by Thomas Maier
For all the remembrances inside the train, the most remarkable scene, the most lasting testament to Robert Kennedy’s politics existed outside the procession— in the faces of people gathered on the street corners, along the guardrails and standing in grassy fields near the tracks, white and black, young and old, filled with an empty forlornness, as though a friend had died. Thousands lined the route that carried Kennedy’s body, paying their respects to his memory and what might have been. Whether Kennedy’s long-shot bid to win the White House could have succeeded was far from certain, despite the inevitability suggested in so many accounts of his campaign. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the eventual 1968 Democratic presidential nominee, was busily gathering all the delegates loyal to Johnson, and McCarthy still threatened a major show of support among liberals. If Kennedy had been elected, as some historians contend, the nostalgic haze surrounding him might have soon disappeared and given way to sharp criticism from the left as well as the right.
But at the moment of his death, Robert Kennedy held the potential of bringing so many different factions, so many new minorities into America’s presidential politics. The most tantalizing aspect of his star-crossed campaign was how he managed to broaden the Kennedy legacy beyond the Irish and other white ethnics to include Latinos, blacks, Asians, women and other minorities. His cultural conservatism—what some observers called his Catholic side—blended with his social progressiveness to form a new inclusive political alliance. His candidacy represented a potent plan for the Democrats to build their old New Deal coalition rather than see it chipped away by the Republicans’ Southern strategies and appeals to race. It was a prescription for the future, if only they would listen. With Bobby Kennedy, the tent was getting bigger, not being divided into small competing factions. In his final efforts, Kennedy died trying to incorporate these new faces into the party’s base, to bring these “outsiders” in.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Ghosts of Camelot
“I don’t think my books could have been written in the world that existed before the Kennedy assassination. And I think that some of the darkness in my work is a direct result of the confusion and psychic chaos and the sense of randomness that ensued from that moment in Dallas. It’s conceivable that this made me the writer I am—for better or for worse.”
—DON DELILLO
AFTER THEIR QUICK-HIT sexual encounters, the president usually found enough time to converse postcoitally with his paramour, Judith Campbell Exner. A “slam-bam-thank-you ma’am” kind of lover, Jack Kennedy didn’t like to linger for chitchat. Various women with whom he engaged in extramarital conviviality provided similar accounts of his businesslike approach, his single-minded intent and his amiable but not particularly engaged conversation during these interludes. Rarely did the president reveal what breezed through his mind as he relieved himself of all that pent-up Kennedy testosterone. But with Judith Exner, a strikingly beautiful brunette first introduced to him by singer Frank Sinatra, he discovered one particular commonality.
“He was very interested in the fact that I was from a large family and that I was a Catholic,” Exner informed Seymour M. Hersh, whose 1997 compilation of Camelot’s “dark side” obsessed on Kennedy’s sexual peccadilloes with the zeal of a Comstocker. As a matter of fact, Exner’s other married boyfriend, Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, was also a Catholic.
Adultery, though, was the least of their sins.
The sexual nexus between the president and the Mafia wasn’t revealed publicly until more than a decade after Kennedy’s assassination—long after the romantic but highly misleading Camelot legend had taken root firmly in the American psyche. The truth about the president’s perfidy read like one of Kennedy’s favorite spy novels. A lengthy November 1975 report by a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating the CIA and its alleged assassination plots on foreign leaders mentioned, in a tiny footnote on the bottom of page 129, that Exner (identified only as “the President’s friend”) had been in contact with Kennedy’s White House no less than seventy times from her home telephone. Her sexual relationship with Kennedy began shortly after his 1960 election and lasted until March 1962, when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover apparently informed the president during a private luncheon that his sexual liaisons with Exner were turning up in FBI field agents’ case reports on Giancana. The Senate committee also discovered that Giancana, a “prominent Chicago underworld figure,” was a central figure in the CIA’s plan against Cuba during the Kennedy administration and boasted of a government-approved assassination plot against Fidel Castro.
The Senate revelations were, in the parlance of tabloidese, a bombshell. Coming on the heels of Richard Nixon’s agonizing Watergate resignation, the nation’s devastating retreat from Vietnam and a general disillusionment with America’s imperial presidency, the Senate report had a profound impact on the public’s view of the martyred president.“The Exner account was a sort of triple whammy laid on Kennedy’s once golden memory—not only an illicit love affair in the White House, but a link to the Mafia, through a woman who was in turn linked to participants in an assassination plot,” wrote New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, who seemed embarrassed about how little he had known of Kennedy’s “dark side” while covering the White House. The Senate’s rather sanctimonious-sounding “Church report”—named after Senator Frank Church, the committee’s chair—startled a nation that was still fundamentally Puritanical. It disappointed many of Kennedy’s admirers, particularly Catholics. Jack’s sexual licentiousness left them with feelings of moral revulsion and betrayal.
