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

by Talbot, David

  Sinatra’s fury was undoubtedly mixed with panic. He had helped enlist his underworld friends in the Kennedy campaign, but then the family brushed him aside. “They treat him like a whore,” a contemptuous Johnny Rosselli was overhead telling Giancana on the phone. That’s the way the Kennedys treated friends, he said: “You fuck them, you pay them, and then they’re through.” Giancana fumed in graphically violent language about Sinatra, and his failure to get the Kennedys to honor the deal that old Joe had allegedly made with the underworld during the 1960 race. The singer, who knew that Joe’s stroke in December 1961 had eliminated any chance of a sit-down between the family and the Mafia, bemoaned his bad luck. “Why, oh why, did Joe get that fucking stroke?” Sinatra’s valet heard him wail.

  Giancana later said that the only thing that saved Sinatra’s life was his sublime talent. The gangster felt a rush of mercy toward Old Blue Eyes during a moment of coital bliss with his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire. One night, he told a Chicago associate, “I’m fucking Phyllis, playing Sinatra songs in the background, and the whole time I’m thinking to myself, Christ, how can I silence that voice? It’s the most beautiful sound in the world. Frank’s lucky he got it. It saved his life.”

  Rosselli was also feeling double-crossed by the government. He had put his services at the CIA’s disposal for free, out of patriotic duty. But Bobby Kennedy saw no reason to honor the intelligence agency’s debts. “Here I am helping the government, helping the country,” Rosselli told a Las Vegas associate on a plane trip to Washington in 1962, “and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.”

  BOBBY KENNEDY WAS NOT intimidated by these dragon blasts from the underworld. The only obstacle in the way of his crime crackdown, as far as he was concerned, was J. Edgar Hoover. Frustrated by Hoover’s foot dragging, Kennedy and his team resorted to building their own makeshift investigative force. “The feeling was very simple—we felt that we could not look to the FBI for any major assistance, and when we did our requests would have to be screened through Hoover,” recalled John Cassidy, who was a lawyer in Kennedy’s organized crime section. “You’d ask them to go interview a witness or a suspect and they’d ask you a hundred questions, most of which came down to ‘why?’ It took a long time to move that forward, to the point where we looked elsewhere for investigators. We found postal inspectors, we found customs people, we found the IRS. We ran around the FBI, because they weren’t getting things done.”

  According to Ed Guthman, Kennedy took the same initiative in the civil rights arena when he realized the FBI was also useless there. The Justice Department built its own “intelligence unit” in the embattled South, said the attorney general’s former press secretary and confidant. “We learned shortly after the attack on the Freedom Riders in Alabama that the FBI knew the Klan was going to attack, but they didn’t do anything and they didn’t warn anybody. So we knew we couldn’t rely on the FBI to deal with whatever crisis came up in the South, and as a result we formed our own intelligence unit.” Guthman told me that the Kennedy Justice Department sent a wave of young staff attorneys into the South to get information. “Another part of our intelligence operation was my relationship with the press,” he said. “The reporters covering the civil rights battles would be all over the place and they would tell me everything they knew.”

  Ignoring organized crime and civil rights, RFK’s two overriding issues, Hoover continued to insist that communism was the nation’s primary threat. Kennedy dismissed this notion when he took office, saying “it is such nonsense to have to waste time prosecuting the Communist Party” when most of its dwindling membership consisted of undercover FBI agents.

  Hoover’s reluctance to pursue the Mafia has been ascribed to his zealous bureaucratic protectiveness—a fear that shifting resources from everyday crime to the more complex rackets would result in less impressive arrest numbers, as well as expose his agents to the Mafia’s seductive bribery. It also has been given more tawdry explanations. The legendary lawman was reportedly not immune to the corrupting influence of the mob, consorting with Joe Kennedy’s favorite gangster Frank Costello and other underworld figures, who helped make him a fortune by supplying him with gambling tips. Other reports suggest that lifelong bachelor Hoover was a victim of sexual blackmail by the Mafia.

