Joseph Kennedy, Sr.

Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy, Sr.
44th United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom
In office 1938 – 1940
Preceded by	Robert Worth Bingham
Succeeded by	John Gilbert Winant
Born	September 6 1888(1888--) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	November 18 1969 (aged 81) (Complications from a stroke) Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Rose Fitzgerald (1890-1995)
Children	Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. (1915-1944), John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), Rosemary Kennedy (1918-2005), Kathleen Kennedy (1920-1948), Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921-), Patricia Kennedy Lawford (1924-2006), Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), Jean Kennedy Smith (1928-), Ted Kennedy (1932-)
Alma mater	Harvard College
Profession	Businessman, Politician
Religion	Roman Catholic

Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy, Sr. (September 6, 1888 – November 18, 1969), was a prominent United States businessman and political figure, the father of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy. He was a leading member of the Democratic Party and of the Irish Catholic community. He served briefly as the US Ambassador to England at the start of World War II. His term as Ambassador and his political ambitions ended abruptly during the height of the Battle of Britain, November, 1940, with the publishing of his disastrous remarks that "Democracy is finished...". With nationwide business interests and political connections, he worked behind the scenes his last decades to continue building both the financial and political fortunes of the Kennedy family, furthering his political ambitions through his sons.

Background, education and family

Joseph Patrick Kennedy was born in Boston, the son of Patrick J. Kennedy, a successful businessman, ward boss, and Irish American community leader. Joseph's grandparents came to America in the mid 1840s to flee the Irish famine. Kennedy was born into a highly sectarian environment where Irish Catholics felt themselves excluded by upper-class Yankees. Many Boston Irish became active in the Democratic Party, including Patrick and numerous relatives.

Kennedy yearbook photo from Boston Latin School.

Patrick Kennedy's home was a prosperous and comfortable one, thanks to his successful liquor bootlegging business and an influential role in local politics. Mary Augusta Kennedy encouraged Joseph to attend the Boston Latin School, where Joe was a below average scholar but was popular among his classmates, winning election as class president and playing on the school baseball team.

Kennedy followed in the footsteps of several older cousins by attending Harvard College. At Harvard he focused on becoming a social leader, working energetically to gain admittance to the prestigious Hasty Pudding Club. While at Harvard he joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity and played on the baseball team.

Joseph was infuriated when he was rejected by one fraternity, convinced that anti-Irish prejudice was at work. This event left bitter memories that resonated with him for the rest of his life.

Marriage & family

In 1914, he married Rose Fitzgerald, the daughter of John F. Fitzgerald, the Democratic mayor of Boston and probably the most recognized politician in the city. Joe and Rose had the following nine children:

Business career

Kennedy made a large fortune as a stock market and commodity speculator and by investing in real estate and a wide range of industries. He never built a significant business from scratch, but his timing as both buyer and seller was usually excellent. Sometimes he made use of inside information in ways which would later be made illegal, but regulations were lighter in his era. He later became the Chairman of the SEC. When Fortune magazine published its first list of the richest people in the United States in 1957 it placed him in the $200-400 million band, meaning that it estimated him to be between the ninth and sixteenth richest person in the United States at that time.

Early ventures

After graduating from Harvard in 1912, he took his first job as a state-employed bank examiner. This allowed him to learn a great deal about the banking industry. In 1913, the Columbia Trust Bank, in which his father held a significant share, was under threat of takeover. Kennedy, borrowing $45,000 from family and friends, bought back control and at age 25 was rewarded by being elected the bank's president, "the youngest in America".

Kennedy emerged as a highly successful entrepreneur with an eye for value. For example he turned a handsome profit from ownership of Old Colony Realty Associates, Inc., which bought distressed real estate.

Although skeptical of American involvement in World War I, he sought to participate in war-time production as an assistant general-manager of Bethlehem Steel, a major shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Here he oversaw the production of transports and warships critical to the war. This job brought him into contact with the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Wall Street

In 1919, he joined the prominent stock brokerage firm of Hayden, Stone & Co. where he became an expert in dealing in the unregulated stock market of the day, engaging in tactics that would later be labeled insider trading and market manipulation. In 1923 he set up his own investment company and became a multi-millionaire during the bull market of the 1920s.

