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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (229066)	4/13/2005 10:01:24 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1578927

- Having been elected to Congress three terms, Jack Kennedy began a race for the Senate in April 1952, seeking the seat held by Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. - The race was still a toss-up when Joe Kennedy learned that John Fox, owner of the powerful Boston Post, was in desperate need of money. The Boston Post, which had a circulation of over 300,000, had been credited with helping defeat Michael Curley in his last campaign in 1949, and with being responsible for getting Maurice Tobin elected governor of Massachusetts. Under Fox, the Boston Post favored Republicans. The newspaper had endorsed Eisenhower for president, and was expected to endorse Lodge. Indeed, those close to Fox confirmed that he "hated JFK." - Fox had bought the Boston Post in 1952 for about $4 million. As a down payment, Fox had paid $2 million for the newspaper, but the IRS immediately took it for back payment of his own taxes. The publisher soon found himself unable to pay his bills. -2- - It was generally assumed that the Boston Post would endorse Lodge, but Fox was desperate for funds, and Joe Kennedy was only too happy to help out. Two days before the election, following a private meeting with Joe Kennedy, Fox gave a front-page endorsement for JFK. - Former Massachusetts state senator Robert L Lee said the Post endorsement of JFK was the "turning point" in the campaign. Lee believed that if Lodge had received the paper's endorsement, it "would have been sufficient to put him back in the Senate." -3- - During a House subcommittee hearing in 1958, Fox admitted that Joe Kennedy had given him a $500,000 loan late in 1952. He insisted that he "repaid it with interest," and that it had nothing to do with his paper's endorsement of Jack. Joe issued a statement saying that the loan - the equivalent of $2.7 million today - was "purely a commercial transaction for 60 days only with full collateral, at full interest, and was fully repaid on time....." - Raymond Faxon, Fox's friend and vice president of the publisher's investment business, revealed the truth about the transaction for the first time years later. - Faxon revealed that two days before the election, John Griffin, the editor-in-chief of the Boston Post, informed Joe that the paper was about to endorse Lodge. He also told him that Fox was desperately in need of cash, having been turned down fora loan by local banks. Joe called Fox and asked him to meet at a local club which Fox owned. In return for an endorsement of Jack, Joe offered Fox a loan that, contrary to what both men later said, carried no interest and was not fully collateralized. "Fox needed the money, and he got it from Joe," Faxon said. "It was $500,000. The whole thing was a payoff." - Based on Faxon's recollection that a bank would have charged interest of about 5 percent at the time, the interest waived amounted to about $10,000, the equivalent of $54,000 today. Aside from that, making any loan to such a shaky financial operation without full collateral represented a bribe. "No bank would have made the loan," Faxon said. "The word 'payoff' was exactly what it was."