WHERE were you when JFK was shot? Most people of a certain age can tell you what they were doing on November 22nd 1963, but one Belfast journalist has the mother of all Kennedy assassination stories. Earlier that year, Dennis Kennedy – no relation, as he says himself – was awarded a fellowship from the World Press Institute at St Paul, Minnesota. He was to spend a year in the US, along with 14 colleagues from all over the world, “getting to know America at first hand”.
As Kennedy recalls in his entertaining memoir, Yankee Doodles, it began modestly enough. There were interviews with such icons of American journalism as Henry Luce of Time magazine – who, on being informed that some of the visiting whipper-snappers disapproved of his august organ on the grounds that it was too right-wing and homogenised, declared: “Hell, I don’t give a damn what they think about Time, but come and have a drink”. There were industrial tours, including a memorable round of a lettuce “factory” in California. There were, of all things, piano lessons.
One lunch time in November, however, this down-home, apple-pie America exploded into a real humdinger of a breaking news story. Kennedy was on the phone to a girl in the female hall of residence, arranging a suitably demure social event, when she suddenly broke off the conversation. Then he heard her scream, “My God, they’ve shot the President”. She dropped the receiver; as it dangled on its cord, he could hear shouting and crying at the other end.
By the end of the day Kennedy and his colleagues were on a plane to Washington; next day he was in the White House, walking past the body of JFK in its closed, flag-draped coffin. The following spring he would walk in the White House rose garden with the new president Lyndon B Johnson.
It was heady stuff for a young hack, and it kickstarted Kennedy into a highly successful career. After a three-month placement at the Newark News he came home to work at the Belfast Telegraph. He moved to The Irish Times, where he worked as diplomatic correspondent, then European editor, before becoming a deputy editor of the paper. After that he worked at the European Commission, then as a lecturer at Queen’s University in Belfast.
But Kennedy kept in touch with several of the journalists from that memorable year in the US. Yankee Doodles was originally written to amuse his friends – a kind of diary, typed on sheets of hotel notepaper and illustrated with photographs and some cartoons by the Turkish journalist Orhan Duru. It was to honour their sense of fun and solidarity that, at the age of 77 – when he ought, by all reasonable reckoning, to be in quiet retirement – Kennedy reinvented himself as Ormeau Books in order to bring Yankee Doodles out as a proper, fully-fledged book.
He didn’t, he says, do it to make money – though he did want to mark the forthcoming 50th anniversary of the World Press Institute. “I thought it would be easy,” he says ruefully. “I had done several books while I was at Queen’s, and with almost all academic books now, the publisher requires the author to divide the text into chapters, and suggest headings and so forth. I had done that, and it was no problem.” Producing an entire book – with illustrations – turned out to be a whole different ball game. “I was swimming along quite nicely. And then I discovered that it was like working with a very able colleague who is incredibly intelligent, but also very pedantic and very short-tempered. I’m talking about my computer, now. Unless you said exactly what he thought you should say, he didn’t hear you. And when you treated his section break with less than respect he threw the cards up in the air and went in a total huff.
“So you’d discover that all the pages were neatly labelled ‘page 75’. Or that the chapter heading of the last chapter had suddenly been transferred to all the chapters throughout the book.”
After a major catastrophe where “pictures zoomed all over the place and the page numbers went bananas”, Kennedy enlisted the help of his son, an IT professional. “I sent him a disc. He didn’t find it easy, but he got it straight in the end.” The straight talk and self-deprecating humour is characteristic both of Kennedy’s writing and of the man himself. Despite the difficulties he would – indeed, he says, he will – do it all again. “After all, it turned me into a bookmaker,” he jokes. “And anyhow, in order to get an ISDN number you have to buy a minimum of 10 – they don’t sell them singly – and they cost over a fiver each. So I now have nine ISDN numbers awaiting a book.” Kennedy stresses in Yankee Doodles that he and his fellow journalists were not students; they were young men in their late 20s and early 30s, some of whom had given up jobs in order to take up the fellowship. But they were all journalists struggling to establish themselves in a print media world which, in those days, could be clannish and extremely difficult to break into.
Perhaps he remembered that when, while lecturing on journalism at Dublin City University, he encountered a “mature” student in her early thirties with two children, zero job prospects and – so Kennedy insisted - a talent for colour writing. It was for the latter that he brought me into The Irish Times on a two-month placement in the summer of 1985. I like to think I haven’t let him down. Yet.