The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty by Neal Thompson

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty by Neal Thompson Based on genealogical breakthroughs and previously unreleased records, this is the first book to explore the inspiring story of the poor Irish refugee couple who escaped famine, created a life together in a city hostile to Irish, immigrants, and Catholics, and launched the Kennedy dynasty in America. Their Irish ancestry was a hallmark of the Kennedys’ initial political profile, as JFK leveraged his working-class roots to connect with blue-collar voters. Today, we remember this iconic American family as the vanguard of wealth, power, and style rather than as the descendants of poor immigrants. Here at last, we meet the first American Kennedys, Patrick and Bridget, who arrived as many thousands of others did following the Great Famine—penniless and hungry. Less than a decade after their marriage in Boston, Patrick’s sudden death left Bridget to raise their children single-handedly. Her rise from housemaid to shop owner in the face of rampant poverty and discrimination kept her family intact, allowing her only son P.J. to become a successful saloon owner and businessman. P.J. went on to become the first American Kennedy elected to public office—the first of many. Written by the grandson of an Irish immigrant couple and based on first-ever access to P.J. Kennedy’s private papers, The First Kennedys is a story of sacrifice and survival, resistance and reinvention: an American story.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hey folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming to another great podcast we certainly certainly, certainly appreciate you showing up. The Chris Voss Show family, remember, it's a family that loves you but doesn't judge you. The best kind of family there is.

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reviewing and go to all of our groups on facebook linkedin twitter and instagram and bad news for most of you there is no onlyfans channel that's a joke so you won't find us on there snapchat sorry my bad also we have an amazing author is always on the show we have these amazing authors we just put on the google machine and they pop up we're like amazing author, as always on the show. We have these amazing authors. We just put them in the Google machine, and they pop up. We're like, hey, we should invite this person to the show. This book sounds really cool. And we've done it again today. Who knew we'd do it again?

Today we have Neil Thompson on the show with us. He's a multi-book author, and he's publishing a book that's coming out February 22 on 2022. Boy, he's going to be able to remember that for the rest of his life when he launched that book. And he's got an amazing book. You may have heard of these folks too. The First Kennedys, The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty. So we're going to be talking about that as well.

We had, oh, who's the, we had the brother of, he's I guess the nephew of Bobby, Tim Shriver on the show. So he's a really great guy. So we got some Kennedy thing with the show going on. I don't know. We're throwing that in there. So let me tell you a little bit more about him. He is the author of Kickflip Boys, a memoir of freedom and rebellion and chaos of fatherhood,

freedom, rebellion, and chaos of fatherhood. And the forthcoming book we before mentioned. And for the works of biography and narrative nonfiction. He's been on ESPN, the History Channel, PBS, C-SPAN, Fox, TNT, the BBC, NPR, Diane Rem Show, The Daily Show, and now The Chris Foss Show. Wow, he's everywhere. As a journalist, he's written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Outside Esquire, Backpacker, Vanity Fair, Men's Health, Sports Illustrated, Seattle

Met, and Wall Street Journal. That's a hell of a resume you got going on there, Neil. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Chris. Good to be here. Good to see you. There you go. There you go.

So give us your plugs so we can find you on those interwebs and learn more about you. A couple of interweb spots. One is neilthompson.com, my website. You can learn about the new book there and find all my other interweb connections. I'm a little bit on the Facebook, a little bit more on Instagram, but those links are on the contact page on neilthompson.com. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? goes back, my interest in this story goes back actually to 1999 when John F. Kennedy Jr., if you remember, was flying his plane north from New Jersey and disappeared. Presumed dead,

I was working as a journalist at the time for the Baltimore Sun. They sent me and another reporter north to Hyannisport, which is the Kennedy compound there in Cape Cod, right on the water, to stake things out, wait for news on JFK Jr. He died. So did his wife and his wife's sister. And I'm up there with this mass of reporters swarming around town doing interviews and whatnot. I go to a bar and the bartender gives me a shot of Jameson's and we start talking about JFK just after the news came back that he actually was dead. And they found his plane on the bottom of the ocean.

And she starts crying and talking about the Kennedy being like family to her. And so I left there, finished my stories, left there, heading back home to my wife and kids. And I'm passing through New Jersey and realized I was a couple miles away from the cemetery where my immigrant Irish grandparents were buried, Bridget and Patrick. She went by Della. And so on this long drive back, I started thinking, where did this frenzy with the Kennedys begin? How does it relate to my Irish history and my interest in my Irish ancestry? And I wanted to know, literally, this is where the title of the book came from. Who were the first Kennedys? Who came to America first? I knew they were Irish, but who came here

in the very beginning? What was life like for them? And how did that family grow from those humble origins of somebody coming over here as an immigrant to what we now know as the Kennedys? So 22, three years later, the book is finally out. I worked on it in bits and pieces over the years, kept getting distracted by other book projects. And it was probably the past few years that the story came back to me. And I realized we're talking a lot these days about immigration. We're not wanting immigrants here, all this rhetoric around, keep them out and that kind of stuff.

