Joseph Kennedy, Sr. Biography

The patriarch of the political Kennedy family, Joseph P. Kennedy was the father of a U.S. president and two U.S. senators and achieved his own fame as a businessman and political force.

Joseph Kennedy was born in Boston during the city’s Irish boom of the late 1800s. Famously ambitious, he won acceptance to Harvard and by age 25 was already president of a small bank. Later he moved into investment banking, movie theaters, film production and liquor, becoming wealthy in the process. (It is often alleged, but does not seem to be true, that he ran liquor illegally during Prohibition.)

Joseph Kennedy supported Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in the elections of 1932; in 1933 the new president made Kennedy chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1938 FDR appointed him ambassador to Britain, making Kennedy the first Irish Catholic to hold that post (formally titled Ambassador to the Court of St. James). He resigned in 1940, when his commitment to American neutrality in World War II made him an awkward ambassador to an American ally fighting for its survival against Nazi Germany.

After the war he became a key player in the political campaigns of his son, John F. Kennedy: “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes” was his famous quote before the elections of 1946. John Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946, to the U.S. Senate in 1952, and to the presidency in 1961.

Joseph Kennedy’s 1913 marriage to Rose Fitzgerald, the daughter of Boston mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, resulted in nine children. Two of their other sons, Robert Kennedy and Edward Kennedy, became U.S. senators.

Joseph Kennedy had a stroke in December of 1961, less than a year after John F. Kennedy became president. Though severely disabled by the stroke, Joe Kennedy survived another eight years (enduring the assassinations of both John and Robert) before dying in 1969.