Book review: JFK In Ireland: Four Days That Changed a President

Published on Monday 29 November 2010 12:28

JFK In Ireland: four days that changed a president BY Ryan Tubridy Collins, 302pp, £20

• Kennedy shares a moment with Dublin's macebearer. Picture: Getty

Ryan Tubridy's timing is excellent. Into these days of financial distress throughout cash-strapped Ireland he spreads a reminder of a simpler, poorer era, when even the briefest of sunny intervals bathed that land in a proxy-glamour despite its privations.

Cue John F Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America, a Bostonian, a Harvard man, an Irishman by delusion and conditioning. Five months before his death, during the European tour during which he triumphantly, metaphorically, bestrode the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1963, he took time out to make a sentimental journey to his roots in New Ross, County Wexford.

The significance of Kennedy's thousand-day tenure in the Oval Office was inflated in the aftermath of his assassination in Dallas, Texas. And it was Kennedy's terrible death, by its prematurity, that created the distorting lens through which he was viewed for a decade.

In Tubridy's otherwise meticulous account of Kennedy's visit to his ancestors' land, the unsuspected, yet imminent death becomes an increasingly palpable presence. There is at times just too much portent as Tubridy charts, what, in effect, was a personal pilgrimage to the stations of family history, an occasion furthermore of mutual pride as the population of rural Ireland laid claim to the world's most powerful man.

The Kennedy story is an archetype of the story of thousands of Irish forced to flee the grip of hunger. The Great Famine of the 1840s sent John F Kennedy's great grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, to Boston. Tubridy follows the Kennedys' rise, evoking the hinterland of anti-Irish prejudice against which they made their mark, becoming the new establishment. Joe Kennedy, JFK's father, is shown as hubristic, ambitious, clever, a Machievelli hugging the shadows, training the spotlight on his son.

This is well-furrowed ground, kept ever engaging by Tubridy's clear, no-nonsense terseness and clever arrangement of the narrative. A facsimile of Jackie Kennedy's letter to Ireland's president, Eamon de Valera, thanking de Valera for attending her husband's funeral, is the first thing the reader encounters. Thus, from the outset, in what is a harbinger of Kennedy's inflated approbation, we are immersed in heroic descriptive.

Jackie Kennedy writes: "He would never have been President had he not been Irish. All the history of your people is a long one of overcoming obstacles … and he had so many obstacles in his path - his religion, his health, his youth … He was so conscious of his heritage - and so proud of it - Ireland can be proud it gave the United States its greatest President."

This was a judgement shared by others, not least at the time. Its subjectivity is echoed throughout the text, and, in particular, in the minutia evoked by Kennedy's fleeting visit, which is given a fly-on-the-wall, docu-drama sense of eye-witness authenticity. In a prologue, for example, Kenny O'Donnell, described as "the President's right-hand man" is shown duly "flabbergasted" when Kennedy proposes the Irish foray: "If you go to Ireland people will say it's just a pleasure trip."

The following day, from behind his newspaper, Kennedy greets his aide with "exasperated impatience" and tells O'Donnell where to get off. You read the account, and are in the room. Tubridy, in the manner of Woodward and Bernstein, displays a surreptitious gift for giving the foreground a fictive gloss in pursuit of the truth. Still pursuing the truth, his authorial master stroke is a simple one. He balances and augments the subjective prose-eye with the more distanced eye of the camera. Objectivity (of a sort) is achieved in more than 100 pages of black and white; one-third of the book. Evoked by prose, the pictures arrive inside our heads. Yet, when laid on the page in black and white, they permit us to linger, scrutinise, notice the simultaneity of foreground and background action: Kennedy rides the gleaming limo, arm aloft, casting a spell; or he stands at a podium; then again he lifts to his lips a cup of tea.

You see around him the relationship with the crowd, the effect on listeners, the people of Ireland swimming into focus to take their place, squaring the circle of events

Taken together the prose and pictures comprise the story of Kennedy's visit in the heroic and mundane modes. But precisely how, as the title claims, the visit changed anything, not least the man who made it, is left unclear. Nonetheless, Ryan Tubridy has fashioned a gripping account of a punctuation mark in the footnotes of Kennedy's life.