Letters to the Editor • Books
Book Recommendation: "When Lions Roar"" The Churchills/The Kennedys."
Book Recommendation: "When Lions Roar" by Thomas Maier, on The Churchill's and the Kennedy's.
I received this book as a Christmas Gift, and it is a show-stopper. Maier has written a highly entertaining history of the relationships and personalities linking these two families and their patriarchs through the first 60 years of the 20th Century.
Maier is a highly literate writer, and he has done a very serious piece of research here, with a bibliography that is definitive in terms of the bio's written on and by the various parties. He discloses a much more complex portrait of Winston Churchill, Joe Kennedy Sr., the various Roosevelts, and hundreds of more related parties than anyone could expect.
I found the information on Kennedy's stock and market manipulations to be highly confirmatory of the previous materials written about him. He was a devious, complex, egomaniacal, venal and vicious man who was without even a shred of morality. Moreover, he adopted or invented many of the major market manipulations we deal with even today, from Pools owned by offshore shell corporations, to inventive short selling, trading off inside information, and much more.
There are some real surprises in this book, such as the disclosure that he hired his nemesis Pecora to work for him at the SEC after Pecora's investigations of his and his friends and competitors manipulations and self-dealing through the 1920's, into the 1929 Crash, and through to the banking shutdown of 1933 that ushered in FDR and his socialist agenda.
This is a real page turner. I recommend most highly to everyone who has ever had a stock shorted, or whose company has seen its stocks and bonds artificially and criminally manipulated by counterfeiting, whether real (as with Erie Lackawanna Railroad and Cornelius Vanderbilt), by "watering", or in modern practice, by electronic (virtual) counterfeiting to support short sellers' illegal activities.
I was born in 1946, and I missed most of this, but I studied the complete history in depth. The TV series "The Men Who Built America" tells the stories John D. Rockefeller, to Tom Scott, to Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt and many more. It stops short of telling the story of the Roaring Twenties, the Crash, the Great Depression, and more, including FDR's failed attempt to "Stack" the Supreme Court. But it does disclose the stunning net worth of John D. Rockefeller, $660 Billion in today's dollars, over one hundred times the net worth of Warren Buffett today.
Don't miss this one. My last recommendation was the Gavin Menzies book, "The Lost Empire of Atlantis", the substance of which has been confirmed by dozens of sources. This Maier book is every bit its equal.