Sixty years since assassination of President John F. Kennedy
By Tom Gillespie
IT is hard to believe that this week (November 22) marked the 60th anniversary since US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) was assassinated and Texas Governor John B. Connally was seriously wounded.
Suspect Lee Harvey Oswald was later captured and charged with the murder of both the President and police officer J. D. Tippit.
Oswald, however, was shot two days later by Jack Ruby while in police custody.
Kennedy was born on Tuesday, May 29, 1917, at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, to businessman/politician Joseph Patrick ‘Joe’ Kennedy and philanthropist/socialite Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald-Kennedy.
His grandfathers P.J. Kennedy and Boston mayor John F. Fitzgerald were both Massachusetts politicians. All four of his grandparents were the children of Irish immigrants.
On June 27, 1963, JFK became the first President of the United States to visit Ireland during his term in office.
Airforce One touched down at Dublin Airport, where he was greeted by Taoiseach Éamon de Valera.
Thousands converged on O’Connell Street in Dublin to see Kennedy as he travelled in a motorcade through the city.
During the visit to Ireland Kennedy stopped at his ancestral home in Dunganstown, Co. Wexford, where his great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy had lived before emigrating to the United States.
The president was greeted there by a crowd waving both American and Irish flags and was reportedly serenaded by a boys choir singing ‘The Boys of Wexford’.
He also enjoyed a cup of tea and cake with members of his extended Irish family at the Kennedy homestead.
His four-day visit also included trips to Cork, Galway and Limerick.
John F. Kennedy would later call his time in Ireland as ‘the best four days of my life’.
The visit was covered extensively by the fledging RTÉ television and the black and white pictures were beamed into the many homes who has TV sets and could get a signal.
On the evenings of the four-day visit I accompanied my mother, Patsy, to her brother Denny Fahey’s home at New Antrim Street, Castlebar, to view the proceedings.
He had one of the few televisions on the street and neighbours crowded in to view the historic visit.
Denny had erected an aerial on a huge mast at the back of his blacksmith’s forge and with much adjusting eventually got a ‘good’ picture.
Kennedy was assassinated only a few months later in Dallas.
I recall that Friday when the news broke and all of Ireland went into shock. So devastating was the news that events were cancelled and I particularly remembered the film planned for showing at Castlebar County Cinema was cancelled as a mark of respect.
Kennedy had an elder brother, Joseph Jnr., and seven younger siblings, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert, Jean and Ted.
Joseph Jr. was killed in action during Wold War II. Robert was John's attorney general and then a senator who was assassinated in 1968, while Ted was a long-serving US senator from 1962 until his death from brain cancer in 2009.
In September 1931, Kennedy was sent to the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, for ninth through to 12th grade. His older brother had already been at Choate for two years and was a football player and leading student. He spent his first years at Choate in his older brother's shadow, and compensated for this with rebellious behaviour which attracted a coterie. Their most notorious stunt was to explode a toilet seat with a powerful firecracker. In the ensuing chapel assembly, the strict headmaster, George St. John, brandished the toilet seat and spoke of certain ‘muckers’ who would ‘spit in our sea’. The defiant Kennedy took the cue and named his group ‘The Muckers Club’.
During his Choate years, Kennedy was beset by health problems that culminated with his emergency hospitalisation in 1934, where doctors thought he might have leukaemia.
In September 1936, Kennedy enrolled at Harvard College. He tried out for the football, golf and swimming teams and earned a spot on the varsity swimming squad.
Kennedy also sailed in the Star class and won the 1936 Nantucket Sound Star Championship.
In 1939, Kennedy toured Europe, the Soviet Union, the Balkans and the Middle East in preparation for his Harvard senior honours thesis. He then went to Czechoslovakia and Germany before returning to London on September 1, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland.
Two days later, the family was in the House of Commons for speeches endorsing the United Kingdom's declaration of war on Germany.
Kennedy was sent as his father's representative to help with arrangements for American survivors of the SS Athenia before flying back to the US.
Kennedy attempted to enter the Army’s Officer Candidate School in 1940, but was medically disqualified for his chronic lower back problems. On September 24, 1941, after exercising for months to strengthen his back, and with the help of the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), former naval attaché to Joseph Kennedy, he joined the United States Naval Reserve (US Navy Reserve since 2005). He was commissioned an ensign on October 26, 1941, and joined the staff of the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C.
He voluntarily entered the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Centre in Melville, Rhode Island. On October 10, he was promoted to lieutenant junior grade.
In April 1943, Kennedy took command of PT-109 which was based at Tiulagi Island in the Solomon Islands. On the night of August 1/2, PT-109, on its 31st mission, was performing nighttime patrols near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands with PT-162 and PT-169. Kennedy spotted a Japanese destroyer nearby and attempted to turn to attack when PT-109 was rammed suddenly at an angle and cut in half by the destroyer Amagiri, costing two PT-109 crew members their lives.
Kennedy gathered his surviving 10 crew members, including those injured around the wreckage, to vote on whether to ‘fight or surrender’. Kennedy stated: “There's nothing in the book about a situation like this. A lot of you men have families and some of you have children. What do you want to do? I have nothing to lose.”
Shunning surrender, the men swam towards a small island three miles away. Despite re-injuring his back in the collision, Kennedy towed a badly burned crewman through the water to the island with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth, and later to a second island, where his crew was subsequently rescued on August 8.
Jumping ahead, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th president at noon on January 20, 1961.