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Joseph P. Kennedy (born September 6, 1888, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died November 18, 1969, Hyannis Port, Massachusetts) was an American businessman and financier who served in government commissions in Washington, D.C. (1934–37), and as ambassador to Great Britain (1937–40).
- Joseph P. Kennedy’s Story of Rags to Riches
- From Hollywood to The Mafia
- Joe Kennedy in The Democratic Party
- Ambassador to Britain: Pledging American Neutrality
- From Phony War to Blitzkrieg
- The FBI’s File on Joe Kennedy
- “Jittery Joe”
- Leaving Great Britain
- “Democracy Is Finished in England”
Joseph P. Kennedy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 6, 1888. His grandparents had come to the United States from Ireland in the 1840s to flee the Irish famine. The political and social mores in Boston at that time separated the Irish from the Protestant “blue bloods,” effectively keeping the Irish from participating in the worlds of b...
Using his now considerable fortune, Joe branched out and began producing Hollywood movies. Most of the films he produced were not big hits, but he made more contacts with the Hollywood moguls, who would add another layer of legitimacy to his already bourgeoning portfolio. If Joe flopped in Hollywood, he more than made up for it when it came to the ...
Besides his business interests, it was politics that drove Joe Kennedy into the public spotlight. He had always harbored ambitions to be the first Catholic president of the United States but despite his increasing fortune the blatant anti-Catholic resentment he encountered in Boston remained the ultimate obstacle to his ambitions. His first foray i...
In 1938, President Roosevelt appointed Joe Kennedy as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, an extraordinary post that put him in the spotlight of international affairs. For Joe, the appointment was the fulfillment of a lifetime of work in the political realm, a chance to put to rest all the slights he felt as a Catholic outsider in Boston society....
War clouds were building over Europe. In September 1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, Adolf Hitler annexed the German-speaking portions of Czechoslovakia, and then, a year later, Hitler’s blitzkrieg overran Poland, setting off a major crisis in both London and Paris as to how to respond to Germany’s aggression. A year earlier, Britain had give...
The FBI, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, opened a file on Joe Kennedy as it did with many other prominent people. Joe Kennedy’s FBI files are now available to the public and show the extent of the interest the FBI had in him. One unidentified person wrote the following on Ambassador Kennedy: “(Blank) described Mr. Kennedy as a man with a v...
If there was a course in diplomacy, Joe Kennedy either did not know it existed or forgot to attend. That is really not what happened, but over time the new ambassador’s actions and rather indiscreet remarks would make FDR cringe. Examples of this include Joe Kennedy’s blatant anti-Semitic remarks. For a person who suffered from religious discrimina...
Believing that his effectiveness as ambassador was coming to an end, Kennedy, on October 6, 1940, wrote a letter to FDR asking that he be relieved of his duties in London and demanded that he be brought home. If his request was denied, he would come home anyway. The Roosevelt administration accepted Kennedy’s wishes, and he arrived in New York on O...
As the Roosevelt administration was debating whether or not to grant military aid to Britain (a March 1941 Lend-Lease deal would eventually send 50 obsolete destroyers to Great Britain in exchange for leases from the British of a number of bases in the Caribbean), Kennedy publicly spoke out against any such U.S. action. He chilled both Washington a...
Apr 2, 2014 · In 1914, Kennedy married Rose Fitzgerald; the couple would eventually raise four sons, Joseph Patrick "Joe" Jr. (born in 1915), John Fitzgerald (born in 1917), Robert Francis (born in 1925) and ...
Dec 12, 2012 · And one can easily see Squantum, the site of an airbase where his oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., learned to fly before heading overseas to die in a war that his father did all in his power to try and prevent.
Oct 24, 2019 · There is a famous story, we don’t know if it’s true, about how in the late summer of 1929, a shoe-shine boy gave Joe Kennedy stock tips, and Kennedy, being a wise old investor, thought, “If ...
The most dramatic parts of that crisis—the famed "13 days"—lasted from October 16, 1962, when President Kennedy first learned that the Soviet Union was constructing missile launch sites in Cuba, to October 28, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev publicly announced he was removing the missiles from the island nation.
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Dec 1, 2005 · Kennedy had profited handsomely from financial manipulation, but he understood keenly the need to balance the interests of the people with the imperatives of the financial markets. Kennedy now faced the daunting task of Building an Institution. True to FDR's intent, Kennedy began his tenure by declaring the SEC the partner of honest capital.