David Kennedy, author of Freedom From Fear, describes the Wall Street of the Kennedy era:

The Crash

Kennedy formed alliances with several other Irish-Catholic money men, including Charles E. Mitchell, Michael J. Meehan and Bernard Smith. He helped establish the Libby-Owens-Ford stock pool, an arrangement in which Kennedy and colleagues created an artificial scarcity of Libby-Owens-Ford stock to drive up the value of their own holdings in the stock. Using inside information, and the public's lack of knowledge, a pool operator would bribe journalists to present that information in the most advantageous manner. The stocks would then change in price up or down depending on the position favored by the pool.^{[citations needed]}

Kennedy got out of the market in 1928, the year before the Crash, locking in multi-million dollar profits.^{[citation needed]}

Movie Production, Liquor Importing, Real Estate

Kennedy made huge profits from reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood studios. Film production in the U.S. was much more decentralized than it is today, with many different movie studios producing film product. One small studio was FBO, Film Booking Offices of America, which specialized in Westerns produced cheaply. Its owner was in financial trouble and asked Kennedy to help find a new owner. Kennedy formed his own group of investors and bought it for $1.5 million.

Kennedy moved to Hollywood in March 1926 to focus on running the studio. Movie studios were then permitted to own exhibition companies which were necessary to get their films on local screens. With that in mind, in a hostile buyout, he acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters Corporation (KAO) which had more than seven hundred vaudeville movie theaters across the United States. He later purchased another production studio called Pathe Exchange.

In October 1928, he formally merged his film companies FBO and KAO to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) and made a large amount of money in the process. Then, keen to buy the Pantages Theatre chain, which had 63 profitable theaters, Kennedy made an offer of $8 million. It was declined. Joe then stopped distributing his movies to Pantages. Still, Alexander Pantages declined to sell. However, when Pantages was later charged and tried for rape, his reputation took a battering and he accepted Kennedy's revised offer of $3.5 million.

It is estimated that Kennedy made over $5 million from his investments in Hollywood. During his affair with film star Gloria Swanson, he arranged the financing for her films The Love of Sunya (1927) and the ill-fated Queen Kelly (1928).

After Prohibition ended, Kennedy amassed a large fortune when his company, Somerset Importers, became the exclusive American agent for Gordon's Dry Gin and Dewar's Scotch. Anticipating the end of Prohibition, he assembled a large inventory of stock, which he later sold for a profit of millions of dollars when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. He invested this money in residential and commercial real estate in New York, and Hialeah Race Track in Hialeah, Florida. His most important purchase was the largest office building in the country, Chicago's Merchandise Mart, which gave his family an important base in that city and an alliance with the Irish-American political leadership there.

New Dealer

Kennedy's first major involvement in a national political campaign was his support in 1932 for Franklin D. Roosevelt's bid for the Presidency. He donated, loaned, and raised a substantial amount of money for the campaign. Roosevelt rewarded him with an appointment as the inaugural Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Kennedy had hoped for a Cabinet post, such as Treasury.

Kennedy's reforming work as SEC Chairman was widely praised on all sides, as investors realized the SEC was protecting their interests. His knowledge of the financial markets equipped him to identify areas requiring the attention of regulators. One of the crucial reforms was the requirement for companies to regularly file financial statements with the SEC which broke what some saw as an information monopoly maintained by the Morgan banking family. Kennedy left the SEC in 1935 to take over the Maritime Commission, which built on his wartime experience in running a major shipyard.

