In June 1963, I was working in Irish Shipping HQ at Aston Quay by O’Connell Bridge, and like perhaps half of Dublin I stayed in town to welcome JFK in Ireland. That meant staying two or three hours after work.
The miracles of TV and jet travel allowed me to watch, through a shop window, JFK’s Cold War speech in the divided city of Berlin.
The miracle of GOOGLE mistranslation was decades away. But whoever wrote the speech may have been unfamiliar with colloquial German.
“ICH BIN EN BERLINER” is said to mean “I AM A DOUGHNUT” to the man in the Strasse, though I couldn’t be sure.
Anyhow a few hours later he was standing up in a limousine a few yards from me in O’Connell Street in a beautifully tailored light blue suit and I marvelled how a man so old could have such colour in his hair for he was all of 46 years and 1 month old.
On 24th June he addressed the Oireachtas in Leinster House, and presented the bullet-holed flag of the Irish Brigade flown at Fredericksburg during the American Civil War in 1862. The battle was fought in December of that year, but JFK reputed to be a history nut, backdated it to September.
The speech reads well and indeed inspirational, but even then I was surprised that when he quoted a great orator on the role of five-foot five nations he was quoting David Lloyd George, though he didn’t say so. I thought at the time that at least some of the TDs must have known that and were extremely restrained in not throwing furniture at him.
Only yesterday did I find out that Lloyd George made the speech in September 1914 and the little five-foot five “nation” he was extolling was Belgium. On the afternoon in November 1960 the news came through of the death in an ambush of Irish UN troops in the Congo. The morning’s news was of JFK’s election to the US Presidency. A few days before JFK’s inauguration Patrice Lumumba was murdered by a Belgian, his body later destroyed and a gold tooth kept as a souvenir. Both British and American Spooks have boasted of involvement.
JFK referred to a free Ireland and the resolution of difficulties imposed by her nearest neighbour. In the 59 years since his speeches in Berlin and Dublin, the Russians have withdrawn their troops from all the territories they liberated from the Nazis in 1945. Ireland’s citizens have been subjected to a denial of civil rights in the North and to life itself during the longest war in her history, and her enemy has not gone away.
Kennedy’s speech was made on the 28th June 1963, exactly 41 years after Michael Collins, on the orders of Winston Churchill, and using borrowed British Artillery, shelled his former friends and comrades in the Four Courts.
My generation was almost completely free of partisan bitterness arising from that tragic quarrel. I don’t think Americans are yet free of the bitterness of their Civil War..
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