Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.
 |
Joe Kennedy |
Joseph "Joe" Patrick 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. As a leading
Irish American Democrat, he was the
patriarch of the
Kennedy political family.
Joseph was born in
Boston, the son of
Patrick J. Kennedy, a successful businessman and
Irish Catholic community leader. Joseph's grandparents came to America in the mid
1840's to flee the
Irish famine. Kennedy was born into a highly sectarian environment where Irish Catholics saw themselves as the victims of Yankee exclusion. Many were active in the
Democratic Party, including Patrick and numerous relatives.
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Kennedy yearbook photo from Boston Latin School. |
Patrick Kennedy's home was a prosperous and comfortable one, thanks to his successful liquor business and an influential role in local politics. Mary Augusta encouraged Joseph to attend the city's most prestigious public high school,
Boston Latin School. 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 relatives and attended
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.
Joseph was infuriated when he was rejected by a fraternity, convinced that anti-Irish prejudice was at work. This event left bitter memories that resonated with him for the rest of his life.
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.
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 become illegal, but regulations were lighter in his era. 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. In that role, he learned that a certain bank was trying to take over the smaller Columbia Trust Bank, in which his father was a minority shareholder. Borrowing $45,000 he bought control and at age 25, he became the youngest bank president in the country.
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.
During the World War he was supervisor of a major shipyard in
Quincy, Massachusetts where he oversaw the production of transports and warships. The job brought him into contact with the Assistant Secretary of the Navy,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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:
(It) was a strikingly information-starved environment. Many firms whose securities were publicly traded published no regular reports or issued reports whose data were so arbitrarily selected and capriciously audited as to be worse than useless. It was this circumstance that had conferred such awesome power on a handful of investment bankers like J.P. Morgan, because they commanded a virtual monopoly of the information necessary for making sound financial decisions. Especially in the secondary markets, where reliable information was all but impossible for the average investor to come by, opportunities abounded for insider manipulation and wildcat speculation.
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 favoured by the pool.
Kennedy got out of the market in 1928, the year before the Crash, locking in multi-million dollar profits. Indeed when the 1929 crash did come, he made money due to his
short positions.
Liquor importing, movie production, property
During
Prohibition, Kennedy's 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 that he sold for a profit of millions of dollars when
Prohibition was repealed in 1933. He invested this money in residential and commercial real estate, the
Merchandise Mart in
Chicago and
Hialeah Race Track in
Hialeah, Florida.
Kennedy made a huge amount from reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood studios. Some speculated he enjoyed the industry because of the attractive women involved in it. Film production in the U.S. was a lot more decentralized than it is today, with many different movie studios producing film product. One small studio was FBO, the Film Booking Office of America, which specialized in Westerns produced cheaply. Its owner was in financial trouble and asked Kennedy to help find a new owner. Kennedy liked the business so much he formed his own group of investors to buy it for $1.5 million.
He then moved to Hollywood in March 1926 to focus on running the studio. Movie studios were then permitted to own exhibition companies and often found it necessary to get their films on the big screen. With that in mind, in a hostile buyout he acquired the
Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters Corporation (KAO) which had more than seven hundred
vaudeville and movie theaters across the United States . He later acquired another production studio Pathe Exchange, owned by the French giant,
Pathé.
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 Theater chain which had sixty-three strong-performing 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).
Joseph's first active involvement in a national political campaign occurred during
Franklin D. Roosevelt's bid for the Presidency. He donated, loaned, and raised a substantial amount of money for FDR's presidential campaign. President 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.
Even Kennedy's critics acknowledged the reforming work he performed as SEC Chairman. His knowledge of the financial markets equipped him to identify areas requiring the attention of regulators, like a
poacher turned gamekeeper. 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 resigned from the SEC in 1935, after which Roosevelt then asked him to chair the
Maritime Commission.
Relationship with radio priest Charles Coughlin
Charles Coughlin was an
Irish American priest from Detroit, who became perhaps the most prominent Catholic spokesman on political and financial issues in the 1930s, with a radio audience that reached millions every week. However, due to disagreements with Roosevelt, Coughlin became a bitter opponent of the
New Deal, and gradually shifted his direction to spread polemical
anti semitic, anti-
New Deal, anti-capitalistic radio talks.
Roosevelt sent Kennedy and other prominent Irish Catholics to try to moderate Coughlin, but they failed.
[Leamer 93; Brinkley 127.]. Coughlin shifted his support to
Huey Long and then 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 (the future
Pope Pius XII) in a successful effort to get the Vatican to shut Coughlin down in 1936.
