David Nasaw's The Patriarch

The Patriarch:  The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw, The Penguin Press, Nov. 13 2012, $40.00, 834 pp. 

The Patriarch dispels the false “facts” that continue to orbit Joseph P. Kennedy’s story.  Nasaw argues that Kennedy really wasn’t a bootlegger, wasn’t his sons’ puppeteer, and didn’t steal any elections.  The truths about Kennedy—like how a New York Times columnist was ghostwriting for him while praising him unbeknownst to readers—are arresting.  Slow to politics, Kennedy supported Republican Hoover over Al Smith in 1928 (even though he was later indignant that fellow Catholics didn’t vote in large numbers for his son John in 1960!)  Interestingly, Kennedy only chose not to become a Republican because of somnolent Governor Calvin Coolidge’s decision to remove an Irish American from public office as a sop to the Protestant establishment. 

Joseph made his millions on Wall Street because “no one knew how to play the angles as well as he did.”  As he says himself in one of many letter excerpts, “I knew all the angles of trading…I had studied pools and participated in them and was aware of all the intricacies and trickeries of market manipulation….I had engaged in many a furious financial fight and knew the formulas—when to duck and when to hit.” 

In fact, he knew the scams of the so-called “free market” we hear so much about—the pools, corners, wash sales, match orders—and was brought into the Roosevelt administration as the SEC chairman to help institute the regulatory state conservative business-types like he now dismantle! In effect, Kennedy regulated himself out of the stock market.  Roosevelt handled more than collaborated with Kennedy even dismissed the patriarch as a “temperamental Irish boy.”

Later he made Kennedy ambassador to England, a regrettable choice given Kennedy’s tendency for isolationism, his suspicion of the English, his hope that the British would just lie down and accept defeat, and his false belief that Hitler was a rational actor.  His notorious interview—“democracy is all done”—is given special attention and while Nasaw doesn’t dwell on the “hundreds of affairs” in which Kennedy indulged, he does highlight Kennedy’s tendency to raise the Jewish question where it didn’t belong.   As everyone knows, this engaging and enormous book cannot end well:  Kennedy outlived four of his nine children.  Three were killed (two on television), his daughter Rosemary was lobotomized, and young Edward fell into scandal.