Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.

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.

Background, education and marriage

Joseph was born in Boston, the son of Patrick J. Kennedy, a successful businessman and Irish Catholic community leader. 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.

Patrick Kennedy's home was a prosperous and comfortable one, thanks to his successful liquor business and an influential role in local politics. At 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, like several older relatives, attended Harvard College where 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.

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.

Business career

Kennedy made a great deal of money 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 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.

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.

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 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. When Pantages was charged and tried with rape though, 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).

New Dealer

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. He resigned 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 "^* 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. ^* 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.

Joe McCarthy close to Joe Kennedy

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)

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. 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 thousdands 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 Sergeant Shriver who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1972. Historians do not reprt that he had a major influence on the policy decisions made by his sons.

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.

References

Resources

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)

Personalities of Wall Street

See List of personalities associated with Wall Street.

External links

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