Книга - The Dark Side of Camelot

The Dark Side of Camelot
Seymour Hersh


This edition does not include illustrations.Sex, the Kennedys, Monroe and the Mafia; the controversial American bestseller – ‘Hersh has found more muck in this particular Augean stable than most people want to acknowledge’ Gore Vidal• Jack Kennedy had it all. And he used it all – his father’s fortune, and his own beauty, wit and power – with a heedless, reckless daring. There was no tomorrow, and there was no secret that money and charm could not hide.• In this groundbreaking book, award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh shows us a John F Kennedy we have never seen before, a man insulated from the normal consequences of behaviour long before he entered the White House. Kennedys could do exactly what they wanted, and could evade any charge brought against them. Kennedys wrote their own moral code.• And Kennedys trusted only Kennedys. Jack appointed his brother Bobby keeper of the secrets – the family debt to organized crime, the real state of Jack’s health, the sources of his election victories, the plots to murder foreign leaders, and the President’s intentions in Vietnam. As Jack’s closest confident and chief enforcer, Bobby attacked any potential family enemy with a savagery he was supposed to reserve for the criminals he was sworn to prosecute – the very criminals their father had enlisted.• The brothers prided themselves on another trait inherited from their father – a voracious appetite for women – and indulged it with a daily abandon deeply disturbing to the Secret Service agents who witnessed it. These men speak for the first time about their amazement at what they saw and the powerlessness they felt to protect the leader of their country. Now Seymour Hersh tells us the real story of those risks, in the hands of a crisis-driven president who maintained a facade of cool toughness while negotiating private compromises unknown to even his closest advisers.









SEYMOUR HERSH

The Dark Side of Camelot










DEDICATION (#ulink_b3614f4e-2861-5a48-920e-c61efa259ee3)


For Elizabeth,

Matthew, Melissa,

and Joshua




CONTENTS


Cover (#uf40625b4-dbbb-51a1-acd4-0064a6a36805)

Title Page (#u8e18f231-d535-5aa2-a15a-249c7130215e)

Dedication (#u52f1f730-2d5f-5779-b25a-0e9cc9983053)

1. November 22

2. Jack (#u61c56d2d-7bde-556a-97c6-e64e8c16a323)

3. Honey Fitz (#ucc1df02d-5b58-52ee-bf68-9cda9b81f7d9)

4. Joe (#uf643f879-7398-580e-ae5e-f6f45fcf950d)

5. The Ambassador (#ub4d8e3e7-824b-5571-be89-07c9855c6cdb)

6. Taking on Fdr (#ub87e5b91-3d06-5c75-98e1-1785df169cf5)

7. Nomination for Sale (#u4abef2f4-6392-5fc8-a827-ce6ebe0c8751)

8. Threatened Candidacy (#u6805d864-753f-54d7-b82f-e9c0e5a14fc2)

9. Lyndon (#ud0e04a28-c304-5130-ae04-90b2b0fb951d)

10. The Stolen Election (#litres_trial_promo)

11. Campaign Secret (#litres_trial_promo)

12. Trapping Nixon (#litres_trial_promo)

13. Executive Action (#litres_trial_promo)

14. Bay of Pigs (#litres_trial_promo)

15. Secret Service (#litres_trial_promo)

16. Crisis in Berlin (#litres_trial_promo)

17. Target Castro (#litres_trial_promo)

18. Judy (#litres_trial_promo)

19. First Marriage (#litres_trial_promo)

20. Missile Crisis (#litres_trial_promo)

21. Deceptions (#litres_trial_promo)

22. Ellen (#litres_trial_promo)

23. Vietnam (#litres_trial_promo)

24. Last Days (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




1 NOVEMBER 22 (#ulink_e1985bfa-e2d3-5803-81b5-db82c9a6d2f3)


It was America’s blackest Friday.

President John F. Kennedy was gunned down on a Dallas street thirty minutes after noon on November 22, 1963. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had accompanied the president to Dallas, sped back to Air Force One and was sworn in with the bloodied widow of Jack Kennedy at his side. The presidential airplane soared away from murderous Texas to the safety of Washington.

Once Air Force One was airborne, some of the military and security men on duty were able to emerge from their despair and anger to begin asking necessary questions. Was Jack Kennedy’s death the first move in an international conspiracy? Was Lyndon Johnson now the target? These concerns were shared in Washington, as the bureaucracy began the slow turn from one presidential orbit to another.

But it was the man closest to John F. Kennedy who needed to put aside his grief and begin immediately to hide all evidence of Kennedy’s secret life from the nation—as well as from the new president, who could be sitting in the Oval Office by early evening. When word came of his brother’s shooting, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the second most powerful man in Washington, was at his Hickory Hill estate in suburban Virginia having a casual lunch of clam chowder and tuna fish sandwiches with, among others, Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.


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In those first hours of horror, the president’s remarkable younger brother lived up to his reputation for pragmatism and toughness, notifying members of the family, worrying about the return of his brother’s body, answering legal queries from the new president, and, it seemed, losing himself in appropriate action. There would be time for mourning later. Now there was a state funeral to arrange and the president’s widow and children to console. Among his many telephone calls early that afternoon was one to McGeorge Bundy, the dead president’s national security adviser, who was told to protect Jack Kennedy’s papers. Bundy, after checking with the State Department, ordered that the combinations to the president’s locked files be changed at once—before Lyndon Johnson’s men could begin rummaging through them.

Bobby Kennedy understood that public revelation of the materials in his brother’s White House files would forever destroy Jack Kennedy’s reputation as president, and his own as attorney general. He had spent nearly three years in a confounding situation—as guardian of the nation’s laws, as his brother’s secret operative in foreign crises, and as personal watchdog for an older brother who reveled in personal excess and recklessness.

The two brothers had lied in their denials to newspapermen and the public about Jack Kennedy’s long-rumored first marriage to a Palm Beach socialite named Durie Malcolm. In 1947 Kennedy, then a first-term congressman, and Malcolm were married by a justice of the peace in an early-morning ceremony at Palm Beach. In an interview for this book, Charles Spalding, one of Kennedy’s oldest friends, broke five decades of silence by family and friends and confirmed his personal knowledge of the marriage. “I remember saying to Jack at the time of the marriage,” Spalding told me, “‘You must be nuts. You’re running for president and you’re running around getting married.’” The marriage flew apart. Spalding added that he and a local attorney visited the Palm Beach courthouse a few days later and removed all of the wedding documents. “It was Jack,” Spalding recalled, “who asked me if I’d go get the papers.” No evidence of a divorce could be found during research for this book.

The president’s files would reveal that Jack and Bobby Kennedy were more than merely informed about the CIA’s assassination plotting against Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba: they were its strongest advocates. The necessity of Castro’s death became a presidential obsession after the disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, and remained an obsession to the end. White House files also dealt with three foreign leaders who were murdered during Kennedy’s thousand days in the presidency—Patrice Lumumba, of the Congo; Rafael Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic; and Ngo Dinh Diem, of South Vietnam. Jack Kennedy knew of and endorsed the CIA’s assassination plotting against Lumumba and Trujillo before his inauguration on January 20, 1961. He was much more active in the fall of 1963, when a brutal coup d’état in Saigon resulted in Diem’s murder. Two months before the coup, Kennedy summoned air force general Edward G. Lansdale, a former CIA operative who had been involved in the administration’s assassination plotting against Fidel Castro, and asked whether he would return to Saigon and help if the president decided he had to “get rid” of Diem. “Mr. President,” Lansdale responded, “I couldn’t do that.” The plot went forward. None of this would be revealed until this book, and none of it was shared with Lyndon Johnson, then the vice president.

The vice president also did not know that Jack Kennedy’s acclaimed triumph in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was far from a victory. The world would emerge from fearful days of pending nuclear holocaust and be told that the president had stood firm before a Soviet threat and forced Premier Nikita Khrushchev to back down. Little of this was true, as Bobby Kennedy knew. Knowing that their political futures were at stake, the brothers had been forced to negotiate a secret last-minute compromise with the Soviets. The real settlement—and the true import of the missile crisis—remained a state secret for more than twenty-five years.

There were more secrets for Bobby Kennedy to hide.

In the last months of the Eisenhower administration, a notorious Chicago gangster named Sam Giancana had been brought into the Castro assassination effort, with Senator Jack Kennedy’s knowledge. But Giancana was far more than just another mobster doing a favor for the government—and looking for a favor in return. Giancana and his fellow hoodlums in Chicago, one of the most powerful organized crime operations in the nation, had already been enlisted on behalf of Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign against Republican Richard M. Nixon, providing money and union support; mob support would help Kennedy win in Illinois and in at least four other states where the Kennedy plurality was narrow. Giancana’s intervention had been arranged with the aid of both Frank Sinatra, who was close to the mob and the Kennedy family, and a prominent Chicago judge, who served as an intermediary for a meeting, not revealed until this book, between the gangster and Jack Kennedy’s millionaire father, the relentlessly ambitious Joseph P. Kennedy. The meeting took place in the winter before the election in the judge’s chambers. A few months after the election, allegations of vote fraud in Illinois were reported to Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department—and met with no response. The 1960 presidential election was stolen.

As Bobby Kennedy knew, President Kennedy and Sam Giancana shared not only a stolen election and assassination plotting; they also shared a close friendship with a glamorous Los Angeles divorcée and freelance artist named Judith Campbell Exner. Interviews for this book have bolstered the claims of Exner, who first met Kennedy in early 1960, that she was more than just the president’s sex partner, that she carried documents from Jack and Bobby Kennedy to Giancana and his colleagues, along with at least two satchels full of cash. On one train trip from Washington to Chicago she was followed by a presidential advance man named Martin E. Underwood, who told in a 1996 interview of being ordered onto the train by Kenneth O’Donnell, Jack Kennedy’s close aide. “Kenny suggested it might be a good idea,” Underwood told me, “to go to Chicago by train. I said, ‘What train?’ It was the same train Judy took.” He watched, he said, as Exner got off in Chicago and handed a satchel to a waiting Sam Giancana. Exner, in a series of interviews for this book, further admitted that she delivered money, lots of it, from California businessmen directly to the president. The businessmen were bidding on federal contracts.

There was further evidence of financial corruption in Kennedy’s personal files. As the president’s 1964 reelection campaign neared, Kennedy was put on notice by newspaperman Charles Bartlett, his good friend, that campaign contributions were sticking to the hands of some of his political operatives. “No books are kept,” Bartlett wrote the president in July 1963, “everything is cash, and the potential for a rich harvest is clear.… I am fearful that unless you put a personal priority on learning more about what is going on, the thing may slip suddenly beyond your control.”

Robert Kennedy understood, from his own investigations, that there was independent evidence for the Bartlett allegations: one of the attorney general’s political confidants had assembled affidavits showing that money for JFK’s reelection campaign was being diverted for personal use. The Bartlett letters could not be left for Lyndon Johnson.

Yet another group of documents that had to be removed dealt with Jack Kennedy’s health. Kennedy had lied about his health throughout his political career, repeatedly denying that he suffered from Addison’s disease. But as Kennedy and his doctors knew, the Addison’s, which affects the body’s ability to fight infection, was being effectively controlled—and had been since the late 1940s—by cortisone. Far more politically damaging was the fact that the slain president had suffered from venereal disease for more than thirty years, having repeatedly been treated with high doses of antibiotics and repeatedly reinfected because of his continual sexual activity. Those records would be hidden from public view for the next thirty years. There is no evidence he told any of his many partners. Kennedy also was a heavy user of what were euphemistically known as “feel-good” shots—consisting of high dosages of amphetamines—while in the White House. Dr. Max Jacobson, the New York physician who administered the shots, was a regular visitor to the White House and accompanied the president on many foreign trips; his name was all over the official logs. Jacobson and his shots were the source of constant friction between the president’s personal aides and some members of his Secret Service detail, who persistently tried to keep the doctor, and his amphetamines, away from the White House. Jacobson’s license to practice medicine was revoked in 1975.



Jack and Bobby Kennedy were even tougher than their most ardent admirers could imagine. They seemed to glide unerringly through the nearly three years of his presidency, with its constant domestic and foreign crises. But in reality they lived and worked on the edge of an abyss. The brothers understood, as the public did not, that they were just one news story away from cataclysmic political scandal.

How to keep secrets and carry on their activities was something they had learned from their father, a successful financier and controversial public official, who masked how much money he had and how he earned it, and from their maternal grandfather, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, a corrupt Boston politician who simply ignored the unpleasant realities of his public life. Jack and Bobby Kennedy also learned from their father and grandfather that—as Kennedys—they could enjoy freedoms denied to other men; the consequences of their acts were for others to worry about.

The family’s main antagonist was J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who knew and was eager to take advantage—so the family was convinced—of the darkest Kennedy secrets, including the fact of Jack’s marriage to Durie Malcolm. Hoover’s biographers have told in compelling detail of Hoover’s ability to collect damaging political and personal information about the men in the White House and use it as a weapon. The relentless FBI director had been keeping score on the Kennedys, father and sons, since the early 1940s and was appalled by their public and private excesses. But the Kennedys understood that Hoover, for all of his moralizing, was a firm believer in the institution of the presidency, and could be counted on in moments of crisis, even those involving angry women looking for a way to make trouble for the president.

Hoover’s reappointment as FBI director was Jack Kennedy’s first announcement as president-elect.



Jack Kennedy’s embarrassing files were not the only materials removed from the White House on November 22. While Air Force One was still in the air, a senior Secret Service agent named Robert I. Bouck began disassembling yet another of the Kennedy brothers’ deep secrets—Tandberg tape-recording systems in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and the president’s living quarters on the second floor of the White House. There was also a separate Dictabelt recording system for use on the telephone lines in the president’s office and his upstairs bedroom. In the summer of 1962, John Kennedy had summoned Bouck and instructed him to install the devices and be responsible for changing the tapes. Apparently Bouck told only two people of the system—his immediate superior, James J. Rowley, chief of the Secret Service, and a subordinate who helped him monitor the equipment. It was Bouck’s understanding that only two others knew of the system while JFK was alive—Bobby Kennedy and Evelyn Lincoln, the president’s longtime personal secretary.

The seemingly open and straightforward young president could activate the recording system when he chose, through a series of hidden switches that Bouck installed in the Oval Office and on the president’s desk. “His desk had a block with two or three pens in it and a place for paper clips,” Bouck said in a 1995 interview for this book. “I rigged one of those pen sockets so he could touch a gold button—it was very sensitive—and switch it [the tape recorder] on.” Another secret switch was placed in a bookend that the president could reach while lounging in his chair. “All he had to do was lean on it,” Bouck told me. A third was tucked away on a small table in front of the Oval Office desk, where Kennedy often met with aides and visitors. (Bouck would say of the tabletop switch only that it was placed “under something that was unlikely to be taken away.”) Microphones were also hidden in the walls of the Cabinet Room and on the desk and coffee table in the president’s office. Kennedy made little use of the devices in the family living quarters, Bouck said. The president could record telephone conversations by flicking a switch on his desk that activated a light in Evelyn Lincoln’s office, alerting her to turn on the Dictabelt system. During its sixteen months of operation, Bouck said, the taping system produced “at least two hundred” reels of tapes. “They never told me why they wanted the tapes,” Bouck said, “and I never had possession of any of the used tapes.”

Bouck had no ambivalence as he tore his way through the office that now belonged to President Lyndon Johnson. Getting rid of the tapes and the taping system was something he did for Jack Kennedy: “I didn’t want Lyndon Johnson to get to listen to them.” The taping system was gone within hours, along with the reels of Oval Office and Cabinet Room recordings.


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By late afternoon it was getting crowded at Hickory Hill, as family friends, neighbors, and Justice Department aides—as if drawn by some survival instinct—made their way to the attorney general’s side. Surrounded by sympathetic mourners, Robert Kennedy still found time to operate in secret, and he now turned away briefly from his need to protect his brother to seek out who might have gunned him down. His first suspect was Sam Giancana, the Kennedy family’s secret helper in the 1960 election and in Cuba. He had been repeatedly heard on FBI wiretaps and bugs complaining about being the victim of a double cross since 1961: Bobby Kennedy had made the Chicago outfit a chief target of the Justice Department, and the mob’s take was down.

Another target of Bobby’s crime war was Jimmy Hoffa and his corrupt Teamsters Union; one of his most experienced operatives in that war was Julius Draznin, who was by 1963 a supervisor in Chicago for the National Labor Relations Board and responsible for liaison with the Justice Department. Bobby Kennedy had personally arranged for the installation of a secure telephone in Draznin’s apartment on Chicago’s South Side—one of many such telephones in what became an extraordinary and little-known communications system linking the attorney general with a select group of loyal government investigators across the nation. Draznin had spoken to Kennedy a few times on the secure telephone, but he talked most often with senior Kennedy aides such as Walter Sheridan, a Justice Department official closely involved with the Hoffa investigations. Draznin understood that such contacts were not to be reported to his labor board superiors. Nor, of course, were they to be mentioned to anyone from Hoover’s FBI.

Draznin’s secure telephone rang twice on November 22. The first call came from Sheridan “four or five hours” after the assassination, Draznin told me in a series of interviews for this book. “Bobby is going to call you,” Sheridan said. “He has some questions he wants you to help on—about the assassination.” Kennedy’s call came moments later. “We need all the help you can give. Can you open some doors for us in Chicago?” Kennedy made it clear, Draznin told me, that he suspected that Sam Giancana’s mob might have been behind his brother’s murder.



Moments after the call to Draznin, Kennedy dashed to the Pentagon, and with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and others flew by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, the home base for Air Force One, in suburban Maryland. A crowd of three thousand saddened Americans watched quietly as the presidential plane landed a few minutes after six o’clock. There was a sorrowful embrace between the president’s brother and his widow. A small entourage, Bobby among them, then followed the body to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where an autopsy was to be performed.

Despite his grief, Kennedy continued to focus on the need to protect the Kennedy reputation. At the hospital, he took Evelyn Lincoln aside. “Bobby said to me that Lyndon’s people were digging around in the president’s desk,” Lincoln told me in the most candid interview she ever gave, shortly before her death in 1995. She and her husband were at her desk packing her files of presidential papers by eight o’clock the next morning, she said, and were called into the Oval Office by President Johnson at eight-thirty. “He said, ‘I need you more than you need me’”—a remark Johnson made to all of the Kennedy staff aides—“and then said, ‘I’d like for you to move out of the office by nine A.M.’” Mrs. Lincoln immediately reported to Bobby Kennedy, who was waiting in a room nearby. “He couldn’t believe it,” Mrs. Lincoln said. “He got Johnson to agree to twelve noon.” Johnson eventually decided to delay a few days before moving into JFK’s office, but Bobby Kennedy was taking no chances; he had already ordered that his brother’s Oval Office and National Security Council files be packed overnight and shipped to a sealed office by the crack of dawn on Saturday, November 23.

The president’s personal papers and the White House tape recordings ended up in the top-secret offices of one of Jack Kennedy’s most cherished units in the government—the Special Group for Counterinsurgency, whose mission was to battle communist-led wars of liberation in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The Special Group’s third-floor corridor in the nearby Executive Office Building was the most secure area of the White House complex, with armed guards on patrol twenty-four hours a day. The president’s papers and tape recordings were now safe.



One final act of cover-up occurred in the early-morning hours of Saturday, November 23, as Bobby Kennedy and an exhausted Jacqueline Kennedy returned to the White House, accompanying the body of the fallen president. There was a brief meeting between Kennedy and J. B. West, the chief White House usher, who turned over the Usher’s Logs—the most detailed records that existed of the visitors, public and private, to the president’s second-floor personal quarters. The logs provided what amounted to a daily scorecard of the president’s sex partners, who were usually escorted by David Powers, JFK’s longtime personal aide. The logs, traditionally considered to be the public records of the presidency, were never seen again by West, and are not among the documents on file at the Kennedy Library.

Bobby Kennedy knew, as did many of the men and women in the White House, that Jack Kennedy had been living a public lie as the attentive husband of Jacqueline, the glamorous and high-profile first lady. In private Kennedy was consumed with almost daily sexual liaisons and libertine partying, to a degree that shocked many members of his personal Secret Service detail. The sheer number of Kennedy’s sexual partners, and the recklessness of his use of them, escalated throughout his presidency. The women—sometimes paid prostitutes located by Powers and other members of the so-called Irish Mafia, who embraced and protected the president—would be brought to Kennedy’s office or his private quarters without any prior Secret Service knowledge or clearance. “Seventy to eighty percent of the agents thought it was nuts,” recalled Tony Sherman, a former member of Kennedy’s White House Secret Service detail, in a 1995 interview for this book. “Some of us were brought up the right way,” Sherman added. “Our mothers and fathers didn’t do it. We lived in another world. Suddenly, I’m Joe Agent here. I’m looking at the president of the United States and telling myself, ‘This is the White House and we protect the White House.’”

Another Secret Service agent had the unceremonious chore of bringing sexually explicit photographs of a naked president with various paramours to the Mickelson Gallery, one of Washington’s most distinguished art galleries, for framing. In a reluctantly granted interview in mid-1996, Sidney Mickelson, whose gallery framed pictures for the White House in the 1960s (and continued to do so for the next three decades), acknowledged that “over a number of years we framed a number of photographs of people—naked and often lying on beds—in the Lincoln Room. The women were always beautiful.” In some cases the photographs included the president with, as Mickelson carefully described it, “a group of people with masks on.” Another memorable photograph, Mickelson added, involved the president and two women, all wearing masks. “The Secret Service agent said it was Kennedy,” Mickelson told me, “and I had no reason to doubt it.” The photographs were always of high quality, Mickelson added, similar to those taken by official White House photographers.

Mickelson told me that the procedure for handling the extraordinary material was always the same. A Secret Service agent would arrive at his shop—ten blocks from the White House—early in the morning with a photograph. “I’d look at it, take the measurement, and then he’d take it back.” The agent would return that evening, after the gallery closed, and wait once again in the same room with Mickelson until he completed the framing. He never had a chance, Mickelson told me, to make a copy of a photograph—something he thought about doing—because “the Secret Service agent was always with it.”

Mickelson, who was seventy years old when we spoke, told me that he had remained especially troubled by the photographs, and his role in framing them, because at the time his shop was deeply involved in the restoration of the White House, managed by the first lady. “I had a very good relationship with Jackie and I respected her,” Mickelson said. “But,” he added with a shrug, “my feeling is whatever the White House sends me …

“No other White House did this.”



John F. Kennedy’s recklessness may finally have caught up with him in the last weeks of his life. One of his casual paramours in Washington, the wife of a military attaché at the West German Embassy, was believed by a group of Republican senators to be a possible agent of East German intelligence. In the ensuing panic, the woman and her husband were quickly flown out of Washington, and Robert Kennedy used all of his powers as attorney general, with the help of J. Edgar Hoover, to quash investigations by the Congress and the FBI. The potential damage of the presidential liaison was heightened, as the worried Kennedy brothers understood, by the ongoing sex scandal involving John Profumo, the British secretary of state for war, that was riveting London—and the British tabloids—throughout the summer of 1963. The government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan barely survived the scandal.

Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price, nonetheless, for his sexual excesses and compulsiveness. He severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast trip in the last week of September 1963. The pain was so intense that the White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace that locked his body in a rigid upright position. It was far more constraining than his usual back brace, which he also continued to wear. The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.

Those braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald’s first successful shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president remained erect—and an excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the head. Kennedy’s groin brace, which is now in the possession of the National Archives in Washington, was not mentioned in the public autopsy report, nor was the injury that had led to his need for it.

November 22, 1963, would remain a day of family secrets, carefully kept, for decades to come.




(#ulink_09837209-d52f-5af3-9c77-826371b30cd4) Morgenthau would not learn until he was interviewed for this book that Robert Kennedy had planned to tell him that afternoon that he was resigning his cabinet post and wanted Morgenthau to replace him as attorney general. Joseph F. Dolan, who was one of Kennedy’s confidants in the Justice Department, said in a 1995 interview for this book that Kennedy “was going to run” his brother’s 1964 reelection campaign.




(#ulink_1623ac8d-cfda-5fab-824b-efab6a5fae5c) The tape recordings remained in direct control of the Kennedy family until May 1976, when they were deeded to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. In a report issued in 1985, the library acknowledged that it was “impossible to establish with any certainty how much might have been removed” from the collection prior to 1975. “That at least some items were removed cannot be doubted.” Some Dictabelt tapes of telephone conversations were also discovered to be in the possession of Evelyn Lincoln after her death in 1995.




2 JACK (#ulink_6b10adb6-4ebe-5e05-b3bc-c2ee05c20ae7)


Jack Kennedy was a dazzling figure as an adult, with stunning good looks, an inquisitive mind, and a biting sense of humor that was often self-mocking. He throve on adoration and surrounded himself with starstruck friends and colleagues. Women swooned. Men stood in awe of his easy success with women, and were grateful for his attentions to them. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Kennedy’s close friends remain enraptured. When JFK appeared at a party, Charles Spalding told me, “the temperature went up a hundred and fifty degrees.”

His close friends knew that their joyful friend was invariably in acute pain, with chronic back problems. That, too, became a source of admiration. “He never talked about it,” Jewel Reed, the former wife of James Reed, who served in the navy with Kennedy during World War II, said in an interview for this book. “He never complained, and that was one of the nice things about Jack.”

Kennedy kept his pain to himself all of his life.



The most important fact of Kennedy’s early years was his health. He suffered from a severe case of Addison’s disease, an often-fatal disorder of the adrenal glands that eventually leaves the immune system unable to fight off ordinary infection. No successful cortisone treatment for the disease was available until the end of World War II. A gravely ill Kennedy, wracked by Addison’s (it was undiagnosed until 1947), often seemed on the edge of death; he was stricken with fevers as high as 106 degrees and was given last rites four times. As a young adult he also suffered from acute back pain, the result of a college football injury that was aggravated by his World War II combat duty aboard PT-109 in the South Pacific. Unsuccessful back surgery in 1944 and 1954 was complicated by the Addison’s, which severely diminished his ability to heal and increased the overall risk of the procedures.

Kennedy and his family covered up the gravity of his illnesses throughout his life—and throughout his political career. Bobby Kennedy, two weeks after his brother’s assassination, ordered that all White House files dealing with his brother’s health “should be regarded as a privileged communication,” never to be made public. Over the years, nonetheless, biographies and memoirs have revealed the extent of young Jack Kennedy’s suffering. What has been less clear is the extent of the impact his early childhood illnesses had on his character, and how they shaped his attitudes as an adult and as the nation’s thirty-fifth president.



Kennedy’s fight for life began at birth. He had difficulty feeding as an infant and was often sick. At age two he was hospitalized with scarlet fever and, having survived that, was sent away to recuperate for three months at a sanatorium in Maine. It was there that Jack, torn from his parents and left in the care of strangers, demonstrated the first signs of what would be a lifelong ability to attract attention by charming others. He so captivated his nurse that it was reported that she begged to be allowed to stay with him. Poor health plagued Jack throughout his school years. At age four, he was able to attend nursery school for only ten weeks out of a thirty-week term. At a religious school in Connecticut when he was thirteen, he began losing weight and was diagnosed with appendicitis. The emergency operation—a family surgeon was flown in for the procedure—almost killed him; he never returned to the school. Serious illness continued to afflict Kennedy at prep school at Choate, and local physicians were unable to treat his chronic stomach distress and his “flu-like symptoms.” He was diagnosed as suffering from, among other ailments, leukemia and hepatitis—afflictions that would magically clear up just as his doctors, and his family, were despairing. Once again, he made up for his sickliness with charm, good humor, and a winning zest for life that kept him beloved by his peers, as it would throughout his life.

