On the night of Feb. 3, 1919, using handmade socks to quiet his footsteps and relying on a defective flashlight signal from a lookout beyond the prison walls, de Valera and accomplices Seán McGarry and Seán Milroy — the latter had drawn the key cartoons — opened the door in the exercise yard wall and walked out of Lincoln Prison.
Their escape almost hadn’t worked: The key they had made broke apart inside the lock of the final perimeter door, but de Valera was able to push the door open.
Avoiding a group of soldiers who were out for the evening with nurses from Lincoln Christ’s Hospital School, the trio entered the Adam and Eve pub. They then moved through organized safe houses using taxis, eventually reaching Manchester.
After a week-long manhunt by the British, de Valera and his accomplices were smuggled into Ireland on a ship sailing from Liverpool.
The following April, de Valera was elected president of Dáil Éireann, the first revolutionary parliament of the Irish Republic.
De Valera traveled to America to secure support and funds for his party’s cause of independence, speaking to crowds in Boston, as well as to 1,200 students at the University of Notre Dame’s Washington Hall, an event he described as “the happiest day since coming to America.”
He would go on to serve as Ireland’s taoiseach (prime minister) and minister for external affairs from 1937 to 1948. He was taoiseach again from 1951 to 1954, and from 1957 to 1959. He was president of Ireland from 1959 to 1973.
He died at the age of 92 on Aug. 29, 1975, with the distinction of having been the oldest head of state in the world.
De Valera’s legacy would be cemented in global popular culture when he was portrayed by Alan Rickman in the 1996 film “Michael Collins,” a dramatized account of the prominent Republican who had helped engineer de Valera’s escape. But he was first adopted as a sort of American icon more than 30 years earlier.
In 1964, de Valera was invited to the White House to meet with President Lyndon B. Johnson. The two statesmen — one a Democrat, one a staunch Republican — greeted each other on the South Lawn. After telling de Valera how much he had been admired by the late John F. Kennedy, Johnson proclaimed: “This is the country of your birth, Mr. President. This will always be your home. You belong to us.”