Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.
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- For other persons named Joseph Kennedy, see Joseph Kennedy (disambiguation).
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. As a leading American Democrat, and staunch anti-Communist, he built a national coalition of supporters to promote the political fortunes of the Kennedy political family.
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[edit] Background, education and family
Joseph Patrick Kennedy was born in Boston, the son of Patrick J. Kennedy, a successful businessman and Irish American 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 felt themselves excluded by upper-class Yankees. Many Boston Irish were active in the Democratic Party, including Patrick and numerous relatives.
Patrick Kennedy's home was a prosperous and comfortable one, thanks to his successful liquor wholesaling business and an influential role in local politics. Mary Augusta Kennedy 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 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 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.
[edit] 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:
[edit] 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.
[edit] Early ventures
After graduating from Harvard in 1912, he took his first job as a state-employed bank examiner. In that role, he 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 World War I 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.
[edit] 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:
- (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.
[edit] 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. He famously remarked about getting out of the stock market in 1928, "You know it is time to sell when the shoe-shine boy tries to give you stock tips."
[edit] 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, 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, and Hialeah Race Track in Hialeah, Florida. His most important purchase was an office building in Chicago, the Merchandise Mart, which gave his family an important base in that city and an alliance with the Irish-American political leadership there.
Kennedy made huge profits from reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood studios. Some speculated that his interest in movies came about because of the attractive women involved in the field. 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, 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 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).
[edit] 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.
[edit] Disputes with Father 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. A strong supporter of Roosevelt in 1932, Coughlin broke with the president in 1934 and became a bitter opponent in his weekly 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. [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 (the future Pope Pius XII) in a successful effort to get the Vatican to shut Coughlin down in 1936. [2] Coughlin later returned to the air and in 1940 Kennedy battled against his influence among the Irish regarding isolationism.[3] 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 nationalist forces of Francisco Franco against the left-wing in Spain.
[edit] 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. Relations were tense between Kennedy and Roosevelt (especially when Joe Kennedy Jr vocally opposed FDR's renomination). Regardless, Kennedy was active in rallying Irish and Catholic Democrats to vote for Roosevelt's reelection. He sat out the war on the sidelines, like Al Smith, eager to help the war effort but never invited. [4]
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.
[edit] 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.[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."[6] 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."[7]
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."[8] 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.[9]
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.[10] 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."[11]
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."[12] 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.[13]
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.[14]
[edit] 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.[15]
[edit] Presidential ambitions for family
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. He played a vital role in fundraising and in managing parts of Democratic party members' campaigns, including those of his own children. How much family money he spent is not known. 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 political capital for the senatorial and presidential campaigns of John, Robert and Ted. (The in-laws did not obtain the same level of support, 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 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 land-slide".
Afterwards, Joseph Kennedy expanded the Kennedy Compound, which continues as a major center of family get-togethers.
[edit] Stroke and death
On December 19, 1961, at the age of 73, he suffered a major stroke, which he miraculously 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.
[edit] Joseph and Rose Kennedy's children today
As of November 28, 2006, only three of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children are still alive. The only two surviving daughters are 85-year old Eunice Kennedy Shriver and 78-year old Jean Kennedy Smith, while the only surviving son is 74-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. The surviving children have grown particularly close as the years have passed.
Joseph was especially close to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.[16]
[edit] See also
- Kennedy family
- List of descendants of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
- Kennedy Curse
- List of well-known U.S. presidential relatives
[edit] References
- ^ Leamer 93; Brinkley 127.
- ^ Maier pp 103-107
- ^ Smith pp 122, 171, 379, 502; Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (1984) p 127; Michael Kazin, The Populist persuasion (1995) pp 109, 123.
- ^ Leamer pp 152-3; William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to George W. Bush (2001) pp 68-72
- ^ Leamer 66, 72; Renehan 5.
- ^ Hersh 63.
- ^ Leamer 115.
- ^ Hersh 64; Renehan 29.
- ^ Renehan 60.
- ^ Renehan 26-27; Leamer 136.
- ^ Renehan, "Kennedy and the Jews".
- ^ Leamer 134.
- ^ Renehan 311.
- ^ Hersh 64, at fn.
- ^ Leamer pp 313, 434; Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor. American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley- His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (2001) p. 250; Timothy J. Meagher. The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (2005) p.150.
- ^ Maier; O'Brien p. 740
[edit] 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
[edit] Personalities of Wall Street
See List of personalities associated with Wall Street.
[edit] External links
- 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
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Categories: 1888 births | 1969 deaths | Ambassadors of the United States | American businesspeople | American film producers | American investors | American Roman Catholics | Anti-Semitic people | Deaths by stroke | Irish-American politicians | Kennedy family | Knights of Malta | Members of the Securities and Exchange Commission | People from Boston | Boston Latin School alumni | John F. Kennedy
