ON January 4th, 1965, in a memo to Mr Charles Haughey, the minister for agriculture and a member of the Irish committee to raise money for the (John F) Kennedy Memorial Fund in Boston, the Taoiseach, Mr Sean Lemass, directed that money he had received for a newspaper article be sent to the fund.
"I have decided the Kennedy Memorial Fund should benefit from this one," Mr Lemass wrote. The amount, £26/Ss, was for an article in the Financial Times.
An American request for an interview with Mr Lemass in September 1965, giving "frank comments" about President Kennedy's "successes and failures" was followed by advice from an official in the Taoiseach's Department. He wrote: "I would strongly advise you to plan your interview carefully so that the questions would not be in the staccato fashion used by one or two of the Teilifis Eireann interviewers I heard recently."