David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life & Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
The Politic: Joseph Kennedy was a complicated man, a mixture of both the good and the bad. It what makes is he an admirable character and in what other ways is he less so?
He was a wonderful father. He was very important as part of the New Deal, not only in helping to get FDR nominated and elected in ’32 – and re-elected in ’36 and ’40 – but he was an important part of the New Deal as the first chairman of the SEC. He was probably the best chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. These are all positive moments in a long life.
He was a disastrous ambassador to London from 1938 to 1940. He never understood the threat Hitler posed to civilization, and as war approached – a war which he feared would destroy the economy, capitalism, and democracy in Western Europe and then in the United States – his fears grew greater and greater and he fell back on the ancient scapegoat: the Jews and a Jewish conspiracy. He believed that the Jews were in some way more responsible than others for pushing first England and then the United States into war against a foe they could not defeat. That was certainly less than admirable. It was rather horrifying to write about and learn about this.
The Politic: Joe Kennedy, an Irish Catholic born in East Boston, the Boston of Brahman New Englanders like the Cabots and Lodges, was constantly reminded of his outsider status to the WASP establishment. How did this insecurity impact his behavior, decisions, and outlooks?
We’ve got to put it into context and we’ve got to understand that the question we should ask is not “Did Kennedy partake in anti-Semitic thought and logic?” but “What kind of kind of an anti-Semite was he?” After all, we’re talking about a period in which the dominate motif among American governing elite, certainly in the State Department, was anti-Semitism. There were few who did not in one way or another indulge in anti-Semitic rhetoric and thought. Kennedy was part of this milieu. He was also part of a milieu of Irish Roman Catholic that distrusted the Jews theologically, culturally, socially.
If by anti-Semite one ascribes the belief that there is something intrinsic to the Jewish genetic makeup, the Jewish blood, that makes Jews untrustworthy, deceitful, interested only in their own tribal wellbeing and determined to destroy or weaken Christian morality – these are the characteristic I would ascribe to people like Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Lady Astor, probably Breckinridge Long, who was FDR’s Assistant Secretary of State for refugee affairs. If you define an anti-Semite that way, Kennedy was not an anti-Semite. I would not use the noun to describe him. I’d say he succumbed to anti-Semitic prejudices, to anti-Semitic scapegoating. But unlike these other people I’ve just mentioned, he had certain admiration for the way that the Jews in Washington D.C., and in Hollywood, and, to a lesser extent, on Wall Street, worked together, were smart, worked hard, achieved a great deal. There were a number of Jews who he admired and who he was friendly with for all of his life. One of his closest friends in college was Jewish, Arthur Goldsmith. One of his closest friends in later life, Carroll Rosenbloom, who was the owner of two football teams, was Jewish. He had a great deal of admiration and was friendly with Bernard Baruch. This is not a simple man and his anti-Semitism is not simple.
Without excusing it, I try to put his beliefs and actions into historical context. I agree with you absolutely that to be a outsider, as an Irish Catholic from Boston, and to hold these prejudices is contradictory and ironic because he charged the Jews with the same kind of behaviors that Protestants charged his son and all Catholics with when Jack ran for the presidency in 1960. Just as he believed that Jews looked out only for themselves and therefore couldn’t be entirely patriotic so Kennedy’s critics in the 1960 did the same thing: that you couldn’t trust an Irish Catholic because every Irish Catholic had dual allegiances.
The Politic: Would you say that his outsider position was the driving force of his life?
In many ways, sure, I would agree with that. One of the things you’ve got to look at is, because he was Irish Catholic, because he was an outsider, because when he graduated from Harvard he couldn’t get a job in banking anywhere in the Boston area because the Irish Catholics were not allowed in the door, he never trusted anybody except members of his family. He never felt entirely comfortable, not socially but in other settings, with those who were not Irish Catholic. He always taught his boys: “Trust your family members because they were the ones who were going to watch out for you; everybody else is not going to. You’ve got no friends outside the family.”
The Politic: Joe Kennedy is popularly thought of today as associating with bootlegging and gangsters. You find very little evidence of this in your book?
