The Kennedys Wanted to Buy the Dodgers and Put JFK in Charge

In the 12 years since Frank McCourt sold the Los Angeles Dodgers for a then-record $2.15 billion to Guggenheim Partners, the franchise has won two National League pennants and one World Series title, and it is currently one win away from returning to the World Series. But the Dodgers could have been part of a historical twist almost a decade before they left New York. 

It was the summer of 1950, and Walter O’Malley, co-owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was flying home from Connecticut with Branch Rickey, who ran the team’s front office and was a part-owner. They had attended the funeral of Pfizer chairman John L. Smith. Together, O’Malley, Rickey, and Smith owned 75% of the Dodgers.

Before heading to the service, Rickey was at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, getting breakfast with Joseph Kennedy, the former ambassador whose family would soon become synonymous with American politics. While the plane’s engines and propellers whirred over their conversation, Rickey told O’Malley that Kennedy had expressed interest in purchasing Rickey’s and Smith’s stock in the team for $1.3 million (roughly $17 million in today’s dollars). Additionally, Kennedy hoped to retain Rickey as general manager and insert his son John as team president. 

Joseph P. Kennedy—who played baseball at Havard—was personally invested in the sport, more than any other Kennedy. His love of the game likely fueled at least part of his acquisition wish. 

But David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, and an expert on JPK’s life, says Kennedy also saw a new way to grow his wealth, following his time in government, during which he helped change rules and regulations in a way that prevented him from continuing to make money the way he always had, including on stocks. 

Nasaw speculates Kennedy saw the Dodgers as a potential real-estate investment. “He was looking for safe investments that were not in stocks and bonds because he only knew how to do that on the edge of legalities,” Nasaw tells Front Office Sports. “And he had helped change the boundaries.”

But in 1968, Walter O’Malley asserted Kennedy’s motivation was different—and that it involved his son John (often known as Jack). In a Saturday Evening Post story from July that year, “A Visit with the Artful Dodger,” O’Malley said Joseph Kennedy was worried John’s health might squelch his political ambitions—and that owning the Dodgers could provide a backup plan if his son lost the 1952 Senate campaign.

“Jack was then a freshman congressman, and his back was giving him a lot of trouble. Joe Kennedy said he had high hopes for Jack in politics, but he had begun to wonder if the boy was up to it physically,” O’Malley told reporter Gerald Holland. “He said Jack was fond of baseball and, if politics was out, he might like to run a ballclub. Joe Kennedy said he was ready to meet anybody’s price for a controlling interest, with the idea of putting Jack in as club president.”

“JFK was a sports fan and knew what was happening in the pennant races—which teams were up, which were struggling, who had just thrown a no-hitter, etc,” Fredrik Logevall, the author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956, wrote in an email to FOS. “He could name the top players on the major teams. In the 1960 campaign against Nixon, he sprinkled in references in his stump speeches in October to the Yankees-Pirates World Series.” But he didn’t have the love for the game his father did: Logevall says John “was more drawn to football.”

Regardless of JFK’s actual desire to run the team if the opportunity had presented itself, the acquisition didn’t pan out: Joseph Kennedy withdrew the bid shortly after he’d put it on the table. O’Malley told The Saturday Evening Post that Kennedy pulled out because the Korean War had just started and he feared the cancellation of the baseball season.

And, of course, John F. Kennedy stayed in politics, becoming the country’s 35th president a decade after his father’s bid for the Dodgers. But could Camelot have become a reference for Ebbets Field and not the White House in an alternate reality? 

There’s no clear answer, especially with limited documentation besides O’Malley’s own trumpeting; John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Library also has nothing in its archives about his father’s pursuit of the team. For Nasaw’s part, he is skeptical of O’Malley’s version of events, especially since O’Malley didn’t even take the meeting with Kennedy himself. 

As the Dodgers edge closer to the World Series, with a roster led by the sport’s biggest global star, it’s interesting to imagine what it would look like with a Kennedy or two intently watching from the owners’ box in Los Angeles—and pulling the strings.