Per Adam’s post earlier today about Obama saying he owed his Senate seat to Jewish support, an anonymous bookish friend supplied these quotes:
Ben Gurion’s biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, reported that Kennedy told Ben-Gurion in 1962: “I was elected by the votes of American Jews. I owe them my victory. Is there something I should do?” He also said that Ben-Gurion found this comment unseemly, and unworthy of a President. It’s in is Ben Gurion (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977), p. 274.
The incident is also described
in Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israeli Alliance (Oxford, 2003), p. 55; with slightly different language:
“You know I was elected by the Jews,” Kennedy is said to have told the diminutive Israeli Prime Minister in private. “I was elected by the Jews of New York. I have to do something for them. I will do something for you.” As a matter of electoral math, Kennedy had a point; the president received 800,000 votes in Jewish precincts in New York, which he carried by only 384,000 votes. Still, which such man-to-man, pol-to-pol candor generally worked for JFK, the coarse, nakedly political approach stuck in the craw of Israel’s founding father. “You must do whatever you think is good for the free world,” Ben-Gurion reportedly told Kennedy. Being treated “like a politician from Brooklyn” offended him. It was beneath both his dignity and Kennedy’s. This was not how statesmen behaved. "To me, he looks like a politician,” he told his aides.
