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.
It is a quarter past noon on the morning of the twenty-seventh of June 1963, on the wooden platform that has been set up at the head of the quay at New Ross, in County Wexford, by the lower bend of the river Barrow, in heavy summer light off the water. He is forty-six years old. He is John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, born at 83 Beals Street, Brookline, Massachusetts, the great-grandson of Patrick Kennedy of Dunganstown, three miles south-west of where he is standing now, who emigrated from this very quay on the Dunbrody coffin-ship of 1849 with thirty-eight shillings in his pocket and a single change of clothes, and died of cholera in Boston in 1858 aged thirty-five.
On the platform with him are the Taoiseach Seán Lemass, the local Member of Parliament Brendan Corish, the Lord Mayor of New Ross, and his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver. The crowd on the quay, by the New Ross Standard's estimate the next morning, is between ten and twelve thousand, including the entire population of the town and the surrounding parishes. Mary Kennedy Ryan, his second cousin, the present occupant of the original Patrick Kennedy farmhouse at Dunganstown (where Kennedy has spent forty-five minutes this morning over tea and Madeira cake in the front parlour, in the same parlour his great-grandfather had left), is in the front row of the crowd in a navy blue dress, in tears.
He has, in the inside pocket of his coat, three sheets of yellow legal-pad paper with the speech in his own pencil hand, drafted on Air Force One in the past forty-eight hours. The speech is six minutes. He has not given it to Sorensen for refinement. He does not intend to. The speech is, by his own private statement to Eunice in the morning, the only speech of the trip I have written entirely in my own hand.
He thinks: Patrick was thirty-five at his death. Patrick has been dead one hundred and four years. Without Patrick getting on the Dunbrody in this town in 1849, my father is not born in 1888 in Boston. Without my father, I am not in this country today.
He thinks: the family has done well in America in four generations. The family has done very well. The family has not been back to this farmhouse in those four generations until I came up the lane this morning at half past nine.
He thinks: the State Department wanted me to go to Galway and to Cork and to address the Dáil. The State Department did not want me to spend three hours in this small Wexford parish that nobody outside the parish has heard of.
He thinks: the State Department was wrong about this. The country has elected the great-grandson of an emigrant from this quay. The country wants its President to come home. The home is here.
He delivers the speech at twenty past noon. The speech is, by every recording of it, in a tone he does not use elsewhere on the trip. He is not, on the platform at New Ross, the Cold War President. He is the great-grandson at the quay. The speech runs six minutes. He says, in the closing line, that when my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith, and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his great-grandchildren have valued that inheritance. The crowd, by every report, weeps.
He left New Ross by motorcade at twenty past one for Wexford and Cork. He flew home from Shannon on the twenty-ninth of June. The visit had taken him four days. He told Sorensen, on the flight home, that the New Ross morning was the best day of my life, and that he would come back, as a private citizen with the family, in the spring of 1964 once the campaign for re-election was settled. He intended to bring Jacqueline and the children. The trip was being planned at the White House through the autumn. He was killed in Dallas on the twenty-second of November 1963, four months and twenty-six days after the morning at New Ross. The trip never happened.
Mary Kennedy Ryan kept the chair at the kitchen table he had sat in. She lived another seventeen years and died at Dunganstown in 1980, eighty-four. The farmhouse at Dunganstown is now a small museum (the Kennedy Homestead) in the care of the Kennedy descendants of New Ross. The yellow legal-pad sheets of the New Ross speech, in his own pencil hand, are in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library at Boston. The quay where he gave the speech is, since 1995, the John F. Kennedy Quay, with a bronze sculpture by the Wexford sculptor Mark Richards of Kennedy at the lectern, his hand on the rail. The tradition of New Ross is that, every year on the twenty-seventh of June, the parish gathers at the quay at noon and a young schoolchild reads aloud the New Ross speech in full, in his own pencil hand. The reading takes six minutes.