there is only a small margin of justice in that the POS was chair bound and could only cry and soil itself for the last eight years of it's life
Posted on 02/03/2018 6:44:24 AM PST by beaversmom
Joe Kennedy Sr., JFK's father and the patriarch of "America's Royal Family," left behind a complicated legacy, including anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies.
In 1928, Joe Kennedy Sr. sold two of his small film studios, creating RKO Pictures, best known for allowing 24-year-old wunderkind Orson Welles to make Citizen Kane, the revered film chronicling the rise and fall of Charles Foster Kane, an illustrious yet treacherous American magnate.
But Joe Kennedy Sr.’s own rollercoaster of a biography trumps even the fictional Kane’s in every regard, from his hand-over-fist stock market days to his persona non grata period as a failed World War II-era diplomat, forever tarnished by what many considered to be an unshakable anti-Semitism.
Like Kane’s tale, the story of Joe Kennedy Sr.’s dark side begins at his end, when Kennedy bested Kane even in the pathos of his dying days. Felled by a debilitating stroke in 1961, Kennedy was forced to sit, trapped in his own failing body, as two of his sons, Jack and Bobby, were assassinated in the tumultuous decade to come.
All he could do to communicate his grief was cry. For the eight years leading up to his death, in fact, Kennedy was unable to write or speak at all.
The assassinations, incredibly, were just the latest in a string of blows to the Kennedy family predating its patriarch’s wheelchair-bound days.
For eight long years, Kennedy couldn’t tell anyone what it felt like to outlive his eldest boy, bomber pilot Joseph Jr., who died in an explosion over the English Channel in 1944, engaged in a war that his father virulently opposed.
For eight long years, he couldn’t tell anyone how gutted he felt to outlive his second daughter, “Kick,” who died in a plane crash in 1948, or if he regretted lobotomizing and institutionalizing his mentally-ill first daughter, Rosemary, in 1941 and insisting that uttering her name was verboten in the Kennedy house.
And even if Joe Kennedy Sr. ultimately regretted his many deeds and statements widely regarded as anti-Semitic, from his years in Hollywood as a studio head to his stint as Ambassador to Great Britain, for eight long years, he was unable to express it.
If you’re unfamiliar with Kennedy’s Shakespearean rise and fall, it’s hard to believe the patriarch of “America’s Royal Family” could be an anti-Semite. This was the man, after all, who encouraged all of his children (the tragically discarded Rosemary aside) to enter public service, and lived to see that influence bear tremendous fruit.
This was the man, after all, who himself grew up as an Irish Catholic outsider in East Boston, struggling to secure jobs in finance that his less-qualified Protestant banker friends were stepping into with ease. If anyone understood the ignorance of prejudice, you would hope that it would be the grandson of an uneducated Irish immigrant farmer who escaped the potato famine to ultimately sire one of the wealthiest and most respected political families in American history. But Kennedy, paradoxically, frequently found himself on the wrong side of that history.
After gaining immense wealth selling short on Wall Street and flipping Hollywood studios — he was a multimillionaire by the age of 40 — Kennedy began his short career in public service in 1934 as the first-ever head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under his longtime friend, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The audacious and ambitious Kennedy wanted to parlay the gig into something bigger: a cabinet position as Secretary of the Treasury. Roosevelt, however, knew the famously stubborn and foul-mouthed Kennedy would have a tough time following orders in that capacity, so he said no.
When Kennedy then suggested the ambassadorship, Roosevelt laughed so hard that he almost fell out of his wheelchair, according to his son James. But upon further reflection, the president decided that the no-nonsense Kennedy was actually the right man for the job.
Roosevelt may have reconsidered had he been privy to correspondence between Kennedy and Joe Jr. from 1934, in which the son calls the Nazi’s “dislike” of the Jews “well-founded,” and the father replies that he is “very pleased and gratified at your observations of the German situation.”
Four years later, it’s 1938. War is looming in Europe. Hitler takes Austria. Hitler wants Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain seeks appeasement — “peace in our time.” Ambassador Kennedy approves, insisting that U.S. involvement would lead to a second Great Depression at best and utter devastation at worst.
According to confidential German documents made public by the U.S. State Department in 1949, Kennedy met with the German Ambassador to Great Britain, Herbert von Dirksen, in June. Dirksen later informed Baron Ernst von Weizsaecker, State Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry, that Kennedy told him that the “Jewish question” was of vital importance to U.S.-German relations.
It is here where the ugly hairline cracks in the Joe Kennedy Sr. facade begin to widen:
“He himself understood our Jewish policy completely,” Dirksen wrote. “He was from Boston and there, in one golf club, and in other clubs, no Jews had been admitted in the past 50 years … In the United States, therefore, such pronounced attitudes were quite common, but people avoided making so much outward fuss about it.”
