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In diary, 28-year-old JFK compared Adolf Hitler to ‘legend’

In diary, 28-year-old JFK compared Adolf Hitler to ‘legend’

Posted March. 24, 2017 07:22,   

Updated March. 24, 2017 07:26

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Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s diary from his younger days will go on the auction block on April 26 at RR Auction in Boston on the occasion of his centennial birth anniversary (May 29). In one of the most interesting entries in the diary, which Kennedy kept at age 28, he compares Adolf Hitler to a "legend."

In August, he visited Hitler’s bombed Bavarian Berghof residence and Eagle’s Nest mountain retreat. The trip was arranged by American media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who was a friend of JFK’s father. “(Hitler) had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him,” JFK wrote. “He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”

Kennedy handed the diary to Deirdre Henderson, who was his research assistant when he was a Massachusetts senator. “When JFK said that Hitler ‘had in him the stuff of which legends are made,’ he was speaking to the mystery surrounding him, not the evil he demonstrated to the world,” Fox News quoted her as saying. “Nowhere in this diary, or in any of his writings, is there any indication of sympathy for Nazi crimes or cause.”



Su-Yeon Kim sykim@donga.com