I wanted to know what was it like back then when the Irish were the immigrants who were coming here and big waves coming ashore trying to start a new life for themselves. So that's the backstory. Definitely. Definitely. And this is probably a really great book for those QAnon people who are just waiting for John F.K. Jr. to come back in Dallas there, right?

Isn't it weird? Yep. They were staked out. It looked like they were waiting for the end of the world to come. I mean, it's weird. The obsession with the Kennedys, it's still there on the left and on the right. We still hold them up as this, for good or bad, like this family that represents something about America.

It depends on who you are, what they represent for you. That's true. And they're still relevant because they're still in Congress and stuff today. So give us an overall arcing view of the book, if you would, please. Yeah, happy to. So it's basically the story of Bridget and Patrick Kennedy. They were the first Kennedys to come to America in the 1840s. They left Ireland at a time when their country was getting devastated by a potato famine. People were starving, people were fleeing in massive numbers. The country, which I think it had like 8 million people before the famine,

after the famine was down to like 4 million people. A million died, 2 million left. The country was just devastated. So Patrick Kennedy was the first member of his family to leave home. He lived on a farm in Wexford in rural Ireland. Bridget Kennedy on her side was the first member of his family to leave home. He lived on a farm in Wexford in rural Ireland. Bridget Kennedy on her side was the first member of her family to leave. They both sail across the ocean to Boston, landing in East Boston to start their new lives. They found each other, got married in 1849 and started a life together. So the book kind of starts there, although there's a little introduction that tees up my interest in this story, the JFK Jr. death scene that we just talked about. And then the book picks up with Bridget and Patrick landing in America and

discovering America doesn't want them here either. It was a place where, especially in Boston, people hated the Irish. They hated Catholics. They were overrun by these poor immigrants coming ashore. And I kind of deeply explore sort of those nativist tendencies that have always been part of American history where newcomers want to make sort of break in and become the next generation of immigrants here. And we don't want them. We push them back. So the story kind of follows that arc of Bridget's life and Patrick's life. He dies nine years after they move to come to America, leaving Bridget with four kids. She's a maid, she's widowed, she's poor, she's living in a

slum in East Boston. And it sort of tracks Bridget as really I portray her as the heroine of the family and the matriarch of the family because she kept her kids together. She moved her way up little by little from maid to hairdresser, and then eventually opened her own grocery store, which was really rare at that time for a single woman and a widow to be running her own shop. She ended up buying the building where the grocery shop was on the first floor. She bought the building next to it. She rented out the apartments that were above it and rented them to new Irish immigrants coming to America, including two dudes who became her sons-in-law. And then Bridget's story is kind of the first half of the book. The second half of the book follows PJ Kennedy, her surviving son, who also works his way up from a longshoreman

working on the docks of East Boston. Then he becomes a saloon owner and then he opens a couple of liquor shops and then gets into politics. So PJ is like the first Kennedy elected to public office, Massachusetts state legislature. And he's the one who really got the family started on an upward ascent. He became a super wealthy dude. His son, Joe, is the one who I think a lot of people might recognize more, the father of JFK and RFK and Teddy Kennedy. But this story really tracks the trajectory of the two generations that came before Joe and his kids. Wow. It really lays the foundation for their political empire and their financial empire,

I guess. Yeah, it does. Yeah. And it kind of reveals, here are some overlooked characters in this story that we think we know. I mean, we do know. The Kennedys, there have been plenty of books written about this family, right? So the goal with this book was, let's go deeper and find out where it all started and kind of unearth the stories of the overlooked, as I said, heroes of the family, mainly Bridget and PJ. And then you got access to, first ever access to PJ Kennedy's private papers, evidently. Yeah, yeah. That was kind of a helpful breakthrough. I had been aware of those papers for years. They're held at the John F. Kennedy Library outside of Boston and started asking the staff up there, the archivists, when can I see them? What's next?

