Biography

Patriarch of a famous political family, Joseph Kennedy was born in Boston, the son of Mary Augusta (Hickey) and Patrick Joseph "P.J." Kennedy. His grandparents were all Irish, with roots in County Wexford, County Clare, and County Cork. Although he grew up in modest East Boston, where his father was a barkeeper and politician, Kennedy was educated with the establishment's children at Boston Latin School and Harvard. In 1914, he married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston's mayor. Billed as "America's youngest bank president" at 25 (his father and his friends owned the bank.) He became a prominent stock market "operator" in the 1920s, and had a brief Hollywood career: He was one of the first financiers to play a leading role in the movie industry. In 1926, as the front man for Wall Street interests, he became chief executive of Film Booking Office, a distributor of low-budget features for unsophisticated audiences. Soon Kennedy also assumed power at another studio, Pathe, and at the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain. Through "financial engineering" of these companies - some of their pieces went into a new major studio, RKO - Kennedy added to his already substantial fortune. (A sidelight in his Hollywood period was his business and sexual relationship with Gloria Swanson, recounted in detail in her autobiography.) In the 1930s, Kennedy turned his attention to politics: an early fund-raiser for Franklin D. Roosevelt, he became the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, then U.S. ambassador to England (1938-40). Kennedy's pessimistic statements about Britain's chances in World War II alienated Roosevelt and made Kennedy deeply unpopular in America. After the war, Kennedy steered his surviving sons, John, Robert and Edward, into politics and served as financier and strategist for their campaigns. In 1961, he suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak, but by all accounts he was aware of many calamities that befell his family until his own death in 1969. Some say that the scandal of his son Teddy at Chappaquiddick was what killed him. Some historians see Kennedy's rapacious greed for success as a fatal flaw that he passed on to his sons, none of whom could transcend it.