Twenty-four years before becoming president of the United States, John F. Kennedy undertook a grand tour of Europe. Together with his friend and traveling companion, Lem Billings, they left a record of their stay in the old continent, which was then falling into a terrifying wave of totalitarian regimes. Until now hidden in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, these student diaries from 1937 form a faithful image of Kennedy”s point of view during a trip that was key to formulating his later ideas on democracy and thus leading the Cold War . And although it exposes some erroneous conclusions and judgments about the political panorama of the time, it also raises highly topical reflections on populism, propaganda and their powerful effects on society. With numerous archive photographs, an introduction by the director of the RAE, Santiago Muñ oz Machado, and an epilogue by Professor Oliver Lubrich, here the unadulterated writings of JFK”s diary are reproduced in their entirety in his encounter with a Europe tormented by Nazism.