His loyal friend K. LeMoyne Billings, who was a classmate at Choate, waited years before revealing how much Kennedy had suffered. “Jack never wanted us to talk about this,” Billings said in an oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, “but now that Bobby has gone and Jack is gone, I think it really should be told … Jack Kennedy all during his life had few days when he wasn’t in pain or sick in some way.” Billings added that he seldom heard Kennedy complain. Another old friend, Henry James, who met Jack at Stanford University in 1940, eventually came to understand, he told a biographer, that Kennedy was not merely reluctant to complain about pain and his health but was psychologically unable to do so. “He was heartily ashamed” of his illnesses, James said. “They were a mark of effeminacy, of weakness, which he wouldn’t acknowledge. I think all that macho stuff was compensation—all that chasing after women—compensation for something that he hadn’t got.” Kennedy was fanatic about maintaining a deep suntan—he would remain heavily tanned all of his adult life—and he once explained, James said, that “it gives me confidence.… It makes me feel strong, healthy, attractive.” A deep bronzing of the skin when exposed to sunlight was, in fact, one of the symptoms of Addison’s disease.

Kennedy had few options other than being strong and attractive; his father saw to that. Joseph Kennedy viewed his son’s illness as a rite of passage. “I see him on TV, in rain and cold, bareheaded,” Kennedy told the writer William Manchester in 1961, “and I don’t worry. I know nothing can happen to him. I tell you, something’s watching out for him. I’ve stood by his deathbed four times. Each time I said good-bye to him, and he always came back.… You can’t put your finger on it, but there’s that difference. When you’ve been through something like that back, and the Pacific, what can hurt you? Who’s going to scare you?”



Jack was always striving to be strong for his father; to finish first, to shape his life in ways that would please Joe. Jack’s elder brother, Joseph Jr., always in flourishing health, had been his father’s favorite, the son destined for a successful political career in Washington. With Joe Jr.’s death in 1944 as a naval aviator, Jack became the focus of Joe Kennedy’s aspirations. In Jack’s eyes, his father could do little wrong. Many of Jack’s friends thought otherwise, but learned to say nothing. “Jack was sick all the time,” Charles Spalding told me in 1997, “and the old man could be an asshole around his kids.” During a visit to the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, Florida, in the late 1940s, Spalding said, he and his wife, Betty, were preparing to go to a movie with Jack and his date, Charlotte MacDonald. Spalding went upstairs with Jack and Charlotte to say good night to Joe, who was shaving. The father turned to Charlotte and said scathingly, “Why don’t you get a live one?” Spalding was appalled by the gratuitous comment about his best friend’s chronic poor health and couldn’t resist making a disparaging remark about Joe Kennedy to Jack. The son’s defense of his father was instinctive: “Everybody wants to knock his jock off, but he made the whole thing possible.”

Charles Bartlett, another old friend, saw both Joe Kennedy’s toughness and his importance to his son. Bartlett, who became friends with Jack in Palm Beach after the war, declared that Joe Kennedy “was in it all the way. I don’t think there was ever a moment that he didn’t spend worrying how to push Jack’s cause,” especially as his son sought the presidency in 1960.

“He pushed them all,” Bartlett, who later became the Washington bureau chief of the Chattanooga Times, told me in an interview for this book. “He pushed Bobby into the Justice Department, and he made Jack do things that Jack would probably rather not have done. He was very strong; he’d done things for the kids and wanted them to do some things for him. He didn’t bend. Joe was tough.” And yet, Bartlett added, “I just found that, in so many things, his judgment down the road was really enormous. You had to admire him.”

Jewel Reed vividly recalled her first visit to a family gathering at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the intense energy Joe Kennedy focused on his children. “The table was dynamic, and Mr. Kennedy was checking up on everybody about whether they had come in first or second or third in tennis or yachting or whatever,” she said in an interview for this book. “And he wanted them to be number one. That stuck with me a long time. I remembered how intensely he had focused on their winning.”

There was a high cost, Reed added. “His values that he imposed upon his children were difficult. His buying things. I hate to use the word bribery, but there was bribery in his agenda often.” During Jack Kennedy’s first Senate campaign, in 1952, Reed said, when he stunned the experts by defeating Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., “the billboards in Massachusetts came to about a quarter of a million dollars. That was a long, long time ago, and a quarter of a million was an awful lot of money.” Reed also said that Joe Kennedy purchased thousands of copies of Profiles in Courage, Jack’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, published in 1956, “to keep it on top of the bestseller list. I don’t know what he did with all those books. That was bribery in a way. He was pushing, and if it cost money, he paid it. I’m sure that the children couldn’t have felt comfortable about that.”

The point, Reed added, was that Joe Kennedy “loved his family. It was very evident, and I remember Teddy [Edward M. Kennedy, Joe’s youngest child] paying tribute to his father in saying that he was always there when they needed him. And that’s saying a lot.”

It was different with Rose Kennedy. As Jack’s friends knew, he was full of misgivings about his mother. Kennedy once said to his aide Kenny O’Donnell that he could not recall his mother ever telling him, “I love you.” Charles Spalding got a firsthand glimpse of a rare flash of Jack’s hostility toward his mother. “I remember being down in Palm Beach and she [Rose Kennedy] came by in the middle of lunch and said to Jack, ‘Oh, baby, I just hate the idea of your having to go back [to Washington].’ Jack just blurted out, ‘If you hadn’t pushed me to be a success, I could stay here.’”

In an interview in 1990 with British biographer Nigel Hamilton, author of JFK: Reckless Youth, a definitive account of Kennedy’s early years, Spalding speculated that Jack’s craving for women and his compulsive need to shower, as often as five times a day, were linked to a lack of mothering. Kennedy, Spalding said, “hated physical touching—people taking physical liberties with him—which I assume must go back to his mother and the fact that she was so cold, so distant from the whole thing … I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid’s hair in his whole life.… It just didn’t exist: the business of letting your son know you’re close, that she’s there. She wasn’t.”

“What is touch?” Spalding added. “It must come from some deeper maternal security—arms, warmth, kisses, hugs.… Maybe sex is the closest prize there is, that holds the whole thing together. I mean if you have sex with anybody you care about at all, you feel you’ve been touched.…”

In an extraordinary series of interviews, one of Jack Kennedy’s lovers has candidly described his strengths and weaknesses as she saw them during a bittersweet relationship that spanned four years during which he campaigned for and won the presidency. The woman, who subsequently married and had a successful career, agreed to share her insights only upon a promise of anonymity. She had met Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, at a fund-raising dinner in Boston in the late 1950s; she was nineteen years old, a student at Radcliffe, and he began flirting with her.

“It was glamorous,” she recalled. “It was supposed to be terrific. It was supposed to be just what anybody would want, what any woman would want. During that early time there would be looking at me. There would be nodding at me. There would be leaning across the table to say something just to me. There would be those signs of special attention. Yes, in public. And of course that was very flattering. I thought, ‘Oh, gosh. I really must be quite something.’”

The affair deepened. She fell totally in love with the handsome Kennedy and spent hours, after making love with him, at dinner or in long conversations in bed. “I was absolutely thrilled to the gills,” she told me. “Here I was, twenty years old, having dinner in the White House, the Abraham Lincoln bedroom. It seemed very amazing. There was a time when he needed to make a statement about a certain thing that happened in the world. And [he] went off and came back half an hour later and was really thrilled with the fact that he had come up with six declarative sentences that just laid it out.” Their relationship, the woman said, “was supposed to be secret, and so I just went along and didn’t talk about it.” As for Kennedy’s seemingly ideal marriage to Jackie, she said, “I did not have the foggiest idea of any consciousness of solidarity with other women. It just did not flicker. I cannot tell you how unevolved as a woman I was, and how it was assumed that women compete with each other for the best men. I just went right along with that. Somehow it didn’t register with me at any deep level that what I was doing was absolutely immoral, absolutely atrocious behavior.”

Kennedy, while attentive and engaging, rarely talked about his childhood in their time together, the woman told me. But she now understands that his ability to compartmentalize his life, to take the enormous risk—while seeking and occupying the presidency—of being so publicly married and so privately a womanizer, stemmed from his experiences as a child. He was “a boy who was sick frequently, who was frail, in a family where there was a tremendous premium on aggressive, competitive, succeeding, energizing activity. In the class that John Kennedy came from, there’s a tremendous emphasis on appearance and how does it look? Well, it’s not supposed to look like it’s painful. It’s not supposed to look like you feel like you don’t know something or that you don’t understand what’s going on in your family or in the world. There’s a tremendous premium on being smooth and in charge and in control—you aren’t sweaty and nervous. You just sail effortlessly through the trials and tribulations that bring down other people, but not you.”

The inevitable result, she explained, was that there were many times when Jack felt the pain of being excluded. “If you are a sickly child who spends a good deal of time in your bed at a young age in a house full of a lot of children, all of whom are in school or playing games or doing whatever they’re doing, you could feel left out. It didn’t sound like everybody then [in his family] took turns to come and sit with him and chat with him and draw pictures with him.” Kennedy could have responded to the experience, the woman told me, by learning to “identify with others in the same situation. Or you can say ‘I’m never going to have that feeling again.’” Kennedy chose to shut out the pain. “It was something he did not reflect [on] and didn’t want to think about much and hoped would never happen and went out of his way to make sure it”—thinking about his childhood emotions—“didn’t happen.”

Kennedy spoke to the woman only once, she recalled, about being a trustworthy parent. If his daughter, Caroline, who was born in 1957, ever got into any kind of trouble, “he hoped that she would come to him and not feel that she had to hide it from him. His father had always wanted him to have that feeling about him, and that was a really important thing.” The woman came to understand that Kennedy’s relationship with his father was “the most vibrant relationship he’d ever had—love, fear, palpitations, trying to please him.” Asked whether Kennedy felt he could turn to his mother for help, she answered, “I do not know. I never heard him speak about his mother. Never.”



Jack Kennedy’s delight in his children, and in all children, was profound, and recognized as such by staff aides who knew nothing of his early life. Marcus Raskin, who worked on nuclear disarmament issues for the National Security Council, recalled in an interview for this book that he and his colleagues would ask, in moments of international crisis, “Where are the children?” If Caroline and her younger brother, John, “were in Washington, then there wouldn’t be a war. If the children were away, then you weren’t sure.” The question was not facetious, Raskin insisted. Jerome B. Wiesner, the president’s science adviser, told McGeorge Bundy’s national security staff, Raskin said, “to watch where the kids are. If they’re here [in Washington], then there’s going to be no war this week. If the kids aren’t here, then we’ve got to be careful.” Wiesner’s remark was obviously tongue-in-cheek, Raskin said, but “many things are said ha-ha that have a grain of truth to them.” He and his colleagues, Raskin said, looked in moments of crisis “for some sort of human affect to understand the momentous questions that they were dealing with.”

If the president’s national security advisers understood his love for children, so did the Secret Service. Larry Newman was one of the White House agents assigned to Kennedy on the evening in August 1963 when the president made a visit to his youngest child, Patrick, born prematurely and hospitalized with a lung ailment, who was fighting for his life in Children’s Hospital in Boston. Newman, who was in the elevator with the president and Patrick’s doctor, listened as Kennedy was told that his newborn son was unlikely to survive. The elevator stopped at the fifth floor, where the pediatric intensive care unit was. The floor had been cleared of all visitors for the presidential visit. The hallway was dark; the patient rooms were illuminated by night-lights. Newman recalled in an interview for this book that while walking with the president to intensive care, “we passed a room where there were two delightful-looking little girls who were sitting up in bed. They were probably about three or four years old, and they were talking and laughing together. The only problem—one girl was bandaged up to her chin. She had severe burns. And the other had burns down her arms and huge pods [of bandages] on the end of her hands. President Kennedy stopped and just looked at these two little girls. He asked the doctor, ‘What’s wrong with them?’ And the doctor explained that one girl may lose the use of her hands. The president stood there. His son was down at the end of the hall in grave to critical condition. We just stood there with him; it was just a small party in the dark. He started feeling in his pockets—it was always a sign he wanted a pen. Someone gave him a pen. He said, ‘I’d like to write a note to the children.’ And nobody had any paper for the thirty-fifth president of the United States to write a note on. So the nurse scurries to the station and gets the name of the children and their family and Kennedy writes a note to each child. There was no fanfare, no photo-op. There was nothing. The nurse took the notes and said she would see that the family got it. And then we proceeded down the hall to see his son, who of course died the next day. It was something he didn’t need to do, but he always seemed to come out of his reserved and Bostonish [ways] with children.

“Nothing was ever said about it. There was no press release or anything. He just went on to do what he had to do—to see his son. This was part of the dichotomy of the man—the rough-cut diamond. You could see so many qualities he had that just glowed; you couldn’t see why he wanted to follow other roads that were so destructive. It was truly painful.”



The women who knew Jack Kennedy, whether they were his lovers or not, invariably spoke, in interviews for this book, about his overwhelming attractiveness. The writer Gloria Emerson was an aspiring journalist when she was first introduced to Kennedy in the 1950s at a cocktail party. “I was almost hypnotized by the sight of this man,” she told me in a 1997 interview. “He was such a stunning figure. He didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in the battalions, by the brigades. And the interesting thing was he didn’t care if you made an effort to make him interested in you. He was perfectly cordial—but come and go, it didn’t really matter to him.”

Kennedy, Emerson added, “always seemed to be surrounded by men. And they were always talking about strategy or the moves of other people. And it was rather mysterious and exciting. You, of course, as a young girl were of no importance whatsoever. Jack always called you kid, because he couldn’t remember women’s names. It wasn’t just the looks—it was the sense of mockery and that kind of fierce intelligence. He didn’t like people who babbled. He was very impatient and often very tense. I didn’t realize it then, but I think he must have been in pain a great deal of the time. Not just the stooped shoulders, but the shifting in chairs.”

Emerson was dating one of Kennedy’s classmates from Harvard when she and Jack first met. It was before his marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier. At the inevitable round of weekend parties, she said, “he was totally unselfconscious. He walked around half-naked, with just a towel wrapped around him—all bone, all rib, all shank. You have to have tremendous self-assurance to do that. I’ve never met anyone like that again. It was the audaciousness, the intensity, the impatience, even the brusqueness. Here was a man who wasn’t going to wait; he was going to get what he wanted. He was going to go from the House to the Senate to the White House. And it was quite thrilling.”

Another part of his charm, said Emerson, was young Jack Kennedy’s total indifference “to his own beauty. He didn’t care if a woman said yes or a woman said no. There would be another one. He was so absentminded about the women he was having affairs with. Once I had a roommate in New York and we were both very young. She was having a very pleasant affair with Jack and not taking it too seriously, which seemed very wise to me. But he could never remember her name. ‘Hello, kid. How are you?’ And he couldn’t figure out how to get in touch with her, so he had to call up the doorman of the building and describe the woman, so the doorman could identify her.”

Kennedy’s longtime secret lover described, with some pain, the night before the inauguration in January 1961, when she slept with the president-elect in the Georgetown home he shared with his wife and two children. Her father, a prominent businessman, was then being considered for a high-level post in the new administration. “He [Kennedy] was getting dressed, in white tie, and he looked at me,” the woman said, and he asked, “by any chance,” whether she was related to the potential nominee. She and Kennedy had been lovers for two years by then, the woman said, and he did not know who she was.

Looking back at it, the woman added, she realized that her relationship with Kennedy was based solely on his need for “conquest.” “I was somebody who happened to cross his radar screen, and so he said, ‘Well, you. I’ll take you.’ Charge and send. I was young. I was pretty. I could talk along. I was just thrilled and said, ‘Oh, wow, gosh. Here’s this handsome older man. Here’s this person, he’s interested in me.’ But in retrospect it’s really sad. I was just another girl. There was a compartment for girls, and once you were in the sex compartment, you weren’t a person anymore. I got declassed and depersonalized” by sleeping with Kennedy.

“He did not talk about his marriage to me,” the woman added. “How do you settle within yourself a pattern of behavior that is a betrayal of someone else’s trust? There are ‘arrangements’ and there’s a whole rhetoric and a whole kind of nonsense that people talk, but the basic act is betrayal. It’s hard to be a person who is trustworthy, when in your own family you are not. I think that somehow between his money, his position, his charm, his whatever, he was caught up in feeling that he was buffered. That people would take care of it. There is that feeling that you are not accountable; that the laws of the world do not apply to you. Laws had never been applied to his father and to him.” Aiding in this was the fact that, “among other things, reporters also wanted to be his friends, wanted to have relationships with him, wanted to spend time with him. I don’t know whether they did male bonding things about women, but the fact is a lot of reporters were very keen to spend time with him. And I think that he assumed they would not turn him in. And they didn’t.”



The woman came to understand that Kennedy’s most significant attachments were not to women but to men. Jack Kennedy was a man’s man. Men adored him, just as he adored his ever-demanding father. “He preferred the company of men,” Gloria Emerson recalled. “They admired him and they wanted to be like him. And they wanted, as did women, to win his favor, but even more important, they seemed to love him. People wanted to please Jack.” Schoolmates, navy buddies, political operatives, and those colleagues in the House and Senate with whom he chased women—all were attracted to Kennedy when they first met him, and had been ever since he was a gangly teenager. Charles Spalding vividly remembered his first glimpse of Kennedy at Hyannis Port in the early 1940s. Spalding, a navy aviator, had just published a bestselling memoir on flying entitled Love at First Flight. Kennedy, also in the navy, was lying down with no clothes on, except for a swimsuit casually draped across his loins. “He liked the fact that I’d written a book that had just come out,” Spalding said. Kennedy’s undergraduate thesis at Harvard, Why England Slept, had been published a few years earlier, and Spalding politely asked how it was going. “Going like hotcakes,” replied Kennedy. “Dad’s seeing to that.”

“I never met anybody who felt that the minute was as important as it was [for him],” said Spalding. “He had to live for today. There was this inner pulse, and he could find it anywhere he went.” Kennedy made things happen. “He was fun,” newspaper editor Benjamin Bradlee recalled in an interview. “That’s what you forget. He was fun to be with. He had a great sense of humor and surrounded himself with people with humor. He teased. He liked to be teased. I enjoyed being with him.” But he made people feel that others had to live by his priorities. “He would ask you to go with him someplace a lot of times when it was inconvenient for you,” George Smathers, a contemporary of Kennedy’s in the Senate, told me. “He would say, ‘Come on, go. Come on, go.’ And he and I made several trips together. He was very wonderful, friendly and loyal.”

Kennedy’s impulsiveness was irresistible. Hugh Sidey, the White House correspondent for Time magazine, who drew close to Kennedy, had an Oval Office interview scheduled for what, he concluded, was the wrong time. When he walked in, the president was in a snit over a minor foreign policy dispute, Sidey recalled in an interview, “looking down at his desk and barking orders. And he looked up at me and says, ‘Come on, Sidey. Let’s go swimming.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, that’s the one piece of equipment I have never thought to bring when I come over for an interview.’ He said, ‘Oh, in this pool you don’t need a suit.’” Once at the pool, Sidey said, “I’m confronted with this problem of who removes his trousers first—the president or the guest?” Sidey laughed at the recollection. “Kennedy beat me. Obviously a man of practice. And we dove in.”

Sidey got his clearest insight into Kennedy, he told me, when, while doing an article on the president’s reading habits for Life magazine, he asked him to list his ten favorite books. “Without hesitating he said, ‘Melbourne,’” referring to the much-acclaimed 1939 biography of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s prime minister and political adviser. Sidey immediately read the book. “It was the story,” he said, “about the young aristocracy of Britain … who gave their lives in military campaigns, who held the ideal of empire and national honor above all else. But on the weekends, when they went to their country estates, it was broken-field running through the bedrooms. I mean they swapped wives, they slept with others. But the code of that period was nobody talked about it. And you didn’t get divorced; otherwise, you were disgraced.

“I saw Kennedy,” Sidey added, “and I said, ‘Listen, now I know you better than anything. [Melbourne] tells me more about you than anything else.’ He just laughed and said, ‘Well, I’m fascinated with it. It was an interesting period in history.’” From then on, Sidey said, he and the president had a shared secret.

Kennedy was particularly energized by the West Coast. Joe Naar, an aspiring television producer, was a friend of the actor Peter Lawford, the president’s brother-in-law, and spent weekends at the Lawfords’ Santa Monica home, which was always crowded with show business celebrities. Naar remains enthralled today when he recalls Kennedy’s vibrance and energy in their chance meetings over lunch in Santa Monica. “He would come in and sit down and go around the room,” Naar recalled in an interview. “He knew everyone’s business. He made you feel like he cared about you and about what you were doing with your life. I was like nobody—the least important person there. He knew I was trying to develop television series and he’d say, ‘I’ve got an idea for a series I want to talk to you about.’ He did that with everyone at the table, some significant and some more like me. He was just the best.” Kennedy also had an unerring ability to put others at ease. Naar’s home burned down in 1961 and the president sent a photograph of Smokey the Bear with a note wondering where the bear had been during the fire. There was a Los Angeles reception soon after, and Naar’s wife was going to meet Kennedy for the first time. She was nervous about it and practiced shaking his hand and thanking him for the photograph. When the moment came, Naar recalled, his wife instead blurted, “Thank you, Mr. Picture.” She was mortified, but Kennedy “just threw his arms all over her and hugged her and laughed. He knew what happened,” Naar told me. “And I can’t forget that.”

Kennedy’s sense of his own importance and his hold over his friends distressed some of their wives, who saw Jack in a far more ambivalent light than did their husbands. Charles Spalding’s former wife, Betty, had met the Kennedys in the mid-1930s on Cape Cod and was especially friendly with Eunice, their third-eldest daughter. Her husband, she said, served one essential function for Jack Kennedy after his high-society wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier, as did all his male friends: escorting women in public who were really meant for Jack. “He bearded for him. That’s what they were doing—even Bobby—cleaning up after or bearding for him.” Like her husband, Betty Spalding found Jack Kennedy “charming and great fun to be with.” But, she added, “you didn’t know whether you were being manipulated.”

Jewel Reed said that she eventually became very disturbed by Kennedy’s “tremendous power over men—more than over women. Jack was more comfortable with men than with women. He didn’t have any value for women, except for a particular purpose.” Reed told me that Kennedy would often ask her husband to join him for a night of “male prowling,” and leave her at home. Kennedy couldn’t understand when his buddy Jim occasionally chose, at his wife’s insistence, not to go. The Reeds’ marriage, as did the Spaldings’, broke up during Kennedy’s days in the White House.

Gloria Emerson came to understand that the wives of Jack’s friends “didn’t like Jack at all because he had such a claim over their husbands.” The women were “completely left out,” Emerson said, “just put aside. It was another cultural climate. And I think they were jealous of JFK, because he could induce people to do things for him, and he was a great actor. He could make them believe that he really needed them to do these things for him—and why not? That’s part of the role of a skillful politician.”

Jack Kennedy’s attitude toward marriage followed the pattern his father set: he and his sons were to get married, stay married, have lots of children, and sleep with any woman they could. Rose Kennedy embraced the Catholic church and ignored what was going on, with her sons as well as her husband, while the Kennedy daughters spent their lives embracing the infidelities of the men in their family, often helping to make it easier for their brothers to cheat on their wives.

Sometimes the daughters would do the same for their dad. The novelist Dominick Dunne, who was working in Hollywood as a television producer for a weekly dramatic series in the 1950s, recalled in an interview for this book that Patricia Lawford, Joe Kennedy’s daughter, who was then married to actor Peter Lawford, routinely telephoned Dunne’s wife when her father was in town to ask, “Who’s on the show?” Lawford was told the names and telephone numbers of the female stars, Dunne said, and then relayed the information to the always eager Joe.


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The man most important to Kennedy, other than his father, was his brother Bobby; yet there were a few times early in the 1950s, Emerson said, when Jack hoodwinked even him. “Jack was having a liaison with one of my roommates in a hotel room and Bobby was at the door suddenly. And he made the woman stand in a closet while he talked to Bobby,” Emerson remembered. “So there were some times he probably concealed, but less and less as time went by. The Kennedys have always felt themselves under siege and were distrustful of the outside world. And that’s why so many men wanted JFK to believe that they could be trusted—it was a test they had to pass.”

Hugh Sidey described the brothers’ relationship as one of “almost total communication. It was almost osmosis. Almost every time I was in talking to Jack the phone would ring, once or twice, it would be Bobby. Muffled conversations back and forth about whatever it was. I don’t think there were secrets of any significance they kept from each other.”

Richard N. Goodwin, who wrote speeches for Kennedy during the 1960 campaign and accompanied him to the White House, described Robert Kennedy as “completely his brother’s man. He was a guy whose basic purpose in life was to advance and protect the career of John Kennedy.” In an interview for this book in 1997, Goodwin recalled one meeting between the president and a group of southern senators on the White House balcony. One of the senators “leaned forward and said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to attack you on civil rights.’ And Kennedy says, ‘Can’t you attack Bobby instead?’ Bobby played that role,” Goodwin explained. The younger Kennedy “was always reflecting his brother’s feelings.” Goodwin was also present at a White House meeting after the Bay of Pigs when Bobby tore into a senior State Department official who, after the fact, had told a reporter that he was opposed to the invasion. “I watched Bobby just lash into him,” Goodwin recalled. “‘You can’t undermine my brother.’ And John Kennedy just sat there quietly, never said a word throughout. But I have no doubt that Bobby was reflecting conversations that the two of them had.”

Jewel Reed, whose husband had also commanded PT boats in the South Pacific, thought that Bobby was put at a disadvantage by his older sibling. “All Bobby wanted to do was to please his brother,” Mrs. Reed said. “I felt Jack was more ruthless than Bobby.”



After the 1960 election, Kennedy put his longtime lover, who came from a wealthy and socially prominent family, into a make-work White House job dealing with international affairs. She watched from the inside and grew extremely skeptical of the men around the president. “He was not surrounded by peers,” she told me. “He was surrounded by intellectual associates, by show business cronies, by family, by old-time family retainers, by a lot of people who were acquaintances but were not friends of his heart.” The woman recalled a private dinner in the White House with the president and one of his very old friends. “And basically what [the friend] wanted was some help in getting a discount on furniture at the Merchandise Mart,” the huge Chicago wholesale furniture hub that was owned by the Kennedy family. “I was amazed. I mean, I was just staggered. It wasn’t about being a friend. It wasn’t about closeness.”

Kennedy’s male friends, she said, like many of his women friends, were attracted by his glamour. “Everyone kept stroking,” she said. “‘You’re fine, it’s great, everything is going well.’ Real friends,” she said, “wade in with you and say, ‘Boy, this is difficult. This is painful.’ I believe he was abandoned at some deep level by the people who thought they were trying to help by keeping things smooth, by saying it’ll all be okay. ‘How can I serve to make your life smoother?’”

Once in the White House, she said, aides such as McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, and Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, “picked up from [Kennedy] not a sense of being Harvard eggheads and smart people, but a sense of being tough. There was part of Jack that rejoiced in knowing what you had to know, doing what had to be done,” she said. “Bundy didn’t know from dirty hands or what Jack knew from street fighting. These men were merely picking up the worst aspects of Jack; they felt they had to be more tough, more Catholic than the Pope.”

All of Kennedy’s aides wanted his acceptance, she said. “In some way I think he must have gotten the least [out] of all the brain power around, because of people’s competition—‘How can we get more of Daddy? How can we get more of his attention? How can we get more of his approval?’ A lot of really radical thinking just went right out the window” on the part of the men who were supposedly giving the president their best advice. Men such as Bundy, McNamara, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian who was a special adviser, “could have stretched their minds more if they hadn’t gotten so tangled up in competing for his favor and his time. They wanted to hang out [with Kennedy], as well as to think about public policy. You wanted to be included at dinner, in rides on the boat, in going to movies.”

Gloria Emerson saw the same behavior. The men working for him in the White House, she told me, “loved him too much. They wanted to please more than they wanted to enlighten, and that’s very dangerous, isn’t it? Everyone wanted to see him smile.”

Kennedy, with his glamour and quickness, seemed especially to bring out the insecurity of intellectuals. And no one was more eager to please than Ted Sorensen, Jack Kennedy’s closest aide in the Senate and the White House. Ralph A. Dungan joined the Senate staff as a labor expert in the mid-1950s and was immediately put off by Sorensen, who was his office mate. “He was not the warmest human being that ever walked down the pike,” Dungan told the Kennedy Library in a 1967 oral history. “The one thing that bothered me the most was an incident that was very, very telling. The senator came roaring into that back office, yelling like hell about something, … directing his fire at me. And I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t touched the damned issue. It was Sorensen who had worked on it. He just sat right there and let me take the whole heat without ever saying, ‘It wasn’t him, it was me.’ And I figured at that point whatever happened along the line, if it in any way impaired his relationship with the principal, Sorensen would pitch anybody over.”



