which was tiresome for both Rose and Joe Sr. On seeing the term used in a newpaper one morning, Joe is reported to have looked up and fumed “Goddam it! I was born in this country. My children were born in this country. What the hell does someone have to do to become an American?”9
Another family might have crumbled under such resentment and latent racism but it wasn’t the house style for the Kennedys, who soldiered on. Realising that money per se was not enough to win society’s acceptance, Joe Kennedy Sr pursued his career in politics, where respectability was attainable and money was always welcome. He pumped a fortune into Franklin D. Roosevelt’s successful presidential campaign of 1932 and for this, he was rewarded with the post of first Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which Roosevelt established in 1934. For the 1936 campaign, Kennedy added to the small fortune he contributed by self–publishing a book entitled I’m for Roosevelt. All of this support was duly acknowledged and in 1937, as the world rumbled towards war, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, grandson of an immigrant cooper, was made American ambassador to the Court of St James. Kennedy was FDR’s man in Britain. In the space of a generation a tragic Irish family was slowly embodying the American Dream. The journey from Famine to Boston and now, the heart of the British diplomatic establishment was very quick but it was also vintage Kennedy.
A model of Irish Catholic achievement in America: a family portrait of the prosperous Kennedys, taken in 1938.
The ambassadorship was an exceptionally prestigious diplomatic position but in reality such posts are in the gift of the President and, to this day, they are often given to party grandees and important donors to party political funds. This appointment would prove to be a turning point in the story of the Kennedys and Ireland, as it was a year later, in 1938, that the head of the Kennedy clan met the Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera. From here on, Irish–American relations would be transformed and all roads would lead to O’Connell Street, June 1963.
CHAPTER TWO The Kennedys Come Home, 1930s–1950s
On 8 July 1938, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy flew back to the country his grandparents had left less than a century earlier. “My visit is not merely a sentimental one,” he told waiting reporters, but he couldn’t tell them the real reason for it: he’d been invited to receive an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, which would be presented by Éamon de Valera, then Chancellor, but university rules forbade recipients of honorary degrees from disclosing the honour until the actual conferral. This was an honour that appealed to Joe Kennedy, as he had been snubbed recently for an honorary doctorate by Harvard University, his own Alma Mater.
The day was a wet one. In Dublin city, cinema–goers were flocking to the Metropole to see Robert Donat in The Count of Monte Cristo when the fourteen–seat de Havilland 86 touched down. Newspaper reports suggested that the Ambassador would be accompanied by his son John and his wife Mrs Rose Kennedy, and the day before the visit, The Irish Press published a front–page photo of Ambassador Kennedy flanked by Joe and John with the headline “US Ambassador Here Tomorrow” but that is the last suggestion of JFK’s involvement, and photographs taken during the visit show only Joe Sr and his eldest son.10 The Ambassador was accompanied by his long–time secretary, Edward Moore (after whom Ted Kennedy was named), Joe Jr and an embassy aide with the outrageously coincidental name of John Kennedy. It is probably here that the confusion arose about his son John’s inclusion on the trip, but Joe Jr was the son being groomed for political greatness, not John. He is the one that Joe Sr would have been keen to introduce to the great and the good of Dublin.
Joseph P. Kennedy, US Ambassador to Britain, is greeted by his sons Jack (left) and Joseph on his return to London after a visit to New York. Two days later, he flew into Dublin’s Baldonnel airport.
The Ambassador’s visit was given all the attention of a major occasion, just shy of an official state visit, and achieved front–page news for his two days in Ireland. With the real reason for the trip undisclosed, there was much speculation in the Irish media that Joe Kennedy was in town to discuss Anglo–Irish relationships, and the thorny issue of Partition in particular.11
The division of the island of Ireland had its origins in the British Government of Ireland Act of 1920 that had introduced separate parliaments in both north and south, based in Dublin and Belfast. With the end of the Anglo–Irish War and the Treaty of 1921 this arbitrary separation began to solidify into a more or less permanent divide, which provoked bitter splits in the newly founded Irish Free State and led directly to the Civil War of 1922–23. A Boundary Commission set up to decide the final border largely followed the original line of 1920 and, in 1925, both the British Parliament and the Dáil ratified the final borders. The Partition of north and south was anathema to some and would remain a live political issue throughout the 20th century and beyond.
De Valera was behind one of the main groups campaigning against Partition and for the island of Ireland to be unified once more, but those who thought Joe Kennedy Sr would speak out on behalf of their cause would be sadly disappointed. Britain was on the brink of war and Kennedy was already in a tense diplomatic situation as the British government invoked their so–called “Special Relationship” with the US and sought American help to stop Hitler from dominating Europe. Kennedy was known to be an isolationist, but at the same time he couldn’t risk upsetting his British hosts because losing their goodwill would make his position as Ambassador untenable. Speaking out about Partition at that time would have been a very bad idea, and that’s why he was careful to describe his trip to the press at least in part as “sentimental”; not political – sentimental; a way of reconnecting with his roots.
In a private meeting at the Department of External Affairs, he said he didn’t want to discuss the progress of negotiations between the British and the Irish but he passed on President Roosevelt’s views that it was important for Anglo–American relations that a settlement was reached. Even this is considered so sensitive that the document was marked “secret”.
The mercurial Kennedy patriarch kept to a busy and full schedule while in Dublin. From the airport, he was driven to the American Legation, which would later become the American Embassy in Ireland. Over lunch he caught up with John Cuclahy, the United States Minister in Ireland (effectively, Ambassador). The two were old friends and the meeting served as a useful scene–setter for the esteemed guest. From there it was off to the main business at hand, the conferral at the university’s offices in Dublin’s Merrion Square.
On arrival at the National University headquarters, Ambassador Kennedy was met by Éamon de Valera, who was dressed in black and gold robes. The Ambassador, dressed in the scarlet and purple gown of the law faculty, was watched by, among others, Joe Jr. Afterwards, photographs showed father and son mingling with guests, of which Rose Kennedy would write twenty–four years later to de Valera: “Joe often speaks of his visit to Dublin when he was Ambassador in London, and there is a place of honour in our home reserved for your photograph with the former President of Eire [Douglas Hyde] and our eldest son, Joe, drinking tea together.”12
Kennedy and de Valera made their way separately across the city to the Dáil, where the latter welcomed the former in his official capacity as Taoiseach, or “Prime
