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Many many years ago a very intelligent Christian Brother, Quentin O’Driscoll, a Headmaster who taught Latin amongst other subjects, informed our class, that the American Vice-President, and perhaps next President was a Catholic. He was mistaken about the Vice President, who had been brought up a Quaker. But the next President was a Catholic, ethnically Irish, of Gaelic and Gaelicised Norman lineage – John Fitzgerald Kennedy. A new enlightened age seemed to dawn on for the world’s downtrodden, struggling and despised masses. Quakers were renowned in Ireland for feeding the hungry and clothing the poor, and not expecting the beneficiaries to renounce the Mass for a mess of potage or bowls of soup. And Quakers did not make war on their neighbours. The Quaker Vice-President, Richard Nixon was less endowed with dollars, speech-writers, good-looks and charm than was Kennedy and was not a graduate of an ivy-league University, but he did make it to the White House, winning two elections to it. He is less kindly remembered than Kennedy. Few if any of the virtues for which Quakers are renowned attached themselves to Nixon. He was hard as nails, but hard-working, and a statesman, but no less tricky and hard-nosed than JFK. JFK didn’t campaign as a Catholic but was very happy to be thought one. He told Gore Vidal that his election to the White House meant that he had to attend Mass every Sunday (to retain the Catholic vote) but there was nothing in his personal or political life to suggest that he believed in any one of the Ten Commandments, or a secular code of ethics. The Protestant King Henri III of Navarre became King Henry IV of France, forsaking his earlier denomination, quipping “PARIS IS WORTH A MASS”. JFK reckoned that Washington was too. The election of Barack Obama to the White House changed its appearance. When Martin Luther King was on his way to make his “I HAVE A DREAM” speech by the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, he and other Black Civil Rights activists called into the White House and were photographed in the Oval Office. They did not get a very heartfelt welcome. President Kennedy, Vice-President Johnson and other White House worthies were there too, But both JFK and LBJ kept their hands behind their backs as if they feared to catch leprosy if they touched their guests. To get to the White House Obama accepted the satanic Doctrine of Manifest Destiny which arrogates to the United States a right to dictate to all nations on every matter under Heaven. Dark-Skinned Americans, can become Generals, and pulverise peoples of all colours and naturalised Americans, such as Dublin-born Samantha Power can pontificate on right and wrong at the UN. I saw and cheered JFK when he visited Dublin. Compared with his host, Eamon de Valera, JFK was a political pygmy and a moral non-entity.
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