Joe Kennedy started an American dynasty, the closest thing the US has had to a royal family

This past weekend, millions of Americans took to the streets for the “No Kings” protests, rallying against Donald Trump.

The US president, with his penchant for golden adornment, a fawning court and authoritarian power, the argument went, was anointing himself as monarch-in-chief.

America is country that prided itself as a nation which fought a bloody Revolutionary War to rid itself of Mad King George and the shackles of imperial control. So, the idea of rule by decree is, in theory, anathema to its founding principles.

There is a disconnect between America’s Pollyanna vision of itself as a beacon of democracy and the land of equality and freedom, and the reality. Which is there has always been an aristocratic class.

It may have had more opportunities for upward social mobility thanks to its faith in hyper-capitalism, but names such as the Rockefellers, the Hearsts, the Astors, the du Ponts, the Kochs and the Waltons have amassed massive wealth and influence, as have political clans the Bushes, the Roosevelts and the Adamses.

But no one has encompassed the idea of American royalty as much as the Kennedys.

Today, there are around 100 Kennedys (they are prolific breeders), ranging from the anti-vaxxer and brain worm survivor Robert F. Kennedy to actor Patrick Schwarzenegger. A New York feature two months ago put the numbers of the third generation at two dozen and the fourth at 75.

They are all direct descendants of Joseph P. Kennedy, widely considered as the founding patriarch of the modern Kennedys.

That story will soon be told in a Netflix series called Kennedy, which still star Michael Fassbender as Joe.

Rather than start the story in the late 1950s when John F. Kennedy was a young senator from Massachusetts making his run for the national stage, the series kicks off in the 1930s, as Joe and wife Rose was laying the foundations for a powerful dynasty through their aspirations for their nine children.

If it runs for enough seasons, expect the series to go through the years and the turbulent public lives and tragedies that led to whispers of a Kennedy Curse that would see one son killed in a exploded aircraft in WWII, one daughter die in a plane crash, two sons assassinated, and another daughter lobotomised at the age of 23. That was just the second generation.

The Kennedy series showrunner will be Sam Shaw, who has worked on other historical dramas Manhattan and Masters of Sex, with Danish director Thomas Vinterberg on board for the first and last episodes of the season. Screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, A Star is Born) is also involved.

While Joe Kennedy sat atop the family tree as the first generation, his father Patrick Joseph Kennedy was the first politician in the brood. The son of Irish immigrants from County Wexford, Patrick started work as a stevedore on the Boston docks at the age of 14.

He bought a saloon with money from his job and from his mother who owned a stationery shop. He expanded that to three bars, and then bought a whiskey importation business. In 1884, four years before Joe’s birth, Patrick went into politics. He served in the state house of representatives and the senate, and then was a factional boss behind the scenes.

As Joe came of age, he benefitted greatly from his father’s business interests and his family’s prominence in local Boston politics. He went to Harvard, graduated with an economics degree and in his 20s, became a banker and amassed a fortune as a stock trader.

He developed a reputation as a ruthless businessman, had an interest in Hollywood studio RKO, a lot of real estate investments, and did very well in the whiskey business.

One of the more persistent rumours was that Joseph had in leagues with mobsters during Prohibition but this has been disputed by several biographers, and no evidence has ever supported the claims.

By 1935, the period the Netflix series will start with, Joe was worth $US180 million, a multi-billionaire in today’s terms.

He married Rose Fitzgerald in 1914, whose father had been the mayor of Boston, but was a philanderer and even once had an affair with Gloria Swanson.

When Joseph worked as a manager of the Fore River Shipyard, he met Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the time the secretary of the navy. He was noted for having a preternatural ability to make and exploit political connections, and was later appointed by FDR to the newly established Securities and Exchange Commission.

The chairmanship of the US Maritime Commission followed in 1937, and then a posting to the UK as the US ambassador in 1938. He was in England when World War II broke out, and Joseph maintained a position of isolationism. He was convinced the Germans would prevail.

During this era, a British MP named Josiah Wedgwood IV had said Joseph had ambitions to be the US’s first Catholic president, but he was actually grooming his son.

The scion he had in mind was not JFK but his older brother Joe Jr, the oldest of all nine children. Joe Jr did all the things one is supposed to do when one’s father had grand political aspirations for their future. He went to the right schools – Choate, Harvard, the London School of Economics – and had started to be active in Democrats politics in his home state.

He enlisted in the army in June 1941, and in August 1944, died in combat.

Joe Sr’s dreams for his first-born had been dashed but he wasn’t going to give up his ambitions to see a Kennedy elected president. His attention turned to Jack.

Joe Jr’s premature death was the first but not the last, and the voluminous tragedies that would follow left even Ted Kennedy wondering out loud if there if “some awful curse did hang all over the Kennedys”.

More likely, especially if you’re not superstitious, there were a lot of Kennedys over the years, and their vast resources and profiles gave them access to a life that held more risks.

Joe died in 1969, he outlived four of his children.

With RKF Jr back in the inner circle of power in Washington DC as the Trump Administration’s controversial Secretary of Health, the Kennedys are firmly back in the spotlight.

Among the 100 or so members of the clan today, all third and fourth generation (the last blood member of the second generation, Jean, died in 2020, and by marriage, Ethel, RFK’s widow, died in 2024), there are former politicians but also “regular” people who work as firefighters, interior designers and yoga teachers.

But the family, the name and the legacy is always in the cultural consciousness. In addition to the upcoming Netflix series, TV producer Ryan Murphy is well into production on American Love Story, an anthology show that will focus on the romance between John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessett.

They were America’s golden couple of the 1990s. With his father’s jawline and his mother’s eyes, JFK Jr was the great big hope of reviving Camelot, that Renaissance era where to be a Kennedy was to live the America dream.

When JFK Jr and Bessett, along with Bessett’s sister Lauren, died in a plane crash off the coast of Massachusetts, that dream was, again, snuffed.

But the obsession that the closest thing the Americans ever had to a royal family never died.