The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Early on the morning that King arrived at Reidsville, Jack called Governor Vandiver. “Governor, is there any way that you think you could get Martin Luther King out of jail?” Jack asked. The two men had a perfect commonality of interests. They both wanted to end the relentless publicity about King’s imprisonment and focus on other matters. They both wanted to win the election. They both wanted to minimize the civil rights issue in the campaign. And they both wanted to keep their role in this matter as quiet as possible. The governor made no public statements but called a close friend, Georgia Secretary of State George D. Stewart, who in turn called his close friend Judge Mitchell, who in the end arranged to release King on bond.

  While this was going on in Georgia, Jack had just finished speaking at a breakfast in Chicago and was in a suite at O’Hare Airport, where the candidate’s plane would soon be taking off. Wofford had talked to Mrs. King and knew that she was terrified after her husband’s midnight ride to a new prison. Wofford called Shriver. “The trouble with your beautiful, passionate Kennedys is that they never show their passion,” Wofford said, imploring Shriver to get Jack to call Mrs. King. “They don’t understand symbolic action.”

  “It’s not too late,” said the terminally optimistic Shriver. “Jack doesn’t leave O’Hare for about forty minutes. Give me her number and get me out of jail if I’m arrested for speeding.”

  Shriver sped to the airport and rushed into Jack’s bedroom, where he had retreated to get a few minutes rest. He made sure that he was alone, so he would not hear the other aides nay-saying his proposal.

  “Why don’t you telephone Mrs. King and give her your sympathy,” Shriver said. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected. But they do want to know whether you care. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

  Jack knew how close Wofford and Shriver were, how fervent their concerns, and he was not about to tell his brother-in-law that he had already called the Georgia governor and hoped that King might be out of prison in a few hours. He trusted Shriver only so far, for he was an ideologue committed to this issue. Instead of confiding in his brother-in-law, he listened, as if he were hearing this matter for the first time this day. “What the hell,” he said, as if he were acting impulsively. “That’s a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.”

  Jack talked to Coretta Scott King, a call that in other circumstances would have been considered little more than a minimal act of decency. When Bobby heard of the action, he was infuriated. “You bomb-throwers have lost the whole campaign,” he told Wofford and Louis Martin. He warned them to issue no more statements. When Bobby was at his angriest, he had a frigid fury, his eyes cold, his voice tightly controlled, his fists clenched. “Do you know that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon?” he said as the campaign plane flew to Detroit. “Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost if for us?”

  Bobby decided, however, that King would have to be released. That evening from a phone booth in New York, Bobby called Judge Mitchell in Georgia because, as he told his aide John Seigenthaler, the judge was “screwing up my brother’s campaign and making the country look ridiculous before the world.” It was an intrusion into the judicial process that many lawyers would think violated professional ethics. Judge Mitchell recalled Bobby saying that if King stayed in prison, “we would lose the state of Massachusetts.”

  Even after King was released from prison, he was still unwilling formally to endorse Jack, but his influential father was not so hesitant, saying that “if Kennedy has the courage to wipe the tears from Coretta’s eyes, he will vote for him whatever his religion.” Kennedy knew how important that statement would be among black voters, though he was not aware of the irony. “Did you see what Martin’s father said?” he asked Wofford. “He was going to vote against me because I was a Catholic, but since I called his daughter-in-law, he will vote for me. That was a hell of a bigoted statement, wasn’t it? Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father. Well, we all have fathers don’t we?”

  While the Kennedy campaign did everything to downplay the role that Jack and Bobby played in King’s release, Wofford and Shriver went ahead and prepared two million copies of a small blue pamphlet to be handed out in black churches on Sunday, two days before the election. As extraordinary as it may seem, Wofford passionately asserts that neither he nor Shriver cleared this effort with Bobby or Jack. The pamphlet talked of Jack’s and Bobby’s calls and quoted King’s statement that he was “deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible.”

