Father to John F. and Robert, Joe Kennedy began his banking odyssey as a bank president at the age of 25. At the time, the youngest in the country. Quickly Joe learned the vagaries of the market. Soon he himself becoming a major inside trader and market manipulator. Luckily he avoided injury on The Street at the time of the vicious terrorist explosion in 1920. He got knocked to the ground.
Hollywood
In the mid-20s he went to Hollywood where he made a fortune streamlining the film business and forming RKO Productions. One story has him trying to take over Pantages Theater for eight million dollars. The owner Alexander Pantages refused. Kennedy hired Eunice Pringle to falsely claim Pantages raped her. The scandal jeopardized his business, so he sold out to Kennedy for 3.5 million. During this time, Kennedy had a pretty public affair with movie starlet Gloria Swanson. He also courted Marlene Dietrich.
Crash
Fortuitously, Kennedy massively shorted the market before the Crash of ’29 which made him millions. He also made tons in selling scotch, though it is not clear if he bootlegged it. Joe cleverly bought a defunct barrel-making factory up in Vermont, figuring that Prohibition would eventually end, and companies would need barrels.
SEC
Amazingly, in 1934, in exchange for campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy became the first head of the Securities Exchange Commission. This prompted people to openly wonder why a guy who ran stock operations now had to oversee finding stock operators. He aggressively reformed the way stocks got traded, stunning many observers with his hypocrisy.
Family
Tragically, of his nine children with Rose Kennedy, his eldest died young, two more assassinated and he lobotomized a daughter without telling her mother about it. Eventually, his son Jack married Jackie Bouvier, daughter of a stock operator with whom Joe finagled with – gambling, drunken, lecherous Black Jack Bouvier, who may get his own space in this gallery.
Get to know Joe Kennedy as a character in our compelling novel “Speaker of the Street.“