The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  The principals are long dead, and the world may never know what threats Lyndon Johnson made to gain the vice presidency. Kennedy knew how much Hoover knew, and he knew that the information was more than enough to give Johnson whatever he needed as leverage. Kennedy's womanizing came at great cost: he could be subjected to blackmail not only by any number of his former lovers but also by anyone else who could accumulate enough specifics about his affairs---even an ambitious fellow senator. Kennedy found a way to make the best of it after the imbroglio over the vice presidency. He explained to Kenny O'Donnell, a longtime Johnson-hater, as O'Donnell wrote in his memoirs: "I'm forty-three years old. I'm not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn't mean anything...."

  * * *

  * Kennedy seemed to have a special softness toward the distinguished Raskin, who was twenty years his senior. After the election, Raskin recalled in a 1994 interview, he was invited to meet on December 2, 1960, with the president-elect at his home in Georgetown, the obvious issue being political payback---what job did Raskin want? Raskin entered the house via a side door; Kennedy had announced a major cabinet appointment that morning, and a large number of reporters were clustered in front. The two men had a pleasant chat, and Raskin told Kennedy that he wanted no job---his goal was to go back to his law practice and make money. It was left unsaid that his connections to the new administration would not hurt. At the end of their talk, Kennedy helped his longtime campaign colleague with his coat and, as he walked him to the front door, began recounting the following apocryphal story: "A Frenchman goes into a Rothschild bank in Paris and waits in the lobby. After about fifteen minutes, out comes a Rothschild. 'Can I help you with anything? Your account? A loan?'" By this point in the story, Raskin told me, he and Kennedy were nearing the front door, and Raskin suddenly recalled the short walk he and Kennedy had taken at the Los Angeles convention when he learned of the Johnson-Rayburn threat. The president-elect continued his story: "'No,' says the man. 'Just put your arm around me and walk me around the lobby.'" The punch line was delivered just as the two men walked outside and were met by a multitude of microphones, flashbulbs, and television cameras. Kennedy wrapped an arm around Raskin and leaned his head close to him, talking animatedly, while the cameras clicked and reporters wondered. An AP wirephoto of Raskin and Kennedy appeared in hundreds of newspapers the next morning. Raskin's revived law practice was off to a roaring start. Raskin told the anecdote with obvious delight.

  10

  THE STOLEN ELECTION

  Joseph P. Kennedy did more than invest his time and money in his unrelenting drive in 1960 to elect his oldest surviving son president. He risked the family's reputation---and the political future of his sons Bobby and Teddy---by making a bargain with Sam Giancana and the powerful organized crime syndicate in Chicago. Joe Kennedy's goal was to ensure victory in Illinois and in other states where the syndicate had influence, and he achieved it, after arranging a dramatic and until now unrevealed summit meeting with Sam Giancana in the chambers of one of Chicago's most respected judges. The deal included an assurance that Giancana's men would get out the Kennedy vote among the rank and file in the mob-controlled unions in Chicago and elsewhere, and a commitment for campaign contributions from the corrupt Teamsters Union pension fund.

  Jack Kennedy and his brother took office knowing that organized crime and Giancana had helped win the 1960 election. Just what Joe Kennedy promised Giancana in return is not known, but the gangster was convinced he had scored the ultimate coup by backing a presidential winner. The heat would now be off the Chicago syndicate.

  The 1960 presidential election was a cliff-hanger in which John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by a final plurality of 118,000 out of more than 68 million votes. Since then, journalists and historians have raised questions about Kennedy's victory---by fewer than 9,400 votes---in Illinois, one of the last states to report and the one that gave Kennedy his dramatic early-morning triumph. The Illinois election was quickly mired in charges of vote fraud, with Republicans accusing Democrats, led by Mayor Richard Daley, of rigging the returns in Chicago. It was widely known that the mayor, since taking office in 1955, had been controlling returns in state and local elections in Chicago, and that in 1960 he had pressured his precinct captains to produce votes for Kennedy. The allegations of vote fraud did not faze Daley, the archetype of the big-city political boss. He stoically dismissed the charges, telling reporters, "This is a Republican conspiracy to deny the presidency to the man who was elected by the people."

