Killing Kennedy

Galway are higher-risk environments than inland cities because of their large immigrant populations, but as is always the case when a motorcade route causes the president’s car to slow down for a turn, the intersection has been thoroughly prechecked by an advance team of agents.

But the tight turns are not the only potential hazard: the buildings lining the route are mostly two stories tall. The distance between their upper windows and the president’s motorcade is a third of the distance between General Ted Walker and the alley where Lee Harvey Oswald hid on the night of April 10, 1963.

In fact, John F. Kennedy is traveling through the ideal kill zone. One man with a gun could squeeze off a shot and escape into the throngs in a matter of seconds. And the president is clearly aware that such a thing might happen. He has been thinking quite a bit about martyrs lately and has become fond of quoting a verse by Irish poet Thomas Davis:

We thought you would not die—we were sure you would not go;

And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell’s cruel blow—

Sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky—

Oh, why did you leave us, Eoghan? Why did you die?

But today the specter of death doesn’t seem to matter. It is Saturday, June 29, 1963. An estimated hundred thousand Irish citizens line the streets of that raucous port city on the west coast of Ireland. Six hundred Gardai, police, are there to hold back the cheering crowds.

Due to Jackie Kennedy’s history of troubled pregnancies, she did not make the trip to Europe, as she so famously did two years ago. John Kennedy has the adulation of the crowds all to himself.

Many questioned why the president would go to Europe at such a volatile time. The title of an editorial in last Sunday’s edition of the New York Times asked, “Is This Trip Necessary?”

“In the face of much adverse comment and good reasons not to go,” the editorial went on to say, “President Kennedy is proceeding with his trip to Europe at a most inauspicious time.”

But John Kennedy knows the power of good political timing, and the trip has been a smashing success. At a time when the civil rights controversy has threatened to damage his presidency, the European trip proves that he is clearly the most popular and charismatic man in the world. More than a million Germans lined his motorcade route in Cologne when he arrived there a week ago. Twenty million more Europeans watched him on television. And another million greeted him in West Berlin. There, to chants of “Ken-ne-DEE,” he won over the crowd with a powerful prodemocracy speech. “All free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin,” said the president. “And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’”

The crowd went wild.

JFK’s Berlin speech was a security nightmare for the Secret Service. The president stood alone and unprotected on a podium as thousands looked on. The crowd wasn’t checked for weapons, and many watched from rooftops or open windows. John Kennedy, in the words of one agent, was a “sitting duck.”

Or, in the words of another agent: “All it takes is one lucky shot.”

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In Moscow, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, fearing that Kennedy’s popularity would lead to an erosion of support in East Berlin, quickly flew to that divided city to reassert his nation’s claims. He and Kennedy did not meet. In fact, crowds a fraction of the size that greeted Kennedy even noticed that Khrushchev was in town, underscoring JFK’s amazing popularity and sending a clear message that Khrushchev’s power was on the wane.

John F. Kennedy’s European presence even affects the arrogant French president, Charles de Gaulle. From his perch in Paris, de Gaulle has become the bully of Western European politics, but he has more than met his match in JFK, prompting an amazed New York Times writer to marvel that “for the first time, President de Gaulle had been confronted by a Western leader whose ideas on that future are as firm as his own, whose confidence in the ultimate triumph of his ideas is as great and who, finally, speaks for the most powerful nation in the community.”

Kennedy and de Gaulle do not meet on this trip, but the French leader watches every move the president makes.

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And then comes Ireland.

“If you go to Ireland,” Appointments Secretary Kenny O’Donnell pointed out when Kennedy adds it to his European itinerary, “people will just say it’s a pleasure trip.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” the president replied. “A pleasure trip to Ireland.”

He has been lauded everywhere he has traveled in the small island nation, hailed as a victorious returning son.

Galway comes on his fourth day in Ireland, and it’s clear by his easy smile and the playful way he interacts with the locals that the pressures of domestic affairs, foreign problems, and the impending birth of his third child seem a million miles away.

Three hundred and twenty children from the Convent of St. Mercy greet the president’s helicopter as it lands on a grassy seaside field at 11:30 A.M. Each of the children is dressed in orange, green, or white, and arranged so that together they form the Irish flag.

Then it is into an open-top limousine for the short drive to Eyre Square, at the center of the city. At one house, Kennedy orders the driver to stop so that he can spend a few minutes talking with the women standing out front.

The speech he gives in Eyre Square is the most heartwarming and personal of JFK’s entire presidency, harkening back to the emotional beginnings of his political career in Boston. The president is utterly at ease as he looks out upon the thousands who fill the square, which will one day be renamed in his honor. This visit is not a campaign stop, or a fund-raising dinner, or even one of those significant historical occasions he might mark with a speech filled with gravity and somber words.

This is a visit from a man whose heart has been touched by the people of his homeland at a time when he needs that very much, and who hopes that his words might do the same for them. “If the day was clear enough,