Fifty-five years ago today, while speaking to Ireland’s Parliament during a historic trip to his ancestral home, President John F. Kennedy charmed his hosts by quoting one of that lovely island’s famous playwrights.

“This is an extraordinary country,” JFK said, then added, “George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life: Other people, he said, see things and say: ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were, and I say: ‘Why not?’”

It’s unclear whether George Bernard Shaw was truly “speaking as an Irishman” when he wrote the lines cited by President Kennedy in Dublin. (They come from Shaw’s post-World War I collection of plays, “Back to Methuselah.”) That said, Shaw’s prescience was impressive: Three years before the killing of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand ignited war in Europe, he wrote, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”

As it happened, the Kennedys would prove a difficult clan to censor, even in the face of tragedy.

After JFK was slain on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Robert Kennedy turned the throwaway line his brother uttered in Dublin into a brief prose-poem that inspired a generation of men and women from Los Angeles to South Africa. On June 8, 1968, Edward M. Kennedy turned it into Bobby’s epitaph.

Whether they were Democrats, Republicans or Independents, on that sad Saturday when Robert F. Kennedy was laid to rest, Ted Kennedy’s fellow Americans couldn’t help but feel pangs of empathy as they watched him speak at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. His voice cracking with emotion, Teddy ended his elegy this way:

“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. To be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

"Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

"‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.’”

But all that lay ahead, albeit only five years in the future, on this date in 1963, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy addressed a joint session of Parliament in Dublin’s Leinster House. “This elegant building, as you know, was once the property of the Fitzgerald family,” he deadpanned, “but I have not come here to claim it.”

Kennedy had opened his remarks by regaling the Irish lawmakers with tales of the Irish Brigade, a storied U.S. Army unit that helped the North win the Civil War at places familiar to Americans, and which rattled off the president’s tongue in Dublin: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Antietam, Gettysburg.

Glancing at New York-born Irish President Eamon De Valera, Kennedy continued:

“I am deeply honored to be your guest in the Free Parliament of a free Ireland. If this nation had achieved its present political and economic stature a century or so ago, my great-grandfather might never have left … and I might, if fortunate, be sitting down there with you. Of course, if your own president had never left Brooklyn, he might be standing up here instead of me!”

Most U.S. presidents know how to be charming, especially when visiting Ireland -- and most especially if they themselves are of Irish extraction -- and Jack Kennedy was a charmer even under less circumstances. All that is by way of saying that winning over the Irish people was not a heavy lift for JFK. It is also undeniable, however, that the inverse was true: Kennedy was deeply moved by his experiences there, as he revealed at his last stop, in Limerick.

“So I carry with me, as I go, the warmest sentiments of appreciation to all of you,” he told the crowd. “This is a great country, with a great people, and I know that when I am back in Washington, while I will not see you, I will see you in my mind and feel all of your good wishes, as we all will, in our hearts.

“Last night, somebody sang a song, the words of which I am sure you know,” Kennedy then recalled before reciting one of the verses:

Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourneen

Come back around to the land of thy birth.

Come with the Shamrock in the springtime, Mavourneen.

“This is not the land of my birth,” John F. Kennedy told the people of Ireland on June 29, 1963, “but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection and I certainly will come back in the springtime.”