Vietnam War wounds run deep for Irish American community in New York

Francis Cardinal Spellman.

Brooklyn native and Vietnam vet John Flanagan identifies himself proudly as “the fifth child of first generation Irish.” And like many Irish Americans born after World War II, Flanagan felt a strong sense of American patriotism.

“I was very happy to be an American and I understood what it meant,” he says.  “Of course, growing up Catholic, every morning we said the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer; I mean, that’s just the way it is.

“You waved flags, you went to parades, you were proud to see your uncles marching in the Veterans Day parades, and that…patriotism in there.”

That’s one reason Flanagan went off to fight in Vietnam, as he explains it in a fascinating new book called Bringing it All Back Home: An Oral History of New York City’s Vietnam Veterans by Philip F. Napoli.

This book comes just as efforts are afoot on both sides of the Atlantic to remember the Irish role in the Vietnam War.  Earlier this month, officials in Ennis, Co. Clare, began commissioning ideas to create a town memorial to 29 Irish-born people who died while serving during the Vietnam conflict.

“The venture, organized with the Irish Vietnam Veterans Memorial Project headed by American Matthew Carroll, will cost €130,000, but funds will be raised privately,” Irish Independent reporter Graham Clifford writes.

“In June 1998, I visited the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington and was shocked to see so many Irish names in the black marble –- Murphy, O'Reilly, McCarthy, O'Callaghan and Gallagher.”

Indeed, thousands of working class Irish Americans joined the fight for a variety of reasons -- often, simply, because they’d been drafted.

And that’s where things get messy.  Commemorating the service of Irish and Irish American soldiers also requires that we recall this was not only one of the most divisive moments in American history, but particularly in Irish American history.

On one side were Irish Catholics who came of age during World War II and the Cold War 1950s.  This was the era when it appeared the Irish could finally feel comfortable in America. 

Instead of being viewed as suspicious, Irish Catholics were patriotic and proudly anti-Communist – for better or worse.

“Some were attracted to Republican Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s,” Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher write in their book The New York Irish.  The infamous red-baiting senator “found a ready audience among many Irish New Yorkers.”

Indeed, McCarthy received lusty cheers when he was embraced by Francis Cardinal Spellman at an NYPD Holy Name Society breakfast in 1953.

So, as the Vietnam era dawned in the early 1960s, many Irish Americans – lifelong members of the Democratic Party – were growing increasingly conservative.  (The historical joke goes that the Irish finally had something to conserve.)  


So, when the war heated up, many Irish Americans felt a particularly acute kind of patriotism.  Their adopted country was finally treating them well, and many knew people who were serving on the front lines. Therefore, many Irish Americans had little use for the anti-war movement.

Their leader, in many ways, was the aforementioned New York Archbishop Cardinal Spellman, a fierce anti-Communist who had little use for the counterculture – just like many of the patriotic, blue collar Irish Americans who filled the pews of parishes across the boroughs of New York.

And yet, as the war continued to take a harsh toll on the Irish American community, some argued that the Irish should oppose the war.  They were, after all, familiar with the costs of war and colonialism. 

Others, such as the radical priest Berrigan brothers, argued that their Catholic faith also should compel Irish Americans to oppose the war.

In the end, families would be torn apart.  James Carroll vividly captured these Irish American tensions in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War That Came Between Us.

When the Vietnam memorial is erected in Clare, we must recall those who made the ultimate sacrifice.  But we should also pause to recall the broader toll the Vietnam War took on Irish America.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan.blogspot.com)

Remembering Morton Downey, Jr, the father of trash TV

Morton Downey, Jr

The year is 1988.  Probably.  I’m getting older and the past is getting a little hazier. 

All I know is I joined a bunch of excited friends and piled into a car and headed off to New Jersey.  Were we going to a rock concert at the old Brendan Byrne Arena?  A football game at Giants Stadium?

Nope.  We were going to lovely Secaucus to see a taping of The Morton Downey Jr. TV show.  Which was always more wild and loud than any rock concert or football game.

It’s easy to forget what a rock star Morton Downey Jr. was, if only briefly.  We look at trash TV like Springer or Maury, or theatrical political commentators like Glenn Back, and assume this has always been with us.

Nope.  Morton Downey Jr. deserves the credit – or blame.

A new movie is currently opening up across the country entitled Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie.  The documentary explores Downey’s coming of age – his father was one of the most famous Irish tenors of his generation – and culminates with the short-lived, hugely-influential syndicated TV talk show that bore his name.

Evocateur offers an opportunity to look back at Downey’s complicated life and legacy.  He had a distinctly Irish struggle with his father, and worked for Irish American political legend Bobby Kennedy.  Downey even tapped into the Reagan-era right-wing populism that was appealing to many working- and middle-class Irish Americans.

Yeah, there’s all of that.  But mainly there’s that talk show.  That unforgettable talk show.
He was born Sean Morton Downey Jr. in New York City in 1932.  His father was a tremendously popular singer in the 1930s and 1940s, often referred to as “The Irish Nightingale.” 

Downey Sr. also appeared on television and in movies.  As a songwriter, one of his many hits was “That’s How I Spell Ireland.”

So, Morton Downey Jr. knew a thing or two about show business.  He himself had an accomplished musical career.  For decades, Downey was a radio and music industry performer, writing songs as well as singing them in a number of genres.

