The House of Kennedy(6)
By 1933, Eunice Pringle has a change of heart. As Ronald Kessler relates, she is preparing to publicly expose her true involvement in the case, and who put her up to it, when she suddenly dies, possibly from cyanide poisoning. The cause of death—murder or suicide—is undetermined. In a deathbed confession to her mother and a friend, Pringle names Joe Kennedy as the mastermind behind the Pantages setup, claiming that in exchange for false testimony, the producer paid Pringle’s agent ten thousand dollars and guaranteed the young woman stardom. She dies without ever receiving the money or the fame.
Yet while Joe certainly profited from Pantages’s crises, any nefarious involvement on his part remains unproven.
“He’s a charmer,” pronounces Frances Marion, a top screenwriter and memoirist. “A typical Irish charmer, but he’s a rascal.” The scribe—who was the highest-paid screenwriter of Hollywood’s Golden Age, making three thousand dollars per week (more than forty thousand in today’s dollars) at MGM in the 1920s—recognizes the illusion of power that Irish charm wields. “Frances rarely said anything negative about anyone,” her daughter-in-law later recalls, “but she hated Joe Kennedy with a passion.”
Joe’s final act in Hollywood is to write himself out, having added prosperously to his already considerable fortune.
Chapter 3
When the time comes that a shoeshine boy knows as much as I do about what is going on in the stock market, it’s time for me to get out.” Even as Joe Kennedy Sr. turns from Hollywood and finance to politics, he’s spinning yet another tale, this one tailored to Wall Streeters eager to pin him for short-selling on the largely unregulated stock market.
As the 1929 crash hits and the Great Depression takes hold, Joe demonstrates his support of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts toward shoring up the capitalist system by becoming one of FDR’s biggest campaign donors. And when in 1934, soon after his first inauguration, President Roosevelt creates the Securities and Exchange Commission—for the protection of investors from swindles, schemes, and insider trading—he has a surprise appointee for chairman of the SEC: Joe Kennedy Sr.
The president rates Joe’s deep knowledge of financial trickery as an asset. He wryly observes, “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”
And Joe does indeed go after them. During his yearlong tenure, the SEC mandates the registration of stock sales and financial disclosures and investigates some two thousand small securities fraud cases. On July 25, 1934, Chairman Kennedy addresses the National Press Club, positioning the SEC as “simple and honest,” and says, “Only those who see things crookedly will find [the new rules] harsh.”
Joe “had the sense to recognize the opportunity offered by the SEC,” one financier says, and to revel in his power. “Joe could tell the moneymen in New York what they would do, and they damned well better do it, or he could sweep them into the sea.”
Though some moguls continue to operate unchecked, Joe’s new rules do ensnare at least one notable: John “Black Jack” Bouvier. Bouvier is a handsome Hamptons socialite who made his fortune on Wall Street, though he prefers gambling, drinking, and womanizing to boardroom duties.
In July 1929, when Bouvier’s daughter Jacqueline (later to become one of America’s most beloved First Ladies) is born, “Black Jack” is a wealthy man. But unlike Joe, who strategically divested himself of vulnerable stock holdings in advance of the October 1929 crash, Bouvier is financially decimated by it, and goes on to owe substantial back taxes and subsist on loans from his father-in-law.
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Joe enjoys being a “Washington insider,” with the accompanying political and social freedoms. He rents Marwood, a thirty-three-room, eleven-bathroom Italianate mansion in Maryland overlooking the Potomac River.
Kennedy and President Roosevelt enjoy a warm, if cautious, friendship. The two men smoke cigars together when the wheelchair-bound president visits the house, accessible via an elevator Joe has installed specifically to accommodate FDR.
On the weekends, Joe visits with Rose and the kids, either at their home in Bronxville; the compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, purchased in 1928; or the Palm Beach mansion, purchased in 1933. He devotedly writes weekly letters to each of his sons and daughters, though he reserves his sternest words for the boys. To Jack, in December 1934: “I am not expecting too much and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius.”
In September 1935, he steps down from the SEC to run the new US Maritime Commission, responsible for building modern merchant ships to replace World War I–era vessels.
Joe quietly plants stories about himself and his family in the press. One key contact is Henry Luce of Time magazine. Another is Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, who enjoys vacations at the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach and other luxury perks in exchange for favorable coverage.
All the while, Joe is deepening a friendship and business relationship with the president’s son, James Roosevelt II, who finds himself caught between the interests of two powerful men he admires. In 1937 Joe writes, “You know as far as I am concerned…I am your foster-father.”
As World War II looms in Europe, FDR knows that Joe is pining to be appointed the first Irish Catholic ambassador to Great Britain, but tells his son to instead offer him a consolation post. Arthur Krock, in his oral history interview for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, relates Joe’s response: “He tried to get me to take the Secretaryship of Commerce and I knew it was only an attempt to shut me off from London, but London is where I want to go and it is the only place I intend to go and I told Jimmy so, and that’s that.”