The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  It is unclear whether the FBI tested the liquid for amphetamines, or if it did, whether the test was positive. The vial was undated, and in his memoir Dr. Jacobson wrote that when tested after two weeks, “there was no trace of amphetamine in the solution.”

  Surely it was reckless of Kennedy to continue with Dr. Jacobson’s injections, which Dr. Cohen feared could have led to his destruction and which also represented an unimaginably dangerous indulgence for the most powerful man in the world. The president’s chronic “back pain” was probably in some sense a generic term for all the suffering he was going through. By now his adrenal glands had completely atrophied. He needed to take naps in the afternoons, though most men of his generation considered naps a mark of self-indulgent weakness.

  Kennedy was not using Dr. Jacobson’s injections as a recreational high, but to help him get through his days with demonstrable energy. To Kennedy, true manhood was everything, and a man was a vibrant, active, physical, sexual being or he was nothing. Even with his treatment, when John Jr. rushed forward to the helicopter to greet his returning father, Kennedy could not bend down to pick the boy up but had to foist him off on an aide.

  Those who worked with Kennedy would consider it slander to suggest that the president they served may have been a drug addict. He may have needed a nap every day, but he did not slur his words, wander in and out of conversations, rant on in manic jags, or do anything that would have alerted them to his drug use. He may have used the injections the way some long-term alcoholics drink, never disgracing themselves, managing their lives and business seemingly as well as if they were sober. In that case, he did a brilliant job of disguising his problem, for his awesome sense of detail, insatiable appetite for facts, and intense curiosity, which took him to the nooks and crannies of government where some presidents rarely ventured, never seemed impaired.

  Kennedy’s back once again became so painful the week before Christmas that in Palm Beach he had to go to bed. Outside his door his doctors began their minuet in earnest again, Dr. Burkley, Dr. Travell, Dr. Kraus, and Dr. Wade all standing there offering medical advice. Dr. Travell, as always, was ready with her injections of novocaine to deaden the pain, a treatment that appalled the other physicians. When the doctors were shown into the bedroom, Dr. Kraus dramatically raised the subject with the ailing president. “I will not treat this patient if she touches him again,” he asserted, staring at Dr. Travell. “Even once.” Kennedy appeared to nod his acceptance.

  On Christmas day, Dr. Travell went into Kennedy’s bedroom to talk to him about a front-page story in that morning’s paper with the headline: “Dr. Travell Quitting as Kennedy’s Doctor.” After listening to the doctor, the president apparently decided against formally accepting her resignation but decided to let her keep the title while taking away most of her authority. “I hate to use the word blackmail,” Dr. Cohen said, “but essentially this is how she kept her tentacles stuck to the White House.”

  After this meeting Dr. Burkley became in effect Kennedy’s White House physician, though the change was not made public until 1963. Dr. Travell kept her office in the White House, though many members of the staff no longer visited her. She had the title that she wanted above all things, but she no longer had authority over the president’s medical treatment.

  As for Dr. Cohen, he kept secret all that he knew about the president’s health. When the physician died in 1999, he had no idea that his letters had been saved by Evelyn Lincoln. “I asked him many times to dictate his memories, particularly about Kennedy’s care, and then at least there would be a straight record of it,” said Dr. Becker. “He was not interested. He was afraid it would get in the wrong hands.”

  The medications that Kennedy was taking, along with his various medical problems, might have diminished his sexual drive or even rendered him impotent. That is why Dr. Jacobson may have included one of the newly discovered anabolic steroids such as nandrolone or testosterone in his medical cocktail. For the president, sex had always been a life force, an assertion that he would never be tied down to all the routines of the sick and the dying. Beyond that, rapacious sex was part of his father’s definition of a true man. If anything, Kennedy was even more interested in the sweet touch of female flesh, in laughter that had no reason but to please, in meetings that had no purpose but pleasure. He was greedy for it, frolicking in the White House pool with two young aides known as Fiddle and Faddle, insisting that there be women available when he traveled, scheduling his women in the White House when Jackie was away.

