Yesterday I posted “Ich Bin Ein Nazi Und Ich Bewundere Die Fuhrer” about JFK’s travelogues and letters which revealed that before WWII he praised Nazism and admired Hitler. That begs the question of how did JFK came by his favorable views of Nazism and Adolf Hitler?
JFK probably got his pro-Nazi views from Joseph P. Kennedy, his wealthy anti-Semitic father. There can be no doubt but that JFK’s father expressed his hatred of Jews and his views on Hitler and Nazism around the family dinner table and on many other occasions when his children were present.
Here is how Wikipedia describes the anti-Semitism of the elder Kennedy, a former ambassador to Britain:
According to Harvey Klemmer, who served as one of [Jseph P.] Kennedy's embassy aides, Kennedy habitually referred to Jews as "kikes or sheenies". Kennedy allegedly told Klemmer that "[some] individual Jews are all right, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch." When Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany and reported the pattern of vandalism and assaults on Jews by Nazis, Kennedy responded, "Well, they brought it on themselves."
On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the United Kingdom, in London, who claimed upon his return to Berlin that Kennedy had told him that "it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. [Kennedy] himself fully understood our Jewish policy." Kennedy's main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern that he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.
Kennedy had a close friendship with Nancy Astor. The correspondence between them is reportedly replete with anti-Semitic statements. As Edward Renehan notes:
__As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these "world problems" (Nancy's phrase).... Kennedy replied that he expected the "Jew media" in the United States to become a problem, that "Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles" were already making noises contrived to "set a match to the fuse of the world".
By August 1940, Kennedy worried that a third term as the President for Roosevelt would mean war. As Leamer reports, "Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews, and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon." Nevertheless, Kennedy supported Roosevelt's third term in return for Roosevelt's support of Joseph Kennedy, Jr., in the run for the Governor of Massachusetts in 1942. However, even during the darkest months of World War II, Kennedy remained "more wary of" prominent American Jews, such as Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, than he was of Hitler.
1 comment:
My aunt with who I had the strongest relationship was socially acquainted with the Kennedy family. It was her opinion that Joe Kennedy was essentially a pirate born 200 years too late and that the boys, with the exception of young Joe (who died during WWII) were all skirt-chasing reprobates. I don't recall she ever offered an opinion as to the genesis of Joe's anti-Semitism. Maybe he just believed the anti-Zionist drivel that was in common circulation among the American upper-class of the time.
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