The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [445]
Kennedy drove out to the old Kennedy house in Dunganstown. In America when a man went to see his old family home, he often discovered that it was torn down long ago, or that it had acquired a new addition, aluminum siding, or at least a different paint job. He often ended up standing there wondering what was left of the past in America, his or anybody else’s. But the thatched house that the president came to along this dirt road was almost exactly what it was 114 years before, when Patrick Kennedy left for America. It was a small place, only forty feet by thirteen feet, with tiny windows no larger than fifteen inches by seventeen inches or the taxes would have been higher. Next to it stood a farmhouse. There was neither indoor plumbing nor a telephone.
The president’s cousin, Mary Ryan, and her two daughters, Mary and Josephine, stood there waiting to greet the president. Mrs. Ryan was a rotund woman who could have been one of the legions of Irish women like his great-grandmother Bridget who had cleaned the Boston Brahmin homes and washed their fine linens. She was the very image of the Irish peasant from whom his father had sought to distance himself. Mrs. Ryan hugged Kennedy and spoke to him with warm familiarity, as if he had grown up just down the road. At some times and in some places, Kennedy might have recoiled from such a gesture, but this time he embraced his cousin. When he talked to his relations, Mrs. Ryan’s daughter Mary was amazed at how well he knew the family tree. “I think he felt back home,” she recalled. Raising his cup of tea, he proposed a toast “to all the Kennedys who went and all the Kennedys who stayed.” Then, almost as suddenly as he had arrived, he was off, flying back to Dublin in his helicopter high above the emerald fields.
As Kennedy left Ireland, he left part of himself and took more of himself than had been there when he arrived. “He had always been moved by its poverty and literature because it told of the tragedy and the desperate courage which he knew lay just under the surface of Irish life,” said Jackie, whose pregnancy prevented her from making the European trip. What Kennedy took from his Irish heritage was neither the calculated buffoonery of the Irish-American politician nor the boozy sentimentality of the saloon, but the dark, ironic wit that was a shield against misfortune. He took also what he considered the indomitable Irish spirit, and its struggle for liberty. He believed that a desire for liberty was one of the essential drives of humankind, and he reasoned that if his forebears had struggled against all assaults, insults, and reprisals, then surely the other oppressed peoples of the world one day would do so too. As he saw it, the Irish had one great song, the song of liberty, and no one had ever been able to still Irish voices.
If heroism in the face of impossible odds is sentimental, then Kennedy at this moment was a sentimental man. He loved this land now as he had not loved it before. He took something else with him as he flew west—a part of his past. He had done here what most Americans do sooner or later: come to terms with his immigrant past, with his humble beginnings. “This is not the land of my birth,” the president said as he was leaving on June 29, 1963,