The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  "What's the moral of the story?" Kennedy's former lover rhetorically asked during one interview. "That this grand man, this man of energy and intelligence and glamour and power, was to a certain extent dehumanized by the privileges that made him who and what he was. He allowed us to think that there are people who have it all. And that's a very dangerous illusion, because at some point they know they don't. Mythologizing this man did not help him and did not help us, because it allowed us to not take responsibility for our participation in the public life. We say, 'Oh well, let this wonderful leader do it.' But that is not inviting us to think."

  The Kennedys' belief that they were extraordinary people who could make their own rules began long before Jack was born. It started with his grandfather.

  * * *

  * No outsider can fully comprehend the dynamics of another family's life, but outsiders were often shocked by what they encountered in the Kennedy household. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader, was asked to make a speech in Palm Beach. It seemed only natural when Rose Kennedy telephoned and invited him to come to the family's beachfront home for lunch. Johnson, recovering from a serious heart attack, was accompanied on the trip by Lady Bird, his wife; Bobby Baker, his aide and confidant; and Senator George Smathers, of Florida. "So we went over for lunch," Baker recalled in an interview for this book. Rose Kennedy, gracious and charming, was alone. Suddenly, Baker said, "Old Man Joe comes in with a seventeen-or eighteen-year-old girl. Doesn't say boo. Walks right in and goes upstairs" and engages in what, clearly and noisily, is sexual intercourse. "Here you have the majority leader of the Senate and he and Jack had a great relationship," Baker told me. "I thought it was the rudest thing I've ever seen." The lunch went on as if nothing had happened. Baker learned later, he said, that the young woman was Joe Kennedy's caddy from the French Riviera, where the Kennedys maintained a vacation home.

  3

  HONEY FITZ

  History has been kind to John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Jack Kennedy's maternal grandfather, who is invariably portrayed as an amiable longtime Boston pol famed for his energetic campaigning and singing "Sweet Adeline" at political events. The athletic, handsome Fitzgerald was said to be the first politician to campaign by automobile: dramatically speeding across Boston, he preached his antiboss, reformer message at twenty-eight rallies on the last night of his successful 1905 campaign for mayor. No one, it was said, shook more hands, danced more dances, talked more rapidly, or generated larger and more enthusiastic crowds than Honey Fitz.

  It is that historical legacy that survives---and not the reality. Fitzgerald's contentious two terms as mayor of Boston, marked by sworn testimony of payoffs and cronyism, have been muted over the years into just another example of big-city political business as usual. His political alliance with his four brothers, who were provided with city jobs and other largesse, including valuable liquor licenses, was the beginning of the brother-to-brother family loyalty that would be repeated again and again in the next generation. And Fitzgerald's political humiliation in 1919, when he was investigated in the House of Representatives for eight months before being unseated for vote fraud, is written off in a sentence or two in most Kennedy family histories.

  The incomplete historical record is partially the result of the Kennedys' purging of unsavory events from the family lore and the ability of family members to lie when necessary. The facts surrounding Fitzgerald's ouster from Congress were protected by the congressional rule dating back to 1880 that sealed all unpublished investigative materials for fifty years. More than three thousand pages of House Elections Committee depositions and files dealing with the challenge to the 1918 election were not available to the public until 1969, and were then left unexamined and unpublished until research began for this book.

  Fitzgerald won the House seat on November 5, 1918, by defeating the incumbent, fellow Democrat Peter F. Tague, by 238 votes out of the 15,293 cast in Massachusetts's Tenth District. (Tague had been defeated by Fitzgerald in the Democratic primary election, amid charges of vote fraud, and ran again, as a write-in candidate, in the general election.) The newly examined elections committee files show that the Fitzgerald forces, who included his young son-in-law Joseph P. Kennedy, recruited immigrant Italians, then entering the United States in huge numbers, and sent them into election precincts with instructions to use threats and physical violence to prevent Tague supporters from casting their special ballots. A few professional boxers were also hired. The House investigators determined that at least one-third of the votes in three precincts in Boston's teeming Fifth Ward were fraudulent, so-called mattress votes cast by men who were falsely registered as living in the district in order to vote on election day. Other Fitzgerald votes were determined to have been cast by men who had been killed in combat or were still stationed overseas in World War I. Most of the illegal votes came from a strip of notorious bars and houses of prostitution in the Fifth Ward, and it was these votes, so the committee concluded, that enabled Fitzgerald to steal the election.

