The reason I remind Mr. Rich is that this connection to Nazi Germany appeared to be relevant to him when he wrote about Prescott Bush’s tenuous connection in 2008. In May 18th of that year as Rich was pontificating about the state of the Presidential election he wrote:

Just 36 hours after the Mississippi debacle, Mr. McCain tried to distance himself from the administration by flip-flopping on his signature issue, Iraq, suddenly endorsing just the kind of timetable for withdrawal he has characterized as “surrender” when proposed by Democrats or Mitt Romney. (When Mr. McCain proposes it, he labels it “victory.”) But hardly had Mr. McCain spoken than his message was upstaged by Mr. Bush’s partisan political speech in Israel. The president implied that Mr. Obama would have enabled the Nazis even more foolishly than his own grandfather, Prescott Bush, did in the 1930s when he  maintained “investment relationships with Hitler’s Germany,” as Kevin Phillips delicately describes it in “American Dynasty.” (Emphasis added)

If this detail was important enough to commit to the pages of New York Times in 2008, it’s strange that Rich’s New York Magazine Kennedy tongue-bath /Conservative hit piece is notably bereft of such details about the Camelot clan’s Nazi sympathies. Allow me to submit the following entry from Edward Renehan, Jr.’s The Kennedys at War  to the record on Mr. Rich’s behalf.

During May of 1938, [Joseph Kennedy Sr.] engaged in extensive discussions with the new German Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Herbert von Dirksen. In the midst of these conversations (held without approval from the U.S. State Department), Kennedy advised von Dirksen that President Roosevelt was the victim of“Jewish influence” and was poorly informed as to the philosophy, ambitions and ideals of Hitler’s regime. (The Nazi ambassador subsequently told his bosses that Kennedy was”Germany’s best friend” in London.)

…

Like his father, Joe Jr. admired Adolf Hitler. Young Joe had come away impressed by Nazi rhetoric after traveling in Germany as a student in 1934. Writing at the time, Joe applauded Hitler‘s insight in realizing the German people’s “need of a common enemy, someone of whom to make the goat. Someone, by whose riddance the Germans would feel they had cast out the cause of their predicament. It was excellent psychology, and it was too bad that it had to be done to the Jews. The dislike of the Jews, however, was well-founded. They were at the heads of all big business, in law etc. It is all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods had been quite unscrupulous … the lawyers and prominent judges were Jews, and if you had a case against a Jew, you were nearly always sure to lose it. … As far as the brutality is concerned, it must have been necessary to use some … .”

Rich can be forgiven his omission, I suppose. To those who would have you believe that progressivism sprang forth from the brow of John F. Kennedy Jr., the mythology can be useful, especially when used as weapon with which to smear political opponents.