Final_Judgment

110 Genesis [49]
scheduled to be honored at a convocation at Brandeis University, a Jewishoriented
center of learning near Boston.
Following the affair at Brandeis, Ben-Gurion journeyed to New York
City where he met with Kennedy at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. According to
Hersh, "The meeting with Kennedy was a major disappointment for the
Israeli prime minister, and not only because of the nuclear issue. " 114
"'He looked to me like a twenty-five-year-old boy,' Ben-Gurion later
told his biographer. 'I asked myself: 'How can a man so young be elected
President?' At first I did not take him seriously.'" 115
HATRED
Following the meeting, Ben-Gurion complained to Feinberg about his
unhappy first meeting with JFK. It was not an auspicious start, and as we
shall see, it set a trend. According to Feinberg, "There's no way of
describing the relationship between Jack Kennedy and Ben-Gurion because
there's no way B.G. was dealing with JFK as an equal, at least as far as
B.G. was concerned. He had the typical attitude of an old-fashioned Jew
toward the young. He disrespected [Kennedy] as a youth." 116
What's more, the Israeli Prime Minister had an additional reason to be
suspicious of the young American's motives. According to Feinberg, "B.G.
could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man." 117 The "old
man" in this case was the president's father, former Ambassador Joseph P.
Kennedy, long considered not only an "anti-Semite" but a Hitler partisan.
Ben-Gurion's contempt for the younger Kennedy was growing by leaps
and bounds—almost pathologically. According to Hersh, "The Israeli prime
minister, in subsequent private communications to the White House, began
to refer to the President as 'young man.' Kennedy made clear to associates
that he found the letters to be offensive." 118
Kennedy himself told his close friend, Charles Bartlett, that he was
getting fed up with the fact that the Israeli "sons of bitches lie to me
constantly about their nuclear capability." 119
Obviously, to say the very least, there was no love lost between the
two leaders. The U.S.-Israeli relationship was at an ever-growing and
disastrous impasse, although virtually nothing was known about this to the
American public at the time.
'A MORE SERIOUS DANGER'
President Kennedy's efforts to resolve the problem of the Palestinian
refugees also met with fierce and bitter resistance by Ben-Gurion. The Israeli
leader refused to agree to a Kennedy proposal that the Palestinians either be
permitted to return to their homes in Israel or to be compensated by Israel
and resettled in the Arab countries or elsewhere.
Former Undersecretary of State George Ball notes in his book, The
Passionate Attachment, that "In the fall of 1962, Ben-Gurion conveyed his