On the Sunday of the Lothian funeral, Kennedy noted in his diary that before attending Mass at St. Matthew’s, he had “read in Washington Post, owned by Eugene Meyer, a Jew, that five prominent men had written short eulogies on Lothian.” Four of the five were active in the campaign for American assistance to the British war effort: Felix Frankfurter, “who is supposed directly and indirectly to influence Roosevelt on Foreign Policy over Hull’s and Welles’s heads [and] whose cohort of young lawyers are in practically every government department, all aiding the cause of Jewish refugees getting into America”; “John W. Davis attorney for J. P. Morgan . . « Tom Lamont, head of Morgans, who would certainly like to get U.S. in”; and William Allen White, the publisher/editor of the Kansas Emporia Gazette and chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. “It looks to me,” Kennedy noted in his diary, “as if the English sympathizers were tying their cause in with the Jews because they figure they’ve got all the influence in U.S.””

He was not alone in his fear that the Jews had too much influence in Washington. Kennedy reported in his diary that Justice Frank Murphy had told him the month before, when they met in New York City, that “it was Frankfurter and Ben Cohen who wrote the Attorney General’s opinion on destroyers and bases. Murphy regards the Jewish influence as most dangerous. He said that after all, Hopkins’ wife was a Jew; Hull’s wife is a Jew; and Frankfurter and Cohen and that group are all Jews.” Sumner Welles had also told Kennedy that he thought Frankfurter “dangerous.” Frankfurter, he told Kennedy, “read all the papers [diplomatic dispatches?] and made suggestions to Roosevelt—

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, 2013