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In the late '20s, Joe Kennedy went into show business, flourished as a board chairman, special adviser or reorganizer of five film, vaudeville and radio companies (Paramount, Pathe, First National, Keith-Albee-Orpheum and RCA). Since the war he has applied his Midas touch to Texas oil investments and real estate in Manhattan, Palm Beach and Chicago. Joe Kennedy's fantastic purchase of Chicago's Merchandise Mart, the world's largest and ugliest commercial building, from Marshall Field & Co. in 1945, still glazes the eyes of real estate speculators. Joe got the Mart for $12.5 million, putting up just $800,000 in cash. He promptly mortgaged it for $18 million. Today the Mart (which is expertly managed by Eunice Kennedy's husband, Sargent Shriver) is worth $75 million, brings in annual rentals that exceed its original purchase price.
Although he was often absent from home while he amassed his millions (his daughter Patricia, born during a hectic, seven-week business deal, was a month old before her father saw her for the first time), Joe Kennedy has always had firm ideas on his children's upbringing. Rose Kennedy, a pious Catholic, supervised her children's religious education, and all of the girls went to Catholic schools (Manhattanville and Sacred Heart convents in the U.S. and Britain). But for his sons.
Joe insisted on a secular education like his own. The boys attended private preparatory schools and Harvard. Bobby and Teddy studied law at the University of Virginia, and Joe Jr. and Jack each spent a term at the London School of Economics under the late Harold Laski, an agnostic, a Socialist and the proponent of some fiscal notions that were on the other side of Joe Kennedy's moon.
"Let 'Em Fight." Wherever the family circle rolled—Boston, Bronxville, Washington, London, Palm Beach, the Riviera, Hyannisport—there were new and exciting experiences, tastes, sounds, discussions. During the long summers on Cape Cod, the Kennedys became fiercely competitive at tennis, sailing, swimming, golf and parlor games. Sibling unity as well as sibling rivalry was encouraged: once Joe Kennedy found himself in a violent argument with his two older sons. "Let 'em fight," he said later. "The important thing is that they fight together. I can take care of myself." At times the daily Donnybrooks (often accompanied by the obbligato of Joe Kennedy's private ticker tape on the front porch) drove Rose to a simple prefabricated shack she had erected as a retreat on a remote corner of the Hyannisport property. "It's solitary confinement not splendor I need." she explains. "Any mother will know what I mean."