Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Lawrence Ukenye. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren Some 60 years ago this week, President JOHN F. KENNEDY wrapped up an emotion-soaked visit to Ireland by reciting a poem to an adoring crowd along the Shannon River told to him the night before by the wife of the country’s president. ’Tis it is the Shannon’s brightly glancing stream, Brightly gleaming, silent in the morning beam, Oh, the sight entrancing, Thus returns from travels long, Years of exile, years of pain, To see old Shannon’s face again, O’er the waters dancing. Clearly moved after four days traveling across his ancestral homeland, Kennedy parted with a promise that would go unfulfilled: “I am going to come back and see old Shannon again,” he said. “And I am taking, as I go back to America, all of you with me.” Kennedy would be assassinated five months later after 1,036 days in office. He's one of 23 American presidents with Irish roots and one of nine, including JOE BIDEN just two months ago, to visit Ireland. But his visit, which came just 15 years after the founding of the Irish Republic, was the first by a president who was fully Irish, and Roman Catholic to boot. “They saw him as one of their own, and the visit so soon after the Republic was founded was a significant moment” said STEWART MCLAURIN, president of the White House Historical Association, who is spending the week retracing Kennedy’s Ireland trip on its 60th anniversary, partly in conjunction with officials from the Kennedy Foundation. Former first lady JACQUELINE KENNEDY later said the four days her husband spent in Ireland were “the happiest days of his life.” And many Irish who saw the young president retain vivid memories of it. They consider the event a significant one in their nation’s history and individual lives. “I’ve been told so many times on this trip that people have grandparents still who have a picture of the pope and John Kennedy in their living room on their mantle,” McLaurin told West Wing Playbook on Thursday ahead of the culminating event of his trip, a ceremonial dinner with the U.S. Ambassador CLAIRE CRONIN. In recent days, McLaurin visited Leinster House, where Kennedy addressed the joint houses of the Oireachtas, the first time a foreign head of state had done so. One gift Kennedy bestowed to the Irish on his trip, an 1862 battle flag from an Irish regiment that fought for the Union in the Civil War, is housed there, treated, McLaurin said, “like we treat the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives.” McLaurin also traveled to New Ross, the Kennedy family’s home town in County Wexford, south of Dublin. At a commemoration of the former president’s visit were roughly a dozen people, now in their 70s, who were young students at Ballykelly National School when Kennedy came. Two men, who as boys ran into a field to greet Kennedy’s landing helicopter, showed McLaurin a photo of them as kids on that day, holding an American flag. “They were so proud of that,” McLaurin said. “The enthusiasm on their faces, it was as if someone from their hometown had gone off and become president of the United States. With their difficult times their great grandparents went through, they never thought they would come back to Ireland when they left. And they never imagined a grandchild would return as president of the United States.”
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