Disputes with Father Charles Coughlin

Charles Coughlin was an Irish American priest from Detroit, who became perhaps the most prominent Roman Catholic spokesman on political and financial issues in the 1930s, with a radio audience that reached millions every week. A strong supporter of Roosevelt in 1932, Coughlin broke with the president in 1934 and became a bitter opponent in his weekly, anti-communist, anti-Federal Reserve and isolationist radio talks. Roosevelt sent Kennedy and other prominent Irish Catholics praised Coughlin.^[1]. Coughlin swung his support to Huey Long in 1935 and then to a third party in 1936. Kennedy strongly supported the New Deal and believed as early as 1933 that Coughlin was "becoming a very dangerous proposition" as an opponent of Roosevelt and "an out and out demagogue." Kennedy worked with Roosevelt, Bishop Francis Spellman and Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli who was supportive of the World Court (the future Pope Pius XII) in a successful effort to get the Vatican to shut the anti-World Court Coughlin down in 1936.^[2] Coughlin later returned to the air and in 1940 Kennedy battled against his influence among the Irish regarding Coughlin's stance against self-interest imperialism.^[3] During the Spanish Civil War, Kennedy helped persuade Roosevelt to keep America out of the conflict, emphasizing that the American Roman Catholic community was heavily Democratic and sympathized with the nationalist forces of Francisco Franco against the left-wing in Spain. Father Charles Coughlin crusaded for over a decade against the Central Bankers he called leeches, saying they were not producers; but used tens of millions of Americans and their artistry, labor and scientific achievement. Father Coughlin boldly reiterated that while only $5 billion in US currency was in circulation, the avaricious bankers called in loans of $30 billion, thereby forcing Americans to sell homes, farms, and industry, which the bankers sold on credit for an additional 4% interest. Coughlin's answer was to put Congress back in charge of coinage and the regulation of currency.

Ambassador to Britain

In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (Britain). Kennedy's Irish and Catholic status did not bother the British; indeed he hugely enjoyed his leadership position in London society, which stood in stark contrast to his outsider status in Boston. His daughter Kathleen married the heir to the Duke of Devonshire, the head of one of England's grandest aristocratic families. Kennedy rejected the warnings of Winston Churchill that compromise with Nazi Germany was impossible; instead he supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement in order to stave off a second world war that would be a more horrible "armageddon" than the first. Throughout 1938, as the Nazi persecution of Jews intensified, Kennedy attempted to obtain an audience with Adolf Hitler.^[4] Shortly before the Nazi aerial bombing of British cities began in September 1940, Kennedy sought a personal meeting with Hitler, again without State Department approval, "to bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany."^[5]

Kennedy argued strongly against giving aid to Britain.

"Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.”, stated Ambassador Kennedy, Boston Sunday Globe of November 10, 1940. In a one simple statement, Joe Kennedy ruined any future chances of becoming US president, metaphorically committing political suicide. While Blitzkrieg bombs fell daily on England, Nazi troops occupied Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, Ambassador Kennedy unambiguously and repeatedly stated his belief that the war was not about saving democracy from National Socialism (Nazism) or Facism. In the now-infamous, long, rambling interview with two newspaper journalists, Louis M. Lyons of the Boston Globe and Ralph Coglan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kennedy opined:

"It's all a question of what we do with the next six months. The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time.” ... “As long as she is in there, we have time to prepare. It isn't that she's (Britain’s) fighting for democracy. That's the bunk. She's fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us.” ... "I know more about the European situation than anybody else, and it's up to me to see that the country gets it," ^[6]

When the American public and Roosevelt Administration officials read his quotes on democracy being "finished", and his belief that the Battle of Britain wasn't about "fighting for democracy.", all of it being just "bunk", they realized that Ambassador Kennedy could not be trusted to represent the United States. In the face of national public outcry, he was offered the chance to fall on his sword, and he submitted his resignation later that month.

Throughout the rest of the war, relations between Kennedy and the Roosevelt Administration remained tense (especially when Joe Kennedy, Jr., vocally opposed FDR's renomination). Having effectively removed himself from the national stage, Joe Sr. sat out the war on the sidelines. Kennedy did however stay active in the smaller venues of rallying Irish and Roman Catholic Democrats to vote for Roosevelt's reelection in 1944. like Al Smith. He claimed to be eager to help the war effort, but as a result of his previous gaffes, he was neither trusted nor re-invited. ^[7]

With his own ambitions for the White House in self-inflicted ruins, he held out great hope for his eldest son Joseph Jr. to gain the presidency. However, Joe Jr. was killed in England while undertaking a high-risk bombing mission. Kennedy then turned his attention to grooming the second son, John F. Kennedy, who won the 1960 election.

Anti-Semitism

Kennedy was (for a while) a close friend with the leading Jewish lawyer Felix Frankfurter, who helped Kennedy get his sons into the London School of Economics, where they worked with Harold Laski, a leading Jewish intellectual and prominent Socialist.^[8] While holding positive attitudes towards individual Jews, Kennedy's views of the Jews as a people were allegedly, by his own admission, overwhelmingly negative.

