LAURENT GUYÉNOT • JULY 10, 2021 • 101 COMMENTS
I have emphasized before that, although very different in character, John and Robert Kennedy may be seen, from the point of view of their historical significance, as one person killed twice. But it should be stressed that their unity was grounded in their filial piety. I learned from David Nasaw's biography, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (2012), that it was their father Joe who insisted that Jack name Bobby Attorney General, because "Jack needed someone in the cabinet in whom he had complete and absolute trust." Robert didn’t like the idea, arguing that "nepotism was a problem," and John was reluctant to pressure Bobby.
John and Robert shared a common horror of modern war, and that, too, was their father’s legacy. John was a genuine war hero decorated with the Navy and Marine Medal for "extremely heroic conduct." Yet on Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, as a young journalist covering the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco, he wrote in the Herald-American: "Any man who had risked his life for his country and seen his friends killed around him must inevitably wonder why this has happened to him and most important what good will it do. . . . it is not surprising that they should question the worth of their sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed."[2] When announcing his candidacy for Congress on April 22, 1946, JFK declared: "Above all, day and night, with every ounce of ingenuity and industry we possess, we must work for peace. We must not have another war."[3] Hugh Sidey, one of his journalist friends, wrote about him: "If I had to single out one element in Kennedy's life that more than anything else influenced his later leadership it would be a horror of war, a total revulsion over the terrible toll that modern war had taken on individuals, nations, and societies, and the even worse prospects in the nuclear age. . . . It ran even deeper than his considerable public rhetoric on the issue."[4] John once said to his friend Ben Bradlee that he believed that "the primary function of the president of the United States [was] to keep the country out of war."[5]
That was the conviction that had guided his father throughout his political life in Franklin Roosevelt's government, until his resignation in December 1940. As U.S. ambassador to London, Joe Kennedy wholeheartedly supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy of "appeasement" in 1938-39. He wanted peace as passionately as Churchill wanted war. "I am pro-peace, I pray, hope, and work for peace," Joe declared on his first return from London to the U.S. in December 1938.[6] For this, he ended in the wrong side of history, which Churchill took care to write himself.
The Stain of Appeasement
Like his father, President Kennedy was a determined peacemaker, and those in the Pentagon who wanted to push the U.S. into a third world war tried to destabilize him with insinuations that he was an appeaser like his father. On October 19, 1962, in the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Kennedy resolved to blockade Soviet shipments rather than bomb and invade Cuba, General Curtis LeMay scornfully told him, “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich . . . I just don't see any other solution except direct military intervention right now."[7]
The stain of his father's record as a Hitler-appeaser had followed John like a shadow. Although the press had not published it, it was no secret in the Pentagon and the CIA that the U.S. army had discovered in 1946, in Berlin's Foreign Office, reports about Joe's meetings with German ambassador von Ribbentrop and his successor von Dirksen, that said that Joe was Germany's "best friend" in London and "understood our Jewish policy completely."[8]
In a joint debate during the 1960 Democratic convention, Johnson had attacked John as being the son of a "Chamberlain umbrella man" who "thought Hitler was right."[9] During Kennedy's presidential campaign, the Israeli press worried that Kennedy's father "never loved the Jews and therefore there is a question about whether the father did not inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John's."[10] Abraham Feinberg recalls that when he invited Kennedy to his apartment to discuss his campaign funding with "all the leading Jews," one of them set the tone with this remark: "Jack, everybody knows the reputation of your father concerning Jews and Hitler. And everybody knows that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." Kennedy came back outraged from that meeting (but with the promise of $500,000).[11] When meeting the new president on May 30, 1961 in New York, Ben-Gurion could not help but see in him the son of a Hitler-appeaser. Feinberg (who arranged the meeting) recalls that "Ben-Gurion could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man [Joe Kennedy]."[12]
Is Joe’s bad reputation among Jews relevant to the assassination of his two sons? Many Jewish authors think it is. In his book The Kennedy Curse, purporting to explain "why tragedy has haunted America's first family for 150 years", Edward Klein links the "Kennedy curse" to Joe's anti-Semitism, citing a story "told in mystical Jewish circles" (perhaps made up by Klein) according to which, in "retaliation" to some remark Joe made to "Israel Jacobson, a poor Lubavitcher rabbi and six of his yeshiva students, who were fleeing the Nazis," "Rabbi Jacobson put a curse on Kennedy, damning him and all his male offspring to tragic fates."[13] Ronald Kessler, for his part, wrote a book titled, The Sins of the Father — a not so subtle allusion to Exodus 20:5: "I, Yahweh, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me." Naturally, for Kessler, Joe Kennedy's worst sin was that "he was a documented anti-Semite and an appeaser of Adolf Hitler" who "admired the Nazis."[14]
