Enda plays Camelot with JP Kennedy

There’s another Kennedy running for Congress, and a day after he had officially launched his campaign, Joseph P Kennedy III got some advice from a man who knows a thing or two about winning elections.

“I’ve had brief conversations with young Joseph here. He’s already gone ahead in the polls, but I tell him not to mind those things,” Enda Kenny said to laughter at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

“If he needs any advice about how to do this job, I’ve been on the circuit, Joe, for a very long time.

“Believe you me, if you ever step into the arena of having to take a party demoralised and crushed by their own fears, and know how to lead that [party] to victory, and [have] belief in your own conviction and belief that you can actually make it, give me a call some time.”

JPK III might just do that — after all, he made sure to turn up at two separate events involving the Taoiseach yesterday in an obvious attempt to get some very good publicity shots for the campaign trail.

The first was at a business breakfast in the city at which Mr Kenny — just as he had done throughout this latest trip to the US — stressed his administration had returned stability to Ireland and cited the country’s strengths as a place in which to do business.

The second was at the JFK museum, where JPK III was part of the welcoming group for the Taoiseach.

Mr Kenny was at the museum for a lunch hosted by Enterprise Ireland and the IDA for about 100 companies.

But before he trotted out his now familiar “Ireland is open for business” line, Mr Kenny was treated to a guided tour of the many poignant exhibits.

The principal guides were JPK III, grandson of Robert Kennedy and son of former Congressman Joe Kennedy II; Stephen Smith, son of former US ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith; and Jack Manning, a billionaire Bostonian and chairman of the “distinguished visitors programme” at the museum.

Like many people, politicians have their heroes, and JFK is mostly certainly Enda Kenny’s — he admitted to having once learned Kennedy’s inauguration address off by heart.

It’s not surprising, then, that Mr Kenny is no stranger to the museum.

He had spoken before yesterday’s official visit of the “strange sense of melancholy and fortitude” which the building and its exhibits had instilled in him when visiting previously.

As he passed from room to room yesterday, he stopped to study many of those exhibits again, including the Kennedy family bible, the presidential seal, a replica of JFK’s oval office desk (the real one remains in the White House), and footage of the president’s 1963 visit to Ireland.

All the time, the sound of JFK’s voice emanated from various speakers, as clips were played of some of his most famous and enduring lines.

It clearly resonated with Mr Kenny, who, when beginning his speech to the lunch a short time later, recalled what he had been doing when he heard of JFK’s assassination.

“I was 12 when I heard the news that Lancer was down,” he said, referring to the Secret Service codename for Kennedy. “I was learning my Latin. ‘De Bello Gallico’ — [the book about] Caesar’s wars in Gaul — and no more than hundreds of millions of others who have survived from that moment, they remember where they were.”

Kennedy had “embodied the success of the Irish in America”, Mr Kenny said, and much later, having delivered his “Ireland is open” message to the business audience, he returned to politics, and predicted Joseph P Kennedy III would succeed too in his forthcoming election battle.

And with a name and a political lineage like that, it would probably be harder not to.