The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  FBI special agents noted in September 1961 that Rosselli was calling Exner when he came to Los Angeles, and he was later observed escorting her to Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. Her telephone records showed that she was telephoning Giancana in Chicago. She drove a 1961 Ford Thunder-bird that had been driven from Chicago to Las Vegas by the Mafia chieftain’s assistant, Joe Pignatello. Everything the FBI learned about Exner suggested that she had no income or substantial bank accounts, yet she had rented a fancy home in Palm Springs and a place in Malibu. Most surprisingly, Exner’s telephone records showed a number of calls to the desk of Evelyn Lincoln just outside the Oval Office.

  By the end of February 1962, Hoover had all this information sitting on his desk. The FBI chief had a brilliantly astute awareness of the wages of power. Two decades before, he did not directly confront President Roosevelt with information making criminal accusations against his son James and Joseph P. Kennedy. He had written a memo so that he would have a legal record of how he had handled this matter and sent it to Roosevelt’s chief of staff by courier. This time he once again wrote a memo, addressed to the president’s assistant, in this case Kenny O’Donnell, and sent it by courier to the White House, as well as a second memo to Bobby. Once again Hoover had proof that the information had been received, but the president could always deny that he had seen the memo.

  Hoover knew all about Kennedy’s sexual predilections and had previously passed on part of his knowledge to the attorney general. Hoover’s memo was so bland, however, that reading the words a thousand times would not reveal whether irony, moralizing, or even veiled threats of exposure lay behind them. “The relationship between Campbell [Exner] and Mrs. Lincoln or the purpose of these calls is not known,” Hoover wrote.

  When Joe Dolan, serving as Bobby’s acting deputy for an ailing Burke Marshall, walked into his office, Bobby shoved a folder of documents toward him. “What do you think of this?” Bobby asked, his even tone suggesting nothing of the potential importance of the memo. In his office Dolan carefully read documents that included the list of Exner’s telephone calls and other information, then returned to the attorney general’s office.

  Dolan knew full well how extraordinary it was that Bobby was even showing him this material. Bobby was secretive about family matters, walling off this world from those who served him and his family. Bobby looked up, and Dolan spoke with the wry wit that was his trademark: “Mrs. Lincoln shouldn’t take calls like that.”

  “So what do you think?” Bobby asked. In a normal world Bobby would have gone over to the White House and spoken confidentially to his brother, but Dolan realized that was not what the attorney general wanted to do. “I think I’ll write Mrs. Lincoln a little memo,” Dolan said, having astutely grasped what Bobby wanted. “Do it today,” Bobby said.

  Dolan wrote a memo outlining what Hoover had discovered. Sensing the importance of the matter, he hand-delivered the memo to Evelyn Lincoln in the White House. “Joe, I’m shocked,” Lincoln said, recalling the famous line in Casablanca when Captain Renault claims to have learned about gambling in Rick’s Café.

  Sinatra had introduced Exner to the president. Bobby had all kinds of memos about Sinatra’s contacts with organized crime, and it was hardly wise that his brother intended to spend a weekend at Sinatra’s Palm Springs house. Kennedy, however, did not think of Sinatra as a political operative, but as a fellow sexual swordsman and bon vivant who offered him beautiful women and good times. Bobby realized that his brother would have to seek his pleasures elsewhere. The onerous task fell to him of calling Sinatra and telling him that in late March 1962 the president would be staying elsewhere.

  Sinatra, like the president, was a man who thought he could have it all, a friendly greeting at the White House and a seat at the head table of the mob, accolades for his noble liberal politics and a personal life of excess. He had already built a helicopter pad for the president and lined up a weekend of assorted entertainments. He raged at Bobby, screaming at him into the phone, infuriated as much over the embarrassment as the insult itself. After hanging up, he went out to the helicopter pad and broke the concrete slab into pieces with a sledgehammer.

  Just before Kennedy set off for his West Coast trip, he had lunch with Hoover. Neither man left a record of what was said that day. Although Exner claimed that Kennedy saw her later, by all documentary evidence he did not. He seems to have ended the relationship the way it began, as just another of his occasional trysts to be dismissed and forgotten.