The "Kennedy curse" did run into the third generation and possibly the fourth, when John’s only son died in a suspicious plane accident on July 16, 1999, with his wife, possibly pregnant. Five days later, John Podhoretz, son of neoconservative luminary Norman Podhoretz, published in the New York Post an opinion piece titled "A Conversation in Hell" in which he imagined Satan speaking to Joe Kennedy in Hell. The devil rejoices at the idea of eternally torturing Joe for "saying all those nice things about Hitler," and brags of having caused the death of his grandson because, he says: "When I make a deal for a soul like yours, I need to season it before I'm ready to put it in the infernal oven." This hateful fantasy, which is reminding of the Talmud's depiction of Jesus in Hell, illustrates the devouring hatred of some Jewish intellectuals toward the Kennedys, and the root of that hatred in Joe Kennedy's effort to prevent the Second World War.[15]
Interestingly, Podhoretz's devil (or is it Yahweh?) accuses Kennedy of having done "everything you could to prevent Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany. Thousands of Jews died because of you." The truth is exactly the opposite. In 1938, the "Kennedy Plan", as the press called it, was to rescue German Jews. Since the U.S. government refused to open its borders to Jewish refugees, and since Great Britain strictly limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, Joe was urging the British government to open up its African colonies for temporary resettlement. "To facilitate the resettlement process," Nasaw writes, "Kennedy volunteered to Halifax that he 'thought that private sources in America might well contribute $100 or $200 million if any large scheme of land settlement could be proposed.'"[16] The plan was presented to Chamberlain just days after Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), and was supported by Jewish financier Bernard Baruch. But it angered the Zionists, who didn’t want to hear about any Jewish emigration except to Palestine, because, Ben-Gurion said, it "will endanger the existence of Zionism."[17] Therefore, today, the "Kennedy Plan" is reviled as a kind of "final solution to the Jewish question," and further proof that Joe was Israel's mortal enemy.[18]
Please go to The Unz Review to read the entire essay.
He decided to offer Bobby the number two position at the Defense Department and asked Clark Clifford, who was running his transition team, to go to New York to explain to [Joe] Kennedy, who had flown there after visiting Jackie and his new grandson in the hospital, why Bobby should not be named attorney general. Clifford agreed, though he thought it rather odd that the president-elect had asked "a third party to try to talk to his father about his brother." Clifford met Kennedy at Kennedy's apartment and presented his carefully rehearsed case against the appointment. "I was pleased with my presentation; it was, I thought, persuasive. When I had finished, Kennedy said, 'Thank you very much, Clark. I am so glad to have heard your views.' Then, pausing a moment, he said, 'I do want to leave you with one thought, however — one firm thought.' He paused again, and looked me straight in the eye. 'Bobby is going to be Attorney General. All of us have worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded I am going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack.' I would always," Clifford recalled years later, "remember the intense but matter-of-fact tone with which he had spoken — there was no rancor, no anger, no challenge." The father had spoken, and his sons, on this issue at least, were expected to obey.[1]Although there is no recorded statement to that effect, Joe probably envisioned that Robert could succeed Jack as president in 1968. And it is easy to imagine that, had John survived and been reelected in 1964, Robert, with John’s support and under his watch, could have inherited the White House. We may ponder what the world would be like today had there been Kennedys in the White House until 1976.
John and Robert shared a common horror of modern war, and that, too, was their father’s legacy. John was a genuine war hero decorated with the Navy and Marine Medal for "extremely heroic conduct." Yet on Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, as a young journalist covering the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco, he wrote in the Herald-American: "Any man who had risked his life for his country and seen his friends killed around him must inevitably wonder why this has happened to him and most important what good will it do. . . . it is not surprising that they should question the worth of their sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed."[2] When announcing his candidacy for Congress on April 22, 1946, JFK declared: "Above all, day and night, with every ounce of ingenuity and industry we possess, we must work for peace. We must not have another war."[3] Hugh Sidey, one of his journalist friends, wrote about him: "If I had to single out one element in Kennedy's life that more than anything else influenced his later leadership it would be a horror of war, a total revulsion over the terrible toll that modern war had taken on individuals, nations, and societies, and the even worse prospects in the nuclear age. . . . It ran even deeper than his considerable public rhetoric on the issue."[4] John once said to his friend Ben Bradlee that he believed that "the primary function of the president of the United States [was] to keep the country out of war."[5]
That was the conviction that had guided his father throughout his political life in Franklin Roosevelt's government, until his resignation in December 1940. As U.S. ambassador to London, Joe Kennedy wholeheartedly supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy of "appeasement" in 1938-39. He wanted peace as passionately as Churchill wanted war. "I am pro-peace, I pray, hope, and work for peace," Joe declared on his first return from London to the U.S. in December 1938.[6] For this, he ended in the wrong side of history, which Churchill took care to write himself.