According to Harvey Klemmer, who served as one of Kennedy's embassy aides, Kennedy habitually referred to Jews as "kikes or sheenies." Kennedy allegedly told Klemmer that "[some] individual Jews are all right, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch."^[9] When Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany and reported the pattern of vandalism and assault on Jews by Nazis, Kennedy responded "well, they brought it on themselves."^[10]

On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, who claimed in Berlin that Kennedy had told him that "it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. [Kennedy] himself fully understood our Jewish policy."^[11] Kennedy's main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.^[12]

Kennedy had a close friendship with Nancy Astor; the correspondence between them is reportedly replete with anti-Semitic tropes.^[13] As Edward Renehan notes:

As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these "world problems" (Nancy's phrase).... Kennedy replied that he expected the "Jew media" in the United States to become a problem, that "Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles" were already making noises contrived to "set a match to the fuse of the world."^[14]

By August 1940, Kennedy worried that a third term for Roosevelt meant war; as Leamer reports, "Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon."^[15] Nevertheless, Kennedy supported Roosevelt's third term in return for Roosevelt's support of Joseph Kennedy Jr. for Governor of Massachusetts in 1942. ^[16] Even during the height of the conflict, however, Kennedy remained "more wary of" prominent American Jews such as Felix Frankfurter than he was of Hitler.^[17]

Kennedy told reporter Joe Dinneen:

It is true that I have a low opinion of some Jews in public office and in private life. That does not mean that I... believe they should be wiped off the face of the earth... Jews who take an unfair advantage of the fact that theirs is a persecuted race do not help much... Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind.

When Dinneen wrote The Kennedy Family, he was pressured to remove these quotations from the book by John F. Kennedy himself. Dineen complied.^[18]

Political alliances

Kennedy used his wealth and connections to build a national network of supporters that became the base for his sons' political careers. He especially concentrated on the Irish American community in large cities, particularly Boston, New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and several New Jersey cities.^[19]

Alliance with Joe McCarthy

Kennedy's close ties with Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy strengthened his family's position among Irish Catholics, but weakened it among liberals who strongly opposed McCarthy. Even before McCarthy became famous in 1950, Kennedy had forged close ties with the Republican Senator from Wisconsin. Kennedy often brought him to Hyannis Port as a weekend house guest in the late 1940s. McCarthy at one point dated Patricia Kennedy. When McCarthy became a dominant voice of anti-Communism starting in 1950, Kennedy contributed thousands of dollars to McCarthy, and became one of his major supporters. In the Senate race of 1952, Joseph apparently worked a deal so that McCarthy, a Republican, would not make campaign speeches for the GOP ticket in Massachusetts. In return, Congressman John F. Kennedy, running for the Senate seat, would not give any anti-McCarthy speeches that his liberal supporters wanted to hear. In 1953 at Kennedy's urging McCarthy hired Robert Kennedy (age 27) as a senior staff member of the Senate's investigations subcommittee, which McCarthy chaired. In 1954, when the Senate was threatening to condemn McCarthy, Senator John Kennedy faced a dilemma. "How could I demand that Joe McCarthy be censured for things he did when my own brother was on his staff?" asked JFK. By 1954, however, Robert Kennedy and McCarthy's chief aide, Roy Cohn, had had a falling out and Robert no longer worked for McCarthy. John Kennedy had a speech drafted calling for the censure of McCarthy but he never delivered it. When the Senate voted to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, Senator Kennedy was in the hospital and never indicated then or later how he would vote. Joe strongly supported McCarthy to the end.^[20]