  The haunting question is, to what extent did the president’s sexual practices affect his administration? A successful leader minimizes the natural vulnerabilities of the political life, in votes cast and in actions taken. Kennedy cavalierly exposed himself to a number of people who made their livings in part by trading on the vulnerabilities of the weak and susceptible, be they a Mafia figure like Sam Giancana or a corporate lobbyist like William Thompson, who was one of Kennedy’s procurers. To these men, overt blackmail was only the final and usually unnecessary step along a dark road that Kennedy had only begun to travel.

  One of the FBI’s informers was an upscale prostitute who told of receiving a phone call from a friend of the president and being asked to go to the Waldorf Towers. She was shown to a suite where a second woman sat waiting. Kennedy entered the room, and together the two women performed their specialties on the president. That was just another sordid little tale, fit for nothing more than to be dropped into the FBI’s bottomless files of undigested, unverified facts and mindless allegations. The woman, however, had another client, a Russian diplomat. She was willing, her FBI handler said, “to give him up with pictures, the whole bit, if that’s what we wanted.” The Soviets had developed sexual blackmail into a dark art, and a woman who was willing to give up the Russian to the FBI might have been willing to give up the president to the Russian. That did not happen, but Kennedy had made himself endlessly vulnerable.

  There was an obsessiveness in Kennedy’s sexuality, unlike that of other presidents whose adulterous trysts could also have been chronicled. The handsome, debonair Kennedy had an erotic quality unlike any of his predecessors, and it made of his assignations pleasurable vicarious reading, amply supplied in books, articles, and documentaries. “You must always remember that sex is something which gives every journalist, every writer, an equal start,” said Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, as wryly witty at ninety as at forty-five. “If you’re talking about economics, foreign policy, or war and peace, you have to have information. On sex, everybody is equal. Therefore, sex is the avenue by which the most incoherent gain attention.”

  In the White House, the Secret Service agents were trained not to look at the president but only outward toward those who might harm him. Kennedy’s aides learned to do much the same thing. They looked away, and yet they knew that things were not right. A serial adulterer is rarely one of humankind’s noblest specimens, yet the men around Kennedy, the men who knew him best, loved and revered him deeply. Paolella sensed what was going on, but that did not diminish what he and his colleagues felt. “I would say I think everybody loved him,” the agent reflected, his voice etched with feeling. “I mean, there’s no doubt, he had charisma, he had a kind of self-deprecating sense of humor. And he never let you think that he was above you.”

  Jackie abhorred what she considered the prisonlike atmosphere of the White House and was spending as much time away as in Washington. She had the feeling that those around her husband had “hit the White House with their Dictaphone[s] running.” It was as if his aides and advisers were seeking to live twice by memorializing their every moment when they ended up not living at all, or only half a life. She thought, “I want to live my life, not record it.” Her perceptions of the events and people in the White House were sometimes savagely penetrating, but she kept all her impressions largely to herself, pointedly never even keeping a journal.

  The president found it difficult to understand Jackie’s fey reticen
ce. At the first state dinner, the president held Jackie’s arm behind her back and pushed her toward a group of women reporters in the Blue Room. “Say hello to the girls,” Kennedy said, to which his wife muttered a perfunctory “hello.” As she turned back out of the Blue Room, the imprint of Kennedy’s fingernails was still visible in Jackie’s arm. Kennedy may have been the most powerful leader in the world, but he was discovering that he had become at least partially hostage to the will and whim of his wife, soliciting her time and bargaining with her over the functions that she would grace with her appearance.

  The president’s other women were much easier to handle. Most of them were so overawed by Kennedy’s sheer presence, so caught up in the moment, or so narrow of mind-set, that they had no rich insights into the man and his psyche. His young Boston mistress was one of the few who observed with depth and sagacity. She did not see the president very often, but when the call came, as it did every few weeks, she was available.