How do I get a look at these things? And they just weren't, they're understaffed, overworked. They just weren't ready to process those. So it took a couple of years of nagging. And then finally, 2019, they started processing these old falling apart onion skin papers and digitizing them, but they had to finish the digitization of it before they could release it publicly. Then COVID hits and they were partway through that process. And I kept nagging and nagging and they said, okay, fine. Here's the first half. Here are a couple hundred pages of these letters of PJs. And that was a real breakthrough because it gave me insight into who this guy was. He was somebody who,

but by the time that he was writing these letters, he was already out of politics, but kind of an influential behind the scenes, backroom mover shaker guy, you know, everybody wanted PJ support or his money or something from PJ. So you, you go through these letters and some of them are available online now at the JFK Library, the Kennedy Archives.

And you read about PJ saying, hey, this guy, Patrick, just came over from Ireland. Let's find a way to get him a job. Can you hire him at your business? Or so-and-so needs a little money. Can you give them a place to live or a job or some help somehow. So it really shows how he was the kind of politician who looked out for his fellow Irish, his fellow Bostonians, and really sort of a grassroots help his fellow man kind of politician. So that's where that started. And you see some of that continuing in the family later on. But I argue in the book that some of that sort of empathy for neighbors and folks in the community who are

down on their luck started with Rick and then PJ. Now, some of this kind of aligns with your story, right? An Irish family coming to America? Yeah. Yeah. And I mentioned earlier, getting the idea of this getting triggered when I'm driving past my grandparents' graves in New Jersey and remembering, oh yeah, they're from Ireland. That's what got me started on the Kennedys. But as I started really researching the Kennedy story, I realized, all right, their family starts with an immigrant couple named Bridget and Patrick. My family started with an Irish immigrant couple named Bridget and Patrick. And in a sort of spooky, similar way, my grandfather, Patrick died died in his 30s of cancer. I left my grandmother with three kids alone in a tenement building in New Jersey.

On the Kennedy side, very similarly, Patrick dies young, died of consumption, left Patrick, Bridget, alone in her tenement building with four grandkids. So I realized my story parallels in certain ways with the start of the Kennedy story. But really the goal of the book was to show a lot of us started that way with a poor immigrant couple or a poor striving couple, just trying to make their way and move their way up and make a better life for their kids. And in the Kennedy's case, it obviously just took off. But it was remarkable to me that after just two generations, from the Irish famine and Bridget coming here with nothing, to then her son, PJ, becoming a wealthy man, and her grandson, Joe, then becoming the powerhouse of this political

dynasty. It just says a lot about what people can do in America. But the book also shows that there are a lot of forces lined up against those people, no matter where you come from. Yeah, it was a really interesting time. My great-grandfather came from Germany. He had some Mormons come by his place in Germany, and he decides to just pick up everything and come to Utah. He literally steps off the Union Pacific train,

not knowing anybody, not knowing anything. He speaks pure German. And somehow made a life for him. And I guess here I am. We all kind of come from that immigrant destiny. Do you talk about some of the persecution? I'm sure they went through a lot of crap going and coming in as immigrants. Yeah.

Crap to say the least um and and it's i discovered maybe not so much to my surprise that these forces have always been there like from the very beginning of even before we were the united states of america each like successive group of newcomers wants to shut the door on the next group right or pull up the ladder whatever term you want to use. And that's exactly what the Kennedys were up against. They were in Boston at a time when the city was still controlled by the descendants of the first colonizers, Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Plymouth Colony. And these were all rich white dudes who came from super waspy guy who came from those early families and wanted to keep things the same they wanted to protect their religion which was protestant they wanted to keep

the irish out because they had that freaky religion catholicism they were paranoid about the irish bringing in like some i mean there were literal conspiracy theories back then that the reason the Irish were coming to America was to create a Catholic takeover of our politics and our institutions. And so there were a lot of clubs, society groups, and then political organizations that popped up or new versions that popped up. They'd always been there to try and keep the Irish out or keep them down, keep them out of politics, prevent them from voting, prevent them from becoming citizens. I mean, you see this kind of stuff repeating throughout our whole history. And so I just focus on this slice of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic frenzy in like the mid-1800s when the Kennedys

were there and were victims of that. They had protesters marching down the street past their crappy apartments and screaming about the Irish and go back home, send them back. These kinds of terms we still hear today. And I just think it's kind of amazing that this family that you think of as rich and swanky and stylish and powerful back in the day when they were just getting started they were up against these forces that that really wanted to send them back and keep them out of politics keep them away from the polls keep them out of business keep them you know down in in the in the in the dirt and i think it says a lot about them and other newcomers to america

like them that they managed like your family managed to move up and out and just clawed their way into sort of middle class and then eventually more than that. Yeah. I'm just glad we skipped that whole Hitler thing. Glad we got out in the 1800s. We didn't get involved in any of that sort of crap. Yeah. But we had some dark moments back in American history. There's a lot of, some that I knew about, some that I rediscovered. There are people like well-known and respected preachers in Boston who supported abolition and were anti-slavery advocates on the one hand. And on the other hand, they're calling the Irish stupid and

drunk and dumb and send them back and all that. Henry David Thoreau, also an abolitionist, and on the one hand, and then hated the Irish on the other. Yeah. And I mean, that kind of the Catholic, hating the Catholics and the Irish went right up into JFK's presidency. They didn't think you could win because no one would want a Catholic president, I guess, was the thing at the time. Totally, yeah. Those conspiracies that I mentioned, it's like an effort to take over the country and make it a Catholic nation. Those kind of paranoid fears followed JFK to and through his presidency, for sure.

