David Nasaw was in town recently for the Brazilian Court’s Author Breakfast Series to discuss “The Patriarch,” his densely informative new biography of Joseph P. Kennedy. Long before he became known as the father of John, Robert and Ted, Kennedy led a fascinating and controversial life — businessman, Hollywood mogul, American ambassador, serial adulterer — and wintered in Palm Beach, where he proved to be a cutthroat sportsman.

Nasaw, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his biography of Andrew Carnegie, as well as a biography of William Randolph Hearst that won the Bancroft Prize, is the first writer to have complete access to the Joseph Kennedy archives. “The Patriarch” is thus primary history about the founding father of the family that replaced the Roosevelts as the crucial political dynasty of 20th century America.

A Q and A interview with the author:

Why now? Why did the Kennedy family decide to open up the archives about Joe?

I think for 60 years, since Jack ran for the Senate in 1952, the family and the patriarch made a decision that Joe would recede from history, fade into the background. He wouldn’t make speeches, give interviews and the family would not defend him when he was accused of things he should have been accused of, or of things he should not have been accused of. They wanted the focus to shift to the boys. That grated on the family, and Eunice and Ted and Jean, before they died, wanted to see a warts and all biography of their father. They wanted the record clear.

It seems to me that your portrait of Joe is that of a money guy; a bottom line businessman before politics, before women, before morality, before anything.

Joe knew early he was brilliant at making money. He wanted his children to take the next step in the ethnic progression toward the inside, toward the establishment. And to do that he needed a lot of money, because there were a lot of children. He would tell his friends, “I’m going to make lots of money so my children don’t have to.”

It was the Depression that frightened him out of his money-making mode. It was a frightening, frightening moment in everyone’s lives. Joe was convinced that unless something was done, America would go in the direction of Italy and Russia and Germany - capitalism would be lost. So he went into government and stopped making money for a time.

Joe could look at a balance sheet; he was a great negotiator and he was ruthless. He regarded business as warfare - no holds barred. If you went into a deal with him, you’d better have the best accountants and the best lawyers.

Was part of raising the family to the next level why he came to Palm Beach? To lay down a marker to old money that the new money was here?

He came to Palm Beach because he loved the weather and he loved the golf. And he loved the separation, the distance. Joe created his own entourage in Palm Beach. Joe was not part of the Palm Beach establishment and didn’t want to be. He didn’t have parties, and he didn’t contribute. He was always here by himself. Rose and Joe had separate lives. Joe would come down for two or three months, Rose would visit with the kids at Christmas, spend a little time with him, then go back with the kids. She would come back the week he’d leave Palm Beach.

Was he as cutthroat at golf as he was at business?

Yeah. He stopped playing tennis when Joe Jr. started to beat him. At golf, nobody could beat him. Pat Kennedy Lawford was the only one who could sometimes beat him at golf.

What did Joe want from his time as a Hollywood studio chief?

Joe wanted to make a lot of money. The one industry which the Brahmins and the Yankees in Boston and New York stayed away from was entertainment. Kuhn, Loeb, a Jewish company, and the Gianninis, an Italian company, they gave money to Hollywood, but not the Brahmin banks, because the entertainment industry was dependent on immigrant dollars and immigrant talent. But Joe realized that if he wanted to make his dollars, this was the way to go.

He was a terrible filmmaker.

Even though he put his name on the films, they were all low-end movies, B westerns, very cheap. Queen Kelly, the only big film he made, was a catastrophe.

He was not an artist. He was not going to make great films. He was going to make money. Joe turned out B movies for Des Moines and Kankakee and Missoula. And he demanded to be paid in stock options. A dollar in salary is a dollar, but if you’re Joe, and you get $10 in stock options, he would drive the option price up so by the time he was ready to sell it, it was worth $100. He left Hollywood with millions of dollars.

Did his affair with Gloria Swanson have any more meaning to him emotionally than any of his more transient affairs?

I don’t think so. For Joe to have as his mistress the biggest star of Hollywood, and the sexiest star in Hollywood, gave him bragging rights with his friends. But an emotional attachment? No. It’s clear that Gloria couldn’t believe that when Joe Kennedy was finished with Hollywood, he was finished with her. Her letters and notes make it clear that she continued to try to see him. He helped her out on various business deals, but that was it.