  What is certain is that Hoover snooped on the Kennedys with more relish than he did on organized crime bosses. The attorney general was locked in a malignant minuet with his FBI chief. At times Kennedy took his father’s lead and tried to win him over with flattery. Other times RFK and his circle flaunted their scorn for Hoover. Bobby and wife Ethel sometimes set loose their high-spirited brood on the prim director’s office, where the kids would go toppling into his giant flowerpots. “My father would send us kids into Hoover’s office to raise hell, overturn stuff on his desk, to get a rise out of him,” Joseph Kennedy II, RFK’s oldest son, remembered with a laugh. “And having Brumus, this huge Newfoundland, come romping in and slobbering all over his office—that probably didn’t go over too well either,” quipped his older sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

  Hoover suspected that the Kennedys were plotting to replace him in their second term, give him the “MacArthur treatment” and send him off to pasture with trumpet blasts and flying colors. But he had other plans. According to William Sullivan, the FBI’s number three man, Hoover assiduously compiled all the dirt he could find on JFK, “which the president, with his active social life, seemed more than willing to provide…. I was sure he was saving everything he had on Kennedy, and on Martin Luther King Jr., too, until he could unload it all and destroy them both. He kept this kind of explosive material in his personal files, which filled four rooms on the fifth floor of headquarters.”

  Looking back on their administration after his brother’s death, Bobby said that he realized the FBI director was a “dangerous” man—a “menace to democracy” and a “habitual blackmailer,” whose poisonous power over presidents and other politicians came from his voluminous secret files. Hoover “acts in such a strange, peculiar way,” Kennedy said in a remarkably frank 1964 interview that was intended to be read only by future historians. “He’s rather a psycho.” But, said Bobby, he and Jack thought “that we could control” him, “that we were on top of, that we could deal with [him] at the appropriate time. That’s the way we looked at it.”

  The Kennedys thought they could control Hoover, suggested one family member, because Jack and Bobby and their top aides were aware of Hoover’s secret life. This was confirmed by Kenny O’Donnell Jr., who said that his father and the Kennedy brothers knew Hoover “wore funny clothes. That’s why they had a stalemate. They knew enough about Hoover and Hoover thought he knew something about them.”

  Ironically, the sexually closeted Hoover spread homosexual rumors about Robert Kennedy. Hoover ally Lyndon Johnson tried to get some mileage out of these rumors at the 1960 Democratic convention when he was vying with JFK for the presidential nomination. Several days before the convention, Theodore White received a phone call from someone who later became a high Johnson administration official. “I think you should know that John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy are fags,” the caller told the journalist. “We have pictures of John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy in women’s dresses in Las Vegas this spring at a big fag party. This should be made public.” The caller promised to deliver the photographic evidence to White in twenty-four hours, but the pictures never arrived.

  The Kennedy brothers’ boyish good looks set off homophobic anxiety attacks among many of their enemies, including the sexually repressed Hoover. The hedonistic Jack and his cultured wife were not discomfited by having gay confidants in their circle. And those who came to know Bobby quickly recognized the empathy underneath his tough-guy exterior. Both brothers seemed soft in a way that deeply unnerved their hard-line opponents. But this particular whispering campaign about the Kennedys, who were notoriously heterosexual, never went anywhere.

  ON JULY 2, 1962, producer Jerry Wald info
rmed Bobby Kennedy that the screenplay based on The Enemy Within was completed. The film project, which Wald had been working on for over a year with screenwriter Budd Schulberg, was close to Kennedy’s heart. The Kennedys were well aware of the silver screen’s mesmerizing powers. It was On the Waterfront, the powerful 1954 movie about the mob’s reign of terror on the New York docks, that had inspired Bobby to launch his crusade against racketeering. When Wald showed him a list of prospective screenwriters for The Enemy Within, Kennedy had quickly chosen Schulberg, who won an Oscar for On the Waterfront. Meeting with Kennedy at Hickory Hill to discuss the project, Schulberg won him over by telling him he thought The Enemy Within was about something bigger than bad men or corrupt unions—it was about how “something at the core of our society was beginning to rot.” This is precisely what the radical reformer in Kennedy had hoped to convey with his book—that the very centers of American power were in danger of being corrupted. By harnessing Hollywood’s magic, Kennedy thought his warning message would finally get the public’s full attention.

