WHEN JFK CAME TO TOWN by Donal Kennedy

Most Irish people were jubilant, not least myself. For how could I not identify with the President-elect – a Kennedy, and, like me, tall, handsome and

irresistible to women! When he came to Dublin  on June 26 1963  of course I was there to see him. I was then working with Irish Shipping at Aston Quay beside O’Connell Bridge. So after work I had tea in a cafe, I watched, through a shop window, live TV coverage of the President making a speech by the Berlin Wall. About an hour and a half later he was standing up in his open-topped limousine, suntanned, smiling and acknowledging our cheers, a few feet away from me in O’Connell Street. He was wearing a light blue suit and I was amazed that a man of 46 still had plenty of colour in his hair. (I still have some colour in mine.)

My father had once worked in Fords when that firm came to Cork and had, in the 1920s worked for some time in New York. He was less starry- eyed about America and Americans than many of my generation and even had reservations about its First Family. He recalled the brutal Americn regime at Fords. But I liked the story of when the ” Auxiliary Police Cadets” visited the plant to search it. “You call yourselves guardians of the peace, but by Christ you’d make anyone want to break it!” was the American manager’s response.

Many of my generation in Ireland will remember “Music While You Work”, “Mrs. Dale’s Diary”, “ITMA”, “Twenty Questions” , “Dick Barton, Special Agent”, “Just William”, and, after BIG BEN, such news and views as the BBC were inclined, or allowed by government, to broadcast. Remember them interviewing Jomo Kenyatta or Archbishop Makarios? Me neither. And its sports commentators were  ludicrously biassed . Until into the 1950s Radio Eireann didn’t come on the air until 5 PM, and when it later increased its output  came  for about an hour in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon.

As a relief from wall-to-wall British propaganda some of us too readily swallowed that of the Americans during their Cold War. Even THE IRISH PRESS, organ of the then stoutly independent Fianna Fail, was not entirely unaffected. Amongst the strip-cartoons it carried daily was the space- fiction hero Buck Rogers. The villain was a pipe-smoking tyrant, ruler of the Red Planet, the spitting image of a certain statesman, and, for some reason  was called Joe. Some decades later a piss-poor attempt to repeat the success of Buck Rogers surfaced in a remaindered novel whose hero was called Fitzgerald and villain was called O Fiaich.

But, back to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who, a couple of days after I first saw him, I saw again,  standing tall in his open car, wearing a beautiful dark, pin-striped suit on his way to Arbour Hill. where, on behalf of his nation, he laid a wreath on the graves of the men, later described by Britain’s Michael Gove, as the leaders of “squalid gangs who betrayed Ireland.” Kennedy’s tribute resonated wherever green was worn, and three years later, the IRISH INDEPENDENT, which in 1916 had called for the death of the wounded Connolly, carried a photograph of Kennedy at Arbour Hill, when it (the paper) commemorated the golden jubilee of the Rising.

A year later I had the Dublin gentlemen’s outfitters, Kingstons, owned by the family of the patriot Cathal Brugha, make me a replica of JFK’s suit, which I

wore at interviews, weddings, funerals and St Patrick’s day for over forty years, when I passed it on, in pristine condition, to my son. It had cost me 22 Guineas in 1964, a Presidential sum?

Had Queen Elizabeth, on her visit to Dublin, visited Arbour Hill, I can’t say that I’d have had a copy of her outfit made for me, but I would have been extremely impressed. It was a missed opportunity. And all the horses at the National Stud could not bring it back again.