  Teddy had been given the West as his territory, and he roamed freely, spreading as much mirth as politics. On a Texas campaign trip, he and his college buddy Claude Hooton Jr. decided to play an inspired prank on Bobby, who was also in the state. They put together a collection of women’s undergarments worthy of Frederick’s of Hollywood, doused the frilly underwear in perfume, and hid them in Bobby’s suitcase, along with an equally perfumed love letter.

  Bobby had the most trusting of wives, for when he arrived home and Ethel unpacked his bag, there were no screams heard from Hickory Hill. Bobby vowed, however, that given his chance he would get revenge on his brother and his friend.

  On another campaign trip to Hawaii, Teddy attempted a measure of circumspection by having his companion, a foreign beauty queen, sitting back in tourist while he flew first-class. But he was so momentarily enamored of the stunning European woman that he kept roaming back among the plebes, signaling his attentions to all but the sleeping. Later in Honolulu at a dinner party with Sinatra, he walked into Don the Beachcomber with the woman on his arm, a gesture that infuriated the singer, who worried that Teddy’s public indiscretions would hurt his brother’s campaign. That did not happen, but if the other campaign managers had done as poor a job as Teddy, Jack’s chances for the presidency would have been minimal.

  All during the fall campaign, Jack had worried about his health becoming an issue. He sought to dispel the rumors by running the most vigorous, demanding campaign imaginable. Jack’s own running mate had tried to kill off his candidacy by leaking the story of his Addison’s disease. His enemies said that he was a deceitful near-invalid whose health alone should have disqualified him from high office. His medical records were inches thick, but he embarked that last week on a seventeen-state campaign that would have tired a marathon campaigner. In that final week he traveled to more states than any presidential candidate had ever visited in a scant seven days.

  Jack had brilliantly presented himself in television debates, sound bites, photo ops, and shrewdly calculated advertising. Yet in 1960, there remained an unspoken compact that each voter had the right to shake hands with the candidate, to touch him, to hear his words in person, to hold a banner with his name boldly written on it, to shout his name as he drove by. Tens of millions of Americans voted twice, once with their presence, and once again with their ballot. These were not neatly orchestrated days of media events in which Jack could retreat for afternoon naps and evening sitz baths. It was still the essence of politics to get out to the people and to talk to them, creating the illusion that this moment was as important to the candidate as it was to them.

  Jack drove through the depressed coal mining areas of Pennsylvania, where voters were scarce, in an open car and waved to onlookers in tiny Republican towns. Even if at times he was collecting one vote at a time, it was still one vote he had not had before. In a given day, sometimes even an hour, he would encounter enormous, boisterous crowds, and then arrive at a half-empty union hall or a rally notable only for being sparsely attended. And everywhere he went there were what the journalists called “jumpers,” young women who screamed their ardor as they would have for Elvis, creating orgiastic moments that had nothing to do with what was once c
alled politics. In the final days the crowds grew larger and applauded him with greater and greater intensity. The next to the last day of the campaign ended at three in the morning before thirty thousand supporters who had waited half the night to see their candidate in the town square of Waterford, Connecticut.

  There was one other Kennedy who had worked as hard and as single-mindedly as Jack since the convention, and that was Bobby. Subtlety and grace were the first casualties of Bobby’s role as campaign manager. Bobby felt that many of those who opposed his brother were not merely misguided men of good intentions but scoundrels and rogues. He had the considerable misjudgment to attack Jackie Robinson for the capital crime of backing the Nixon candidacy, impugning the black leader’s honor more than his judgment. “If the younger Kennedy is going to resort to lies,” the legendary sports star replied, “then I can see what kind of campaign this is going to be.”

  Bobby wisely backed off from that particular attack, and for the most part his campaign judgments were acute and judicious. “He gave people their head,” said Wofford, “He kept saying we want to get every horse running on the track.” He nonetheless left the queasy feeling in some of the campaign staff that he was ready to discard them the moment they faltered or misjudged, or that he needed them to take a fall for an error that more rightfully should have had a Kennedy name attached to it.