  The attorney general asked Sheridan and Guthman to assist Schulberg on the script. Paul Newman was approached to play Bobby in the movie. By July 1962, Schulberg believed, The Enemy Within was headed toward becoming “not merely a sequel to Waterfront but a significant extension of that film on a national scale.” Then, eleven days after telling Kennedy the cameras were ready to roll, Jerry Wald dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of forty-nine in his Beverly Hills home. Schulberg feared that the project would die with him. He thought that the rotund, ebullient independent producer—maker of hits like From Here to Eternity, Peyton Place, and Key Largo—was the only one in Hollywood who had the courage and the clout to make the movie. Schulberg was right.

  After Wald’s death, a labor racketeer paid a visit to the deceased producer’s studio, 20th Century Fox. Walking brazenly into the office of the studio president, he announced that if 20th Century Fox went ahead with the project, it would be plagued by labor troubles—Teamsters would refuse to deliver prints of the film to theaters, stink bombs would be thrown into cinemas where it was shown. The studio abruptly dropped the film.

  Kennedy convinced Schulberg to produce The Enemy Within himself, and he began searching for financing. But the two men soon found out how much muscle organized crime had in Hollywood. Some studios were under the direct control of the Mafia, Schulberg later wrote, “and, of course, those studios rejected [the film] out of hand.” Columbia, which had released On the Waterfront, showed a brief interest in The Enemy Within. But then the movie company got a warning from a Hoffa attorney—a letter that was “disturbingly extra-legal,” Schulberg recalled—and a studio meeting to discuss the film was suddenly canceled. Schulberg’s cast also became infected with fear. One star showed up at Schulberg’s house drunk one night and told the screenwriter he was afraid he would be killed if he appeared in the movie.

  The Enemy Within never made it to the screen. Schulberg had grown up a Hollywood prince, the son of movie mogul B.P. Schulberg. He had written one of Hollywood’s masterpieces, winner of the 1955 Academy Award for Best Picture. Bobby Kennedy was known as the second most powerful man in the country. But they could not get a movie made over the blunt opposition of organized crime. It was a stunning lesson in the dark workings of American power.

  THE CHAIRMAN OF THE Joint Chiefs of Staff marched into the president’s office at 7:59 p.m. He had been summoned by his commander-in-chief, but it was the general—with his rugged jaw, gray-flecked hair, and silver stars—who seemed to radiate the most authority in the room. Even when the president told the general why he had been brought to the White House, his commanding self-confidence seemed to remain intact. The president had made a shocking discovery: his Joint Chiefs chairman was plotting to overthrow his government and replace it with a “regular damn South America junta,” in the president’s words. He confronted the military man with irrefutable evidence of his treason, but the general did not immediately crumble. He lashed viciously into the president. “You have lost the respect of the country,” he told him. “Your policies have brought us to the edge of disaster. Military morale has sunk to the lowest point in thirty years.” In his eagerness to make peace with the Soviet Union, the president had acted as recklessly as “a naïve boy.”

  The president was shaken by the general’s defiance. The plot had been exposed, but the president was still uncertain of victory. He knew that the power of the U.S. military establishment had been growing unchallenged ever since World War II. He knew that the general enjoyed heroic stature among the American people. He knew that after living for years in the shadow of nuclear terror, the public was ripe for a military strongman who promised them security. When people “feel helpless, they start going to extremes,” the president had mused aloud with his most trusted aides when he first heard about the coup plot. “Look at the history—Joe McCarthy, then the Birch society…. The climate for democracy in this country is the worst it’s ever been…. People have seriously started looking for a superman.”

  After their taut confrontation in the Oval Office, the general finally agreed to submit his resignation. In return the president agreed not to make public the military conspiracy and to allow its masterminds to quietly retire to civilian life. It was a compromise that underlined the Democratic president’s sense of moderation and restraint, but perhaps his political weakness too.

