He tried to improve German-American relations and opposed U.S. ambassador to Britain.īut Kennedy was out of step on World War II. That led to appointments as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and, in 1937, U.S. Joe Kennedy married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston's mayor, and became a friend of Franklin D. Afterward, he made a mint selling the stuff himself. Leamer and other historians say he supplied bootleggers with imported liquor during Prohibition. There were stints as a bank president and a steel executive. He invested profitably in stocks, commodities, real estate and movie studios.

As the Kennedys prospered, many immigrants saw in the family's rising fortunes what they hoped to achieve for themselves.įew people were as driven or flamboyant in pursuit of success as Joseph P. The story of the Kennedy clan in America began with Patrick Kennedy, an Irish man who fled the potato famine in 1849. 'They are America's family,' he says, 'both good and bad.' 'Sooner or later, we'll get a balanced vision of what they were,' says Laurence Leamer, author of three books on the Kennedy family.īoston University historian Thomas Whalen says anyone in a family, especially a large one, can relate to the adventures and misadventures of the Kennedys. Kennedys have been idolized and demonized for decades, romanticized as the second coming of Camelot and splashed across tabloids as exemplars of self-indulgence. The dark side of the family story also endures: Two assassinations and 13 children who grew up without fathers accidents that claimed and damaged lives, and men behaving badly toward women, one generation after another. Kennedy, and in dozens of laws that bear Ted Kennedy's name or imprint - including one that made possible the multicultural, multihued society that elected a black man president. Kennedy's leadership style and call to service in a commitment to social justice inspired by Robert F. It lives on in the fusion of politics and celebrity created by patriarch Joseph P. Edward Kennedy's death late Tuesday, the family's last towering public figure is gone, but the Kennedy legacy is woven through American life in ways that will never disappear. WASHINGTON - Outsized in their ambition, their flaws, their tragedies and their accomplishments, the Kennedys have long occupied prime real estate in the political arena and the public imagination.Īfter Sen.

Woman of the House by Vincent Bzdek