Joseph P. Kennedy(1888-1969)
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Patriarch of a famous political family, Kennedy had a brief Hollywood
career: He was one of the first financiers to play a leading role in
the movie industry. 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. 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.