I tracked down every story, every innuendo, every rumor. I found absolutely no evidence that he was a bootlegger or that he associated with crime figures. Now, when he went to the racetrack, which he did, and when he went to nightclubs, which he did, and the best restaurants, which he did, he no doubt – whether he was in Miami or Chicago or New York – saw crime figures and members of organized crime. He may have waived to them. But beyond that, no, it just wasn’t there. Kennedy was in many ways a very careful man. He knew exactly what the law said. He was going to use or play the margins of legality, but he was not going to do anything illegal because he knew damn well that if he did he would be caught because there were people looking out for him. He’d be caught and punished. That’d be the end of him and the end of his family. So he was very careful in that regard on Wall Street. He played with the laws that allowed him to sell short, to do insider trading, to drive prices up and down and sideways, to form pools, to trade stocks and manipulate prices – all of that. But it was legal until he went to the SEC and outlawed it. Once he outlawed the strategies that had made him a millionaire many times over, he stopped using the market. He stopped trading. He went into real estate.
The Politic: Why do you think he outlawed those practices?
He outlawed those practices because he understood that the American public would never trust the market and would never invest in the market until those practices were outlawed. He understood, more than most people, the depth of the Depression and that, in order to get out of the Depression – and we had to get out of the Depression or capitalism would be threatened – there had to be reforms and regulations. He regarded, unlike many of his banker friends and almost all of his Harvard friends, FDR as the savior of capitalism. If capitalism was not reformed and regulated and Wall street was not reined in, if the American people did not have faith in the banks, the stock market, the bankers, and the financiers, then the United States would be in danger of moving away from democracy as Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union had.
The Politic: Could you talk a little more about his relationship with Roosevelt? He said some pretty harsh things about the man.
One of the joys of writing this book was being able to write about the relationship between these two powerful personalities: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph P. Kennedy and the duel between the two. Each needed the other. Roosevelt needed Kennedy because Kennedy was his link to the Irish Catholic community of voters and his link to bankers, and to Wall Street, and to Hollywood. Roosevelt wanted to keep Kennedy close by and in the New Deal camp. Kennedy wanted very much to be an insider. He wanted to be part of the establishment, and Roosevelt offered him entrée into government and into the establishment. Roosevelt offered the positions that would make him an American aristocrat and make the Kennedy name not a reference to Irish Americans or Irish Catholics, but to the political elite. They needed each other and both intended to use the other. Each knew that the other was trying to use him. It’s this extraordinary test of wills.
In the end, Roosevelt won every battle because Roosevelt was smarter. Roosevelt was even more charming than Kennedy. When either man walked into a room, all eyes would be on them and he would be the center of every conversation. Every look would go towards either Roosevelt or Kennedy. But in the end, Roosevelt was craftier and sharper. Roosevelt knew exactly what he wanted from Kennedy and was able to manipulate him and charm him. And Roosevelt was the president. Whatever went on, he had more to offer Kennedy than Kennedy ever had to offer him. He used the magic of the White House, and the magic of the presidency, and the magic of invitation to the White House to keep Kennedy in line.
The Politic: One of the wedges between Kennedy and Roosevelt was the former’s isolationism, an isolationism which continued even after the war.
Kennedy represents a strand of American foreign policy that has pretty disappeared. Kennedy was convinced that the road to ruin for the United States was to be entangled in foreign affairs, to enter into European wars, to leave behind the Western hemisphere. He did not want the Americans to fight a world war against Germany or to engage in a Cold War against the Soviets. He thought it was a waste of resources, that it was diverting resources that were needed in this country, that if we needed more imports and more exports and more trade then we should do it with Latin America and do it with the Caribbean. The old world was poison and it just made no sense to be involved in spending money or sending American boys to their deaths to save one European dynasty against the other. He was consistent in this. He was an isolationist. Another way to put it, although he never joined the America First Organization, he was an America First-er. He believed in a world in which the American economy would be strongest if resources were spent in this country, not overseas.
The Politic: He sounds like a Ron Paul libertarian type.
Ron Paul is the closest guy, absolutely. It used to be the staple of the Republican party and it was the Republican progressives, many from the Midwest and the West, who held hard and fast to what we would now call isolationism. Until Henry Cabot Lodge and Dwight Eisenhower became the dominate force within the Republican party, as long as Senator Taft was Mr. Republican, the Republican party stood for a foreign policy that did not expend resources on fighting wars abroad and did not enter lightly into any treaty or international arrangement – again, what we call isolationism. Historians are beginning to look at this stuff again and beginning to ask questions about it. It’s a fascinating time. The winners write history often and the winners in the battle were the Cold Warriors. The minority opinions are like Kennedy. He was against NATO. He was against the Marshall Plan, he was against the war in Korea. He was against sending American troops to Germany after the war. He was for a strong defense of the United States. He was for whatever missiles and warships and talk to defend America from invasion, but he was not for using American dollars to support the French in Vietnam or sending American boys to fight a war in Korea.