When it came to sex, JFK was more interested in the what than the who. Was Joe the same way, or did he have long term mistresses?

Both. He had a relationship with Claire Booth Luce that went on for some time. He had relationships with some of the people who worked for him. He had a caddy who was a beautiful young French girl who said she was learning English from Joe. Joe loved women, to be with women. His relationship with Rose was not unlike Rose’s father’s relationship to Rose’s mother, and not unlike a lot of the relationships Joe’s peers had with their wives: you took care of your wife, you gave her the money and material goods she wanted, and you didn’t embarrass her. You allowed her the option of plausible deniability.

But women were not a driving force in his life. The church was, confession was. He had to go to church wherever he was and go to confession. I found a letter he wrote to a friend he was going to be visiting. He wanted to know the local church, when was mass, when was confession. And then, in the next paragraph, there was something about some girls named Candy and Millie - were they going to be around?

Gloria Swanson said in her notes for her book that she couldn’t figure out how he could be a married man and talk about his family and have an affair with her, a married woman. And how could he be a good Catholic and carry on adultery with a married woman, and not seem to blink? And she realized it was because for Joe, going to confession was like washing his hands.

You reject one story about Joe - that he was a bootlegger -but confirm his great political and intellectual blunder - his attempts to appease the Nazis when he was Ambassador to England.

By the time he got to London, Joe had succeeded in everything he had done. Except baseball - his great tragedy was that he didn’t make the Harvard baseball team. But other than that, everything he tried, he did. He knew numbers, he knew politics, he had gorgeous children who adored him. He understood the way the world worked: the economy comes first; if the economy doesn’t work, nothing else works.

Joe was convinced that if the war came, the English economy would be destroyed forever, and if we tried to help out, our economy would be destroyed and capitalism would fall apart. All the money he had saved for his children would be gone. He kept saying to himself, why fight this war? Even if we win, it will be years before we get to normal.

Joe Kennedy’s greatest mistake was that he thought Hitler was a rational actor; he thought that if Roosevelt let him sit down with Hitler he could negotiate an end to the war and the end of the persecution of the Jews.

Did he ever acknowledge that he was wrong?

No. After the war, Joe had a box at Hialeah. Churchill had been thrown out of office by the Brits, so he came here on his victory tour and to sell books. Someone brought him over to Joe’s box at Hialeah. Joe Jr. had died in the war months before. Churchill said he was sorry, and Kennedy just snarled at him: What did we get from this war? What was the use? And Churchill just looked at him, not understanding. To his dying day, Joe believed World War II was a mistake.

He’s not a sympathetic subject.

I don’t think a biographer can be God and sit in judgement, say you’re a sinner, you’re a saint. I tell a story and I try to be as generous as possible to viewpoints I abhor. Joe was an isolationist because he didn’t believe the economy was strong enough to stand on its own. The more money was exported, the less we would have, and the higher taxes would rise. You name it, he was against it. He was against the Marshall Plan, against the Korean war, against aiding the Nationalist Chinese, against NATO, against stationing troops in Berlin or in Europe. Jack Kennedy was not going to get elected dogcatcher if his views on the Cold War were tied to his father, so his father had to shut up after 1952.

He was something rare - an isolationist northeastern Democrat. Was he anti-Semitic?

He wasn’t an anti-semite in the sense that Henry Ford was or Charles Lindbergh was. Yet he swallowed whole every thousand year old myth about Jews. He repeated anti-semitic canards and myths over and over again. I didn’t think I’d find that. I thought he was smart enough not to fall into those traps. This was a guy who was unbelievably smart, but he’d talk about the Jewish conspiracy, Roosevelt as the captive of the Jews, and how the Jews owned the press, even though he was friends with William Randolph Hearst, who actually did own the press. He knew better than that. It was more than disappointing.

Joe Kennedy was an extraordinary subject not because he had lots of women, or his son was the president, or because he became one of America’s great villains, but because he was everywhere. I could talk about WWI, I could talk about the stock market crash, about Hollywood at the moment when it went from silents to talkies, I could talk about Roosevelt and the New Deal, and I could talk about them all through the life of an outsider who always felt like an outsider even when he was sitting in the Oval Office.