#OnThisDay 1963 John Fitzgerald Kennedy the 35th President of the United States & WW2 veteran visited Ireland. He started with a visit to the ancestral home of his great grandfather in Dunganstown, Wexford. Though this was not his first time there, ‘sixteen years earlier, during a three-week trip to Ireland, Kennedy had visited the town’.
J.F.K. described his Irish trip as;
‘The best four days of my life‘.
‘Hours before he left Ireland, he stood in the main square of Galway city and told the crowd:
“If the day was clear enough, and if you went down to the bay, and you looked west, and your sight was good enough, you would see Boston, Massachusetts. Some of us who came on this trip… feel ourselves at home and not … in a strange country, but feel ourselves among neighbours, even though we are separated by generations, by time, and by thousands of miles.” ‘
Five months later John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas.
The Irish at War 