The Politic: His son, Jack Kennedy, was by no means an isolationist. We all remember his inaugural address: “We will fight any foe, we will bear any burden…” If this is one difference between father and son, what are some others between the two men?
Joe Kennedy knew his positions on the Cold War were in such a minority that he and his son decided to emphasize the differences between the two of them, not the similarities. But in my book, I make the case that Jack Kennedy was very much like his father. Jack Kennedy, like his father, would not allow Soviets to have any influence in the Western hemisphere. In his debates with Nixon in 1960, Kennedy said over and over again: we’ve got to keep the Soviets out of Cuba; we’ve got to keep the Soviets out of the Western hemisphere. It makes no sense to threaten communist China over Quemoy and Matsu, tiny islands between Formosa and Mainland China. When the American sent the U2 plane that was shot down over the Soviet territory and Khrushchev pulled out of a summit with Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy said we should apologize for it and then get negotiations started again. So there were many similarities.
A difference between the two of them, though we didn’t know it when he ran in 1960, was that Jack Kennedy was much more of a mainstream liberal. He began to understand in a way his father never did that civil rights, poverty, housing, and education were imperatives. His father just didn’t pay attention to such things. He was much more aggressive rhetorically than his father would ever be. His father believed that it was possible to negotiate an Old World settlement with the Soviets. I don’t know if Jack did. The difficulty we have is that the Kennedy administration was cut short. It was 1,000 days. We don’t really know what was going to happen with Vietnam. In the end, Kennedy pushed negotiations, not war, in Berlin with the Soviets and in Cuba. One of my readers sent me a note saying that if you go further into the Kennedy administration and Kennedy foreign policy, especially over the Cuban Missile Crisis, you see something of the father in the son’s actions.
The Politic: How much influence did the father wield over his son throughout these 1000 days?
Almost none because, number one, the father had a major, major, major, stroke less than a year into his son’s presidency in December of ’61. Number two, Jack was his own man by then. His father didn’t run his campaign for the presidency in 1960 and his father stayed far away from the White House. Every once in awhile Jack would call and would talk about something, but it was clear to both of them that Jack was going to make all of the decisions. The one major influence and the only thing his father demanded of him, and Jack came around to this, was that he make his brother, Robert Kennedy the Attorney General so that he would have someone in the cabinet that he could trust and look after his well being. The father insisted on this and Jack and Bobby, who didn’t want to be Attorney General, agreed. But once the presidency began and even during the campaign, Jack was his own man. There was absolutely no doubt about that.
The Politic: You’ve written previous biographers on Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst. And now with Joseph Patrick Kennedy, should I notice a trend?
[Laughs] I think if there was a trend it’s over because I’ve spent long years doing these biographies about men who accomplished a great deal and lived long lives. I can’t imagine taking up another one now. If I write a biography it’ll be about James Dean or someone who died young.
The Politic: What are some of your favorite political biographies? Who are some biographers you particularly admire?
Biographers I disagree with. I admire historians. I consider myself a historian whose written biographies, not a biographer. John Lewis Gaddis, who is at Yale, his biography of Kennan, though I don’t agree with everything in it, is a marvelous biography. Allen Brinkley, another historian, wrote a terrific biography of Henry Luce. David Levering Lewis’s two volumes biography on W.E.B. Dubois are absolutely brilliant. Eric Foner has a great biography he wrote very early in his career on Tom Paine. Foner’s political biography Lincoln is just an astounding work, a great work. When I look at biographies, the ones that appeal to me are the ones by historians. I learned a great deal about the craft of writing from people like Robert Caro and his books on Johnson and Robert Moses. They’re terrific! I learned a great deal about writing biographies, if you can believe it, from a biography on Orson Welles by Simon Callow, the British actor.
The Politic: What is it about the Kennedy family that continues to capture the imagination of American society today?
The thing about the Kennedy family is that there is a glamour, there’s a celebrity, and there’s an intelligence that just shines through. Whether you agree with them or don’t agree with them, you can’t help but be fascinated by the members of this family. Not only by the men in the family, the three men who entered public life, Senator Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and the President, but the women as well are extraordinary. I think Eunice Kennedy Shriver in the years to come for her contributions to the disabilities rights movement and the push that people who were disabled mentally and physically are as much citizens of the nation as anyone else – her accomplishments are going to be looked at. Jean Kennedy Smith was the ambassador for the United States to Ireland at a time of the peace settlement and she played a part in that. This is a family that, through three generations and now into the fourth generation, has been active in addressing questions that devil all of us. We’re fascinated by them and some of us grateful to them.
Josef Good man is a junior in Morse College