Kennedy’s friends lived in terror of his boredom. “We relaxed him.” That’s what Ben Bradlee believed. “We made him laugh. We talked mostly about people and what was going on … [Kennedy] loved gossip about what people are up to and what they’re thinking about.” You had to keep him interested, Bradlee said, but “if he were bored five minutes he’d get up and leave. He wasn’t going to suffer that. I mean, when he was through he was through. He got up and left.” Many others, even those considered to be old friends, had a sense that they, too, were disposable. Charles Bartlett, the journalist, was famed for having introduced Jack to Jackie at a dinner party; Bartlett profited, socially and professionally, from his closeness. But it came at a cost. “He was very spoiled,” Bartlett told me. “One thing you couldn’t do with Jack was bore him. It was one of his least attractive characteristics—how quickly he could turn off.”

Gloria Emerson said that she thought Jack Kennedy became bored “when people talked too much—when they made their case at too great length. He liked movement and results. He had no sort of small talk. He wanted to talk strategy, politics, so one was totally excluded. Things had to have a point for him, and parties were a waste of time unless there was a political advantage to be gained.”

Kennedy’s lover experienced the same sense of impatience and the same anxiety about cutting through it. “It wasn’t just the women going ga-ga,” she said. “It’s everybody trying to be good enough, smart enough, witty enough. I was trying to knock him out—to be terrific. It’s much more criminal in the case of Bundy and McNamara.”

Adding to her anxiety, she said, was Kennedy’s constant “restlessness, a sense that there was something he wanted but it wasn’t quite there. The tapping of the teeth, the tapping of the foot, the drumming of the fingers. A sense that it was hard work. You had to really work to keep his attention unless … he had something that he wanted from you. And then, boy, you were the object of extremely focused attention.”

Her lover’s goal, she said, was to fill his life “with adrenaline. ‘What are we going to do that’s exciting?’ What will he do that will keep his attention from being pulled into darker events or darker feelings? When you want excitement, when you want to be occupied and pulled out of yourself, you’re saying in some way that you don’t have to mull over things that are painful, things that could be very uncomfortable. He was caught in a bind, and the people around him were caught. It was as if he was struggling to come out, but he struggled with people who were in the same dynamic as he was.”

Kennedy ignored any problems in their relationship. When he could not perform sexually, it was simply not discussed, she said. “It was dealing with imperfection by just closing it down. ‘Let’s not think about this anymore.’ But it was clear that he was thinking about it. What do you do? What do you say? I had no idea. Somehow I wasn’t doing it right. I was sexually inexperienced, so I thought it was something I was doing or not doing. I didn’t know what was going on.”

Kennedy understood the extent of his power over men, and he used it. In the late 1950s, Jerry Bruno, who came from Wisconsin, was working in Washington for Senator William Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat. Bruno and Kennedy began a conversation in the underground shuttle linking the Senate office buildings to the Capitol. Kennedy invited him to come around his office for a chat. Bruno knew that Kennedy was going to run for president in 1960 and that Wisconsin would be a key primary election state. “I go there and Kennedy stands me up,” Bruno said in a 1995 interview for this book. “I wait one and a half hours and then Evelyn [Lincoln, Kennedy’s secretary] says he wants to see you at his home tomorrow morning at eight o’clock for breakfast. I go there, ring the bell, and the butler comes and puts me in the patio. I sit there and the butler gives me a newspaper.” After a half hour, Kennedy came downstairs, sat at another table on the patio, ate breakfast, and read the newspaper. Caroline, his daughter, climbed on his knee for a moment to get a ride. “He knew I was there, but he didn’t say anything,” Bruno told me. Bruno continued to wait. Asked why he did so, Bruno explained, “Hey, listen, I’m a factory worker who only went to the ninth grade.” He knew his place.

Finally, Kennedy turned to him, Bruno said, and “begins asking me a lot of questions about Wisconsin. He asks me to be his executive director for his campaign in Wisconsin. Later it dawned on me that he didn’t know anything about me, but I had the identity of [having worked for] Bill Proxmire.” Bruno took the job and, after the election, became a political advance man in the White House. He remains loyal to this day.

Kennedy’s treatment of Bruno was that of a master to a servant, just as his father, Joe, would have dealt with the hired help. Kennedy’s former lover talked at length in our interviews about what she termed his “tremendous acceptance of inequality.” Kennedy did articulate the view that “things should be better, yes.” He also “could do acts of personal kindness, yes.” But, she said, deeply ingrained in him was “the acceptance of inequality at every level—that women were not equal with men, that African Americans were not equal with white people, that Jews were not equal to gentiles. That was absolutely acceptable, and that doesn’t mean he was a horrible racist, anti-Semitic, classist, sexist person. He was a person of his time. And that involved a lot of limitations.”

When discussing the poor, the blacks, the Jews, “he used to say, ‘Poor bastards.’ That was it. There were a lot of poor bastards in this world. There were people who either didn’t get jobs they wanted or they didn’t get programs they wanted. That phrase covered so many times when he would have turned someone down for a job, or would have turned down some legislation that was being pressed on him. You know, ‘Poor bastard, they’re going to feel terrible.’” Kennedy seemed to believe that “people who are different have different responses. The pain of poor people is different from ‘our’ pain.”

Kennedy was aware of the disconnect. While interviewing candidate Kennedy for a Time magazine cover story in the late 1950s, Hugh Sidey suddenly asked if he had any memory of the Depression. Sidey had grown up in rural Iowa and vividly recalled the harshness of those days. “Kennedy had his feet on the desk, and he looked across at me and he said,” Sidey said in a 1997 interview for this book, “‘I have no memory of the Depression. We lived better than ever. We had bigger houses, more servants. I learned about the Depression at Harvard—from reading.’” Jack Kennedy, Sidey told me, with some consternation, “just hadn’t encountered breadlines or bums that used to come to our doors and ask for handouts. He was the ambassador’s son, and that was a very elegant existence. He was never in contact with the reality of the Depression.”

Kennedy’s former lover believed that it would have been difficult for Kennedy, given his comfortable family circumstances and the belief in his own destiny, to understand the aspirations of the people in Cuba and South Vietnam, the nations that became the object of presidential obsession, anger, and frustration. Kennedy, the woman said, “did a wonderful thing in trying to bring people into a sense of participation. But I feel most of it was on the basis of being special, and surrounding himself with the best and the brightest—with people whose accomplishments were their badge of worth.” Thus, when “things got really troublesome,” she said, the president and his immediate aides “reinforced each other’s isolation. Those people, in their specialness, got separated from reality. It was as if Bundy, McNamara—all of these extraordinary men—in rising and shining, had cut off their ability to feel their own pain. I never did experience John Kennedy in a moment of reflection or pain or sadness,” she told me.

The affair came to an end in late 1962, the woman said, but not before she learned of Kennedy’s extensive womanizing. She was “crushed” by the news. “I thought, ‘Gee, maybe I’m really special.’ But no, I was one of many, many people. That was helpful in the long run, because I decided to leave Washington, and it was time to go.”

The end was unsentimental. “It was very painful to be with someone who was everything and I was nothing,” the woman said. “It was painful to have it called love. It was painful to be chosen and to have someone be interested in me for my class, my speech, my looks, my whatever—but not my heart.” She was abroad, sitting by herself in a European café, when she learned of Kennedy’s assassination. “It was sort of symbolic in the sense that I was alone with it,” she said. “I’d been alone with myself during that relationship and I was alone” at Kennedy’s death. “I read newspapers. I read magazines. I read every single thing I could read. I did not cry.”

“What’s the moral of the story?” Kennedy’s former lover rhetorically asked during one interview. “That this grand man, this man of energy and intelligence and glamour and power, was to a certain extent dehumanized by the privileges that made him who and what he was. He allowed us to think that there are people who have it all. And that’s a very dangerous illusion, because at some point they know they don’t. Mythologizing this man did not help him and did not help us, because it allowed us to not take responsibility for our participation in the public life. We say, ‘Oh well, let this wonderful leader do it.’ But that is not inviting us to think.”



The Kennedys’ belief that they were extraordinary people who could make their own rules began long before Jack was born. It started with his grandfather.




(#ulink_4e2acb17-548d-52e8-b21d-5a921ceeb39e) No outsider can fully comprehend the dynamics of another family’s life, but outsiders were often shocked by what they encountered in the Kennedy household. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader, was asked to make a speech in Palm Beach. It seemed only natural when Rose Kennedy telephoned and invited him to come to the family’s beachfront home for lunch. Johnson, recovering from a serious heart attack, was accompanied on the trip by Lady Bird, his wife; Bobby Baker, his aide and confidant; and Senator George Smathers, of Florida. “So we went over for lunch,” Baker recalled in an interview for this book. Rose Kennedy, gracious and charming, was alone. Suddenly, Baker said, “Old Man Joe comes in with a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl. Doesn’t say boo. Walks right in and goes upstairs” and engages in what, clearly and noisily, is sexual intercourse. “Here you have the majority leader of the Senate and he and Jack had a great relationship,” Baker told me. “I thought it was the rudest thing I’ve ever seen.” The lunch went on as if nothing had happened. Baker learned later, he said, that the young woman was Joe Kennedy’s caddy from the French Riviera, where the Kennedys maintained a vacation home.




3 HONEY FITZ (#ulink_bab081ed-173b-54fd-8104-7b458a5bf233)


History has been kind to John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Jack Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, who is invariably portrayed as an amiable longtime Boston pol famed for his energetic campaigning and singing “Sweet Adeline” at political events. The athletic, handsome Fitzgerald was said to be the first politician to campaign by automobile: dramatically speeding across Boston, he preached his antiboss, reformer message at twenty-eight rallies on the last night of his successful 1905 campaign for mayor. No one, it was said, shook more hands, danced more dances, talked more rapidly, or generated larger and more enthusiastic crowds than Honey Fitz.

It is that historical legacy that survives—and not the reality. Fitzgerald’s contentious two terms as mayor of Boston, marked by sworn testimony of payoffs and cronyism, have been muted over the years into just another example of big-city political business as usual. His political alliance with his four brothers, who were provided with city jobs and other largesse, including valuable liquor licenses, was the beginning of the brother-to-brother family loyalty that would be repeated again and again in the next generation. And Fitzgerald’s political humiliation in 1919, when he was investigated in the House of Representatives for eight months before being unseated for vote fraud, is written off in a sentence or two in most Kennedy family histories.

The incomplete historical record is partially the result of the Kennedys’ purging of unsavory events from the family lore and the ability of family members to lie when necessary. The facts surrounding Fitzgerald’s ouster from Congress were protected by the congressional rule dating back to 1880 that sealed all unpublished investigative materials for fifty years. More than three thousand pages of House Elections Committee depositions and files dealing with the challenge to the 1918 election were not available to the public until 1969, and were then left unexamined and unpublished until research began for this book.

Fitzgerald won the House seat on November 5, 1918, by defeating the incumbent, fellow Democrat Peter F. Tague, by 238 votes out of the 15,293 cast in Massachusetts’s Tenth District. (Tague had been defeated by Fitzgerald in the Democratic primary election, amid charges of vote fraud, and ran again, as a write-in candidate, in the general election.) The newly examined elections committee files show that the Fitzgerald forces, who included his young son-in-law Joseph P. Kennedy, recruited immigrant Italians, then entering the United States in huge numbers, and sent them into election precincts with instructions to use threats and physical violence to prevent Tague supporters from casting their special ballots. A few professional boxers were also hired. The House investigators determined that at least one-third of the votes in three precincts in Boston’s teeming Fifth Ward were fraudulent, so-called mattress votes cast by men who were falsely registered as living in the district in order to vote on election day. Other Fitzgerald votes were determined to have been cast by men who had been killed in combat or were still stationed overseas in World War I. Most of the illegal votes came from a strip of notorious bars and houses of prostitution in the Fifth Ward, and it was these votes, so the committee concluded, that enabled Fitzgerald to steal the election.

Fitzgerald offered little defense during the months of congressional inquiry, other than to insist that he had been “framed” and to deny that any fraud was involved in his election. The elections committee’s report was debated for more than four hours on October 24, 1919. The House voted overwhelmingly to unseat Fitzgerald and swear in his opponent on the spot.

Fitzgerald’s comment to newsmen outside the Capitol was almost jaunty: “Well, McKinley was unseated by the Congress and became a candidate and was elected president. See what’s ahead of me?” In her bestselling biography The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, published in 1987, Doris Kearns Goodwin took brief note of the election of 1918 and its aftermath and observed that Fitzgerald, after being ousted from office, “remained as exuberant as ever, emerging once again from disgrace like a duck from water, and the local newspapers still considered him the leading citizen of Boston.”

Why was Fitzgerald so exuberant?

One answer may be that he was successfully practicing what is known today as political spin control—putting on an act for the public and the press in an attempt to minimize the importance of the disaster that had befallen him.

Another possible answer revolves around Fitzgerald’s lifelong ability to ignore the consequences of his actions. He had run for mayor of Boston in 1905 as a reformer but, once elected, presided over a regime that became infamous for patronage and graft. “From his earliest days in politics,” Goodwin wrote, “Fitzgerald had been able to compartmentalize his actions so that he could hold on to an image of himself as a ‘good’ man and a ‘reformist politician’”—even as he joined fully in the corruption of his administration. Fitzgerald’s instinct for compartmentalization and tolerance for political dirty tricks would be passed along to his son-in-law Joe Kennedy and to Kennedy’s second son, John.

Further, Fitzgerald might have understood how much more the House Elections Committee could have made public but did not. The unpublished hearings records of the committee depict Fitzgerald as a political leader who, like other corrupt big-city politicians of his time, relied heavily on alcohol, prostitution, and violence for financial and voter support.

The same files also demonstrate that Joe Kennedy was directly involved in many aspects of his father-in-law’s public life, an involvement that has been generally overlooked by historians. Fitzgerald family patronage of Kennedy is revealed in documents such as long-forgotten 1918 campaign leaflets in which Tague released letters showing that Fitzgerald had urged him to recommend Kennedy as a director of the federal Farm Loan Board (a position Kennedy did not get). Other depositions and documents show that the elections committee suspected Kennedy of playing a major organizational role on election day in November 1918, when the Fitzgerald forces used fraud and intimidation to win Tague’s seat. Some of the mattress voters from the shadiest hotels in the Fifth Ward were asked directly by suspicious House investigators whether Joe Kennedy had played a part in their illegal vote, but they provided no evidence. There was also a suggestion that Kennedy was involved in illicit campaign financing. A Fitzgerald supporter named Thomas Giblin told under oath of a secret $1,500 campaign account—roughly $50,000 in current dollars—in a small Boston bank then controlled by Kennedy, which was viewed by many of Fitzgerald’s campaign workers as particularly dirty. “They are all running away from it,” Giblin testified. He quoted Tague as telling Fitzgerald’s campaigners that he “would have them prosecuted if they used [the Kennedy] money.”



Fitzgerald, stung by his rejection in 1919 and later political failures, is described in family biographies as a happily doting grandfather who spent many afternoons in the 1920s catering to the needs of the children of his eldest daughter, Rose Kennedy, whose burgeoning family lived a few miles away until late in 1927. Fitzgerald became especially close to his two oldest grandsons, Joseph Jr. and John, taking them to the zoo, on boat rides in the Public Garden, and to cheer for the Boston Red Sox and the old Boston Braves.

Those accounts fail to emphasize the overriding toughness of the extended Fitzgerald family, a trait that was passed along to future generations and, eventually, into the presidency. Chester Cooper, a CIA official who served in the Kennedy White House, spent his summers in the 1920s a few blocks from the beach at Nantasket, south of Boston. The Fitzgerald summer house was directly on the beach. “I remember playing in front of the Fitzgerald house,” Cooper told me in an interview. “A couple of burly guys came out of the house and said, ‘Get off our beach.’ I remember saying, ‘This is a public beach.’ I was violently hit for the first time in my life. They were [Fitzgerald] sons and uncles. They literally kicked us off the front of the beach.”

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys always took care of their own. In the mid-1930s, Joe Kennedy risked his standing as an insider in the Roosevelt administration by urging the president to appoint one of Fitzgerald’s brothers to a federal liquor position. President Kennedy, carrying on the family tradition, ignored talk of nepotism and appointed his brother attorney general; he ignored it again in 1962 by ensuring that Edward M. Kennedy, his youngest brother, was nominated and elected to the Senate from Massachusetts.

Fitzgerald’s relationship with his often-absent son-in-law Joe was never close, according to the Kennedy family biographers. There was a crucial side to Honey Fitz, and his continued popularity among many Boston voters, that the constantly upward-striving Joe Kennedy could not comprehend: the mayor was an old-fashioned pol who was unapologetic about his humble beginnings and worked incessantly to present himself as a man of the people.

Joe Kennedy’s political ambitions began at the top. He was ruthless, as we shall see, in his efforts while serving as President Roosevelt’s ambassador to England to collect adverse information about the president, in a poorly conceived attempt in 1940 to force FDR from office—and position himself as a viable candidate. Joe Kennedy’s political career was in ruins by the end of 1940, but he learned from his mistakes. His son Jack, emulating his grandfather, would develop a strong political base in Boston.

After his political disgrace, Honey Fitz remained loyal to the family, and did what his wealthy son-in-law told him to do. In 1942, at the age of seventy-nine, Fitzgerald served Joe’s needs by running as a spoiler in the Democratic senatorial primary in Massachusetts against an attractive New Deal Democrat named Joseph E. Casey, one of FDR’s favorites in the Congress. Fitzgerald, whose daily campaign activities were heavily subsidized by Kennedy—and carefully monitored by one of Joe’s high-powered and well-paid speechwriters—took 80,000 votes away from Casey in the primary, and inflicted so much damage that Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., won the general election easily. The defeat, as expected, embarrassed the president and seriously hurt the career of Casey, who was viewed by Kennedy as a potential threat to the political ambitions of his first-born son, Joe Jr., ambitions Joe nurtured until his son’s death in 1944. The Kennedys learned a vital lesson in 1942: even a very good candidate, like Joseph Casey, could be defeated with money.

Honey Fitz came into the limelight once again, in 1946, when Joe Kennedy turned to Jack, his eldest surviving son, as the family’s political heir. Jack came out of the war as a decorated navy hero of torpedo boat skirmishes; it was decided that he would campaign for Fitzgerald’s old seat in Congress


(#ulink_71cde12e-e200-5b81-936d-a54060871005) as one of ten candidates in the Democratic primary. The Kennedy public relations machine was turned loose again and the natural affinity between grandson and grandfather was put to work—with careful guidance from Joe, who remained in the background during the campaign, as he would throughout his son’s political career. Dozens of favorable news stories appeared as the young man and old man campaigned together in the working-class districts of Boston’s North End and West End, with the former mayor introducing his grandson to the city’s elders. Honey Fitz seemed to play a significant role in the campaign.

Jack Kennedy and his campaign workers understood, however, that Fitzgerald was an anachronism whose politics had little to do with postwar America. Robert Kennedy, in an interview for the Kennedy Library four years after his brother’s death, acknowledged that his grandfather’s political “effectiveness … was not overwhelming. He had some important introductions and contacts which were significant. But the appeal that John Kennedy had was to an entirely different group.” Kennedy added that his grandfather “felt very close to my brother.”

Jack Kennedy’s best friend, K. LeMoyne Billings, told interviewers after Kennedy’s assassination that grandson and grandfather “were absolutely crazy about each other. Jack was undoubtedly the old man’s favorite. He was a very attractive old man, full of the Irish blarney, full of mischief and full of life.… His humor was something that Jack loved so much; he adored his grandfather’s sense of humor.” As president, Jack would honor his grandfather’s memory—Fitzgerald died in 1950—by naming the presidential yacht the Honey Fitz.

Nonetheless, the family warmth was put aside at critical moments in 1946. Joe Kennedy, as usual, treated Honey Fitz contemptuously during his son’s first campaign, and Jack Kennedy, never able to stand up to his father, was unable to stand up for his beloved grandfather.

The chief adviser in the campaign, handpicked by Joe, was a hard-nosed Boston political operative named Joseph L. Kane, who had served as the political strategist for Peter Tague during his successful fight to reclaim his House seat from Honey Fitz in 1919. Kane, who was Joe Kennedy’s first cousin and childhood friend, had done little in subsequent years to hide his disdain for Honey Fitz, and did not spare him in 1946.

In an interview in the late 1950s, published in Front Runner, Dark Horse, a study of the 1960 campaign by journalists Ralph G. Martin and Ed Plaut, Kane told of the tense moment, early in the primary campaign, when Fitzgerald accidentally walked into a Kennedy strategy meeting. Kane yelled, “Get that son of a bitch out of here!” The startled young Kennedy said, “Who? Grandpa?” Fitzgerald was ushered away and Jack, his political career on the line, stayed put. Young Kennedy was learning to be as ruthless, if necessary, as his father. A few days later, a pleased Joe Kennedy praised his son’s ability to get along with the difficult Kane: “I didn’t think you’d last three hours with him,” Joe Kennedy said.

The famed Kennedy loyalty—father to sons, sons to father, and brother to brother—did not always extend, at election time, to grandfathers.



Joseph P. Kennedy, in his drive to elect Jack Kennedy in 1946, left nothing to chance—an approach he would repeat in every one of his son’s political campaigns. Kane was deemed essential, because the elder Kennedy was pouring hundreds of thousands of family dollars into the campaign; Kane, who spent forty years as a backroom political operative in Boston, knew whom to pay off and how much to pay. Kane’s political theory was very simple, as he told Martin and Plaut years later: “It takes three things to win: the first is money and the second is money and the third is money.” One primary rival was paid $7,500 to “stay in or get out,” depending on how the race was going. Yet another rival was neutralized when Kane paid to have someone with the same name enter the primary, inevitably confusing voters and splitting the vote. The Kennedy campaign bought up much of the available billboard space in the district, and advertised heavily on the radio. The campaign slogan, as devised by Kane, was appropriately vague: “The New Generation Offers a Leader.”


(#ulink_6870e34b-d480-5d12-9d87-50c770a9daa5) Thousands of leaflets and pamphlets bearing those words were mailed, and many of the eligible women voters were personally invited by mail to join with Kennedy family members at a swanky hotel reception a few days before the election. The response was overwhelming. Kane said that Joe Kennedy was used to paying for what he got. “They paid a staggering sum in the Congressional race of 1946, but Jack could have gone to Congress like everyone else for ten cents.”

John F. Kennedy campaigned vigorously and successfully for his grandfather’s old seat in Congress, and with enormous charm, intelligence, and growing confidence. His first campaign invoked strategies that would bring him continued political success: an early start, effective use of volunteers, and a ferociously loyal organization made up of family members, old friends, former schoolmates, and shipmates from his combat days in World War II, when Kennedy commanded PT-109 in the Pacific.

The essential lessons he learned in the 1946 campaign would stay with Jack Kennedy for the next fourteen years, as he moved away from the local politics of his grandfather and began his long run for the presidency: Good looks, good organization, and hard work were not enough. Above all, he needed his father—and his father’s noholds-barred spending.




(#ulink_e49dce45-2962-50b2-be82-011f728896cf) Redistricting changed Honey Fitz’s election district to the Eleventh by the time his grandson ran for office.




(#ulink_21296a9e-f9d3-59c0-a4af-9a38e66af136) Kennedy also was vague about his specific political views. In an interview during the 1946 campaign with Selig S. Harrison, then a staff reporter for the Harvard Crimson, Kennedy steadfastly refused to make any commitments. “Kennedy seems to feel honestly that he is not hedging, not playing politics,” Harrison wrote, “by refusing to offer a positive specific platform. He feigns an ignorance of much in the affairs of government and tells you to look at his record in two years to see what he stands for.” Recalling the interview in an essay for the New Republic in 1960, Harrison wrote, “It would be difficult to forget the irritation which Kennedy displayed when this reporter … peppered him with questions.…”




4 JOE (#ulink_6e67588c-0cf6-5187-815b-93df5716eab2)


Money bought Joseph P. Kennedy enormous personal freedom, and bought his son the presidency.

At his death in 1969, Joe Kennedy’s private estate and various trust holdings were estimated by the New York Times to be worth “perhaps $500 million.” A complete accounting of what he owned, and how he got there, simply could not be obtained then, nor does one exist today. Joe Kennedy spent his life making money—and hiding it.

The Kennedy family biographers, relying on material supplied by Joe Kennedy, his wife, Rose, and other family members, have provided a familiar chronology of achievement that begins with Kennedy, a few years after his graduation from Harvard, becoming president of the Columbia Trust Company, a small Boston bank, and becoming known as the youngest bank president in the nation. Eager to avoid active duty in World War I, he left the bank in 1917 to become assistant general manager of Bethlehem Steel’s huge Fore River ship-building plant in nearby Quincy. He left the shipyard after the war to join the brokerage firm of Hayden, Stone and Company in Boston, where he was an instant success. Within a year, he generated enough money by speculating in the stock market to buy a new twelve-room home in suburban Brookline—he and Rose then had four children—and also a new Rolls-Royce. Kennedy left Hayden, Stone in 1923 and, setting up shop as an independent banker, began speculating full-time in the stock market. By 1927, generally considered to have made millions, Kennedy had moved his burgeoning family to suburban New York and himself into the movie business, where he once again was said to have made millions. With his uncanny instinct for trends, he began pulling out of the high-flying stock market before the Wall Street crash of October 1929.

In 1931, no longer a movie magnate, Kennedy became a major contributor to and fund-raiser for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first successful campaign for the presidency. Roosevelt astonished Washington and Wall Street in mid-1934 by naming Kennedy, who was notorious as a stock market manipulator, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a New Deal agency set up to reform and regulate the financial markets. FDR was said to have explained the perplexing choice by citing, with a laugh, an old saw—“It takes a thief to catch a thief.” There was a brief stint later as chairman of the Maritime Commission and a disastrous three years as U.S. ambassador to England, where by 1940 Kennedy’s isolationism and vocal skepticism about England’s ability to continue the war against Germany made him enormously unpopular abroad and at home. It was his last government post. Kennedy would spend the next twenty years shuttling between homes in Palm Beach, Florida, and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, shepherding the careers of his nine photogenic children and making huge amounts of money in real estate and business. After his son’s election to the presidency, Joe Kennedy served as a one-man kitchen cabinet until his severe stroke in December 1961. He remained an invalid, able to comprehend but unable to speak, until his death in 1969. He had outlived his daughter Kathleen and three sons—Joe, Jack, and Bobby.

Joe Kennedy was, by all accounts, a brilliant corporate predator and an expert manipulator of both Wall Street and his fellow investors. What is missing from the published accounts, and the public record, is an appreciation of how Kennedy was also able to profit from his understanding of the corruption that made American big-city politics work, knowledge that he acquired at the side of his father-in-law, Honey Fitz.

The House Elections Committee files make clear that Kennedy, at a minimum, served as a money man during Fitzgerald’s campaign against Peter Tague; the committee generated evidence showing that Fitzgerald’s decision to challenge Tague, a fellow Democrat, had been mandated by party bosses in Boston after Tague, while in the Congress, would not cooperate in a series of corrupt and highly profitable real estate schemes involving the Fore River Shipyard. Tague testified that he refused to help Fitzgerald and his cronies buy land adjacent to Fore River which was scheduled to be a future site for a large federal housing project. At the time, Joe Kennedy was assistant general manager of the shipyard, and the questioning by committee investigators strongly suggested that they believed Kennedy was involved in the profit-taking. Making money illicitly may well have been essential to Kennedy’s early financial success—as important, perhaps, as his skill in Wall Street speculating.