Then there was politics. The Downey family had a home in Hyannis, right next to the estate owned by Joseph P. Kennedy.  In fact, though he became a right-wing icon who despised “pabulum-puking liberals,” Downey Jr. worked on the 1968 Senate campaign of famously liberal Bobby Kennedy.

Downey even wrote a book of poetry entitled Quiet Thoughts Make the Loudest Noise to deal with the grief of Kennedy’s assassination (which, incidentally, occurred on June 6, 1968, 45 years ago last week).

But all was not well in the Downey clan.  Irish fathers and sons have famously difficult relationships and the Downeys were no exception. 

Morton Downey Jr. spent years trying to outdo his accomplished father, who died in 1985.  Around this time, having worked as a musician, radio DJ and political operative, Downey was working at a California radio station when he was fired for using allegedly racist language. (Rush Limbaugh replaced him.)

Downey, in his fifties, decided to head off to New Jersey to do a new kind of TV talk show.
These days we expect to see fights and chair-throwing on daytime TV.  But when The Morton Downey Jr. Show hit the airwaves it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. 

The late 1980s were a politically tense time and Downey dove in.  Always puffing on a cigarette, Downey won all the arguments because he shouted the loudest.  It was vile, offensive, ignorant -- and you could not stop watching!

Though raised a rich kid, Downey liked to come off as the defender of the blue collar common man sick and tired of egghead know-it-all elites. 

Anyone can be a demagogue.  For a year or two, Morton Downey Jr. was the best demagogue in America.

His fall was as swift and spectacular as his rise.  He claimed to have been assaulted by Nazi skinheads at a San Francisco airport in April 1989.  It seemed a ploy for attention. 

Producers of his show feared a backlash from critics and advertisers and the show was cancelled.  Downey went bankrupt in 1990 and died of lung cancer in 2001.

But every time you turn on the TV, Morton Downey Jr. is still with us.  For better or worse.

(Contact Sidewalks at tdeignan.blogspot.com)

Father Andrew Greeley’s powerful faith - remembering the larger than life Chicago priest

The late Father Andrew Greeley

The only thing harder than imagining a world without Father Andrew Greeley is traveling back in time - say, to around 1954 - and imagining a character such as Andrew Greeley.

That was the year Greeley became a priest.  Last week, just one year short of his 60th anniversary in the priesthood, Greeley died at the age of 85.

If a novelist had invented a character such as Greeley it would seem downright preposterous.

Greeley was born into a large Irish American family living outside of Chicago in 1928, just in time for the Great Depression. He went on to become a priest.  No big stretch there so far.

Greeley, however, would go on to become a writer and respected sociologist who made some bold claims about the nature of American Catholics and their church.

Oh, and he also wrote detective and romance novels.  Many with steamy sex scenes.  (The National Catholic Register once proclaimed that Greeley had "the dirtiest mind ever ordained.”  Which, by the way, turns out to be sadly untrue.  But that’s a separate story.)

When Greeley wasn’t spinning sex yarns, he was scolding church officials in language both colorful and blunt.

"Honesty compels me to say that I believe the present leadership in the church to be morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt,” Greeley said. 

And this was not in 2013, with all of the tarnish taken off of the church in the wake of the sex scandals.  This was in the mid-1970s, after Greeley completed a study of the American priesthood and reported that there was a high level of discontent among priests.

The bishops who commissioned the study did not seem interested in such findings.  So Greeley unloaded with both barrels.

One of Greeley’s obvious strengths was that he understood the church, its leaders and even its members were more than capable of absorbing such criticism.  Greeley had faith that the word of Christ would endure, even if certain members of the church acted terribly. 

Pointing that out, Greeley knew, would strengthen rather than weaken the church.


True, Greeley said things that some of the most ardent anti-Catholics might have muttered.  But Greeley knew as well as anyone the ferocity of opposition Catholics faced in the 19th and 20th centuries.  One of his earlier books, 1972’s The Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish, outlined the hard path to assimilation.

Greeley himself believed anti-Catholicism played a role when the University of Chicago denied him tenure, even though he’d already published over 10 books.

Of course, those who suggested that Greeley’s combative style might have played a role in his tenure denial were not necessarily wrong. 

What can’t be denied is that Greeley changed what we think about Irish Americans, American Catholics and -- perhaps most importantly -- priests.

Greeley’s book Irish Americans: The Rise to Money and Power upended many stereotypes established by America’s WASP elite regarding Irish Catholics.  Greeley’s argued that the Irish, thanks in large part to their connections to the Catholic Church, had become America’s most prosperous and educated ethnic group.

Numerous books and articles by Greeley -- way back in the 1960s and 1970s -- outlined what he saw as the widening gulf between Catholic Church officials and the people standing and kneeling in the pews.

Perhaps Greeley was most prescient on the sex abuse scandals.

As Peter Steinfels wrote in The New York Times, “Father Greeley had been an early and vehement advocate for victims of abusive priests at least since 1989, when he began writing articles in Chicago newspapers demanding that the church take action against pedophile priests.”

He was also an early donor to Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

In the end, whether the topic was sex or saints, Greeley was a storyteller. And he liked to point out that Jesus had so many followers because he, too, was a compelling storyteller.

“I suppose I have an Irish weakness for words gone wild,” Greeley once said.

The American Catholic Church has lost an iconoclast and a prophet.