  In Palm Springs, Kennedy may not have had Sinatra to gather a bouquet of Hollywood’s rosebuds for his pleasure, but he had an even sweeter treat in store. Marilyn Monroe arrived to spend the evening with the president. The blonde actress was the benchmark of American sexual fantasy. Even the president was not immune to the dream of sleeping with her, and for months he had been pestering his brother-in-law Peter Lawford to set up an assignation.

  Monroe appears to have viewed Kennedy not only as a political star in a firmament far above Hollywood but as an epic hero. In talking to her analyst, she spoke about him as a man who walked in the shoes of Jefferson and Lincoln. “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.” As for Kennedy, he may have suffered from the common male failure of taking almost as much pleasure in having his male cohorts know about his conquest as in the act itself. “Well, she loved him, and she was a beautiful girl,” Smathers reflected. “He took her down the Potomac on the presidential yacht two times. And God she loved Jack. After he was president. She was all over him, of course, he liked her very much. But he was already married and everything. So he had to be reasonably discreet. But he’d take a lot of guys, take a lot of his old buddies out when he had someone like Marilyn, and they’d all be around, five of us, or a bunch of us, where he could blame it on any one of his friends.”

  On August 3, 1962, Bobby and his family flew to San Francisco for the start of a summer vacation. He was not one for sedate excursions, and he spent the weekend at the ranch of John Bates in northern California, driving back into the city Sunday evening to stay at Red Fay’s home.

  Early in the morning on Sunday, August 5, Sergeant Jack Clemmons was led into Monroe’s bedroom in her home on Helena Drive. The actress’s nude body lay under a sheet. Beside her corpse stood her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and Dr. Hyman Engelberg, her physician. An autopsy revealed that the body of the troubled actress was full of Nembutal.

  Two years later Frank A. Capell, a right-wing journalist, published a book in which he alleged that Bobby was having an affair with the actress, who “believe[d] his intentions were serious.” To cover up her murder, Bobby had used “the Communist Conspiracy which is expert in the scientific elimination of its enemies” by employing Dr. Engelberg, who was supposedly a Communist. In the years since, other journalists have expanded on this scenario, often more in the name of commerce than ideology, suggesting that the attorney general had secretly flown down to Los Angeles to play his own role in the nefarious act.

  Bobby’s host and others at the ranch that weekend assert fervently that Bobby never left the isolated premises. Beyond that, his whereabouts were so carefully chronicled by the FBI that not even he could have gotten in and out of Los Angeles without being seen.

  Bobby, like his brothers, may well have had his own sexual encounters outside of marriage, and it is possible that Marilyn Monroe was one of those. Bobby had met her several times at parties given by his sister and brother-in-law, Pat and Peter Lawford, in Santa Monica. On one of these occasions, Ed Guthman recalled, the attorney general commandeered his press secretary to accompany him while he shepherded a drunken Marilyn home. On another occasion, Bobby may have unsuccessfully attempted to make a pass at the movie star. “I’m dancing with Marilyn,” Joe Naar, Peter Lawford’s friend, recalled, “and Bobby wants to dance with her, and makes some lewd remark, and she turns to me and makes a sign as if she’s throwing
up. He kept hitting on her all the time.”

  Bobby appeared obsessed with Monroe. “Eunice kidded Bobby one night at dinner,” Charley Bartlett recalled. “She got up and said something about Marilyn Monroe. And Bobby got red in the face and said, ‘If you ever say that again, I’ll hit you.’ “

  Monroe had been on the cusp of middle age, nearing the end of her career as Hollywood’s reigning sex symbol. It was not the time to add to her reputation as a petulantly difficult, irresponsible actress, but the Kennedys nonetheless pushed her to leave the set of Something’s Got to Give to fly to New York to sing “Happy Birthday” to the president on May 19, 1962, at a gigantic celebration at Madison Square Garden. “The man in charge of the studio rejected that,” recalled Milton Gould, a Twentieth Century-Fox movie executive. “He had a confrontation with Robert Kennedy, and he told him we couldn’t do it. Mr. Kennedy was then steered to me because at that moment I was in charge of reorganizing the company. And he asked me if I would do it. I said no. He got very disturbed and very abusive. She left the next day for New York anyway. She was suspended, the picture was discontinued.”