As those who worked in politics with him came to understand, the seemingly straightforward Kennedy was, at best, extremely secretive and, at worst, an incessant liar on all matters involving his financial interests. Just how much money he made and how he made it always remained a secret, even from his wife and other members of the family, who learned never to ask questions. What is known, one biographer wrote, is that money began to “flood into the family” in the early 1920s, at the same time that federal agents, who knew nothing of Joe Kennedy, began to track huge shipments of illicit liquor into the United States, triggered by the insatiable American demand for liquor and the advent of Prohibition.

Kennedy was one of the first to seize a dominant position in the liquor importing business. He used medicinal permits to avoid the restrictions of Prohibition, gaining intimate knowledge of the industry that would place him ahead of his competitors for the legal trade when the moment arrived. He swept into London in the fall of 1933, when it was clear that Prohibition was about to end, and signed agreements making him the sole American distributor of two premium scotches and Gordon’s gin.


(#ulink_1fc88c1d-3fb3-58bb-88da-24270f31dc9e) Kennedy established Somerset Importers Ltd., and operated it until its sudden sale, for $8 million, in 1946 (equivalent to about $55 million in 1997 dollars).

Kennedy’s rapid and highly profitable shift into the liquor importing business helped trigger what would become an unverified national rumor by the time his son entered the White House: that Joe Kennedy had been deeply involved in the bootleg liquor business since the first days of Prohibition—a business that was dominated by such organized crime leaders as New York’s Frank Costello, Newark’s Abner “Longy” Zwillman, and Chicago’s Al Capone. The rumors were made more plausible by Joe’s shipbuilding experience at Fore River during World War I—most bootleg liquor came to America by boat—and by the sheer number of Kennedy and Fitzgerald family members who had been in the liquor business before Prohibition began in 1920. Joe Kennedy’s father owned at least three taverns in Boston as well as a prosperous liquor importing business that handled shipments from Europe and South America. And two of Rose Kennedy’s uncles, younger brothers of Honey Fitz, remained active in the bootleg liquor business during Prohibition.



The difficulty in attempting to evaluate the many reports of Joe Kennedy’s participation in bootlegging is the remarkable lack of documentation in government files. The FBI, in the years since Joe Kennedy’s death, has released hundreds of pages of Kennedy files in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, but those files—a compilation of security reviews and fawning letters between Hoover and Kennedy—make no mention of any link between Joseph Kennedy, organized crime, and the bootlegging industry. Yet, in scores of interviews for this book over four years, former high-level government officials of the 1950s and 1960s, including Justice Department prosecutors, CIA operatives, and FBI agents, insisted that they knew that Joe Kennedy had been a prominent bootlegger during Prohibition. “I do know that he had associates in organized crime who respected him,” Cartha D. DeLoach, a deputy director of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, said in an interview for this book in 1997. But, added DeLoach, “I only knew him through Mr. Hoover. He had considerable experience in the bygone era of smuggling, and that’s how he made his fortune, according to Mr. Hoover.”

One uncontested fact is that Joe Kennedy, through his liquor importing activities, defied all the risks and all the gossip—a defiance his son Jack would emulate in later years—by doing retail liquor business with the most notorious organized crime families throughout the post-Prohibition 1930s and well into the 1940s.

The most direct assertion of Kennedy’s involvement in bootlegging came from Frank Costello, the most powerful Mafia boss of the 1940s and 1950s, who sought in his later years to cast himself as a successful businessman. In February 1973, at the age of eighty-two, Costello decided to begin telling his life story to Peter Maas, the prize-winning New York journalist. Ten days after he began, he suffered a heart seizure and died, before Maas could fully explore the Kennedy-Costello relationship. Maas later told the New York Times that Costello had confided that he and Kennedy had been “partners” in the bootleg liquor business during Prohibition—a partnership that began, Costello said, after Kennedy sought him out and asked for his help. In an interview for this book, Maas said that Costello specifically recalled arranging for the delivery by sea of bootleg scotch to a Cape Cod beach party celebrating the tenth reunion of Joe Kennedy’s Harvard class of 1912. “We were together in the liquor business,” Costello told Maas, adding that Kennedy was responsible for the shipping of liquor to the United States from abroad.

Similarly, in his 1983 memoir, A Man of Honor, Joseph Bonanno, the retired New York Mafia boss, said that Costello always told him, “and I have no reason to doubt it, that during Prohibition he and Joe Kennedy of Boston were partners in the liquor business.… I would sometimes go to Sag Harbor, Long Island, in the summer. This was one of the coves, so I was told, that the Kennedy people used to transport whiskey during Prohibition.”


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Some of Joe Kennedy’s hired hands—those silent men whose names were appropriated for Kennedy’s buying and selling of real estate and stock—also told me their secret stories about the Kennedy link to Costello. Harold E. Clancy of South Boston, one of the few Joe Kennedy employees still alive in the mid-1990s, said in an interview for this book that it was commonly supposed by the staff that Kennedy and Costello worked together during Prohibition. Kennedy “had trucks and he also had boats,” Clancy said. “I heard anecdotes, rumors, and stories of bringing Haig & Haig scotch from Canada to Cape Cod and to Carson’s Beach in South Boston.” Another senior Kennedy aide once told him, Clancy recalled, that Costello, who made big money in the early 1930s running slot machines in New York and New Orleans, once “tried to interest the ambassador [Kennedy] in buying into the company that made the machines, but he was too smart.” (The slot machines were manufactured in Chicago by a firm controlled by the Capone syndicate.)

Clancy was recruited by Kennedy for his personal staff in the late 1950s, after spending years as an investigative reporter and editor for the Boston Traveler. He told me that the more senior members of Kennedy’s staff would share cryptic stories of Kennedy’s derring-do. Many involved Kennedy’s willingness to stand up to organized crime shakedowns in the years after Prohibition, when he was heavily involved in the legitimate sale and shipping of liquor. Kennedy, for example, was said to have hired “people from Murder, Incorporated” to deal with gangster-led unions that were threatening labor trouble. “I knew,” Clancy told me, “that Joe had hired some very hard cases to deal with these gangsters who were in control of unions and giving him a hard time.” Clancy provided no further details.


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Yet another suggestion of an early Kennedy connection to bootlegging came from a 1996 interview with Q. Byrum Hurst, an attorney in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who for more than twenty years represented Owney Madden, the notorious gangster, until Madden’s death in 1965. Madden, born in England, had in his youth been a sadistic killer in New York City, but he emerged in the 1920s as a sophisticated racketeer who moved as an equal among the crooked politicians and major crime figures along the East Coast. He ended his career as a Hot Springs casino operator, whose facilities—never challenged by local police—were always available for criminal leaders needing a quiet retreat. “Owney and Joe Kennedy were partners in the bootleg business for a number of years,” said Hurst. “I discussed the Kennedy partnership with him many times.… Owney controlled all the nightclubs in New York then. He ran New York more than anyone in the 1920s, and Joe wanted the outlets for his liquor.” Hurst, who served in the Arkansas state senate for more than twenty years, added that Madden “told me he valued Kennedy’s business judgment. He recognized Kennedy’s brains.”

Another insider, Abraham Lincoln Marovitz of Chicago, who represented many leading organized crime figures before beginning a forty-year career as a local and federal court judge in Chicago, also insisted that Joe Kennedy had been a bootlegger. “I know about that era,” the ninety-two-year-old Marovitz said in an interview for this book. “I represented some people. Kennedy was bootlegging out there in New England, and he knew all these guys. He had mob connections. Kennedy couldn’t have operated the way he did without mob approval. They’d have knocked him off, too.” Marovitz, a longtime associate of legendary Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, was appointed a U.S. district court judge in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy.



There is further anecdotal evidence alleging that Kennedy was trying to profit, as were scores of other bootleggers, in the huge shipments of illicit scotch and gin that were off-loaded from ships anchored off the beaches of Massachusetts south of Boston. The liquor would then be trucked in convoys via nearby Brockton to New York City, where it could fetch higher prices than in Boston. The arrival of the first of the so-called rum fleets in 1923 was extensively reported by leading newspapers, including the New York Times.

In 1985 a New Jersey journalist, Mark A. Stuart, an assistant editor of the Newark Record, published a biography of Longy Zwillman in which he described Joe Kennedy’s rage at Zwillman for Zwillman’s involvement, so Kennedy believed, in the hijacking of a truck convoy of Kennedy-financed bootleg whiskey in 1923. The Stuart biography quoted Joseph Reinfeld, Zwillman’s bootlegging partner, explaining that “I told Joe Kennedy that his shipment, the one that was hijacked outside of Brockton … couldn’t have been done by one of our people. I don’t think he believed me.… [Kennedy] said it must have been that punk kid Zwillman, making a deal to hijack his whiskey, … said he’d get Longy if it was the last thing he did.”


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A description of the hijacking that suggested that Reinfeld was right in denying involvement was provided by Meyer Lansky to three Israeli journalists, Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau. They published a sympathetic biography of Lansky in 1979, based in part on extensive interviews. Lansky was then living quietly in Israel and trying to avoid extradition to the United States. In a chapter entitled “The Feud with Joseph Kennedy,” Lansky and his longtime associate Joseph “Doc” Stacher claimed that their organization—and not Zwillman—was responsible for the hijacking, which they recalled as taking place four years later, in 1927. The subsequent shoot-out, they said, took the lives of eleven men. The whiskey had been shipped into New England from Ireland by Joe Kennedy, and Kennedy knew who was responsible for its diversion. “Kennedy lost a fortune in the hijack,” the three Israelis wrote, “and for months afterward he was beset by pleas for financial help from the widows and relatives of the killed guards who were supposed to protect the cargo.” Lansky and Stacher remained convinced, the Israeli authors wrote, that Kennedy “held his grudge” and passed on his hostility toward some organized crime bosses to his son Robert. “They were out to get us,” Lansky said at his retirement home in Tel Aviv.



The most significant and yet least-noticed account of hard evidence tying Kennedy to business dealings with crime figures can be found among the many thousands of pages of testimony on organized crime generated in the early 1950s by the famed Senate hearings chaired by Estes Kefauver, a Democrat of Tennessee. During scores of public hearings across the nation, Senate investigators and local police officials focused on, among other things, the influx of gambling and racketeering in the Miami area prior to and during World War II. One of the most important front men for organized crime in that era was Thomas J. Cassara, a lawyer from New London, Connecticut, who first came to the attention of law enforcement officials in the late 1930s, when he signed a lease as co-owner of the newly constructed Raleigh Hotel in Miami Beach, which was known to have been financed by organized crime families led by Capone’s successors in Chicago and Costello in New York. A few years later, just as World War II was breaking out in Europe, Cassara took over the leases of two nearby hotels, the Grand and the Wofford. Daniel P. Sullivan, a former FBI agent who became operating director of the Crime Commission of Greater Miami, told Kefauver’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce that the area around the Cassara-operated hotels in Miami Beach “became nationally known as a meeting place probably for more nationally known racketeers and gangsters than any one local area in the United States.” The Wofford Hotel, in particular, became the hotel of choice for the criminal elite, Sullivan testified, including Costello, Joey Adonis, Longy Zwillman, and many senior members of the Miami-based organization of Meyer Lansky. This was an era, Sullivan added, when America’s racketeers, hiding their ownership behind men such as Cassara, were pouring “difficult to trace” money into dozens of legitimate businesses, including hotels and nightclubs.

Cassara left Miami in 1941. By 1944, according to testimony before the Kefauver Committee, he was working full-time for Joe Kennedy’s Somerset Importers. The testimony came from Joseph Charles “Joey” Fusco, a former bootlegger and strong-arm man for Al Capone in Chicago. In October of 1950, Fusco was subpoenaed to testify at a closed-door hearing and asked, among other things, about his dealings with Cassara. Fusco replied unhesitatingly: “When he first came to Chicago, I think [it] was in 1944, he was working for Kennedy, the Somerset Import Company. He was their representative here. He used to call on the trade as a missionary man [sic], and that is when I first met Tom Cassara in Chicago. He came into our office and introduced himself. From then on we knew Tom Cassara’s working for Somerset in Chicago. Later on, he opened a company here called the Raleigh Distributing Company. He became one of the distributors with us. In other words, he came in and became a distributor for the Somerset line.” The reference to Kennedy’s company was fleeting, and although the committee understood who Fusco was talking about, Joseph P. Kennedy’s name does not appear in the index to the hearings. Journalists plowing through the voluminous transcripts did not link Kennedy to Cassara or Fusco, and thus the important Fusco reference to Joe Kennedy’s liquor importing business escaped public notice.


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In late January 1946, Cassara was shot in the head, gangland style, in front of a mob-dominated nightspot known as the Trade Winds on Chicago’s trendy Rush Street, an area dominated by nightclubs, bars, and restaurants in the infamous East Chicago Avenue police district, where the hoodlum “outfit” exercised near-total control over illegitimate—and legitimate—business activity. Chicago newspapers identified one of Cassara’s business partners as Rocco DeStefano, but did not report that DeStefano was a first cousin of Al Capone and Joey Fusco. Nor did the newspapers report that Cassara was an employee of Joe Kennedy’s liquor importing business. Cassara survived the bullet wound, the case remained unsolved, and newspaper attention quickly turned elsewhere. Cassara left the liquor distribution business and moved to Los Angeles, where he once again operated as a front man for organized crime families in New York and Chicago.

Joe Kennedy began negotiating his exit from the liquor business within months of the Cassara shooting. On July 31, 1946, he formally sold Somerset to a New York firm controlled in part by New Jersey gangster Longy Zwillman and his longtime Prohibition partner, Joseph Reinfeld.

With that sale, Kennedy cut his last known tie to the liquor business. But few businessmen had his understanding of the intricate relationship between politicians, unions, and organized crime in the major American cities after World War II. Joe Kennedy’s knowledge and contacts would play a major role in the 1960 presidential election, an election stolen, with the help of organized crime, from Richard Nixon.

In 1945 Kennedy bought the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, then the world’s largest building, located just north of the Chicago River, in the East Chicago Avenue police district, and joined the long list of businessmen making monthly payoffs to stay in business. The Mart was famed for its block-long speakeasy, which swung into operation shortly after the building opened in 1930, with no interference by the local police. “The free lunch was magnificent,” New York Times reporter Harrison E. Salisbury recalled in a memoir. “I never knew whether Old Joe owned the bar, but we thought he did and it made someone a lot of money.” One of Kennedy’s former employees, in interviews for this book, said he knew nothing of a Kennedy involvement in the Merchandise Mart speakeasy, but he did recall that Kennedy maintained ownership, at least into the late 1950s, of two old-fashioned Chicago saloons near the Mart that also were within the jurisdiction of the East Chicago Avenue police district.

The district was famed for having what senior police officials called “a solid set-up” of corruption. Organized crime controlled the bars, gambling, and prostitution that dominated the area’s economics, just as it did in Boston’s Fifth Ward. It was understood that any illicit business could operate without disruption, as long as two payoffs were made at the beginning of each month—one to the East Chicago Avenue police and one to the local ward committeeman, who represented Chicago’s Democratic political bosses. Journalist Sandy Smith, who in the 1980s became the chief investigative reporter for Time magazine in Washington, was assigned to East Chicago Avenue as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune in 1946. “The mob was so strong,” Smith recalled in an interview for this book. “They had the police department and they had the politicians. If you paid at the beginning of the month, you had a month of immunity.”

Only one FBI document showed a direct link between organized crime figures and Kennedy’s liquor importing business, and it was not among the documents on Kennedy routinely released to journalists by the FBI. In this heavily censored document, part of a 1944 survey of “outstanding mobsters and racketeers” in the Miami area, the FBI reported that a gambler named Charlie Block was “the Southern representative of the Somerset Importers from New York City. He [Block] is known to be a big figure in the liquor industry.” The FBI document added that Somerset was owned by Joseph Kennedy. Block later operated one of Miami Beach’s most popular restaurants, the Park Avenue, in partnership with a professional gambler named Bert “Wingy” Grober, one of Joseph Kennedy’s close friends, who was also heavily involved in Mafia-controlled casinos in Las Vegas. Joe Kennedy’s love for Las Vegas, with its high life, beautiful women, and easy access to political cash, would be shared by his son Jack.

Joe Kennedy’s decision in 1946 to sell Somerset to Longy Zwillman and Joe Reinfeld and get out of the liquor business has been interpreted by some historians as a result of Jack Kennedy’s decision—made with his father’s strong encouragement—to run for Congress that year. “He had enjoyed thirteen profitable years,” wrote Richard J. Whalen, in The Founding Father, a bestselling 1964 biography of Joseph Kennedy, “but the whiskey trade was vaguely embarrassing and not at all in keeping with the public effect of dignity that Kennedy wished to achieve.” And yet Joe Kennedy continued to flaunt his liquor connection after his sons moved to Washington, routinely sending gifts of high-priced scotch to the aides and colleagues of his sons. “Even when Bobby was attorney general,” recalled Joseph F. Dolan, a top Kennedy deputy in the early 1960s, in a 1995 interview for this book, “every Christmas one of the black clerks would come around the Justice Department handing out bottles of Haig & Haig Pinch. If you got two bottles, the light shone on you.”

Joe Kennedy’s secret world also involved gambling. Harold Clancy, who began working for Kennedy in the late 1950s, recalled in an interview that Kennedy briefly considered buying into the mob-dominated company that manufactured the totalizer systems used by racetracks around the country to compute and transmit betting odds and race results. Kennedy decided against it. In 1943 he did buy 17 percent—a controlling interest—of the Hialeah Race Track in Miami, later selling it at a profit. Just how much and how seriously Kennedy gambled is not clear. His wife, Rose, in her memoir, wrote of visiting the track with her husband “a couple of times a week,” adding that she “seldom ventured” from the two-dollar window. Kennedy also was a regular at the roulette tables in Miami Beach casinos during and immediately after World War II.

Joe Kennedy certainly understood that there was big money to be made from racetracks and gambling. In the mid-1940s he made a strenuous, and secret, effort to buy the Suffolk Downs Race Track near Boston at a fraction of its true value. Kennedy didn’t get his way, but his hard-line tactics evoked the postwar tactics of organized crime families seeking to expand into legitimate businesses: threats, payoffs, and judicial corruption.

Suffolk Downs was the major asset of the Aldred Investment Trust (AIT), a nearly bankrupt Massachusetts firm that was registered with the SEC. During World War II the firm’s trustees, in what was later determined to be a “gross abuse of trust,” sold off many of its investments in order to buy the racetrack; some of the trustees then appointed themselves highly paid officers of the track. The SEC and an investor successfully sued AIT’s management in federal court and forced the appointment of two outside receivers, who were instructed to reorganize or liquidate the trust. After the war, a group of independent investors, who included a financier named Richard Rosenthal, of Stamford, Connecticut, bought stock in AIT but found, to their dismay, that the court-appointed receivers were in the process of selling off the firm’s control of Suffolk Downs for slightly more than $1 million—one-tenth the racetrack’s value. The buyer, as all involved learned later, was Joe Kennedy, operating in his usual manner. The receivers’ “idea of competitive bidding,” Rosenthal recalled in an interview for this book, “was to get into a telephone booth with Joe Kennedy. They made a deal and brought it to court. We objected.” Rosenthal retained his brother-in-law, the New York attorney Milton S. Gould (later of Shea and Gould), and others, and filed suit in federal court in Boston to stop the sale. “We argued that they [AIT management] had not followed common sense in having a private negotiation. The minimum is that you should have taken bids.” What he and his lawyers did not know, Rosenthal added, with a laugh, “was that you couldn’t beat Joe Kennedy in the Boston area.”

Gould, who in 1997 was still practicing law in New York, recalled in an interview what happened next. The federal judge hearing the case, George C. Sweeney, who was named to the bench by President Roosevelt in 1935, summoned Gould and his cocounsel to an afternoon meeting in early 1946 in his chambers with the two AIT receivers, their lawyer, and the regional SEC director. Sweeney had a tough message for Gould and his clients: “You’re sticking your nose where you don’t belong. This is a local thing and we want local people involved.” Gould later concluded that the judge was telling him that the AIT receivers did not want to sell the racetrack “to a bunch of Jews.” Gould’s cocounsel proposed to write a brief for the judge, summarizing the legal issues involved, to which Sweeney replied: “I don’t need a brief. I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.” Judge Sweeney, who died in 1965, then announced that he would deny the Rosenthal motion to intervene, with this sweetener: he would instruct the AIT receivers to buy back the stock held by Rosenthal and his colleagues for $250,000 more than they had initially paid; he also would grant Gould and his legal colleague a fee of $100,000.

The Rosenthal-Gould team rejected Judge Sweeney’s offer and filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals. Competitive bidding for the racetrack was eventually ordered, and Suffolk Downs was sold at auction to a Boston businessman for roughly $10 million. That businessman was not Joe Kennedy or even a proxy. Kennedy lost out, but not before one last, and typical, maneuver. Richard Rosenthal, while struggling unsuccessfully to put together a syndicate to bid on the track, received a telephone call and a visit from Joseph Timilty, the former police commissioner of Boston, who—as Rosenthal did not know at the time—was one of Joe Kennedy’s most trusted operatives. “His entrée,” recalled Rosenthal, “was that he’d been police commissioner and he could be helpful to me.” Rosenthal also did not know that in March 1943, Timilty, then police commissioner, and six of his aides had been indicted by a grand jury in Boston and forced out of office for conspiring “to permit the operation of gaming houses and the registration of bets.” The charges against Timilty never came to trial.


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At their meeting, Rosenthal told me, Timilty raised a disturbing issue: “He said you have to be careful how you handle this. This track is supported by people who drive out to it, and the roads are not in great shape. Suppose somebody decides to start repairing them during the [racetrack] meet. You’d be out of business.” Rosenthal responded, simply, that “they wouldn’t do that.” “I wouldn’t be too sure,” answered Timilty. It was an obvious threat.

Rosenthal had few illusions, even then, about Joe Kennedy. In the years immediately before the war, as a young stock analyst in New York, he was assigned the shipbuilding industry. He wrote Kennedy, then chairman of the Maritime Commission, to arrange a face-to-face meeting. The airplane flight from New York to Washington was unforgettable—it was Rosenthal’s first. He and Kennedy had “an informative conversation,” recalled Rosenthal. “I was two years out of school and brash and young. I had a conviction that we were going to get into war.” Kennedy asked whether Rosenthal had looked into a certain company, Todd Shipyards, and volunteered his view: “I think it’s one of the best shipyards in the United States.” Duly impressed, Rosenthal recommended Todd as a buy in his report. Years later, Rosenthal said, he learned that Kennedy, while chairman of the Maritime Commission, had maintained a large, and secret, personal investment in Todd. The stock was registered in the name of Edward E. Moore, Kennedy’s longtime personal secretary.


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Ironically, Rosenthal maintained his financial interest in AIT and eventually became its sole owner. The firm is still being operated as a private investment company by Rosenthal, now an investor and philanthropist in Stamford. “When I was young,” he said, “I thought intellect would win over everything. I honestly didn’t believe that things got fixed, or that you could buy judges.” He still does not understand, Rosenthal said, why Kennedy wanted the track and was willing to spend “a lot of political currency to get it.” The financier shrugged and then offered an answer: “The track was a big cash handle business and he may have wanted it for other business.”



Jack Kennedy once explained to Arthur Schlesinger, as Schlesinger recorded in A Thousand Days, that his father “held up standards for us, and he was very tough when we failed to meet those standards. The toughness was important.” Kennedy brought his father’s toughness and his history into the presidency, and with them he brought a sense that he, like his father, understood how the world really worked. It was an understanding that the earnest young businessmen, government officials, and academics in the Kennedy administration could never have—and it increased their awe and reverence for the president. Joe Kennedy’s street-hardened past became, ironically, further proof of Jack Kennedy’s qualifications for the Oval Office.




(#ulink_e03c7614-e3e9-5bef-b28f-986977582220) Kennedy was accompanied on the high-profile London trip by James Roosevelt, the son of the newly elected president, who had star quality abroad. Kennedy, then forty-five years old, and Roosevelt, just twenty-seven, had become close friends during the 1932 presidential campaign. It was a friendship based on Roosevelt’s weaknesses for liquor and women and Kennedy’s ability to exploit weakness.




(#ulink_363765f9-d0a3-540a-8360-0e72d9670c08) Kennedy’s recklessness in these years extended, not surprisingly, to his womanizing. Shortly after Prohibition ended in 1933, he began an affair with a Broadway showgirl named Evelyn Crowell, who was the widow of Larry Fay, a notorious and fashionable New York gangster who, at his height of power in the 1920s, maintained a lavish mansion and gave lavish parties in Great Neck, New York. The dapper Fay, who began his career as a bootlegger but soon moved into extortion, became the model for the gangster in the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic The Great Gatsby. Fay was shot to death in 1932. Three years later, Kennedy’s affair with Fay’s widow made it as a blind item into Walter Winchell’s widely read New York Journal-American gossip column: “A top New Dealer’s mistress is a mobster’s widow.” Winchell’s longtime assistant, Herman Klurfeld, who wrote most of Winchell’s columns for thirty years, said in an interview for this book that Kennedy, who was an expert at dealing with the press, arranged a meeting with Winchell after publication of the item. The two men quickly became friends, Klurfeld said, and Kennedy eventually became one of Winchell’s key sources. Although no such evidence exists in the case of Winchell, Kennedy’s “friendship” with many journalists—such as Arthur Krock, the revered Washington bureau chief of the New York Times—was predicated on the fact that Kennedy provided them with the equivalent of money: lavish gifts and prepaid vacations and, in the case of Krock, women.




(#ulink_66b9cf65-c84c-5b08-9ec3-9ec3d666f662) Clancy said his job at first was to investigate various real estate properties and businesses for Kennedy, beginning with a Chicago company that was for sale. “I spent a week,” Clancy said, before returning to report to Kennedy at his summer home in Hyannis. Kennedy began the meeting by telling his new employee what he was about to report: “For ten minutes he sat there and told me what I was going to tell him. He even had the sequence right. I thought this is the smartest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”




(#ulink_400e9808-276c-58aa-bf55-2018c4c6f8eb) During Prohibition, Zwillman and Reinfeld operated out of Newark what the federal government later determined was the nation’s largest bootlegging operation, responsible at its height for as much as 40 percent of illicit liquor sales. Reinfeld, who later changed his name to Renfield, went on after Prohibition to become a successful and legitimate liquor importer; Zwillman committed suicide in 1959, while facing a subpoena from the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, whose chief counsel was Bobby Kennedy. It was, as we will see, Zwillman and Reinfeld who bought Joseph Kennedy’s Somerset Importers in 1946.




(#ulink_d9a598b2-6f5b-5867-b14f-d75895d30f5d) Kefauver certainly understood the importance of Fusco’s testimony. Kefauver’s handwritten notes for the day of Fusco’s testimony include references to Cassara and his ties to Somerset Importers. The senator, who took notes only on the testimony of key witnesses, filled six pages of his notebook with remarks and comments on Fusco. Kefauver’s papers are on file at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.




(#ulink_15e78f3b-cf4c-524d-a7c8-379f8268e081) Timilty and his senior aides in the police department were specifically accused of protecting in the early 1940s the vast gambling syndicate of Harry J. “Doc” Sagansky, the boss of New England’s largest numbers racket. At his height, Sagansky, who lived in the Boston suburb of Brookline, employed an estimated three thousand people in his illicit rackets. He also owned numerous nightclubs and three racetracks, leading the Kefauver Committee to describe him as “perhaps the principal gambling racketeer in the New England area prior to … his conviction … in 1943.” The committee also reported that Sagansky worked closely with Frank Costello and was in daily telephone communication with him through 1942, when Timilty’s alleged protection of the racketeer was at its height. The initial indictment of Timilty was quashed in June 1943, but Timilty was reindicted. The second charge was dropped after a judge in Boston somehow ruled that Timilty only “administered” the police department and did not “enforce the law” or participate in arrests, as specified in the indictment. Timilty’s term as police commissioner ended in November 1943.




