The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  * * *

  * Kent, after seeing Costello, kept on talking. In a separate interview later in 1982 with the BBC's Newsnight television show, he explained how easy it had been to smuggle the cable traffic out of the embassy code room. One source, he told the journalist Richard Harris, was to obtain cable copies that were "surplus and were to be incinerated ... burnt in an incinerator.... Another source was that Ambassador Kennedy was having copies of important political documents made for his own private collection. Part of my function was to make these copies, and it was quite simple to slip in an extra carbon." The BBC show reported that Kent, described as an "amateur," had been followed for eight months by British counterintelligence before his arrest.

  * Arvad's nickname for Baruch, Frank Waldrop told me, was "the old goat." Baruch could be very indiscreet, Waldrop wrote in an unpublished essay made available for this book, and the FBI agents assigned to wiretap the Arvad apartment gossiped about Baruch's many telephone conversations with her. During the early years of the war, Waldrop said, he often traded gossip with the old financier, sometimes over lunch on a bench in Lafayette Park, near the White House. "It was on just such a bench," Waldrop recalled, "that I heard about what was going on down at Oak Ridge, Tennessee---something about a bomb made of split atoms---for which Baruch was helping put together the labor force. He told me to keep mum and I did, but that should signify that Baruch was a very heavy carrier of important information in World War II. And he was tickled to have Inga come up to visit him, weekends, at his place on Long Island. He also carried on long palavers with her on the telephone which the FBI faithfully took down." It's not known whether Hoover, an expert on double standards, intervened with Baruch, as he did with Joe Kennedy.

  *In an interview for this book in 1995, the ninety-year-old Waldrop, who first met Joe Kennedy, a fellow isolationist, in the 1930s, said that "the best way I know how to tell you how much smarter Franklin Roosevelt was than Joe Kennedy" was by citing a classic FDR story that had been relayed to him by Edward A. Tamm, a senior aide to Hoover who later became a highly respected judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Tamm began, Waldrop said, by asking whether Waldrop "knew the difference between an amateur and a pro." Waldrop said no. Tamm then told him the following: "FDR asked Hoover to come along to the White House. Hoover brought me along. He asked Hoover to get the goods on Jim Farley," the politically contentious postmaster general who was suspected by Roosevelt of leaking inside stories to an anti-Roosevelt newspaper columnist.

  "Hoover said, 'I won't do it.'

  "FDR outraged: 'What!'

  "Hoover: 'I won't do it.'

  "FDR: 'I'm ordering you to.'"

  At this point, Tamm told Waldrop, Roosevelt was "quick enough to realize something was up. He asked Hoover: 'Why not?'

  "Hoover: 'I'll put it on the other guy'"---the reporter---rather than wiretap a member of the cabinet.

  "Roosevelt almost fell down laughing," Tamm told Waldrop, "and said, 'Edgar, I'm not going to tell you your business anymore.'"

  Waldrop's point was that Roosevelt was tougher than Kennedy in ways Kennedy could not fathom: "Joe never understood how FDR could smile and smile and be a villain. Joe thought once he was dealing with a friend, they could make a crooked deal."

  7

  NOMINATION FOR SALE

  John F. Kennedy's rise is a story that has been told and retold in hundreds of biographies and histories. The senator, always suntanned, with his photogenic wife and daughter, was the subject of articles for national magazines month after month in the late 1950s. When he wasn't being interviewed, the senator, who relied on speechwriters on his staff and those in the pay of his father, published scores of newspaper and magazine articles as well as the bestselling Profiles in Courage, which won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

  Kennedy's political standing was given an enormous boost at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, when he narrowly lost a dramatic floor fight against Senator Estes Kefauver for the nomination as Adlai Stevenson's vice presidential running mate in the party's doomed campaign against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy's grace and seeming good humor in defeat, and his boyish good looks---viewed by millions of television watchers---overrode his lackluster record in the Senate and made him an early favorite for the party's nomination in 1960. Kennedy ran hard over the next four years, spending most weekends making speeches and paying political dues at fund-raising dinners across America.

