It's Tuesday, April 11, 2023. President Biden heads to the Emerald Isle today on a nostalgic visit to his ancestral homeland that is part business and part pleasure.
The business is a serious one: celebrating -- and tacitly bolstering -- the Good Friday agreement signed 25 years ago this week that helped end "The Troubles" that had made Northern Ireland a bloody battleground for a generation.
President Bill Clinton was the straw that stirred the drink, in Reggie Jackson's famous self-description, but as John F. Kennedy liked to say, victory has 100 fathers, but defeat is an orphan. You might say that the peace process in Northern Ireland was started by former California governor Jerry Brown, running for president in 1992. At a dinner of Irish American Democrats in the run-up to the New York primary, Brown, a former seminarian (and descendant of a County Tipperary clan), announced that if elected president, he'd appoint a special envoy to Northern Ireland, investigate "human rights abuses" by British soldiers, and issue a visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to visit the United States.
Although Bill Clinton's claimed Irish roots range from tenuous to nonexistent, as a politician he was as savvy as Edmund Burke (mother from County Cork). Clinton's response to Brown's gambit was to say, "Me, too." And since Clinton, not Brown, became the 42nd U.S. president, it was Bill Clinton who followed through, inviting not just Gerry Adams to visit the White House, but a raft of politicians from Northern Ireland, Protestant and Catholic.
This was the start of the peace process. It took five years to come to fruition, but as it happened, Clinton (and Brown) had willing partners across the Atlantic. The Troubles had claimed 3,000 Irish lives by that point, roughly half from each community. Blessed are the peacemakers, as we say at this time of year, and those who worked to end the violence included two successive British prime ministers, John Major and Tony Blair, Northern Ireland statesmen John Hume and David Trimble, in addition to various other players, including Clinton-selected special envoy George Mitchell.
The negotiations produced fruit in the spring of 1998, with President Clinton himself closing the deal with marathon telephone negotiations. The pact they signed didn't solve the impasse completely, but it created a framework of mutual trust -- not to mention a cease-fire that has held, mostly, for 25 years. Differences remain, of course. The two old adversaries don't even call the truce by the same name. The pro-British Loyalists refer to it as the Belfast Agreement. The Nationalist side prefers the phrase "Good Friday Agreement." The operative word, however, is agreement, as President Biden will emphasize during his visit.
Bill Clinton visited Ireland three times as president, and for different reasons each time. In his first sojourn, the 1995 trip that set the stage for what was to come, he shared a stage with the great statesman John Hume at a largely -- but not exclusively -- Catholic throng at Guildhall Square in Derry. When the man from Hope was introduced, the audience began chanting, "Bull! Bull! Bull!"
Perplexed, Clinton turned to Hume on the dais.
"Why are they saying that?' he asked.
Hume, familiar with the local dialect, smiled and replied, "They are saying your name." They were saying, "Bill! Bill! Bill!"
When the stalemate was finally broken in 1998, British and Irish leaders gave Clinton much of the credit. "If I played a positive role," Clinton responded with uncharacteristic modesty at an emotional White House ceremony, "I'm grateful to have had the chance to do so."
Fast forward to today. The part of his Irish trip that Biden is most anticipating will be the non-heavy lifting portion: i.e., the sentimental trip to Republic of Ireland, the land of his roots. There, Biden's propensity for blarney will be welcome -- as it has been for previous American presidents.
As my good friend George Condon wrote in National Journal this week (that might be behind a paywall; if so, I apologize), Joe Biden is the most overtly proud Irish American president since John F. Kennedy. Proud of being Irish is what George means.
JFK was not only Irish American on both sides of his family, he was also the first U.S. president who was Roman Catholic. Biden is the second. Our current president quotes Irish poets Seamus Heaney and William Butler Yeats and occasionally, as the New York Times pointed out this morning, his Irish great-grandfather Edward Francis Blewitt. "Being Irish," Biden has said, "has shaped my entire life."
Tens of millions of Americans claim Irish heritage, some more than others, and many (whether they know it or not) are descended from Irish Protestants. That distinction hasn't meant as much on this side of the ocean as it did over there, and that's not all due to President Kennedy.
The first American president to visit Ireland wasn't Catholic, and he wasn't still president, but Ulysses S. Grant cut to the heart of the matter. Grant had led many thousands of Ireland-born troops during the Civil War and was proud of their performance in the field and their sacrifice to their adopted country. He mentioned this often during his trip to Ireland. Grant also foreshadowed the future of Irish American politics while addressing a Dublin crowd in early January 1879.
"I am by birth," he noted, "a citizen of a country where there are more Irishmen, either native born or the descendants of Irishmen, than there are in all of Ireland."
John F. Kennedy made his reverse pilgrimage June 1963, a visit that is still talked about six decades later. Through the prism of modern Ireland, it's difficult to imagine the galvanizing effect this visit had on the Irish. It had a similar impact on the young American president. The trip, noted the Cork Examiner, was "a union of hearts."
Kennedy's trusted Boston political aide Kenny O'Donnell had told the president that he already had all the Irish-American votes he was ever going to get and that the Ireland sojourn would be dismissed as "a pleasure trip."
"That's exactly what I want," Kennedy replied. In "One of Ourselves: John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Ireland," another friend of mine, James R. Carroll, explains why this was good for both sides. "[U]nderlying all the analysis about historical turning point, global status, economics and policy was a simple obvious fact," Carroll wrote. "John Fitzgerald Kennedy touched a nation, and it touched him."
Political magic is hard to conjure up on command, but other presidents dutifully tried. Richard Nixon went to County Mayo, where his wife's people had come from, a visit that is scarcely remembered. Ronald Reagan paid homage to his heritage in a village named Ballyporeen, home of a great-grandfather named Michael Regan.
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all subsequently made the trek. White House aides and political well-wishers of good intent would invariably attempt to find Irish blood in these men. Some of these efforts at tracing lineage were more dubious than others, but the spirit of the exercise was the important thing.
"I didn't know much about my family background -- not because of a lack of interest, but because my father was orphaned before he was 6 years old," President Reagan told the crowd in Ballyporeen. "Now, thanks to you and the efforts of good people who have dug into the history of a poor immigrant family, I know at last whence I came. And this has given my soul a new contentment. And it is a joyous feeling. It is like coming home after a long journey."
