"IT just came to me in a flash. It just hit me that it would be a really good idea at this point in my life. And I think it sort of fit, you know. I knew how crazy they [the Irish] were about Jack and I thought `Why not try?'"

Four years ago Jean Kennedy Smith, eighth child of Joe and Rose Kennedy, decided to compete for the post of US ambassador to Ireland. It was a new departure for a Kennedy woman.

Joe Kennedy had promoted the men in the family. The Kennedy women stayed in the background. Her inspiration, she later told Laurence Leamer, author of The Kennedy Women, first came during a trip to Ireland in the summer of 1992, when George Bush was president.

During that vacation she called at the ambassador's Phoenix Park residence. On returning to the US she suggested to her younger brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, that maybe, one day, she would return there as ambassador.

When President Clinton, an ardent admirer of the Kennedy family, came to the White House, the Kennedys seized the moment.

Jean Kennedy Smith had raised four children with her husband Stephen, manager of the Kennedy family finances, who died in 1990. She had founded the Very Special Arts Programme to foster art for the mentally disabled in 1974, which is now in all 50 US states and 55 countries including Ireland.

She resented being described as a dilettante. "They said I did charity work, but if I were a man, they would have said I ran an international organisation," she remarked.

She had no experience in diplomacy or international politics. This was hardly a disqualification for a post which had become a sinecure for retired political fund raisers. Her predecessor was the octogenarian William Fitzgerald, who at his confirmation hearings had identified the two sides in Northern Ireland as unionists and loyalists.

Senator Kennedy began to lobby the new President to have his sister appointed to Dublin. There were other powerful people who had ideas about who should get the posting.

Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley was promoting former Congressman Brian Donnelly of Boston, who had secured the "Donnelly visas" in Congress.

Speaker Foley was, however, outmanoeuvred by Senator Kennedy. He had to learn from a journalist that Clinton had chosen Jean Kennedy Smith over Donnelly. The President found it impossible to decline Ted Kennedy's personal request.

Mrs Smith had little knowledge of Irish politics at the time and avoided the media during the nomination process. But when she appeared before a Senate committee for confirmation, she had been well schooled and made no mistakes.

THE Kennedy sister spoke in a such a low voice to the fawning senators that reporters could not hear what she was saying. To some, this enhanced the impression that Mrs Smith would be no more than a cypher in Dublin, an agent for her brother.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger cautioned, however, that "Jean may well be the best politician of all the Kennedys."

She arrived in Dublin with a photograph of the nomination ceremony inscribed by Ted Kennedy:

"For Jean, who is going back in the springtime." This was a reference to President Kennedy's remark before leaving Ireland in 1963: "I'll be back in the springtime." That had been 30 years earlier, to the day.

Dublin was not her first embassy residence. As an 11 year old, Jean Kennedy had lived at 14 Prince's Gate, the grand US embassy home in London, when her father was pre war US ambassador to the Court of St James's.

It wasn't long before she showed, that she was going to be as independent minded in Dublin as her father had been in London, where his wrong headed opposition to war with Germany eventually brought about the end of his diplomatic career.

Her starting point was a presumption that the President had sent her to Dublin to find a way to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

She began, shaking up a mission which had become, as her deputy Dennis Sandberg later testified to State Department inspectors, "basically non productive with very low output."

The State Department had always regarded Northern Ireland as off limits to the embassy in Dublin. The Troubles up north were an internal problem of the United Kingdom. The last Irish American ambassador appointed by a Democratic President, Bill Shannon had asked permission in the late 1970s to cross the Border and had been told bluntly to stay in the South.

The Inspector General of the State Department, who censured Mrs Smith in a report last month for high handed treatment of staff, acknowledged that "policy emphases changed significantly with the arrival of ambassador Smith" in the embassy in 1993.

"The ambassador wished to avoid confrontation with the Government of Ireland and the Irish, whether with regard to policy differences or US visa issuance," the report stated. "She also stressed an appreciation for Irish culture, cultural exchanges and US business promotion."

Innocuous as this sounds, her arrival was clearly a shock to the diplomats in what had been a sleepy mission in a second division European country, famously described by cultural attache Robin Berrington in the Reagan era as "small potatoes".

"She was everything an ambassador shouldn't be, indiscreet, pugnacious, vengeful, but brilliant," said an admiring acquaintance. She inundated the State Department with cables.

Sinn Fein gave her the code name "Strong Lady". Senator Kennedy was known as "The Brother".

THE brother came for a visit in December 1993, when a US visa for Gerry Adams was becoming a hot issue. The symbiosis between the two was at this moment a key component of the peace process.

