Joseph Patrick Kennedy was born in 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts. Kennedy was the elder son of Mary Augusta (Hickey) Kennedy and businessman and politician Patrick Joseph “P.J.” Kennedy. He had a younger brother, Francis, and two younger sisters, Mary and Margaret. All four of Joe’s grandparents had immigrated to Massachusetts in the 1840s to escape the Irish famine. He was born into a highly sectarian society, where Irish Catholics were excluded by upper-class Boston Brahmins. Boston Irish thus became active in the Democratic Party, which included P.J., an accomplished businessman, numerous relatives. P.J. Kennedy had a successful saloon business and investment ventures, and an influential role in local politics enabled him to provide a comfortable lifestyle for his family. His mother encouraged Joe to attend the Boston Latin School, where he was a below-average scholar but was popular among his classmates, winning election as class president and playing on the school baseball team.

Kennedy followed in the footsteps of elder cousins by attending Harvard College. He focused on becoming a social leader, working energetically to gain admittance to the prestigious Hasty Pudding Club. While at Harvard he joined the Delta Upsilon International fraternity and played on the baseball team, but he was blackballed from the Porcellian Club. Kennedy graduated in 1912 with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

Kennedy’s first job after graduating from Harvard was a position as a state-employed bank examiner; this job allowed him to learn a great deal about the banking industry. In 1913, the Columbia Trust Bank, in which his father held a significant share, was under threat of takeover. Kennedy borrowed $45,000 ($1,164,091 today) from family and friends and bought back control. At the age of 25, he was rewarded by being elected the bank’s president. Kennedy told the press he was “the youngest” bank president in America.

On October 7, 1914, Kennedy married Rose Fitzgerald, the eldest daughter of Boston Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and Mary Josephine “Josie” Hannon.

During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson asked the Intercontinental Rubber Company—owned by Bernard Baruch, J. P. Morgan and Kennedy—to grow guayule. Guayule is a plant that produces latex that can be used to make rubber. Many feared the German navy might blockade rubber shipments from Asia. As a result, Intercontinental established the Continental Farm and the little town of Continental in southeastern Arizona in 1916. The guayule-growing operation did not continue long; in 1922 the Continental Farm was sold to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who rented the fields to cotton farmers for several years.

In 1919, Kennedy joined the prominent stock brokerage firm of Hayden, Stone & Co. where he became an expert dealing in the unregulated stock market of the day, engaging in tactics that were later considered to be insider trading and market manipulation. He happened to be on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets at the moment of the Wall Street bombing on September 16, 1920, and was thrown to the ground by the force of the blast. In 1923, he left Hayden and set up his own investment company. Kennedy subsequently became a multi-millionaire during the bull market of the 1920s and even wealthier as a result of taking “short” positions in 1929.

In March 1926, Kennedy moved to Hollywood to focus on running film studios. At that time, film studios were permitted to own exhibition companies, which were necessary to get their films on local screens. With that in mind, in a hostile buyout, he acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters Corporation (KAO), which had more than 700 vaudeville theaters across the United States that had begun showing movies. He later purchased another production studio called Pathe Exchange, and merged those two entities with Cecil B. DeMille’s Producers Distributing Corporation in March 1927.

In August 1928, he unsuccessfully tried to run First National Pictures. In October 1928, he formally merged his film companies FBO and KAO to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) and made a large amount of money in the process. Then, keen to buy the Pantages Theatre chain, which had 63 profitable theaters, Kennedy made an offer of $8 million ($119 million today). It was declined. He then stopped distributing his movies to Pantages. Still, Alexander Pantages declined to sell. However, when Pantages was later charged and tried for rape, his reputation took a battering, and he accepted Kennedy’s revised offer of $3.5 million ($52.1 million today). Pantages, who claimed that Kennedy had “set him up”, was later found not guilty at a second trial. The girl who had accused Pantages of rape, Eunice Pringle, confessed on her deathbed that Kennedy was the mastermind of the plot to frame Pantages.