  At the White House press conference where he later announced the general’s resignation, the president denied reports of an attempted coup. The beleaguered leader did not want to further undermine confidence in his government. The American military is deeply indoctrinated in the principles of the Constitution, the president lectured the assembled reporters, so such treason is foreign to our officer corps. “I am sure the American people do not believe that any such thought ever entered the mind of any general officer in our services since the day the country began,” the president said, as he concluded the conference. “Let us pray that it never will.” For those who knew how close to the brink the country had really come, the president’s reassurances must have seemed bleakly hollow.

  These were not real-life scenes from the Kennedy presidency, but fictional scenes inspired by the increasingly ominous mood in the capital. They take place at the end of Seven Days in May, the bestselling novel about a military coup that comes chillingly close to success. Written by Washington journalists Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, the political potboiler lacked literary flair, suffering from cardboard characters and corny dialogue. But its spooky scenario struck a chord with the public when it was published in September 1962, after nearly two years of well-publicized tensions between civilian and military officials in the Kennedy administration. Knebel, a White House correspondent for Look magazine, said he got the idea for Seven Days in May after interviewing the country’s always disturbing Air Force chief, Curtis LeMay, who at one point shocked the journalist by going off the record to fume against President Kennedy’s “cowardice” at the Bay of Pigs.

  Knebel and his co-author were not just expressing their own anxieties—and those of the public—about the stability of the Kennedy presidency. They were channeling the fears of the Kennedy brothers themselves. Both men were haunted by the premonition that their administration would end violently. They raised the subject of a coup or assassination with eerie frequency during their brief hold on power. Surely no American presidency, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln’s, has been so filled with intimations of its own mortality. Yet, oddly, this chronic concern of the Kennedys has received scant attention in histories of the administration.

  JFK made a habit of shocking his friends with the morbid specter of his own bloody demise. One day, JFK was sailing off Palm Beach with Grant Stockdale, an old friend and fund-raiser whom he appointed ambassador to Ireland. JFK began shooting off rounds from a .22 rifle over the empty ocean expanse and he urged his friend to join him. Stockdale said, “Not on your life, not with all the Secret Se
rvice around and me with a gun in my hands.” JFK then turned thoughtful and said, “Stock, do you think I’ll be assassinated?” His friend rushed to reassure him: “Chief, don’t even think about such a thing. Of course you won’t.”

  Kennedy brought up the subject on several occasions with Charlie Bartlett, even discussing at length with him what kind of president Lyndon Johnson would make after his own violent departure. One day, the two men were taking a relaxing drive on a backcountry road in Virginia. Suddenly a car shot past the Secret Service car that was trailing the president and then roared past JFK and his friend. “He was shaken a little bit by this car going by,” Bartlett recalled. “And he said, ‘Those fellows should have stopped them…. The Secret Service should have stopped that car.’ And then he disliked the fact that he was showing concern, and he said, ‘Charlie, that man might have shot you.’ But the thing was obviously on his mind.”

  John Kennedy had highly sensitive political nerve endings. He was acutely attuned to the dark rumblings in Washington. And so were journalists like Knebel, who enjoyed good access at the White House. Knebel had known Kennedy since his days in Congress, when he recognized the dazzling young politician from Boston as a comer. “He was just good copy, that’s all—with the money and the flashiness and the beautiful wife and the whole thing, you know?” Knebel later said. “Also, I felt strongly that he was going someplace, so I just began hanging around his office.”

  Like his wife, fellow Look staff writer Laura Fletcher Knebel, he developed a genial, sparring relationship with JFK. Once, after showing Kennedy a 15,000-word profile of him that he had written for an upcoming book about the 1960 presidential race, Knebel was sharply challenged by the candidate on one of his facts. Knebel had written about a well-documented loan that Joe Kennedy had made to the publisher of the Boston Post during JFK’s 1952 Senate race. Soon after, the Post’s editorial page switched allegiance from Republican candidate Henry Cabot Lodge to JFK.