Presidential ambitions for family

Joe Kennedy was a fiercely ambitious individual who thrived off competition and winning. And, in his eyes, the ultimate prize was being president of the United States. Joe Kennedy wanted his first son, Joseph Kennedy Jr. to become president, but after his death in WWII, he became determined to make his second oldest son, John F. Kennedy, president. Joe Kennedy was consigned to the political shadows after his WWII remarks that "Democracy is finished...", and he remained an intensely controversial figure among US citizens because of his suspect business credentials, his Roman Catholicism, his opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy, and his support for Joseph McCarthy. As a result, his prescence in John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign had to be stymied. Having him in the spotlight would hurt John, making it look as if it were his father who was running for president. However, Joe Kennedy still drove the campaign behind the scenes. He played a central role in planning strategy, fundraising, and building coalitions and alliances. Joe supervised the spending and to some degree the overall campaign strategy, helped select advertising agencies, and was endlessly on the phone with local and state party leaders, newsmen, and business leaders. He had met thousands of powerful people in his career, and called in his chips to help his sons. He would use this to his son's advantage. His father's connections and influence was turned directly into political capital for the senatorial and presidential campaigns of John, Robert and Ted. Historian Thomas J. Whalen describes Joe's influence on John Kennedy's policy decisions in his biography of Joseph Kennedy. Joe was influential in creating the Kennedy Cabinet (Robert Kennedy as Attorney General for example). However, in 1961, Joe Kennedy suffered from a heart attack that placed even more limitations on his influence in his son's political careers. Joseph Kennedy expanded the Kennedy Compound, which continues as a major center of family get-togethers. When John F. Kennedy was asked about the level of involvement and influence that his father had held in his razor-thin presidential bid, JFK would joke that on the eve before the election, his father had asked him the exact number of votes he would need to win - there was no way he was paying "for a landslide." John's presidency was a victory for Joe. He saw it as a step forward for, not just his son, but the entire Kennedy family. Joe was a family man and strategically constructed his family's image towards the public. He once said,"Image is reality", and the presidency framed the Kennedy family picture.^{[21] [22]}

Stroke and death

On December 19, 1961, at the age of 73, he suffered a major stroke, which he survived. He was left paralysed on the right side, confining him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and he lost all power of speech. Despite being severely disabled from the stroke, Kennedy remained aware of the tragedies that befell his family until his own death, which occurred on November 18 1969, two months after his eighty-first birthday.

Joseph and Rose Kennedy's children today

As of August 12, 2007, only three of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children are still alive. The only two surviving daughters are 86-year old Eunice Kennedy Shriver and 79-year old Jean Kennedy Smith, while the only surviving son is 75-year-old Senator Ted Kennedy.

Of the six deceased children of Joe and Rose Kennedy, the only two to die of natural causes to date are their daughters Rose Marie Kennedy and Patricia Kennedy Lawford. Rosemary (who was Joe and Rose's first daughter) underwent a lobotomy in 1941 at the age of 23 after Joe Kennedy was informed that his daughter's mental disorder could be cured by such an operation. Unfortunately, the lobotomy went wrong, and Rosemary was left with profound mental retardation. Rosemary was cared for at St. Coletta's institution in Wisconsin from 1949 until her death of natural causes on January 7 2005, at the age of 86. Patricia (who was the fourth daughter) died from complications due to pneumonia on September 17 2006, at the age of 82. Joseph was especially close to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.^[23]

Ancestors

See also

• Kennedy family
• List of descendants of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
• Kennedy Curse
• List of well-known U.S. presidential relatives

References

Bibliography

• Brinkley, Alvin. Voices of Protest. Vintage, 1983.
• Goodwin, Doris K., The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga (1987)
• Hersh, Seymour. The Dark Side of Camelot. Back Bay Books, 1998.
• Leamer, Laurence. The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963. Harper, 2002.
• Thomas Maier, The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings (2003)
• Kessler, Ronald, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Warner , 1996, ISBN 0-446-60384-8
• O'Brien, Michael. John F. Kennedy: A Biography (2005)
• Renehan, Edward. The Kennedys at War, 1937-1945. Doubleday, 2002.
• Renehan, Edward. "Joseph Kennedy and the Jews". History News Network. George Mason University, April 29, 2002.
• Schwarz, Ted, "Joseph P. Kennedy" 2003, ISBN 0-471-17681-8
• Smith, Amanda, ed. Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy (2002), the major collection of letters to and from Kennedy
• Whalen, Richard J., "The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy". The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1964.

Personalities of Wall Street

See List of personalities associated with Wall Street.

External links

• Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. at the Internet Movie Database
• Joe Kennedy's Political Influence
• The Kennedys - PBS Special
• Kennedy's Legacy at the SEC
• Biography of Joseph P. Kennedy and his early life and education

Chairmen of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission
Kennedy • Landis • Douglas • Frank • Eicher • Purcell • Caffrey • Hanrahan • McDonald • D Cook • Demmler • Armstrong • Gadsby • Cary • Cohen • Budge • Casey • B Cook • Garrett • Hills • Williams • Shad • Ruder • Breeden • Levitt • Pitt • Donaldson • Cox

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