On 27 June 1963, the Freedom of Wexford was conferred upon the thirty-fifth President of the United States.
t Redmond Place, along the quayside in Wexford town, ‘a special platform had been dressed in the national colours of America and Ireland’ for the occasion and ‘from its four corners the Stars and Stripes and Tricolour made a brave display in the seaside breeze’.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was ‘obviously moved’ as he leaned forward to sign the Roll of Freemen, making him only the thirteenth freeman of the ancient Irish borough. To ‘a tumult of cheering,’ the Mayor of Wexford, Councillor Thomas Byrne, handed the roll, placed in a silver casket, to the United States President.
However, ‘a hush’ quickly ‘then descended on the thousands who stood craning their heads forward in expectance of the President’s speech. President Kennedy came to the microphone’.
The population of Wexford had temporarily swollen by 250 per cent to 30,000 and ‘the narrow streets of the former Danish stronghold were early packed with people who had driven in from many parts of the south, using many modes of conveyance, even to horse traps’.
In opening his acceptance speech to the assembled crowd, President Kennedy simply said: ‘I want to express my pleasure at being back from whence I came.’
Kennedy’s presence in Wexford was a family homecoming of sorts. He had spent part of the morning with distant relatives in Dunganstown, outside New Ross, drinking tea and, in the President’s own words, toasting ‘all the Kennedys who went and all the Kennedys who stayed’.
He had also made a short speech in New Ross, the small port town, where his great-grandfather had taken his last steps on Irish soil. Reflecting on his impoverished ancestor’s emigrant voyage and his own Irish heritage, the President of the United States of America famously said: “I am glad to be here. It took 115 years to make this trip, and 6,000 miles, and three generations.
“And I am proud to be here and I appreciate the warm welcome you gave to all of us. 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.”
Rapid population growth was at the root of the catastrophe that devastated Ireland in the 1840s. Between 1741, the date of the previous big famine, and the coming of the potato blight in 1845, the population of Ireland had tripled. Feeding so many was already a problem before the Great Famine, with the bulk of the Irish population surviving on a subsistence diet.
Leaving behind forever his native, rural Wexford and an Ireland devastated by starvation and British misrule, Patrick Kennedy boarded a ship in New Ross.
He journeyed initially to Liverpool ‘living by his wits, until he could secure passage to Boston’. On 20 March 1849, Patrick Kennedy boarded the Washington Irving, a White Diamond Line ship that had been built by Donald McKay, one of the most famous shipbuilders of the time, with a steerage class ticket bought at the offices of Train & Co on Waterloo Road, Liverpool.
After enduring over a month of sordid and perilous conditions, which saw vessels like the Washington Irving labelled ‘coffin ships’, Patrick Kennedy became part of a massive Irish influx into the capital city of Massachusetts. The author Roger Abrams has noted that in the decade between 1840 and 1850 Boston’s population swelled from 85,475 to 136,881. This demographic surge was rooted in the problems of Ireland. In 1847 alone, the worst year of the Great Famine in Ireland, more than 37,000 immigrants arrived in Boston, many fleeing from starvation. By 1855, more than a third of Boston’s population was Irish. At the turn of the twentieth century, Boston had become one of the largest Irish populated cities in the world, outside of Dublin.
Announcing his candidacy for President of the United States, on 16 June 2015, Donald Trump proclaimed, ‘Sadly, the American dream is dead’. For Patrick Kennedy, the tragedy was that his American dream never became a reality.
His life in the New World was as impoverished as it had been in New Ross and, hampered by prejudice and a deteriorating economic situation, by 1856 his annual family income had declined to only $100. During the previous year, 1855, Patrick and his wife Bridget Murphy, another Wexford native, who he had married just five months after arrival in America, had endured the nightmare of losing a child, their eldest son, John Kennedy, who died from cholera, a disease associated with the squalid living conditions that typically accompany poverty.
The children of immigrant Irish Catholics, mostly ‘living in the vermin-infested confines’ of East Boston experienced by far the highest levels of infant mortality in the city.
