Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  The road that had brought Paul Corbin into Robert Kennedy’s life was long, winding, and paved with dishonorable intentions. He was born Paul Corbrinsky in 1915, the child of Russian émigrés who lived in Manitoba. He entered the United States in 1935—illegally—and reentered it several times after authorities shipped him back to Canada for a raft of misbehavior ranging from con games to assault. He abandoned his first family in New York, moved to the Midwest, where he supported himself in part by threatening businesses with wildcat strikes unless they bought advertising in a union publication, which did not exist. He was an organizer for at least one union that had been expelled from the CIO for its left-wing ties. Corbin himself was—literally—a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but it was a measure of Corbin’s flexibility that by the early 1950s he was a business partner of sorts with the red-hunting Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. (Corbin would travel to towns where McCarthy was scheduled to speak, selling American flags for the faithful to wave; he and McCarthy would split the profits.)

  By 1960, he was a fringe player in Wisconsin Democratic politics, when Pat Lucey, a rising star in the party, brought him into the Presidential primary campaign of John Kennedy. His first meeting with Robert Kennedy was a profanity-ridden exchange of insults; but by the primary’s end, Kennedy had come to respect Corbin’s political instincts, as well as his highly unconventional approach to organizing. He would bring seminarians to work for the campaign in Protestant towns, but insist they wear sport shirts to hide their Catholic ties. He would introduce the devoutly Catholic Helen Keyes to Protestant voters as “a Baptist lady from Boston.” He would make sure that scurrilous anti-Catholic diatribes against Kennedy were seen by Catholic voters. In Stevens Point, he convinced the local priest to ring the church bells on Primary Day to help get out the vote. (When the priest protested that the bells were only rung on holy days, Corbin argued that the election of the first Catholic President would someday be recognized as a holy day; the bells were rung.) Robert Kennedy was sufficiently impressed by Corbin to dispatch him to West Virginia, where he distributed ten-dollar bills like candy, and to New York, where he helped insulate upstate voters from the despised influence of Tammany Hall. By Election Night, Corbin was part of the inner circle that gathered at Hyannis Port to watch the returns.

  Paul Corbin wanted nothing more than a nice, cushy sinecure on the federal payroll, enough to insure him a pension; and Kennedy found him a place in the Interior Department. But when a Kennedy aide read the FBI report, it was blindingly clear that there was no way to put him on any government payroll. So he was given a job at the Democratic National Committee. No one could say exactly what he did, but it was clear whom he was doing it for; he even had one of the two keys to Kennedy’s private elevator in the Justice Department. It was an unsettling arrangement for many of Kennedy’s associates; his Justice Department aide and future Senate office head Joe Dolan called Corbin “the dark side of Bobby Kennedy.” Helen Keyes, the faux Protestant, once said, “If you have a job to do, and you want to get it done, and you don’t care how it’s done, send Paul Corbin to do it.” Kennedy’s eldest daughter Kathleen (who, like all of Kennedy’s children, called Corbin “Uncle Paul”) said that while Corbin was “a rascal,” her father “appreciated someone who would find out what’s going on in the government or in politics, and would be forthright about telling him, so he could have eyes and ears in places that he wouldn’t normally have them.” His job, then, was to use his preternatural instincts to find out who might be in a position to embarrass the Kennedy administration before their conduct made headlines.

  Corbin’s devotion to Robert Kennedy was absolute; the Jewish atheist even converted to Catholicism in 1961. And the loyalty was returned, insulating Corbin from the all-but-unanimous distaste of Kennedy’s circle, who were frequent targets of Corbin’s venom. (One of the items on Robert Kennedy’s plate the day his brother left for Dallas in November 1963 was Corbin’s charge that White House aide Kenneth O’Donnell was selling postmaster jobs for cash.) It was also the source of the first venomous split between Bobby and Lyndon Johnson in the weeks after Dallas. Early in 1964, Corbin began organizing a write-in “Kennedy for Vice President” campaign in New Hampshire. A furious President Johnson ushered Kennedy into the Oval Office after a Cabinet meeting, and snapped, “Get him out of there. Do you understand? I want you to get rid of him.”