(#ulink_ea1222c1-99a2-5286-b3e0-828cdf7fa196) Edward K. Linen of Rye, New York, who retired in 1979 as secretary of Todd Shipyards, confirmed in an interview for this book that Kennedy did hold a “sizable” amount of stock in the firm while serving as chairman of the Maritime Commission. “It was in Eddie Moore’s name,” Linen said. “I was assistant secretary of Todd at the time and Moore was a trustee for Joe Kennedy. Kennedy’s name did not appear” on any document. Asked how he learned about the Moore-Kennedy connection, Linen recalled only that John D. Reilly, who was president of the shipyard in the 1930s, “was a friend of Joe Kennedy’s and, at some point, I found out that Eddie Moore was Joe Kennedy.” Kennedy’s use of Moore to mask his stock purchases was made more insidious by the fact that he seemed to be completely aboveboard in disclosing his stock holdings to the White House and to Congress prior to his Senate confirmation to the Maritime Commission. In a series of March 1937 letters on file at the Roosevelt Library, Kennedy acknowledged that one of the family trusts, over which he had no control, owned 3,300 shares of stock in Todd. He also acknowledged personal ownership of an additional 1,100 shares in Todd, and proposed turning those shares over to his broker for sale within sixty days. In a letter to the Senate, Kennedy forthrightly promised to put the stock “beyond my control … before taking the oath of office. I think an understanding of these facts will clear my position much more satisfactorily, at least in my own mind.” There is no evidence in the Roosevelt documents that Kennedy disclosed the stock he held in the name of Eddie Moore.




5 THE AMBASSADOR (#ulink_ead4e4e0-83ae-556a-89a9-b6dc297d63f5)


Joe Kennedy played by his own rules both in running his personal life and in amassing his personal fortune. He employed the same ruthlessness and secrecy with all—his wife, fellow businessmen, organized crime leaders, newspapermen, and political figures. He served the Roosevelt administration with distinction as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and, later, as chairman of the Maritime Commission, bringing the techniques and skills that worked so well in his business life to government service. His cherished ambition was to convince Franklin Roosevelt to nominate him as ambassador to Great Britain, the most socially prestigious post in the American government. “Being appointed ambassador to England,” explained one Kennedy biographer, “would mean social preferment for the Kennedys and their offspring, and an opportunity to ‘show’ the Brahmins that he could ‘get there’ without their support. He would be their social superior—the social superior of Boston’s snobbiest!” Kennedy spent months in 1937 lobbying for the appointment, with the continuing help of James Roosevelt, the president’s son, whose presence had assured favored treatment when he accompanied Joe to seek British liquor contracts in 1933.

The president and his aides understood the cynicism of Joe Kennedy’s friendship with Jimmy, but made no attempt to intervene. Kennedy’s influence on the president’s son remained enormous. Kennedy was rich and attractive to women, and the young Roosevelt wanted to be both. The two collaborated on business deals and vague promises of partnerships. Roosevelt, trading on his father’s fame, was working as an insurance broker, and at Prohibition’s end, Kennedy allowed him to write policies on overseas liquor shipments. There were always women. While ambassador to England, Kennedy told an embassy aide that Jimmy Roosevelt was “so crazy for women he would screw a snake going uphill.”

In 1935, with Kennedy’s help, Roosevelt was named president of the National Grain Yeast Corporation of Belleville, New Jersey, one of many companies that found themselves doing big business after the repeal of Prohibition. Yeast, of course, was essential for the mass production of beer, and it became one of the legitimate businesses that attracted former bootleggers. Roosevelt failed at the job and was out of work within six months.

James Roosevelt’s business disappointments no doubt figured in his father’s decision, despite opposition from his advisers, to name him his personal secretary at the beginning of his second term. Kennedy, not surprisingly, continued to lavish attention, affection, and, undoubtedly, women on the president’s son. “You know as far as I am concerned,” Kennedy wrote Roosevelt and his wife in a January 1937 letter on file in the FDR Library, “you are young people and struggling to get along and I am your foster-father.”

Foster father was hyperbole, but James Roosevelt, as personal secretary to his father, played a major—and not fully known—role in assuring Kennedy’s nomination as ambassador to England. The most extensive account of the machinations appeared in Memoirs, Arthur Krock’s autobiography, published in 1968. Krock, then the columnist and Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, had a secret life. By the late 1930s he had become another of Kennedy’s wholly owned subsidiaries—a journalist who vacationed at Kennedy’s Florida home, shared in his lifestyle, and very often wrote whatever Kennedy wanted. It was a pattern that would be repeated again and again by the reporters covering Joe and, later, Jack Kennedy. In his autobiography, Krock told of a dinner with Kennedy, then chairman of the Maritime Commission, at which James Roosevelt arrived and took Kennedy into another room for an extended private conversation. Kennedy’s nomination as ambassador was rumored at the time, and, Krock noted, there was sharp opposition inside the White House and from liberals in the Congress. After the meeting, a very angry Kennedy told Krock that young Roosevelt had proposed that he take an appointment as secretary of commerce. “Well, I’m not going to,” Kennedy said. “FDR promised me London, and I told Jimmy to tell his father that’s the job, and the only one, I’ll accept.”

Kennedy got his nomination in December 1937 and arrived in prewar London full of ambition.



Kennedy’s rise and fall as ambassador in London has been often told: a brief honeymoon with the British press and public, much of it revolving around his highly social and photogenic children, and then a relentless fall from grace. Kennedy was reviled for his defeatism. His widely quoted belief was that Great Britain had neither the will nor the armaments to win a war against Nazi Germany. And he was ridiculed for his perceived cowardice during the intensified Luftwaffe bombing of London in 1940, when he chose to spend his nights at a country estate well away from the targeted city centers. German Foreign Ministry documents published after World War II show that Kennedy, without State Department approval, repeatedly sought a personal meeting with Hitler on the eve of the Nazi blitzkrieg, “to bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany.” His goal was to find a means to keep America out of a war that he was convinced would destroy capitalism.

There is no evidence that Ambassador Kennedy understood in the days before the war that stopping Hitler was a moral imperative. “Individual Jews are all right, Harvey,” Kennedy told Harvey Klemmer, one of his few trusted aides in the American Embassy, “but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch. Look what they did to the movies.” Klemmer, in an interview many years later made available for this book, recalled that Kennedy and his “entourage” generally referred to Jews as “kikes or sheenies.”

Kennedy and his family would later emphatically deny allegations of anti-Semitism stemming from his years as ambassador, but the German diplomatic documents show that Kennedy consistently minimized the Jewish issue in his four-month attempt in the summer and fall of 1938 to obtain an audience with Hitler. On June 13, as the Nazi regime was systematically segregating Jews from German society, Kennedy advised Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, as Dirksen reported to Berlin, that “it was not so much the fact that we wanted to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. He himself understood our Jewish policy completely.” On October 13, 1938, a few weeks before Kristallnacht, with its Brown Shirt terror attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses, Kennedy met again with Ambassador Dirksen, who subsequently informed his superiors that “today, too, as during former conversations, Kennedy mentioned that very strong anti-Semitic feelings existed in the United States and that a large portion of the population had an understanding of the German attitude toward the Jews.”


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Kennedy knew little about the culture and history of Europe before his appointment as ambassador and made no effort to educate himself once in London. He made constant misjudgments. In the summer of 1938, for example, he blithely assured the president in a letter, described in the published diaries of Harold Ickes, FDR’s secretary of the interior, that “he does not regard the European situation as so critical.” Diplomats serving on the American Desk in the British Foreign Office quickly came to fear—and hate—Kennedy. They compiled a secret dossier on him, known as the “Kennediana” file, which would not be declassified until after the war. In those pages Sir Robert Vansittart, undersecretary of the Foreign Office, scrawled, as war was spreading throughout Europe in early 1940: “Mr. Kennedy is a very foul specimen of a double-crosser and defeatist. He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope that this war will at least see the elimination of his type.”

The Foreign Office notes also included many allegations of Kennedy’s profiteering once the war began. Kennedy, still very much in control of Somerset Importers, was suspected of having commandeered valued transatlantic cargo space for the continued importation of British scotch and gin; it was further believed that he was abusing his position of trust as a high-level government insider to support his Wall Street trading. No proof of such business activity was then available to the British Foreign Office—officially, at least—but Kennedy was worried that he might be doing something illegal: in April 1941, shortly after his return to the United States, he telephoned the State Department and inquired whether there were rules governing private financial transactions of U.S. officials serving abroad. Kennedy was told that Congress had passed legislation in 1915 making any business dealings for profit illegal.

In 1992 Harvey Klemmer, an ex-newspaperman who served as Joe Kennedy’s personal public relations aide at the Maritime Commission and had the same role in London, acknowledged in a British television interview that the Foreign Office suspicions more than fifty years before were valid: Kennedy, in fact, did continue to be a major investor and speculator on Wall Street, placing buy and sell orders by telephone through John J. Burns, a former justice of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court who was retained by Kennedy to run his New York office, a practice he continued into the 1950s. Klemmer, depicted by one British diplomatic reporter as Kennedy’s “brains trust,” remained silent about Joe Kennedy until a few months before his death, from cancer, in 1992, when he did a brief on-air interview with television producer Phillip Whitehead on Thames TV. Klemmer, who was severely disfigured from his cancer, also granted Whitehead an extraordinary interview on audiotape—much of it never made public until it was obtained for this book. The unedited transcripts of the two interviews provide a rare inside look at the Kennedy embassy. “Kennedy continued to do business as usual while in London,” Klemmer told Whitehead. One night, while out at dinner, the ambassador left the table for a telephone call. “He was gone a long time. When he came back, he said, ‘Well, the market’s going to hell. I told Johnny [Burns] to sell everything.’” Also at the dinner, Klemmer recalled, was “a Jewish friend of his and mine.… In a little while [the friend] began to fidget and finally excused himself on the basis that he had something important to do and left. As soon as he had left, Kennedy said, ‘Watch the son of a bitch go out and sell. Actually the market is doing very well and I told Johnny to buy.’”

Kennedy was equally unprincipled in his use of ambassadorial perquisites. Klemmer told Whitehead that one of his principal duties at the embassy was shipping Kennedy’s liquor. “Using his name and the prestige of the embassy and also my connection with the Maritime Commission, I was able to get shipping space for up to, I think, around 200,000 cases of whiskey at a time when shipping space [from England to the United States] was very scarce.” Kennedy’s abuse of office on behalf of Somerset Importers was so extreme, Klemmer said, that “a British friend in the Ministry of Shipping came to see me one day and said, ‘You’d better lay off with the ambassador’s whiskey, because some of the other distillers, who can’t get shipping space, are going to have the question raised in Parliament. He’s using the influence of the American Embassy to preempt shipping space.’ So,” Klemmer concluded, “we kind of tapered off a little bit after that.” Kennedy ignored the widespread gossip about his whiskey dealing, Klemmer added: “He just brushed it off.… His stock reply to any criticism was ‘To hell with them.’… He didn’t take things like that seriously.”



London’s concerns about the American ambassador went far beyond defeatism and profiteering. British policy, after the failure of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich, was unstated but nonetheless clear: to somehow get the United States into the war against Germany. In May 1940, with France on the verge of defeat, Winston Churchill, who had been serving as first lord of the Admiralty, replaced the failed Chamberlain. A few days later, while shaving, Churchill announced to his son, Randolph: “I think I can see my way through.” Randolph, recalling the conversation in a 1963 memoir, asked, “Do you mean we can avoid defeat or defeat the bastards?” His father, flinging his razor into a washbasin, proclaimed, “Of course I mean we can beat them.” Asked how, the new prime minister simply said, “I shall drag the United States in.”

It was clear even before Churchill became prime minister that Joe Kennedy, with his access to Roosevelt, his desire to meet personally with Adolf Hitler, and his eagerness to avoid American involvement in the war at all costs, had become a national security risk to England. Historians are in agreement that Kennedy was a priority target of Britain’s famed MI5, its counterintelligence service, and was subjected to physical surveillance as well as extensive wiretapping. No such files have been declassified and released by the British government, despite repeated requests.

Harvey Klemmer knew firsthand, though, about MI5’s close surveillance. Kennedy was seeing a wealthy English divorcée who was in touch with Sir Oswald Mosley, a leading British fascist. The woman, Klemmer said in his interview, “told me that Joe had asked her to initiate … contact with Mosley,” in the mistaken belief that the fascists in England were more numerous than they were. “So one day [Kennedy] asked me to take her home and it was in one of her cars. So I did. And on the way back I was stopped by a man in uniform who said there was an air raid or invasion drill in progress. I would have to leave my car for a while and take refuge with them in a nearby country home.… I wondered if there was something going on, and so I arranged my gloves on the seat in a certain way, and I arranged some of the papers in the glove compartment.” After an hour, when Klemmer was given the all-clear sign, “I looked and I could see the car had been searched.… I knew I was under suspicion” by British intelligence, Klemmer said, “because of my association with him. My files at the embassy were searched,” as was, he believed, his London apartment. He and others at the embassy did learn later, Klemmer told Whitehead, that “the British had Kennedy’s telephone tapped.”

Given his precarious position in London, some of Kennedy’s actions seem stupefying.

In the spring of 1939, shortly after Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, Kennedy—despite being instructed not to do so by Washington—encouraged a bizarre and little-known scheme being actively promoted by a naive American automobile executive who had been told in Berlin that the Nazi regime would agree to peace concessions and a general disarmament in return for an Anglo-American gold loan totaling between $500 million and $1 billion. The American, James D. Mooney, president of General Motors Overseas, flew to London to discuss the German proposal with an equally impressed Kennedy at the American Embassy. According to Mooney’s unpublished memoir, made available for this book, Kennedy urged Mooney to return to Berlin and inform the Germans that he would “certainly like to have a talk with them, quietly and privately.” Mooney’s papers reveal that it was agreed that Kennedy would meet secretly in Paris with Dr. Helmut Wohltat, a high-level Nazi official who was a deputy to Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Only after Kennedy made the commitment to Mooney did he send a vaguely worded cable to the State Department, wondering whether there would be “any objections” to his flying to Paris to meet with Mooney and “a personal friend of Hitler.” He was emphatically denied permission to make the trip by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Mooney, still eager to involve Kennedy, returned to London and presented the ambassador with the list of the promised German concessions that would result from the gold loan. “What a wonderful speech could be built up from these points back home!” Kennedy exclaimed, according to Mooney’s notes. Kennedy then took his case for a meeting directly to President Roosevelt, and was told once again to have nothing to do with the proposal.

Nonetheless, Kennedy met in secret with Mooney and Wohltat at a hotel in London on May 9, 1939. “Each man made an excellent impression on the other,” Mooney recorded in his unpublished memoir. “It was heartening to sit there and witness the exertion of real effort to reach something constructive.” Within days, London’s Daily Express blew everyone’s cover by reporting on its front page, under the headline “Goering’s Mystery Man Is Here,” that Wohltat had arrived in London “on a special mission.” Neither Kennedy nor Mooney was named in the article, but a few days later Kennedy was singled out for censure in The Week, a radical weekly newsletter. Its editor, Claud Cockburn, wrote that Kennedy, in his talks with Germans, “uses language which is not merely defeatist, but anti-Rooseveltian.… Mr. Kennedy goes so far as to insinuate that the democratic policy of the United States is a Jewish production, but that Roosevelt will fall in 1940.” The article was reprinted in the New York Post and eventually brought to Roosevelt’s attention by Harold Ickes. In his diaries, Ickes noted that “the President read this and said to me: ‘It is true.’”

Kennedy’s indiscretion knew no limits. After Munich he had summoned a group of American journalists to the embassy and, among other things, briefed them off the record about a most secret plot by a group of dissident German generals to overthrow Hitler. James Reston of the New York Times summarized the briefing in Deadline, his 1991 memoir: “It was known in London on the eve of Munich that … a group of German officers led by Generals Halder and Beck had a plan to overthrow the Führer. Fearing war on three fronts, these conspirators informed officials in Westminster [the British Foreign Office]—so Ambassador Kennedy told us—that they would arrest Hitler if the British and French took military action to block the invasion of Czechoslovakia.” It would not become publicly known until after the war that the plotters, General Ludwig Beck, then chief of the German General Staff, and his deputy, Franz Halder—their lives very much at stake—had approached the British Foreign Ministry. The Beck-Halder partnership was the most serious early resistance to Hitler and also involved, by some accounts, a plan to assassinate Hitler.


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It is impossible to assess what was in Kennedy’s mind when he chose to casually brief American correspondents about the plot—and to provide the names of those involved. His blabbing can be seen most innocently as the actions of an ambitious man, eager to seem an insider, who would let nothing block his efforts to ingratiate himself with the press. But there is a far darker interpretation. The British Foreign Office’s Kennediana files, which were made public after the war, show that Kennedy was opposed to any policy based on the assassination of Adolf Hitler, in fear that Hitler’s death would leave Soviet communism unchecked. In late September of 1939, three weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Kennedy directly raised his concerns in a conference with Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary. Halifax quoted Kennedy as stating that he

himself was disposed to deprecate perpetual reference to the personal elimination of Hitler. How could we be sure that it would not have precisely the opposite effect on German feeling? … According to Mr. Kennedy, United States opinion thought that Russia was a much greater potential disturber of world peace through Communist doctrine than was Germany. He thought that American opinion would inevitably be greatly disturbed if and when it came to think that the result of the present struggle was a greater extension of bolshevism in Europe.… He appreciated the strength of British opinion about Hitler and the Nazi system, but, if the end of it all was to be universal bankruptcy, the outlook was very black.

Halifax, according to his Foreign Office note, did not respond to Kennedy’s comment about Hitler’s assassination.


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During his years in London, Joe Kennedy compounded his political and personal problems with FDR and his senior advisers through his overriding presidential ambition and his clumsy attempts to mask it. “He thought he was about the most qualified individual on earth to be president,” Klemmer said in his 1992 television interview. “He had supreme self-confidence, of course, as everybody knows, and he thought the monetary system in the United States needed revising and … one of his ambitions was to revise the whole monetary system.” Kennedy spent much time masterminding a campaign—transparent to the men in the White House—for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1940. The Kennedy claque of newspaper sycophants, headed by Arthur Krock, repeatedly planted stories about a possible Kennedy candidacy. Krock’s columns in the New York Times made the men in the White House gag. In a diary entry dated May 22, 1939, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau described how Thomas G. Corcoran, one of Roosevelt’s senior political advisers, “got really violent” while discussing Kennedy and Krock. “He said that Krock was running a campaign to put Joe Kennedy over for President.”


(#ulink_55159cb9-2889-5e60-8bb5-3bdaf79552da) Krock was further described as “the number one Poison at the White House.” Harold Ickes had earlier expressed concern about Kennedy’s qualifications, and his ambitions, in his diary: “At a time when we should be sending the best that we have to Great Britain, we have not done so. We have sent a rich man, untrained in diplomacy, unlearned in history and politics, who is a great publicity hound and who is apparently ambitious to be the first Catholic President of the United States.”

Roosevelt, who had every intention of running for an unprecedented third term in 1940, was just as skilled as Kennedy at planting stories. Walter Trohan, the crusty bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, who was known to be close to Kennedy, recalled being summoned to the White House by Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, and given a challenge. “‘You’re a friend of Joe Kennedy’s, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I like Joe.’ He said, ‘You wouldn’t criticize him?’ I said, ‘Oh yes, I would. I’d criticize any New Dealer. What’s Joe done?’” Early then gave Trohan copies of two Kennedy letters. The first, Trohan told me in a 1997 interview for this book, was addressed to Arthur Krock and said, “We ought not to get into the war.” The second, sent to the State Department, “was extremely pro-British and suggested getting along with Britain.” Trohan wrote an account of Kennedy’s gamesmanship for the Tribune. A few weeks later, Kennedy was called to Washington for a meeting. “He ran into me,” Trohan said, “and drew his hand across his throat. Joe knew I got the information from the White House.” The ambassador, Trohan added, “forgave me in the long run.”

FDR reacted to the political and diplomatic dangers posed by Kennedy by keeping him in London and increasingly isolating him from the American public and from all important policy decisions. The president sent a series of personal representatives to Great Britain in mid-1940, after Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway and began his drive into the Netherlands and Belgium toward France, and instructed them to make on-the-scene surveys of British morale and military readiness. Men such as Colonel William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, Colonel Carl Spaatz, General George Strong, and Admiral Robert L. Ghormley arrived in London, did their business, and returned to Washington—with little or no contact with the embassy, to Kennedy’s embarrassment and rage. By that time, too, much more of America’s business with England was being handled directly by the British Foreign Ministry, headed by Lord Halifax, including a highly sensitive proposal to swap long-term American leases on British overseas bases for fifty much-needed American destroyers. With war being waged throughout Europe, American diplomacy in Europe was made the primary responsibility of Ambassador William C. Bullitt in Paris, a Roosevelt confidant who shared FDR’s contempt for Nazi Germany.


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Kennedy understood that Roosevelt, despite his many public statements to the contrary, was intent on bringing America into the war. The president had begun an intermittent secret correspondence with Winston Churchill in the fall of 1939, nine months before Churchill was named prime minister. The two men were careful, even in their encrypted communications, not to talk openly about taking on Hitler together, but they did agree to work out procedures for sharing, among other intelligence, the location of German submarines and surface ships. Such exchanges would have provoked, at the least, an outcry among the isolationists in Congress and imperiled Roosevelt’s reelection prospects. No copies of the sensitive communications were to be made available to the British Foreign Office; the two leaders communicated via the code room in the American Embassy—Joe Kennedy’s embassy.




(#ulink_4b02e6f0-63d6-5ad8-8264-6efe9de43a78) Kennedy remained insensitive, at best, about the Jewish issue through the later war years, when the existence of concentration camps was widely known. In a May 1944 interview with an old friend, Joe Dinneen of the Boston Globe, Kennedy acknowledged, when questioned about his alleged anti-Semitism: “It is true that I have a low opinion of some Jews in public office and in private life. That does not mean that I hate all Jews; that I believe they should be wiped off the face of the earth.… Other races have their own problems to solve. They’re glad to give the Jews a lift and help them along the way toward tolerance, but they’re not going to drop everything and solve the problems of the Jews for them. Jews who take an unfair advantage of the fact that theirs is a persecuted race do not help much.… Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind.” Kennedy’s discussion of anti-Semitism was withheld from publication at the time by the editors of the Globe, but in 1959 Dinneen sought to include a portion of it in a generally flattering precampaign family biography. Advance galleys of the Dinneen book, entitled The Kennedy Family, had been given to Jack Kennedy, who understood how inflammatory his father’s comments would be and had no difficulty in successfully urging Dinneen to delete the offending paragraphs. The incident is described in Richard Whalen’s biography of Joe Kennedy.




(#ulink_bf1b649d-b451-58b8-a644-3f16ee0c808e) Beck resigned as chief of staff in protest against Hitler’s plan to invade Czechoslovakia, and was involved in a series of plots against Hitler for the next six years. He shot himself after the failure of Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s final attempt to assassinate Hitler, by bomb, on July 20, 1944. Halder, who served as chief of staff until September 1942, was arrested in the Gestapo’s widespread roundup after the 1944 bomb attempt and placed in a concentration camp. He survived the war.




(#ulink_589d6bf1-2379-57aa-b8ff-f073856e4106) Even Rose Kennedy knew something was up. In her gossipy memoir, Times to Remember, she described an early 1939 lunch at 10 Downing Street at which she asked Chamberlain “if Hitler died would he be more confident about peace, and he said he would.” Rose defended her husband’s contrary view in her memoir, published in 1974, insisting that “of course, no one knew then that Hitler was criminally insane and had no intention of living by humane standards except his own demented ones, and that his promises meant nothing to him.” In Mrs. Kennedy’s view, presumably, “no one” would not include the millions of Jews who were being systematically persecuted throughout Germany and German-occupied Central Europe by 1939.




(#ulink_473fc038-27a5-5081-b440-a83b09e79fc8) In an interview in 1962 with Richard J. Whalen, Corcoran depicted Kennedy, with grudging admiration, as having staged a “remarkable coup d’état” in putting his son into the presidency. “You have to look at this piece of energy adapting itself to its time,” Corcoran said. “A man not afraid to think in a daring way. He had imperial instinct. He knew what he wanted—money and status for his family. What other end is there but power?” Jack Kennedy’s election in 1960 was a “long-shot risk,” Corcoran added, into which Joe Kennedy “slammed money.… These are not the attributes of the philosopher, the humanitarian, educators or priests. These are the attributes of those in command.”




(#ulink_707d350a-c4c1-56d1-a2f0-7bfd996b967d) Bullitt and the president were briefly put on the defensive in late March 1940, when the German Foreign Office released a series of diplomatic documents that had been found in Polish archives after the seizure of Warsaw the previous September. In a private conversation in November 1938, Bullitt was said by Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish ambassador to Washington, to have expressed “great vehemence and strong hatred about Germany and Chancellor Hitler. He said only strength, and that at the conclusion of a war, could make an end of the mad expansion of the Germans in the future.” In a talk a few weeks later, Bullitt was said to have given the Poles “moral assurance that the United States will leave its isolationist policy and be prepared in the event of war to participate actively on the side of France and Britain.” The White House quickly characterized the documents as propaganda and put out a statement, in Roosevelt’s name, urging that they “be taken with several grains of salt.” Over the next few days, however, reporters in Berlin were shown the documents in question and found them to have all the appearance of being genuine. One set of the Polish papers released by the Germans dealt with an interview with Joseph Kennedy, who, in a June 1939 talk with Jan Wszelaki, a Polish trade official, was quoted as boasting that his two eldest sons, Joseph and John, had recently traveled all over Europe and “intended to make a series of lectures on the European situation … after their return to the United States, at Harvard University … ‘You have no idea,’” Wszelaki further quoted Kennedy as telling him, “‘to what extent my oldest boy … has the President’s ear. I might say that the President believes him more than me.’”




6 TAKING ON FDR (#ulink_81d0901e-b8af-5011-afde-10cf05f0d043)


By early October 1940, there was very bad blood between the president and his reluctant ambassador in England. Kennedy wanted out and he didn’t care who knew it. On October 10, he took advantage of a farewell meeting in London with Foreign Minister Halifax to issue a warning to Roosevelt—correctly anticipating that the British Foreign Office would relay the threat to the State Department via the British Embassy in Washington. “His principal complaint,” Halifax reported to the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, was that

they had not kept him adequately informed of their policy and doings during the last two or three months.… He told me that he had sent an article to the United States to appear on November 1st, if by any accident he was not able to get there, which would be of considerable importance appearing five days before the Presidential election. When I asked him what would be the main burden of his song, he gave me to understand that it would be an indictment of President Roosevelt’s administration for having talked a lot and done very little. He is plainly a very disappointed and rather embittered man.

Kennedy was more than embittered; he was in a rage. “I’m going back and tell the truth. I’m going home and tell the American people that that son of a bitch in the White House is going to kill their sons,” he told Harvey Klemmer over lunch on the day before he left London, as Klemmer recounted in the television interview made available for this book.

Arthur Krock, Kennedy’s faithful scribe, provided a detailed account of Kennedy’s blackmail plottings in his Memoirs:

On October 16 Kennedy sent a cablegram to the President insisting that he be allowed to come home.… That same day Kennedy telephoned … and said that if he did not get a favorable reply to his cablegram, he was coming home anyhow; … that he had written a full account of the facts to Edward Moore, his secretary in New York, with instructions to release the story to the press if the Ambassador were not back in New York by a certain date. A few hours after this conversation the cabled permission to return was received.

Kennedy’s “full account” referred to the extensive exchange of cables between Roosevelt and Churchill that had been relayed through the American Embassy. Those secret cables had a secret history known to only a few in America and England in the spring of 1940. Kennedy had been shocked in May when a special unit of British counterintelligence staged a late-night raid on the apartment of Tyler Kent, an American Embassy code clerk, and uncovered a cache of more than 1,500 decoded diplomatic cables that Kent had taken home. Kennedy took the unusual step of immediately revoking Kent’s diplomatic immunity—State Department immunity has never been revoked since—and Kent was secretly tried and convicted in a London court. He spent the war years in an isolated British prison on the Isle of Wight.

