and I say, Why not?

----------------George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life: . . . "I dream things that never were -- and I say:  Why not?"

  -- John F. Kennedy before the Irish Parliament, June 28, 1963

----------[excerpt, Dallek's Unfinished Life]-------------- For Joseph Patrick Kennedy, whose drive for social acceptance shadowed most of what he did, being described as an "Irishman" was cause for private rage.  "Goddamn it!" he once sputtered after a Boston newspaper identified him that way.  "I was born in this country!  My children were born in this country!  What the hell does someone have to do to become an American?"

But his second son had taken his cue from his mother's father, John F. Fitzgerald.  "There seems to be some disagreement as to whether my grandfather Fitzgerald came from Wexford, Limerick or Tipperary," Kennedy would later recall.  "And it is even more confusing as to where my great grandmother came from -- because her son -- who was the Mayor of Boston -- used to claim his mother came from whichever Irish county had the most votes in the audience he was addressing at that particular time." ...

= = = = = = = = = = =
In August 1947, John F. Kennedy traveled to Ireland. ... Though his thirtieth birthday had passed in the spring, Congressman Kennedy looked like "a college boy"....He contributed to the impression with his casual attire, appearing sometimes on the House floor in khaki pants and a rumpled seersucker jacket with a shirttail dangling below his coat or in the House cafeteria line in sweater and sneakers.  At six feet and only 140 pounds, his slender body, gaunt and freckled face, and tousled brown hair made him seem younger....

Although he conveyed a certain coolness or self-control, his radiant smile and genuine openness made him immediately likable....

The Ireland trip, officially, was a fact-finding mission to study the potential workings of the Marshall Plan in a Europe still reeling from the devastation wrought by the Second World War.  Unofficially, it was a chance to relax with Kathleen Kennedy Hartington, Jack's favorite younger sister....Though her husband, William Cavendish Hartington, who was in line to become the next duke of Devonshire, had died in the war, Kathleen had stayed in England....

A visit to New Ross, a market town on the banks of the Barrow River...filled some of Jack's time in Ireland.  Kathleen, who spent the day playing golf with her guests, did not join him.  Instead, Pamela Churchill, whom Jack asked "rather quietly, rather apologetically," went along.  They drove for five hours in Kathleen's huge American station wagon over rutted roads along Ireland's scenic southeastern coast before reaching the outskirts of the town.

As they approached, with only a letter from his aunt Loretta, his father's sister, to guide him, Jack stopped to ask directions to the Kennedy house.  ("Which Kennedys will it be that you'll be wanting?" the man replied.)  Jack tried a little white farmhouse on the edge of the village with a front yard full of chickens and geese.  A lady surrounded by six kids, "looking just like all the Kennedys," greeted him with suspicion.  After sending for her husband, who was in the field, the family invited Jack and Pamela for tea in their thatched-roof cottage with a dirt floor.  Though Pamela was impressed with the family's simple dignity, she compared the visit to a scene from Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road.

Jack believed that he had discovered his third cousins and seemed to enjoy himself thoroughly.  When he asked if he could do anything for them, the cousins proposed that he "drive the children around the village in the station wagon," which he did, to their pleasure and his.  For her part, Pamela clearly did not understand "the magic of the afternoon."  Neither did Kathleen, who was angry when Jack returned late for dinner.  "Did they have a bathroom?" she asked snidely.

The successful striving of her great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents -- the unceasing ambition of the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys -- had catapulted the family into another realm, an ocean and a century apart from the relatives left behind in Ireland.  In America anything was possible -- the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys were living proof.  For most of the family, these Kennedys of New Ross were something foreign, something best ignored or forgotten.  But not for Jack.----------- [end excerpts]

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excerpts from An Unfinished Life.  John F. Kennedy; 1917 - 1963.  Written by Robert Dallek.  Copyright 2003 - Robert Dallek.  Little, Brown and Company.

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