  He made his mark not in the Senate, where his legislative output remained undistinguished, but among the voters, who responded to Kennedy as they would to a famous athlete or popular movie star. From the start the campaign was orchestrated by Joe Kennedy, who as a one-time Hollywood mogul understood that his son should run for president as a star and not as just another politician. In an exceptionally candid interview in late 1959 at Hyannis Port with the journalist Ed Plaut, then writing a preelection biography of Jack, the elder Kennedy said that his son had become "the greatest attraction in the country today. I'll tell you how to sell more copies of your book," Kennedy told Plaut. "Put his picture on the cover." Plaut made a transcript of his interview available for this book.

  "Why is it," Kennedy asked, "that when his picture is on the cover of Life or Redbook that they sell a record number of copies? You advertise the fact that he will be at a dinner and you will break all records for attendance. He will draw more people to a fund-raising dinner than Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart and anyone else you can name. Why is that? He has the greatest universal appeal. I can't explain that. There is no answer to Jack's appeal. He is the biggest attraction in the country today. That is why the Democratic Party is going to nominate him. The party leaders realize that to win they have to nominate him.

  "The nomination is a cinch," Joe Kennedy told the reporter. "I'm not a bit worried about the nomination."

  By the summer of 1960, with brother Bobby serving as campaign manager and father Joe as a one-man political brain trust---as well as secret paymaster---Jack Kennedy arrived at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles as an unstoppable front-runner who apparently had earned the right to be the presidential candidate by running in, and winning, Democratic primary elections across America. He had conducted a brilliant campaign that would set the standard for future generations of ambitious politicians, especially in its relentless tracking and cataloguing of delegate votes. One of Kennedy's loyal aides, Ted Sorensen, would describe admiringly in Kennedy, his 1965 memoir, how Kennedy went over the heads of the backroom politicians and took his campaign to the people:

  He had during 1960 alone traveled some 65,000 air miles in more than two dozen states---many of them in the midst of crucial primary fights, most of them with his wife---and he made some 350 speeches on every conceivable subject. He had voted, introduced bills or spoken on every current issue, without retractions or apologies. He had talked in person to state conventions, party leaders, delegates and tens of thousands of voters. He had used every spare moment on the telephone. He had made no promises he could not keep and promised no jobs to anyone.

  What no outsider could imagine---and what Sorensen did not write about---was the obstacles overcome and the carefully hidden deals engineered as Kennedy achieved one political victory after another en route to Los Angeles.

  Kennedy's most important primary victory came on May 10 in West Virginia. In his campaigning in the state, Kennedy directly confronted the religious issue, telling audiences, for example, that no one cared that he was a Catholic when he was asked to fight in World War II. He defeated Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota by more than 84,000 votes. In his memoir, Sorensen quoted another of Kennedy's unsuccessful rivals for the nomination, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, as saying after the convention: "He had just a little more courage, ... stamina, wisdom and character than any of the rest of us."

  Sorensen's account, as with so much of the Kennedy history as told by Kennedy insiders, has many elements of truth but is far from the whole st
ory. The Kennedys did not depend solely on hard work and stamina to win the primary elections en route to the Democratic nomination. They spent as never before in American political history. In West Virginia, the Kennedys spent at least $2 million (nearly $11 million in today's dollars), and possibly twice that amount---much of it in direct payoffs to state and local officials.

  A far more complete account of the campaign emerges in the unpublished memoir of one of Kennedy's most trusted, and little-known, advisers during the 1960 campaign, Hyman B. Raskin, a Chicago lawyer who had helped manage Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956. Raskin had been recruited in late 1957 by Joe Kennedy, and secretly paid, to help plan and organize his son's drive for the presidency. Raskin, who after the 1960 election retired to his law practice, died in comfortable obscurity in 1995 at the age of eighty-six in Rancho Mirage, California. His widow, Frances, later provided for this book a copy of his memoir, entitled A Laborer in the Vineyards, which contains a rare firsthand account of Joe Kennedy's direct, and powerful, intervention in national politics on behalf of his son---interventions that were always hidden from the press. In Raskin's account, the combination of unlimited campaign funding, Joe Kennedy's high-level political connections, and Jack Kennedy's strong showing in the Democratic primaries---especially his West Virginia victory---enabled the Kennedys to fly to Los Angeles knowing they had enough ironclad delegate commitments to win on the first ballot.

