Joseph
Kennedy II
BackGround
Joseph P. Kennedy II (b. 1952) is the eldest son of Senator and Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy. Kennedy was born in Brighton and had a troubled childhood. He was expelled from several private schools for getting into fights with his classmates, and he would frequently quarrel with his siblings and cousins. When he was fifteen, his father Robert was assassinated while running for President. Kennedy dropped out of Milton Academy, an elite private prep school, eventually graduating from a prep school in Cambridge. Kennedy then attended the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, but dropped out the same year he started. He then spent several months working for an initiative to combat tuberculosis in the black community of San Francisco, an act which earned him praise from San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto. Kennedy finally graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Boston in 1976, but not before being hijacked by Palestinian terrorists in 1972 and causing a scandalous car crash, ruled to be Kennedy’s fault, that left his sister-in-law
Political Emergence
Joseph Kennedy II showed little to no interest in politics prior to 1986, when Tip O’Neill, longtime U.S. Congressmen, announced his retirement, the same seat John F. Kennedy had held in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kennedy announced he would run, but faced fierce opposition in the Democratic primary from career politicians who considered Kennedy’s campaign and endorsements to be overtly nepotistic. Kennedy still won the primary with a decent 52% of the vote, and won the general election in a landslide with
paralyzed in 1973. From 1976 on, he ran a non-profit focused on providing heating oil to impoverished households, living off of his inherited fortune. In 1979, Kennedy married Sheila Rauch and gave birth to twin boys, Joe Kennedy III and Matthew Kennedy.
73% of the vote. From their, Kennedy won every other congressional campaign he ran in a landslide if he even ran opposed. He was wildly popular in Massachusetts, pushing liberal policies, those to help the poor in particular. He was so popular in the mid-1990s that polling for a hypothetical race between Kennedy and the Democratic incumbent Governor of Massachusetts had Kennedy winning by five points, as was reported by The Boston Globe. Kennedy stayed in office until 1999, when the death of his brother prompted him to withdraw from politics. Since 1999, Kennedy remains involved in his non-profit, focused on Eastern Massachusetts, but is not interested in pursuing political office.