  There was a tremendous optimism about him that was very attractive, and a sense that good fortune would smile on him. But in the end I think that all that vitality became a trap, masking or even obliterating a more nuanced way of being. His image of high-performing achievement robbed him of his connection to his interior life. His light and energy could be stimulating, but it could also be intimidating and competitive. There was a magic circle, but there was always the threat of being cast out of that special place. So what do you do to maintain your position? Well, in this situation, you especially did not want to be boring or insipid or wishy-washy. I was always afraid of losing color, dwindling into invisibility. So I would try to be smooth and perfect, and then I’d be resentful that I was trying so hard and would be sullen and annoying. One day I was wearing a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, and he said, “Don’t you have anything better than this to wear in the White House?” I was glad he noticed that I wasn’t trying to look good the way everybody else did. And I was furious because he didn’t understand that I was “making a point.” All those feelings and nowhere for them to go. Because he, magical he, prized smoothness. There were so few colors, and yet human beings have so many colors.

  Kennedy set up his Boston mistress in the White House, parading her past such bluenose academics as Bundy and Rostow. He had a heedless disregard for the chances he was taking, though just as Dr. Cohen had warned him about his drug use, so too did he continue to have ample warnings that his sexual indulgences might become public knowledge. Florence Kater had continued trying to expose what she was convinced was a sexual relationship between Kennedy and Pamela Turnure, sending out letters to prominent journalists, even picketing one of his campaign speeches. The president could have tried to quiet Kater’s campaign by shuttling Turnure off into some obscure sinecure in Washington. Instead, he made the startling decision to bring Turnure into the White House as Jackie’s press secretary.

  Kennedy had few limits on whom he would proposition and where he would proposition her. At one dinner party, with Jackie present, he passed a note to a guest asking for her phone number. He called her later in the evening. “I’m sending a car for you,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, I’m your wife’s friend,” the woman replied, though to Kennedy that was apparently a non sequitur.

  Another Washington woman who accepted the president’s invitation talked to Kennedy’s old friend John White afterward. “It all happened in such a hurry that she couldn’t analyze her emotions,” White recalled. “But the feeling of this power was like a hurricane, wham, you’re swept off and left lying on this beach. And she said, ‘That’s unique in my life. No man had ever done that to me before, and there was a weird, wild pleasure in it. It wasn’t an ordinary matter of affection.’ “

  The most dangerous of Kennedy’s many liaisons was with Judith Campbell Exner. She was shuttling between her occasional visits to Kennedy and her much more frequent sojourns in Chicago with her newfound friend Sam Giancana, as well as dating Johnny Rosselli and others in Los Angeles. She had not seen Kennedy for seven months from the summer of 1960 until she reconnected with him at the Ambassador East in April 1961. “A moment later we were in each other’s arms and it was like we had never been apart,” Exner recalled. There was hardly time for lengthy reminiscences since Kennedy had only twenty minutes before he had to leave for his next engagement.

  In her later years, when her beauty was gone and she was sick with cancer, and she had no money, Exner made her living by telling and retelling the story of her life. She treated her life story like costuming that she would wear until no one was looking at her anymore; then she discarded it and tried on a new, more outrageous outfit that would bring her more attention and money. In 1988 she first realized what new versions of her life were worth, earning $50,000 doing interviews for People magazine in an article written by Kitty Kelley (“I lied when I said I was not a conduit between President Kennedy and the Mafia”). From then on journalists often gave her what were called “expenses,” a term of limitless elasticity, so that they could say they had not paid her.

