John FitzGerald Kennedy casts a long shadow on Democratic candidates running for president.
Joe Biden’s inauguration day January 20th 2021 was exactly sixty years to the day when Kennedy electrified America with his “New Frontier” inaugural speech.
It is likely 60-years later, Biden would not have been standing on the Capitol steps making his own inaugural speech were it not for the influence of the only Irish Catholic president who came before him.
Joe Biden attributes his decision to turn away from seeking the priesthood or becoming a wealthy lawyer to the election of JFK in 1960 when Biden was an impressionable, if unfocused 19 year-old.
Kennedy’s inauguration triggered a deep desire for public service and Kennedy’s words to “Ask not what your country could do for you but what you could do for your country,”struck home with the young man.
In the book “Where Were You-- America Remembers the JFK assassination,” by Gus Russo and Harry Moses, Biden discussed what JFK’s victory meant to him and how it launched his own political career.
“I was a Catholic schoolboy, Irish Catholic, Jean Finnegan’s son, going to an all-boys Catholic school. I had two reactions. The first reaction was: My God, this may be the final validation of us Irish Catholics, that we’re totally accepted.
I know this sounds strange, that Irish Catholics in the ‘60s would think somehow they were second class, but that’s how it was. There was that sense of exclusion from certain areas of social and public life. “
Biden realized he was suddenly alive to the possibilities of his own political ambition.
“When I think of Kennedy, I think about the notion of possibilities. There’s nothing beyond our capacity. It’s not naiveté; it’s a sense of our capacity.”
Biden was not alone in feeling the gravitational pull of JFK which has inspired generations of Democratic presidential candidates.
Senator John Kerry, defeated by George W. Bush, actually went as far as directly borrowing Kennedy’s mannerisms when he ran in 2004.
Bill Clinton credited Kennedy for firing up his political ambition when a youthful Clinton met with Kennedy as part of a high school delegation at the White House on July 23rd 1963.
If JFK was Biden’s North Star then Robert Kennedy was the guiding light who showed how compassion and caring could reverberate in American politics despite all the cynicism.
Interesting to note that it is RFK’s bust that now graces the Oval Office, not JFK. A line from RFK’s impromptu speech on April 4 1968 after Martin Luther King’s assassination is said to deeply resonate with Biden and helped frame his inaugural speech.
RFK said “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”
After 1960 Biden was caught in the powerful undertow of the new young president and his brother who was a fearless Attorney General.
Both dazzled the nation, especially budding young politicians
One of them was Joseph R. Biden
He studied every move by Kennedy, how he dressed and spoke, his appeals to America’s better nature.
Biden’s own persona of always displaying political optimism was born after listening to JFK’s speech in 1962 about putting a man on the moon within the decade. It happened in July 1969, just seven years after Alan Sheppard was the first American in space.
The fact that both men came from large Irish Catholic families helped fuel the kinship Biden felt.
Biden replicated the Kennedy tactic when he first ran for Senate of holding coffee mornings, hosted by friendly female voters and organized by the Biden women.His sister Valerie has been his campaign manager in every one of his races and she understood how to maximise the Kennedy connection.
Like JFK, the 29-year old Senate candidate had a huge following among younger women who were taken by his Irish charm and looks, as well as his prowess as an excellent wide receiver known as “Hands” on his high school football team.
It was Valerie who years later re-invented the Biden home, his Delaware private residence, creating its scattered family living quarters which is based on Hyannis Port, the Kennedy compound.
The connection remains. If you walked into former Vice President Biden’s study at the Naval Observatory where he lived for eight years the major portrait was of JFK.
There are many other intersections, but there is no doubt how Biden would have answered Robert Frost’s admonition to Jack Kennedy, “Be more Irish than Harvard,” when JFK asked him for advice on how to present his presidency. Indeed, arguably Biden is more Irish than Kennedy who was, at the end of the day, also a dedicated Anglophile.
Throughout his life, Biden and the Kennedys crossed paths. He never forgot the care and concern shown by Senator Edward Kennedy when Biden lost his daughter and wife and his two sons were seriously injured right before he was sworn in as senator standing at his two sons hospital beds in November 1972.
Again it was a Kennedy intervention that helped him overcome the incredible loss of his wife and child. Ted Kennedy, by then a master of the Senate, decided the young Delaware senator to be would not throw away a promising political career to nurse his grief.
Here is a contemporary account of that sense of connection that Biden felt when eulogizing Kennedy in the Senate in 2009 where he gave a very emotional speech.
“Vice President Biden on Monday gave an emotional dedication to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, whom he credits for having helped him continue his political career after the death of his wife and young daughter.
“’It’s close to certain I would have never been sworn in as a United States senator if not for your father, your father’s encouragement,’” he told the Kennedy children, including former Representative Patrick Kennedy, who spoke before him.”
In the end Biden became president because of the fact that the Kennedys opened the door of the White House to Irish Catholics and while it took 32 years from his first run in 1988 to achieve his dream Joe Biden finally crossed the threshold. Somewhere the Kennedys were smiling.
Niall O’Dowd is Founder of IrishCentral.com, Irish America Magazine and Irish Voice Newspaper in New York.