Kennedy’s decisive action to keep Kent’s betrayal of his nation—as well as the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence—from becoming public has been credited by historians as high-minded and exemplary. Had this not been done, Kent could have been tried in America; his documents would become part of the court record, triggering anger and resentment in the Congress and among the many Americans opposed to U.S. involvement in the war in Europe. The furor, the historian Michael Beschloss wrote in his Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance, published in 1980, “might have eliminated any chance of a third term for the president and made it nearly impossible for him to move public opinion so swiftly toward aid to the Allies.… [Kennedy] was unwilling to influence American policy at the cost of an act that seemed illegitimate and disloyal.”

Kennedy had much more to gain, however, by making private use of the Tyler Kent materials in his war against FDR. American Embassy files show that on May 20, 1940, the day of Kent’s arrest, Ambassador Kennedy arranged to ship a diplomatic pouch full of “personal mail and various packages” to Washington, in the care of a friend in the State Department. On May 23, three days after Kent’s arrest, Kennedy sought and received authorization from the State Department for Edward Moore, his exceedingly faithful personal assistant, to return to New York with Rose Kennedy and their retarded daughter, Rosemary. Moore left London on May 28 and never went back.

Tyler Kent, obsessed with hatred for Kennedy, lived in obscurity after the war as a gentleman farmer in rural Maryland. The FBI files on his case remained secret until 1982, when the British journalist John Costello, an expert on World War II history, obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act. Costello, who died in 1995, also obtained scores of State Department documents on the Kent affair, including many of Ambassador Kennedy’s cables to Washington. Costello approached Kent, who was intrigued by the newly released documents and agreed to a series of detailed interviews. In those interviews, Kent is quoted as explaining that his interest in the secret cables had been aroused only after Kennedy ordered him “to make copies of nonroutine messages that went in and out of the embassy for Kennedy’s personal file.” Kennedy also instructed Kent to retrieve all of Roosevelt’s coded exchanges, dating back to the 1938 Munich accord, with Ambassador William C. Bullitt in Paris and with the other ambassador widely known to be avidly anti-Hitler, Anthony Drexel Biddle, in Warsaw.


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The Kent matter languished until later in the 1980s, when Robert T. Crowley, a counterintelligence officer who specialized in Soviet penetrations of the West, retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. “There were a couple of guys left over when I retired, and one was Kent,” Crowley recalled in an interview for this book. “I thought the guy was unstable” and a possible Soviet KGB agent. As a former CIA officer, Crowley had connections. Over the next few years he was able to obtain access to previously unavailable government files on Tyler Kent. The Kent-KGB spy story soon petered out, Crowley said: “Tyler never developed into anything we thought. We couldn’t demonstrate that he was working for the Soviets, or the Germans, or the Italians. He was working for Tyler—and he’s trying to save the United States from Roosevelt. He was everybody’s tool. Just a kooky half-wit.” But Crowley did find documentation, he told me, that convinced him that Kennedy had been assembling a political dossier on FDR, and was using Kent to get access to the potentially damaging Roosevelt-Churchill cables.

In Crowley’s view, Kennedy’s refusal of diplomatic immunity to Kent, thus assuring that he would be held without access to the American press, was a brilliant move. Kennedy made another brilliant move, Crowley said; he arranged to ship his copies of the sensitive and politically incriminating Churchill-Roosevelt cablegrams to America. Edward Moore, once in America, could retrieve the copies and prepare for the coming showdown with Roosevelt. The cablegrams, Crowley told me, “put Kennedy in a marvelous position with FDR. He had him in a spot and could possibly deny him his reelection. He had a knife.”



Joe Kennedy declared war on the White House. Historians agree on what happened next: Kennedy arrived in Washington on the evening of October 26, amid much press speculation that he was planning to endorse Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate. The election was only ten days away. Kennedy’s flight from London had been delayed for days by poor weather, and en route he received a series of urgent and confidential messages from FDR inviting him to dinner at the White House. The two men talked early on the twenty-sixth—Kennedy was then in Bermuda, on the last leg of his Pan Am Clipper flight to New York—and Roosevelt’s side of the conversation was overheard by Lyndon Baines Johnson, then an ambitious young congressman from Texas, who happened to be visiting the Oval Office. “Ah, Joe,” the president said, “it is so good to hear your voice. Please come to the White House tonight for a little family dinner.” Over the years, Johnson would dramatically tell many journalists what happened next: FDR slowly drew his hand across his throat and added, “I’m dying to talk to you.”

Exactly what took place at the Kennedy-Roosevelt White House meeting may never be known. In Joe Kennedy’s much-quoted version, as relayed by him to Arthur Krock, FDR was at his most charming with Kennedy and his wife, who had been personally invited by Roosevelt to join her husband at dinner. There was the inevitable praise for Kennedy’s children and a presidential willingness to listen to Kennedy’s complaints about the way he had been ignored and mistreated while in London. Roosevelt claimed, according to the account in Krock’s memoir, that “he had known nothing about these matters; the fault lay with the State Department.” FDR’s sweet-talking prevailed, according to Krock. Temporarily smitten, Kennedy agreed to make a radio speech calling for Roosevelt’s reelection.

That explanation, given the well-documented and high level of hostility between the president and his ambassador, is simply not believable. In later years, Kennedy provided at least two different reasons for his turnabout. He told the journalist Stewart Alsop that the president had held out the hope that a strong endorsement in the radio talk could lead to FDR’s backing for a Kennedy presidential campaign in 1944. And Kennedy explained to Clare Boothe Luce, wife of his longtime friend Henry Luce, publisher of Time magazine, that “we agreed that if I endorsed him for president in 1940, then he would support my son Joe for governor of Massachusetts in 1942.” Kennedy and Roosevelt viewed each other as consummate liars, so a presidential promise of future support—even if one was, in fact, proffered—would have meant little.

A far more compelling reason for Kennedy’s decision to make the radio speech was provided by Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, who in 1960 privately told the New York Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger that MI5 had provided Roosevelt with a collection of intercepted Kennedy cables and telephone calls in which the ambassador was critical of the president. The cables were passed to Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill’s close friend and adviser, who, with Churchill’s approval, passed them along to FDR’s trusted aide Harry Hopkins. There is yet another version, which Joe Kennedy told Harvey Klemmer, who was surprised, as were many in London, at Kennedy’s last-minute endorsement of the despised Roosevelt. In his Thames TV interview, Klemmer recalled a later conversation with Kennedy about the radio address. “I said the press was speculating that FDR had dragged out an old tax return and said, ‘Joe, you wouldn’t want me to show this to the public, would you?’ And [Kennedy] said, ‘That’s a damn lie. I fixed that up long ago.’ So,” noted Klemmer, “there had been a tax mix-up at one time or another.”

Whatever the truth, the president and his ambassador had become two scorpions in a bottle: Kennedy could damage and perhaps destroy Roosevelt’s reelection chances by making public the Tyler Kent documents; Roosevelt, with Churchill’s help, had assembled an equally lethal dossier of telephone and cable intercepts. The full story lies buried, perhaps forever, in classified U.S. and British archives.

Kennedy’s half-hour radio speech on October 29 reassured Americans that the United States “must and will stay out of war.” No secret commitments had been made to the British by the Roosevelt administration, Kennedy said. And as for the oft-stated charge that the president was attempting “to involve this country in world war … such a charge is false.” The speech was jolting to those who knew what Kennedy really understood about Roosevelt’s war policy. In his memoirs, Arthur Krock noted: “The speech was out of keeping, not only with the wholly opposite view he had been expressing privately (to me, among others), but with Kennedy’s earned reputation as one of the most forthright men in public life.”

Three days after the election, Kennedy self-destructed. In an interview with Louis Lyons of the Boston Globe and two other journalists, he essentially declared that Hitler had won the war in Europe. “Democracy is finished in England,” Kennedy told Lyons. “Don’t let anybody tell you you can get used to incessant bombing. There’s nowhere in England they aren’t getting it.… It’s a question of how long England can hold out.… I’m willing to spend all I’ve got to keep us out of the war. There’s no sense in our getting in. We’d just be holding the bag.” The story made headlines. The American response was devastating for Kennedy: thousands of citizens wrote Roosevelt urging him to fire his defeatist ambassador. The British took it in stride, more astonished by Kennedy’s suicidal indiscretion in granting the interview than by its substance. Kennedy’s departure from London, during the Battle of Britain, with its nightly bombings and aerial dogfights, was seen by many as a cowardly retreat under fire. T. North Whitehead, one of the American specialists in the British Foreign Office, filed yet another caustic note in the office’s Kennediana file: “It rather looks as though he was thoroughly frightened when in London and has gone to pieces in consequence.”

The interview eroded Kennedy’s public support and ended his dreams of being elected to high public office in 1940. It also gave his enemies the courage to be his enemies.

Roosevelt finally lashed out at Kennedy after a private meeting with him at Thanksgiving; Kennedy was to be a weekend guest of the president and his wife at their estate at Hyde Park. It is not known precisely what took place, but Roosevelt ordered Kennedy to leave. Eleanor Roosevelt later told the writer Gore Vidal that she had never seen her husband so angry. Kennedy had been alone with the president no longer than ten minutes, Mrs. Roosevelt related, when an aide informed her that she was to go immediately to her husband’s office.

So I rushed into the office and there was Franklin, white as a sheet. He asked Mr. Kennedy to step outside and then he said, and his voice was shaking, “I never want to see that man again as long as I live. Get him out of here.” I said, “But, dear, you’ve invited him for the weekend, and we’ve got guests for lunch and the train doesn’t leave until two,” and Franklin said, “Then you drive him around Hyde Park and put him on that train.” And I did and it was the most dreadful four hours of my life.

Just what happened between the two men is not known, but Vidal, recounting the scene in a 1971 essay for the New York Review of Books, quoted Mrs. Roosevelt as wistfully adding, “I wonder if the true story of Joe Kennedy will ever be known.” (Discussing the scene years later, in an interview for this book, Vidal said he thought at the time that Mrs. Roosevelt’s real message was not only that the truth about Kennedy would not be known, but that it would be “too dangerous to tell.”)

Kennedy’s resignation as ambassador became official early in 1941. He would never serve in public office again.



Kennedy soon learned that having Roosevelt as an enemy meant having J. Edgar Hoover as an enemy, too. Published and private reports available to the White House and the British Foreign Ministry early in 1941 alleged that a notorious Wall Street speculator named Bernard E. “Ben” Smith had traveled to Vichy France in an attempt to revive an isolationist plan, favored by Kennedy, to provide Germany with a large gold loan in exchange for a pledge of peace. Kennedy, still intent on saving American capitalism from the ravages of war, was described in one British document as “doing everything in his power to try and bring this about.” Smith, known as “Sell ’Em Ben” in his Wall Street heyday, was identified as Kennedy’s emissary. In a confidential report to the Foreign Ministry dated February 4, Kennedy was reported to have sent Smith to visit senior officials of Vichy France in an effort to encourage “Hitler to try to find some formula for the reconstruction of Europe.… Having secured this, [Kennedy] hoped that, with the help of two prominent persons in England.… [he could] start an agitation in England in favour of a negotiated peace.” Roosevelt had learned of the Kennedy plan in advance, according to the Foreign Office report, and was able to abort it. Smith, a heavy contributor to Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign, did travel to Vichy France in late 1940, but the plan went nowhere. On May 3, 1941, nonetheless, Hoover—getting his facts wrong—told Roosevelt that the FBI had learned from a “socially prominent” source that Kennedy and Smith had met secretly with Hermann Göring in Vichy, “and that thereafter Kennedy and Smith had donated a considerable amount of money to the German cause.” There was no evidence that Kennedy went to Europe with Smith, and no evidence that a meeting with Göring took place; but Hoover clearly understood that the discredited Kennedy was fair game—at least inside FDR’s White House.



By December 7, 1941, with Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and America finally in the war, it was over for Joe Kennedy. Caught up in his ambitions and his fears for the world economy, he had failed to see how Franklin Roosevelt connected to the American people. Kennedy, with his relentless social climbing and political scheming, had been on the wrong side of the greatest moral issue in his life—the need to stop Hitler’s Germany. It was a mistake his son Jack would not make.

Joe Kennedy’s political ambitions shifted, with a vengeance, to his two oldest sons, who would become his political surrogates, and would get the benefit of his money, intellect, and willingness to do anything. Joe Jr. was completing navy flight training in Jacksonville, Florida; Jack, a navy ensign, was assigned to the headquarters of the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, where he was put to work writing daily and weekly intelligence bulletins.

Even with the war on, Jack Kennedy still managed to find time for partying. Just before the end of the year he initiated a torrid affair with a married Danish journalist, Inga Marie Arvad, who was estranged from her husband, a Hungarian movie director named Paul Fejos. Arvad, a former beauty queen, had interviewed Hitler and briefly socialized with him and other leading Nazis in 1936, while covering the Olympics for a Danish newspaper. She had been spotted by Arthur Krock while attending the Columbia School of Journalism in 1941. Krock recommended her to Frank Waldrop, the editor of the isolationist Washington Times-Herald, and Waldrop hired her to write a fluffy human interest column that focused on new arrivals to wartime Washington. Jack Kennedy was among those she interviewed. The handsome twenty-four-year-old navy officer fell in love with the older, more experienced, and far more sophisticated former beauty queen.

The FBI, alerted to Arvad’s meeting with Hitler by a jealous fellow reporter on the Times-Herald, marked her as a potential Nazi spy and began an investigation into her background. One early allegation, eventually discredited, was that Arvad’s uncle was a chief of police in Berlin. By early 1942, J. Edgar Hoover, at the direct insistence of FDR, became personally involved in the Arvad investigation. The next step was classic Hoover. Walter Winchell, firmly established as the FBI director’s favorite columnist, published the following item on January 12: “One of Ex-Ambassador Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections. So much so she has consulted her barrister about divorcing her exploring groom. Pa Kennedy no like.” A few days later, Hoover personally relayed a warning to Joe Kennedy, as JFK told it, that “Jack was in big trouble and he should get him out of Washington immediately.”

Eager to save his son’s career, Joe Kennedy arranged for Jack’s immediate transfer to a desk job at a base in Charleston, South Carolina. Jack continued, nonetheless, to meet with Arvad for the next two months, as the FBI—at Hoover’s direction—maintained round-the-clock surveillance, wiretapping her in Charleston and at her apartment in Washington. Agents even broke into her apartment to plant eavesdropping devices and to search through her papers and other belongings. No evidence linking Arvad to any wrongdoing was found, but the FBI—and Hoover—accumulated a large file of explicit tape recordings of the lovers at play. Joe Kennedy was overheard on the FBI wiretaps discussing politics with his son, who, the transcripts showed, was writing drafts of his father’s speeches. One FBI summary, as reported in JFK: Reckless Youth, by the British biographer Nigel Hamilton, showed that Joe Kennedy had political ambitions at an early stage not only for Joe Jr., as is widely known, but also for his second-born son. The FBI summary said Jack told Arvad that his father had stopped fully defending his very unpopular political positions in public “due to the fact that he believed it might hurt his two sons later in public.” The FBI wiretaps further showed that Arvad, while involved with Jack Kennedy, was also spending some nights with Bernard Baruch, the international financier and stock market speculator, who was close to the White House.


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Young Kennedy’s involvement with Arvad dwindled by early March. Arvad got divorced in June 1942, moved to California, married the cowboy movie star Tim McCoy, and received her American citizenship. One of her references was Frank Waldrop, her former editor. In an unpublished essay written in 1978 and provided for this book, Waldrop, by then long retired, whimsically recalled how the much-ado-about-nothing FBI investigation had begun. A young female Times-Herald journalist who, wrote Waldrop, was Arvad’s rival for the attentions of the handsome Jack Kennedy, breathlessly informed him in the office one day that Arvad had been photographed in Hitler’s box during the 1936 Olympics. “That did it,” Waldrop wrote. “There was a row. So I took Inga by the elbow on one side and the other girl on the other and marched the pair of them over to the Washington field office of the FBI and told the agent in charge: ‘This young lady says that young lady is a German spy.’” At the time, Waldrop wrote, he did not know that a similar report by a fellow female student at the Columbia School of Journalism had been filed the previous year. “Nor did I guess what was going to happen next”—that a memorandum was sent by Roosevelt “directly to Hoover calling on him to have Inga ‘specially watched.’ How did FDR find out about Inga? Who broke in on his war planning to tell him about so trivial a matter, at the very time that the most critical moment of the war in the Pacific—the Battle of Midway—was in the making? I don’t know, though I have tried to find out.” In the end, Waldrop concluded, “Inga was no spy. Never had been. I have the official conclusions of the Department of Justice.”


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Waldrop’s assertions were confirmed in an interview with Cartha DeLoach, the FBI’s deputy director who worked closely with Hoover for nearly thirty years. “The investigation on Inga Arvad never conclusively proved that she was a German espionage agent,” DeLoach told me in 1997. “She had an amorous relationship with John F. Kennedy. And basically that’s what the files contained. She was never indicted, never brought into court, never convicted.”

Joe Kennedy understood what was going on. While some FBI field agents perhaps believed they were dealing with a true national security threat in the pretty Inga Arvad, the men at the top—Franklin Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover—were interested in payback, in reminding Joe Kennedy to stay in line and to remember that he was dealing with enemies who would be only too happy to hurt him. The FBI, as Joe Kennedy had to understand, had enough in its file on Jack Kennedy, complete with sound effects, to stop a future political career in its tracks.

Joe Kennedy knew what to do to safeguard his ambitions for his sons off at war. He had strayed from the church of Hoover and now sought redemption. In September 1943, Freedom of Information files show, Kennedy volunteered himself to the FBI bureau in Boston as a “Special Service Contact” and declared that “he would be glad to assist the Bureau in any way possible should his services be needed.” In a letter to Hoover, Edward A. Soucy, the agent in charge of the Boston Bureau, added: “Mr. Kennedy speaks very highly of the Bureau and the director, and has indicated that if he were ever in a position to make any official recommendations there would be one Federal investigative unit and that would be headed by J. Edgar Hoover.” A pleased Hoover accepted Kennedy’s offer and outlined, in a subsequent letter to Soucy, some of the requirements: “Every effort should be made to provide him [Kennedy] with investigative assignments in keeping with his particular ability and the Bureau should be advised as to the nature of these assignments, together with the results obtained.”

The full extent of Joe Kennedy’s machinations will never be known, but he left little to chance. The investigation into Inga Arvad and her relationship with Ensign Jack Kennedy had been supervised inside the Justice Department by James M. McInerney, who in 1942 was chief of the department’s national defense and internal security units. A former FBI agent, McInerney would remain in high policy positions in the Justice Department for the next ten years. In late 1952 McInerney successfully intervened to get Bobby Kennedy, just a year out of law school, a job as a staff attorney on the powerful Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In 1953 McInerney went into the practice of law as a sole practitioner, opening up a small office on F Street in downtown Washington. Joe Kennedy and his three sons, Jack, Bobby, and Ted, were among his first clients, and they remained certainly his most important ones. Over the next decade, James McInerney would handle many sensitive matters on behalf of the Kennedy family and Jack Kennedy’s presidential ambitions. Women were seen, bribes were offered, and cases were settled—all in secrecy.




(#ulink_f411ac97-1c91-5c99-9b42-ed826d1b7d7d) Kent, after seeing Costello, kept on talking. In a separate interview later in 1982 with the BBC’s Newsnight television show, he explained how easy it had been to smuggle the cable traffic out of the embassy code room. One source, he told the journalist Richard Harris, was to obtain cable copies that were “surplus and were to be incinerated … burnt in an incinerator.… Another source was that Ambassador Kennedy was having copies of important political documents made for his own private collection. Part of my function was to make these copies, and it was quite simple to slip in an extra carbon.” The BBC show reported that Kent, described as an “amateur,” had been followed for eight months by British counterintelligence before his arrest.




(#ulink_41b8a1ee-392a-5660-bc00-0628ebaba969) Arvad’s nickname for Baruch, Frank Waldrop told me, was “the old goat.” Baruch could be very indiscreet, Waldrop wrote in an unpublished essay made available for this book, and the FBI agents assigned to wiretap the Arvad apartment gossiped about Baruch’s many telephone conversations with her. During the early years of the war, Waldrop said, he often traded gossip with the old financier, sometimes over lunch on a bench in Lafayette Park, near the White House. “It was on just such a bench,” Waldrop recalled, “that I heard about what was going on down at Oak Ridge, Tennessee—something about a bomb made of split atoms—for which Baruch was helping put together the labor force. He told me to keep mum and I did, but that should signify that Baruch was a very heavy carrier of important information in World War II. And he was tickled to have Inga come up to visit him, weekends, at his place on Long Island. He also carried on long palavers with her on the telephone which the FBI faithfully took down.” It’s not known whether Hoover, an expert on double standards, intervened with Baruch, as he did with Joe Kennedy.




(#ulink_20c9a7d1-3c95-5557-80c1-5aee1f0b982b)In an interview for this book in 1995, the ninety-year-old Waldrop, who first met Joe Kennedy, a fellow isolationist, in the 1930s, said that “the best way I know how to tell you how much smarter Franklin Roosevelt was than Joe Kennedy” was by citing a classic FDR story that had been relayed to him by Edward A. Tamm, a senior aide to Hoover who later became a highly respected judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Tamm began, Waldrop said, by asking whether Waldrop “knew the difference between an amateur and a pro.” Waldrop said no. Tamm then told him the following: “FDR asked Hoover to come along to the White House. Hoover brought me along. He asked Hoover to get the goods on Jim Farley,” the politically contentious postmaster general who was suspected by Roosevelt of leaking inside stories to an anti-Roosevelt newspaper columnist.

“Hoover said, ‘I won’t do it.’

“FDR outraged: ‘What!’

“Hoover: ‘I won’t do it.’

“FDR: ‘I’m ordering you to.’”

At this point, Tamm told Waldrop, Roosevelt was “quick enough to realize something was up. He asked Hoover: ‘Why not?’

“Hoover: ‘I’ll put it on the other guy’”—the reporter—rather than wiretap a member of the cabinet.

“Roosevelt almost fell down laughing,” Tamm told Waldrop, “and said, ‘Edgar, I’m not going to tell you your business anymore.’”

Waldrop’s point was that Roosevelt was tougher than Kennedy in ways Kennedy could not fathom: “Joe never understood how FDR could smile and smile and be a villain. Joe thought once he was dealing with a friend, they could make a crooked deal.”




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John F. Kennedy’s rise is a story that has been told and retold in hundreds of biographies and histories. The senator, always suntanned, with his photogenic wife and daughter, was the subject of articles for national magazines month after month in the late 1950s. When he wasn’t being interviewed, the senator, who relied on speechwriters on his staff and those in the pay of his father, published scores of newspaper and magazine articles as well as the bestselling Profiles in Courage, which won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Kennedy’s political standing was given an enormous boost at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, when he narrowly lost a dramatic floor fight against Senator Estes Kefauver for the nomination as Adlai Stevenson’s vice presidential running mate in the party’s doomed campaign against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy’s grace and seeming good humor in defeat, and his boyish good looks—viewed by millions of television watchers—overrode his lackluster record in the Senate and made him an early favorite for the party’s nomination in 1960. Kennedy ran hard over the next four years, spending most weekends making speeches and paying political dues at fund-raising dinners across America.

He made his mark not in the Senate, where his legislative output remained undistinguished, but among the voters, who responded to Kennedy as they would to a famous athlete or popular movie star. From the start the campaign was orchestrated by Joe Kennedy, who as a one-time Hollywood mogul understood that his son should run for president as a star and not as just another politician. In an exceptionally candid interview in late 1959 at Hyannis Port with the journalist Ed Plaut, then writing a preelection biography of Jack, the elder Kennedy said that his son had become “the greatest attraction in the country today. I’ll tell you how to sell more copies of your book,” Kennedy told Plaut. “Put his picture on the cover.” Plaut made a transcript of his interview available for this book.

“Why is it,” Kennedy asked, “that when his picture is on the cover of Life or Redbook that they sell a record number of copies? You advertise the fact that he will be at a dinner and you will break all records for attendance. He will draw more people to a fund-raising dinner than Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart and anyone else you can name. Why is that? He has the greatest universal appeal. I can’t explain that. There is no answer to Jack’s appeal. He is the biggest attraction in the country today. That is why the Democratic Party is going to nominate him. The party leaders realize that to win they have to nominate him.

“The nomination is a cinch,” Joe Kennedy told the reporter. “I’m not a bit worried about the nomination.”

By the summer of 1960, with brother Bobby serving as campaign manager and father Joe as a one-man political brain trust—as well as secret paymaster—Jack Kennedy arrived at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles as an unstoppable front-runner who apparently had earned the right to be the presidential candidate by running in, and winning, Democratic primary elections across America. He had conducted a brilliant campaign that would set the standard for future generations of ambitious politicians, especially in its relentless tracking and cataloguing of delegate votes. One of Kennedy’s loyal aides, Ted Sorensen, would describe admiringly in Kennedy, his 1965 memoir, how Kennedy went over the heads of the backroom politicians and took his campaign to the people:

He had during 1960 alone traveled some 65,000 air miles in more than two dozen states—many of them in the midst of crucial primary fights, most of them with his wife—and he made some 350 speeches on every conceivable subject. He had voted, introduced bills or spoken on every current issue, without retractions or apologies. He had talked in person to state conventions, party leaders, delegates and tens of thousands of voters. He had used every spare moment on the telephone. He had made no promises he could not keep and promised no jobs to anyone.

What no outsider could imagine—and what Sorensen did not write about—was the obstacles overcome and the carefully hidden deals engineered as Kennedy achieved one political victory after another en route to Los Angeles.



Kennedy’s most important primary victory came on May 10 in West Virginia. In his campaigning in the state, Kennedy directly confronted the religious issue, telling audiences, for example, that no one cared that he was a Catholic when he was asked to fight in World War II. He defeated Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota by more than 84,000 votes. In his memoir, Sorensen quoted another of Kennedy’s unsuccessful rivals for the nomination, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, as saying after the convention: “He had just a little more courage, … stamina, wisdom and character than any of the rest of us.”

Sorensen’s account, as with so much of the Kennedy history as told by Kennedy insiders, has many elements of truth but is far from the whole story. The Kennedys did not depend solely on hard work and stamina to win the primary elections en route to the Democratic nomination. They spent as never before in American political history. In West Virginia, the Kennedys spent at least $2 million (nearly $11 million in today’s dollars), and possibly twice that amount—much of it in direct payoffs to state and local officials.

A far more complete account of the campaign emerges in the unpublished memoir of one of Kennedy’s most trusted, and little-known, advisers during the 1960 campaign, Hyman B. Raskin, a Chicago lawyer who had helped manage Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956. Raskin had been recruited in late 1957 by Joe Kennedy, and secretly paid, to help plan and organize his son’s drive for the presidency. Raskin, who after the 1960 election retired to his law practice, died in comfortable obscurity in 1995 at the age of eighty-six in Rancho Mirage, California. His widow, Frances, later provided for this book a copy of his memoir, entitled A Laborer in the Vineyards, which contains a rare firsthand account of Joe Kennedy’s direct, and powerful, intervention in national politics on behalf of his son—interventions that were always hidden from the press. In Raskin’s account, the combination of unlimited campaign funding, Joe Kennedy’s high-level political connections, and Jack Kennedy’s strong showing in the Democratic primaries—especially his West Virginia victory—enabled the Kennedys to fly to Los Angeles knowing they had enough ironclad delegate commitments to win on the first ballot.

At the convention site, Raskin was entrusted with the all-important task of running communications. The Kennedys, in one of their political innovations, had leased a trailer and filled it with state-of-the-art communications gear that enabled the campaign’s backroom operators to reach the leaders of state delegations instantly. In his memoir, Raskin depicted the convention as anticlimactic for the campaign insiders: “We were confident that the [delegate count] numbers which the state reports produced would closely approximate those we had before the initial [convention] meeting was held.… It appeared impossible for Kennedy to lose the nomination. The votes merely needed to be officially tabulated; therefore, in my opinion, if he failed, it would be the result of some uncontrollable event.”

Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson’s last-minute declaration just days before the convention that he would, after all, be a candidate for the presidency—an announcement that created a flurry of press reports—was too little, too late, in Raskin’s view. “The front-runner was unbeatable,” he wrote. “For unknown reasons, some members of the press refused to concede the nomination of Kennedy, ignoring the arithmetic reported by their associates.… Johnson and his managers must have had access to the same information. Much of it was published and verifiable through Johnson connections in almost every state. Why then, I asked myself, did the anti-Kennedy forces continue their futile struggle?” Johnson stayed in the race until the presidential balloting and suffered an overwhelming defeat by Kennedy on the convention floor.

The fact that Kennedy had locked up the nomination weeks in advance of the convention was one of the campaign’s secrets. There were other secrets far more damaging, any one of which, if exposed, could cost the handsome young candidate his otherwise assured presidential nomination.



The most dangerous problem confronting the Kennedys before the convention was the hardest to fix, for it was posed by a group of reporters from the Wall Street Journal who were raising questions about the huge sums of cash that had been spent by the Kennedys to assure victory in the West Virginia primary. Their story, triggered by the instincts of an on-the-scene journalist, never made it into print.

Alan L. Otten, the Journal correspondent who covered the campaign, had been stunned by the strong Kennedy showing. He had spent weeks walking through the cities and towns of the coal counties and concluded, as he wrote for the Journal, that Humphrey would capitalize on the pronounced anti-Catholicism in West Virginia and win the Democratic primary handily. “Every miner I talked to was going to vote for Humphrey,” Otten recalled in a 1994 interview for this book. The reporter, who later became chief of the Journal’s news bureau in Washington, was suspicious when the votes were counted and urged his newspaper to undertake an extensive investigation into Kennedy vote buying. “We were fairly convinced that huge sums of money traded hands,” Otten told me.

Buying votes was nothing new in West Virginia, where political control was tightly held by sheriffs or political committeemen in each of the state’s fifty-five counties. Their control was abetted by the enormous number of candidates who competed for local office in the Democratic primary, resulting in huge paper ballots that made voting a potentially interminable process. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1960 campaign, The Making of the President, 1960, the journalist Theodore H. White noted that the primary ballots for Kanawha County, largest in the state, filled three full pages when published the day before in the Charleston Gazette. Sheriffs and other political leaders in each county made the process less bewildering for voters by putting together lists, or slates, of approved party candidates for each office. Some candidates for statewide offices or for important local posts, such as sheriff or assessor, invariably ended up on two, three, or more slates passed out on election day by campaign workers. The unwieldy procedure continues today.

The sheriffs and party leaders were also responsible for hiring precinct workers and poll watchers for election day. Political tradition in the state called for the statewide candidates to pay some or all of the county’s election expenses in return for being placed at the top of a political leader’s slate. Paying a few dollars per vote on election day was widespread in some areas, as was the payment for “Lever Brothers” (named after the popular detergent maker)—election officers in various precincts who were instructed to actually walk into the ballot booth with voters and cast their ballots for them.

The Journal’s investigative team, which included Roscoe C. Born, of the Washington bureau, spent the next five weeks in May and June in West Virginia and learned that the Kennedys had turned what had historically been random election fraud into a statewide pattern of corruption, and had apparently stolen the election from Hubert Humphrey. The reporters concluded that huge sums of Kennedy money had been funneled into the state, much of it from Chicago, where R. Sargent Shriver, a Chicagoan who had married Jack’s sister Eunice in 1953, represented the family’s business interests. The reporters were told that much of the money had been delivered by a longtime Shriver friend named James B. McCahey, Jr., who was president of a Chicago coal company that held contracts for delivering coal to the city’s public school system. As a coal buyer earlier in his career, McCahey had spent time traveling through West Virginia, whose mines routinely produced more than 100 million tons of coal a year. Roscoe Born and a colleague traveled to Chicago to interview McCahey “and he snowed us completely,” Born recalled in a series of interviews for this book. Nonetheless, the reporter said, “there was no doubt in my mind that [Kennedy] money was dispensed to local machines where they controlled the votes.”

Born, convinced that he and his colleagues had collected enough information to write a devastating exposé, moved with his typewriter into a hotel near the Journal’s office in downtown Washington. He was facing a stringent deadline—the Democratic convention was only a few weeks away—and also a great deal of unease among the newspaper’s senior editors.

As with many investigative newspaper stories, there was no smoking gun: none of the newspaper’s sources reported seeing a representative of the Kennedy campaign give money to a West Virginian. “We knew they were meeting,” Otten recalled in our interview, “but we had nothing showing the actual handing over of money.” The Journal’s top editors asked for affidavits from some of the sources who were to be quoted in the exposé; when the journalists could not obtain them, the editors ruled that the article could not be published. “The story could have been written, but we’d have to imply, rather than nail down, some elements,” Born said. “I really wanted to do it, but I can see that the editors would be nervous about doing it practically on the eve of the convention.” Other Journal reporters were told that Born and his colleagues had “gotten the goods,” as one put it, on the Kennedy spending in West Virginia. The columnist Robert D. Novak, then a political reporter on the Journal, recalled in an interview for this book hearing that the newspaper’s top management had concluded that the West Virginia money story could affect the proceedings in Los Angeles, and it was not “the place of the Wall Street Journal to determine the Democratic nominee for president.”

The Journal’s reporting team was far closer to the truth than its editors could imagine. Jack Kennedy had wanted a clean sweep in the April 5 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, aiming to defeat Hubert Humphrey in all ten of the state’s congressional districts, and he campaigned long hours to get one. He was bitterly disappointed when he won only six districts—and, most important, when his showing failed to discourage the equally hardworking Humphrey, who decided to continue his presidential campaigning in West Virginia. It was understood by professional politicians that Humphrey, too, would be putting in as much money as he could to meet the inevitable bribery demands of the county sheriffs. The Kennedy team also feared that other Democratic opponents for the nomination, Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson among them, would urge their backers to shove money into the state on Humphrey’s behalf in an effort to stop Kennedy and deadlock the convention.


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West Virginia thus became the ultimate battleground for the Democratic nomination, and the Kennedys threw every family member and prominent friend they had, and many dollars, at defeating Humphrey. At stake was not only Jack’s presidency, but Joe Kennedy’s dream of a family dynasty: Bobby was to be his brother’s successor.

In interviews for this book, many West Virginia county and state officials revealed that the Kennedy family spent upward of $2 million in bribes and other payoffs before the May 10, 1960, primary, with some sheriffs in key counties collecting more than $50,000 apiece in cash in return for placing Kennedy’s name at the top of their election slate. Much of the money was distributed personally by Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. The Kennedy campaign would publicly claim after the convention that only $100,000 had been spent in West Virginia (out of a total of $912,500 in expenses for the entire campaign). But what went on in West Virginia was no secret to those on the inside. In his 1978 memoir, In Search of History, Theodore White wrote what he had not written in his book on the 1960 campaign—that both Humphrey and Kennedy were buying votes in West Virginia. White also acknowledged in the memoir that his strong affection for Kennedy had turned him, and many of his colleagues, from objective journalists to members of a loyal claque. White stayed in the claque to the end, claiming in his memoir, without any apparent evidence, that “Kennedy’s vote-buyers were evenly matched with Humphrey’s.”

In later years, even the most loyal of the loyalists acknowledged what happened in the West Virginia primary. In one of her interviews in 1994, Evelyn Lincoln said, “I know they bought the election.” And Jerry Bruno, who served as one of Kennedy’s most dependable advance men in the 1960 campaign, similarly said in an interview: “Every time I’d walk into a town [in West Virginia], they thought I was a bagman. They used to move polling places if you didn’t give them the money. We didn’t do it better, but we got the people who at least were half-honest. The Hubert people—they’d take the money and then come to see us.”

The most compelling evidence was supplied by James McCahey, the Chicago coal buyer, who refused to cooperate with the Wall Street Journal in 1960. In a 1996 interview for this book, he revealed that the political payoffs in West Virginia had begun in October 1959, when young Teddy Kennedy traveled across the state distributing cash to the Democratic committeeman in each county. McCahey was told later that the payoffs amounted to $5,000 per committeeman, a total expenditure of roughly $275,000. McCahey, who left the coal business in Chicago for the railroad business (he retired in 1985 as a senior vice president of the Chessie System Railroads, in Cleveland), added that the Wall Street Journal’s suspicions of him were wrong: his assignment in West Virginia had not been to make payoffs but to organize the teachers in each county “and help them get out the word about Kennedy.” Through this assignment he was able to learn a great deal about what was going on in the state.

McCahey, a major fund-raiser in 1960 for Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, was also a strong Kennedy supporter and had been assigned to direct the Kennedy campaign in the southern districts of Wisconsin. After the disappointing results there, McCahey told me, Sargent Shriver telephoned and invited him to an important insiders strategy meeting in Huntington, West Virginia, that had been put together by Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and included Jack’s brother-in-law Stephen Smith, the campaign’s finance director. New polling was showing a precipitous drop in support for Kennedy among West Virginians; the subject of the meeting was how to get the campaign back on track. It was then, McCahey said, that he learned about Teddy Kennedy’s efforts the previous fall to pay for support from the county committeemen.

“It didn’t work at all,” McCahey told me. “You don’t go into a primary [in West Virginia] and spread money around to committeemen. The local committeeman will take your money and do nothing. The sheriff is the important guy” in each county. “You give it to the sheriff. That’s the name you see on the political banners when you go into a town.” McCahey further recalled being told at the meeting that Joe Kennedy believed that the buying of sheriffs “was the way to do it.”

The sheriffs, it was understood, had enormous discretion in the handling of the cash. Some would generously apportion the cash to their supporters; others would pocket most of the money.

McCahey recalled that his essential contribution was to tell the Kennedys “to forget what you’ve done and start again. I laid out a plan”—to organize teachers and other grassroots workers—“and they said go.” He also worked closely with Shriver in visiting the major coal-producing companies in the state, all of which he knew well from his days as a buyer. “I’d drop into the local coal places and ask the fellows, ‘What’s going on?’” McCahey acknowledged passing out some cash to local political leaders while at work in West Virginia, paying as much as $2,000 for storefront rentals and for hiring cars to bring voters to the polls on primary day. He knew that far larger sums of money were paid to the sheriffs in the last weeks of the campaign. “If they did spend two million dollars,” McCahey told me, with a laugh, in response to a question, “they figured, ‘Hell, let McCahey go [with his plan to organize teachers and the like].’ They had lots of angles.”

There is evidence that Robert Kennedy was, as Teddy had been earlier, a paymaster in the hectic weeks before the May 10 primary. Victor Gabriel, of Clarksburg, a supervisor for the West Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission who ran the Kennedy campaign that spring in Harrison County, recalled in an interview for this book a meeting before the election with Bobby and the ever-loyal Charles Spalding. Gabriel told the two men that he needed only $5,000 in election-day expenses to win the county for them. The exceedingly low estimate, Gabriel told me, caused Spalding to exclaim, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gabriel, eighty-two years old when interviewed in 1996, refused to take any more cash and delivered his county, as promised, on election night. Gabriel joined other Kennedy workers at a gala victory celebration at the Kanawha Hotel in Charleston. At some point during the party, he said, a grateful Bobby Kennedy ushered him into the privacy of a bathroom and pulled out a little black book. “You could have gotten this,” Kennedy told him, as he pointed to a page in the book, “to get people on the bandwagon.” Kennedy’s notebook showed that as much as $40,000 had been given to Sid Christie, an attorney who was the top Democrat of McDowell County, in the heart of the state’s coal belt in the south. The Kennedy notebook made it clear, Gabriel told me, that the campaign had “spent a bundle” to get the all-important support of all the sheriffs and political leaders in the south.

Gabriel told me that he had no second thoughts about the relatively small amount of Kennedy money he had requested. “I told [Bobby] what I needed and didn’t take a damn dime more,” Gabriel said. “All I had to do was tell him fifteen thousand or twenty thousand, instead of five thousand, and I’d have got it. But I don’t operate that way. If you’re going to be for a man, be for him.” The sheriffs who took more than $5,000, Gabriel told me, were simply pocketing the money.

Two former state officials acknowledged during 1995 interviews for this book that they also knew of large-scale Kennedy spending.

Bonn Brown of Elkins was the personal attorney to W. W. “Wally” Barron, who was elected Democratic governor of West Virginia in 1960. He estimated the Kennedy outlay at between $3 million and $5 million, with some sheriffs being paid as much as $50,000. Asked how he knew, Brown told me curtly, “I know. If you don’t get those guys”—the sheriffs—“they will really fight you.” In his role as adviser to the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Brown met with Robert Kennedy and other campaign officials “and told them who to see and what to do, but stayed clear of it myself. Bobby was smart and mean as a snake. I think he had more to do with West Virginia”—the victory there, and the payoffs—“than any other person. Bobby ran it; he was the one who set it up.” Governor Barron was later convicted on bribery charges, and Brown was later convicted of the attempted bribery of a juror in the case.

Curtis B. Trent, of Charleston, who served as executive assistant to Governor Barron, also recalled that the Kennedys “were spreading it around pretty heavy. I thought they spent two million dollars.” Trent, like Bonn Brown, insisted that he did not personally take any Kennedy money. “They were trying to push it off on us,” he recalled. “I’d explain to them that I was concerned with the governor’s race and not the president’s race.” Kennedy reacted typically to Trent’s refusal to help: “Bobby was so mad … just as angry as he could be.” Trent, like more than a dozen officials of the Barron administration, the most corrupt in the history of the state, was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to a jail term in 1969.

The Gabriel, Brown, and Trent accounts are buttressed by Rein Vander Zee, a former FBI agent who had been working since early January 1960 in Humphrey’s West Virginia campaign. Vander Zee was responsible for dealing with the sheriffs of West Virginia, and had—for a price—received their political commitments for Humphrey. “Four or five days before the primary,” Vander Zee, now living in Bandera, Texas, told me in an interview in 1995, “I couldn’t get some of my people on the phone. I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ and got in my car and started driving. They were laying out—the sheriffs—and I knew something was way wrong. The Humphrey signs were down and Kennedy signs were up. I met Sid Christie, who was supposed to be our man [in McDowell County] all the way. He was the absolute boss down there.” Vander Zee arranged a meeting with Christie in the rural town of Keystone. “We sat in his car across from a deserted movie theater, like a scene from The Last Picture Show. I said, ‘What can be done?’” Christie dryly responded: “It’s too late. I didn’t realize what a groundswell of support there’d be for this other fellow.”

Vander Zee said he and Humphrey later held a last-ditch conference with Wally Barron, the governor-to-be: “We asked him what had to be done. I always liked Wally.” Barron gave Humphrey the bad news: he was being vastly outspent by the Kennedys. “He said he had a figure [of Kennedy expenditures] that was something we couldn’t meet,” Vander Zee said. Years later, a West Virginia political professional told Vander Zee that he watched as Christie received a huge payoff from a Kennedy insider—at least $40,000, the professional said—“in green in a shoe box.” Kennedy received 84 percent of the Democratic primary vote on May 10 in McDowell County.



In the years after Kennedy’s assassination, many people would take credit for his strong showing in West Virginia.

In his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, published in 1976, Hubert Humphrey told of a 1966 meeting with Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, in which Cushing expressed anger at what he called the self-aggrandizement of various Kennedy aides, such as Ted Sorensen. “I keep reading these books by the young men around Jack Kennedy and how they claim credit for electing him,” Cushing told Humphrey. “I’ll tell you who elected Jack Kennedy. It was his father, Joe, and me, right here in this room.” Humphrey and an aide sat in stunned silence as Cushing told how he and Joe Kennedy had agreed that West Virginia’s anti-Catholicism could be countered by a series of cash contributions to Protestant churches, particularly in the black community. Cushing continued, Humphrey wrote: “We decided which church and preacher would get two hundred dollars or one hundred dollars or five hundred dollars.”

The most widespread misinformation about the West Virginia election involves the role of organized crime, which, according to countless magazine articles and books over the past thirty years, supplied the cash that enabled Kennedy to win. The allegations center on Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, the New Jersey nightclub owner who in 1960 became general manager of a Nevada gambling lodge owned in part by Frank Sinatra and his good friend Sam Giancana of Chicago. D’Amato’s account, as repeatedly published, is that he was approached by Joe Kennedy during the primary campaign and asked to raise money for West Virginia. D’Amato agreed to do so, with one demand: if Jack Kennedy was successful in gaining the White House, he would reverse a 1956 federal deportation order for Joey Adonis, the New Jersey gang leader. With Joe Kennedy’s promise, D’Amato raised $50,000 for West Virginia from assorted gangsters. D’Amato, who died in 1984, has been quoted as telling a business associate that the $50,000 was used not for direct bribes but to purchase desks, chairs, and other supplies needed by local politicians. After Kennedy’s election, D’Amato said, he reminded Joe Kennedy of his pledge. The father explained that the Adonis deal was fine with his son the president, but Bobby, the new attorney general, wouldn’t hear of it. There is no basis for disbelieving D’Amato’s account; but $50,000 in cash, when contrasted with what was really spent in West Virginia, was hardly enough to earn everlasting gratitude from the Kennedys.

D’Amato’s big mouth got him in trouble. Soon after taking office, Bobby Kennedy was informed by the FBI that D’Amato had been overheard on a wiretap bragging about his role in moving cash from Las Vegas to help Jack Kennedy win the election. A few months later, D’Amato suddenly found himself facing federal indictment on income tax charges stemming from his failure to file a corporate tax return for his nightclub. The indictment was brought to the attention of Milton “Mickey” Rudin, a prominent Los Angeles lawyer who represented Frank Sinatra and other entertainment figures.

“Skinny [was] Frank’s friend,” Rudin told me in a series of interviews for this book. “Bobby [Kennedy] and the Old Man [Joe Kennedy] knew the relationship. When Skinny got indicted, I got pissed and called up Steve Smith. I tell him I want to see him. He meets me at the University Club in New York. I order my gin. ‘What can I do for you?’ Smith asks. I tell him, ‘I’m unhappy about Skinny being indicted on the bullshit charges. It’s unfair. No taxes were paid because there was no profit.’” Rudin said he did not raise the issue of D’Amato’s political favors for the Kennedy campaign, but he did tell Smith, “This is a political act.” Smith responded, “Well, you don’t understand politics.” Rudin then said, “Well, I’m glad I don’t,” drank his gin, and left.

Steve Smith delivered a clear message, Rudin said: D’Amato had been overheard on FBI wiretaps talking about Las Vegas cash going to the Kennedys, and the indictment neutralized any possible damage from such talk. “If some guy like Skinny had anything to do with moving money,” Rudin concluded, “the way to handle him is to indict him so if he talked about it, it’d be [seen as] vengeance.” Rudin told me that he returned to Los Angeles thinking—and saying as much to Sinatra and others—that the Kennedys were going to be much tougher than some had thought.

Organized crime, as we shall see, played a huge role in Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard Nixon in November. But Jack Kennedy had more than a few campaign promises to gangsters to worry about, both before and after the election.




(#ulink_46b0b535-748e-58fc-ad9f-0068a6e7f970) Max Kampelman, Humphrey’s longtime friend and political adviser, recalled warning Humphrey not to run against Kennedy in West Virginia. In an interview in 1994, Kampelman said he “knew” that the Kennedys would put big money into the state and “steal the election—and we had no money.” An additional concern was Humphrey’s political future: “I told Hubert, ‘They’ll [the Kennedys will] kill you in West Virginia, and you have to run for reelection [to the Senate] in Minnesota. They’ll paint you as anti-Catholic, and there are a lot of Catholics in Minnesota.’” Humphrey nevertheless won reelection to the Senate in 1960.




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Jack Kennedy emerged from West Virginia as the man to beat, but there were still many dangers that threatened his drive for the presidency. At least four women could control his destiny. One of them was Marilyn Monroe, the American film goddess whose affair with Kennedy had begun sometime before the 1960 election and would continue after he went to the White House.

Like his father, Jack Kennedy had a special fondness for Hollywood celebrities. The celebrated and gifted Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson, emerged as a sex symbol in the early 1950s and worked her way through husbands, lovers, pills, liquor, and psychiatric hospitals until her death, apparently by accidental suicide, in August 1962. Some published accounts place the beginning of the Kennedy-Monroe relationship in the mid-1950s, as Monroe’s second marriage, to the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was unraveling and she was beginning a romance with the playwright Arthur Miller, who would become her third husband. Her affair with Kennedy was by all accounts in full bloom as the presidential campaign was getting under way. Many of their rendezvous were at the Santa Monica home of Peter and Patricia Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and sister, who were Monroe’s close friends. There has been published speculation that Monroe became pregnant by Kennedy and had an abortion in Mexico; the full story may never be known, but accounts of her affair and abortion have been published again and again since her suicide and his murder.

In interviews for this book, longtime friends and associates of Monroe and Kennedy acknowledged that the two stars, who both enjoyed living on the edge, shared a powerful, and high-risk, attraction to each other. “She was a beautiful actress,” George Smathers, Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate, told me. “Probably as pretty a woman as ever lived. And Jack—everybody knew he liked pretty girls. When he had the opportunity to meet Marilyn Monroe, why, he took advantage of it, and got to know her a little bit.” The attraction went beyond sex. Monroe had a quirky sense of humor and a tenacious desire to learn. “Marilyn made Jack laugh,” Patricia Newcomb, who worked as a publicist for Monroe in the early 1960s, explained in an interview for this book. There was also a family connection that went beyond the Lawfords. Charles Spalding, who was a trusted intimate of Kennedy’s by the late 1940s and remained so until the president’s assassination, clearly recalled a private visit by Monroe to the family enclave at Hyannis Port, where she was welcomed enthusiastically as a friend of Jack’s—even though he was married.

Monroe’s repeated crack-ups did not diminish her looks or her ability to appeal to men. “Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate glamour girl,” Vernon Scott, a longtime Hollywood reporter for United Press International, told me in an interview. “She was gorgeous and she was funny. She had more sex appeal than any woman I ever saw, and I’ve seen lots of them. She was probably every man’s dream of the kind of woman he’d like to spend the rest of his life with on a desert island. She was much smarter than people gave her credit for. She never did or said anything by accident.”

Monroe was said to be deeply in love with Kennedy. After her death, John Miner, head of the medical legal section of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, was given confidential access to a stream-of-consciousness tape recording Monroe made at the recommendation of her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, a few weeks earlier; Miner put together what he considered to be a near-verbatim transcript of the tape. After obtaining permission from the Greenson family, Miner ended thirty-five years of silence by making the transcript available for this book in 1997. Many of Monroe’s comments dealt with her sexuality; her extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm—in very blunt language—were meant only for the analyst’s couch, but her lavish admiration for Jack Kennedy could have been read from a podium:

Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander-in-chief. He says do this, you do it. He says do that, you do it. This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry, no person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans. People who can’t afford it will get good medical care. Industrial products will be the best in the world. No, I’m not talking utopia—that’s an illusion. But he will transform America today like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the Thirties. I tell you, Doctor, when he has finished his achievements he will take his place with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as one of our great presidents. I’m glad he has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the President is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Show business people who worked behind the scenes with Monroe described a hard edge beneath the glamour. There were repeated breakdowns and repeated threats to tell the world about her relationship with Kennedy—threats that could have damaged his candidacy, and threats that only increased after he got to the White House. “What happened,” George Smathers told me, “was that she, [like] naturally all women, would like to be close to the president. And then after he had been associated with her some, she began to ask for an opportunity to come to Washington and come to the White House and that sort of thing. That’s when Jack asked me to see what I could do to help him in that respect by talking to her.” Monroe, Smathers said without amplification, had “made some demands.” Smathers said he arranged for a mutual friend to “go talk to Marilyn Monroe about putting a bridle on herself and on her mouth and not talking too much, because it was getting to be a story around the country.” It had happened before. Charles Spalding recalled that at one point during the 1960 campaign, when Monroe was on a liquor and pill binge, Kennedy asked him to fly from New York to Los Angeles to make sure that she was okay—that is, to make sure that Monroe did not speak out of turn. “I got out there, and she was really sick,” Spalding told me. With Lawford’s help, “I got her to the hospital.”

Monroe’s instability posed a constant threat to Kennedy. Michael Selsman, one of Monroe’s publicists in the early 1960s, depicted her as “a loose cannon” who toggled between high-spirited charm and mean-spirited cruelty. “Sometimes she had to put on this costume of Marilyn Monroe. Otherwise, she was this other person, Norma Jean, who felt abused, put-upon, and unintelligent. As Marilyn Monroe, she had enormous power. As Norma Jean, she was a drug addict who wasn’t physically clean.”

Vernon Scott told me that the other, insecure Monroe “made herself known to me one night” after he had concluded a newspaper interview with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Scott had a date with his wife-to-be and, as he and Monroe continued to chat over two bottles of champagne, he began looking at his watch. Monroe noticed and asked if he was going out. Scott said yes. “And she said,” Scott recounted, “sniffling a little bit and feeling sorry for herself, that everybody had somebody else to go to, everybody had dates, except her. She said, ‘I’m Marilyn Monroe. Everybody thinks the phone rings all the time with men asking me out. Well, everybody’s afraid to date Marilyn Monroe or ask her for a date.’ And she began crying, with mascara running down her face. And her eyes were red and she looked like kind of a clown. Her nose was red. She began sobbing. I tried to cheer her up and told her that I was sure most men would be delighted to take her out. She said, ‘Well, they don’t have the nerve to call me, not the right ones. And once in a while I meet a nice guy, a really nice guy, and I know it’s going to work. He doesn’t have to be from Hollywood; he doesn’t have to be an actor. And we have a few drinks and we go to bed. Then I see his eyes glaze over and I can see it going through his mind: “Oh, my God. I’m going to fuck Marilyn Monroe,” and he can’t get it up.’ Then she started howling with misery over this. I just bent over double laughing. And she began pounding on me—‘It’s not funny.’

“But,” Scott told me, “this was not Marilyn Monroe. Norma Jean would never have allowed Marilyn to look like that, but she did this one time. So I saw [Norma Jean] as a frightened, insecure, young puppeteer that was running this machine known as Marilyn Monroe. It was very touching and somewhat sad. And I liked her all the more for it.”

Monroe’s affair with Kennedy was no secret in Hollywood. In early January 1961, before the inauguration, Michael Selsman was informed about the relationship. “It was the first thing I was told,” Selsman said. “We had to be careful with this. We had to protect her, we had to keep her [private life] out of print. It’d be disastrous for me. It wasn’t hard in those days. It was a different era. Today it would be impossible to keep anything resembling that a secret.” Patricia Newcomb, who worked in the same public relations office with Selsman, also recalled knowing that her client “had been with the president,” and added: “It never occurred to me to talk about it. I couldn’t do it.”

James Bacon, who spent much of his career covering Hollywood for the Associated Press, said in an interview for this book that Monroe, whom he had befriended early in her career, had given him a firsthand account of her relationship with Kennedy as early as the campaign. “She was very open about her affair with JFK,” Bacon told me. “In fact, I think Marilyn was in love with JFK.” Asked why he didn’t file a story about the affair, Bacon said that in those days, “before Watergate, reporters just didn’t go into that sort of thing. I’d have to have been under the bed in order to put it on the wire for the AP. There was no pact. It was just a matter of judgment on the part of the reporters.”

Bacon added that he understood Kennedy’s “fascination with Hollywood. This is where the beautiful girls are, you know, and that’s why JFK loved it out here. He was a man who was addicted to sex, and if you want sex, this is the place to come.”



Kennedy was placing his political well-being in the hands of a group of Hollywood actresses, reporters, and publicists. His confidence that the affair with Monroe would remain secret was all the more perplexing because he was, even before he declared his candidacy, the target of a letter-writing campaign by a middle-aged housewife named Florence M. Kater, who decided in 1959 that her mission in life would be to force the Washington press corps to deal with Kennedy’s womanizing. Kater learned more than she wanted to know about the senator’s personal life after renting an upstairs apartment in her Georgetown home to Pamela Turnure, an attractive aide in Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy and Turnure were conducting an indiscreet affair that involved many late-night and early-morning comings and goings, to Kater’s consternation. Turnure moved to another apartment a few blocks away. In late 1958 Kater ambushed Kennedy leaving the new apartment at three A.M. and took a photograph of the unhappy senator attempting to shield his face with a handkerchief.