[ Maier pp 103-107] Coughlin later returned to the air and in 1940 Kennedy battled against his influence among the Irish regarding isolationism.
[Smith pp 122, 171, 379, 502; Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (1984) p 127; Michael Kazin, The Populist persuasion (1995) pp 109, 123.] During the
Spanish Civil War, Kennedy helped persuade Roosevelt to keep America out of the conflict, noting that the American Catholic community sympathized with the forces of
Francisco Franco.
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.
As Roosevelt shifted away from neutrality toward a more aggressive anti-German policy, Kennedy had to resign in November 1940. Regardless, Kennedy was active in rallying Irish and Catholic Democrats to vote for Roosevelt's reelection.
Kennedy was a strong supporter of offering aid to Britain and testified before Congress in January 1941, supporting the Roosevelt administration's
Lend Lease proposal, and gave a well received radio address supporting the same legislation.
While his own ambitions for the White House seemed impossible to realize, he held out great hope for his eldest son
Joseph Jr. to gain the presidency. However, Joe Jr. was killed undertaking a high-risk bombing raid over Germany. 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 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.
[ Leamer 66, 72; Renehan 5.] While holding positive attitudes towards individual Jews, Kennedy's views of the Jews as a people were, 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."
[Hersh 63.] 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."
[Leamer 115.]On
June 13,
1938, Kennedy met with
Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, who reported to 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."
[Hersh 64; Renehan 29.] 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.
[Renehan 60.] Kennedy had a close friendship with
Nancy Astor, who shared (and perhaps surpassed) his hatred of the Jews; the correspondence between them is replete with anti-Semitic tropes.
[Renehan 26-27; Leamer 136.] 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). No member of the so-called "Cliveden Set" (the informal cabal of appeasers who met frequently at Nancy Astor's palatial home) seemed much concerned with the dilemma faced by Jews under the Reich. Astor wrote Kennedy that Hitler would have to do more than just "give a rough time" to "the killers of Christ" before she'd be in favor of launching "Armageddon to save them. The wheel of history swings round as the Lord would have it. Who are we to stand in the way of the future?" 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."[Renehan, "Kennedy and the Jews".]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."
[Leamer 134.] Nevertheless Kennedy campaigned for Roosevelt. 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.
[Renehan 311.]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.
[Hersh 64, at fn.]Joseph McCarthy, after 1950, was the nation's most prominent
Irish-American along with the
Kennedy family. Even before he became famous, McCarthy became close friends with Kennedy, who contributed thousands of dollars to McCarthy, and became one of his major supporters. Kennedy often brought him to Hyannis Port as a weekend house guest in the late 1940s. McCarthy at one point dated Patricia Kennedy. 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 Joe's urging McCarthy hired
Robert Kennedy (age 27) as a senior staff member. 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.
[ Michael O'Brien, John F. Kennedy: A Biography (2005)]Joe Kennedy was always an intensely controversial figure among liberal Democrats because of his business credentials, his Catholicism, his opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy, and his support for Joseph McCarthy. Therefore he operated in the background. He played a vital role in fundraising and in managing parts of the campaigns, such as the West Virginia primary of 1960. How much family money he spent is not yet known. While he stayed in the background his children engaged in intensive campaigning, with round after round of rallies, and coffie klatches. 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 made thousands of friends in his career, and called in his chips to help his sons. The family's glamour thus was turned directly into poitical capital for the senatorial and presidential campaigns of John, Robert and Ted. (The in-laws did obtain the same level of support, as for example
Sargent Shriver who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1972. Historians do not report that he had a major influence on the policy decisions made by his sons.
When John F. Kennedy was asked about the level of involvement and influence 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 land-slide".
Afterwards, Joseph Kennedy expanded the
Kennedy Compound, which continues as a major center of family get-togethers.
On
December 19,
1961, Kennedy suffered a disabling stroke which left him almost totally paralyzed and incoherent but, despite that, he was still aware of all the calamities that befell his family until his own death on
November 18,
1969.
*
Kennedy family*
List of descendants of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy*
Kennedy Curse*
List of well-known U.S. presidential relatives*
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 0446603848
*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)
See
List of personalities associated with Wall Street.
*
Joe Kennedy's Political Influence*
The Kennedys - PBS Special*
Kennedy's Legacy at the SEC*http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG03/omara-alwala/JPKennedy.html Biography of Joseph P. Kennedy and his early life and education
