The Lost History of FDR’s Court-Packing Scandal

Some Democrats are talking about adding justices to the bench. But new revelations show almost no one understands what really happened back in the 1930s.

POLITICO

JOSEPH KENNEDY

 

FRESH AIR  Dave Davies

 By the time he turned 40, Joseph Kennedy was a millionaire many times over and the head of what would soon become one of America's greatest political dynasties. In his new biography of the senior Kennedy, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, David Nasaw charts Kennedy's life and trajectory from Boston society boy to Hollywood bigwig to controversial ambassador to Great Britain as World War II unfolded on the European stage.

And then there are the tragedies. Joe Kennedy — a devoted father by Nasaw's account — outlived four of his nine children, and struggled with the mental illness of his daughter Rosemary, whose lobotomy he personally set in motion when she was 23. He then sent her away to an institution for the remainder of her life. After she left, her name was not mentioned again in the Kennedy home.

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Tell us a little about his background.
He is the third generation. His grandparents came from Ireland during the potato famine in the early 1850s. His father did very well for himself. His father was a very well-respected and admired politician. He was a quiet man who did most of his work behind the scenes. He was one of the leading figures in the Boston Democratic Party.
His mother came from a well-respected, old, East Boston family. The thing to remember about them is that they're from East Boston. And East Boston in that day and age was separate from Boston. It was part of the same municipality, but it was a separate island with a separate culture, a separate establishment that was all Irish-Catholic.

On Kennedy's introduction to prejudice against Irish Catholics
"Joe Kennedy grew up a privileged child of East Boston aristocracy. Everybody knew who he was, everybody knew who his family was. He was a sports star, he was handsome, articulate ... His greatest tragedy was not making the varsity [Harvard] baseball team because he was too slow. It was only when he graduates from Harvard that he begins to understand what it means to be an Irish Catholic from East Boston, whose father is a local ward leader. He wants to go into banking or finance. He cannot get a job. Cannot get an interview. His friends, who happen to be Protestant with the same degree that he has and not as good a head for numbers as he has, they have no problem getting jobs at First Boston, at Shawmut National Bank. But the only way he can get into banking is to take a civil exam as a state assistant, not even a state examiner, assistant state banking examiner... So it's at that moment in 1912 that he realizes — really for the first time — that there are going to be a lot of doors closed to him, and only because he is Irish Catholic in Boston."


Now he does make his way into banking and finance. There's a bank that his father is associated with, right, and he gets work there, does very well, and then in the late '20s, I guess mid-'20s, goes out to Hollywood. How did he get there? What did he do in Hollywood? how Kennedy became a Hollywood mogul?
He goes into the moving picture business because as a man who wants to make deals, financial deals; as a man who wants to control something, own something; the way to do it in Boston is moving pictures because now of the Boston Brahmins, none of the banks, none of the financial houses want anything to do with the moving picture, which they think are, you know, going to go away tomorrow.
He thinks they're friendly. He gets into moving pictures exhibitions. He owns a couple of theaters, distributes films to New England, eventually ends up as the studio head of a minor studio, goes to Hollywood as the owner of FBO, which had been a British company, and immediately makes his mark.
"The man understands that the nation, in the 1920s, is as divided as it is today, but not between red and blue states or Democrats and Republicans, but into ethnic tribes — ethnic religious tribes. He gets it, and when he arrives in Hollywood he presents himself not as an Irish Catholic, but as a non-Jew. And he says to the industry — and he says it over and over and over again ... 'You guys need me, a Boston banker who's not a Jew, as the face of the industry, because you're going to be in trouble. You're already in trouble. Towns and cities and states across this country are beginning to institute censorship laws because they don't trust an industry which caters to their children and is run by Eastern European Jews. And I will be the fresh face. I'll protect you.'"



And because he understands finance and how you cut costs and manage budgets, he helps the studios be successful, he makes a fortune and also has this fascinating relationship with the film star Gloria Swanson. Tell us about that.
Gloria Swanson is the sex-symbol actress of her day. Everybody - she's as popular, as famous as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. She is a tiny woman who has an independent streak and cannot stand being controlled by Hollywood studios that are run by Eastern European Jews.
And Kennedy enters into a business relationship with her that soon becomes a romantic relationship. They form an intense relationship, which lasts only as long as Kennedy is in Hollywood. When he leaves Hollywood to go east again, he drops her like a hot potato. They remain in touch, but their romantic attachment is gone. And he's the one who ends it. They were both...married while they carried on this affair.


