How Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Became a Billionaire And Founded a Political Dynasty That Defined The 20th Century!

A black and white photo of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. stood wearing a suit and smiling at the camera for a promotional photo

A cotemporary of businessmen like J. Paul Getty, Conrad Hilton and Coco Chanel, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. didn’t just create a business empire that still exists today, but also founded a political dynasty that defined the 20th century.

The patriarch of the famed Kennedy family, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., better known as Joe Kennedy Sr., used his immense fortune to help his children’s political careers, which allowed them to dominate the legislative, and eventually the executive, branches for decades!

Early Life

Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr. was born on September 6 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts, as the eldest of four children born to Patrick Joseph “P. J.” Kennedy, a local businessman and politician (then a Massachusetts State Representative) and his wife, Mary Augusta Hickey.

Irish on both sides of his family, his paternal grandparents had migrated to Boston from Wexford in County Wexford, whilst his maternal grandparents had migrated from Rosscarbery in County Cork. Both had left Ireland during the Potato Famine.

Despite being one of four children, Joe only grew up with two siblings, his two sisters – Mary and Margaret – as his younger brother, Francis (born March 11 1891) died in infancy on June 14 1982.

Only the second member of his family (behind his father) to receive a formal education, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., better known as just “Joe Kennedy”, attended the prestigious Boston Latin School, was a below-average student at best.

However, he excelled at sports, particularly baseball (with him playing on the school baseball team) and was popular among his classmates, who elected him as their class president.

At his father’s insistence, Joe enrolled at Harvard College, where he became an active social leader on campus, joining the Hasty Pudding Club and the Delta Upsilon fraternity and was unsuccessful in being admitted into the Porcellian Club.

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. graduated Harvard in 1912 with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

Business Career

Having been quite close to his father – arguably the most prosperous Irish-American businessmen in all of Boston – Joe Kennedy, now in his mid-twenties, decided he wanted to pursue a business career.

Bank Manager, Investor, Bethlehem Steel

Settling on the idea of entering the financial sector, primarily in the banking industry after reading about how J. P. Morgan made his fortune, Kennedy first found employment as a state-employed bank examiner.

Although the pay was next to nothing, Kennedy soon learned a lot about the industry.

In 1913, the Columbia Trust Bank, which his father was a major shareholder in, was under siege, with a rival attempting to take it over.

Unwilling to let this happen, Joe Kennedy borrowed $45,000 from family members and his wealthy Harvard graduate friends, and bought enough stock in the company to prevent the bank’s rival from taking it over.

As a “thank you” for saving the bank, a 25-year-old Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was elected president of the bank, making Kennedy the self-proclaimed “youngest bank president in America”.

Using the bank’s money to help him, Joe Kennedy became what modern investors would call a “value investor” – eg. buying a company worth $1 for only 50 cents.

To that end, he acquired Boston-based realty firm Old Colony Realty Associates, Inc., which specialized in buying real estate in foreclosure and selling them at a huge profit. With the bank’s money behind it, Kennedy made a small fortune as a real estate investor.

With the US’s entrance into WWI in 1916, Kennedy sought to get involved in the war effort.

Not wanting to fight in the trenches, Kennedy instead used his business savvy to become an assistant general manager of Fore River, one of Bethlehem Steel’s most important shipyards.

Early Days on Wall Street

1929 Stock Market Crash & Great Depression

Hollywood Mogul

In the mid-1920’s, using the money he’d earned from his earliest days on Wall Street, Joseph P. Kennedy began acting as a financier to Hollywood studios (much like Kennedy’s hero, J. P. Morgan did with steel companies).

Liquor Importer And Real Estate Tycoon

Contrary to popular belief, there’s actually no evidence that suggests Kennedy was involved in bootlegging during prohibition, even if mobsters testified to it under oath.

What we can prove, however, is that in 1933, when public opinion had begun to sour against Prohibition, and its end looked imminent, Kennedy used his great fortune to begin acquiring stakes in Scottish distilleries.

Aside from this, Kennedy also partnered with James Roosevelt II, the eldest son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in March 1933 to establish Somerset Importers, and traveled to the UK to secure deals with English and Scottish distilleries.

Thanks to this, Somerset Importers became the official US agents of Dewar’s scotch, Haig & Haig whiskey and Gordon’s dry gin.

Once Prohibition formally ended on December 5 that year, Kennedy and Roosevelt imported millions of dollars worth of high-end alcohol from the distilleries Kennedy owned and the distilleries Somerset Importers were the official US agent of.

Arriving in the US only a few weeks after Prohibition ended, Kennedy and Roosevelt sold their alcohol to alcohol-hungry Americans at a huge markup, netting them millions in the process!

Kennedy remained in the liquor importing business for years, using the proceeds to invest in real estate, acquiring residential and commercial properties in New York City and the Hialeah Park Race Track in Florida.

The crown jewel of his empire was the Merchandise Mart in the heart of downtown Chicago.

Purchased by Kennedy in 1945 for either $12.5 or $13 million (sources differ), the revenues from the building were a lasting source of money for the Kennedys, until subsequent generations sold to Vornado Realty Trust for $625 million in 1998.

Political Career

When then-Governor of New York Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was one of the many business elites who supported Roosevelt, mostly due to the poor handling of the Great Depression by President Hoover.

During Roosevelt’s run, Kennedy raised, donated and loaned his campaign millions in today’s money, which ultimately helped him to win the presidency that year.

First Chairman of The SEC

With Roosevelt becoming President in 1932, one of his first priorities was to establish a government agency that would regulate the stock market, and prevent the kinds of market manipulation that had run rampant for decades, costing American lives and jobs in the process.

