The daughter of the now-deceased Jackie Kennedy-Onassis and JFK apparently now has a good chance to soon join JFK’s brother in the U.S. Senate—despite her lack of legislative experience, her lack of experience previously working at a U.S. government job and her reluctance to reveal much information about her personal financial worth. But if you’re a daughter of Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, a grandchild of Joseph P. Kennedy and a member of the Kennedy Dynasty, not much experience is apparently needed to start a U.S. political career at the top with one of New York State’s seats in the U.S. Senate.
Despite the mysterious premature deaths of JFK and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s due to gunshot wounds, the Kennedy Dynasty apparently continues to control its own private economic empire. In his book The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster, John Davis described how the Kennedy Dynasty’s family holding company, Park Agency Inc., and its Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation operated in the early 1980s:
“The Kennedy enterprises that are managed in room 1850 at 125 Park Avenue represent money accumulated by Joseph P. Kennedy during the years 1920 to 1969 and consists of trust funds the patriarch established for his wife and children, several charitable foundations, and a string of businesses that feed those trusts and foundations. The aggregate value of these enterprises, which, taken together, constitute `the Kennedy fortune,’ has never been revealed, but it is thought to amount to something in the neighborhood of $350 million [as of 1983] …
“Since John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy are dead, their trusts have passed on to their children. John F. Kennedy Jr. [now-deceased] and Caroline Kennedy receive income from Kennedy trusts worth from $7.5 million to $10 million each, in addition to the substantial trusts established for them by Aristotle Onassis, and the children of Robert F. Kennedy receive income off trusts worth about $1 million…
“Feeding the Kennedy trusts, foundations, and memorials are the various Kennedy-owned businesses that are either held or managed by the Park Agency.
“The largest of these, by far, is the Merchandise Mart, a 24-story structure in Chicago with 1,000 tenants, currently [as of 1983] worth about $200 million, which generate an annual income of about $25 million a year. Other Kennedy businesses include the Corpus Christi-based Mokeen Oil Corporation, and the Kenoil Corporation, worth around $20 million, with oil-producing properties in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and California. These are the principal moneymakers. Other Kennedy-controlled businesses include the Park Agency’s considerable real estate holdings, the Sutton Producing Corporation, a small oil company based in San Antonio, and the Forest Oil Corporation of Bradford, Pennsylvania, which is wholly owned by Senator Edward Kennedy. Finally, rounding out the Kennedy holdings is a substantial portfolio of stocks and bonds containing such standard blue chips as Exxon, IBM and Eastman Kodak.”
(Downtown 3/25/92)
Friday, December 26, 2008
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