During the Great Depression, Kennedy vastly increased his fortune by investing most of his money in real estate. In 1929, Kennedy’s fortune was estimated to be $4 million (equivalent to $59.6 million today). By 1935, his wealth had increased to $180 million (equivalent to $3.36 billion today).

In 1932, Kennedy supported Franklin D. Roosevelt in his bid for the Presidency. This was his first major involvement in a national political campaign, and he donated, loaned, and raised a substantial amount of money for the campaign.

A recurring rumor alleges that he made money in bootlegging illegal liquor during Prohibition. Historians have not found credible evidence of this. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence that as the end of prohibition loomed (in 1933), Kennedy invested heavily in Scottish distilleries. As soon as it became legal he imported large shipments of high-priced Scotch and made a large profit. Various contradictory “bootlegging” stories circulated but historians have not accepted them. At the start of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in March 1933, Kennedy and future Congressman James Roosevelt II founded Somerset Importers, an entity that acted as the exclusive American agent for Haig & Haig Scotch, Gordon’s Dry Gin and Dewar’s Scotch. Kennedy kept his Somerset company for years. Kennedy himself drank little alcohol. He so disapproved of what he considered a stereotypical Irish vice that he offered his sons $1,000 not to drink until they turned 21.

In 1934, Congress established the independent Securities and Exchange Commission to end irresponsible market manipulations and dissemination of false information about securities.

Father Charles Coughlin, an Irish-Canadian priest near Detroit, became the most prominent Roman Catholic spokesman on political and financial issues in the 1930s, with a radio audience that reached millions every week. Having been a strong supporter of Roosevelt since 1932, in 1934 Coughlin broke with the president, who became a bitter opponent of Coughlin’s weekly anti-communist, anti-Semitic, far-right, anti–Federal Reserve and isolationist radio talks. Roosevelt sent Kennedy and other prominent Irish Catholics to try to tone down Coughlin.

Kennedy sought out the best lawyers available giving him a hard-driving team with a mission for reform. They included William O. Douglas and Abe Fortas, both of whom were later named to the Supreme Court. The SEC had four missions. First was to restore investor confidence in the securities market, which had collapsed on account of its questionability, and the external threats supposedly posed by anti-business elements in the Roosevelt administration. Second, the SEC had to get rid of penny-ante swindles based on false information, fraudulent devices, and get-rich-quick schemes. Thirdly, and much more important than the frauds, the SEC had to end the million-dollar maneuvers in major corporations, whereby insiders with access to high-quality information about the company knew when to buy or sell their own securities. A crackdown on insider trading was essential. Finally, the SEC had to set up a complex system of registration for all securities sold in America, with a clear set of rules, deadlines and guidelines that all companies had to follow. The main challenge faced by the young lawyers was drafting precise rules. The SEC succeeded in its four missions, as Kennedy reassured the American business community that they would no longer be deceived and taken advantage of by Wall Street. He trumpeted for ordinary investors to return to the market and enable the economy to grow again. Kennedy’s reforming work as SEC Chairman was widely praised on all sides, as investors realized the SEC was protecting their interests. He resigned from the SEC in 1935.

Coughlin swung his support to Huey Long in 1935 and then to William Lemke’s Union Party in 1936. Kennedy strongly supported the New Deal (Father Coughlin believed that the New Deal did not go far enough – indeed that Franklin Roosevelt was a tool of the rich) and reportedly believed as early as 1933 that Coughlin was “becoming a very dangerous proposition” as an opponent of Roosevelt and “an out and out demagogue”. In 1936, Kennedy worked with Roosevelt, Bishop Francis Spellman and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) to shut Coughlin down. When Coughlin returned to the air in 1940, Kennedy continued to battle against his influence among Irish Americans.

In 1937, Kennedy became the first Chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, which built on his wartime experience in running a major shipyard.

In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (UK). Kennedy hoped to succeed Roosevelt in the White House in 1940.

On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met in London with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the United Kingdom, who claimed upon his return to Berlin that Kennedy had told him that “it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. [Kennedy] himself fully understood our Jewish policy.” Kennedy’s main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern that he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.