  At the convention site, Raskin was entrusted with the all-important task of running communications. The Kennedys, in one of their political innovations, had leased a trailer and filled it with state-of-the-art communications gear that enabled the campaign's backroom operators to reach the leaders of state delegations instantly. In his memoir, Raskin depicted the convention as anticlimactic for the campaign insiders: "We were confident that the [delegate count] numbers which the state reports produced would closely approximate those we had before the initial [convention] meeting was held.... It appeared impossible for Kennedy to lose the nomination. The votes merely needed to be officially tabulated; therefore, in my opinion, if he failed, it would be the result of some uncontrollable event."

  Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson's last-minute declaration just days before the convention that he would, after all, be a candidate for the presidency---an announcement that created a flurry of press reports---was too little, too late, in Raskin's view. "The front-runner was unbeatable," he wrote. "For unknown reasons, some members of the press refused to concede the nomination of Kennedy, ignoring the arithmetic reported by their associates.... Johnson and his managers must have had access to the same information. Much of it was published and verifiable through Johnson connections in almost every state. Why then, I asked myself, did the anti-Kennedy forces continue their futile struggle?" Johnson stayed in the race until the presidential balloting and suffered an overwhelming defeat by Kennedy on the convention floor.

  The fact that Kennedy had locked up the nomination weeks in advance of the convention was one of the campaign's secrets. There were other secrets far more damaging, any one of which, if exposed, could cost the handsome young candidate his otherwise assured presidential nomination.

  The most dangerous problem confronting the Kennedys before the convention was the hardest to fix, for it was posed by a group of reporters from the Wall Street Journal who were raising questions about the huge sums of cash that had been spent by the Kennedys to assure victory in the West Virginia primary. Their story, triggered by the instincts of an on-the-scene journalist, never made it into print.

  Alan L. Otten, the Journal correspondent who covered the campaign, had been stunned by the strong Kennedy showing. He had spent weeks walking through the cities and towns of the coal counties and concluded, as he wrote for the Journal, that Humphrey would capitalize on the pronounced anti-Catholicism in West Virginia and win the Democratic primary handily. "Every miner I talked to was going to vote for Humphrey," Otten recalled in a 1994 interview for this book. The reporter, who later became chief of the Journal's news bureau in Washington, was suspicious when the votes were counted and urged his newspaper to undertake an extensive investigation into Kennedy vote buying. "We were fairly convinced that huge sums of money traded hands," Otten told me.

  Buying votes was nothing new in West Virginia, where political control was tightly held by sheriffs or political committeemen in each of the state's fifty-five counties. Their control was abetted by the enormous number of candidates who competed for local office in the Democratic primary, resulting in huge paper ballots that made voting a potentially interminable process. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1960 campaign, The Making of the President, 1960, the journalist Theodore H. White noted that the primary ballots for Kanawha County, largest in the state, filled three full pages when published the day before in the Charleston Gazette. Sheriffs and other political leaders in each county made the process less bewildering for voters by putting together lists, or slates, of approved party candidates for each office. Some candidates for statewide offices or for important local posts, such as sheriff or assessor, invariably ended up on two, three, or more slates passed out on election day by campaign workers. The unwieldy procedure continues today.

  The sheriffs and party leaders were also responsible for hiring precinct workers and poll watchers for election day. Political tradition in the state called for the statewide candidates to pay some or all of the county's election expenses in return for being placed at the top of a political leader's slate. Paying a few dollars per vote on election day was widespread in some areas, as was the payment for "Lever Brothers" (named after the popular detergent maker)---election officers in various precincts who were instructed to actually walk into the ballot booth with voters and cast their ballots for them.

