Donna is right, the Irish were never considered “non white” as such, they were discriminated against primarily because of their religion and that many Irish immigrants were poor and uneducated (if I remember correctly about the nativist riots in NYC, the earlier Irish immigrants were often Irish protestants or scotts Irish, and they resented the waves of later Irish immigrants who were Catholic).
It is telling that when in the 1920’s they passed the first immigration restrictions since the Asian exclusion acts, that it basically blocked immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, etc) to a very low quota, it was like 22,000 total from those regions combined, it basically did not limit immigration from Nothern Europe (what the law did was limit immigration to a percent of the population before 1890; by 1890 the Irish already had a lot of people here, as did people from Germany, England, and to a lesser extent Scandinavia, so their quote was much larger, basically pretty much allowed in anyone who wanted to come), and one of the reasons was people from Eastern and Southern Europe were considered non Anglo Saxon and didn’t have the work ethic and such of the ‘northern races’ (to use the writing of the time).
The difference was that post WWII, the Irish, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians and so forth, and even the Jews, became de facto white in the atititudes of most, the restrictions on living in some areas, the job discrimination that was one rampant, diminished and died off, before WWII for example if you were from such a background, companies like IBM and Bell Labs would likely not hire you, and if they did they certainly had ‘quotas’ (not too bright, someone pointed out to leaders of places like IBM and Bell Labs the accomplishments of people like Marconi and Enrico Fermi and the many Jewish scientists who had helped revolutionize physics and chemistry and such, and the response was “that is a different story”…)…post WWII it was very different…which is not true of blacks and hispanics and others, where lingering discrimination is still the norm, if more subtle than outright bans once were.
As far as Joseph Kennedy goes, the feelings against him were a combination of things, some of the repugnance was in how he amassed his wealth and also his major part of the machine politics dominated by Irish Catholics in Boston, much the same as in Tammany Hall was in NYC. I don’t know about him being a bootlegger, that one I have never been able to track down for veracity, but I do know for certain that Kennedy made a lot of money selling basically watered securities (Ie where they just kept issuing new stock shares, without adjusting the price of existing ones) or ones in companies that were basically a sham from the start to simply sell fictional stock, including reputedly somehow getting a list of the soldiers who died in WWI who would presumably get death benefits and selling crap stocks and bonds to the families of the deceased, which I haven’t been able to run down. I am sure being Irish and a Catholic also worked against him, but some of it was also the kind of person he was. (Put it this way, there was a reason Roosevelt put him in charge as the first head of the SEC, he basically told Kennedy he was a thief and a crook, and who better than someone who knew every scheme to head the agency regulating it…and supposedly when Kennedy balked, FDR told him it was either he head the SEC, and enforce the law, or go to jail under the new law).
As far as Kennedy getting in with that little essay, it was a different time, back then the kids going to the elite prep schools were almost guaranteed admissions to the ivy league schools, and remember that in that day, before the second world war, a college like Harvard was probably almost entirely filled up with full pay students (which obviously old Papa Joe could pay), there just wasn’t the kind of financial aid available back then. Sure, there were always ‘scholarship’ students from more modest backgrounds, who caught someone’s eye and ended up at the prep schools (sometimes because they were outstanding students, standouts, others because they were athletes) and then got a scholarship to harvard, but they were a small minority of the population, so if you were in some way in the ‘gentleman’s league’ ie the top prep schools, and daddy could pay full freight, there just wan’t the competition to the elite schools.