Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.: From East Boston Banker to SEC Chairman, Ambassador and Patriarch

Joseph Patrick Kennedy was a bank president at 25, a film studio owner, chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission and a U.S. ambassador, and his sons became a President and two senators. The National Park Service, which runs the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, tells his story as that of a complicated man who was at different times a son, a brother, a student, a husband, a father, a financier, a film producer and a public servant.

East Boston roots

Kennedy was born on September 6, 1888, the first of three surviving children of Patrick Joseph "PJ" Kennedy and Mary Augusta Hickey. He grew up watching his father's success in business and politics and his care for the Irish immigrant community of East Boston he represented, which left PJ respected but owed money by many constituents. Joseph concluded that money, not politics, gave power. As a teenager he organized a neighborhood baseball team, raised donations for uniforms, rented a fenced field and sold tickets.

At 13 he was enrolled in the mostly Protestant Boston Latin School, where he was popular, elected class president and colonel of the cadet regiment in his senior year, and played baseball and basketball and managed the football team. Despite unimpressive grades, that record won him a place at Harvard, which he entered in 1908. As an Irish Catholic and the son of an East Boston ward boss, he met subtle, painful exclusion from elite social circles.

Bank president at 25

Ethnic prejudice kept him out of banking at the level of his Boston Brahmin classmates, so he became a state bank examiner, earning $1500 a year and gaining connections and insight into the industry. In 1914 he used those skills to rescue a small bank, the Columbia Trust Company, where his father sat on the board. Its shareholders made him president at 25, one of the youngest bank presidents in the country.

A home in Brookline

With that position Kennedy was finally an eligible suitor for Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, whom he had courted secretly for seven years against the wishes of her father, John F. Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston. They married on October 7, 1914, and moved to 83 Beals Street in Brookline, only 5 miles from East Boston but a world away from the Irish immigrant neighborhood of his youth. Their children:

His children became the center of his life. He pushed them to excel in everything, encouraged lively political talk at dinner, urged a vigorous life and fostered competition among them. By 1920, with four children, the family moved to a larger house a few blocks away.

Money and influence

After the United States entered World War I, Kennedy moved from finance to industry as assistant general manager at Bethlehem Steel's Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, one of the country's largest shipyards, then booming. After the war he went back to finance, and in 1926 he arranged the purchase of a production studio in the still-new movie industry and moved the family to New York. Over the next few years mergers, acquisitions and independent productions made him and his investors very wealthy. By the time the family left Brookline in 1927 he was a multimillionaire, and he retired from the film industry in 1930. During the Great Depression he made profitable short sales of industries the downturn devastated. In 1957 Fortune magazine estimated his fortune at between $200 million and $400 million, among the 16 wealthiest Americans.

The Park Service also has a video that takes on the idea that his entire life and wealth are often reduced to one word, "bootlegger," a part of the Kennedy family story, and explores where that myth came from.

Joseph Kennedy Sr. (fifth from right in the front row) campaigning for Franklin D. Roosevelt (center of the train platform), September 23, 1932. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Public service

With his family's finances secure, Kennedy went back to his father's world of politics. He backed Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, and Roosevelt rewarded him by naming him chairman of the newly established Securities and Exchange Commission. There he administered the laws on trading stocks and bonds and helped reform the industry, under strict scrutiny from a public that distrusted bankers and investors during the continuing depression.

In 1938 Roosevelt named him Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Business success did not prepare him for it. In the volatile climate before World War II he counseled appeasement with Germany and repeatedly spoke publicly for American isolationism, without making clear that these were his own views, so many took them as administration policy. They alienated Roosevelt and drew disapproval from British and American citizens alike. Without presidential support, and with war near, he resigned in 1940.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and John F. Kennedy arriving at Southampton, England, July 2, 1938. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Later years

After the break with Roosevelt he withdrew from public view, though he had entertained higher political ambitions, and turned his wealth toward his family's long-term good and to philanthropy, mainly through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. He kept his attention on his remaining children's goals. John became President of the United States, and Robert and Edward were elected senators.

On December 19, 1961, a stroke paralyzed the right side of his body and left him unable to speak. He died on November 18, 1969, at 81.

President John F. Kennedy visits his father at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, August 14, 1963. Photo: Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

The family celebrates Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.'s birthday at Hyannis Port, September 7, 1963. Photo: Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Sources

• National Park Service, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.: Family Patriarch, John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The family members' remembered words and studio portraits credited to private photographers are left out.