  Allegations of vote fraud were eventually filed against Democrats in eleven states. The Republican Party, after a series of high-level meetings in Washington, decided in late November to send officials on troubleshooting missions to seven of the eleven states---New Jersey, Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Kennedy's margin in some of these states was so minute---he took Nevada and New Mexico by fewer than 2,500 votes---that any significant pattern of vote fraud could have changed victory to defeat. All the missions were futile.

  It was the election in Illinois that captured the nation's attention. The turnout in Chicago was high, as usual: more than 89 percent of the eligible voters voted, or were recorded as having voted. The city's Democratic machine had turned out more than 80 percent of the voters in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. What was unusual in 1960 was Kennedy's huge plurality in Chicago, which enabled him to offset a wave of downstate Republican votes. He won Chicago by 456,312 votes, a margin nearly four times as great as his final plurality in the nation as a whole.

  These statistics have been repeatedly cited in countless articles and books discussing the election in Illinois, with the assertion usually made that the Illinois vote was less essential, and therefore less dramatic, than was initially thought. Kennedy's narrow victories in Texas, Michigan, New Jersey, and Missouri, the argument goes, gave him 303 electoral college votes---34 more than he needed to claim the White House. But the fact is that Illinois was essential to Kennedy's victory. Without the state's 27 electoral votes, Kennedy would have had a plurality of only 7 votes over Nixon in the electoral college, with 26 unpledged Democratic electors in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama threatening to bolt unless they received significant concessions on federal civil rights policy from the Democratic Party. A loss in Illinois would have given those unpledged electors---fourteen of whom eventually did choose to cast their votes for Democratic senator Harry F. Byrd, of Virginia---a huge increase in leverage. They had the power, if Kennedy lost Illinois, to throw the election into the House of Representatives for the first time in the twentieth century.

  At the time, Kennedy's huge Chicago margin was widely considered suspect, even by the newly elected president. "Mr. President," Kennedy quoted Mayor Daley as telling him on election night, "with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you're going to carry Illinois." That reported assurance caused a furor when it was made public in 1977 by the journalist Benjamin Bradlee, a close Kennedy friend who shared dinner with the newly elected president at Hyannis Port on the evening after the election. Bradlee would assert, lamely, in a later memoir that "Me, I don't know what the hell Daley meant." Two grand juries were convened in Chicago after the election, but they ended up indicting only five low-level Democratic Party officials for vote buying and vote fraud. The official investigations continued until July 1961, when a downstate Democratic county judge---in what one journalist subsequently described as "a gross display of partisanship"---dismissed the last of 677 contempt charges that alleged that Democratic precinct workers had intentionally erred in tallying votes. The judge ruled that there was "insufficient evidence" to prove that Democratic Party officials in Chicago had intentionally made errors in counting.

  Richard Nixon had no illusions about what happened in Illinois, but he chose not to demand a recount, as some Republican leaders urged him to do. Many Americans considered Nixon's decision not to contest the legitimacy of the election one of his finest hours. I
n his memoir, RN, Nixon was candid in admitting that his decision was based on self-interest: "And what if I demanded a recount and it turned out that despite the vote fraud Kennedy had still won? Charges of 'sore loser' would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career."

  Nixon was right. The recount in Illinois was in the hands of the Democratic Party, and would not have come close to telling the real story of the election.

  Joe Kennedy dealt with the mob out of necessity. As the owner of the Merchandise Mart, he understood as well as anyone the extent to which organized crime dominated the major unions in Chicago in the late 1950s. The Chicago "outfit," headed by Al Capone, had begun expanding into legitimate business and unions before World War II; by the late 1940s more than one hundred unions were controlled by the mob, providing millions of dollars annually in cash and---equally significant to Chicago's politicians---a huge manpower base that could be mobilized on demand. The outfit's labor expert was Murray "the Camel" Humphreys, who was credited in one biography with maintaining personal control over sixty-one unions at the height of the Capone empire.

