at Dunganstown so that they too can sit at Mary's table. Through the autumn of 1963 the White House staff is quietly planning the trip. On the twenty-second of November, one hundred and forty-nine days after the platform at New Ross, he is killed in Dallas. The trip never happens.
THE QUAY, EVERY JUNE
Mary Kennedy Ryan kept the chair he had sat in by the window. She lived another seventeen years and died at Dunganstown in 1980, eighty-four. The farmhouse is now the Kennedy Homestead, in the care of the New Ross descendants. The three sheets of yellow legal-pad paper, in his own pencil hand, are in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library at Boston. The quay at New Ross has been, since 1995, the John F. Kennedy Quay, and Mark Richards of Wexford has cast the President in bronze at the lectern, his hand on the rail. The tradition of the town is that, every year on the twenty-seventh of June at noon, the parish gathers at the quay and a child of the local school reads the New Ross speech aloud, from the pencil draft, in full. The reading takes six minutes. The river goes by behind it as it went by behind him, and as it went by behind Patrick Kennedy in 1849 when he walked down the same boards to the Dunbrody and did not look back.