Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  It was an odd selection, considering the frivolity of the evening. Written by Kurt Weill, the German Jewish composer who had fled the Nazis in 1933 after his avant-garde musicals sparked fascist riots, the song was a little masterpiece of melancholic beauty. Though Weill wrote it for Knickerbocker Holiday, his 1938 effort to adapt to the lighter moods of the Broadway stage, “September Song” was suffused with the wistful world-weariness of old Europe.

  Joan played the song’s haunting chorus and Jack began to sing:

  “Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December

  But the days grow short when you reach September;

  When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame,

  One hasn’t got time for the waiting game.”

  A hush fell over the room as Kennedy delivered the next lines of the song in a speaking voice:

  “Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few,

  September, November!

  And these few precious days I’ll spend with you

  These precious days I’ll spend with you.”

  The following month, Kennedy’s small group of confidants grew smaller, when, six days before Christmas, his father suffered a stroke while playing golf in Palm Beach. It was the final blow in this harshest of years. The hard-charging entrepreneur—who had been deeply wired into the highest and lowest enclaves of power, from kings to mobsters—had put all of his relentless drive and paternal devotion at the service of his sons. Joe Kennedy’s emotional tides rose and fell with those of his son in the White House. When Jack was reduced to tears by the Bay of Pigs debacle, Joe had spent much of the day on the phone with him and Bobby. “At [the] end, I asked him how he was feeling,” his wife Rose later recorded in her diary, “and he said ‘Dying’—the result of trying to bring up Jack’s morale.” Now the once powerful patriarch could no longer offer his son solace or counsel, his speech reduced to one word by his calamity, the word “no,” which he uttered in angry frustration over and over.

  Joe Kennedy suffered his stroke just five days after J. Edgar Hoover reported to Bobby that FBI bugging devices had caught Chicago godfather Sam Giancana complaining bitterly about being betrayed by the Kennedys. The gangster made provocative references to Joe Kennedy and a deal that had been struck with the mob to deliver the Chicago vote to JFK in 1960. Giancana’s fury over the alleged double-cross was volcanic.

  Considering how often his sons sought his counsel, it’s likely that Bobby had brought this disturbing information—which was now in the hands of the blackmailing Hoover—to his father. The old man knew what savage enemies that Mafia bosses—and the reptilian FBI chief—could be for his already beleaguered sons. The stress on the father must have been terrible. And now he was unable to help them.

  “The tragedy was Joe Kennedy getting a stroke,” Gore Vidal said. “He could have settled the problem with the Mafia in two minutes.”

  Vidal has long suspected that the Mafia played a key role in the events in Dallas. “I lived for years in a house in southern Italy. When the chief of police of all Italy arrives in Palermo, in an open car with his wife, they blow him up in public view for everyone to see, in precisely the same scene that happened in Dallas. Typical Mafia killing.”

  With his father incapacitated, it would fall to Bobby—the son Joe knew was as hard as he was—to try to protect the family. “Bobby’s a tough one, he’ll keep the Kennedys together, you can bet,” the old man once said.

  As the brothers’ enemies proliferated in places high and low, the task seemed daunting.

  3

  1962

  Bobby Kennedy rarely shouted or raised his voice when he got angry. But there was no mistaking his mood when he was not pleased with you. “When he lost his temper, he would fix you with an icy cold look—you knew you were wiped out,” recalled Fred Dutton, who as a Kennedy insider from JFK’s 1960 presidential race to RFK’s 1968 run, saw him in various states of pique.

  At four o’clock on the afternoon of May 14, 1962, the attorney general’s glinting blue eyes were focused sharply on two men from the CIA who were sitting in his spacious, walnut-paneled office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. CIA counsel Lawrence Houston and Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the agency’s chief of security, had been summoned by Kennedy to discuss a highly delicate matter. The attorney general wanted them to explain why the agency was trying to block the prosecution of a private eye who had been caught the year before bugging the telephone in comedian Dan Rowan’s Las Vegas hotel room. The case would expose national security secrets, the CIA men told Kennedy, because the private eye had been hired by the shadowy CIA intermediary Robert Maheu as a favor to Chicago godfather Sam Giancana, who suspected that Rowan was sleeping with his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire. Why was Maheu so interested in keeping Giancana happy? Because, the intelligence officials informed Kennedy, the CIA had enlisted the gangster in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.

  It was at this point during the half-hour meeting that Robert Kennedy’s eyes grew icy and his jaw tightened, giving the CIA men “a definite impression of [his] unhappiness.” Kennedy had spent years as a Senate investigator and now as attorney general trying to waken the country to the dangers of the growing merger between legitimate authority—unions, corporations, political institutions—and criminal forces. Now the CIA, an agency that he and his brother already found deeply suspect, was informing him that it had entered into the assassination business with the very Mafia lords he was trying to bring to justice. Kennedy fixed the two obviously discomfited CIA couriers with a hard look. “I trust that if you ever do business with organized crime again—with gangsters,” he said in a voice seething with sarcasm, “you will let the attorney general know.”