  The brothers were perfectly in tandem on this quest: Jack, the sonorous voice and subtle mind of the campaign, Bobby the fist and the muscle. As the brothers flew around the country, they rarely saw each other in person but talked often on the phone in their own private code. On one occasion, they happened to be passing through the same airport.

  “Hi, Johnny,” Bobby said, as nonchalantly as if they were two barnstorming salesmen drumming up their wares. “How are you?”

  “Man, I’m tired,” Jack said, looking into a pair of eyes as exhausted as his own.

  “What the hell are you tired for?” Bobby exclaimed. “I’m doing all the work.”

  As Jack moved through the last days of the campaign, Bobby was on his own frenetic schedule, as if by sheer will he could push up the vote tallies. On the final Saturday of the campaign, he took a trip to make speeches in Ohio, Kentucky, and North Carolina. In the Cincinnati airport, Bobby spied a gigantic six-foot-tall stuffed dog. His children loved animals, and though the gigantic dog was a display gimmick, not up for sale, he fancied himself walking into Hickory Hill with a dog larger than he was.

  “How much is that?” Bobby asked. It was a question that bored travelers had probably asked before, and the vendeuse gave him the answer that always drove them away, down the airport corridor. “A hundred dollars.”

  “I’ll take it,” Bobby said. The gigantic dog could not even fit into the private plane without having its head unceremoniously removed. The weather was foul and the time was late, but Bobby insisted that the pilot fly back to Washington so that he could spend the night with his family at Hickory Hill. And so the plane soared north through the murky black skies, carrying Bobby and an enormous, beheaded stuffed dog.

  All those weeks of the campaign, Jack’s father continued to work quietly for his son’s election. When Arthur Krock spoke unkindly about Jack’s candidacy, Joe shut the New York Times columnist out of the Kennedy lives forever. Krock had become a prickly near-reactionary, and Joe was not wrong in believing that the journalist changed to a softer lens when he turned to look at Nixon.

  Joe had an understanding of the relationship between money and political power that was mercilessly realistic. From the time he had first worked for Roosevelt, he had understood that big contributors did not want passbook-size returns on their money, and that what they considered good for the country was often their own personal or corporate good writ large. Cash had no fingerprints on it, and in 1960 campaign laws were still loose enough that large amounts of untraceable money moved around Kennedy’s campaign, as it did in Nixon’s.

  Joe told one of the aides to go pick up a valise full of money and to carry it to another destination in the campaign. The aide returned, confused. “You know, there was ten thousand less than you said,” he told the man whom they knew as “the Ambassador.”

  “In politics, money does not grow in the passing,” Joe said, always the philosopher.

  There has been much conjecture that the Kennedy patriarch made an unholy alliance with the mob to ensure Jack’s election. In these stories Sam Giancana shows up at all the crucial moments, a shadowy presence, his face barely visible. Exner has Giancana standing on the platform at Chicago’s Union Station waiting for her to arrive with a valise full of Kennedy money. Tina Sinatra has Joe asking her father to meet with Giancana to solicit his help. Tina says that Frank Sinatra met the Chicago mobster on a golf course, where he appealed to an undiscovered strain of patriotism in the pathological killer. “I believe in this man and I think he’s going to make us a good president,” Sinatra supposedly said, one good citizen to another. “With your help, I think we can work this out.”

  A different story has Joe meeting the mobster the first time in the Chicago courtroom of Judge William J. Tuohy, where the two men conspired to subvert the election. Another story has Joe meeting Giancana, other Chicago Mafia figures, and the Los Angeles mobster Rosselli at Felix Young’s, a New York restaurant, while their bodyguards waited outside. In yet another scenario Joe met at the restaurant that day with an even more notorious array of mobsters that included Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans don.