Yeah. It is interesting, like you say, how people want to pull the ladder up, yet we have that glorious Statue of Liberty in the harbor that says, give us your titer, et cetera, et cetera. And I remember when, just recently, when that whole wall business was going on, that one that got built. Yeah, yeah. I think someone just said it was actually almost completed. But I remember seeing Mexican people saying, yeah, they shouldn't let Mexicans across the border anymore.

And then the reporter would say to them, but didn't you come across? You're a immigrant too, right? Yeah, but, you know, it's changed after I get through. It's interesting how we've done that through the history of this country. Totally. And, you know, believe me, the Irish were guilty of that too. Once they got in and got established and made their way into politics, they're like, all right, that's it.

No more. Everybody else stay out. And I touch a little bit in the book on some of the hypocrisy of the Irish immigrants coming here and trying to work their way up while at the same time not being strong enough anti-slavery voices. I quote Frederick Douglass talking about visiting Ireland during the potato famine and finding the people just to be wonderful and supportive and humane. And he was a champion of their cause that when they get to America, because they were scrounging for low-wage jobs, similar to free blacks and others from other countries, they weren't as empathetic at that time or supportive of their fellow strivers as they should.

Well, let me ask you this, because this actually came up in one of our recent conversations with somebody. Somebody threw me that there were more, we were in a gaming thing, so you get all sorts of crazies in the gaming, but they'd thrown the trope out that more Irish people had been enslaved in America than black people, which I knew was completely wrong. But I Googled it, and I was interested to see that that's actually

a big racist trope and stuff. What was the context of Irish people coming here either as slaves or it was an indentured servitude? I think it might've been that. Yeah, that's a tricky one. And I don't buy it that they were enslaved. I don't think there's a, you can compare the experience of Irish coming to America and,

and, and African people being enslaved against their will and brought here in chains. There's the Irish came here for the most part willingly, but I will say they, they, they had a very hard time of it. And many of them were kept in really crappy jobs. Like Kennedy, one of the main characters of the book, worked like many Irish women did as a maid. Low wage, long hours, six to seven days a week, being treated poorly by their employers.

I actually read really good books by Stephanie Land called Maid. There's a Netflix TV series now out based on her book and learned a little bit about what it was like to serve other people in modern times and realized it was very similar to how Irish maids back in the 1800s described their servitude for these rich Boston families in the case of the Kennedy experience. Just treated terribly and in some cases worse. Women abused by the male of the house or fired by the female of the house. But that's not slavery. They had jobs and they had their freedom. So it's a very different experience from what African-Americans went through.

Yeah. We need to fix somehow the racism and prejudice in this country. It's 450 years. They're just a mess. But that's another story. What were some of the things that maybe stuck out or you want to tease out to readers in encouraging them to buy the book? Maybe insight to something you discovered that you're surprised by? Yeah. One thing I thought was interesting as it relates to the Kennedys is their involvement

in the liquor business from the very beginning. So Patrick Kennedy, who's JFK's great grandfather, came over. He was a trained barrel maker. He made whiskey and beer barrels in Ireland and then did the same when he got to East Boston. So he was involved in the business. His wife, after Patrick died, later opened her own grocery store. And like many grocery stores, then and now she sold liquor on the side. So she got her start selling liquor too. And then her sort of business savvy and her ability to start her own business that influenced her son, PJ, who in the late 1870s opens his own saloon in a crummy part of Boston. The proprietor had sold it because depressed patron had shot himself in the head in the basement and the proprietor said, okay, I'm out. Sold the place. P.J. Kennedy swooped in and bought it. And that was his introduction to the saloon business. But then during P.J.'s career, so P.J.'s, JFK's grandfather, he opens multiple saloons, liquor dealers, wholesale shops in Boston and East Boston and got rich off that. And that's what introduced him to his own political career. P.J. Kennedy