  The CIA men assured Kennedy that the Mafia plots had been terminated. But, probably unbeknownst to the two agency messengers, the murderous intrigue was still alive. In fact, around the same time Houston and Edwards were conveying their assurances to Kennedy, the CIA’s point man on Cuba, William Harvey, was delivering poison pills to Giancana confederate Johnny Rosselli, to eliminate the Cuban leader.

  In later years, CIA officials and other political opponents of the Kennedys would insist that Bobby’s outrage that day had been an act, that he was already aware that the Mafia had been enlisted in the government’s crusade against Castro. They would say that Kennedy was simply scolding the CIA because he wanted to be fully informed of the agency’s underworld dealings in the future, not because he wanted the sinister plots against Castro shut down.

  But Houston himself, who as the bearer of bad news that afternoon was in the best position to read the attorney general’s immediate reaction to the Mafia scheme, later testified that he “got the impression at that time that [Kennedy] did not know about” the CIA’s underworld pact. Under questioning from the Church Committee, the Senate panel formed in 1975 to investigate CIA involvement in assassination plots and other nefarious business, Houston observed that Kennedy “was disgusted that he had been placed in that position” by the CIA—where he would be forced to drop an organized crime case because of the agency’s shady intrigues.

  RFK’s right-hand man at the Justice Department, John Seigenthaler, also believes that Kennedy’s anger that afternoon was genuine. “I remember when Bob found out about the plots against Castro, he was absolutely furious,” recalled Seigenthaler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Nashville Tennessean who served as the attorney general’s administrative aide until mid-1962. “When the two fellows from the CIA came over, I took them into Bob’s office and was there for part of it. It was a very testy, cold discussion. My impression was that the silliness had stopped, and there would be nothing in the future unless the administration approved it. I could tell that Bob was genuinely furious at that meeting. He was not putting on a show for me. He didn’t want the administration embarrassed…. I mean you’re talking about something that would have driven Robert Kennedy right up the side of a wall, and it did when he found out about it
. Whatever anybody might think about him, you just don’t know the man if you think that’s something he might go for. It violated his most basic principles. Advance knowledge of a conspiracy to assassinate Castro would have been antithetical to his most basic beliefs. I don’t think there’s any evidence of it and I don’t believe you’d ever find it.”

  Robert Kennedy’s meeting with the two CIA officials still looms large in historical debates about the Kennedy administration. Was he truly shocked and enraged by the agency’s dark dealings? Or was the younger Kennedy actually the driving force behind the government’s murderous plots against Castro? Two warring camps have angrily engaged each other over these questions in the past four decades, with Kennedy partisans on one side and CIA apologists on the other. At stake is nothing less than the Kennedy brothers’ moral standing in history and the reputation of the intelligence agency.

  Another crucial question hovers over this debate: Were the Kennedys in control of their own intelligence apparatus? Yes, CIA officials and their advocates in the media have long insisted—the Kennedys were not only in control, they were so zealous and single-minded in their pursuit of Castro, the man who had humiliated the highly competitive brothers in their showdown at the Bay of Pigs, that they drove intelligence officials past acceptable bounds in their pursuit of the Cuban leader. But Kennedy partisans have been equally insistent that the two brothers were simply not this kind of men, that using underworld cutthroats as agents of U.S. foreign policy would have been anathema to them.

  The debate began while Robert Kennedy was still alive, and it continued long after he was dead. Years after the younger Kennedy’s 1968 assassination, Seigenthaler went to a Georgetown dinner party, a soiree with the usual mix of journalists, policymakers, and spooks. Among the guests was Richard Helms, the master CIA bureaucrat who had emerged as the real power in the agency soon after the downfall of Dulles and Bissell, even after JFK appointed John McCone as CIA director. “It was clear that McCone was out of the loop—Dick Helms was running the agency,” Seigenthaler had quickly concluded. “Anything McCone found out was by accident.”

  During the party, Helms—an urbane and calculating man who, unlike other CIA veterans, never drank more than his limit of one martini—maneuvered himself into Seigenthaler’s path. “In his own super-secret, egocentric way, without saying anything directly, Helms brought up the Castro plots and began pointing fingers at the Kennedy administration,” Seigenthaler recalled. “He was very careful, because he knew I was a Kennedy loyalist, but he was also being cute, saying things like, ‘The Castro plots? You don’t want to go there.’ He was snide and sly.”

  In 1975, Helms—by then dispatched to Tehran as U.S. ambassador but still very much the keeper of CIA secrets—tried to point the finger even more bluntly at the late Robert Kennedy. By then, news of past CIA abuses was beginning to surface in Washington’s post-Watergate climate. One morning, Helms took Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to breakfast and made it plain where he was going to pin the blame if government investigators got too close to agency secrets: “Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,” Kissinger later reported to President Ford at an urgent meeting in the Oval Office. “If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the assassination of Castro.” Helms’s threat, which his friend Kissinger was all too eager to relay, might have helped ensure that the CIA inquiry that was later launched by the Ford administration, under the cautious chairmanship of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, did not delve too deeply into the agency’s hidden chambers.