She felt ripped-off by him and said so in her memoirs.
Kennedy believed that all's fair in business. You know, he's going to try to take advantage of you, you're going to try to take advantage of him. He's got his lawyers and accountants; you've got your lawyers and accountant. And, you know, may the better businessman or businesswoman win. In this case he won everything.
He put together a company called Gloria Productions and - to produce her films, and unbeknownst to her, every time he bought her a gift, or he redecorated her studio bungalow, he charged it to her. She thought, my God, isn't this a generous man? Look at all these gifts he's buying me. And only after the relationship ended did her accountant show her the books and that she had paid for every gift she got. She was not a happy woman.


So Kennedy does well in finance, goes to Hollywood, does even better, and plays the market very well in the Roaring '20s. How did he do in the crash of 1929?
He did - you know, he made out like a bandit. He knew the market. He knew the market was oversold. He knew a crash was coming. He made gazillions. He made enough money to set aside a million-dollar trust fund for each of his nine children and his wife. That's $10 million in 1920 money. And he did it by demanding stock options whenever he worked for a studio and then forcing up the price of those options when he was ready to sell them and, you know, making millions.
But he understood the way the market worked, that there was no relationship between a share price and the value of the company that it represented. And he knew that, you know, the bubble was going to burst. He got out in 1928, well in advance of the crash, put his money into safe investments, waited for the crash to come. And then after the crash when Hoover told the country don't worry, prosperity's coming back, nothing to worry about, Kennedy knew that there was plenty to worry about.
And for a couple of years, he made money by selling American companies short. In other words, he bet that the stock was going to go down. And he made a dollar for every dollar that the stock went down. And again his millions of dollars became tens of millions of dollars.



He supported Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election. But when the Depression comes, he thinks we need a change, ends up with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. How did he help FDR, and how did that relationship develop?
He was very important in the campaign, but more than that, he exaggerated his importance in the press so that he was mentioned, prominently, after the election was won, as a future Cabinet position, as one of the insiders. The truth was that he had connections, which the Democrats didn't have and Roosevelt didn't have.
He was friendly with William Randolph Hearst. He was friendly with the Hollywood producers and studio moguls who had a lot of money and a lot of influence - and all Republicans. And he had a direct line to Wall Street and to the Irish-Catholic and Irish-American communities.
That was invaluable for Roosevelt, and Roosevelt used it, and he in turn used Roosevelt. The relationship between these two men was remarkable. These were two of the most savvy personal politicians. They were good at political - at politics on a private level, on a public level.
They could charm anybody they wanted to be on their side and do it with consummate good grace, so you didn't know what was going on.


Did he give Roosevelt credibility with, you know, the elite financiers and industrialists of the country, that he needed?
When it came to encouraging support for Franklin Roosevelt among the businessmen whom Kennedy considered his social peers but who were skeptical of the president, Kennedy addressed his wealthy friends as a rich man himself. The class war, and it really was, in effect, a class war, in 1932 and through the early years of the New Deal, he was one of the only bankers. 
"[Kennedy] wrote a book in 1936 called Why I'm for Roosevelt, Because he couldn't believe — even after four years — that the banking community and the Wall Street community just detested [FDR], and he said over and over again, and he put it in his book ... 'This man, Franklin Roosevelt is not a communist, is not a socialist, is not a radical; he is saving capitalism, and you should support him.' "


When Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced that the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission was going to be Joseph P. Kennedy, the outcry from the New Dealers, left, moderate and right, everybody in Washington was just - they couldn't believe it. And Roosevelt said: You watch. This is going to work out.
And it did work out. After 15 months as the chairman of the SEC, Kennedy had established so many rules and regulations that, when he left the SEC, he had to stop trading stocks because all of the tricks of the trade that he had used - selling short, using insider information, engaging in pools to pump prices up and down and sideways - he had outlawed all of these tricks so that he could no longer invest in stocks. So he didn't know how to make money in any other way.
He put his money instead into real estate. He was an enormous success because he understood. He understood that capitalism was threatened. Unless the average American had faith in the stock market, faith in the stock exchanges, faith in their brokers, American capitalism would never be the same because people would withdraw their money from the market.

So the left, the New Dealers, thought Roosevelt was handing this important regulatory task to someone who would serve the stock manipulators, when in fact what he was doing was using his own information as a stock manipulator to crack down on them.
He did, but Kennedy was also so savvy politically, while he's part of the Roosevelt administration, he reaches out to people like Hearst, who have gone into the opposition to the New Deal. And he says to them: Look, I'm not one of those guys. I'm one of you guys. I'm a agent for, you know, banking and industry inside the New Deal. And I'm getting the best deal we can from Roosevelt and from these lefties.
So he is able to play both sides of the New Deal against one another and does it brilliantly.



