The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Bobby turned to his father. “Now wait a minute, Dad,” Bobby laughed. “There are others in the family.”

  The one new face in the Monday and Friday strategy meetings in Jack’s Senate offices was Joe Miller, a political operative from the Northwest. Miller had worked on a string of Senate Democratic victories from Oregon to Wisconsin. He had a cocky, joshing air that did not always sit well with Bobby. These meetings had the levity of a scene in the counting room at a Las Vegas casino. Bobby was obsessed with the campaign, and those like Joe Miller who kidded around were squandering time and attention and deserved to be shunted aside.

  Jack, however, liked the man he called “Smiling Joe,” a brusque former football player with the brush-cut hair of an army private. Miller traveled with Jack on a campaign jaunt to Hawaii in July. On Saturday evening at Honolulu’s Princess Kaiulani Hotel, Jack was having a meeting with a group of local leaders to discuss the future of Hawaii, but the ever-present Sorensen and the other aides were missing. He had still not shown up the next morning.

  “Where the hell are they?” Jack fumed. Miller explained that some of the aides had met young women.

  “I brought them here to hunt delegates, not to hump hula girls!” Jack exclaimed. Jack’s aides identified so profoundly with their candidate that they, for the most part, adopted his sexual habits as well, a practice that on this particular Sunday morning Jack found less than a compliment.

  Miller had a tight working relationship with labor union leaders and Democratic Party principals in the West. In September he headed off on a month-long trip, starting with the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, and then visiting ten western states, all paid for by the Kennedy patriarch.

  When Miller returned to Washington, he prepared several memos. The detailed, seven-page document addressed to Bobby was a frank rendering of the situation with the labor movement. Miller had been startled at the intensity of the hostility toward Jack among many union people. He detailed the reasons labor leaders mistrusted Jack, one of which was that they had misread his role on the labor bill. Jack’s work on the McClellan Committee “created perhaps understandable resentments in the labor movement.” As a result, working people and their leaders were angry and felt that Jack was “too rich, too slick, and dominated by his family … not one of the boys in the Truman manner.”

  Miller dictated a state-by-state report on his trip, seeking ways to change the perception of Jack among labor people. Then he typed another memo himself, giving the only copy to Jack’s prim secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, a woman who prided herself on her absolute discretion when it came to the senator from Massachusetts. Miller told Lincoln that this sensitive document was for the senator’s eyes only. The memo dealt with the single most potentially damaging problem he had encountered.

  “A remarkable revelation emerged from my 100-plus dialogues,” Miller wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Virtually everyone I talked to mentioned Kennedy’s sex life as a barrier to his nomination. I was taken aback. Not that I hadn’t heard a story or two myself. Nevertheless, in all my travels, political and social contacts with him, I had seen nothing to indicate that he was a philanderer. He was all business, the business of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.”

  Miller concluded that this was a serious enough matter that it could blow Jack’s candidacy away. In his memo he said that the only effective way to end the rumors was for Jack to keep Jackie at his side on all his trips.

  Within a day or two an angry Sorensen took Miller to lunch at the Methodist Building cafeteria. “You have been participating in some ugly talk about the senator’s private life,” Sorensen raged. “We will not dignify scurrilous gossip by acknowledging it. I am speaking not only for myself, but also for the senator and Bob Kennedy. Such talk will not be tolerated.”

  Miller was stunned. He was not saying that the stories were true. He did know that Jack’s campaign should know about the widespread rumors. He railed back at Sorensen as vigorously as the aide condemned him, and when they left that afternoon neither man had backed off. Miller, though, found that he was not invited to an important strategy session at Hyannis Port, and from then on his role in the campaign diminished.

  Jack had received a series of the most explicit possible warnings that he simply had to rein in his sexual conduct. For the past two and a half years he had sat on a committee that in its investigation of corruption in the labor movement showed how mobsters seduced vulnerable politicians and businesspeople with money, favors, or women, slowly enveloping them in a web of deceit. His own behavior in Havana and elsewhere had advertised his predilections to those best able to exploit them.