  Fitzgerald offered little defense during the months of congressional inquiry, other than to insist that he had been "framed" and to deny that any fraud was involved in his election. The elections committee's report was debated for more than four hours on October 24, 1919. The House voted overwhelmingly to unseat Fitzgerald and swear in his opponent on the spot.

  Fitzgerald's comment to newsmen outside the Capitol was almost jaunty: "Well, McKinley was unseated by the Congress and became a candidate and was elected president. See what's ahead of me?" In her bestselling biography The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, published in 1987, Doris Kearns Goodwin took brief note of the election of 1918 and its aftermath and observed that Fitzgerald, after being ousted from office, "remained as exuberant as ever, emerging once again from disgrace like a duck from water, and the local newspapers still considered him the leading citizen of Boston."

  Why was Fitzgerald so exuberant?

  One answer may be that he was successfully practicing what is known today as political spin control---putting on an act for the public and the press in an attempt to minimize the importance of the disaster that had befallen him.

  Another possible answer revolves around Fitzgerald's lifelong ability to ignore the consequences of his actions. He had run for mayor of Boston in 1905 as a reformer but, once elected, presided over a regime that became infamous for patronage and graft. "From his earliest days in politics," Goodwin wrote, "Fitzgerald had been able to compartmentalize his actions so that he could hold on to an image of himself as a 'good' man and a 'reformist politician'"---even as he joined fully in the corruption of his administration. Fitzgerald's instinct for compartmentalization and tolerance for political dirty tricks would be passed along to his son-in-law Joe Kennedy and to Kennedy's second son, John.

  Further, Fitzgerald might have understood how much more the House Elections Committee could have made public but did not. The unpublished hearings records of the committee depict Fitzgerald as a political leader who, like other corrupt big-city politicians of his time, relied heavily on alcohol, prostitution, and violence for financial and voter support.

  The same files also demonstrate that Joe Kennedy was directly involved in many aspects of his father-in-law's public life, an involvement that has been generally overlooked by historians. Fitzgerald family patronage of Kennedy is revealed in documents such as long-forgotten 1918 campaign leaflets in which Tague released letters showing that Fitzgerald had urged him to recommend Kennedy as a director of the federal Farm Loan Board (a position Kennedy did not get). Other depositions and documents show that the elections committee suspected Kennedy of playing a major organizational role on election day in November 1918, when the Fitzgerald forces used fraud and intimidation to win Tague's seat. Some of the mattress voters from the shadiest hotels in the Fifth Ward were asked directly by suspicious House investigators whether Joe Kennedy had played a part in their illegal vote, but they provided no evidence. There was also a suggestion tha
t Kennedy was involved in illicit campaign financing. A Fitzgerald supporter named Thomas Giblin told under oath of a secret $1,500 campaign account---roughly $50,000 in current dollars---in a small Boston bank then controlled by Kennedy, which was viewed by many of Fitzgerald's campaign workers as particularly dirty. "They are all running away from it," Giblin testified. He quoted Tague as telling Fitzgerald's campaigners that he "would have them prosecuted if they used [the Kennedy] money."

  Fitzgerald, stung by his rejection in 1919 and later political failures, is described in family biographies as a happily doting grandfather who spent many afternoons in the 1920s catering to the needs of the children of his eldest daughter, Rose Kennedy, whose burgeoning family lived a few miles away until late in 1927. Fitzgerald became especially close to his two oldest grandsons, Joseph Jr. and John, taking them to the zoo, on boat rides in the Public Garden, and to cheer for the Boston Red Sox and the old Boston Braves.

