By contrast, Kennedy, the worldly and wealthy son of an ambassador, had visited Palestine in the early summer of 1939, when he was a twenty-two-year-old Harvard student, and sent his father a letter in which he demonstrated a reasonably good grasp of the facts and a skeptical assessment of the main arguments of both sides in the conflict. This skepticism made Kennedy less susceptible than most American politicians to the pressures applied by Israel’s supporters.15
