I hear you Flashy, we all flare up sometimes. The very nature of this thread is antagonistic, and is bound to fuel flames, so there it is.
I was interested in what you had to say about Joe Kennedy. I never knew this. I wonder what would have been if King Edward the VIII hadn't have met Wallis Simpson, and remained King, instead of abdicating for her hand in marriage. He was (as I'm sure you know) a Nazi sympathiser, he even gave the Nazi salute when he visited Hitler in 1937.
Frightening thought.
frightening indeed.
Joe Kennedy was convinced that England could not last around the time of the blitz, and prior to the cancelled Operation Sealion (and Barbarossa) and it was only a matter of time before England was defeated.
He was a real defeatist, not to mention a tad too sympathetic to the Nazi's IMO
his comments in November 1940 during the BoB pretty much sealed his fate
when he said "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here, [in the US]."
this is just a snippet from wikipedia, but they scratch the surface of that appeaser and apologist (IMO)
Ambassador to Britain
In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Kennedy as the
United States Ambassador to the
Court of St. James's (Britain)... Kennedy rejected the warnings of
Winston Churchill that compromise with Nazi Germany was impossible; instead he supported Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain's policy of
appeasement in order to stave off a second world war that would be a more horrible "armageddon" than the first. Throughout 1938, as the Nazi persecution of
Jews intensified, Kennedy attempted to obtain an audience with
Adolf Hitler.
[7] Shortly before the
Nazi aerial bombing of British cities began in September 1940, Kennedy sought a personal meeting with Hitler, again without State Department approval, "to bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany."
[8]
Kennedy argued strongly against giving aid to Britain.
"Democracy is finished in England. It may be here," stated Ambassador Kennedy, Boston Sunday Globe of November 10, 1940. In that one simple statement, Joe Kennedy ruined any future chances of becoming US president, effectively committing political suicide. While bombs fell daily on England, Nazi troops occupied Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, Ambassador Kennedy unambiguously and repeatedly stated his belief that the war was not about saving democracy from National Socialism (Nazism) or Fascism. In the now-infamous, long, rambling interview with two newspaper journalists,
Louis M. Lyons of the
Boston Globe and
Ralph Coghlan of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kennedy opined:
"It's all a question of what we do with the next six months. The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time." ... "As long as she is in there, we have time to prepare. It isn't that [Britain is] fighting for democracy. That's the bunk. She's fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us... I know more about the European situation than anybody else, and it's up to me to see that the country gets it,"[9]
In
British government circles during the Blitz, Ambassador Kennedy was widely disparaged as a
defeatist and also known as a
coward. He became known as
Jittery Joe for his propensity to run for cover to an air raid shelter located near
Windsor at the slightest sign of an air raid.
When the American public and Roosevelt Administration officials read his quotes on democracy being "finished", and his belief that the Battle of Britain wasn't about "fighting for democracy," all of it being just "bunk", they realized that Ambassador Kennedy could not be trusted to represent the United States. In the face of national public outcry, he was offered the chance to fall on his sword, and he submitted his resignation later that month.
Anti-Semitism
Kennedy was (for a while) a close friend with the leading Jewish lawyer
Felix Frankfurter, who helped Kennedy get his sons into the London School of Economics, where they worked with
Harold Laski, a leading Jewish intellectual and prominent Socialist.
[11] While holding positive attitudes towards individual Jews, Kennedy's views of the Jews as a people were allegedly, by his own admission, overwhelmingly negative.
According to
Harvey Klemmer, who served as one of 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."
[12] When Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany and reported the pattern of vandalism and assault on Jews by Nazis, Kennedy responded "well, they brought it on themselves."
[13]
On
June 13,
1938, Kennedy met with
Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, who claimed in 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."
[14] 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 he communicated in a letter to
Charles Lindbergh.
[15]
Kennedy had a close friendship with
Nancy Astor; the correspondence between them is reportedly replete with anti-Semitic tropes.
[16] 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."[17] By August 1940, Kennedy worried that a third term for Roosevelt meant war; as Leamer reports, "Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon."
[18] Nevertheless, Kennedy supported Roosevelt's third term in return for Roosevelt's support of Joseph Kennedy Jr. for Governor of Massachusetts in 1942.
[19] Even during the height of the conflict, however, Kennedy remained "more wary of" prominent American Jews such as
Felix Frankfurter than he was of Hitler.
[20]
Kennedy told reporter
Joe Dinneen:
It is true that I have a low opinion of some Jews in public office and in private life. That does not mean that I... believe they should be wiped off the face of the earth... Jews who take an unfair advantage of the fact that theirs is a persecuted race do not help much... Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind. When Dinneen wrote
The Kennedy Family, he was pressured to remove these quotations from the book by
John F. Kennedy himself. Dineen complied
