Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.: Stock Pools, the First SEC Chief and a Secret

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Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was born in East Boston in 1888 to an Irish Catholic ward boss, became class president at Boston Latin and at Harvard was rejected by the elite Porcellian Club. At 25 he borrowed $45,000 to keep his father's bank from a takeover and called himself America's youngest bank president. In the 1920s he joined stock pools that used wash trading to pump up shares, such as an auto glass maker, then sold to the public at the peak. He shorted the market before the 1929 crash and grew his fortune from about $4 million to an estimated $180 million by 1935. In 1934 Franklin Roosevelt made him first chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, where he outlawed the practices that had enriched him.

In Hollywood he helped assemble RKO and bought the Pantages theater chain after its owner's arrest; the episode says historians found no proof Kennedy engineered the charge, and likewise no evidence for the bootlegging legend. Instead, with Jimmy Roosevelt along, he secured legal import rights to Dewar's and Gordon's through Somerset Importers before Repeal. As ambassador to Britain from 1938 he backed appeasement, and his November 1940 remark that democracy was finished in England ended his political career. He turned to his sons' careers, allying with Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1941 he authorized a lobotomy for his daughter Rosemary, 23, without first telling his wife, Rose; it left her incapacitated, and he hid her condition for 20 years. A 1961 stroke left him unable to speak, and he died in 1969 at 81.

• His three-year affair with Gloria Swanson ended after she found an expensive gift from him had been charged to her own account.
• At the SEC he brought in future Supreme Court justices William O. Douglas and Abe Fortas.
• He described Kristallnacht chiefly as bad publicity for the Nazi regime that complicated appeasement.
• His son Robert worked on Joseph McCarthy's investigative committee staff.
• He outlived four of his nine children: Joe Jr. in World War II, Kathleen in a 1948 plane crash, and John and Robert by assassination.