[liberallarry]

Partisan revisionism at its best. I always thought better of Hitchens - but I guess he's as human as the rest of us.

[Dr. Scarpetta]

Bump

[Tares]

bump

[Monti Cello]

Was the leftist icon actually an 'unelected' President who led us into a quagmire? Oh my!

[Peach]

Bump

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP

[Richard Kimball]

bump for later

[Paulus Invictus]

Another Hitchens home run! A great and accurate article by the former commie sympathizer.

[cars for sale]

bump for later

[RightWingMama]

Bump for later.

[Overtaxed]

Ping!

[Sam Cree]

Was Kennedy even a "liberal" by today's standards?

I was 14 when he was assassinated, but remember clearly my conservative parents, after having done volunteer work for the Nixon campaign, being somewhat agreeabley surprised by Kennedy's actual job performance.

Perhaps it was lowering of taxes that got their attention.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

The biographers and archivists have done most of the relevant job of reporting and disclosing, and what they have reported and disclosed is a president frantically "high" on pills of all kinds (that's when he was not alarmingly "low" for the same reason); a president quick on the draw and willing to solicit Mafia hit-men for his foreign policy; a president willing to risk nuclear war to save his own face; a president who bugged his own Oval Office; a president who used the Executive Mansion as a bordello and a president whose name we might never have learned if not for the fanatical determination of his father to purchase him a political career.

He forgot to mention turning Cuba over to the Communists.

[texasbluebell]

.

[octobersky]

bump

[Revolting cat!]

I've read through the entire thread and find not one sentence here that refutes anything Hitchens says!

These two (three?) JFK lovers here sound exactly like today's Jacko defenders.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." -- John Ford.

[onyx]

Good post.

ETOM: "for tonight" :)

[lilylangtree]

I too am tired of the Kennedy camelot myth. The Kennedy sire got his money bootlegging and hanging out with the Mafia in 20s & 30s. Old Joe loved his mistresses too. A trait passed on to all of his sons. The Kennedy family and relations are BORING, immoral, degrading and degenerate. Now if mainstream media would take a hint and quit playing and re-playing this tiresome myth.

[Helms]

4-29-02: Culture Watch

Joseph Kennedy and the Jews
By Edward Renehan, Jr.
Mr. Renehan's most recent book is The Kennedys at War, 1937-1945, published in April 2002 by Doubleday.

Arriving at London in early 1938, newly-appointed U.S. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy took up quickly with another transplanted American. Viscountess Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor assured Kennedy early in their friendship that he should not be put off by her pronounced and proud anti-Catholicism.

"I'm glad you are smart enough not to take my [views] personally," she wrote. Astor pointed out that she had a number of Roman Catholic friends - G.K. Chesterton among them - with whom she shared, if nothing else, a profound hatred for the Jewish race. Joe Kennedy, in turn, had always detested Jews generally, although he claimed several as friends individually. Indeed, Kennedy seems to have tolerated the occasional Jew in the same way Astor tolerated the occasional Catholic.

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). No member of the so-called "Cliveden Set" (the informal cabal of appeasers who met frequently at Nancy Astor's palatial home) seemed much concerned with the dilemma faced by Jews under the Reich. Astor wrote Kennedy that Hitler would have to do more than just "give a rough time" to "the killers of Christ" before she'd be in favor of launching "Armageddon to save them. The wheel of history swings round as the Lord would have it. Who are we to stand in the way of the future?" 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."

During May of 1938, Kennedy engaged in extensive discussions with the new German Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Herbert von Dirksen. In the midst of these conversations (held without approval from the U.S. State Department), Kennedy advised von Dirksen that President Roosevelt was the victim of "Jewish influence" and was poorly informed as to the philosophy, ambitions and ideals of Hitler's regime. (The Nazi ambassador subsequently told his bosses that Kennedy was "Germany's best friend" in London.)

Columnists back in the states condemned Kennedy's fraternizing. Kennedy later claimed that 75% of the attacks made on him during his Ambassadorship emanated from "a number of Jewish publishers and writers. ... Some of them in their zeal did not hesitate to resort to slander and falsehood to achieve their aims." He told his eldest son, Joe Jr., that he disliked having to put up with "Jewish columnists" who criticized him with no good reason.

Like his father, Joe Jr. admired Adolf Hitler. Young Joe had come away impressed by Nazi rhetoric after traveling in Germany as a student in 1934. Writing at the time, Joe applauded Hitler's insight in realizing the German people's "need of a common enemy, someone of whom to make the goat. Someone, by whose riddance the Germans would feel they had cast out the cause of their predicament. It was excellent psychology, and it was too bad that it had to be done to the Jews. The dislike of the Jews, however, was well-founded. They were at the heads of all big business, in law etc. It is all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods had been quite unscrupulous ... the lawyers and prominent judges were Jews, and if you had a case against a Jew, you were nearly always sure to lose it. ... As far as the brutality is concerned, it must have been necessary to use some ... ."

Brutality was in the eye of the beholder. Writing to Charles Lindbergh shortly after Kristallnacht in November of 1938, Joe Kennedy Sr. seemed more concerned about the political ramifications stemming from high-profile, riotous anti-Semitism than he was about the actual violence done to the Jews. "... Isn't there some way," he asked, "to persuade [the Nazis] it is on a situation like this that the whole program of saving western civilization might hinge? It is more and more difficult for those seeking peaceful solutions to advocate any plan when the papers are filled with such horror." Clearly, Kennedy's chief concern about Kristallnacht was that it might serve to harden anti-fascist sentiment at home in the United States.

Like his friend Charles Coughlin (an anti-Semitic broadcaster and Roman Catholic priest), Kennedy always remained convinced of what he believed to be the Jews' corrupt, malignant, and profound influence in American culture and politics. "The Democratic [party] policy of the United States is a Jewish production," Kennedy told a British reporter near the end of 1939, adding confidently that Roosevelt would "fall" in 1940.

But it wasn't Roosevelt who fell. Kennedy resigned his ambassadorship just weeks after FDR's overwhelming triumph at the polls. He then retreated to his home in Florida: a bitter, resentful man nurturing religious and racial bigotries that put him out-of-step with his country, and out-of-touch with history.

[cyclotic]

ping to read comments at home. Read the article in WSJ today. Agree.