They formed a formidable political axis. They had been close since childhood, when "she was his valiant friend and big sister", according to Rose Kennedy in her autobiography.

"They were kindred souls, shuttled from one boarding school to the next, both teased and pampered by their older siblings and disciplined by their mother," wrote Laurence Leamer.

The two Kennedys also had a visceral reaction to terrorism, having lost two brothers to the assassin's gun. He was reportedly cool at first to the suggestion of an Adams visa.

But the visit to Dublin made a difference. Back in Washington he began to recruit other senators to the idea.

When Senator Kennedy turned on an Irish issue, everyone else in Irish America turned. Speaker Foley was the exception, but once again he was on the losing side in a tight with the Kennedys.

The Speaker represented a generation of Irish American heavyweights who exerted influence everywhere except on US foreign policy towards Ireland. Jean Kennedy Smith was the opposite, an Irish American who saw the changing of US foreign policy as her major goal.

She made the US embassy a bridge between the emerging pan nationalist front in Ireland and the US administration.

Previous US envoys in Ireland had remained aloof from the conflict. The scion of Irish America's most powerful family became enmeshed in it.

She became a confidante of John Hume, in whose Derry home she had stayed in 1974. She invited loyalists to Phoenix Park. She opened her doors to the former untouchables in Sinn Fein.

Her involvement was acclaimed on Capitol Hill in Washington, where she had important allies and where rumours about high handed treatment of staff and indiscretions cut little ice.

When the ambassador designate to the UK, Admiral William Crowe, appeared at Senate confirmation hearings, he was lectured by Senator Joseph Biden on how he should co operate with Jean Kennedy Smith in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

The two had fundamental differences which made co operation difficult. Ambassador Crowe did not welcome Mrs Smith's cross Border forays. He differed strongly with her on the interpretation of US policy on decommissioning, taking a tough State Department line on the desirability of prior decommissioning of IRA weapons.

Mrs Smith interpreted liberally the President's stated desire to see Sinn Fein "seriously discuss" giving up IRA arms. The State Department opposed the Adams visa, and four career diplomats in the Dublin embassy followed the department's line. They took up the issue with their boss, who was not pleased.

TENSIONS built up at the Ballsbridge embassy. They reached boiling point in mid January 1994, two weeks before the President decided to let Mr Adams visit New York for 48 hours.

Mrs Smith composed a cable to Washington recommending that a visa be issued. The officials filed a dissent cable arguing that it should not be granted until Mr Adams renounced violence.

The cable, code named "Dublin 0190" went to Washington without Mrs Smith seeing its contents. She was "upset and angry" as the Inspector General put it, and felt "betrayed".

When angry, Jean Kennedy Smith is a formidable woman. Her wrath was felt by two of the officials, who subsequently had complaints of unfair treatment upheld by the inspector.

She showed what the Washington Post described as "the same quiet ferocity" in August 1994 when an IRA ceasefire hung on a Sinn Fein demand that veteran IRA man Joe Cahill be given a US visa to sell the decision to American supporters.

The ambassador, who was holidaying in the south of France with a Conservative MP and his wife, pulled out all the stops to get Cahill the visa. She tracked down Nancy Soderberg of the National Security Council in Madrid and urged her to get the President to make an exception to the immigration law forbidding entry job people with terrorist type convictions.

Cahill had served time for involvement in killing an RUC man in the 1940s. Many career diplomats were appalled, again. The British were furious at her meddling.

She found Albert Reynolds on a yacht in the Mediterranean. She told him "Nancy Soderberg is 25 per cent Irish. Convince her to use it," according to Mr Reynolds, who was making his own calls to the US administration.

Nancy Soderberg said later: "She was the driving force in pushing us to grant the visa." Clinton, holidaying in Martha's vineyard, shrugged and authorised Cahill's entry. The ceasefire was declared within hours.

The woman whose voice was barely audible at her confirmation hearings played a similar high profile role in every visa war. She was always demanding to be in the loop, always on the telephone to key players in New York and Washington, insisting on knowing what was going on, berating her contacts angrily one day, bantering with them the next.

Old Joe Kennedy never liked the term "Irish American". He despised "sentimental Irish malarkey" about the family forebears.

It is a matter of irony that Jean Kennedy Smith was named Irish American of the year at a ceremony hosted by Irish American magazine in 1995, just three years after she thought, "Why not try?"

But it is no longer an expression of sentimental malarkey. She has helped make it a symbol of political power, something of which her father would have approved.