A serious bout with bronchitis over the Christmas-to-New Year's break gave me five days in bed to catch up on some long-overdue reading.  Atop the list was a vintage book I received as a gift and it's worth your time both for its readability as well as the appeal of its subject: Kennedy family patriarch Joseph Kennedy.

A link to the book is here at Amazon and here at Alibris.

Written by Richard J. Whalan, the book quickly moves through Kennedy second-generation Irish-American upbringing in Boston, his meteoric rise as a young executive (youngest bank CEO in Boston at the time) and his personal as well as political battles.

The book is a quick read despite being written in language that is somewhat more formal (it was published in 1964) than today's vernacular.

Three key elements stand out to me:

One, the inside glimpses of Kennedy's role as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James during the fall of Europe and the Battle of Britain, especially his defiant belief that appeasement could work as a strategy when the object was capitalistic coexistence with a Reich-dominated world.  I drew parrallels to today's foreign policy questions.

Two, the diaries of then-Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes are quoted as primary sources of inside perceptions about Kennedy and they are harsh, damning and also at points downright gossipy.  In an interesting coincidence, several days after finishing the book my wife and I watched the 1990's video classic "The War Room" in which Ickes' son is featured in a campaign senior staff meeting preening for the cameras and to hear himself speak.  A link to the diaries is here.

Three, the business acumen of Kennedy was exceptional and the book chronicles his tireless work ethic, decisions to invest and then retire his funds from the stock market (pre 1929 crash), and his efforts to move into entertainment as well as real estate.  We also see where bends and pushes aside rules for personal gain (stockpiling whiskey under "medicinal" purchase orders to capitalize on skyrocketing demand following repeal of prohibition.

Another key point that arose in my mind was the secret, back-channel correspondence between Winston Churchill (even before he was selected Prime Minister) and FDR.  The book also reviews a critical incident that would have been devistating to the Allies when intelligence sources unearth the secret correspondence traveling under pseudonym via diplomatic pouch.  At the time the Kennedy biography was published, the FDR-Churchill correspondence was still secret, and unpublished.

With the trust fund income of Joseph Kennedy generating news still today  (in New York), the book is a worthwhile reward in return some used book store and internet searching.