As the 50th anniversary approaches of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963, we Jews have our own special reasons to mourn.
The conventional community memory would be enough by itself. JFK overcame the legacy of his father, Joseph Kennedy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notoriously appeasement-minded ambassador to Britain on the eve of World War II, to build a warm relationship with American Jews.
As Warren Bass recounted a decade ago in his book “Support Any Friend,” the U.S.-Israel alliance advanced significantly with JFK’s approval of the sale of HAWK missiles to Israel.
Kennedy appointed Arthur Goldberg as labor secretary and then to the Supreme Court, Abraham Ribicoff as secretary of health, education and welfare, and Mortimer Caplin as internal revenue commissioner.
In the closing days of the 1960 campaign, Kennedy held separate rallies in New York’s garment district with David Dubinsky’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and with the rival Amalgamated Clothing Workers, which also was heavily Jewish.
In researching my new book, “JFK, Conservative,” I came across two lesser-known bits of evidence that shed new light on Kennedy’s views about the American Jewish community.
The first was a tape recording of a meeting between Kennedy and American civil rights leaders after the March on Washington in 1963. The Oval Office recording system became famous under President Richard Nixon, but it was active in the Kennedy years as well, and it captured some fascinating interactions.
With the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the White House following his “I Have a Dream” speech, Kennedy launched into discussion of what blacks could do to help themselves.
“Now, isn’t it possible for the Negro community to take the lead in committing major emphasis upon the responsibility of these families, even if they’re split and all the rest of the problems they have, on educating their children?” Kennedy asked/lectured. “Now, in my opinion, the Jewish community, which suffered a good deal under discrimination, and what a great effort they made, which I think has made their role influential, was in education: education of their children. And therefore they’ve been able to establish a pretty strong position for themselves.”
Kennedy added, “With all the influence that all you gentlemen have in the Negro community … [you] really have to concentrate on what I think the Jewish community has done on educating their children, on making them stay in school, and all the rest.”
For blacks, the president’s advice might have been good, patronizing, beside the point or all of the above. But for Jews, it encapsulated how Kennedy admired them and saw them as exemplars of American immigrant upward mobility.
An example of that trajectory was the Jewish attorney Lewis Weinstein, who built a close relationship with Kennedy and is the source of the second piece of evidence.
Weinstein had been born in Lithuania in 1905. He had come to America when he was 15 months old, graduated from Harvard and its law school, served in the army during World War II and had returned to become a partner at the Boston law firm of Foley, Hoag, and Eliot.
One day in the summer of 1946, Weinstein’s partner Thomas Eliot, whose grandfather Charles had been president of Harvard, walked into Weinstein’s office and said, “Lou, meet Jack Kennedy.”
From this classic Boston political moment — the Brahmin lawyer introducing the Irish Catholic politician to a Jewish partner who could help him raise campaign contributions — an enduring relationship began.
The relationship came into play later when the plight of Soviet Jewry was starting to emerge as a concern for American Jews.
This particular anecdote is at least a partial corrective to the claim in Gal Beckerman’s well-received 2010 history “When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone” that Soviet Jewry “was an issue that John F. Kennedy ignored.”
It is true that American Jewish organizations were rebuffed when they tried the usual route — having friendly members of Congress contact the State Department.
The assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, Frederick Dutton, sent Sen. Kenneth Keating (R-N.Y.) a long letter acknowledging that Russian synagogues had been closed and Jewish cemeteries desecrated as part of “the long-term Soviet campaign against religion generally,” but fretting that the American government could not do much about it.
Weinstein, as he later recounted in a little-noticed 1985 article for the journal American Jewish History, went to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and succeeded in having a mention of the Soviet closing of synagogues included in his president brother’s September 1963 speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
Weinstein persuaded the president to have Averell Harriman raise the matter with Khrushchev during a Harriman’s negotiating mission to Moscow on arms control.
And in a White House meeting with President Kennedy in November 1963, Weinstein launched into a plea on the issue.
Weinstein told Kennedy that no American president had intervened with the Russian authorities on behalf of the Jews since President Theodore Roosevelt had protested to Czar Nicholas II after the Kishinev massacre.
Kennedy replied, “Well, here’s one president who’s ready to do something.”
Kennedy told Weinstein to organize a conference in Washington about the Soviet Jewry issue. He told Weinstein to schedule the meeting for soon after Kennedy returned from a coming political trip to Dallas.
Ira Stoll is the author of “JFK, Conservative,” published Oct. 15 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He was managing editor of the Jewish Daily Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post.
