Introducing a future leader

The first person to introduce John Fitzgerald Kennedy in public as “the next President of the United States” was from Kanturk, Co Cork.

It happened on a January night in 1957, three years before Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon to become America’s 35th president.

Kennedy was the guest speaker at the annual dinner of the Irish Institute in New York and Sean P Keating, a leading figure in Irish-American life of the city, did the introductions.

The young senator from New York, who had already visited Ireland, was beginning to quietly plan his journey to the White House.

However, he still didn’t have the same pulling power as the Democratic Party boss from the Bronx in New York.

About 1,700 people paid $25 a head to hear Congressman Charles Anthony Buckley speak at the Irish Institute annual dinner in 1956.

A year later only 700 people came to hear John Fitzgerald Kennedy speaking, proving once again that all politics is local.

It is easy to understand why many of those who stayed away from that Jan 12 function in 1957 had later regrets.

That’s partly because the articulate and charismatic Kennedy, who was just making a name for himself in American politics, delivered a powerful address.

One draft of the speech exists and is among his papers at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

It started off with an Irish joke of the type that would characterise many Kennedy speeches in the years ahead, but it also had a serious content.

Kennedy contrasted the experience of the Irish who fled into exile in the past to the Hungarian people who had risen in revolt against the Soviet occupation of their country a few months earlier.

He wished that the spirit and stories of Irish martyrdom would be recalled in the cellars of Budapest, in the council halls of the Kremlin, and in his own nation’s capital.

“And let us here tonight resolve that our nation will forever hold out its hands to those who struggle for freedom today, as Ireland struggled for a thousand years.”

Kennedy, paraphrasing the words of Mallow-born Thomas Davis in his Lament for Owen Rua O’Neill, said: “We will not leave them to be ‘sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky’.”

He said the happenings in Hungary and Poland in 1956 had firmly demonstrated, as the struggles in Ireland and elsewhere demonstrated in centuries gone by, that “there may be satellite governments’ but there are never satellite peoples”.

Whether a man be Hungarian or Irish, Catholic or Muslim, white or black, there forever burns within his breast the unquenchable desire to be free, he said.

The speech contained hints of the civil rights policies that President Kennedy would pursue in later years, but it was not the only reason the occasion was so memorable. A veteran of the War of Independence from Kanturk in Co Cork, a lifelong friend of Éamon de Valera, and a man prominent in New York’s Irish community, presided.

Keating’s introduction of Kennedy for the first time in public as the “next president of the United States” was to become a toe-note in history.

Three years later Kennedy was elected president. He remembered Keating, who had previously served as assistant to New York Mayor Robert F Wagner, and appointed him regional director of posts for New York State, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

Keating was the first native born Irishman to be appointed to such a high US federal post, which made him responsible for 1,800 post offices with 93,000 workers in the busiest postal region of the busiest postal service in the world.

Keating’s friendship with JFK’s brothers, Bobby and Teddy, continued after the president was killed, and he was regularly on hand to greet family members on their visits to this country.

His leadership was again called upon as chairman of the Memorial Committee, which secured the lands and raised the funds for the John F Kennedy Arboretum in Co Wexford.

In Jun 1968, Keating was the invited studio guest of CBS television news anchor Walter Cronkite during the coverage of the funeral train of Senator Bobby Kennedy from New York to Washington.

Years earlier, Keating gave the senator a copy of the Thomas Davis poem that President Kennedy quoted in 1957 when he addressed the Irish Institute dinner in New York.

Keating’s grandson, Matthew Larkin, recalled in an article for the Irish Echo of New York in 2011 that Bobby Kennedy also read a passage from the poem after the civil rights leader Martin Luther King was killed in 1968 — just two months before the senator himself was assassinated.

It was a poignant moment in the CBS studio as Keating quoted from the Davis masterpiece on Owen Rua O’Neill, which could well have been a lament written for the slain Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.

“Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky

Oh! why did you leave us, Owen? Why did you die?”

*Were you in Cork when Kennedy visited, or know somebody who was? Get in touch or have your say below.