Before this report, there were plenty of critiques of the Kennedy years, usually written by conservatives who could be dismissed easily as crackpots or reactionaries. After the Senate report, a flood of media documentation about Kennedy’s sex life, including a 1977 ghostwritten book by Exner herself, seemed to sully and overwhelm his carefully nurtured legacy. The nation’s largest news magazine, Time, which had once jockeyed for intimate family photos of John-John and Caroline, now informed their readers about “Fiddle” and “Faddle,” the Secret Service code names for two young women traveling with Kennedy who had “no discernable duties.” In this revisionist version of the Kennedy presidency, plots to blow up Castro with exploding cigars or to poison him with the help of gangsters were given moral equivalency with sexual threesomes played out in the pool behind the Oval Office. Ultimately, his critics relied on sex to tear at the Camelot legend, partly because Kennedy was no longer alive to cover it up. Camelot seemed like a long-lost fairy tale. And all the hagiographies and all the Kennedy men couldn’t put this image together again.
From the very beginning, the Camelot imagery seemed an odd and determined attempt to cast the Kennedy story in decidedly Anglophile terms. This family of Irish Catholic immigrants who, at best, had an ambivalent relationship with Great Britain, now saw their dead beloved Jack portrayed as an English king. His brothers, Bobby and Ted, and other key administration officials became knights of the round table, and Jacqueline Kennedy was depicted as his regal widowed queen. Earlier attempts to portray the Kennedys as pioneers for American equality, for the ascendancy of immigrants into the mainstream of society, gave way to this storybook parable of British royalty and entitlement.
In an emotional interview days after her husband’s murder, Jackie Kennedy mentioned the Broadway musical called “Camelot,” how Jack liked to play its songs on their Victrola to relax at night, and how she felt the image of Camelot was so emblematic of her husband’s presidency. Alone with the grief-filled widow, journalist Theodore H. White immediately grabbed on to the Camelot metaphor and milked it in a way that gave his own editors at Life magazine pause before printing it. Nevertheless, the allegory resonated with a nation still searching for answers to Kennedy’s senseless killing and moved by the graceful majesty of his funeral. Fifteen years later, White acknowledged that “the magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed.” Like so many other journalists of his generation,White was mesmerized by K
ennedy’s charisma—a word so identified with JFK that it now seems dated. In hindsight, he identified a more significant aspect of Kennedy’s presidency, far less Anglo-Saxon in orientation, as his lasting legacy. “It is quite obvious now, of course, that he was the man who broke up the old pattern of American politics,”White wrote.
He was the man who ruptured the silent understanding that had governed American politics for two centuries—that this was a country of white Protestant gentry and yeomen who offered newer Americans a choice for leadership only within their clashing rivalries. . . . Historically, he was a gate-keeper. He unlatched the door, and through the door marched not only Catholics, but blacks, and Jews, and ethnics, women, youth, academics, newspersons and an entirely new breed of young politicians who did not think of themselves as politicians—all demanding their share of the action and the power in what is now called participatory democracy.
At the time of its invention, however, Camelot played to the Anglo- Saxon inclinations of America’s opinion makers. These top columnists and television commentators, mostly white Protestant men themselves, generally subscribed to the “melting pot” school of American assimilation, where ethnicity was left behind in the name of progress. Jack Kennedy appeared the perfect graduate of this school of assimilation, an Anglophilic creation, like some modern-day Pygmalion, who had been scrubbed clean of any hint of his Irish Catholic heritage. “He was a story-book President, younger and more handsome than mortal politicians, remote even from his friends, graceful, almost elegant, with poetry on his tongue and a radiant young woman at his side,” recalled James Reston of the New York Times, then perhaps the nation’s most admired columnist, a year after JFK’s passing. In this nostalgic haze, they remembered Kennedy’s princely handling of press conference questions. They rewound and replayed the film clips and photos of his interrupted presidency, sometimes accompanied by the Camelot theme music, until the image became embedded in the minds of Americans. Anniversaries of his death became cause for remembering the Camelot myth. Even the press had a difficult time remaining objective. “It is hard to think of another politician into whose life so many people read themselves with such indulgence,” observed Henry Fairlie in a 1973 Harper’s essay revisiting the Camelot legend. At a Washington luncheon sometime after JFK’s murder,Wicker discussed Kennedy’s legacy with a group of political wise men, including Richard Scammon, the president’s Census Bureau director.“He’ll be remembered for just one thing,” declared Scammon. “He was the first Roman Catholic elected President. Period.” Scammon had seen the numbers, counted the heads and knew a historical ground shift when he saw one. But faced with a challenge to the accepted boundaries of the Camelot legend,Wicker says, he was “scandalized by this first hint of revisionism,” and never explored the comment’s significance.
Any detailed suggestion that John Kennedy’s presidency might be influenced by his cultural background—or that his election signified not only a historic advance for Irish Catholics but for America’s immigrants and minorities at large—wouldn’t be welcome here. As historical analysis goes, the Camelot myth was more comfortable, a lot less ethnic and had its own secular catechism. As Gore Vidal noted mockingly, books by Kennedy’s devotees were “not so much political in approach as religious.” In retelling, Vidal said “the thousand days unfold in familiar sequence and, though the details differ from gospel to gospel, the story already possesses the quality of a passion play.”These Camelot versions presented Jackie, Bobby and other key players in the drama as “demigods, larger than life,”Vidal explained, and always included its “ritual” ending with Jack’s death (sometimes featured in the first chapter). Unflattering facts were ignored by these authors; there were hints that bad things—such as the nation’s quagmire in Vietnam— never would have happened if their lost king had lived.