was a state representative in Massachusetts and was an example of this type of politician in Boston at that time where they made money from saloons or other liquor dealings and that helped fund their political career and also helped them make connections to their constituents. They sat behind the bar and talked about their policy and what they stood for, or bought a round of drinks to try and encourage voters. So the whole family really starts from liquor sales. And later, Joe Kennedy, JFK's dad, gets credit for being a bootlegger during Prohibition, which he wasn't, but he did become a super wealthy liquor importer after prohibition and that helped contribute to his wealth and in turn contributed to the political careers of

jfk rfk and teddy kennedy and is the story correct that with joseph he also invested in the in the stock market knew how to scam it and run it. And that's why he got hired by Franco D. Roosevelt to oversee the SEC. Do I have that story right? Yeah. And in fact, if you go back further, he worked at his father's bank. So Joe's introduction to finance and then subsequently trading started because after he went to Harvard with daddy's money. I'll make a quick aside on Joe, and I don't mean to pick on him, but he's somebody who at times had portrayed himself and others have portrayed him since as this poor kid who grew up and made something of himself, a real up from the bootstraps kind of guy.

Not really. I mean, by the time he was in his teens and ready to go to college, his father was a wealthy, influential politician and had the means to send Joe to Harvard. And PJ was a part owner in a bank. And Joe's first job, one of his first jobs out of Harvard was working at daddy's bank. He was good at it. And he later became good at working the market and he was good at other things too. He had his Hollywood career as well, but a lot of his formative years and his, and his help came from his father who had already established sort of this base from which Joe was later able to ascend to even higher heights. I mean, what a trajectory when you think about it. But yeah, it's interesting, all these little pieces and put together, because I never heard about anything before Joseph Kennedy, other than just what I knew about Joseph Kennedy. But this is really cool. This is really

interesting. Anything else you want to tease out about the book before we go? Well, you make a good point. I think a lot of our, if you care about the Kennedys or whatever, Irish history or the history of the Democratic Party or whatever, we've heard the story of Joe Kennedy and JFK and all that. And we think we know how the Kennedys fit into the kind of the history of America or history of politics in America. But I wanted to tell this other story, really go back deeper and show where it began and how humbly and simply it began and show not necessarily a Kennedy story, but a story of a poor immigrant couple trying to make it and then seeing the widow of that couple, the surviving widow, make something for herself and for her kids. And then it goes from there and becomes sort of the Kennedy legend that we know of now. But it started with very little. And I think that's something to celebrate, that we have been and are still, with caveats and with complications,

a country where you can come and really make something of yourself and for your family. That is the beauty of the American democracy, the American experiment, if you will. I was talking with my nephew recently about the Constitution, trying to get him to read the Constitution in the Federalist Papers. And the beauty of a lot of people take democracy for granted. And this beauty where people can come here, where people are willing to die to come here. Just the right to vote, the simple access that my vote is equal to your vote, technically. Don't get us started on the college thing.

But, I mean, technically, all men are created equal in the vision of this experiment. And so you think about this country, when you look at books like yours and others of the Kennedys, you realize how different this country might be without them. I mean, would we be, would we have had the moon race? We've won the moon. There's a lot of different things if you take out John F. Kennedy as president and his family, actually, and its influence, you know, what might have changed in the history and dynamic of this country. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the family represents a lot of things to a lot of people on both

sides of the political spectrum. But for a lot of people, there was just so much hope placed in JFK's presidency and then in Bobby's candidacy that all cut short and all that tragedy. It makes the Kennedy story, I've described it as like Shakespearean. It's just so tragic and epic and so many ups and downs. And my hope was that this book would add another sort of early chapter, a deeper understanding of the early chapter of that saga, that Shakespearean drama. Most definitely. I mean, this definitely has more color. Extraordinary family, extraordinary reach, and it just keeps going on.

So it'll be interesting to see how things change between Teddy Kennedy and his influence in the Congress, JFK, like you said, Bobby. I think there's family members still in Congress. So it's interesting how they go. And yeah, the tragedies are just John F. Kennedy Jr. I remember how upset people were about that.

And then, of course, the family is still, everyone's still scrutinizing him. So there you go. Thanks for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it, Neil. Thanks, Chris. Really enjoyed it. Good to talk to you. There you go.

Give us your plugs one more time as we go out so people can check out the book. Yeah. So the book, The First Kennedys, The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty. It's out February 22 of 22, 2-22-22. It was recently picked as an Amazon Best Book of the Month. For February, you can find it at your local bookseller. Bookshop.org is a site that I've been using lately to buy books that support independent booksellers. You can find it on Amazon too, of course. And you can find me on at neilthompson.com with all my social links and stuff on that website. There you go.

There you go. Order the book up, guys. February 22nd, 2022. What a great day. You got the 22s. It's all just twos in there. And thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com.

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