  Already, in March 1959, Jack feared there might be a wiretap on one of his telephones. By then he was having to deal with an obsessed Georgetown matron, Florence Kater, who had rented an apartment to his secretary, Pamela Turnure. Turnure was a sensuous version of Jackie, a provocative, sumptuous presence among the dowdy professional women who largely peopled Jack’s office. Kater had taken a picture of a man she said was Jack, with his hand over his face, exiting Turnure’s Georgetown residence at one o’clock in the morning. She also claimed to have a tape recording of their activities in the apartment. Kater charged that in July 1958 Jack had confronted her and her husband, threatening that if the couple did not stop bothering him, Leonard Kater would lose his government job. In the months since then, Florence Kater wrote that James Mclnerney, Jack’s attorney, had visited her seven times. She had in her possession what appeared to be a signed note from Mclnerney dated January 24, 1959, when she handed the attorney copies of the photo and tape.

  It was a different time in American journalism, and no newspaper or magazine printed a word of the woman’s charges or what Kater purported to be a photo of Jack “racing like a scared turkey bird from his girlfriend’s house in his own self-incriminating pose as he tries to run out of camera range.” She was, however, an obsessed woman who seemed likely to go far to expose Jack’s alleged philandering.

  Jack needed no more flashbulbs going off in the Washington night to alert him to the imminent danger of exposure. And now Miller had given him a memo about the ubiquitous rumors. The political operative was a forceful, highly opinionated man who could have been faulted for setting forth his truths unshorn of nuance. But Miller was no liar, and that Sorensen so quickly silenced him sent a signal that others should tiptoe lightly outside Jack’s bedroom door and keep their mouths tightly clamped.

  Jack believed that he could get away with his conduct without costs or consequences. He felt that others could do the same. His friend Chuck Spalding’s marriage was full of the kind of volatility that never surfaced in Jack’s relationship with Jackie. “Here comes the agony and the ecstasy,” Jack whispered to Chuck as his wife approached. “Why don’t you do what I do? Why get a divorce?”

  What Jack accepted as a civilized solution was emotionally impossible to the Spaldings, who saw it as institutionalizing the rankest hypocrisy. As Spalding looked back on his long friendship with the Kennedys, he saw that Joe’s sexual conduct was a malady that he inflicted on his sons, causing them damage even if they could not see the ravages of their conduct. “It just tears at the human fundamentals,” Spalding reflected. “When I first saw Jack—coming from a Catholic family—it was good to see some of that animal freedom. Some of it was like a soldier home from the war who has run into normal life. How many people think they can take Gloria Swanson on their vacation and make it work? But that doesn’t mean others can make it work. It left the Kennedy men with vulnerability in that area. It was like a contagious disease.”

  Jack was no out-of-control Lothario ready to sacrifice his political future on the sweaty altar of sexuality. He was after the greatest prize in American political life, and there were days, even weeks, when he had no time or interest in yet another momentary dalliance. But he had one favored way to relax, and nothing was going to change that.

  As for his wife, Jack may not have been sexually loyal to Ja
ckie, but he deeply appreciated her wry, mocking quality. If not for the exigencies of politics in a democracy, he probably would have enjoyed standing aloof with his wife and looking with her in disdainful amusement at what passed as humanity. He dictated a letter to her after a visit to Newport, probably in the summer of 1959, that exhibited those qualities in full measure, especially in his description of a dinner party. “I was taken into the kitchen and introduced to all the help who were just over from Ireland,” he said into the Dictaphone. “I find them more attractive than the guests.” He shared with Jackie an overwhelming concern for the sheer physical attractiveness of humans, wincing at the sight of ugliness. “Jenny Ryan was there with her rather squinty-eyed children for a five-week period,” he said. “Mrs. Shaw [the nanny] is the loveliest figure actually on the beach and has a beautiful red-brown bathing suit that goes with her hair. She has let herself go however slightly around the middle.”

