Other biographers have asserted that Kennedy made his money as a bootlegger. Nasaw writes flatly that this “was not true.” Rather, the investment capital that Kennedy used to become a multimillionaire by the age of forty came various banks including one held by the Kennedy family. In the 1920s he became a major player in Hollywood’s motion picture industry. He made a fortune while casting himself as Lothario against Gloria Swanson’s role as rich man’s mistress. He bought and sold stocks and bonds, anticipated the 1929 crash, and made yet more money.
Kennedy supported Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 bid for the presidency and campaigned for his election. The Boston banker had no experience in national politics but in 1934 won appointment as FDR’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was so successful that the Washington gossip mill began talking about him as a possible presidential candidate.
When Kennedy went to the capital he and Rose had nine children including two year-old Ted, the youngest, born in 1932. Joe Kennedy was often gone for business, and pleasure. He took long winter vacations in Palm Beach, generally without his family. Jean Kennedy Smith said, “They went their separate ways,” and none of the children thought it odd.
Rose also used their money to travel and to shop. Later, when Caroline Kennedy asked her grandmother how she handled “differences” with her husband, Rose responded, “I would always just say, ‘Yes dear,’ and then I’d go to Paris.”
For his part, Joe spent the winter of Ted’s birth in Palm Beach while Rose lay in, up in Massachusetts. Nasaw accepts the family’s view of Joe and Rose’s relationship. He writes about Joe’s womanizing but, in one of the biography’s shortcomings, he leaves Rose in the background and provides no particular insights into a marriage spent more apart then together.
In contrast, Nasaw loses no opportunity to highlight the warmth of the relationships between Joe and his children, tightly weaving their stories into that of their father. These relationships, however, cannot be understood without reflection on Rose Kennedy’s role both as wife and mother. Understanding the dynamics of the family also begs discussion of what was typical for upper class Irish Catholics in the first half of the twentieth century, something Nasaw does not provide.
Nasaw’s biography transforms itself into a more compelling read when he undertakes the story of Joseph Kennedy’s time as US ambassador to the Court of St. James. Kennedy had helped FDR win re-election in 1936 and wanted, as his reward, to be appointed secretary of the treasury. FDR, however, was committed to retaining Henry Morgenthau. James Roosevelt, sent to Kennedy as his father’s emissary, reported back that “old Joe,” as FDR referred to him, would accept appointment as United States ambassador to England. James reports that upon hearing this FDR “laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair.” In Washington and around the White House, Joe Kennedy was not known to be diplomatic nor interested foreign policy. FDR, however, gave him the position, counting on Kennedy to have good contacts in European and British business communities, and to be an excellent analyst.
Kennedy arrived in England in the winter of 1938. Roosevelt would quickly discover that the appointment was a colossal mistake. As Nasaw notes, “two weeks into his tenure, Ambassador Kennedy was already trying to usurp the authority of the secretary of state and interfere with British politics [and was] … slapped down by Cordell Hull for doing so.” Kennedy dedicated himself to preserving the peace, first, as Nasaw notes, as a “toady” for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, calling for appeasement and resisting the implications of Hilter’s aggressive actions. However he was thought of by the Jewish community while a Hollywood studio boss, he was now labeled an anti-Semite.
Roosevelt thought about calling Kennedy home, but could not afford the loss of Catholic votes in the 1940 election. The president solved the problem of his rogue ambassador by excluding Kennedy from most diplomatic negotiations after Churchill became prime minister. The ambassador’s tenure in London ended in October 1940, two and a half years after his arrival. Kennedy subsequently opposed a US entrance into the war fearing American capitalism would not survive. FDR thought Kennedy “thoroughly patriotic” but a man with “a positive horror of any change in the present methods of life in America.”
Joe Kennedy is best known as the founder of an American political dynasty. After making a fortune, beginning in the 1930s, Kennedy either engaged in public service or used his money to establish his male children as elected officials. His father and father-in-law were politicos. It was not surprising that as a young businessman Kennedy set his sights upon wealth sufficient to permit his children lives of public service. Having secured the fortune, he set out with single-minded determination to shape his sons into successful political candidates. Nasaw chronicles the encouragement, meddling, and pressure involved in making Jack president of the United States and Robert his Attorney General. Readers will either thrill at the machinations or despair that these sons, and later Ted Kennedy, were nothing short of smothered by their father’s ambitions.
Kennedy sold the family’s liquor importing business in 1946 when Jack launched his political career. It might become, Nasaw writes, “a source of potential embarrassment.” He used long-established media connections to the sons’ advantage. More critically, according to Sargent Shriver, his son-in-law, Joe Kennedy “was a genius about how Jack should be handled on television,” having adapted what he, Joe, knew about the newsreel camera to the then-new medium.
The senior Kennedy charted the way through the rocky waters of McCarthyism and well-knew the power of J. Edgar Hoover. When questions were raised about his excessive influence over Jack’s presidential campaign, Joe stayed out of sight at his Palm Beach home although he never stopped committing huge sums of money to the campaign. And he was never off the phone. One of President Kennedy’s advisors later recalled, “If Jack had known about some of the telephone calls his father made on his behalf to Tammany-type bosses during the 1960 campaign, [his] hair would have turned white.”
David Nasaw does not ask his readers to like Joe Kennedy. He does not hold back on the damning stories of deceit and unbridled ambition. He does, however, appear utterly convinced that Kennedy doted on his children — beyond needing them to fulfill his ambitions, and that they returned his love. The Patriarch offers up a complicated story of a remarkable life lived in the maelstrom of particularly turbulent decades. The book is detailed and yet, with the exception of Kennedy’s years as ambassador, it fails to deliver the kind of dramatic intensity that we, rightly or wrongly, associate with the Kennedy clan.
©2013 Jill Norgren for SeniorWomen.com
And Consider These DVDs:
Acorn has released the first four chapters of the evergreen series, Midsomer Murders. Set 21 debuts on Blu-ray and DVD and it gave us an entertaining concentration of the new character, John Barnaby, who takes over as the new DCI after his cousin, Tom Barnaby (John Nettles), retired. Of course, after that many seasons of the comfortable, usually relaxed delivery of Nettles, it takes a little while to accept his replacement, a pricklier version of the country detective we've been so used to. Occasionally, we'd wonder if Tom would shamble into view, offering to fill in with his vast knowledge after some 13 seasons as the lead investigator of the collection of villages making up the fictional Midsomer County. And, of course, we miss Jane Wymark, as Joyce, Tom's long-suffering wife who had many a dinner interrupted by a inconvenient body or two but we're willing to welcome Sarah Barnaby, played by Fiona Dolman.
Four mysteries, approx. 372 min. SDH subtitles
Blu-ray 2-Disc Set (SRP: $59.99) / DVD 4-Vol. Boxed Set: (SRP: $49.99)
(Echoes of the Dead and The Oblong Murders contain nudity and disturbing images)
Kidnap and Ransom is a series that, especially having just seen Zero Dark Thirty, leaves you wishing for more with only six episodes — so far. It features two familiar actors, Trevor Eve (Waking the Dead) and Helen Baxendale (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Cold Feet) in a storyline that examines the rise of international kidnapping with the lead character being the negotiator. It's tense, realistic and takes place in exotic destinations.
Six episodes, 4 ½ hrs, 2 DVDs.
Mature audiences. Boxed set, 276 minutes plus bonus programming. (SRP $49.99)
Contains violence and nudity.
— T. G.
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