he is the namesake of the family's patriarch, the first joseph p kennedy who served at the sec and kennedy'sllowed him into public service that and that started 64 straight jeers in which at least one kennedy was on capitol hill or in the white house. young john f kennedy led to a successful bid in 1960. younger brother teddy won his old seat skpld serve for nearly five decades. brother bobby was elected to serve as new york's carpet bagging senator at the time. so he was accused of. the second generation served in the house of representative with bobby's son, joe spending a dozen years and patrick serving ai eight terms before retiring. with teddy's death in 2009 and patrick's decision not to run again, congress has been without a member of the kennedy family for about two years. it seems fitting that there is a look out about his namesake called the patriarch, the remarkable and tush lept times of joseph p kennedy. dave nassau, good morning to you. >> good morning. >> the complicated political beginnings of joseph p kennedy, where to begin. i want to start with deal with his wealth. how di

. >>> david nasaw recounts the life of joseph p. kennedy patriarch of the political family that included president john f. kennedy and senators robert f. kennedy and edward kennedy. the author examines joseph kennedy's career in business and politics, which included ventures in wall street, hollywood and the founding chairman of the securities and exchange commission. this is a little under an hour. [applause] >> thank you, all. delighted to be here. as i tell my history students at the city university of new york in the ph.d. program -- thank you. [laughter] as i tell my history students until they want to choke me the past is a foreign country. we can visit, try to learn the customs and the white smith the fragrances, recoil at the foul odors but we are foreigners in a strange land. this is true as much in the recent past as it is of colonial america or 12th century venice. writing about the recent past is not easy as it is this time around. first there are people you have to talk to. and while i was blessed from beginning to end by havin

took me 800 pages in my new book, "the patriarch: the remarkable life and turbulent times of joseph p. kennedy to tell the story. i won't be able to tell very much of it now. but from hollywood, he remained the insider and outsider. supported roosevelt. he was an integral part of the museum. he was the first commissioner of the fcc, in which he wrote so many tough laws about stock trading, that when he was finished, he had a stock trading stocks and took his money out and put it into real estate. the way he made money he had now outlawed. [laughter] he went on to be the first irish american ambassador to great britain, as i said before. the first and probably the worst ambassador this country have seen. he did everything he possibly could to appease hitler. even when neville chamberlain, the author of the munich agreement, said that you cannot make a deal with hitler. kennedy kept trying. he returned to this country in 1940 in disgrace because he had made it clear that no american dollar support the british because they were going to get defeated. the only way americans could survive, he thoug

our job as historian, when grounded, delays of joseph p. kennedywhispered me a surrogate antique fun house mirror, which if i looked at it long enough would reflect back off and hazy, indistinct distorted form, images of events, people, places, which organize and arrange the story 20th century america. as an historian, amateur see the origins. i was the colleagues have arthur sausage or. he introduced me to the kennedy family at some of them. i don't know what it was. i met with jean kennedy and i had recently was finishing up my first book ended my first biography, i had feared a treasure trove of materials that jean kennedy smith stutter, who is writing a collection, compiling letters from her father to her aunts and uncles had put me onto. and in that treasure trove of material, letters from william randolph post joseph kennedy back in court, i glimpsed a man who is different from everything i had heard about. so i told jean kennedy smith at some point that her daughter should write a biography of her grandfather and that the man was absolutely

than nonfiction and especially because it is such a thorough and comprehensive biography of joseph p. kennedy who was the father of president kennedy, many other kennedys, was also active in the sec and ambassador to london and in the hollywood film industry, very active in the roosevelt administration, sometimes the relationship between him and the president got contentious and he has been doing an excellent job putting together so much research. c-span six years on this book going to archive after archive, cross checking, fact checking, one of the things he seems to have proven definitively, joe kennedy was not a bootlegger. rumors persisted about this for decades. i admire the scholarship and i am glad to have spent the many weeks i have with this book. >> discovering new things about the kennedy family is outstanding. we were talking about what if one of the alternative history things, what if nixon had been kennedy in 1960? what if john kennedy had never been president? thinking of all the thousands of books that never would have been written or may be different books written. i once int

i was president of my student body, i interned for congressman joseph p. kennedy who has since required, a congressman -- retired. i then went on to work for united states senator john kerry for 11 years and ultimately was recruited to run for office, was elected in 2009. i am 38. this is where you say i look much younger than that. [laughter] i love coming to this space, good lighting. [laughter] but i think, again, i can speak to this personally because now that i am an elected official, the only woman serving on that body and the first woman of color in that body in its history -- mass. [applause] now, why does that matter, why is that relevant? i appreciate the applause, it has nothing to do with a personal achievement. i think it's a shared victory for all of us. it means that the solutions we're developing in government are more comprehensive and fully informed because of that perspective. so i've thought a great deal about this issue of attraction and retex, but more than that, how do we keep native bostonians? because we were losing young people who had be