The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [70]
Thanks to men like Krock, Joe had managed to become one of the most celebrated members of Roosevelt’s administration. He was also one of its most disloyal. Joe did most of his bellyaching not to Roosevelt but to conservative journalists such as Krock, who heard his complaints not as treacherous whining but as a principled assault on New Deal doctrines.
Roosevelt realized that in Joe he had a subordinate who approved of neither his fiscal nor social policies, a man who in less troubled times perhaps would have been sacked. The president, however, was holding together a disparate and troubled coalition. Joe was no more disloyal than many Democratic Catholics who listened on the radio to the vicious anti-New Deal jeremiads of Father Charles Coughlin as if they were Sunday sermons. Joe was friendly enough with the demagogic priest that he wrote Coughlin in August 1936 thanking him for calling Joe “a shining star among the dim ‘knights’ of the present administration’s activities.”
During the interlude between his two positions in Washington, Joe had hired himself out to various troubled corporations for princely sums. He was brilliant at ferreting out excess, fraud, and corporate squalor and singularly unsympathetic to the mediocre inheritors who often sat at the heads of America’s major corporations.
In a stint at troubled Paramount Studios, Joe prepared a harshly candid portrait of a company in which directors who were the architects of “dissension and division in management policies” still sat on the board. He condemned the “cumulative effects of a chain of incompetent, unbusinesslike and wasteful practices,” and he backed up his critique with figures as firm as his words.
Joe received $50,000 in return, plus another $24,000 for his assistants, but he apparently thought that Paramount itself would have been fairer compensation. “Roosevelt is worried about anti-Semitism in America and one of the causes is all the movie companies being owned by Jews,” he told the board of directors, including Edwin Weisl, a senior partner in the Wall Street firm of Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett. Weisl recalled the incident to his son, Edwin Weisl Jr., who, like his father, was a leading Democratic operative.
“What are we supposed to do?” a board member replied, painfully aware of the wages of fear rising across the world.
“The company ought to be owned by a non-Jew, and Roosevelt says you should sell it to me.”
Weisl had excellent political connections, and before he advised the board to sell, he wanted to confirm everything with Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest aides. “Hey, Chief,” Hopkins asked Roosevelt as Weisl stood near by. “What’s this about Joe Kennedy and Paramount?”
“What’s Paramount?” the president queried.
“Have you heard enough?” Hopkins replied, and the two men left the president alone. Weisl went back to the board to tell them that they should not sell Paramount to Joe but pay him off with money and thanks and be rid of him.
Joe returned to Cambridge in November 1937 for the Harvard-Yale game, in which Joe Jr. would have his last chance to win a letter. His son had had a sad, unfulfilling career on the Harvard team, condemned to perpetual life on the bench.
He had practiced as hard as any of the varsity players and was never known to shirk an exercise or cut practice. Joe Jr.’s tenure on the team, however, had been plagued by injuries. In his freshman year he had broken his arm. The next year he had suffered such a serious knee injury that in his junior year his leg was operated upon. His father, despite his quasi-religious