Memories of JFK’s visit a stark contrast to opinions on modern-day US

The day that President Kennedy came to Galway in 1963 is fondly remembered, and as the years go by there is a tendency to remember it as a sunny day for Galwegians.

But in truth it was an unseasonably cold day, and the waves of Irish school children that greeted the president’s helicopter at the sports ground on the College Road were more shivering than shimmering.

BY GERARD DOHERTY

As the motorcade was about to set off for Eyre Square, an ambitious young local photographer muscled his way in for a shot, drawing the attention of Secret Service agents who moved toward him like a threat.

In what would be an especially poignant moment, knowing now what would happen in Dallas just five months later, President Kennedy intervened, asking his security to back off, to let the photographer do his job.

“He’s a friend,” the president said of the stranger from Ireland.

It said a lot about Jack Kennedy, about the way he viewed people not just from Ireland, but from other countries in general. They weren’t strangers to be feared; they were friends not yet made.

As the great-grandchild of Irish immigrants, President Kennedy understood intuitively the way the Irish had come to America with little and gave and gained a lot. He was living proof that, given opportunities, immigrants from any and all countries, from any and all religious backgrounds, could rise and prosper in America. That was the compact that America made with its immigrants, and it always paid dividends.

President Kennedy made his bones as a politician the old fashioned way, with shoe leather. I was just a teenager the day he walked into my house in Charlestown in 1946, during a lull in Boston’s annual Bunker Hill Day parade. He was running for the seat in Congress formerly occupied by James Michael Curley, the quintessential Boston Irish pol. Curley, whose father left Oughterard for Boston, served four terms as mayor, three terms in Congress, one term as governor, and one term in the federal penitentiary.

Like Curley, Kennedy knew his power derived from the people, that to obtain power you needed to have a genuine mandate from the people, and to obtain that mandate you had to make a genuine effort to meet those people.

Jack Kennedy knew the people because he talked to them. And he respected them, because he saw in their struggle the struggle of his own forbears who left Ireland with little more than dreams.

“If the day was clear enough, and if you went down to the bay, and you looked west, and your sight was good enough, you would see Boston, Massachusetts,” President Kennedy told the crowd at Eyre Square 55 years ago. “And if you did, you would see down working on the docks there some Dohertys and Flahertys and Ryans and cousins of yours who have gone to Boston and made good.”

At that point, the president asked if anybody in the crowd had family in America.

Just about every hand in Eyre Square went up.

“I don’t know what it is about you that causes me to think that nearly everybody in Boston comes from Galway,” President Kennedy said. “They are not shy about it, at all.”

That wasn’t hyperbole. When running for Congress and later the Senate, President Kennedy would have pressed the flesh all over the greater Boston area and he would come to realize that what seemed like half of Rosmuc had relocated to South Boston.

The president concluded his remarks that day with words that stand in stark contrast to the message coming out of the White House these days.

“If you ever come to America,” he said, “come to Washington and tell them, if they wonder who you are at the gate, that you come from Galway. The word will be out and when you do, it will be Céad Míle Fáilte.”

If one of Galway’s sons or daughters arrived at the White House today and told anyone at the gate they were from Ireland, they might be locked up. The presumption, the official position of the Trump administration, is that every immigrant who shows up on America’s shores is there to take advantage not of the opportunity but of the American taxpayer.

Immigrants have been demonized, with xenophobic language and sentiment that flies in the face of the American experience, families separated in scenes that conjure fascist, inhumane regimes.

The empirical evidence suggests immigrants, on the whole, remain essential to the United States. Immigrants continue to be the backbone of our economy. Without them, food would rot in our fields. Hospital corridors would be unclean. Hotel beds would be unmade. Our elderly and infirm would have no minders.

But beyond the more modest jobs that first-generation immigrants fill, there is that promise, the one the Kennedys fulfilled, of rising, generation by generation, from the corridors of hospitals to the corridors of power, in boardrooms, in situation rooms.

President Trump has insulted and dehumanized immigrants of many cultures. He has instituted policies in which hard-working, tax-paying undocumented immigrants are rounded up while criminals who mostly victimize immigrant communities are too often conveniently ignored. And he has the cheek to dismiss so-called chain immigration as wrongheaded when his own family benefited from it.

Unfortunately, his demonization of immigrants resonates with a sizable minority of Americans, the same ones who voted for him in the first place. There has always been a nativist streak in American culture, one that ebbs and flows, and it has been on the rise, not just with Trump and his minions but in many European countries as well.

Nativists purposely and cynically ignore history. History tells us President Kennedy was right to look at a stranger, some young photographer from Galway, and assume he was a friend, not an unwanted interloper. And history tells us the great majority of Americans aspire to be more like President Kennedy than like President Trump.

■ Gerard Doherty spoke at the Kennedy Summer School in New Ross. He is a former aide to President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy and the author of “They Were My Friends: Jack, Bob and Ted.