  The Kennedys had their splendidly sensuous moment as Monroe turned singing “Happy Birthday” to the president into an erotic moment whose subtext was lost on no one. As much as that flattered the president, Monroe had become a problem to the Kennedys. She had always been a woman of wild mood swings and immense insecurities. She had had a tryst with the president, and she may have had one with Bobby as well. More likely, though, Bobby was once again cleaning up after his brother, trying to assuage this deranged, tragic woman who in a few slurred, drunken words could expose a sexual scandal that would be devastating to the Kennedy presidency. She spent much time at the Lawfords’ Santa Monica home, often drunk or dazed on sedatives or barbiturates.

  Monroe telephoned Bobby at his Washington office in those weeks as well, the calls generally lasting only a short time. On the evening of her death Peter Lawford sensed that something was wrong. He called his manager, Milt Ebbins, and told him that they should go over to the actress’s house. “If there’s anything wrong there at all, you’re the last guy that should be there,” Ebbins recalled telling his client. “You’re the president’s brother-in-law.” When it came to choosing between the possible death of his friend and the Kennedy image, Lawford decided that he had best stay home, a decision that haunted him the rest of his days.

  Joe DiMaggio came forward to manage his ex-wife’s funeral. It was a measure of what he thought of the Kennedys and their pernicious influence on Monroe that none of them was invited to attend. Bobby flew on to Seattle to join Ethel and their four eldest children. Also in their company were Eunice and her eldest son, Lem Billings, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his wife. The group went on a hiking and riding trip in Olympic National Park that was chronicled in the press like a major expedition. Time reported: “Bobby’s three younger children … will stay on at Hyannis Port, presumably to train for a later assault on Mount Everest.”

  The Forest Service, at government expense, ran eleven miles of telephone line into the camp, removed overhanging branches along the trail, and hired a packer with twenty-four horses to transport most of the group to a campsite that included tents with stoves and portable lavatories. All the time a helicopter and pilot stood at the ready.

  Bobby might disappear into the pristine wilderness of the Northwest, but wherever he traveled he carried with him a burdensome weight of knowledge of matters that would have shocked most Americans. Early in May 1962, Sheffield Edwards, the CIA’s director of security, and Lawrence Houston, the agency’s general counsel, told Bobby about a serious problem involving targeted mobsters and the Mafia plots to assassinate Castro.

  When Giancana suspected that his mistress, singer Phyllis McGuire, might be having an affair with comedian Dan Rowan, he turned to Robert Maheu, his new friend with the CIA connections. The mobster asked for a favor he considered small compared to attempting to murder Castro. He wanted Maheu to bug McGuire’s Las Vegas hotel room. Maheu used CIA contacts and money to attempt to place the electronic device. The technicians were so incompetent that they were immediately found out, and the Las Vegas police arrested one of them. That was October 31, 1960, before Kennedy had been elected. When Maheu was called, he used his connections to squelch the local case, but the FBI sought to turn the matter into a federal indictment. At the end of March 1962, Sheffield Edwards met with the FBI liaison to the CIA to ask the agency to back off the Las Vegas prosecution in the name of the national interest. That was the decision about which Bobby was being asked to give his approval.

  “If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness,” Houston recalled. Bobby’s jaw may have been set, and his eyes steely, but he mouthed no words of criticism of the assassination plots. Bobby was not a man to hold in his rage or to seek less than draconian punishments of those who dared betray him. Bobby was merciless at ferreting out truth, but he was no relentless questioner this day. Edwards recalled that the attorney general neither expressed disapproval of what had gone on in the past nor asked that they refrain from such actions in the future. “He cautioned Larry Houston to the effect that he was to know about these things,” Edwards recalled.