  The Kennedy patriarch's turn to Giancana for help was all the more risky because of Jack and Bobby's known antagonism to organized crime, stemming from their involvement in the late 1950s with the Senate special investigating committee on labor racketeering, officially known as the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. Robert Kennedy had been especially aggressive and insulting in his first known encounter with Giancana, during the gangster's testimony before the committee in June 1959. Giancana took the Fifth Amendment and made a point of smiling at each of Kennedy's questions. "I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana," Kennedy remarked at one point. The exchange made huge news.

  Joe Kennedy, according to the family biographers, bitterly objected to his sons' involvement with the Senate Rackets Committee. Senator John Kennedy was one of four Democrats on the committee, whose chairman was John L. McClellan, the Democrat from Arkansas. Robert Kennedy was the committee's chief counsel, and the driving force behind the high-profile investigations into labor racketeering, which placed special emphasis on the activities of James R. Hoffa, head of the Teamsters Union. In his 1978 biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur Schlesinger described Joe Kennedy as being "deeply, emotionally opposed" to his sons' participation on the committee. Schlesinger described the senior Kennedy as believing that "an investigation ... would not produce reform; it would only turn the labor movement against the Kennedys.... Father and son [Robert] had an unprecedentedly furious argument." Joe Kennedy then asked his good friend Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to intervene with Bobby. It didn't work, according to Schlesinger. Douglas told Joe that Bobby felt that the committee represented "too great an opportunity" to give up.

  Joe Kennedy, fearful of losing union support in 1960, understood that labor unions, honest or not, could supply political campaigns with money and foot soldiers---and Jack, so his father believed, would need a great deal of both to win the presidency. Hoffa, as hard-boiled as Bobby Kennedy, was sure to do all he could to stop JFK in 1960. Joe Kennedy was convinced that he had to make a deal in Chicago, and he turned for help to an old friend, William J. Tuohy, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County (Chicago). Tuohy, who died in 1964, was given an assignment: to set up a clandestine meeting between Joe Kennedy and Sam Giancana, known as Mooney to his colleagues. Tuohy, who had served the state's attorney of Cook County before being elected to the bench in 1950, did not know Giancana. But a former protégé from his days in the state's attorney's office, Robert J. McDonnell, was then one of the mob's leading attorneys.

  "Tuohy asked me to come to his chambers," the seventy-one-year-old McDonnell recalled in an interview for this book. The call came, McDonnell estimated, in the winter of 1959--60. "I went. We chatted. He said, 'I don't know how to pose this question. Do you know Mooney Giancana?' I said yes. He said, 'How do you suggest that I arrange a meeting between Mr. Giancana and Joseph Kennedy?'" McDonnell gave the judge the name of a local politician with close ties to the syndicate. A few days later, McDonnell was summoned to a meeting with Giancana at the Armory Lounge in suburban Forest Park, and was told that the meeting with Kennedy was going to happen in Tuohy's courtroom. "Can you guarantee this will be a very, very private meeting?" Giancana asked, according to McDonnell.

  The jittery Tuohy invited McDonnell to attend. "So," McDonnell continued, "I showed up about five o'clock. The courts were just getting out, and darkness was enveloping the courtroom. It's always melodramatic at that time of day." McDonnell entered the judge's chambers and was introduced to Joe Kennedy. After twenty minutes or so, McDonnell said, "we heard footsteps come into the courtroom, and in walked Mooney Giancana" and one of his associates. McDonnell made the introductions. "The three of them sat down. Judge Tuohy and I left the chambers. We went over to the jury box in the courtroom. I remember Judge Tuohy saying to me, 'I'm glad I'm not privy to this.' He was very dispirited. This was a man of the highest integrity, and he was asked to do a favor for Joe Kennedy. And I know that it repulsed him." McDonnell and Tuohy left the courthouse while the meeting between Kennedy and Giancana was still going on.

