Books: The Driving Will

THE FOUNDING FATHER by Richard J. Whalen. 541 pages. New American Library. $6.95.

Harvard is beating Yale 4-1. Two outs, last of the ninth. The Harvard pitcher (and captain) beckons to a lanky redhead on the bench to take over first base so that he can win his letter. Yale’s last batter grounds out. The captain asks the sub for the winning ball, but he refuses to hand it over. “I made the putout, didn’t I?” snaps Joseph P. Kennedy.

“Joe was the kind of guy who, if he wanted something bad enough, would get it and he didn’t care how he got it,” recollects Joe’s ex-teammate, who tells this story on him. In this case, Joe wanted his Harvard H, and Boston politicos pressured the captain to put him in the game. In other cases, Joe wanted considerably more. What he wanted and what he got are the subject of this fascinating first biography of President Kennedy’s father.

The book began as an article in FORTUNE (January 1963) that was reprinted in LIFE. Biographer Whalen, an associate editor of FORTUNE, took leave from the magazine to write the book, which he did without any explicit help from Joe Kennedy or any other member of the family. But the available material is voluminous, and the story is vividly told and carefully documented.

Smiles and Spitballs. Grandson of an Irish immigrant, son of a barkeeper-politician, Joe Kennedy grew up in the rough world of Boston ward politics and wanted out. Though most Roman Catholic boys went to church schools, Kennedy’s parents were wealthy and ambitious enough to send him to Harvard. There he mingled with Yankee plutocrats among the alumni, kept them supplied with choice tickets to football games. With his flashing smile and disarming frankness, Joe got along with most anyone. On a summer cruise to Europe, he spotted Heavyweight Boxing Champ Jack Johnson in the ship’s lounge, promptly bounced a spitball off his massive dome. Johnson turned and glared. Kennedy smiled and introduced himself, danced with Johnson’s pretty wife, and left with a card inscribed, “To Joe Kennedy, a mighty fine fellow.”

With this kind of brashness, Kennedy fought for and won control of a Boston bank, made himself bank president at 25, and married Mayor John (“Honey”) Fitzgerald’s daughter Rose. When World War I broke out, Kennedy went to work for Bethlehem Shipyard in Boston as assistant manager, helped the yard break one production record after another. Chief thorn in his side was another ambitious young man, Navy Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt, who drove such a hard bargain that he occasionally reduced Kennedy to tears, and once, when Kennedy refused to deliver two battleships to Argentina until payment was received, F.D.R. ordered the ships towed out of the yard.

Contemptuous of Capitalists. After the war, Kennedy left for more profitable pastures in New York, where he plunged into the stock market, earning a reputation as a clever bear. Always alert for a fast buck, he went to Hollywood in 1926, bought a film company, and started turning out low-budget potboilers. He became banker and confidant to Gloria Swanson, who named an adopted son after him. Kennedy, however, made the mistake of putting her in one of his pictures, Queen Kelly, which featured such gamy scenes as a priest administering the last rites to a madman dying in a bordello. The Kennedy-Swanson team split up in acrimony. “I questioned his judgment,” Gloria Swanson told Whalen. “He did not like to be questioned.”

After making some $5,000,000 in 32 months in the cutthroat movie industry, Kennedy pulled out; he also bearishly pulled out of the stock market in time to save his fortune from the 1929 crash. Fearing revolution and contemptuous of his fellow capitalists for not foreseeing the crash, Kennedy became an early, enthusiastic supporter of his old antagonist Franklin D. Roosevelt. He worked hard on William Randolph Hearst, who controlled the California delegation. Hearst finally came around, and Kennedy liked to boast that he was responsible, “though you don’t find any mention of it in history books.”

After the election, Roosevelt appointed Kennedy first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was a shrewd choice. Kennedy knew his way around the exchanges and could not be bluffed; he was also eager to do a good job. Not only did he vigorously administer a rather clumsily written law; he reconciled business to the SEC and encouraged new capital financing in the depth of the Depression.

Shattered Career. As a reward, Kennedy was named ambassador to England in 1938, where he found a kindred spirit in Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, another businessman-turned-politician, and he eagerly seconded Chamberlain’s appeasement policies. Believing that all the world’s ills could be solved by clever horse trades, Kennedy urged making a deal with Hitler, and he applauded the Munich capitulation. Determined to intervene on the side of Britain, Roosevelt eventually gave up on his pessimistic ambassador, who was so convinced of Nazi victory that he even objected to Americans’ enlisting in the British armed forces—on the grounds that Hitler might retaliate by shooting all U.S. citizens when he occupied London. By the time he resigned in 1940, Kennedy had worn out his welcome in England and was anathema to the New Deal at home.

His own career in politics shattered, Kennedy concentrated on his sons’ careers. “His would be the driving will, theirs the legs that would go the distance,” writes Whalen. Joe contributed not money alone but prodigious energy to Jack’s various election campaigns. Staying in the background, not trying to influence Jack’s opinions, he masterminded campaign strategy, persuaded acquaintances all over the country to help out.

At age 72, while playing golf at Palm Beach, Kennedy suffered a serious stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed and near death. It was 2½ years before he could take a few steps, and he still cannot speak very well. He received his greatest blow when, sitting in his bedroom at Hyannis Port, he learned from Teddy of Jack’s death. Quiet and dry-eyed, while even the Secret Service man wept, Kennedy never once broke down, Whalen reports. And though his doctor had agreed that he was strong enough to travel to Washington for the funeral, Joe decided to stay in Hyannis Port. He watched the funeral on television in his bedroom.