The encounter rattled Kennedy, and he struck back. A few weeks later, Kater alleged, she and her husband were accosted on the street in front of her home by the angry Kennedy, who, waving his fore-finger, warned her “to stop bothering me. If you do it again,” Kater quoted Kennedy as saying, “or if either of you spread any lies about me, you will find yourself without a job.” Kennedy eventually asked James McInerney, the former Justice Department attorney who had been retained in 1953 by Joe Kennedy, to try to muzzle Kater; the loyal McInerney spent dozens of hours in an attempt to convince her to stop her campaign.

McInerney met seven times with Kater, she later wrote, but for once the usual Kennedy mix of glamour, power, and money didn’t work. In May of 1959, Kater mailed a copy of the photograph and an articulate letter describing her encounter with Kennedy to fifty prominent citizens in Washington and New York, including editors, syndicated columnists, and politicians. Her letter and photograph also ended up on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, as similar letters would over the next four years. The FBI, of course, began keeping a file on Kater, one obtained under the Freedom of Information Act for this book. In the letter Kater explained that, as an Irish Catholic, she had been a “warm supporter” of Kennedy; she had taken the photograph in the belief that “shock treatment” was needed. “But Senator Kennedy thought his behavior was none of our business,” Kater wrote. “We think he’s wrong there; it’s part of the package when you’re a public figure running for the Presidency.”

Kater became even more obsessed as Kennedy neared the Democratic nomination, and she continued sending out scores of letters complaining that the senator was a hypocritical womanizer who was morally unfit to be president. Kater was not taken seriously by the national press corps, but she came close to attracting media attention. On May 14, 1960, just four days after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, she approached him at a political rally at the University of Maryland carrying a placard with an enlarged snapshot of the early-morning scene outside Pamela Turnure’s apartment. Kennedy ignored her, but a photograph of the encounter was published in the next afternoon’s Washington Star, along with a brief story describing her as a heckler. Kennedy’s aides denounced the photograph on her placard as a fake, Kater later wrote, and no questions were ever asked of the candidate, although Kennedy’s ongoing relationship with Turnure was no secret to the reporters covering his campaign or to campaign aides.

For all his apparent anger at Kater, Kennedy seemed to enjoy the added tension. Spalding told me of his concern at the time about the immense political liabilities posed by his friend’s constant womanizing. “I used to think he was crazy to do this stuff.” The risks were obvious: Kennedy’s campaign stance as a practicing Catholic and a responsible husband and father would be fatally undercut by a sex scandal. Steeling his courage, Spalding raised the issue at one point with Kennedy. “Well, if you’re worried about this,” Kennedy responded, “let me show you these pictures.” The candidate then pulled out a series of photographs—those mailed by Kater—showing him leaving the Turnure apartment.

Kennedy came much closer to exposure than he knew. Kater’s photograph in the Star stimulated an editor’s curiosity, and Bob Clark, a former White House reporter, was assigned to interview her. “I found her interesting and a little flaky,” Clark, now with ABC News, said in a 1997 interview for this book. “I believed her story.”

That story was complicated, Clark said, by the fact that Kater was a collector of Impressionist paintings and casually admitted that she had initially offered to drop her protests over Kennedy’s involvement with Turnure if the Kennedy family would buy her a Modigliani. Jack Kennedy was a “good Catholic” and so was she, Kater told Clark, and she’d “let it go” for the art. It was that request, among others, Kater told Clark, that was being negotiated with James McInerney. “The family said no,” Clark quoted Kater as saying, but only after protracted negotiations.

Kater’s story was credible, Clark told me, because it was not just a question of her word against Kennedy’s: Kater told Clark that she and her husband had secretly planted two tape recorders in the upstairs apartment while Turnure was spending nights there with Kennedy. The landlords overheard the senator in both the living room and the bedroom. Kater invited Clark to return later to listen to the recordings.

Despite her obvious eccentricity, Clark told me, he was persuaded that it was one hell of a story. He telephoned his editor, Charles Seib, and—as all reporters do—told him what he had, including the fact that Kater had been refused a painting. He was put on hold, while Seib checked with his superiors. A few moments later, Seib returned to the telephone and ordered him “to drop the story,” Clark said. “He wouldn’t even let me go back to listen to the tapes.”

Clark did as instructed, but not without regret. “If the Star, a highly respected paper, had gone public with the [Kater] story,” he said, “it could have blown Kennedy out of the water. There never would have been a President Kennedy. Today, with the same information, any of fifty newspapers would have gone after the story.”

No responsible journalist touched the story. According to her FBI file, the outraged Kater carried her protest and her placard to the Democratic convention, and spent the final weeks of the 1960 campaign marching in front of the White House. She was not only ignored, as usual, by the press but also urged by passersby to go back “to the nuthouse.” After his election Kennedy showed his disdain for Kater by appointing Pamela Turnure press secretary to his wife.

Kater, remarkably, picketed in front of the White House after Kennedy’s inaugural, to no avail, and continued to send a stream of well-written protest letters to public officials and newspapers about the president’s lack of morality, also to no avail. In one such letter, she wrote:

In 1960 the vast, vast majority of American women were hoaxed by the press, by television and by many influential people into believing that John Kennedy was the same clean-living man they read about or listened to on the air. That wasn’t just everyday political cynicism; it was a brutal combination of power that could and did enforce total censorship of the truth about John Kennedy’s well-known lecheries and his penchant to ruin anyone who dared criticize him for them. And I went out, all alone, to fight it with my little windbattered sign! But, far from being a fool, I was the one woman in America who wasn’t fooled by John Kennedy.

The obsessed Georgetown housewife was a campaign-damaging bomb that did not explode. There were others, equally dangerous.



Senator Kennedy’s scramble to protect his future presidential reputation began in earnest in late 1959, when a political opponent discovered that he was carrying on an affair with a nineteen-year-old student, the woman interviewed in Chapter Two. She was studying at Radcliffe College, the woman’s college of Harvard University, on whose board of overseers Kennedy then served. His indiscretion was known to many: Kennedy’s car and driver had been seen picking up and dropping off the student at her dormitory.

In this instance, Kennedy’s biggest worries came not from Republicans but from his fellow Democrats, who were eager to find ways to discredit their competition. Word of the liaison reached Charles W. Engelhard, a South African diamond merchant and investor with corporate offices in New Jersey. Engelhard had endorsed Robert B. Meyner, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, who had presidential ambitions of his own; he and Meyner could not resist a chance to get rid of Kennedy. The two men arranged for one of Engelhard’s aides to approach a former New York City policeman, then a private investigator, and offer him $10,000 to fly to Boston and take incriminating photographs of Kennedy with the Radcliffe student. However, the former policeman was a staunch Kennedy supporter. He turned down the job and, through a mutual friend, brought the plan to the attention of a politically connected Democratic lawyer in Washington. The lawyer, who had spent many years as a Senate aide, immediately arranged to see Jack Kennedy.

“Evelyn Lincoln shows me in,” the lawyer, who did not wish to be identified, recalled in a 1996 interview for this book, “and I show him the name of the girl. He says, ‘My God! They got her name.’ He started to explain—some bullshit—and I said, ‘I’m not really interested. I just wanted to let you know.’ He was so appreciative that I’d tipped him off.”

It was clear, the lawyer said, that “Charley Engelhard was trying to get the goods on Kennedy to knock him out of the running. They were going to set him up.” Senator Kennedy, in the meeting, had exclaimed, “That goddamned Charley Engelhard. I’m going to give it to him up to there”—drawing his hand across his neck. Changing the subject, the lawyer asked Kennedy what he could do to help him win the Democratic nomination. He vividly recalled the answer: “I need money. I can’t ask my father to pay for everything. Raise money.”

Months later, during the campaign, the lawyer bumped into Kennedy and was thanked anew for his timely information. Kennedy told the lawyer he had assigned Carmine Bellino, one of his longtime assistants, to find out what was going on. Bellino, he said, had “put in a wire” on the Engelhard Industries official who had tried to hire the former New York City policeman. The lawyer raised an objection to the use of wiretaps and Kennedy reassured him, explaining, “We’re not tapping his phone—just recording who he called.”

In a meeting with the lawyer after the election, Kennedy reported that he was being urged by many ranking Democrat members of the Senate to name Engelhard ambassador to a high-profile embassy. “I’m going to fuck him,” Kennedy said, with a laugh. “I’m going to send him to one of the boogie republics in Central Africa.” Engelhard, who died in 1971 one of the world’s richest men, never got his embassy, but the Kennedy administration did name him as the American representative to the Independence Day ceremonies in Gabon and Zambia. Kennedy, as we have seen, continued his relationship with the student. After his inauguration, he arranged for her to be named a special assistant to McGeorge Bundy, who had been dean of faculty at Harvard. She remained on Bundy’s White House staff until late 1962. “It was very embarrassing,” the woman recalled in one of our interviews. “It put McGeorge in a very creepy situation.”



The fourth woman, and the one who, in the spring of 1960, posed the most direct threat to Kennedy’s presidential aspirations, was a self-proclaimed artist named Barbara Maria Kopszynska, who had emigrated with her mother from Poland to Boston as a displaced person after World War II. According to heavily censored FBI files made public under the Freedom of Information Act in 1977, Kopszynska began telling reporters after the 1960 election that in 1951 she had become engaged to marry Jack Kennedy, then a member of the House, only to have the engagement broken up by Joe Kennedy because she was half Jewish. In March 1957 the blond and beautiful Kopszynska, who had changed her name to Alicia Darr, married Edmund Purdom, a British actor and playboy, and moved to Rome with him. The marriage quickly fell apart, and by early 1960 the Purdoms were in an Italian state court filing charges against each other.

Alicia Darr’s FBI file created a brief stir when it was released in 1977. It included a summary of an interview in the issue dated January 31, 1961, of Le Ore, an Italian weekly magazine, in which Darr described her early relationship with Jack Kennedy and declared, according to a translation made for this book, that she “could have been the first lady.” The FBI attaché in Rome told J. Edgar Hoover on January 30, ten days after Kennedy took office, that the article indicated that Darr “was considering the release of further information.” The U.S. media paid no attention to the interview in 1961.

But a second FBI document in Darr’s file, dated June 4, 1963, and sent at that time to Bobby Kennedy by J. Edgar Hoover (as the Le Ore summary had been two years earlier), made headlines in 1977, when America’s newspapers, no longer in awe of the presidency after Watergate, were eager to publish any account of Kennedy’s womanizing. Hoover warned the attorney general that the president’s name had come up in connection with a disciplinary proceeding in New York against two Darr attorneys, Simon Metrik and Jacob W. Friedman. Metrik and Friedman, Hoover reported, had filed documents in court describing Kennedy’s relationship with Darr and claiming that “just prior to the President’s assuming office you”—Bobby Kennedy—“went to New York and arranged a settlement of the case out of court for $500,000.” Reporters found Darr, by 1977 remarried and living in the Bahamas, and she denied having received any money from the Kennedys. The Hoover memoranda, even though heavily censored when released, produced the kind of stories that, if they had been published during JFK’s days in office, would have seriously damaged his reputation and his chances for reelection. Most newspapers, citing the FBI documents, flatly reported that Kennedy had paid $500,000 to quash a lawsuit filed by Darr.

Those newspaper stories were wrong. The full story—that is, as much as could be obtained for this book—is far more dramatic.



The uncensored versions of Hoover’s reports to Bobby Kennedy, made available in full for this book, reveal that Alicia Darr posed an extreme danger to Jack Kennedy in 1960, a danger that was hidden by deletions FBI censors made in the documents released in 1977. The uncensored versions reveal that Darr was well known to federal authorities and the New York police as a high-priced Manhattan prostitute and madam. The documents Hoover forwarded to Bobby Kennedy reported that in 1951, the year she first met Jack Kennedy, Darr was operating a “house of prostitution” in Boston. She moved to New York City a year later, where she turned again to prostitution, the FBI said, and also “was blackmailing people involved in the ‘Jelke case’”—a highly publicized 1952 sex scandal involving New York’s café society. The scandal led to a three-to-six-year jail term for Minot Frazier Jelke III, the twenty-three-year-old heir to an oleomargarine fortune, who was found guilty of procuring.


(#ulink_55ca1024-83f3-5ead-b6a1-7681074393e9) By 1953 Darr, described as a “talented prostitute,” was operating “a call girl service” in midtown New York, the unexpurgated FBI report said. Another of the FBI documents depicted her as “a notorious, albeit high-class, ‘hustler.’”

Darr’s marriage to Purdom was in shambles by December of 1959, when she sued him in Rome for assault, battery, and nonmaintenance. She was out of money by early 1960 and, according to contemporary European newspaper accounts, began writing bad checks, for which she was eventually arrested and briefly jailed. In September 1961, a month after she was granted a divorce, in Mexico, Darr’s finances improved dramatically: she married Alfred Corning Clark, a millionaire heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. It was her second and his sixth marriage. Alfred Clark died of a heart attack in upstate New York thirteen days later, leaving her the bulk of his $10 million estate.

Alfred Clark’s other surviving heirs quickly challenged his state of mind at the time he wrote the will. Simon Metrik, who had since 1958 been Alicia Darr’s lawyer and media adviser, throughout her marriage to and divorce from Purdom, was retained on her behalf to handle the Clark family’s protests. (He later said that he also twice kept her from getting arrested for prostitution, following two New York City vice raids.) Darr and Metrik eventually quarreled, according to court documents, and she dismissed him in December 1961, whereupon Metrik submitted a bill for $1.2 million. Darr, outraged, refused to pay. During the legal skirmishing over his fees, Metrik filed a bill of particulars against Darr, which described what a New York court would later characterize as “the commission of a contemplated crime.” Darr’s new attorneys argued that Metrik, in his papers, had violated the rules of attorney-client confidentiality; they asked the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court to initiate disciplinary proceedings against him and against his partner, Jacob Friedman, who was acting for Metrik in the fee dispute with Darr.

The Appellate Division found in favor of Darr’s new lawyers: Metrik and Friedman, it ruled, had breached the attorney-client privilege in their bill of particulars against Darr. On June 4, 1963, the two attorneys were publicly censured, and the file in the case was sealed. Metrik and Friedman were subsequently disciplined by the New York Bar Association. The two attorneys are deceased, and their firm disbanded; their file remains sealed today.


(#ulink_4c22d72d-0450-573a-b980-49ea967c06d8) In its ruling, the Appellate Division noted that Metrik and Friedman’s “disclosure here on the intended crime was not made to prevent the act or to protect those against whom it was threatened. It was made long after the alleged occurrence” and was “not connected, even remotely,” with issues arising out of the Clark inheritance. Alicia Darr Clark kept her inheritance, and Metrik did not receive his $1.2 million fee.

What was the “contemplated crime” cited by Metrik and Friedman? Hoover’s memorandum to Bobby Kennedy—in the version released in 1977—provided some clues; Kennedy received it on June 4, 1963, the same day the New York court announced its censure of Metrik and Friedman for their bill of particulars. Hoover reported that his sources had been told that Alicia Darr had in her possession letters signed by John F. Kennedy and photographs proving that the two had had a relationship. Hoover, as the press reported in 1977, wrote that Darr had initiated a lawsuit against Kennedy before the inauguration and that Bobby Kennedy had allegedly gone to New York and settled the matter for $500,000.

Hoover’s information was apparently wrong. No record of a Darr lawsuit against Kennedy has been found, nor is there any evidence that the Kennedys paid anything to quash such a suit. A number of Jack and Robert Kennedy’s former associates, contacted by reporters in 1977, denied any knowledge of a $500,000 payoff and expressed doubt about the accuracy of the FBI report. Hoover may have been wrong about the lawsuit, but there is much evidence that Darr tried for years to extort money from the Kennedy family.

Alicia Darr did have money problems in early 1960, at exactly the time the presidential campaign was in full bloom, and she did worry the candidate. On April 8, 1960, three days after the disappointing Wisconsin primary, Kennedy drafted in pencil a two-page memorandum for the record—made public for the first time in this book—summarizing a conversation with Bobby Baker, the secretary of the Democratic membership of the Senate and a proétgé of Lyndon Johnson. Baker met secretly with Kennedy and warned him that he had been approached by a New Jersey lawyer named Mickey Weiner and had been told that the wife of “a well-known movie actor”—Darr had not yet obtained her Mexican divorce—was willing to give Johnson an affidavit acknowledging an affair with Kennedy in return for $150,000. “Baker,” Kennedy wrote, “said he thought it was blackmail, and did not inform Johnson of the matter.” Baker may have been a Johnson protégé, but he was also a sometime playmate of Jack Kennedy; his loyalty to that part of Senate life and not to his mentor Johnson carried the day. Kennedy, obviously aware of the political danger posed by Alicia Darr, treated his memorandum as if it were a legal document; it was countersigned on the same day by Pierre Salinger, his press secretary, placed in an envelope, and sealed three days later by Salinger, as Salinger noted on the front of the envelope. The handwritten memorandum, still sealed, was found among the papers of Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s personal secretary, after her death in 1995.

In a 1995 interview for this book, Bobby Baker said he did not recall the blackmail threat or the conversation with Kennedy about it, but he did have a sharp memory of Mickey Weiner: “He was a whorehound, a percentager. He was trying to get defense contracts.” Salinger said in an interview that he did not recall the document, or signing and sealing it.

Although there is no evidence of any blackmail payments to Alicia Darr, the Kennedy family did turn to Clark M. Clifford, the high-powered Washington lawyer, for help in a matter that may have been the same one Bobby Baker reported to Kennedy.


(#ulink_1b91fe17-c055-5dca-b03d-b1a08269a1f5) Clifford recalled in an interview for this book being asked by Kennedy to handle what he depicted as an “extraordinarily dangerous” situation in the spring of 1960, a few months before the Democratic convention. It involved a woman “who could destroy him,” Clifford told me. “I had a conversation with Jack Kennedy that was so dramatic that if I could live to be a million years old, I could never forget it.” The senator had gotten involved in a “very sensitive matter,” Clifford said. “Public knowledge [of it] could have blown the Kennedy nomination out of the water.”

At the time of Kennedy’s request, Clifford was working for the presidential campaign of Stuart Symington, a fact he immediately mentioned to Kennedy. “I thought he’d say that I can’t place you in the position of having this explosive information. He didn’t say that. He said, ‘I want you to go on representing me on this matter. Go ahead and work for Symington, but please continue on. If it becomes known, I’ve had it.’” Clifford added that he handled the incident until it got “to the point where I could turn it over to the Old Man [Joe Kennedy].” Clifford refused to say more about the matter, but did note that he made it a practice to have nothing to do with cash payoffs to women. “When it got into this area, I was never involved.” The issue did arise in one case, the lawyer added: “I told Jack that I was not the right fellow to handle it. And they turned to [James] McInerney.” Nothing more could be learned about the possible role of McInerney, who died in an automobile collision in 1963.



Further evidence of the threat posed by Alicia Darr emerged in yet another document in the FBI files, this one dated August 9, 1963, but not released in any form in 1977. Hoover warned Bobby Kennedy that some of the sealed documents in the Metrik disciplinary case were beginning to make the rounds of Kennedy enemies, who were depicting the documents as “dynamite” and an “H-bomb.” In July, Hoover wrote, the documents were offered by a “private detective” going by the name “Robert Garden” to Senator John G. Tower of Texas, a Republican who was on the Armed Services Committee and a strong supporter of Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964; Tower was told that the materials dealt with a vital national security matter. Tower sent his administrative assistant, H. Edward Munden, to New York to visit Garden and take a look. Munden told the FBI in an interview soon afterward that the papers dealt with an affair in the 1950s between Kennedy and a woman named Clark who had become pregnant sometime before Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. There was also a letter from Clark to her attorney, the FBI summary said, that stated that “now that Mr. Kennedy had been elected President, ‘their’ position”—that is, Clark and Metrik’s position—“was much better.” Munden was told further during his New York visit to the private detective that there were additional documents and compromising pictures.

Munden, interviewed for this book in 1995, recalled that the subject of the meeting with Garden, which was obviously not his real name, was the 1964 election; the alleged detective, who made it clear that he wanted a large sum of money for the documents, was eager for Senator Tower’s help in getting information to the Republican Party for use in the presidential campaign. The documents, Munden told me, included “legal papers concerning an illegitimate child of President Kennedy. The mother was one of the Singers.” Munden, who had anticipated that the materials would deal with national defense or military issues, said he handed the materials back to Garden and told him that “it had nothing to do with the security of the United States.” Munden returned to Washington and described the bizarre meeting to Tower, who immediately telephoned the attorney general. “He told him that we had nothing to do with the information,” Munden told me. “Bobby thanked him and said he knew the rumor was out there.” He heard nothing further, Munden recalled in our interview, but there was no question in his mind that somebody wanted Barry Goldwater “to buy this material to blackmail Kennedy” before he ran for reelection in 1964. There was also no doubt, Munden told me, that Robert Garden, whoever he may have been, was convinced that his documents proved “that Kennedy had an illegitimate child” sometime in the late 1950s, although the documents he saw said nothing about a baby being born.

Alicia Darr Clark insisted in one of her interviews for this book that she had had no child out of wedlock by Jack Kennedy and would never have sought money from him. But in a 1997 telephone interview from Rome, Edmund Purdom, her former husband, said that the talk of a baby had a familiar ring. “She told me she was pregnant,” he said. “That’s why I married her [in 1957]. Of course,” Purdom added, “she never had any children.” Purdom, still involved in the entertainment business, was exceedingly bitter about his ex-wife, who is, he said, “a very dangerous woman” who has misrepresented many facts about her life and was always avaricious. He learned after their marriage, Purdom added, that his wife had been well known as a call girl among his friends in New York. Purdom said that in the early 1960s Simon Metrik told him, among other details, that he had “saved her from two police raids.” At the time of the rescue, Metrik told Purdom, Darr was actively running a call-girl ring in partnership with a woman from West Germany. “I’m not out to get her,” Purdom said, in concluding our conversation. “I’m out to forget her.”



Alicia Darr, known today as Mrs. Alicia Clark, breezily refused to discuss her past in detail in interviews for this book in 1996 and 1997, but she remained eager to talk about her relationship with the “beautiful and charming” Jack Kennedy. “I was one of his pals,” she said of John Kennedy, who was a congressman when they met. “I didn’t want to be a first lady. Believe me, he loved me. He knew me as a kid and loved me to the day he died. But I preferred to be married to a movie star. Why marry Jack and be stuck with Old Joe, and having to please him? John Kennedy,” she added, “was a spender. He’d buy you flowers, gifts. He told me he’d like to buy me diamonds, but he had trouble with his father, who was telling him he was spending too much money.” Darr insisted that he was willing to marry her, but she said no. “He was looking for me,” she told me. “I wasn’t looking for him. He was calling Rome. He wanted to run away from it all with me—to Europe, just to skip town. But I’d say, ‘Jack, you don’t have enough money.’”

Once safely in the White House, the young president did seem to be more than ever intrigued by her—or by the danger of being with her. Maxwell Raab, a Boston attorney who was secretary of the cabinet in the Eisenhower administration, found himself dancing with Clark at a British Embassy party in the early 1960s. President Kennedy suddenly entered the room, and Clark whispered to Raab: “I’d like to see the president. Dance me over to him. I know him very well.” Raab, recalling the incident in a 1995 interview, said he understood what “very well” meant.

The president was indeed delighted to see Clark, Raab said, and whisked her off. “I saw that I was not to be in this,” Raab said, “and so I walked away.”


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(#ulink_f017fff7-68f0-5855-83d8-49704364d227) The case attracted front-page attention even in the staid New York Times, which reported in August 1952 that Jelke, now deceased, had provided call girls to society figures and businessmen for fees ranging from $50 to $500. Alicia Darr’s name did not show up in newspaper accounts; it is impossible to determine what role she had, if any, in the scandal, or how the FBI concluded that she had been blackmailing some of the participants.




(#ulink_261ff48c-4a0b-5bac-a551-163caf514b06) In March 1996, the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division denied my request to unseal the Metrik and Friedman file. The request was initially opposed by Richard M. Maltz, the deputy chief counsel to the disciplinary committee of the Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department. In a memorandum dated April 11, 1995, Maltz noted that my argument had a “superficial appeal” because “there may very well be public interest in the type of information the applicant is seeking to uncover.” However, Maltz said he could not determine from the available files why “the Court sealed a record that would otherwise, as a public censure, be public.” Without such information, he added, the disciplinary committee had no choice but to oppose any proposed unsealing. As an alternative, he urged the justices of the Appellate Division to review the record, in camera, to determine whether the public interest would be served by unsealing. A year later, on March 8, 1996, the Appellate Division reviewed the files, deliberated on the issues, and denied my request in a one-page ruling.




(#ulink_e1ce8dde-f8ec-5c60-8ef5-f7f4ca5931e0) Clifford had performed valiantly for Kennedy in 1957, after questions were raised about the authorship of his Profiles in Courage, a series of case studies of senators who chose the greater good over narrow party interests. In an interview televised on ABC in December of that year, Kennedy was described by the columnist Drew Pearson as being “the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer Prize on a book which was ghostwritten for him, which indicates the kind of public relations buildup he’s had.” A few days later, a distraught Kennedy came to see him, Clifford wrote in his 1991 memoir, Counsel to the President, and sought his guidance. “I cannot let this stand,” Clifford quoted Kennedy as saying. “It is a direct attack on my integrity and my honesty.” At that point the telephone rang. It was Joe Kennedy. “Before I could even say hello,” Clifford wrote, “Joe Kennedy said: ‘I want you to sue the bastards for fifty million dollars. Get it started right away. It’s dishonest and they know it. My boy wrote the book. This is a plot against us.’ ‘Mr. Ambassador,’ I said, ‘I am preparing at this moment to go to New York and sit down with the people at ABC.’ ‘Sit down with them, hell! Sue them, that is what you have to do. Sue!’ he shouted in my ear. His son watched me with a faint air of amusement.” Clifford eventually compelled an ABC vice president to state on the air that Pearson’s charges were unfounded and that “the book in question was written by Senator Kennedy.” In his diary, published years later, Pearson wrote that Kennedy “got a whale of a lot of help on his book” and expressed doubt that Kennedy “wrote too much of the final draft himself.” But, he added, he met for an hour with Kennedy after their skirmish and concluded that he showed enough knowledge of the book to enable him to conclude that “basically it is his book.”




(#ulink_f32de340-9ddc-5345-a247-fb69187d0cc2) Raab, who served with distinction as ambassador to Italy during the Reagan administration, had been used by Senator Kennedy during the 1960 campaign. He left the White House in 1959 and was working as an aide to Senator Kenneth Keating, Republican of New York, when Kennedy, very agitated, sought him out. The two men had known each other since the late 1940s, Raab told me in our interview. “I gotta talk to you,” Kennedy said. “Nixon and the Republican National Committee are doing a job on me. They’re trying to destroy me and they’ve got Jackie all upset. It’s created havoc in my home. It’s got to be stopped.” Kennedy asked Raab to approach Nixon and his fellow Republicans and tell them “to stop spreading the word that I’m philandering.” “It wasn’t rage,” Raab said of Kennedy’s demeanor, but “the nearest thing.” Raab dutifully brought up the matter with Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and with Nixon. “Nixon said, ‘I’m not doing it,’ but he”—referring to Hall—“was.” Raab, who admits he was very naive about Jack Kennedy at the time, subsequently reported back to the senator, assuring him that “there will be no more talk from the White House or Republican National Committee.” Kennedy thanked him.




9 LYNDON (#ulink_55bb559c-44ec-5ff1-bb2e-622b92d2f43a)


Jack Kennedy came to Los Angeles with more than enough delegates to assure a first-ballot nomination, and enough excess baggage—from the huge cash outlays in West Virginia and the womanizing—to threaten his certain victory. It is only with an understanding of the dark side of the Kennedy legacy—and who was aware of it at the time of the convention—that the surprise selection of Lyndon Johnson as the vice presidential candidate can be understood.





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