Posted on 08/26/2009 9:31:54 AM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast
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.
The same sorts that weep for Camelot, wept for Lady Di and Michael Jackson. Their view of reality comes from the pages of People Magazine.
From Was G. K. Chesterton anti-Semitic?
from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man:
“…the world owes God to the Jews…[T]hrough all their wanderings… they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle…The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. [W]hile the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe…”
That's some anti-semite there...
THANK YOU for bringing REALITY into the disgusting slobbering over a second rate human and Senator.
Many folks confuse GK with his (VERY) racist and anti-semitic cousin AK Chesterton.
Fast forward 70 years and you have the current Bush-hating, nObama-loving crowd that put the current set of bozos in power at Foggy Bottom. P.T. Barnum was spot-on in his commentary about the stupidity of the public.
Thanks for the post. A story that needs to be told and a reminder of what the Kennedy Klan was all about.
That moron still has a few defenders on this site. That populist charlatan had the nerve to tell his listeners to buy "gentile silver" while speculating in the silver market himself.
Probably would have been Huey Long's amen corner had not Huey been cut down via friendly fire from Gerald LK Smith's revolver.
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Joseph Kennedy, the founder of the “dynasty” was one of the foulest, most despicable, cowardly crooks and gangsters ever to emerge in American History. He shorted stocks, he sold bootleg liquor, he slept with anything he could get his hands on, he manipulated and financed his sons political campaigns, he had foul mouth and a lousy temper, he treated his saintly wife as a nothing. The lowest of the low. A foul specimen.
The truth about the Kenndys you will never get from the MSM.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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HIDEOUS.
There is a legend that while en route across the Atlantic to England, he found a minyan of Jews in the tea room conducting Yom Kipur services. Infuriated, Joe slapped a venerable elderly sage across the face (I’ve heard from some it was Rabbi Jacobson, one of the earliest Lubavitcher emissaries to the US). One of the more august of that gathering then told him that he would see all his sons die at the height of their careers. Further legend has it that years later, Teddy went to see the Lubavitcher Rebbe about removing this curse, and that year he became involved in a certain auto accident in which a young woman drowned in his car. But at least he wasn’t assassinated, only shunted aside and left a mere senator.
Second rate? More like fourth or fifth.
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