father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., while a businessman himself, had also been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a former Wall Street insider who knew the system, the senior Kennedy had cracked down on Wall Street profiteers. Some of the financial titans of the thirties regarded JFK’s father as a class traitor, “the Judas of Wall Street,” for his work on behalf of FDR.[30] It was in the light of Joseph Kennedy’s fight to initiate government controls over Wall Street, and the opposition he encountered, that he made his
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