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155 9 CATHOLICS AND THE SUPREME COURT From the“Catholic Seat”to the New Majority Barbara A. Perry In june 1963 President John F. Kennedy made a sentimental pilgrimage to Ireland, the land from which his family was only three generations removed. JFK, not noted for the public emoting that is seen with annoying frequency from our politicians in the twenty-first century, told a gathering in Limerick, “So I carry with me as I go the warmest sentiments of appreciation toward all of you. This is a great country, with a great people, and I know when I am back in Washington I . . . will not see you, but I will see you in my mind and feel all of your good wishes, as we all will in our hearts.”1 Bidding farewell to the crowds that turned out to say good-bye to the youthful Irish American president at Shannon Airport, he again waxed nostalgic:“What gives me the greatest satisfaction and pride, being of Irish descent, is the realization that even today this very small island sends thousands . . . of its sons and daughters to the ends of the globe to carry on an historic task, which Ireland assumed 1,400 or 1,500 years ago.”2 The president then took out a slip of paper on which he had scrawled a verse, quoted to him the previous evening by the wife of Irish president and national hero Eamon De Valera, because JFK thought the words were “so beautiful”: ’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.3 Turning to the throngs one last time, he promised, “Well, I am going to come back and see old Shannon’s face again, and I am taking, as I go back to America, all of you with me.”4 Earlier in his trip through the Emerald Isle, he had paraphrased an old Irish ballad, vowing “I shall come back in the springtime.”5 He never returned, falling victim to an assassin’s bullets just five months later. Two days after the president’s murder, the Irish writer Frank O’Connor wrote of JFK’s importance to his compatriots: “John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a miracle. In three different ways he broke through age-old American prejudices against Catholics, against Irishmen and against intellectuals, and you have to have lived in America to realize how strong these prejudices are. Eleven years ago [1952], in the bar of an exclusive Boston club, an old Bostonian said to me: ‘Do you know, you’re the first educated Irishman I’ve ever met?’”6 The Irish author, playwright, and poet had been so proud to hear the night before Kennedy died that the president had quoted him in a San Antonio speech describing America’s goal to put a man on the moon within the decade. The novelist, JFK noted, had written of the Irish parable about embracing the challenge of climbing a high wall by tossing one’s cap over it. O’Connor observed in his elegiac tribute that President Kennedy “was not the man to be afraid of quoting some Irish writer, whom most of his audience had never heard of. He was leading the Irish out of a ghetto of humiliation and pretense and telling them that they were a people with a history and literature as good as the best.”From triumph to tragedy, O’Connor heard on one night that the president of the United States was quoting him and the next evening that he was dead. “I wept,” the novelist reported, “partly for ourselves, who have lost a man that represented not only his own country but ours.”7 In addition to the emerald thread that ties the Kennedy clan together and links it to the Irish wherever they may have settled, the remarkable story of JFK’s ascent to the presidency is inextricably bound to the role of immigration, religion, and ethnicity in American politics. This fascinating mixture also played an identifiable role in appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court from the latter part of the nineteenth century until President Kennedy’s election, which signaled that Catholics had made their way into the mainstream of American politics. Until that time, presidents had felt the political need to reach out to religious minorities...

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