And who better to head the agency than someone who’d previously manipulated the markets to an epic proportion?

To that end, after the Securities and Exchange Commission was founded in 1934 after Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, FDR appointed Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. as the first chairman of the SEC.

As a former market manipulator, Kennedy was particularly effective at closing down many of the schemes that he’d used to make his fortune.

Beyond that, Kennedy and the SEC also cracked down on get-rich-quick schemes and the mediums which shady stockbrokers used to disseminate false information to drive a company’s stock price up and/or down.

Using his position as not only the head of a government agency, but also a well-respected investor, Kennedy singlehandedly restored American businesses’ faith in Wall Street by assuring them that they “would never be taken advantage of again by Wall Street”.

Or so Kennedy said anyway.

Initially, Kennedy and SEC were crucified in the court of public opinion, with many investors, both large and small, believing that government intervention in the stock market would cripple the already depressed market.

Eventually, these same investors realized that this wasn’t an example of a large government overstepping its boundaries, but was actually a government agency built by investors, to protect investors.

After a rather eventful year on the job, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. resigned as Chairman of the SEC, with Kennedy’s close friend James M. Landis taking his place as Chairman of the SEC.

Ambassador to The UK

Republican Party Alliances

Despite being a leading figure in the Democratic Party, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was firmly on the right of the party, especially so when it came to fiscal matters. As such, he also maintained close personal friendships with members of the GOP.

An ardent anti-communist due to his position as one of the wealthiest men in America, Joe Kennedy was a staunch supporter of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his McCarthy Trials, donating thousands of dollars to the cause.

Whilst this weakened his position among liberals, who saw the McCarthy Trials as nothing more than a modern-day witch hunt, this made him even more popular with Irish-Americans, who as a whole despised collectivism as they’d done it for the British back home in Ireland.

Even before the McCarthy Trials, Kennedy and McCarthy were close, initially bonding over their shared hatred of communism before eventually bonding over other shared interests. At one point, McCarthy even dated Pat, one of Kennedy’s daughters.

Through their friendship, Kennedy was able to secure a job for Bobby working as a senior staff member on McCarthy’s subcommittee too.

Similarly, after Nixon (an ardent anti-communist) won the Republican nomination, and the Democrats were still deciding, Joe Kennedy reached out to Nixon – a man he’d known for years – on the telephone.

Here, Joe Kennedy assured Nixon that if his son, John, didn’t win the nomination, he and the rest of the Kennedy clan would financially support Nixon. Sadly, John won the nomination, and Joe’s money was used to beat Nixon for the presidency.

Founding a Dynasty

Connections

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

On October 7 1914, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. married Rose Fitzgerald, the eldest daughter of Boston’s first Irish Catholic Mayor, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. Despite Joe’s many affairs, the marriage lasted until Joe’s death in 1969.

Soon after the wedding, Rose fell pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy on July 25 1915. The couple named the child Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. in honor of the boy’s father, who despite only being 26 years old, was a self-made millionaire by today’s standards.

Aside from being one of the happiest days of his life, the birth of his son made Joe realize that despite having built a huge fortune already (a fortune he was determined to expand at any cost), he could never rise up the political ranks.

He simply hadn’t spent his entire life in politics to make this happen.

Still wanting there to be a President Kennedy, Joe Sr. made the decision to groom his eldest son to become the first Irish Catholic President of the United States.

In fact, the driving force behind Joe Sr. getting involved in politics was to get the connections within the Democratic Party, that would allow his son to enter politics, and give him the clout to get all the way up to the top!

The son of a multimillionaire, Joe Jr. was sent to the best schools money could buy, attending the prestigious Choate School (paid for by Joe Sr.) and later Harvard (again, paid for by Joe Sr.), and later the prestigious Harvard Law (again, paid for by Joe Sr.)

However, whilst Joe Jr. was studying at Harvard Law, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the US entered WWII. Raised by his father to have an immense feeling of patriotism, Joe Jr. joined the US Navy and was shipped off to the European Theater.

Becoming a decorated bomber pilot, Joe Jr. signed up for a top-secret mission flying radio-controlled aircraft laden with explosives into German U-Boat pens. Joe Jr. never came back from that mission…

John F. Kennedy

With Joe Jr.’s death in 1944, Joe Sr.’s decades of work had been rendered pointless in an instant. A savvy businessman, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. quickly came up with a backup plan: his second son, John.

Though John had a reputation for being fairly mischievous, he had received much of the same education his older brother had. As such, Joe Sr.’s aspirations for Joe Jr. passed on to John.

Returning home from his naval service during WWII, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. began prepping his son to become the Representative for Massachusetts’s 11th District in 1947, chiefly by convincing the incumbent, James Michael Curley, to step down.

Despite being a Democrat running for a long-held Democratic seat, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. spared no expense for his son’s campaign which he obviously won by a landslide. John F. Kennedy served in the House until he retired in 1953.

But JFK (nor his father!) weren’t done just there.

Retiring from the House, Joe Sr. financed his son’s senatorial campaign, where he faced off against veteran Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Even in spite of Cabot Lodge having more experience, JFK was able to win the election.

Most historians tend to agree that this was mostly due to the immense amount of money Joe Sr. put into his son’s campaign.

Serving in the Senate from 1953 until 1960, JFK resigned his seat in the Senate after winning the Democratic nomination for President during the 1960 Presidential Election and subsequently winning the election itself!

Once again, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.’s money was a major factor in why JFK became the first Irish Catholic US President (and the first of only two to date).

Kennedy Siblings

Kennedy Family

What do you think of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.? Was he more influential as a businessman or the founder of a political dynasty? Tell me in the comments!