JFK was great for Irish-America, but his political legacy is debatable

MOST people who are old enough remember where they were this day 40 years ago. I was heading for Des Moines, Iowa, when a couple of women got on the bus.

One asked who was the last president to have been shot. The other mistakenly replied, Abraham Lincoln.

Two other presidents had been shot since then, James A Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901.

I thought at the time how odd it was that a president had actually been shot in the 20th century. Then when I got off the bus at Des Moines, there was an elderly black shoeshine man sitting on his stand with tears rolling down his cheeks, listening to the radio.

The man on the radio was talking in funereal tones about somebody who had given his life. It had to be momentous to interrupt commercial radio, so it suddenly struck me that it must be Kennedy.

"Is Kennedy dead?" I asked. "Yes," he replied, "he was shot in Dallas."

There was a great outpouring of sadness. As I continued the bus journey to North Dakota, passengers were evaluating Kennedy and his predecessor. Despite his enormous popularity, a number of people expressed the view that Dwight Eisenhower had not really done much as president.

Of course, in reality Kennedy had been more style than substance.

He may have fired the imaginations of a great many young people, but those imaginations were soon swamped in the mud and rice paddies of Vietnam.

He also articulated the plight of black people in the so-called Land of the Free, but was unable to do much about it because of the power of the white southern politicians in Congress, and especially within his own Democratic Party.

It is doubtful that he would have had much impact on civil rights, if he had not been assassinated.

It was his successor, the southerner Lyndon B Johnson, who got the civil rights legislation through Congress as a tribute to Kennedy.

Johnson used the Kennedy legacy to do more for the rights of black people than all of the presidents since Abraham Lincoln combined.

Of course, Johnson undermined his very real accomplishments by getting bogged down in Vietnam. Some people suggested that Kennedy was primarily responsible for that involvement, but that is nonsense.

The involvement went back to Eisenhower and his decision to establish a puppet regime in Saigon to prevent the free elections promised for 1956. Eisenhower subverted democracy there because he realised that Ho Chi Minh and his communists would win at least 80% of the vote.

Kennedy had also inherited plans to invade Cuba and the fiasco ensued at the Bay of Pigs, where Fidel Castro's communist forces routed the American-backed invasion force made up mostly of Cuban exiles.

Kennedy was faced with a tough decision either to send in American troops to back up the invasion, or abandon the whole thing as a disaster.

He chose to do the latter, and he accepted full responsibility for the debacle, but then he shafted Allan Dulles and those CIA people who had advised him so badly beforehand. To Kennedy's great surprise, his popularity in the polls actually rose as a result of his handling of the calamity.

"My God," he said to an aide, "it's as bad as Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get." He was certainly very popular in this country, and his reception here in 1963, as the first incumbent American president to visit this country, fired the imagination of other American presidents.

Johnson initiated the practice of receiving a bowl of shamrock in the White House on St Patrick's Day, while Richard Nixon visited Ireland during his first term, as did Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

From an Irish perspective, however, Jack Kennedy's greatest impact was on the psyche of Irish-Americans, because his election to the White House really elevated them out of a psychological ghetto as second-class citizens.

The Americans may have always talked about anyone being capable of being elected president, but there were many kinds of people who had no real chance at the beginning of the 20th century. They included blacks, women and Jewish, Catholic or divorced men.

In 1928 the Democrats nominated Al Smith, a Catholic, but he was trounced at the polls. People were genuinely afraid that the Pope would be allowed to take control of the White House if a Catholic were elected president.

DURING the 1960 campaign Kennedy tackled the religious question head on. He came out publicly against state aid to religious schools. "After Al Smith's defeat in 1928 he sent a one-word telegram to the Pope 'unpack'," Kennedy told an election rally.

"After my press conference on the school bill, I received a one-word wire from the Pope myself 'pack'." He disarmed and deflected the bigotry of the time with humour.

Kennedy's margin of victory was the smallest in the 20th century, but it dispelled forever the notion that the Americans would never elect a Catholic. As a result Irish-Americans could finally feel that they were fully accepted in the US.

There is a sense in this country that the Irish were always welcomed there with open arms, but that is far from the truth. The hundreds of thousands who fled there in the aftermath of the Great Famine were regarded as the dregs of society poor, dirty, disease ridden and uneducated.

In New York at the time the life expectancy of Irish emigrants averaged less than 40 years. Their death rate was seven times greater than the average. Tuberculosis was the leading killer, along with drink and violence.

Irish emigrants were famously described at the time as having "plenty of courage, but no brains: useful but dangerous".

The Irish were blamed for an upsurge in crime, disease and depravity during the 1850s.

New York mayor George Templeton Strong famously wrote: "The gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense."

It was estimated in 1850 that there were 50,000 Irish prostitutes working in New York city.

Illegitimacy reached frightening proportions and tens of thousands of orphaned and abandoned children of the Irish prowled the city's streets. Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1850s were Irish-born. The police vans were dubbed 'paddywagons' and street brawls were called 'donnybrooks'.

Violent Irish gangs fought one another, or other gangs, but primarily they robbed houses and small businesses, and trafficked in stolen property.

Anti-Irish feelings spawned the American Party, which became famous under the nickname of the Know-Nothings.

They won six governorships in 1854. They swept Massachusetts, electing the governor and winning every state office, all 40 seats in the state Senate, and 379 of the 381 seats in the state House of Representatives.

Governor Henry J Gardener noted in his inaugural address that the main problem facing the state was the influx of Irish Catholics, and he vowed to lead a crusade to "Americanise America".

Less than a century later the same state would elect John F Kennedy (the great grandson of one of those despised emigrants) to the US Senate and thus provided the springboard to the White House and the full acceptance of Irish-American Catholics.