FDR appointed his dad Joe Sr. to serve as chairman of the SEC and later U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, of course, but in all my reading I’ve never come across any mention of the 32nd President meeting the (future) 35th President. Anyone know of such a meeting?
It seems likely that they met socially. FDR had a lot of White House parties before WWII started.
JFK was working in Washington in 1941 as an ensign in the US Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence. He got involved with a suspected spy, Inga Arvad and was quickly transferred out of Washington.
Given Joe’s desire to see his children succeed it would be unlikely that they didn’t meet at some function or another, but I don’t remember reading about them meeting, either socially or otherwise. They really wouldn’t have been in the same social circles I don’t think…
They were both part of wealthy Northeastern families that were active in Democratic politics, both were Harvard alums and JFK’s father was part of FDRs campaign and then his administration.
That said, JFK was pretty young when FDR was elected, and then was in boarding schools and college most of the early 30’s, and then finally was abroad with his father during the late 30’s and early 40’s . And of course, once WWII broke out, FDR probably didn’t have much time for meet-and-greets with the families of his staff (and JFK was in the Pacific after the US joined the war). So it may have been that the men just never had the opportunity to meet each other, despite the fact that they obviously would’ve known a lot of the same people.
In anycase, I can’t find any reference to their meeting on google, and given that Presidents meeting their future successors seems to be popular factoids amongst people that collect Presidential trivia, I suspect the lack of hits on search results means such a meeting never happened.
I suspect you’re right, but Joe Sr. took his boys lots of places:
London, 1937
http://fortunefeatures.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/joseph_kennedy1.jpg
Vatican City, 1939 (the Swiss Guardsman on the right looks like Babe Ruth!)
http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/ted-kennedy-vatican-2.jpg
London, 1939, on the day the UK declared war on Germany
http://www.jfklibrary.org/~/media/assets/Foundation/Kennedy%20Family/Joseph%20Kathleen%20and%20John%20Kennedy%201939.jpg
Anyone else want to weigh in?
Bumped.
A helpful staffer at the JFK Library found this letter from JFK’s White House secretary indicating that a young Kennedy did indeed meet Roosevelt. No indication of when, though: Kennedy, John F.: First visit to the White House | JFK Library
Very nice! Now we all want to hear the story of what transpired between your bump in 2011 and your post of today. Have you been doggedly pursuing this for almost 3 years? If so, you might be eligible for some sort of attaboy from the SDMB community! But I don’t know how the SDMB attaboy system works. Is there some sort of form? 
Zeldar will probably enter it into the archives. 
*Shocked to See. The President’s difficult Struggle.
*
Perhaps an early reference to his disability? I’m pretty sure even in 1962 (the letter’s date) FDR’s mobility problems wasn’t widely known.
Maybe seeing FDR cope made Kennedy feel he could serve as President in spite of Addison’s Disease?
No attaboy necessary. I’ve been reading a bit about JFK lately and that made me remember I’d posed this question earlier. I have a query pending with the FDR Library in Hyde Park, too.
aceplace57, that’s reasonable speculation. It might also have been a reference to how severely aged FDR was by the end of his term. Most people didn’t realize just how ill he was by 1944-45.
FDR’s polio and mobility problems were widely known. However, it was never mentioned in the press as that would have been considered extremely rude and in bad taste. Even the people who really hated FDR didn’t mention it. Everyone went along with the fiction that he could walk some. That wasn’t the sort of thing respectable or even disrespectable people would be caught talking about. The same sort of thing applied to J. Edgar Hoover’s probably being a closeted gay man, but not quiet as much. Nobody talked about it in public.
Wasn’t that true in a sense, though? I vaguely recall that with his leg braces and a cane he could make a somewhat staged show of walking with difficulty for a short distance. And he delivered many of his speeches in a standing position, again with the aid of the leg braces and by tightly gripping the podium.
I thought he delivered all of his public speeches (i.e. non-radio) standing. IIRC, and I might not, I thought the book, FDR made of point of insiders making a big deal of FDR not standing for a speech very late in his life.
I disagree with all of this. Roosevelt went to enormous lengths to cover up his inability to walk. He never appeared in public in his wheelchair; he always got out of it backstage and walked to the podium braced against his sons or another trusted staffer. Yes, the press and other insiders had to know that he spent all day in his chair, but that didn’t make it widely known. People who hated him called him a cripple, but privately, mostly because they had no good proof of it being otherwise and every public appearance of his seemed to prove them wrong.
If someone as insider as JFK found Roosevelt’s difficulties to be “far greater than he had ever imaged” then it is wholly impossible that the general public knew differently.
His younger sister (by about 1 1/2 years) visited FDR at least once, accompanied by at least some of her siblings, although this description is too vague to indicate whether JFK was actually present.
Fair enough that you disagree. I’ve known a lot of people lived through those times and knew. Today there would be endless speculation in the press as to what he could and could not do, demands to know for sure, etc. Back then, these were not topics that were raised. Polio was a very real threat and every town had people suffering from varying degrees of it.
Even on his last speech to Congress when he had to sit, and asked forgiveness for doing so, this was not cause for press speculation. It just wasn’t done.
On the other hand, I just got this email from an archivist at the FDR Library:
*This is in response to your recent request to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library regarding whether or not JFK and FDR ever met. After checking the FDR Day by Day feature on our website, which lists every person FDR met with while president, and the White House Office of Social Entertainments Papers, which lists every person invited to a social function at the White House, I have to conclude that, based on our information, FDR and JFK never met in person. He never had a scheduled meeting, nor was he invited to attend a social function at the White House. Until 1944, JFK was not the politician-in-training of the Kennedy family, and so would have been less important than his older brother in the eyes of Joseph Kennedy Sr.
The John F. Kennedy library has a letter from JFK’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, dated April 9, 1962, that states that JFK went to the White House and saw FDR, but it doesn’t say when. * [same link as above] Note that it doesn’t say he met FDR, but rather saw him. There are many possible explanations, including: attending a public event, such as an inauguration; accompanying his father to a meeting at the White House (which Joseph Kennedy had fairly frequently with the President) but remaining in an anteroom during the meeting; or on a tour of the White House, such as with a school [group] or while on vacation…
Wow, excellent. By the way, that archivist writes publishable English prose even in emails.