  Joe had contacts with the darkest part of American society. In June of that election year, he stayed at the Cal-Neva Hotel at Lake Tahoe, owned by mob interests. The FBI said later that, according to informants, he met there with “many gangsters with gambling interests and a deal was made which resulted in Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and others obtaining a lucrative gambling establishment, the Cal-Neva Hotel.” This did not mean that Joe had brokered the deal, but Mafia interests owned the Cal-Neva Hotel, and it was an unlikely place for the candidate’s father to have chanced upon.

  Joe was an immensely shrewd man who had for the most part kept his underworld connections quiet. Joe may well have met with individuals who had mob connections and asked for their help in the campaign, just as he was meeting with party bosses, power brokers, labor people, and others. It was unlikely he would flaunt that interest by meeting mobsters in prominent restaurants.

  There were, however, limitations on what he was likely to ask and what they were likely to be able to do. Joe was one of the wealthiest men in America. It was an unnecessary risk to have tainted Mafia money pouring into the campaign in vast amounts with all the chances of discovery and the possibility of blackmail. His own son Bobby was one of the vociferous enemies of Giancana and his kind. By working out an elaborate agreement with Giancana, Joe would have betrayed his own blood.

  That the Mafia had its tentacles deep into American life did not mean that it had strength enough to lift a man to the White House. The mob, moreover, was ecumenical in its political concerns, purportedly making a half-million-dollar contribution to Nixon’s campaign. As for Giancana, he had power in Chicago, but for every vote that the Chicago Mafia controlled, Mayor Daley controlled a hundred. Across America the mobsters had their hooks into union locals and officials, but the unions largely backed Democratic candidates anyway, and in those instances the mob could only confirm what the unions were already doing. Even if Joe utilized his mob connections, as he probably did, it is simply unthinkable that Giancana and his cohorts could have been the crucial factor in the election.

  The syndicate bosses, nonetheless, had reasons to think that in a Kennedy administration the FBI might back off from its interest in organized crime. Sinatra provided the campaign theme song, “High Hopes,” and Giancana and his associates had their own high hopes in Kennedy. Sinatra had boasted to Giancana that his friend Jack would ease up on the mob, and with that in mind Giancana had pushed Kennedy’s election.

  The final rally is always
a sentimental moment, even in the most dispirited of presidential campaigns, for whatever the polls might say, no matter what the aides might fear, it is not they who decide, but tens of millions of voters across the land. Jack’s campaign was ending in Boston, where the Kennedy saga had begun over a century before. The motorcade crawled through downtown streets so slowly that it took ninety minutes to move the two miles from his hotel to Boston Garden. Jack waved to sidewalks crowded with over half a million citizens who hoped their votes would help lift this son of Massachusetts to the White House. They shouted and they hooted and they yelped the way Boston Democrats had fifty-four years before when the torchlight parade celebrated his grandfather Honey Fitz’s ascendancy to the mayor’s office.

  The car passed the old State House and rolled over the ground where the Boston Massacre took place, and where Rose had stood lecturing Jack and his brothers and sisters on the five heroic Americans shot dead by the British redcoats, their martyrs’ blood drenching the street. At times his mother had been a merciless pedagogue, but she had woven history into Jack’s very sinews, and he could see himself as someone walking in the firm steps of American patriots. His eyes were red, but as he waved and smiled, he gave no sign of collapse. Jack had his Methedrine-laced shots to provide their ersatz lift, but to a politician there was no shot like this, the pure amphetamine of politics, which lifted him beyond even the exhaustion of the two-month-long campaign.

  The platform behind Jack at Boston Garden was jammed with every Massachusetts Democratic pol from Pittsfield to Yarmouth. There were those who had loved Jack from the day the scrawny veteran had first walked through the streets of East Boston. There were those who had always despised him and his benighted family and thought them the bane of party politicians. And there were many who had been indifferent. But they were all Kennedy men this evening, pressing toward their candidate. No one remembers, though, like the Kennedys—when you had signed on, what you had given, how long you had worked. A smile tonight would not make up for years of shrugs. As they stood there waiting for Jack’s appearance, Kenny O’Donnell surveyed the platform with its preponderance of Irish-American faces. Then