  “He was appointed by President Kennedy,” Bobby said, not entirely accurately, “who thought he was good.”

  “Do it,” said Johnson. “President Kennedy isn’t President anymore. I am.”

  “I know you’re President,” Kennedy said, before storming out. “And don’t you ever talk to me like that again.”

  When Corbin was ousted from his post a few months later, he was put on the payrolls of the Merchandise Mart, the Kennedy-owned retail giant, and the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation. And he found his way to insinuate himself into Robert Kennedy’s public life in very private ways. In 1964, when New York Democrats kept him out of the Senate campaign, he set up shop across the river in New Jersey, where he installed so many phone lines that the police raided his operation, assuming he must have opened a bookie joint. In 1968, he showed up in California bearing the name of a retired military officer, where he tried to persuade young Kennedy supporters to dress up in outlandish hippie gear and pretend to be Kennedy-hating McCarthy supporters. And when J. Edgar Hoover’s long-anticipated bombshells about the Kennedy family failed to appear, more than a few saw the fine hand of Corbin in whatever had persuaded the Director to stay his hand.

  When Robert Kennedy won the Presidency, there was no chance, none at all, that Corbin would find any role in the administration, or even in the catacombs of the Democratic National Committee. For one thing, his reputation as a political fixer was too well known. For another, he had burned more bridges than Sherman, spreading dark tales about Kennedy’s advisors. However, he was still on the payroll of two Kennedy family enterprises; and more important, he still had the affection and the trust of the one man who mattered. So he rented an office, installed his longtime secretary and an unlisted phone number, and assigned himself the job of protecting the man he loved. He had not been in that kitchen pantry in Los Angeles to save Kennedy’s life; that task had fallen to Steve Smith, whose role Corbin deeply envied. Now, with the crucial midterm elections approaching, Corbin was certain that he knew the nature and the source of a different kind of attack; and he was determined to protect Robert Kennedy from it, whatever it took.

  IN THE WAKE OF Richard Nixon’s loss, the Republican Party concluded that it needed a makeover.

  “The face of Richard Nixon cannot be the face of our party,” House Minority Leader Gerald Ford told a closed-door meeting of top party leaders in Palm Springs. The gathering quickly settled on a handsome forty-four-year-old congressman from Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush, with impressive credentials: a World War II hero, son of a respected U.S. senator, roots deep in the New England aristocracy, father of five. (There were vague hints that the eldest boy, George W., was something of a hell-raiser at Yale, but as one fund-raiser said, “What family doesn’t have its problem child?”) When the committee elected Bush as its chair, his speech struck the post-Nixon note that they were looking for.

  “I want,” he said, “a kinder, gentler Republican Party.”

  Paul Corbin wasn’t buying it, not for a minute—not when Bush hired as the party’s policy director a thirty-eight-year-old ex-Marine who had run Nixon’s key issues committee, Charles “Chuck” Colson. Corbin’s seismograph had kicked into high when he learned from a source inside the Nixon campaign—he always had at least one source in the enemy camp—that Colson was a devotee of political hardball, who was often heard to say, “When you’ve got’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” (That was Corbin’s own political philosophy as well.) And his suspicions deepened when Colson, in turn, hired a just-retired CIA agent, E. Howard Hunt, who had quit in large mea
sure because he had never forgiven the Kennedys for refusing to topple Castro at the Bay of Pigs.

  I know what those bastards are up to, Corbin told himself. You don’t hire men like Colson and Hunt unless you’re plunging head first into the dark side. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but it didn’t take a man of Corbin’s intense, fevered imagination to assemble a list of possibilities:—Were they looking for the FBI files on President John Kennedy and his after-hours pursuits?