  Kennedy loyalists like Seigenthaler have a very different view of the relationship between the brothers and their intelligence agency. It was not the Kennedys who were flogging the agency to take deadly action against foreign enemies—it was the CIA’s own unchecked passions, they contend, that led it astray. “I thought and I still feel that the CIA was always a rogue agency—it did wet work on its own,” Seigenthaler says today in a soft Tennessean drawl. “The concept of plausible deniability, under which the CIA took action with the so-called tacit consent of the president, gave men like Helms the excuse to do whatever they wanted. They were way too in thrall to 007. My own instinct was that the relationship between the CIA and the Kennedy White House was not a healthy one. The administration was particularly vulnerable with someone like McCone in charge over there—he was in over his head…. And Bob shared that feeling—he didn’t have any confidence that John McCone had the slightest idea of what the CIA was doing.

  “We were caught in the reality of the Cold War and the agency obviously had a role to play,” Seigenthaler continued. “But I don’t think the Kennedys believed you could trust much of what they said…. We were trying to find our way out of the Cold War, but the CIA certainly didn’t want to.”

  Seigenthaler’s Kennedy ties date back to 1957, when he tried to share the fruits of his investigative reporting on Nashville labor racketeering with Bobby, who was making a name for himself at the time as the chief counsel for the McClellan Committee, the Senate panel that was probing organized crime’s corrupt inroads into America’s economy and politics. Bobby’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, arranged a meeting between the two men in New York, where Seigenthaler was leading a seminar on investigative reporting at Columbia University. The journalist hurried downtown for the meeting, arriving ten minutes early, only to have the brash Bobby—dressed in his overcoat and ready to leave—accuse the journalist of being tardy, insulting his regional roots in the process. “Are you Southerners always late?” Kennedy snapped. He brushed past Seigenthaler, telling him to get in touch with his assistant. A few weeks later, after being summoned to Bobby’s Washington office, the newspaper reporter was again snubbed by RFK, who shunted him off once more to his aide. By now, Seigenthaler knew what he thought of Kennedy: “What a rich little prick!”

  Three weeks later, Seigenthaler began to change his opinion. While working in the newsroom of the Tennessean one afternoon, he unexpectedly got a phone call from Kennedy. For the next forty-five minutes, Bobby peppered the investigative reporter with detailed questions about Teamster corruption in Tennessee, making it plain that he had read every article that Seigenthaler had written on the subject. Then he told the reporter he was sending two investigators to Nashville the next day and asked if he could help them. Seigenthaler agreed.

  “From that point on, I grew more and more impressed with Bobby Kennedy and I thought the little snot was a great guy, and our relationship warmed tremendously,” remembered Seigenthaler. “Who would have guessed?”

  Seigenthaler had passed the Kennedy test. He would now join the band of brothers that included fellow journalists like Ed Guthman and Pierre Salinger, investigators like Walt Sheridan, and political comrades like Kenny O’Donnell—men whose lives would be forever changed, first by Bobby’s reformer zeal, and then by his brother’s presidential mission. For Seigenthaler, the bond with RFK would grow deeper when he asked the journalist to help him with the memoir of his anti-crime campaign, which would become the 1960 bestseller The Enemy Within. Seigenthaler moved into Kennedy’s Hickory Hill mansion, editing the manuscript as Bobby turned out the pages in longhand, and taking long walks with him in the afternoon. It was during those walks that Seigenthaler “got to know Bob Kennedy better than I got to know anybody during my whole life,” he later recalled. “He was completely candid with me about everything.”

  As he grew closer to Kennedy, Seigenthaler’s early impressions of him as an arrogant, entitled prince began to evaporate. The Kennedy brothers could have chosen the idle lives of “little rich boys” sunning themselves on a “beach somewhere,” the journalist concluded, but instead they had chosen lives of public service. They were willing to take risks to change America. And Seigenthaler decided he would join their cause, doing “everything in my power to make Jack Kennedy president.” And, after that, putting his body on the line for Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department.

  In May 1961, d
uring the administration’s first civil rights crisis—prompted by violent attacks on a bus filled with Freedom Riders traveling through Alabama—Seigenthaler was dispatched by the attorney general to monitor the situation. Alabama Governor John Patterson had promised Seigenthaler that the civil rights activists would be protected, but as their Greyhound bus reached Montgomery, its convoy of state police cars suddenly melted away, and the bus riders were left to the mercy of an ugly crowd wielding chains and ax handles. Kennedy aide John Doar was reporting to the attorney general on the alarming events from a phone booth near the Montgomery bus terminal where the Freedom Riders were besieged. “The passengers are coming off,” he alerted Bobby. Then his voice grew agitated: “Oh, there are fists, punching. A bunch of men led by a guy with a bleeding face are beating them. There are no cops. It’s terrible. It’s terrible. There’s not a cop in sight. People are yelling, ‘Get ’em, get ’em.’ It’s awful.”

  Seigenthaler could not restrain himself. Seeing a girl being smacked in the face and hit over the head as she tried to escape the mob, he went to her rescue. She warned him: “Mister, get away…. You’re only going to get killed. This is not your fight.” He tried to push her into his car, but was suddenly clubbed from behind. While FBI agents stood watching, Seigenthaler collapsed to the ground, where he was kicked as he lay unconscious. He awoke in a Montgomery hospital.