How well-known was he in the United States, say in the 1930s and '40s?
He was very well-known. His - he happened to be extraordinarily photogenic. He had nine photogenic children. He loved to hobnob with the press. He was a walking soundbite, he'd give them whatever they wanted. So he was plastered all over the place. Everybody knew who this man was from, you know, 1932, when he helped campaign - when he campaigned for Roosevelt, for the rest of his life.

 So becoming powerful, politically, and influential among the nation's media. How does he build his reputation? Does he do it by giving them good stories, or does he pay them off? How does his influence in the newspaper world grow?
He knows what the press wants. The press wants a good story with insider information and colorful language. And he gives it to them. He makes friends with Arthur Krock, and this was an extraordinary story. I don't think anyone has uncovered this before me. Arthur Krock is the New York Times bureau chief in Washington and has his own column - one of the most influential, if not the most influential, reporter-columnists in the country.
And he puts Krock on the payroll. For the rest of Kennedy's life, Arthur Krock is being paid to write speeches for Kennedy, which he then comments on in his column. He says, wasn't that a great speech that Joseph Kennedy gave? It was a speech that he, Krock, had either written himself or edited. He makes sure, Krock, that Kennedy is in the papers all the time.
Krock helps with Jack Kennedy's career later. And all the time he's on the payroll. When he's not on the - he's on the payroll, and he's being wined and dined, taken on vacations, fawned over in Hyannis Port, in the South of France when Kennedy moves to the South of France, and Palm Beach.

Joseph Krock

On Kennedy's controversial ambassadorship to England in 1938
"A couple of his good friends tell him not to go. They say, 'You're unfit in every way to be an ambassador. You don't understand history, you don't understand diplomacy, you're the least diplomatic man that's ever lived. You've got a foul mouth, you won't follow protocol, you won't follow orders. An ambassador is a messenger boy, and you're not going to want to follow or deliver anybody's messages.'
"But he goes ... and within weeks of his arrival, the Germans invade Austria and declare that Austria is now a part, a province, of the Third Reich, and from the moment he arrives, the fears of the world are exacerbated day after day after day after day by Hitler's demanding pieces of Czechoslovakia, all of Czechoslovakia, pieces of Poland, all of Poland — and Kennedy, instead of following orders, instead of acting as the ambassador, follows his own agenda. He has his own foreign policy agenda, and that foreign policy agenda is appeasement."
There is a logic to Kennedy's behavior. We've got to remember that the Soviet Union was out of the picture during this, so that no one imagined that Hitler would ever have to fight a two front war. After Hitler invades Western Europe, conquers Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, France, it is Hitler who now controls most of Europe against Britain. And Kennedy is convinced that there is no conceivable way that the British are going to come out ahead.

On Kennedy's belief in a Jewish conspiracy to get the United States to enter World War II
 Well, there are two parts to this story and they contradict one another. In part one or the first aspect of Kennedy's relationship to the Holocaust and to the Jews of Europe in the United States is that he wants to get the Jews out of Germany. After Hitler moves into Austria and then soon after at Kristallnacht, it becomes abundantly clear not that the Jews are going to end up killed in concentration camps, nobody knows that, but they're being reduced to the most inhumane and brutal of conditions. And Kennedy believes that he's got to get the Jews out because as long as the Jews are being persecuted no Western power is going to feel that they can negotiate with Hitler. Right? So once you remove the Jews, then it'll be easier to reach a modus vivendi with Hitler.

Part two is very different and very disturbing. Kennedy believes that there is a Jewish conspiracy to go to war with Hitler. He believes that the Jews — to get revenge against Hitler and in the mistaken belief that they can defeat him and save their European Jewry — he believes the Jews are doing everything they possibly can to push the United States into war, into a war it should not, he believes, fight. And he indulges in every kind of anti-Semitic scapegoating and conspiracy myth. ...he tells his friends that the Jews control the media and the media is making it impossible to make a deal with Hitler because they're demonizing Hitler.

He knows well that the Jews don't control the American media. William Randolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick are his friends, the two most important newspaper men in the country. And he believes and he says over and over again that the Jews have taken over Washington, that Frankfurter is the power behind the throne and is telling Roosevelt what to do.

"At one point in 1940, he goes to Hollywood — this is after Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator movie, which makes fun of Hitler — and he says, to a room full of Jewish studio executives, 'You guys are going to be responsible for pushing the United States into war against the Nazis unless you stop your anti-Nazi films, your anti-Hitler propaganda, your anti-German propaganda. When war breaks out, the American people are going to turn on American Jewry, and there's going to be an outbreak of anti-Semitism like you've never seen, because the Jews are going to be held responsible for every American soldier and the destruction of the American economy."