  The Journal's investigative team, which included Roscoe C. Born, of the Washington bureau, spent the next five weeks in May and June in West Virginia and learned that the Kennedys had turned what had historically been random election fraud into a statewide pattern of corruption, and had apparently stolen the election from Hubert Humphrey. The reporters concluded that huge sums of Kennedy money had been funneled into the state, much of it from Chicago, where R. Sargent Shriver, a Chicagoan who had married Jack's sister Eunice in 1953, represented the family's business interests. The reporters were told that much of the money had been delivered by a longtime Shriver friend named James B. McCahey, Jr., who was president of a Chicago coal company that held contracts for delivering coal to the city's public school system. As a coal buyer earlier in his career, McCahey had spent time traveling through West Virginia, whose mines routinely produced more than 100 million tons of coal a year. Roscoe Born and a colleague traveled to Chicago to interview McCahey "and he snowed us completely," Born recalled in a series of interviews for this book. Nonetheless, the reporter said, "there was no doubt in my mind that [Kennedy] money was dispensed to local machines where they controlled the votes."

  Born, convinced that he and his colleagues had collected enough information to write a devastating exposé, moved with his typewriter into a hotel near the Journal's office in downtown Washington. He was facing a stringent deadline---the Democratic convention was only a few weeks away---and also a great deal of unease among the newspaper's senior editors.

  As with many investigative newspaper stories, there was no smoking gun: none of the newspaper's sources reported seeing a representative of the Kennedy campaign give money to a West Virginian. "We knew they were meeting," Otten recalled in our interview, "but we had nothing showing the actual handing over of money." The Journal's top editors asked for affidavits from some of the sources who were to be quoted in the exposé; when the journalists could not obtain them, the editors ruled that the article could not be published. "The story could have been written, but we'd have to imply, rather than nail down, some elements," Born said. "I really wanted to do it, but I can see that the editors would be nervous about doing it practically on the eve of the conventi
on." Other Journal reporters were told that Born and his colleagues had "gotten the goods," as one put it, on the Kennedy spending in West Virginia. The columnist Robert D. Novak, then a political reporter on the Journal, recalled in an interview for this book hearing that the newspaper's top management had concluded that the West Virginia money story could affect the proceedings in Los Angeles, and it was not "the place of the Wall Street Journal to determine the Democratic nominee for president."

  The Journal's reporting team was far closer to the truth than its editors could imagine. Jack Kennedy had wanted a clean sweep in the April 5 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, aiming to defeat Hubert Humphrey in all ten of the state's congressional districts, and he campaigned long hours to get one. He was bitterly disappointed when he won only six districts---and, most important, when his showing failed to discourage the equally hardworking Humphrey, who decided to continue his presidential campaigning in West Virginia. It was understood by professional politicians that Humphrey, too, would be putting in as much money as he could to meet the inevitable bribery demands of the county sheriffs. The Kennedy team also feared that other Democratic opponents for the nomination, Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson among them, would urge their backers to shove money into the state on Humphrey's behalf in an effort to stop Kennedy and deadlock the convention.*

  West Virginia thus became the ultimate battleground for the Democratic nomination, and the Kennedys threw every family member and prominent friend they had, and many dollars, at defeating Humphrey. At stake was not only Jack's presidency, but Joe Kennedy's dream of a family dynasty: Bobby was to be his brother's successor.

  In interviews for this book, many West Virginia county and state officials revealed that the Kennedy family spent upward of $2 million in bribes and other payoffs before the May 10, 1960, primary, with some sheriffs in key counties collecting more than $50,000 apiece in cash in return for placing Kennedy's name at the top of their election slate. Much of the money was distributed personally by Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. The Kennedy campaign would publicly claim after the convention that only $100,000 had been spent in West Virginia (out of a total of $912,500 in expenses for the entire campaign). But what went on in West Virginia was no secret to those on the inside. In his 1978 memoir, In Search of History, Theodore White wrote what he had not written in his book on the 1960 campaign---that both Humphrey and Kennedy were buying votes in West Virginia. White also acknowledged in the memoir that his strong affection for Kennedy had turned him, and many of his colleagues, from objective journalists to members of a loyal claque. White stayed in the claque to the end, claiming in his memoir, without any apparent evidence, that "Kennedy's vote-buyers were evenly matched with Humphrey's."