  —Was Hunt bringing matters long buried in the CIA files—about whom the government had reached out to in its efforts to remove Castro from power?

  —Were they looking for dirt buried deep in the pasts of the new, younger breed of people now being drawn into Robert Kennedy’s government?

  What he did know was that the only way to protect the President was to find out exactly what Robert Kennedy’s enemies were up to. And that’s why he was here in his office, on a very late September night, waiting for the call that would tell him he had succeeded.

  At ten minutes past midnight, the phone rang. And as soon as he heard who was on the other end of the line, Paul Corbin realized that he was in very serious trouble.

  IT WAS during the California primary that Kevin McKiernan first crossed paths with Paul Corbin. The twenty-three-year-old native of Sherman Oaks had taken a leave from his graduate studies at Georgetown University to work on the Kennedy campaign, and found himself drawn into the orbit of the mysterious operative who seemed to have no clear campaign role. McKiernan was one of the young volunteers who were asked by Corbin to dress up as unwashed street freaks and declare their love of Gene McCarthy and their hatred of Robert Kennedy. McKiernan declined, but was intrigued enough by Corbin to spend late nights over drinks, listening to Corbin’s tales of political machinations.

  If McKiernan was surprised to hear from Corbin after the election, he was stunned to hear what Corbin was proposing. I think you should volunteer at Republican headquarters, Corbin said. Be a trooper. Work mornings. Work late nights. Run the copying machine. Answer phones. Make yourself useful. Even indispensable. With a doctored resume listing grunt-level work in Ronald Reagan’s 1966 governor’s race and Max Rafferty’s 1968 Senate campaign, and references that were mail drops, McKiernan was welcomed, and for the next year and a half appeared several times a week at the town house on First Street, just across from the U.S. Capitol. McKiernan would meet with Corbin over dinner at the A and T, an ill-lit, low-priced Italian restaurant a few blocks from the Capitol, to offer whatever intelligence he could provide. It was mostly thin gruel—intra-party feuds, sexual entanglements—until one evening in late summer.

  I’ve been asked to come in late tomorrow for copying and collating, McKiernan said. I don’t know exactly what they’re preparing, but it sounds like this may be their campaign briefing book for candidates and surrogates. Strictly limited distribution, numbered copies, that sort of thing.

  Corbin nodded.

  We need a copy.

  But. . .

  This comes right from the Oval Office. We need a copy.

  To veterans of the Kennedy organization, such a comment would have been shrugged off: Corbin was famous for insisting that anything he was asking for came straight from Robert Kennedy. For McKiernan, it had the ring of truth; hadn’t Corbin gotten him an autographed picture of Kennedy, with a personal inscription thanking him for his help in California?

  At 9:30 on the night of Tuesday, September 15, the last staffer left the building, leaving McKiernan to finish copying and collating the document. He reached for the Minox B camera tucked inside the waistband of his chinos, and began to photograph the document, page by page. It would take him an hour or more, but McKiernan had spent enough nights at headquarters to know that no one would be returning this late at night . . . except that Jennifer Fitzgerald, who had served under Chairman Bush in a variety of positions, and who was now the Committee’s Chief of Staff, had forgotten her house keys, and had swung by the office after a working dinner with Bush. Between the noise of the Xerox 914 copier, and his absorption in the work of photographing the document, McKiernan never heard them coming. Thirty minutes later, McKiernan was being grilled by two District of Columbia detectives as an angry George Bush waited in his office. When one of the detectives found a piece of paper in McKiernan’s wallet with a local phone number, it took one phone call to a local telephone executive to disgorge the name attached to the number . . . which is why, when the man in the downtown office answered the phone, he was startled to hear the voice on the other end say, “Mr. Paul Corbin? This is Sergeant Paul Leeper of the District of Columbia Police. We’d like to talk with you.”

