Good morning, it’s Tuesday, March 17, 2015. Today is St. Patrick’s Day, a semi-holiday that has morphed on these shores into a celebration more secular -- and more inclusive -- than it ever was in the old country. That place, of course, is Ireland.
On this day, tens of millions of Americans who wouldn’t know a shillelagh from a shebeen claim some Irish heritage. Among those who give themselves over to their inner Irishness is our African-American president, who today can be referred respectfully by his boyhood first name “Barry” -- as long as his last name is altered to O’bama.
President Obama meets with Republic of Ireland Prime Minister Enda Kenny this morning. Taoiseach (pronounced “tee-shock”) is Kenny’s actual title back home, and he will present a traditional bowl of shamrocks to Obama before both of them go to Capitol Hill for a luncheon hosted by House Speaker John Boehner. This evening, Obama will host a St. Patrick’s Day reception in the East Room of the White House.
These traditions, which are relatively new, have evolved over time. When the first shamrocks were delivered by an Irish taoiseach to the White House in 1952, President Harry Truman wasn’t even at home. But several U.S. presidents have journeyed to Ireland in the past five decades, and the political bonds between the two nations have become not only strong but substantive. The name of the U.S. president who deserves the most credit for this attachment might surprise you.
I’ll explain in a moment. First, I’d like to point you to
RCP’s front page, which aggregates videos, polls, news stories, and an array of columns spanning the political spectrum. We also offer a complement of original material from RCP’s reporters and contributors, including the following:
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Although many early U.S. presidents claimed some Irish ancestry, the first Irish-American who was also Roman Catholic to occupy the Oval Office was John F. Kennedy. Until JFK reached the White House in 1961, the only president to visit the Emerald Isle was Ulysses S. Grant -- and he didn’t make the trip (by boat, of course) until after leaving office.
Grant had led many thousands of Ireland-born troops during the Civil War and was proud of their performance in the field and their sacrifice to their adopted country. He mentioned this often during in his trip to Dublin. Grant also foreshadowed the future of Irish-American politics while addressing a Dublin crowd in early January 1879.
“I am by birth,” he noted, “a citizen of a country where there are more Irishmen, either native born or the descendants of Irishmen, than there are in all of Ireland.”
John F. Kennedy made a trip to the island in June 1963, a visit that is still talked about more than five decades later. Through the prism of modern Ireland, it’s difficult to imagine the galvanizing effect this visit had on the Irish. It had a similar impact on the young American president. The trip, noted the Cork Examiner, was “a union of hearts.”
Kennedy’s trusted Boston political aide Kenny O’Donnell had told the president that he already had all the Irish-American votes he was ever going to get and that the Ireland sojourn would be dismissed as “a pleasure trip.”
“That’s exactly what I want,” Kennedy replied.
In “
One of Ourselves: John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Ireland,” author James R. Carroll explains why this was good for both sides. “[U]nderlying all the analysis about historical turning point, global status, economics and policy was a simple obvious fact,” Carroll wrote. “John Fitzgerald Kennedy touched a nation, and it touched him.”
Magic is hard to conjure up on command, but other presidents dutifully tried. Richard Nixon went to County Mayo, where his wife’s people had come from. Ronald Reagan visited a village named Ballyporeen, home of a great-grandfather named Michael Regan.
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all made the trek. White House aides and political well-wishers of good intent would invariably attempt to find Irish blood in these men. Some of these efforts at tracing lineage were more dubious than others, but the spirit of the exercise was the important thing.
“I didn’t know much about my family background -- not because of a lack of interest, but because my father was orphaned before he was 6 years old,” President Reagan told the crowd in Ballyporeen. “Now, thanks to you and the efforts of good people who have dug into the history of a poor immigrant family, I know at last whence I came. And this has given my soul a new contentment. And it is a joyous feeling. It is like coming home after a long journey.”
Both Kennedy and, later, Reagan employed the “No Irish Need Apply” meme, as do most Irish-American politicians. But what these men were really doing was telling those who’d stayed behind that although life in the new country hadn’t been easy, the promise of America had been realized by those who left. It was, and remains, a bittersweet message.
More troubling still was the sectarian troubles that re-emerged in Ireland even while JFK was still alive. Famed New York-born Taoiseach Eamon de Valera privately pushed Kennedy regarding Ireland’s traditional grievances with Great Britain.
“If you are weak in your dealings with the British, they will pressure you,” de Valera told his American counterpart. “Only if you are reasonable will they reason with you, and being reasonable with the British means letting them know that you are willing to throw an occasional bomb into one of their lorries.”
By the time William Jefferson Clinton was president, no political leader from the Republic of Ireland would talk that way, even in private, to a U.S. president. After 9/11, it became unthinkable.
But several years before the terrorist attacks, Clinton had helped set in motion a series of negotiations that all but quelled the violence. His Irish connection was first made in 1992 when he had yet to lock up the Democratic presidential nomination.
He’d lost the Connecticut primary very narrowly to former California Gov. Jerry Brown, and during the postmortem Clinton’s political advisers concluded that if they’d done better with the state’s white Catholic Democrats they’d have won.
So Clinton accepted an invitation he’d earlier declined: a forum in New York City on Irish issues. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminarian and descendant of a County Tipperary clan, was going; moreover, Brown had announced that, as president, he’d appoint a special envoy to Northern Ireland, investigate British human rights abuses, and issue a visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Although these measures went against existing U.S. policy, Clinton quickly followed suit -- and at the forum he won over the crowd.
After winning the New York primary, the Democratic nomination (the convention was also in New York), and the presidency, Clinton honored his promise to involve himself in the fledgling Irish peace process. For the ensuing five years, he participated in numerous late-night negotiating sessions over the phone with political principles on all sides in the long Northern Ireland conflict.
When the stalemate was finally broken in 1998, British and Irish leaders gave Clinton much of the credit. “If I played a positive role,” Clinton responded with uncharacteristic modesty at an emotional White House ceremony, “I’m grateful to have had the chance to do so.”
In so doing, Clinton had fulfilled a promise long predicted for America.
As far back as 1867, William Gladstone had noted -- not approvingly -- that the British-Irish problem had “an American dimension.” In the 1880s, Home Secretary William Harcourt articulated the dark English vision of this dimension:
“In former Irish rebellions, the Irish were in Ireland,” he said. “We could reach their forces, cut off their resources in men and money -- and then to subjugate them was comparatively easy.
“Now there is an Irish nation in the United States, equally hostile, with plenty of money, absolutely beyond our reach.”
Not much had changed in the intervening century, including private American financial support to Irish Catholic paramilitaries. But as terrorism became a tactic viewed with deep disdain by almost all Americans, a more advanced and humane view of American involvement in Irish politics evolved. As Clinton arrived on the scene, this more pacific view was described by Irish author Tim Pat Coogan.
“Given American support, Ireland and England could be at peace,” he wrote in 1994. “Ireland and England are both mother countries. There is a time in life when parents look to their children for support. That time is now.”
The people of Ireland, particularly in the North of that island, were grateful for the attention Bill Clinton gave their troubles. In 1995, when he visited Derry, a huge throng assembled at Guildhall Square.
Seeing him on the dais, the crowd went into a chant, “Bull! Bull! Bull!” Perplexed, Clinton turned to Irish statesman John Hume. “Why are they saying that?’ he asked. Hume, familiar with the local dialect, smiled and replied, “They are saying your name.”
They were saying, “Bill! Bill! Bill!”
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
By Carl M. Cannon
The Email-Benghazi Nexus; Tax Reform in Puerto Rico; the Real St. Patrick; U.S. Presidents and Ireland