Once the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor then the United States was in the war, Joe Kennedy lost his oldest son, Joe Jr., in the war. He was on a bombing mission. And throughout the war he, you know, continued to hold the belief that it wasn't necessary that there might have been a way out of it, that all this suffering didn't have to happen. Did he ever come to regret either his statements about the war, his views of Hitler or about Jewish influence?
 As time went on and the events of the war and of his time in London receded, he became more and more and more convinced that he had been right. That all that had happened, and he told Churchill this, and Churchill said I'm so sorry about your son. And Kennedy said, what did we get from this war? It's been a disaster. And Kennedy went on to say that, you know, what difference does it make? Now instead of Hitler threatening liberties and capitalism, we've got Stalin and the Soviet Union. What did we gain? He till his dying day believed that the United States should stay out of the affairs of any nation outside the Western Hemisphere. If Brazil or Argentina was threatened by the Soviets or by the Nazis then we should intervene but we shouldn't go fighting wars in Asia and we shouldn't go fighting wars in Europe.

Talk to us a little bit about what he expected of his kids and what their relationship was like.
Joseph Kennedy had wanted to exert his influence in a positive way, and Rosemary aside, he did. His children entered public service with verve and single-mindedness because that was what he raised them to do. "He told [his children] over and over again, 'I'm making all this money so you don't have to make money, so that you can go into public service,'
"He impressed on them that those who are privileged with money, with education, with good looks, have to give something back to those who don't have those privileges, and he truly believed that," Nasaw says. "And all of these kids grew up knowing they were not going to go into business. They didn't want to go into business. They were going to do some sort of public service and, in the end, they did."

And, you know, we forget, we know about the men who went into politics, but Eunice Kennedy Shriver I think 50 years down the road is going to be as remembered or should be as remembered as her brothers were because she invents, she constructs the disability rights movement. Jean Kennedy Smith is the ambassador to Ireland during the critical time in which the English negotiate a new relationship with Northern Ireland that ends the troubles. Each of the children embarks on a career in public service, because they knew that's what their father wanted and because they knew that's what they owed him and the owed nation that had been so kind to all of them.

You mentioned it was Rosemary who had the mental retardation and then had the botched lobotomy. And I was stunned to read in your book, that after she was institutionalized following that, I mean, she did regain some ability to communicate and speak, I think, but Joe Kennedy didn't see her for, what, 20 years.
 Joe Kennedy never saw her for the rest of his life because he had made a dreadful decision. It was the decision the medical authorities pushed on him. I mean, the lobotomy was the approved treatment for depression and anxiety, and he believed that his daughter could not cope with her retardation, could not cope with the idea that she was going to be watched over and institutionalized for the rest of her life as a, quote, "retarded" young lady.
So he agreed with the doctors that they would do this operation and she would accept her condition. It went terribly wrong and I don't think he ever forgave himself and never wanted to see evidence of what he had done to his beloved daughter.

Joe Kennedy had, you know, dozens if not hundreds of extramarital affairs, was a very, very tough businessman and could be at times ruthless in the way he used power. I think some would look at the Kennedy family and say that these were kids that also grew up with a deep sense of entitlement and some moral shortcomings. And I'm interested in your take on that.
I would not disagree with that,...What distinguishes the Kennedy family and why they remain part of the American life and the American scene, is that they were truly dedicated to public service. And, you know, these kids, all of them, could have led the lives of the idle rich, and instead Ted Kennedy becomes the hardest-working senator and the longest-serving senator in the country.
Bobby dedicates his life to public service, even though he knows that he's a target for assassination, as his brother was. And his brother Jack, who was in pain every day of his life, goes into public service and becomes president. The girls in the family, as well. And I think that is something that Americans cherish, whether they agree or disagree with the Kennedy politics.

 On the deaths of Kennedy's second and third sons, John and Robert
"It's unimaginable, you know. If this were fiction, no one would believe it. This most articulate, most domineering, most dominant man, in December of 1961 — less than a year into his son's first term as president — has a massive stroke. They perform the last rites. Nobody thinks he'll last more than 24 hours; he lasts eight years. But during those eight years, he is unable to communicate through language. He can't write, he can't speak, though he understands everything coming in. And it is during those eight years that he witnesses the assassinations — the violent deaths — of his second and his third sons. An unimaginable horror. And there's no way for him to express his feelings except to sob. And he cries and he cries and he cries, but it won't bring back those two boys."