A young John F Kennedy was “apathetic” to partition and was “inclined to belittle the cause” of Irish unification.
The 29-year-old Kennedy returned from the second World War as a hero having saved the lives of crew members of a patrol torpedo craft boat in the Pacific Ocean when it was rammed by a Japanese destroyer.
On his return to Boston the head of the Irish legation (embassy) in Washington, Robert Brennan, sought Kennedy out and had lunch with him in November 1945.
He was, after all, the son of the former US ambassador to Great Britain Joe Kennedy and the grandson of John Francis ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston.
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Kennedy had been in Dublin shortly before his return to the United States and Brennan anticipated that he would be fired up over the issue of partition.
“I was somewhat surprised to discover that Mr Kennedy was quite apathetic towards the question and was inclined to belittle our cause,” Brennan recounted in a note which is in the Boston consulate files as part of the National Archives annual release.
“He said that after all we had not been too badly off and there were other partitions that were so much more pressing and that, in the final analysis, he would see no reason for the United States taking a particular interest in that problem since it might well mean that in another war, which to him seems likely, the bases in [the] North, if a united Ireland came into existence, would then be unavailable in the United States.
“In other words, he asked what has the United States to gain from backing Ireland’s point of view on this partition question and antagonising Great Britain with whom her interests are so closely aligned for the present and, indeed, may be more closely connected in the future.”
He went on to tell a startled Brennan that the United States would not act out of “altruistic” motives in calling for an end to partition.
Like all great powers, the United States would always look out for its own interests and everything else was “sentimental twaddle”.
Kennedy confessed to Brennan that he knew little about Irish history at that stage, but was studying the life of John Boyle O’Reilly, an old Fenian who had escaped from a western Australian prison camp and had fetched up in Boston where he became a prominent journalist and activist in the Irish community there.
A year later Kennedy was elected to Congress for the first time. Brennan described him as a “very earnest young man who seems to move in a vague atmosphere of idealism and give out the impression that is [he] not overtly practical”. However, Brennan observed that his campaign for Congress had been very effective.
“Mr Kennedy knew little of Ireland and in studying his constituency previous to the actual campaign, he found his lack of knowledge something of a handicap and asked me for a list of books which he might read,” he said.
“Now he is beginning to look up his Irish pedigree – or so he told me the last time I met him.”
He noted Kennedy was a wealthy bachelor “much in demand by matchmaking mamas, even by the Beacon Hill type who otherwise reject his entire family as Irish Catholics”.
Kennedy later gave a speech at the Éire Club in Boston where he sounded a good deal more knowledgeable about Ireland than Brennan might have suggested.
He had met then taoiseach Éamon de Valera, Fine Gael leader James Dillon and Gen Richard Mulcahy. De Valera had a “unique hold on the hearts of the Irish people” who had supported his policy of neutrality.
“There is no compromise in de Valera’s firm aesthetic face,” Kennedy observed. “He has a passionate intensity and single-mindedness in the course of talking that brooks no opposition.”
Kennedy was non-committal on the issue of partition except to say there would be no possibility of ending it if Britain was forced to give up Belfast as a naval base.
“Some people feel that Gen Mulcahy and Mr Dillon with their willingness to play a full part in the British Commonwealth may yet be the ones to end partition.”