A number of highly significant Irishmen died violently in 1916 – Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, James Connolly and their associates to name but a few who were shot in May. Pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington had been summarily executed during the Rising. His brother in law Tom Kettle, barrister, poet and former MP followed them all in September when he died at the Battle of Ginchy on the Western front.

In between, another famous Irishman came to an unfortunate end. However not many people realise that Herbert, Lord Kitchener, hero of Omdurman, scourge of the Boers and Secretary of State for War in the British Cabinet was actually Irish. It was not something he tended to highlight himself.

But he was, in fact, as much a Kerryman as Mick O’Dwyer or John B.Keane. He was born Horatio Herbert Kitchener on 24 June 1850 in Ballylongford, near Listowel. His father, Lt.Col. Henry Horatio Kitchener, had purchased land under the terms of the Encumbered Estates Act designed to buy out bankrupt property owners after the Famine – so a sort of 19^th century NAMA.

Kitchener left Kerry at the age of fourteen when the family moved to Switzerland for the health of his ailing mother. The future war lord nurtured a similar attitude to his native land as had that other great 19^th century military figure, the Duke of Wellington, who allegedly observed of his Irish birth that, ‘being born in a stable does not make one a horse’. His dislike of the Irish, of course, did not stop Kitchener, like a lot of other Anglo-Irish grandees with a minimal knowledge of the country of their birth, from claiming to have an informed insight into how the country should be governed. Kitchener was for lots of stick and very little carrot.

Not that his counsel on the subject would have been widely canvassed. Kitchener made his reputation in faraway wars, starting with the Sudan and his victory at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. There he showed his compassionate side by digging up the remains of the Mahdi, slayer of General Gordon in the 1880s humiliation of Khartoum, and having his bones scattered. Even Winston Churchill, not renowned for his squeamishness, who was covering the war as a reporter, was disgusted with the slaughter of, in particular, Sudanese prisoners.

The de facto Kerryman also made his presence felt in the Boer War where his scorched earth policy and his creation of concentration camps brought the Boers to their knees in the most ruthless possible fashion. Kitchener didn’t have much time for uppity colonials.

When WW1 broke out Kitchener was quickly appointed Secretary of State for War and his iconic moustache and index finger were used as recruiting devices on the famous ‘Your country needs you’ posters.’

In a final gesture of solidarity with his native land Kitchener refused all requests for the incorporation of the southern Irish Volunteers as a unit into his New Army, despite the passage of the Home Rule act before hostilities commenced. The Ulster Volunteers however, signatories of a covenant pledging opposition to a democratic decision taken by the British parliament, became the 36^th Ulster division. Consistency to Kitchener was as dangerous a vice as sentimentality.

Kitchener, who harboured a pathological hatred of journalists probably owed his appointment to the Cabinet in 1914 to a newspaper campaign designed to force the Liberal government to put this crusty old Tory in charge of the Army and Navy. Having created him the newspapers of the Press Baron Lord Northcliffe, the Dublin born Alfred Harmsworth from Chapelizod, sought to undo their own handiwork when they campaigned against him in 1915, blaming the Secretary of State for War for a chronic shortage of shells on the western front. The public sided with the most famous moustache in history and burned copies of the Times and Mail in the streets.

In June 1916 Kitchener set sail for talks in Russia on board the HMS Hampshire. The ship hit a German mine and sank, taking the Secretary of State for War with it. The reluctant Kerryman died 99 years ago, on this day.

It’s one of the most popular ‘what ifs’ of the last fifty years. ‘What if it had been raining on 22 November 1963 in Dallas?’

Obviously there would have been no Presidential open-top motorcade and Lee Harvey Oswald – or the Mafia, or the man on the grassy knoll, or the four French hired assassins from Marseilles, or whatever other conspiracy theory you subscribe to – would have been denied the opportunity to demonstrate his or their peerless marksmanship and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35^th President of the United States of America, would probably have seen out his first term and been re-elected in November 1964.

JFK was originally elected with just over 49% of the popular vote in the 1960 race for the White House with Richard Nixon. While in office his popularity rarely dipped below 60%. After the Cuban missile crisis his ratings were in the high 70s. In a poll of 1960 voters taken after his death 70% claimed to have chosen him as President.

Of course there’s another great ‘what if’ when it comes to the career of John F.Kennedy. What if his older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr, had survived World War 2? Would John F have become Bobby, his older sibling’s loyal Doberman, rather than Senator and President?

He was arguably, the first conscious political ‘brand’. With iconographers like Theodore Sorenson and Pierre Salinger cultivating and honing the Kennedy narrative he could hardly fail. Fifty years later he is a mythic figure. Myth=branding + time.

But the skein of myth is easily unravelled.

For example, he wasn’t even the youngest American president. When Theodore Roosevelt took over the office after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 he was nine months younger than Kennedy.

And his credentials as a supposed political progressive don’t stand up to too much examination. In 1957 he opposed Eisenhower’s civil rights legislation. He persisted, when in office, with the Democratic party practice of appointing dodgy judges to federal courts in the south. One such JFK appointee, a man called Harold Cox, once described African Americans as ‘chimpanzees’ after he had been elevated to the federal bench.

During his first term as a senator Kennedy teamed up with the darling of the Republican right, Barry Goldwater, to try and keep rock and roll music off American radio stations. He presided over the assassination of a supposed ally (and fellow Catholic) in Ngo Dinh Diem, beleaguered president of South Vietnam.

But he also achieved a lot of good in a very short life

Take just one month of his Presidency – June 1963. On June 10 this apparent cold war warrior made a major foreign policy speech at the American University in Washington DC. In a world dominated by ideas of mutually assured destruction he appeared to extend an olive branch to the Russians.

The following day, after Governor George Wallace of Alabama was forced by Federal intervention to, quite literally, step aside and allow two African American students pass into the campus of the University of Alabama, Kennedy made a largely improvised address on national radio and TV, promising equal access to public schools and enhanced voting rights, to African American citizens.

Then on 26 June he made his famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech (the ‘ein’ was superfluous) a short time after viewing the newly erected Berlin wall. Oh, yes, and, of course, he dropped into Ireland for four days on his way home.

Not a bad month’s work really.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35^th President of the USA, was born 98 years ago, on this day.