Opinion: Ireland and liberal Irish America may have idealised the Kennedys, but their story contains many dark passages
By Mary Burke, University of Connecticut
60 years ago this month, America’s first Catholic president of Irish descent made an official visit to Ireland. Five months before his assassination in Dallas, John F. Kennedy's June 1963 visit was incredibly impactful. A 1965 mosaic in Galway Cathedral memorialises his trip to that city on his final day in the country. Strikingly, the mosaic portrays the slain president – whose hands are clasped in prayer and who gazes towards a much larger triumphant risen Christ figure – as meek and pious.
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From RTÉ News, film to be launched marking anniversary of John F Kennedy's visit to Galway in June 1963
By contrast, cultural and journalistic portrayals in America the wake of Kennedy’s death – and those of other family members that followed – were dark and complex enough that they can be called "gothic." Gothic is fiction (or other cultural expressions) with a sinister or claustrophobic atmosphere of conspiracy, terror, or disruption. In gothic's 18th century English beginnings, that conspiracy was often associated with an all-powerful Catholic elder.
Many of gothic’s other foundational elements repeat over centuries, from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) to John Banville's Birchwood (1973): a secret or curse linked to a corrupt aristocratic bloodline; sexual excess; endangered beautiful women; interrupted inheritance or murdered heirs. Most of these elements have correspondences in the Kennedy narrative.
A genre that centres on power and its abuses, gothic fit competing conspiracy theories that depicted the Kennedys as both blameless targets and wicked schemers. What my book Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History terms "Kennedy Gothic" emerged from both sides of America's political divide. Robert Kennedy served as Attorney General in his brother’s administration. After his assassination in 1968, liberals and Democrats who had approved of the brothers’ progressive policies believed that the Kennedys were innocent victims of dark conspiracies. However, for conservatives and Catholic Irish-Americans leaving traditional Democratic Party loyalty behind, the family known as "America’s aristocrats" epitomised the corrupt elite.
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From RTÉ News Audio Archive, commentary on John F Kennedy's visit to Cork in June 1963
In early gothic novels, the usual source of corruption was the omnipotent Catholic elder. In Kennedy Gothic, that role was given to the president's father, Joe Kennedy, and his seeming ambitions to aristocratic hereditary rulership however repeatedly disrupted. Biographies detail how the father had originally strategised that his first-born, Joseph Jr., would run for president and he decided on John's political rise only after his eldest died during World War II. Robert had been running for president at the time of his assassination, and yet another Kennedy son, Ted (Edward), later attempted to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
Kennedy Gothic enfolded even those who had received that name through marriage. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy transformed into gothic's endangered beautiful woman when stills of her crawling in the presidential convertible in a bloodied suit moments after her husband was shot went global. Strikingly, her eerie 1970 official portrait resembles the fleeing woman in billowing white gown of gothic paperback cover tradition.
She herself used gothic vocabulary in an interview given mere days after her husband’s assassination, ruminating on the portent of having been presented with blood red roses on arrival in Dallas: "She remembers thinking, how funny—red roses for me; and then the car was full of blood and red roses."
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Liveline, listeners recall November 22nd 1963, the date of JFK's assassination in Dallas
In the same interview, she famously used the phrase "Camelot" to denote the idealism of her husband's administration. However, a morally complex Kennedy family emerged in the years that followed, especially after the liberal politics of male Kennedys began to get as much press as their "liberal" behaviour with women.
This was particularly true in the case of the death of a young woman in the company of Ted Kennedy in 1969. He drove off a bridge in Massachusetts, and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned after Ted left her in the water and delayed reporting the accident.
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From RTÉ News, previously unseen footage of John F Kennedy's 1963 visit to Wexford has been discovered
In a public response, he referred to the role played by "some awful curse" in the woman's death. His voicing of the very gothic idea of a family curse caught the public imagination. Subsequently, the dynasty’s tragedies have been described in this way, down to the 1999 airplane crash of John Jr., JFK's son and possible political heir, and the 2019 death by overdose of Bobby’s granddaughter, Saoirse Kennedy Hill.
When baldly tallied, the numerous premature deaths of family members do, disquietingly, read as statistically improbable. Equally disquieting is that the concept of a family curse in Judeo-Christian culture implies an original crime or sin. As to whether the family's tragedies are the result of conspiracy or curse has been a matter of interpretation. While Ireland and liberal Irish America may have idealised the Kennedys, their story was a darker one for conservative Irish America.
Prof Mary Burke is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut where she directs her department's Irish Literature and Honors programs. She is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History (Oxford University Press). This piece is based on an article which was originally published by The Conversation.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