  IT WAS another slow night on the city desk of the Washington Post, and the twenty-seven-year-old wondered if this was really what he wanted to be doing with his life: monitoring police scanners, answering phone calls reporting flying saucer sightings, taking down details of an obituary notice. Maybe he’d just skip the rest of his two-week tryout. But then a report came in about an arrest at Republican National Committee headquarters, and, with two nightside reporters out with a flu bug, the editor told him to work the phones, maybe get something for the late city edition. A few minutes later, the reporter hung up the phone and looked up at his boss, a thirty-year veteran of Washington journalism.

  “Do you know anybody by the name of . . . Paul Corbin?” Bob Woodward asked.

  “Hold front!” yelled the editor.

  AT TEN A.M. THE next day, the White House briefing room was thick with reporters, cigarette smoke, and tension. In just about every hand was the Washington Post’s front page, folded to the above-the-fold headline that read “A GOP Mole—And a White House Link?” Bob Woodward’s story reported that a young volunteer, caught photographing “highly confidential political documents,” was found to have in his wallet a phone number belonging to a “longtime ally of Robert Kennedy, whose work has been shrouded in mystery.” Paul Corbin, the story said, had been “questioned and released, but D.C. police say there are many unanswered questions about Mr. Corbin’s relationship to the young man, who was released on $1,500 bail.”

  The White House senior staff that had gathered three hours earlier knew what that story would trigger. They quickly assured each other that none of them had had any contact with Paul Corbin. All of the men in the room had heard Corbin declare that “Robert Kennedy wants . . .” “the Attorney General wants . . .” “the Senator wants . . .” And in one way or another, all of the men in the room had been victims of Corbin’s accusations of theft, double-dealing, and assorted other betrayals of Robert Kennedy. Indeed, over the years, they and other friends and colleagues had made their doubts about Corbin clear to Kennedy. The problem was that, over the years, they had also received variations of the same answer columnist Rowland Evans had gotten when he urged Kennedy to distance himself from Corbin: “When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.” But if Kennedy’s link to Corbin was a mystery, one thing now was clear: for the first time, the scent of political blood was in the air—and there was little doubt about who would be the lead bloodhound. Clark Mollenhoff, the forty-seven-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner, had prodded the young Robert Kennedy into probing union corruption back in 1956. In more recent years, their friendship had soured. It was Mollenhoff who had also investigated John Kennedy’s affair with a suspected East German spy, and late in the 1968 campaign Mollenhoff had agreed to join the White House staff if Nixon had won.

  When Frank Mankiewicz walked into the briefing room, Mollenhoff was on his feet even before the press secretary had read his statement denying any White House connection to Corbin, and promising the administration’s “full, complete cooperation.”

  Don’t you find it curious that a twenty-five-year-old volunteer at Republican headquarters would have the unlisted number of one of the most notorious political operatives in America?

  “I haven’t yet measured my level of curiosity,” Mankiewicz replied.

  Within twenty-four hours, an e
nterprising entrepreneur, seizing on the controversy surrounding a sexually explicit Swedish film import called I Am Curious (Yellow), had printed up buttons and T-shirts reading: “I Am Curious, Bobby.” What kicked the story into overdrive, however, was not the merchandising but the stories of Corbin’s past—“colorful” was the most neutral description—that began to fill the newspapers over the next two days. Between the veteran Mollenhoff’s FBI contacts and Woodward’s intelligence sources he’d met during his five years in the Navy, the story gained enough traction for Congress to get into the act. That afternoon, Senator John McClellan called his Government Operations Committee into an emergency closed-door session. The same Senator McClellan had presided over young Robert Kennedy’s probe into union corruption thirteen years earlier, but civil rights and Vietnam had driven the two far apart. McClellan was more than receptive to launching an investigation, as was fellow Southerner Sam Ervin of North Carolina who declared, “I’m just a humble country lawyer, but I know if you see a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by accident.” That left the committee deadlocked—and then Senator Eugene McCarthy spoke up.