Exploited, overworked and undernourished, Patrick Kennedy was also a victim of this grinding poverty. He died aged only 35, just over ten years on from his departure from New Ross. The first Kennedy to set foot in America, he was the last to die in obscurity.
When Patrick Kennedy died, the prospects for his wife and their surviving children were bleak. Patrick Kennedy is often referred to as the ‘founding father’ of the Kennedy dynasty, but without the perseverance, work ethic and ingenuity of Bridget Murphy, the Kennedy family may well have perished. To keep her family from starving, Bridget took in lodgers and she worked long hours as a maid. Born and raised on a small holding in Cloonagh, Ballycullane, twelve miles from New Ross, before emigrating to the United States, Bridget was blessed with endurance and entrepreneurial skills.
Though faced with much adversity as a young widow, she ensured that the Kennedys not only survived, but began to thrive. Through endeavour and hard work, she managed to get enough money together to buy and build up a flourishing grocery business, which ‘apparently sold liquor as well as food to local Irish labourers’.
Bridget Murphy lived long enough to witness her son, Patrick Joseph ‘PJ’ Kennedy become a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and state Senate, and the birth of her grandson, Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father.
PJ Kennedy was a shrewd businessman. He had started out working on the docks, but he eventually became the owner of three pubs and, before he was 30, he owned his own whiskey importing business. By the time of his death in 1929, the upward mobility of his family had seen the Kennedys join ‘the ranks of the cut-glass set’ with an attractive home on ‘Jeffries Point’. PJ died a wealthy man with an interest in a coal company and a substantial shareholding in a bank – the Columbia Trust Company. PJ’s son, Joseph P Kennedy, would bring the Kennedys’ wealth and level of influence into a new stratosphere.
Joseph P Kennedy was ambitious and driven. By 1914, he was, by his own claim, ‘the youngest bank president in America’. Throughout the 1920s, he ruthlessly played the stock market and profited enormously. He survived the Wall Street crash of 1929 by getting out of stocks in time and investing in real estate. He later said he knew it was time to get out of the overheated market when he received a ‘stock tip from a shoeshine boy’. By 1935 his personal fortune was over $180m, making Joseph P Kennedy a billionaire by modern standards.
Joseph P Kennedy also nurtured unrestrained political ambitions. He had supported Franklin D Roosevelt’s successful campaign for the presidency in 1932 and served the New Deal administration before being appointed the United States Ambassador to Great Britain. On 16 March 1938, the grandson of Irish famine emigrants presented his credentials to King George VI at Buckingham Palace. Kennedy wished to succeed Roosevelt at the 1940 presidential election and, as ambassador, he was not averse to using his new position and his wealth to encourage media support for his potential candidacy.
Joseph P Kennedy’s presidential ambitions ran aground because of his support for appeasement and United States isolationism.
Following the death in August 1944 of his eldest son, Joe Jnr, in a secret military mission to guide B-17 drone planes loaded with explosives into Nazi V-2 rocket bases, Joseph P Kennedy shifted the focus of his ambition to his next-eldest son, who himself had been seriously wounded in the Pacific when his patrol boat was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not initially want a political career, his father recalled many years later, ‘he felt he didn’t have the ability … But I told him he had to’.
JFK may have been a reluctant politician, but he quickly rose through the ranks of national politics.
Winning a place in Congress during his late 20s, a Senate seat during his mid-30s and the presidency while still in his early 40s, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the US presidency’s youngest incumbent and he was its first Roman Catholic.
His visit to the land of his forefathers in 1963, as the first serving President of the United States to set foot in Ireland, was a major event for the relatively young Irish state. The veteran Irish Ambassador to Washington, Thomas Kiernan, privately noted that President Kennedy’s trip had boosted national morale and drawn a line under decades of despair and failure.
He wrote: “I think his coming back to Ireland was a closing of a chapter that began with the famine… here was a success at top level. Here was a fellow who came from famine stock on both paternal and maternal sides and who had reached the very top in the United States. That was felt throughout the country.”
Extract taken from From Whence I Came: The Kennedy Legacy, Ireland and America by Brian Murphy and Donnacha Ó Beacháin, published by Merrion Press.