Kennedy told a British reporter in late 1939 that he was confident that Roosevelt would “fall” in 1940 (i.e. in that year’s presidential election).

In British government circles during the Blitz, Kennedy was widely disparaged as a defeatist. On September 19, 1939, he sent three of his nine children back to the United States. They were, Robert aged 13, Jeanne aged 10, and Edward aged 7. Kennedy retreated to the countryside during the bombings of London by German aircraft, at a time when the British Royal Family, Prime Minister, government ministers, and other ambassadors chose to stay in London.

Kennedy rejected the belief of Winston Churchill that any compromise with Nazi Germany was impossible. Instead, he supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Throughout 1938, while the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany intensified, Kennedy attempted to arrange a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Shortly before the Nazi bombing of British cities began in September 1940, Kennedy once again sought a personal meeting with Hitler without the approval of the U. S. Department of State, in order to “bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany”.

By August 1940, Kennedy worried that a third term for President Roosevelt would mean war. Laurence Leamer in The Kennedy Men: 1901–1963 reports: “Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews, and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon.” Nevertheless, Kennedy supported Roosevelt’s third term in return for Roosevelt’s promise to support Joseph Kennedy Jr. in a run for Governor of Massachusetts in 1942. However, even during the darkest months of World War II, Kennedy remained “more wary of” prominent American Jews, such as Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, than he was of Hitler.

Throughout the rest of the war, relations between Kennedy and the Roosevelt Administration remained tense, especially when Joe Jr. vocally opposed President Roosevelt’s unprecedented nomination for a third term, which began in 1941. Kennedy may have wanted to run for president himself in 1940 or later. Having effectively removed himself from the national stage, Joe Sr. sat out World War II on the sidelines. Kennedy stayed active in the smaller venues of rallying Irish-American and Roman Catholic Democrats to vote for Roosevelt’s re-election for a fourth term in 1944. Former Ambassador Kennedy claimed to be eager to help the war effort, but as a result of his previous gaffes, he was neither trusted nor invited to do so.

Kennedy requested that surgeons perform a lobotomy on his eldest daughter Rosemary in 1941. Various reasons for the operation have been given, but it left her permanently incapacitated. He did not inform his wife of this decision until after the procedure was completed. Rosemary’s name “was never mentioned in the house”, according to Janet DesRosiers Fontaine, Kennedy’s secretary and mistress. Dr. Bertram S. Brown, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said later that Kennedy called his daughter Rosemary mentally retarded rather than mentally ill in order to protect John’s reputation for a presidential run, and that the family’s “lack of support for mental illness is part of a lifelong family denial of what was really so”.

Kennedy hugely enjoyed his leadership position in London high society, which stood in stark contrast to his relative outsider status in Boston. On May 6, 1944, his daughter Kathleen married William “Billy” Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, the elder son of the Duke of Devonshire. The union was disapproved by Rose Kennedy due to Hartington being an Anglican. Unable to reconcile their religious backgrounds, Hartington and Kathleen were married in a civil ceremony. Hartington, a major in the Coldstream Guards, was killed in action in 1944.

Kennedy had been consigned to the political shadows after his remarks during World War II (“Democracy is finished”), and he remained an intensely controversial figure among U.S. citizens because of his suspect business credentials, his Roman Catholicism, his opposition to Roosevelt’s foreign policy, and his support for Joseph McCarthy. Although his own ambitions to achieve the White House were thwarted, Kennedy held out great hope for his eldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., to seek the presidency. However, Joe Jr., who had become a U.S. Navy bomber pilot, was killed over the English Channel in August 1944 while undertaking Operation Anvil, a high-risk, new way to use heavy bombers to strike German weapon sites in France. After grieving over his dead son, Joe Sr. turned his attention to his second son, John, for a run for the presidency.

A political conservative (John F. Kennedy once described his father as being to “the right of Herbert Hoover”), Kennedy supported Richard Nixon, who had entered Congress with John in 1947. In 1960, Joseph Kennedy approached Nixon, praised his anti-Communism, and said “Dick, if my boy can’t make it, I’m for you” for the presidential election that year.