Most damning, however, was Kennedy’s assertion (in Dirksen’s words) that it “was not so much the fact that [the Germans] wanted to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to [the Germans], but rather the loud clamor with which [the Germans] accompanied the purpose.”
In November, the persecution of German and Austrian Jews intensifies into the “loud clamor” and horror of Kristallnacht. Working with Chamberlain, Kennedy promoted a plan to relocate European Jews abroad, but failed to inform the State Department. The plan fizzled.
Kennedy continued for years to loudly advocate for appeasement, in London and at home, arguing that Britain would be destroyed otherwise. He attempts to set up a personal meeting with Adolf Hitler, again failing to inform the State Department, but it never materialized.
An embassy aide, Harvey Klemmer, later shared Kennedy’s summary of his anti-Jewish sentiment, even as news of concentration camps came across the wires: “Individual Jews are alright, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch. Look what they did to the movies.”
Klemmer also recounts Kennedy’s common terms for Jews: “kikes” or “sheenies.”
In May 1940, Winston Churchill replaced Chamberlain and Britain declared war a few months later. The rest, as they say, is history, but Kennedy’s disgraceful, victim-blaming role during the war is a lesser-known chapter in that history.
Back in the U.S., a paranoid Kennedy blamed Hollywood and its anti-German propaganda, specifically Charlie Chaplin (an English Jew) and his Führer-mocking The Great Dictator, for pushing America into the war. He also blamed the problematic “Jew media” and the “Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles” for trying to “set a match to the fuse of the world.”
By the fall of 1940, Kennedy was a pariah in America, a condition not aided by statements like, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.” He then resigned shortly after half-heartedly endorsing Roosevelt’s third term on the radio.
Whether or not Kennedy’s ugly remarks and apparent Nazi sympathies stemmed from textbook “anti-Semitism” or not is merely a semantic exercise — history and decency have proven him to be woefully in the wrong.
Nevertheless, investigating his motives is an exercise worth engaging in, and Kennedy biographer David Nasaw does it deftly in his exhaustive biography The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. Nasaw doesn’t think that Kennedy was strictly anti-Semitic, considering him instead to be a tribalist of sorts, raised to believe cultural myths — both positive and negative — about Jews, Catholics, and Protestants alike.
Nasaw doesn’t think that Kennedy, unlike high-profile American anti-Semites such as Henry Ford or Charles Lindbergh, subscribed to the idea that there is “something in the genetic makeup, in the blood of Jews that makes them sinister, evil and destructive of Christian morality.”
Kennedy’s most comprehensive biographer argues, instead, that the Ambassador’s admiration for the Jews allowed him to buy into “thousand year-old anti-Semitic myths” and succumb to “anti-Semitic scapegoating” while not crossing the line into actual anti-Semitism.Kennedy continued this scapegoating as late into the war as May 1944, in an unpublished interview with a Boston reporter: “If the Jews themselves would pay less attention to advertising their racial problem, and more attention to solving it, the whole thing would recede into its proper perspective. It’s entirely out of focus now, and that is chiefly their fault.”
Believing that Kennedy would have blamed any “tribe” thusly doesn’t make a statement like that sting any less. That Kennedy’s status as a post-war pariah and known anti-Semite didn’t get in the way of fostering and financing some of the greatest political and public-service minds of the 20th century speaks volumes about how common these ugly sentiments were.
As for Nasaw’s statements, while they may seem, ultimately, like a distinction without a difference, the biography isn’t tantamount to apologia. Commenting on Joe Kennedy Sr.’s remarks to Dirksen about understanding the German’s “Jewish policy” completely, Nasaw does not mince words: “[W]hile telling them what they wanted to hear about American anti-Semitism and Jewish media dominance, [Kennedy] was not saying anything he did not believe to be true.”
You are correct.
No he gained immense wealth bootlegging whisky into the US through Canada during prohibition with his buddies Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. A tidbit they left out oif the article.
Joe Kennedy, Sr. was Boston’s version of Al Capone. He should have been charged with treason during WWII when he was ambassador to GB.
America’s biggest regret is that SOB wasn’t sterile
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Fully agree! ...Also noticed there was no mention in the article of Joe’s activities during the prohibition years, when he was using boats to take Canadian liquor across the lakes to the USA, a felonious activity that helped to make him a very rich man.
There is a curse on the person who serves, who sells, who gives liquor.
“Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness! Thou art filled with shame for glory: drink thou also, and let thy foreskin be uncovered: the cup of the LORD’S right hand shall be turned unto thee, and shameful spewing shall be on thy glory.” Hab. 2:15,16
Kennedy made his fortune through bootlegged liquor . . .
It was self-imposed
Live by the sword, die by the sword
This family is the biggest fraud in American history
Beating out the Clintons and Obamas by a hair
I’ve always imagined Joe making the mistake of bargaining with the Devil.
“Let my sons rise to power”
Only to lose 3 of them and a daughter, and have babbling Ted the lone survivor.
“The article skips how many people were killed as Old Joe took control of Scotch Whiskey importing during prohibition. Joe was in bed with the NY mob to distribute the Scotch Whiskey he made $millions on.”
I don’t fault him for that. Prohibition was an evil law and should have been disobeyed by everyone.
Don Kennedy will make you an offer you can’t refuse.
That is a sickening story (I previously read about it in depth). If I recall correctly, the real reason for the lobotomy was that Rosemary was beginning to have relationships with men and Joe felt that if she got pregnant or caught up in a scandal, that it would damage the political careers of his sons. She might have been a bit of a dullard (like Chelsea Clinton) but there is no reason that Rosemary couldn't have had a normal life, found a man for herself and been a wife and mother. But she just didn't meet the "Kennedy standard" for women.
Even more sickening is the fact that so many women worshipped this family over the decades.
The Kennedy men by and large were very contemptuous of the women in their lives. Not just lobotomizing an adult daughter out of fear she might embarrass the family but using them like sex toys, dumping them into rivers (and leaving them for dead) and treating their wives like doormats. I can go on.
Yet even to this day, the same women who show up to protest President Trump in pink pussy hats because he evidently engaged in some off-color locker room talk, will throw themselves at the feet of these Kennedy men and grovel.
That’s his great-grandson, Robert’s grandson.
Or his private life as a woman chaser...for which he was famous elsewhere.
there is only a small margin of justice in that the POS was chair bound and could only cry and soil itself for the last eight years of it's life
Even when they are supposedly telling the truth about the kennedys it's a whitewashed truth. Starting at least with Joe Sr. they were criminals, mobsters, murderers, rapists, addicts and thieves.............and that was on their good days!
No matter how much lipstick the kennedy worshipers try to put on it
In MA of the “Southies” I have met an been able to discuss “things” over a beer. They seem to be the ones most taken in by the Kennedy myth. Many of them also think Whitey Bolger is Robin Hood. Which I find “interesting”!
The book, "Sins of the Father" by Ronald Kessler explains Rosemary's problem the best.
She was not mentally-ill, she had a learning disability and she was sort of a klutz. When the Kennedy's would all gather on the lawn to play sports, Rosemary did not excel. And old Joe thought that was not normal and he could not fathom having someone in the family who was not athletically perfect. (Eugenics much?)
Some have written that she was mentally retarded, however she could do higher-level math with ease.
What old Joe worried about was that she was so beautiful, he thought that she would become a loose woman and "embarrass" him by getting pregnant and flaunting herself. She did tend to be a bit erratic at times, but then if you were the family klutz in a family where physicality was a top priority, you'd be a bit upset too.
Because she was deemed a "problem" he decided to act without his wife's knowledge and found a doctor who would lobotomize her in order to straighten her out. The procedure caused her to become mentally incapacitated.
Yes, her father paid for someone to cripple his daughter mentally.
So, the Special Olympics, supposedly created in the honor of a mentally retarded Rosemary Kennedy, has a very crippled foundation.
He had more than one of those. In the big thick bio of JFK around here, there's an interesting vignette -- JFK and Joe Sr are arguing that the slightly older German photographer (the one with some Hitler connections) JFK was dating at the time wasn't right for him. She recounted that, when JFK would storm out to cool down, Joe Sr would hit on her. Thanks beaversmom.
I read “Sins of the Father,” by Ron Kessler a while back. He had to be the biggest scoundrel of his era. He was an unapologetic adulterer even regularly bringing his paramours to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port. Rose even became close friends with some of them. Although he made a fortune bootlegging and importing during Prohibition, he wasn’t an alcoholic. He usually limited himself to one after-dinner Irish whiskey on the rocks. He also made a fortune in the manipulation of securities.
I finished it in three evenings. Fascinating, but sad and anger-provoking. I needn’t dwell on Rosemary as Slyfox covered that ground completely and accurately.
And, when the Kennedy brothers and sisters changed into their bathing suits for swimming they all did it in the same room, boys and girls. They got naked together and didn't think anything of it.
That just creeps me out. I came from a large family and we always dressed separately out of respect for our bodies.
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