I feel a bit guilty about John F Kennedy's arrival in Ireland exactly 40 years ago today. I was in Dublin at the time and instead of waiting for him, I drove north hoping to miss his cavalcade. Maybe I was still under the influence of my history teacher four years earlier. Kennedy, then running for president, had announced that if elected, his religion and personal ethics would be set aside when it came to affairs of state. My history teacher, a veteran nationalist and strict Catholic, didn't like that kind of talk. This man might claim to be a Catholic, he told us, but he obviously was "a political jellybelly." If he didn't get elected we should shed no tears.
So like the vast majority of Irish people, I experienced JFK's visit on television. Three of his speeches remain stuck in my mind forty years later: his address to the joint houses of the Oireachtas, his speech in Limerick and his farewell speech at Shannon.
The Oireachtas speech was a humdinger. He started with a stirring recall of the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. The Irish brigade had fought that day with distinction, he told us, twelve hundred men going into battle wearing a green sprig in their hats, just 280 surviving. Stirring stuff. Here clearly was a man who knew how to get an audience going and had no problems with political violence.
But when he turned to present-day Ireland I felt a tiny itch for something else, some missing ingredient.
He said how honoured he was to be a guest"in the free Parliament of a free Ireland."
None of the people watching television with me said anything, and neither did I: to speak would have been to damage the fairytale. If President Kennedy wanted to airbrush out the north, sure why not? Forget the substance, enjoy the style. He was ours, he was Irish and he was perfect.
When he told us that "our two nations, divided by distance, have been united by history", we shivered with pleasure. Imagine talking about Ireland as if it was up there with the US! When he spoke of emigration and quoted the lines: "They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay" we sighed and never thought of shouting that if some of the bloody politicians listening to him had stirred their arses, they might have created jobs that would have helped them stay.
And when he said that though we were not rich, we were "according to statistics, one of the best fed countries in the world", we practically cheered. One of the best fed! According to statistics! Even when he added that Ireland was no longer "a country of persecution, political or religious – it is a free country" – well, we took our disbelief, tied it up very very tight and suspended it.
Because this was a historic occasion, full of historic resonance. When he visited New Ross, we marvelled at the fact that his great-great grandfather had left that place in 1848 during the Famine. Now here was the descendant, full of youth and charisma and power, with a movie-star wife by his side, come back to visit us. Not just that. When he spoke in Limerick, he asked the crowd: "What is this country noted for?" then answered his own question: "Fast horses and beautiful women." It was marvellous. The Limerick crowd cheered and clapped and up in the north, free from political and religious persecution, in front of our flickering black and white TVs, we laughed and clapped and cheered as well.
And when he came to say goodbye at Shannon Airport, and told how Sinead de Valera, Dev's wife, had during dinner the previous night taught him a poem about "seeing old Shannon's face again," and when he promised that he would come back and see its face and our faces again, it was eloquence and sadness and perfection, and we knew he would. But he didn't.
Audiences can be very kind to politicians they've decided to like, and few politicians were as likeable to an audience as John F Kennedy. He came to Ireland exactly forty years ago direct from Berlin, where he had spoken to another group of people in the western sector of that divided city of one million. To them he made his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" – I am a Berliner – which received huge applause and has since become a classic.
No one in that vast crowd had the heart to tell the handsome young American president that 'Berliner' was local slang for a type of doughnut.
