The Opinionator

Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.

The story of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy (1888-1969) in the years leading up to World War II provides an interesting peek at American history.  It is a broadening perspective to read about Joseph Kennedy in a context other than, "He made all his money in bootleg scotch."

Joseph P. Kennedy was born and raised in Boston, attended Boston Latin and Harvard University and had begun a very promising career as a bank examiner in Boston, and at the age of 25, became the youngest bank president in the United States. He made a lot of money and displayed a lot of good business sense about buying and selling at the right times.

He married Rose Fitzgerald, the daughter of the mayor of Boston, in 1914 and they had nine children shown on right. In World War I he ran a shipyard in Quincy, MA and in that capacity became an acquaintance of Franklin D. Roosevelt who was the assistant secretary of the Navy. In 1932 Kennedy supported Roosevelt for the presidency and was rewarded by being appointed chairman of the SEC.

Fr. Charles Coughlin was a political commentator and radio celebrity who had supported Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1932. He had an audience of millions and had become very powerful.  Later, he turned against Roosevelt and the president enlisted the services of Joseph Kennedy and others  which eventually resulted in the Vatican shutting down Fr. Coughlin in 1936.  This Coughlin experience brought Roosevelt and Kennedy closer together and Kennedy became a Roosevelt adviser.  He was instrumental with keeping America at a distance from the 1936 Spanish civil war which brought Franco to power. Kennedy convinced Roosevelt that many Spanish-American Catholics, sympathetic to Franco, were Democrats.

In those days Kennedy invested in the movies and became close with actress Gloria Swanson, who was also an investor.  His dalliances with Hollywood are chronicled in the books.

Kennedy was appointed ambassador to England by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938.  He, his wife and nine handsome children were in all the papers as they boarded a ship in New York harbor for the cruise to England.  Joseph Kennedy loved it.  He was granted the respect and status he felt he deserved in England, unlike what he had experienced in Boston as a Catholic and Irishman.

As ambassador, he supported the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain (shown on left in photo here with Kennedy) with Hitler and rejected the warnings of Winston Churchill that compromise with Germany was impossible.  As Roosevelt shifted from neutrality to a more anti-German position, Kennedy pulled away from him and in 1940 resigned as ambassador.  The tenseness between the two increased as Joseph Kennedy Jr. vocally opposed the re-nomination of Roosevelt in 1940.

After he left the ambassadorship,  Kennedy assumed a somewhat lower profile, promoting the career of his sons, and grieving for two of his children who were lost in the war. In a sense, he was unfulfilled after the ambassadorship. 

He was a man who could stir controversy and is on record with some troubling anti-Semitic statements.  He also had a friendly relationship with Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy whose red baiting activities caused him to be censured by the US Senate. Kennedy's friendship with McCarthy was unusual because most liberal Democratic Catholics opposed the position of Senator McCarthy.

Joseph P. Kennedy died of complications from a stroke in 1969, the father of a US President and two US Senators. His wife Rose, the mother of his nine children, died 26 years later at the age of 105. The couple had  31 grandchildren.

Of the nine Kennedy children, three survive today. Jean Kennedy Smith is a former ambassador to Ireland, Eunice Kennedy Shriver is the mother of Maria Shriver Schwarzeneggar, first lady of California, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy is the senior senator from Massachusetts.