The Patriarch

Nasaw had access to the Kennedy family papers, including material previously closed, and wrote the definitive biography of Joseph P. Kennedy. It covers the Boston origins, the banking and film industry careers, the stock market operations of the 1920s, the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the ambassadorship to Britain, the campaign against intervention in the war, and the management of his sons' political careers.

The business material is substantial. Kennedy made money in banking, in the Hollywood studios where he restructured and merged film companies including the transactions that produced RKO, in liquor importing after Prohibition ended, and in real estate, notably the Chicago Merchandise Mart. Nasaw examines the stock pool operations Kennedy participated in during the 1920s and is careful about what the evidence supports, concluding that Kennedy engaged in practices that were legal at the time and that he later prohibited as the first chairman of the SEC, which Roosevelt appointed him to precisely because he knew the practices.

The political material is the more contested part. Nasaw documents Kennedy's opposition to war with Germany in detail and argues it came from a conviction that Britain would lose and that war would destroy capitalism and democracy, rather than from sympathy with Nazism, while documenting the antisemitic statements without excusing them.

The book is long and archival. It is useful to investors mainly for the account of how fortunes were assembled in a period of weak regulation and for the SEC chapters on how the first securities regulation was designed by someone who had exploited its absence.