Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 1, 2020

A Young John F. Kennedy’s Unimpressive Musings on Nazi Germany and Zionism

“Fascism seems to treat them well.”

Reviewing the first volume of a new biography of JFK by the Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall, P.J. O’Rourke reflects on why a “distant, hazy, reminiscent glow lingers” in the air around the Kennedys. The dynasty’s founding patriarch, Joseph, Sr., was, in O’Rourke’s words, “a priapic, stock-jobbing, isolationist, defeatist, Hitler-appeasing anti-Semite,” who was recalled from his absurd posting as ambassador to Great Britain and resigned in disgrace in 1941. Yet, although his son John Fitzgerald would, as president, uphold the U.S.-Israel relationship, his earlier judgments were less inspiring:

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