  He later heard from his clients, McDonnell said, that Kennedy "was obsessed with the election of John Kennedy---absolutely obsessed with it. I don't know what deals were cut; I don't know what promises were made. But I can tell you, Mooney had so many assets in place. They were capable of putting drivers in every precinct to help out the precinct captains, to get the voters out. And they had the unions absolutely going for Kennedy. I realize that today the unions don't vote as they're told to vote, but in the days of 1960 they did. Mooney assisted in all of this.

  "There was no ballot stuffing," McDonnell added. "I'm not suggesting that. They just worked---totally went all out. He [Kennedy] won it squarely, but he got the vote because of what Mooney had done. I'm convinced in my heart of hearts that Mooney carried the day for John F. Kennedy."

  McDonnell, a Notre Dame graduate who was seriously wounded in World War II, was in financial trouble by the time of Tuohy's call for help. His success as a trial lawyer in the state's attorney's office was overwhelmed by his addictions to gambling and alcohol; by the early 1950s, he was constantly in debt and little more than a paid mouthpiece for the outfit. In 1966, he was found guilty of passing forged money orders; his license to practice law was suspended but not revoked. McDonnell renewed his legal practice in the early 1980s but lost his license after a second conviction for the attempted bribery of an electrical workers union official. In 1983 McDonnell married Antoinette Giancana, Sam Giancana's daughter; they were divorced in 1995.

  McDonnell's account was buttressed by interviews for this book demonstrating that Joe Kennedy did have a long-standing, if little-known, friendship with Judge Tuohy. Tuohy's two sons, Patrick and John, both lawyers, told me that they knew nothing about a meeting involving their father and Sam Giancana, but they recalled Joe Kennedy---"the Ambassador," as he liked to be called---at casual dinners in their home after the war. John Tuohy told me that his father and Joe Kennedy attended a Chicago Bears football game together in 1947. Both Tuohys also said they knew McDonnell as a lawyer who, as Patrick put it, had fallen "off the normal track." Patrick added, "I'm pretty sure my father knew him."

  Another witness to meetings between Kennedy and Tuohy was Thomas V. King, who was general manager of the Merchandise Mart in 1960, and worked directly under Kennedy. King said in an interview for this book that Kennedy and Tuohy "were very, very close." It was his understanding, King added, that "Joe took care of him, too---helped him out financially." King witnessed a number of meetings between Kennedy and Tuohy at the Merchandise Mart, he said, but did not hear their discussions. "I was an employee then, in the background," King explained.

  Robert McDonnell's firsthand testimony is compelling, and evocative of a similar account of Joe Kennedy's insistence on a meeting with Giancana
which appeared on national television in 1992, in a miniseries produced for CBS by Tina Sinatra, Frank's daughter. In the script for one episode of the dramatized series, the actor playing Joe Kennedy tells the actor playing Sinatra that "the best thing you can do for Jack" is to "go to those people" who "control the [Teamsters] union." Sinatra, in a subsequent scene, relays the request to Sam Giancana and gets his approval.

  In a 1997 interview for this book, Tina Sinatra acknowledged that her father had provided the information for the scenes and had explicitly approved the script. Sinatra, in effect, broke faith with a long-held secret in an effort to provide some pizzazz for his daughter's show: he publicly admitted for the first time that he played a role in brokering Giancana's support for Jack Kennedy in 1960.

  "What I understood," Tina Sinatra told me, "was that a meeting was called" late in 1959 at Hyannis Port. "Dad was more than willing to go. He hadn't been to the house before. Over lunch, Joe said, 'I think that you can help me in West Virginia and Illinois with our friends. You understand, Frank, I can't go. They're my friends, too, but I can't approach them. But you can.' I know that it gave Dad pause. But it still wasn't anything he felt he shouldn't do. So off to Sam Giancana he went." Her father arranged to meet Giancana on a golf course, Tina said, away from Giancana's seemingly constant FBI surveillance. Sinatra told him, Tina said, "I believe in this man and I think he's going to make us a good president. With your help, I think we can work this out."