  Those accounts fail to emphasize the overriding toughness of the extended Fitzgerald family, a trait that was passed along to future generations and, eventually, into the presidency. Chester Cooper, a CIA official who served in the Kennedy White House, spent his summers in the 1920s a few blocks from the beach at Nantasket, south of Boston. The Fitzgerald summer house was directly on the beach. "I remember playing in front of the Fitzgerald house," Cooper told me in an interview. "A couple of burly guys came out of the house and said, 'Get off our beach.' I remember saying, 'This is a public beach.' I was violently hit for the first time in my life. They were [Fitzgerald] sons and uncles. They literally kicked us off the front of the beach."

  The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys always took care of their own. In the mid-1930s, Joe Kennedy risked his standing as an insider in the Roosevelt administration by urging the president to appoint one of Fitzgerald's brothers to a federal liquor position. President Kennedy, carrying on the family tradition, ignored talk of nepotism and appointed his brother attorney general; he ignored it again in 1962 by ensuring that Edward M. Kennedy, his youngest brother, was nominated and elected to the Senate from Massachusetts.

  Fitzgerald's relationship with his often-absent son-in-law Joe was never close, according to the Kennedy family biographers. There was a crucial side to Honey Fitz, and his continued popularity among many Boston voters, that the constantly upward-striving Joe Kennedy could not comprehend: the mayor was an old-fashioned pol who was unapologetic about his humble beginnings and worked incessantly to present himself as a man of the people.

  Joe Kennedy's political ambitions began at the top. He was ruthless, as we shall see, in his efforts while serving as President Roosevelt's ambassador to England to collect adverse information about the president, in a poorly conceived attempt in 1940 to force FDR from office---and position himself as a viable candidate. Joe Kennedy's political career was in ruins by the end of 1940, but he learned from his mistakes. His son Jack, emulating his grandfather, would develop a strong political base in Boston.

  After his political disgrace, Honey Fitz remained loyal to the family, and did what his wealthy son-in-law told him to do. In 1942, at the age of seventy-nine, Fitzgerald served Joe's needs by running as a spoiler in the Democratic senatorial primary in Massachusetts against an attractive New Deal Democrat named Joseph E. Casey, one of FDR's favorites in the Congress. Fitzgerald, whose daily campaign activities were heavily subsidized by Kennedy---and carefully monitored by one of Joe's high-powered and well-paid speechwriters---took 80,000 votes away from Casey in the primary, and inflicted so much damage that Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., won the general election easily. The defeat, as expected, embarrassed the president and seriously hurt the career of Casey, who was viewed by Kennedy as a potential threat to the political ambitions of his first-born son, Joe Jr., ambitions Joe nurtured until his son's death in 1944. The Kennedys learned a vital lesson in 1942: even a very good candidate, like Joseph Casey, could be defeated with money.

  Honey Fitz came into the limelight once again, in 1946, when Joe Kennedy turned to Jack, his eldest surviving son, as the family's political heir. Jack came out of the war as a decorated navy hero of torpedo boat skirmishes; it was decided that he would campaign for Fitzgerald's old seat in Congress* as one of ten candidates in the Democratic primary. The Kennedy public relations machine was turned loose again and the natural affinity between grandson and grandfather was put to work---with careful guidance from Joe, who remained in the background during the campaign, as he would throughout his son's political career. Dozens of favorable news stories appeared as the young man and old man campaigned together in the working-class districts of Boston's North End and West End, with the former mayor introducing his grandson to the city's elders. Honey Fitz seemed to play a significant role in the campaign.

  Jack Kennedy and his campaign workers understood, however, that Fitzgerald was an anachronism whose politics had little to do with postwar America. Robert Kennedy, in an interview for the Kennedy Library four years after his brother's death, acknowledged that his grandfather's political "effectiveness ... was not overwhelming. He had some important introductions and contacts which were significant. But the appeal that John Kennedy had was to an entirely different group." Kennedy added that his grandfather "felt very close to my brother."