Following the lobotomy, Rosemary was immediately institutionalized. In 1949, she was relocated to Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she lived for the rest of her life on the grounds of the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children (formerly known as “St. Coletta Institute for Backward Youth”). Kennedy did not visit his daughter at the institution. In Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, author Kate Clifford Larson stated that Rosemary’s lobotomy was hidden from the family for twenty years. In 1961, after Kennedy suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak, his children were made aware of Rosemary’s location. The lobotomy did not become public knowledge until 1987. Rosemary Kennedy died from natural causes on January 7, 2005, at the age of 86.

Kennedy’s close ties with Republican (GOP) Senator Joseph McCarthy strengthened his family’s position among Irish Catholics, but weakened it among liberals who strongly opposed McCarthy. Even before McCarthy became famous in 1950, Kennedy had forged close ties with the Republican Senator. Kennedy often brought him to his family compound at Hyannis Port as a weekend house guest in the late 1940s. McCarthy at one point dated Patricia Kennedy.

When McCarthy became a dominant voice of anti-Communism starting in 1950, Kennedy contributed thousands of dollars to McCarthy, and became one of his major supporters. In the Senate race of 1952, Kennedy apparently worked a deal so that McCarthy, a Republican, would not make campaign speeches for the GOP ticket in Massachusetts. In return, Congressman John F. Kennedy, running for the Senate seat, would not give any anti-McCarthy speeches that his liberal supporters wanted to hear.

At Kennedy’s urging in 1953, McCarthy hired Robert F. Kennedy (aged 27) as a senior staff member of the Senate’s investigations subcommittee, which McCarthy chaired. In 1954, when the Senate was threatening to condemn McCarthy, Senator John Kennedy faced a dilemma. “How could I demand that Joe McCarthy be censured for things he did when my own brother was on his staff?” asked JFK.

By 1954, Robert F. Kennedy and McCarthy’s chief aide Roy Cohn had fallen out with each other, and Robert no longer worked for McCarthy. John Kennedy had a speech drafted calling for the censure of McCarthy, but never delivered it. When the Senate voted to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, Senator Kennedy was in a hospital and never indicated how he would cast his vote. Joe Kennedy strongly supported McCarthy to the end.

Various criminals, such as Frank Costello, have boasted they worked with Kennedy in mysterious bootlegging operations during Prohibition. Scholars dismiss the claims. The most recent and most thorough biographer David Nasaw asserts that no credible evidence has been found to link Kennedy to bootlegging activities. When Fortune magazine published its first list of the richest people in the United States in 1957, it placed Kennedy in the $200–400 million group.

Because of his own unpopularity, Kennedy’s presence in John’s 1960 presidential campaign had to be downplayed. However, Kennedy still drove the campaign behind the scenes. He played a central role in planning strategy, fundraising, and coalition and alliance building. Kennedy almost oversaw the entire operation, supervising spending, helping to select advertising agencies, and phoning local and state party leaders, newsmen, and business leaders.

In 1961, Kennedy suffered a stroke that placed limitations on his influence on his sons’ political careers.

On December 19, 1961, at the age of 73, Kennedy suffered a stroke. He survived but was left paralyzed on his right side. Thereafter, he suffered from aphasia, which severely affected his ability to speak. He remained mentally alert, regained certain functions with therapy, and began walking with a cane. His speech also showed some improvement. Kennedy began to experience excessive muscular weakness, which eventually required him to use a wheelchair. In 1964, Kennedy was taken to The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia, a medical and rehabilitative center for those who have experienced brain injury.

In the alternate history novel Fatherland by Robert Harris, set in 1964, the senior Kennedy—not his son John F. Kennedy—is president of the United States and about to arrive in Berlin to conclude a treaty with Adolf Hitler.

Kennedy’s son Robert was assassinated on June 5, 1968. In the aftermath of his son’s death, Kennedy made his last public appearance when he, his wife, and son Ted made a filmed message to the country. He died at home in Hyannis Port the following year on November 18, 1969. He had outlived four of his children. He was buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. Kennedy’s widow Rose was buried next to him following her death in 1995, as was their daughter Rosemary in 2005.