"Lost memoir" sheds light on former Taoiseach's views on JFK, America

In the Lemass family home in Co Wicklow, there is a box with the seal of the President of the United States on it. 

Inside is a collection of photographs taken from Seán Lemass’s visit to Washington DC in October 1963 to meet President John F Kennedy, a month before Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. 

Lemass’s 10-day trip to the United States was a reciprocal one following Kennedy’s historic visit to Ireland in June of that year, the first by a sitting American president. 

The photograph album was a private gift from Kennedy and is much cherished by the Lemass family. 

(Courtesy Lemass Family Archive)

The two visits in 1963 were highlights of Lemass’s time as Taoiseach between 1959 and 1966. Though he was only Taoiseach for seven years, his predecessor Éamon de Valera had effectively ceded all economic policy to Lemass on Fianna Fáil’s return to power in 1957. 

(Lemass Family Archive)

Lemass is commonly regarded as Ireland’s greatest Taoiseach, but it was assumed he had no interest in giving his own account of his own extraordinary life for posterity. He had not written a memoir or donated his papers to an institution. However, he had given 23 interviews to the businessman Dermot Ryan, consisting of 22 hours of recordings amounting to 270,000 words, which were not published in either man’s lifetime but are being published now.

These recordings amount to the most candid political memoir ever produced by a senior Irish politician. Lemass was famously blunt. When asked a straight question, he gave a straight answer. 

"Seán Lemass: The Lost Memoir," edited by Ronan McGreevy, is now available via Amazon.

In his time as Taoiseach, he met with two American presidents, Dwight D Eisenhower and Kennedy. “Each time I was very conscious of the fact that I was talking to the most powerful man in the world. Even if he was an idiot, he was still the most powerful man in the world and on his decisions rested the fate of mankind,” he told Ryan at a time when American presidents were generally thought of as sane. 

Eisenhower, he said, was a man who was not a natural politician and therefore a front-rank US president. However, “you could not help but like him. I met him again when he had ceased to be president and he still was the same very attractive personality to whom you were drawn immediately; there was a warmth there.

“He was not an aggressive protagonist of any particular point of view and this helped to draw people towards him.” 

His portrait of Kennedy is very telling. He liked him, but saw him as somebody who had cultivated a carefully managed façade.

“Kennedy also had charm and was a strongly attractive personality. I always felt, however, that he had a motive for everything he did. There was a certain noticeable reservation in his attitude, a mind working away behind the outward facade of the charming personality. 

“One could detect that his mind was working but one could not know what it was producing. Kennedy’s eyes were the most striking, they were almost expressionless; even when he was joking or laughing, he was coldly calculating the effect he was having on listeners.” 

Nevertheless, he got on well with Kennedy and believed he would have gone on to have become a great president, both because of his capacity to analyse and deal with problems and his brilliance as a communicator. 

"Seán Lemass: The Lost Memoir" covers Lemass’s time as a politician from 1923 to his resignation in 1966. Lemass was famously reticent about his time during the Irish revolution, though I have added a chapter about his early years with new information not previously available to his biographers, including the revelations that he accidentally shot his baby brother Herbert dead in 1916. 

One of the few times Lemass mentions the Easter Rising in the book is in his recall of Kennedy visiting the graves of the executed leaders of the Rising in Arbour Hill. 

“I must confess I got a tremendous personal satisfaction when he, the president of the United States, laid the wreath on the graves at Arbour Hill. He was the first president or head of state to do this. 

“Since then, there have been several others, but you would have had to be alive in 1916 to realise the real significance of this event – the head of the greatest state in the world coming to pay honour and respect to the men who had been shot at that time.” 

June 28, 1963: President John F. Kennedy (center) attends a wreath laying ceremony at the Arbour Hill Cemetery in Dublin, Ireland; Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, Seán Lemass, walks beside President Kennedy. Also pictured: Air Force Aide to the President, Brigadier General Godfrey T. McHugh; Minister for External Affairs of Ireland, Frank Aiken; U.S. Chief of Protocol, Angier Biddle Duke; and Ambassador to Ireland, Matthew H. McCloskey (all walking behind the President). (Public Domain / Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Lemass was extraordinarily prescient that Europe’s dependence on the US security umbrella could lead to problems in the future. Ireland, he stressed, was militarily unaligned, not neutral. In any confrontation between “East and West, we will be on the side of the West. Ireland will side with democracy against any socialist or totalitarian system. But we consider we could give more service to the West outside a formal alliance.

“Once we are in the area of common political policies, we must have a common defence policy. I, personally, would not at all disagree with de Gaulle that Europe must be capable of an independent defence, if this is feasible, because there is a great deal of sense in his contention that when the chips are down, America would not commit suicide for the sake of Europe.” 

Though Lemass sought and achieved good relations with the United States, his government adopted an independent foreign policy, which frequently riled the State Department. In 1957, Ireland agreed to support the entry of China into the United Nations, much to the chagrin of the Americans who had just fought the Korean War and were adamant that Communist China could not be allowed to join the UN. The decision incurred the wrath of the Irish-American head of American Catholicism, Francis Spellman, who warned he would ‘raise the devil’ because of that decision. 

Lemass backed the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Frank Aiken, in his stance at the UN on the issue. “I was quite certain we were right; I felt the role we had to play in the United Nations and similar organisations was to get rid of all the false conceptions prevalent at that time, which meant that a small country could attend the United Nations while a quarter of the world’s population was not allowed representation.” 

"Seán Lemass: The Lost Memoir," edited by Ronan McGreevy, is published by Ériu Press, priced at $40 on Amazon.