The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [46]
When Joe acted in a generous manner, it often turned out to be simply a loan that was expected to be repaid with interest. One of those who learned this lesson was the president’s son, James “Jimmy” Roosevelt. Jimmy was something that none of Joe’s sons would ever be, a sad inheritor endlessly trading on his father’s name and power. Joe helped Jimmy win some of the Ford Motor Company’s business for Jimmy’s insurance company. Joe then invited Jimmy to go along with him to England in September 1933, where he hoped to acquire liquor distributorships before the end of Prohibition.
Jimmy’s presence next to Joe at business meetings signaled to the British business leaders that if they wanted to please the new administration, here was a good way to do it. Joe had no interest in risk, leaving that sad concept to entrepreneurs, plungers, and business school professors. He preferred certainty, and the exclusive Dewar’s Scotch, Gordon’s gin, Ron Rico rum, and Haig & Haig Scotch import licenses were the very definition of certainty. Once that was locked up for his new company, Somerset Importers, Joe finagled a “medical” license to bring in large shipments of Scotch to be sitting in warehouses on December 5, 1933, when liquor could be sold legally again in America.
Joe expected a cabinet post for his contributions to FDR’s victory and in recognition of the acumen that he thought he would bring to the new administration. Instead, he was frozen out, the only trifle thrown his way being possible membership in the American delegation at the London Economic Conference, which would be writing a reciprocal trade agreement with Latin American nations. James Warburg, Roosevelt’s chief representative, scotched that possibility. “I didn’t want anything to do with a delegation selected to pay off political debts,” he recalled, “for one thing because I thought it would be by definition an incompetent delegation.” A few days later, on April 8, 1933, Warburg had lunch with Harrison Williams, a young administration official, who provided even more devastating insight into Joseph P. Kennedy. “Found out all about Kennedy from him,” Warburg noted in his diary, “a completely irresponsible speculator who has been spreading malicious stories about the President…. I think Kennedy was probably spreading these tales because he hadn’t got his payoff for his $50,000 campaign contribution.”
In June 1934, Roosevelt made the “completely irresponsible speculator” chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Joe’s critics scoffed at the idea that he would end the ruinous practices that he and his kind had for so long employed to such profit and harm.
Joe knew that he had to make the sort of authentic reforms that would satisfy his critics among the New Dealers. Yet he could not so overregulate the securities industry that the golden god of greed would never return to Wall Street. Joe was a decisive man, and in hardly more than a year he did magnificent service, creating many of the laws and rules that have formed the underpinnings of Wall Street ever since his time and helped to keep the American economy on an ever-rising trajectory.
Joe had the confidence—and this became an essential part of the way the Kennedys worked—to bring in the smartest, most ambitious people he could find and let them work unfettered. In this instance, he brought in such brilliant minds as two Yale law professors, William O. Douglas and Thurman Arnold, both of whom would make a firm mark on history.
Joe was not one to accept all the humbug of the New Deal by living in a narrow townhouse in Georgetown. Instead, he rented Marwood, a magnificent twenty-five-room estate in Maryland. He happened to be in town on the final Sunday in June 1935,