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Joseph "Joe" Patrick Kennedy, Sr. ( September 6 , 1888 РNovember 18 , 1969 ) was a prominent United States businessman and political figure, the father of President John F. Kennedy and the Patriarch of the Kennedy Political Family . BACKGROUND AND EARLY CAREER 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 . After graduating from Harvard in 1912, his first job was 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. In 1912 he married Rose Fitzgerald , the daughter of John F. Fitzgerald , the Democrat mayor of Boston and probably the most recognized politician in the city. 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 the early 1920s, Joseph acquired two movie studios and personally produced several films, he then sold the companies to the Radio Corporation Of America (RCA) . He was romantically linked to Gloria Swanson during 1929 and 1930, during which time he poured large sums of money into Gloria Productions Limited, a film company which Swanson had just started. BUILDING TREMENDOUS WEALTH 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. 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, long before the Crash, locking in multi-million dollar profits. Indeed when the 1929 crash did come, he made money due to his Short Position s. 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 which was only allowed to be imported during Prohibition for medicinal purposes. Anticipating the end of Prohibition (not difficult to do as it slowly passed through the required number of states) he assembled a very 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, Path̩ . In October 1928, he formally merged his film companies FBO and KAO to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum 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. PUBLIC SERVICE 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, but felt that his ambitions were being denied by a number of White House insiders, including the President's secretary and chief aide Louis Howe. Even Kennedy's critics acknowledge the reforming work he performed as SEC Chairman. 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 lodge financial statements with the SEC which broke what some saw as an information monopoly maintained by the Morgan banking family. After serving in this post for several years, he resigned in 1935. President Roosevelt then asked him to chair the Maritime Commission. During the Spanish Civil War Kennedy helped persuade President Roosevelt to stay out of the conflict arguing that the American Catholic community sympathized with the forces of Francisco Franco . Kennedy's opponents claim he circulated fabricated charges of atrocities against the Church in Spain on the part of the Spanish loyalists. Appeasement In 1938, he was appointed as the United States Ambassador to the Court Of St. James's ( United Kingdom ). Kennedy, of Irish descent, hugely enjoyed his leadership position in London society, which stood in stark contrast to his outsider status in Boston. He rejected the warnings by Winston Churchill that Nazi Germany posed a looming threat, and supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain 's policy of Appeasement in order to stave off a second world war that would be more horrible than the first. He had to resign in November, 1940, because he disagreed with Roosevelt's policy of hostility toward Germany as well as continued tensions with the White House. Regardless, Kennedy was active in rallying Irish Democrats to Roosevelt's reelection. Yet it is not fair to call Joe Kennedy a true isolationist. Kennedy was a strong supporter of offering aid to England and testified before Congress for 5 hours in January, 1941 supporting the Roosevelt administration's support of Lend Lease. Furthermore, Kennedy also gave a well received radio address supporting the same legislation that same month. 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 indeed won the 1960 Elections . MCCARTHY'S SUPPORT FROM THE KENNEDY FAMILY 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 Joseph P. Kennedy, who contributed thousands of dollars to McCarthy, and became one of his major supporters. Joseph 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. Joe Kennedy was always a controversial figure among 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 did play a vital role in fundraising and in managing parts of the campaigns, such as the West Virginia primary of 1960. STROKE AND RETIREMENT On December 19, 1961, Kennedy suffered a disabling stroke which left him almost totally paralysed and incoherent until his death. JFK's assassination in 1963 made Kennedy reluctant to support his other son Robert F. Kennedy 's bid to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency in the 1968 Elections . His fears came to pass when Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert in 1968 while on the campaign trail. After learning of Ted Kennedy 's accident involving the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in the Chappaquiddick Incident , Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. started refusing food and became uninterested in life. He died shortly afterwards on November 18 , 1969 . Joseph Kennedy expanded the Kennedy Compound , which continues as a major center of family get-togethers. SEE ALSO
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