The Stain of Appeasement
Like his father, President Kennedy was a determined peacemaker, and those in the Pentagon who wanted to push the U.S. into a third world war tried to destabilize him with insinuations that he was an appeaser like his father. On October 19, 1962, in the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Kennedy resolved to blockade Soviet shipments rather than bomb and invade Cuba, General Curtis LeMay scornfully told him, “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich . . . I just don't see any other solution except direct military intervention right now."[7]
The stain of his father's record as a Hitler-appeaser had followed John like a shadow. Although the press had not published it, it was no secret in the Pentagon and the CIA that the U.S. army had discovered in 1946, in Berlin's Foreign Office, reports about Joe's meetings with German ambassador von Ribbentrop and his successor von Dirksen, that said that Joe was Germany's "best friend" in London and "understood our Jewish policy completely."[8]
Ambassadors Joseph P. Kennedy and Joachim von Ribbentrop
In a joint debate during the 1960 Democratic convention, Johnson had attacked John as being the son of a "Chamberlain umbrella man" who "thought Hitler was right."[9] During Kennedy's presidential campaign, the Israeli press worried that Kennedy's father "never loved the Jews and therefore there is a question about whether the father did not inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John's."[10] Abraham Feinberg recalls that when he invited Kennedy to his apartment to discuss his campaign funding with "all the leading Jews," one of them set the tone with this remark: "Jack, everybody knows the reputation of your father concerning Jews and Hitler. And everybody knows that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." Kennedy came back outraged from that meeting (but with the promise of $500,000).[11] When meeting the new president on May 30, 1961 in New York, Ben-Gurion could not help but see in him the son of a Hitler-appeaser. Feinberg (who arranged the meeting) recalls that "Ben-Gurion could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man [Joe Kennedy]."[12]
Is Joe’s bad reputation among Jews relevant to the assassination of his two sons? Many Jewish authors think it is. In his book The Kennedy Curse, purporting to explain "why tragedy has haunted America's first family for 150 years", Edward Klein links the "Kennedy curse" to Joe's anti-Semitism, citing a story "told in mystical Jewish circles" (perhaps made up by Klein) according to which, in "retaliation" to some remark Joe made to "Israel Jacobson, a poor Lubavitcher rabbi and six of his yeshiva students, who were fleeing the Nazis," "Rabbi Jacobson put a curse on Kennedy, damning him and all his male offspring to tragic fates."[13] Ronald Kessler, for his part, wrote a book titled, The Sins of the Father — a not so subtle allusion to Exodus 20:5: "I, Yahweh, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me." Naturally, for Kessler, Joe Kennedy's worst sin was that "he was a documented anti-Semite and an appeaser of Adolf Hitler" who "admired the Nazis."[14]
Interestingly, Podhoretz's devil (or is it Yahweh?) accuses Kennedy of having done "everything you could to prevent Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany. Thousands of Jews died because of you." The truth is exactly the opposite. In 1938, the "Kennedy Plan", as the press called it, was to rescue German Jews. Since the U.S. government refused to open its borders to Jewish refugees, and since Great Britain strictly limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, Joe was urging the British government to open up its African colonies for temporary resettlement. "To facilitate the resettlement process," Nasaw writes, "Kennedy volunteered to Halifax that he 'thought that private sources in America might well contribute $100 or $200 million if any large scheme of land settlement could be proposed.'"[16] The plan was presented to Chamberlain just days after Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), and was supported by Jewish financier Bernard Baruch. But it angered the Zionists, who didn’t want to hear about any Jewish emigration except to Palestine, because, Ben-Gurion said, it "will endanger the existence of Zionism."[17] Therefore, today, the "Kennedy Plan" is reviled as a kind of "final solution to the Jewish question," and further proof that Joe was Israel's mortal enemy.[18]
Please go to The Unz Review to read the entire essay.
________
Israel today:
Israel today:
Making of political enemies while making peace:
Jospeh P. Kennedy when he was the US Ambassador to Britain:
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