  In 1997, during a legal deposition in a libel suit, Exner recalled under oath that she had received an amount that “could have been in the $20,000” range for a television series with Anthony Summers, a British journalist. She said that he had paid her more money for a newspaper serial for the London Sunday Times. “I, Anthony Summers, have never paid Judith Exner a bean,” Summers asserted. German television purportedly paid Exner around $6,000 for an interview. She swore that Frontline, the public television series, paid her. Exner said that the Japanese paid her between $10,000 and $20,000. For an article by Gerri Hirshey in Vanity Fair in 1990, the journalist agrees with Exner that the magazine paid her $5,000 in “expenses.” For another piece seven years later in the same magazine, telling a different tale, she said in her sworn testimony that the gossip columnist Liz Smith personally paid her $10,000. “I did try to help her,” Smith said. “I was very concerned for her.” Exner said under oath that for a program featuring another dramatic new version of her life hosted by Peter Jennings on ABC in 1997, based on Seymour Hersh’s exposé, that she was scheduled to receive a total of $20,000; this is denied by both Mark Obenhaus, the producer, and Hersh. She said that Tribune Entertainment paid her $25,000 for an option on her life story, the BBC paid another $25,000, and Showtime paid $200,000 for rights.

  Whatever Exner’s critics thought of her ever-evolving revelations, for a decade there was overwhelming sympathy for a woman who was suffering from bone cancer that made her every move painful and who claimed to be standing at death’s half-open door during that time. In her sad last years, though she did have breast cancer, she apparently knowingly lied about the extent and nature of her illness, as she had lied about so much else in her life. Kim Margolin, her doctor and a partner in this deception, admitted in a 1998 deposition that she had a number of times made false statements when she said that Exner suffered “from extensive bone metastasis, including destruction of the spine,” and that she had “made an error several times trying to help this patient. I didn’t realize it was going to get us into trouble in a court of law.”

  Unlike some once-beautiful women, Exner did not exaggerate her makeup and her clothes as she grew old, trying to maintain some vestiges of her youthful allure. It was her own life that she exaggerated. Her true life was theatrical, and her pain genuine, but she insisted on rouging up her life, each time spreading a thick coat of drama over the few rich moments of her days, treating her occasional sexual relationship with Kennedy as a treasure that could endlessly be exploited and exaggerating even the painful circumstances of her fatal disease.

  Much of the truth of her life and her relationship with Kennedy probably lies somewhere among the discarded garments of her life. Giancana was unlikely to have fancied Exner’s regular company if he was not having a sexual relationship with her. “Whenever she’d come to Chicago, Mooney [Giancana] would fuck her,” recalled Robert J. McDonnell, an attorney who has defended mob figures and married a
nd divorced Giancana’s daughter, Antoinette. “Mooney was one horny guy. And I don’t understand why she’d have money problems. Mooney always took care of her. Always.”

  Giancana was fully aware that Exner was journeying from Chicago to be with Kennedy, using cash that probably came from his criminal ventures. He was content to share Exner with Kennedy, knowing that his knowledge of their affair might prove to be a free pass that he could use one day, perhaps avoiding prosecution. Some called that blackmail, but to a man of Giancana’s evil sentiments, it was merely trading one item of value for another.

  Love was not cheap. For his occasional dalliance, the president was trafficking with a woman who journeyed between his arms and the darkest elements in American society. She was a woman with endless illusions about herself. She came and went like all the others, but she would share the pages of history with him more than she shared the moments of his life, sullying much of what he did, and much of what he hoped he would mean to future generations.

  24

  Bobby’s Game

  Bobby vowed that he would not end up like Attorney General William Rogers, so cowed by the hatred he engendered in the South that he hid on the plane when traveling with candidate Nixon below the Mason-Dixon Line. Bobby was not a man to hide from his enemies, but on the day he first walked into his stately office in the Justice Department, he was already far more a target of hatred than Rogers ever had been.

  Bobby knew that there was potential danger to himself and his family, but it was impossible to sort the real threats from the malicious gossip, the honest concerns from the pernicious rumors. During his first year as attorney general the governess was returning to Hickory Hill one evening with several of the children when, on a nearby road, she surprised a man in the bushes. The intruder jumped into his car and sped off without bothering to turn on his lights. After interviewing the governess, a Fairfax County police officer concluded that “on the basis of the man’s action at the time he apparently had gotten out of his car to urinate and on being surprised rapidly left the area.”