“The sources of the holy family’s power is the legend of the dead brother, who did not much resemble the hero of the books under review,” attested Vidal.“The myth that JFK was a philosopher-king will continue as long as the Kennedys are in politics. And much of the power that they exert over the national imagination is a direct result of the ghastliness of what happened in Dallas.” Interestingly enough, Vidal suggested the Kennedys’ Irish Catholic background had more to do with their motives than many understood. “In a way, the whole Kennedy episode is a fascinating throwback to an earlier phase of civilization,”Vidal observed. “Because the Irish maintained the ancient village sense of the family longer than most places in the West and to the extent that the sons of Joe Kennedy reflect those values and prejudices, they are an anachronism in an urbanized non-family-minded society.”
SEX BECAME A STAPLE of the Kennedy bestseller for the next quarter century. In some books, Kennedy’s promiscuity was used as a weapon to explain away legitimate political achievement (such as the Cuban missile stare down with the Soviets) as nothing more than unabated recklessness. Tales of who-was-doing-what-to-whom in Camelot was merely a fan dance to attract attention to other books, the musky lubricant for more sales. Numerous exposés speculated on Marilyn Monroe’s alleged affairs with Jack and Bobby Kennedy, the Boswells ranging from the machismo Norman Mailer to the feminist Gloria Steinem. The 1960s Rat Pack friendships with Sinatra and presidential brother-in-law Peter Lawford, the Hollywood and Las Vegas–based atmosphere of starlets and wise guys, brought a Runyonesque “Guys and Dolls” tone to these stagings of Camelot. Former girl friends, including Judith Exner and Gloria Swanson, cashed in with tell-alls that featured breathless re-creations of their sexual exploits with the Kennedys. In successive tomes, various Kennedy brothers, sisters, cousins, in-laws, and their hired help were all caught with their pants down. Each book touted its own new indiscretion, its own sneak peek behind into the Kennedy boudoir or White House bacchanalia. Whether real or imagined, sex acts among the long-ago dead seemed all that was left to rouse the living. Religion made Kennedy lust seem more enticing. The marital infidelities and the tales of unbridled urges seemed more sinful, more like a bite from the biblical forbidden fruit, because of their Roman Catholic faith and the church’s taboos. Indeed, the Kennedys’ obsessions underlined the sexual duplicity in their ancient church and in modern American society.
During this sexually permissive age of the 1970s—awash in media stories of free love on campus, spouse-swapping in the suburbs and other excesses of the flesh—similar disclosures about other former politicians merited only a ho-hum reaction, sort of like learning rumply old Eisenhower had a mistress. To many Americans, however, the adultery and carnal sins of the Kennedys confirmed their own prejudices about Catholic dogma and hypocritical edicts from Rome regarding sex. The clean, wholesome family image projected by the president’s handlers contrasted with his satyr-like behavior in private. John Kennedy was voted into office in part because of his physical attractiveness, his magnetism in crowds and his appeal for women, and yet Americans appeared shocked when they learned he had acted out their adulterous fantasies.
Sexual hypocrisy pervaded the Kennedys’ own actions. During 1960s, Attorney General Robert Kennedy brought a criminal pornography case against Ralph Ginsburg, publisher of a well-regarded art journal, Eros, because it printed nude photographs, including some of black men suggestively touching white women at a time when television wouldn’t even show them kissing. “I ought to prosecute him, but it’ll hurt me politically,” Bobby told a top Justice Department aide. “They will blame it on my Catholicism.” Sure enough, when the indictment came, Ginsburg blamed Kennedy’s religious prudery for bringing such an affront to the First Amendment and eventually forcing him to jail. “He may not have thought I was ruining the country’s morality, but the Catholics whispering in his ear thought so,” Ginsburg said. If Bobby was a bloodhound in public on sexual immorality, he learned to keep his mouth shut on private matters close to home. He knew about the improper dossiers kept by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover containing information on the alleged extramarital affairs of his brother, but he remained q
uiet. In his oral history for the Kennedy library, Bobby indicated he knew about other sexual escapades of Washington politicians, shuttled to him by Hoover, including an FBI probe into call girls and at least “one Senator from the South who had a Negro mistress.” But Bobby, because of what he knew, was in no position to throw stones.
In its own way, the sordid disclosures of the Kennedys’ sexuality highlighted the pretense confronting American Catholics on sexual matters in general, a rank hypocrisy often staring at them in the mirror. As the nation’s best known Catholics, the Kennedys, like millions of their co-religionists, professed an allegiance to a church run by an abstinent clergy and a distant papacy that inundated their flock with restrictions on sex, birth control, divorce and threats of condemnation if these rules weren’t followed. Yet the complexity and sheer messiness of the Kennedys’ adult lives underlined the difficulties for many American Catholics living with these strictures.