  Shortly after Jack formally announced his candidacy on January 2, 1960, Jack and Jackie flew to the Half Moon Hotel and Cottage Colony in Jamaica for their last vacation before the onslaught of the campaign. Jackie had at times been desperately unhappy with her marriage. She had recoiled from the heat and fire of publicity, but what she had faced until now was no more than a match compared to the bonfire of attention that would greet her in the next months. She had a strange premonition that Jack and she might die on this Caribbean island. She wrote a last will and testament and mailed it to Evelyn Lincoln. “If we don’t arrive back from Jamaica will you please send whats [sic] below to Jack’s lawyer—Jim McInerney—my will! Otherwise just tear it up!!”

  I Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy wish to make provision for my daughter Caroline—that in the event of her parents deaths she should go to live with her fathers youngest brother Edward J. Kennedy and his wife Joan—to be raised as one of their own children…. Everything I have should be left to her—money, furniture, jewelry, etc—

  Signed

  Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Jan 11, 1960

  Even after announcing his candidacy, Jack continued unabated in his pursuit of women. He seemed heedless of the risk, taking chances in circumstances in which he should have been more circumspect, and with the kinds of women whom he once had considered beneath him even for an evening.

  Hoover’s FBI began receiving unsubstantiated reports about Jack’s conduct. A guard in the Old Senate Office Building told an informant that in July 1959

  he was checking offices in the Senate Building one night and noted on the top of Kennedy’s desk a photograph openly displayed. This photo included Senator Kennedy and other men, as well as several girls in the nude. It was taken aboard a yacht or some type of pleasure cruiser … the thing that disturbed him most was that the senator would show such poor judgment in leaving this photo openly displayed and said that other members of the guard and cleaning forces were aware of the photograph and that Kennedy’s “extracurricular activities” were a standard joke around the Senate Office Building.

  Far more seriously, on March 23, 1960, Hoover received a memo containing allegations from an informant friendly with various hoodlums, including Meyer Lanksy, whom Jack had probably met in Havana in 1957. The man said that he had been told that when Jack was in Miami, an airline stewardess had been sent to his room. He also said that

  in Miami he had occasion to overhear a conversation which indicated that Senator Kennedy had been compromised with a woman in Las Vegas, Nevada. He stated that he knows that Senator Kennedy was staying at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas about 6 or 8 weeks ago during the filming of a movie entitled “Ocean 11,” starring Dean Martin. He stated that he observed Senator Kennedy in the nightclub of the Sands Hotel, during this period, but has no idea as to the identity of any possible female companion.

  Jack had been in Las Vegas precisely when the informant said he had. There he met Judith Immoor Campbell, a stunning, twenty-six-year-old woman known now as Judith Exner. Fare takes strange shapes: a Japanese destroyer cutting through the Blackett Strait, thrusting a PT-boat captain into a hero’s role; a brother blown up in the skies of England, leaving his sibling a wealth of obligations; an occasional lover scrawling her name in bold letters into the history of our time. Jack’s life had no larger ironies than this—that he should be first toppled from his pedestal of public virtue not by some terrible act of misfeasance, but in large part by a woman with whom he had one of his myriad liaisons.

  Jack had flown in from New Mexico on February 7, 1960, to attend Frank Sinatra’s show at the Sands Hotel that evening. Sinatra, one of the biggest names in show business, was a liberal Democrat and one of Jack’s most fervent supporters. The singer also had an ever-changing entourage of available women, and they were there that evening in ample supply at Jack’s table. One of the other guests, the journalist Blair Clark, recalled the women sitting there as a collection of “some bimbos and some show girls,” hardly the type of woman whom he and Jack had generally associated with when they had been together at Harvard, and none of them notable enough to stay in Blair’s memory.

  Sinatra had invited Exner to fly in from Los Angeles for the weekend, or so she claimed. The singer had ample reason to believe that Exner might well provide a midnight treat for Jack. Three months before, Sinatra had met Exner at Puccino’s, one of his favorite restaurants. The next day he called and invited her to join him that day on a Hawaiian vacation. Exner flew out of Los Angeles that night and by the following evening was in the entertainer’s bed. The affair was short-lived, largely, according to Exner, because Sinatra tried to involve her in a sexual threesome, an invitation that she declined. She was not distressed enough, however, to turn down Sinatra’s invitation to come to Las Vegas to see his show at the Sands.