  Jack Kennedy's best friend, K. LeMoyne Billings, told interviewers after Kennedy's assassination that grandson and grandfather "were absolutely crazy about each other. Jack was undoubtedly the old man's favorite. He was a very attractive old man, full of the Irish blarney, full of mischief and full of life.... His humor was something that Jack loved so much; he adored his grandfather's sense of humor." As president, Jack would honor his grandfather's memory---Fitzgerald died in 1950---by naming the presidential yacht the Honey Fitz.

  Nonetheless, the family warmth was put aside at critical moments in 1946. Joe Kennedy, as usual, treated Honey Fitz contemptuously during his son's first campaign, and Jack Kennedy, never able to stand up to his father, was unable to stand up for his beloved grandfather.

  The chief adviser in the campaign, handpicked by Joe, was a hard-nosed Boston political operative named Joseph L. Kane, who had served as the political strategist for Peter Tague during his successful fight to reclaim his House seat from Honey Fitz in 1919. Kane, who was Joe Kennedy's first cousin and childhood friend, had done little in subsequent years to hide his disdain for Honey Fitz, and did not spare him in 1946.

  In an interview in the late 1950s, published in Front Runner, Dark Horse, a study of the 1960 campaign by journalists Ralph G. Martin and Ed Plaut, Kane told of the tense moment, early in the primary campaign, when Fitzgerald accidentally walked into a Kennedy strategy meeting. Kane yelled, "Get that son of a bitch out of here!" The startled young Kennedy said, "Who? Grandpa?" Fitzgerald was ushered away and Jack, his political career on the line, stayed put. Young Kennedy was learning to be as ruthless, if necessary, as his father. A few days later, a pleased Joe Kennedy praised his son's ability to get along with the difficult Kane: "I didn't think you'd last three hours with him," Joe Kennedy said.

  The famed Kennedy loyalty---father to sons, sons to father, and brother to brother---did not always extend, at election time, to grandfathers.

  Joseph P. Kennedy, in his drive to elect Jack Kennedy in 1946, left nothing to chance---an approach he would repeat in every one of his son's political campaigns. Kane was deemed essential, because the elder Kennedy was pouring hundreds of thousands of family dollars into the campaign; Kane, who spent forty years as a backroom political operative in Boston, knew whom to pay off and how much to pay. Kane's political theory was very simple, as he told Martin and Plaut years later: "It takes three things to win: the first is money and the second is money and the third is money." One primary rival was paid $7,500 to "stay in or get out," depending on how the race was going. Yet another rival was neutralized when Kane paid to have someone with the same name enter the primary, inevitably confusing voters and splitting the vote. The Kennedy campaign bought up much of
the available billboard space in the district, and advertised heavily on the radio. The campaign slogan, as devised by Kane, was appropriately vague: "The New Generation Offers a Leader."* Thousands of leaflets and pamphlets bearing those words were mailed, and many of the eligible women voters were personally invited by mail to join with Kennedy family members at a swanky hotel reception a few days before the election. The response was overwhelming. Kane said that Joe Kennedy was used to paying for what he got. "They paid a staggering sum in the Congressional race of 1946, but Jack could have gone to Congress like everyone else for ten cents."

  John F. Kennedy campaigned vigorously and successfully for his grandfather's old seat in Congress, and with enormous charm, intelligence, and growing confidence. His first campaign invoked strategies that would bring him continued political success: an early start, effective use of volunteers, and a ferociously loyal organization made up of family members, old friends, former schoolmates, and shipmates from his combat days in World War II, when Kennedy commanded PT-109 in the Pacific.

  The essential lessons he learned in the 1946 campaign would stay with Jack Kennedy for the next fourteen years, as he moved away from the local politics of his grandfather and began his long run for the presidency: Good looks, good organization, and hard work were not enough. Above all, he needed his father---and his father's noholds-barred spending.