Joseph Kennedy Sr

Joseph Kennedy built the fortune and the political machine that produced a president and two senators, and destroyed his own career by arguing that Britain would lose the war. He was the grandson of Irish immigrants and the son of a Boston ward boss, made money in banking, shipbuilding, Hollywood studios and stock speculation in the 1920s, and got out of the market before the crash. Roosevelt appointed him the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, on the reasoning that a man who knew every manipulation from the inside was the one to stop them, and he was effective at it. As ambassador to Britain from 1938 he supported appeasement, told anyone who would listen that democracy was finished in Europe, left London for the countryside during the Blitz in a way that was noticed, and gave an interview in 1940 saying democracy was done in Britain; he resigned within weeks and never held office again. He had also opposed Jewish immigration and made remarks that were reported at the time and have not improved with age. He then transferred the ambition to his sons. Joseph junior was killed flying an experimental mission in 1944; John became president, Robert attorney general and senator, Edward a senator for forty-seven years. His daughter Rosemary was given a lobotomy at twenty-three at his direction, without her mother's knowledge, and was institutionalised for the rest of her life. He had a stroke in 1961 and lived, unable to speak, through the killings of two of his sons. The suggestion that he made the fortune in bootlegging is repeated everywhere and has never been documented. He bought the Merchandise Mart in Chicago in 1945, which was for years the largest building in the world by floor area and the base of the family money. Rosemary died in 2005 at eighty-six.

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