  Exner recalled that it was Teddy, not Jack, who made a pass at her that evening, inviting her to fly to Denver with him. Jack, for his part, supposedly called and invited Exner to lunch the next day in Sinatra’s suite. Exner asserted later that no sexual encounter took place that long afternoon. Instead, for three hours “the main topic of conversation, once I had given him my family history, was religion.”

  Jack was not given to lengthy dialogues about religion and may never have had a three-hour discussion with a woman in his life. Exner, moreover, was largely uneducated. She had the mascara-thin layer of culture acquired by many Hollywood actresses and would-be actresses; it largely consisted of the judicious application of a few multisyllable words and an accent suggesting that its speaker had at one time passed through London.

  Jack had no way of knowing that much of what Exner said about her family history was simply not true. She fancied that she, like Jack, came from a wealthy, privileged family. She described her childhood home as an elegant, twenty-four-room mansion in Pacific Palisades so enormous that she found it “kind of spooky.” There is no evidence that Exner’s father, Frederick Immoor, a project architect, ever owned the house or that the family lived in it for an extensive time. The family may have stayed there for a period while Immoor was renovating the mansion, or in partial payment for his services. In any event, a more realistic version of her childhood would be painted in far more modest hues. The family traveled from rented house to rented house, in Pacific Palisades, Chicago, New Jersey, Phoenix, North Hollywood, L.A., sometimes living well, other times only a few steps from insolvency.

  Exner never finished high school and says that she was privately tutored to get her degree. As a teenager, she became one of those young women who hang around the studios with vague dreams of becoming a star, a singer, a notable, somebody. She was stunningly beautiful, her face set off by thick eyebrows that another woman would have plucked but that emphasized her exquisite, dramatic features. She met Bill Campbell, an actor in his midtwenties, who married her when she was only eighteen. The marriage was a disaster from the beginning, and by 1958 Exner was a single woman again with alimony of $433.33 a month.

  Exner said she was “financially independent,” with “family money [that] kept her
in furs and steak Diane.” That was simply another illusion. In her 1958 divorce proceedings, she presented to the court a signed statement that she was “without sufficient funds or income to maintain or support herself either permanently or during the pendency of this action.” Shortly after separating from Campbell, she moved in with another man, Travis Kleefeld, but left him in the fall of 1959. By then she owed $2,784 on a $3,145.50 time-plan loan at the Bank of America and was behind in her car payments. She called herself an artist and an interior decorator, though she never made a cent from either profession. In her entire life, her only daily employment was a two-month-long “public relations” position, working for the comedian Jerry Lewis at about $100 a week.

  When Jack met Exner, she was living off and on with her parents. Her father, who was earning $866 a month, was in such financial straits that he took out a number of loans that year, the last one in December for $2,032 to consolidate his debts and pay for Christmas gifts.

  Exner called herself an artist, but her primary creation was the illusion of affluence. She was shrewd, not smart, with an affinity for older gentlemen whose major virtues were their money and their largess. Just two weeks before meeting Jack, she had been in Las Vegas staying at the Sands as the guest of Richard Ellwood, a middle-aged businessman who later became publicly known as a “boyfriend.”

  Another of her friends was John Rosselli, a dapper fifty-four-year-old gangster with close connections to the film industry who frequented the same nightclubs that Exner did. Rosselli was one of the top Mafia figures on the West Coast, and his biographers have speculated that “almost certainly it was Rosselli who produced his friend to meet Kennedy.” Another proponent of that position is Fred Otash, a private detective with a propensity for wiretapping. It was from Otash, who had friends in low and high places, that the FBI may first have learned that Jack and Exner were having an affair when he suggested to the agency that she was “shacking up with John Kennedy in the East.”