  After hearing from the CIA about the bungled bugging in Las Vegas, Bobby met two days later with the FBI chief. Hoover knew about the CIA’s role in the wiretapping, but until the attorney general told him, he suggested that he did not know that Giancana had been involved in an assassination plot against Castro, though he surely must have suspected.

  Hoover treated truth as if it were a precious commodity, to be given out only in small quantities, and his memo of the meeting probably included only what he chose to memorialize. “I told the attorney general that this was a most unfortunate development,” Hoover wrote.

  I stated as he well knew the “gutter gossip” was that the reason nothing had been done against Giancana was because of Giancana’s close friendship with Frank Sinatra, who, in turn, claimed to be quite close to the Kennedy family. The attorney general stated he realized this and it was for that reason that he was quite concerned when he received this information from CIA about Giancana and Maheu. The attorney general stated that he felt notwithstanding the obstacle now in the path of prosecution of Giancana, we should still keep after him.

  Hoover wrote a memo to Bobby saying that the CIA believed that it could not afford to have this “dirty business” surface since Maheu and Giancana were involved in missions for the agency. The memo stated: “Mr. Bissell … in connection with their inquiries into CIA activities relating to the Cuban situation told the attorney general that some of the associated planning included the use of Giancana and the underworld against Castro.”

  This memo did not mention the word “assassination,” but it was as explicit an admission of the plots as any official was likely to make. Anyone would have asked just what Giancana and his colleagues were doing. If the matter had been unknown to the attorney general, he most likely would have thunderously cried out against the CIA for employing the very figures that the Justice Department was trying determinedly to indict and put in prison. Instead, Bobby wrote in a margin his instruction to the FBI liaison, Courtney Evans: “Courtney, I hope this will be followed up vigorously.”

  Bobby was usually assumed to be speaking with the authority and the voice of the president. It remains unknown to what extent Kennedy approved many of his brother’s specific actions. What was indisputable, however, was that there was hardly a crucial issue in the administration in which Bobby’s hand did not appear. “It must be understood that the president wanted his brother involved in almost every important action,” Feldman asserted. “Those who say that Bobby was spread thin have to realize that he was merely doing what his brother wanted him to do.”

  Bobby’s scribbled note may have been an attempt to cover himself. He was the crucial player in th
e actions against Cuba, and he could scarcely have been unaware that Castro’s possible death was an integral part of these plans. What was happening in the Kennedy administration was that more and more of the important actions of government were being kept purposely obscure, the connection between the word and the deed so smudged that no one could ever tell definitively who had given what order, and who had been deputized to carry it out.

  In March 1962, Lansdale, Bobby, and a few others met with the president at the White House to discuss Operation Mongoose. General Lemnitzer mentioned “contingency plans” for the invasion of Cuba. The military would create “plausible pretexts … either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.” For months Bobby had been talking of creating an orchestrated event to justify an American assault on Communist Cuba. This was just what the Nazis had done before their invasion of Poland, and such an action was the antithesis of what democratic leadership was supposed to represent. Yet apparently nobody in that room condemned the idea on moral grounds. The president, for his part, bluntly told his top general that those forces might be needed in Berlin and he should not be contemplating sending them into Cuba.

  Bobby spoke later. There are times when covert information is little more than wishful gossip, and Bobby told the group about reports that Castro was so upset at the way things were going in Cuba that he had begun to drink heavily. Bobby talked of Mary Hemingway, whose novelist husband had killed himself eight months before, “and the opportunities offered by the ‘shrine’ to Hemingway.” Ernest Hemingway’s beloved house in Havana was being turned into a museum, and supposedly Castro went there on occasion. Lansdale already knew about this possibility:

  I commented that this was a conversation Ed Murrow had had with Mary Hemingway, that we had similar reports from other sources, and that this was worth assessing firmly and pursuing vigorously. If there are grounds for action, CIA had some invaluable assets which might well be committed for such an effort. McCone asked if his operational people were aware of this. I told him that we had discussed this, that they agreed the subject was worth vigorous development, and that we were in agreement that the matter was so delicate and sensitive that it shouldn’t be surfaced to the Special Group until we were ready to go and then not in detail. I pointed out that this all pertained to fractioning the regime.