The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Although he had an excellent relationship with Bobby, Corbin was someone who apparently made no assumptions about anyone. He attempted in 1963 to get his information about O'Donnell and the others---information he realized no one wanted to hear---directly to the president. He did so by sharing his story with Charles Bartlett, the journalist who could, as Corbin understood, relay word directly to his good friend Jack Kennedy. Corbin and Bartlett had met during the difficult 1960 Wisconsin primary campaign, Bartlett told me in an interview for this book. "He was a good friend of mine." Bartlett learned that Corbin, on his own, had been keeping track of the handling of campaign money at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington. In the late spring of 1963, Corbin concluded that he had solid evidence of the skimming of campaign contributions by O'Donnell and two others, and he went to Bartlett to have him warn the president. The process was simple, as Corbin explained to Bartlett. In one specific case, Corbin said, a senior executive of a California oil company with a merger proposal pending in the Justice Department was told to give $100,000 to the reelection campaign in $100 bills. The quid pro quo was an age-old Washington tradition: a promise to try to resolve, or "fix," the problem. Only $50,000 of the oilman's cash was recorded as having been contributed to the campaign; the other $50,000 ended up, Corbin told Bartlett, in the pockets of Kenny O'Donnell and his cohorts.

  Bartlett eventually did Corbin's bidding, and in July 1963 began writing memoranda to the president warning him of corruption inside his White House. It was a courageous act. No president likes to be told that his closest aide, who knows the most about him, has to go. After a series of interviews, Bartlett provided me with startling evidence of his own warnings, as well as support for Corbin's allegations: carbon copies of some of the letters he sent the president.

  On July 19, Bartlett told the president in a typewritten note relayed by Evelyn Lincoln, "I know well how you dislike bearers of bad news but I am passing these memos along under a deep conviction that they deal with an area which urgently requires your personal scrutiny. An aura of scandal is building up---someone as remote as John Sherman Cooper [the Republican senator from Kentucky] observed to me the other evening that ... it would be a terrible thing if your record as President were to be impaired by disloyalty on the part of your associates." Bartlett then named O'Donnell and two other aides who, he said, were "performing legitimate political functions in a way that is breeding resentment and suspicion. At worst they are the heart of an extensive corruption which is reaching into many of the government agencies. No books are kept, everything is cash, and the potential for a rich harvest is clear.... I am fearful that unless you put a personal priority on learning more about what is going on, the thing may slip suddenly beyond your control."

  Bartlett told me that he was alarmed by O'Donnell, who was doing little to hide his newfound wealth. The presidential aide had offered a large sum of money for an elegant house in Georgetown, Bartlett learned, only to lose it to a higher bidder. Later that summer Bartlett wrote Kennedy another memorandum, reporting that O'Donnell, while drinking at a bar in Hyannis Port, had been overheard by a Secret Service agent making derogatory remarks about the president. "The purport of O'Donnell's remarks," Bartlett wrote, "was that the President was in fact rather stupid and that if it were not for [O'Donnell's] assistance, he would fall flat on his face. O'Donnell said he had had a great many offers from industry but that he was afraid to leave because he knew that the administration would fall apart." Kennedy's response was to give the note to O'Donnell, who had the Secret Service agent immediately removed from the White House presidential detail, disrupting his career. The agent did not learn the facts behind his reassignment until he was interviewed in 1995 for this book.

  The possibility exists that Bartlett and Corbin misunderstood O'Donnell's role. Some of the political cash that he was allegedly skimming may have been taken for the president himself, who had problems---with Ellen Rometsch, for example---that Charles Bartlett could not envision; problems that only cash could solve. The president responded very coolly to the July 19 letter, Bartlett told me, calling him one day to say, "Charlie, there are a lot of people over here mad at you." Kennedy's view, Bartlett said, was patrician: "He made his money. Other people should make theirs."

  Jack Kennedy's obvious lack of concern about O'Donnell's behavior did not stop Paul Corbin. He returned to his inquiry with renewed determination, Bartlett told me, and, after months of preparation, "brought Bobby the stuff. He had affidavits proving that it was still going on" as of November 1963. "He was a good sleuth," Bartlett said. "He told me he got it all together, signed statements, with Kenny O'Donnell being the bagman. He took it to Bobby and Bobby went through it and said, 'This is it.' He called Jack" in front of Corbin. Evelyn Lincoln told the attorney general that his brother had just left for Texas. "Bobby said," Corbin told Bartlett, "'We'll do it Monday. First thing.'" After the assassination, the distraught attorney general told Corbin to let the issue rest. "Lyndon wouldn't believe me," Kennedy said, according to Corbin.

  Bartlett never wrote a newspaper story about the scandal, which died with the murder of his good friend. Like Ben Bradlee and others who covered the White House, he found himself trapped in the gray area between friendship and professionalism. Bartlett remained troubled enough by what he knew and, perhaps, by what he did not do at the time, to make his letters to the president available for this book.

  There were two brutal ironies on November 22.

  That Friday started as a great day for Bobby Kennedy, and a potentially ruinous one for Vice President Lyndon Johnson. At ten o'clock in the morning, Donald Reynolds, a Washington insurance broker, walked with his lawyer into a small hearing room on Capitol Hill and began providing Burkett Van Kirk, the minority counsel of the Senate Rules Committee, with eagerly awaited evidence of unreported gift-giving to Johnson. Van Kirk had learned about Reynolds independently, but he and Bobby Kennedy had been secretly working together for weeks, through intermediaries, to accumulate evidence of payola against Johnson and Bobby Baker, Johnson's former Senate aide. Reynolds told Van Kirk and a Democratic staff member of the Rules Committee how he had listed Bobby Baker as a vice president of his insurance agency, and he claimed to have funneled off-the-books cash to Baker---subsequently written off as a "business expense." Reynolds told of making payoffs to Democratic Party officials, arranged through Baker's office in the Senate, in return for being allowed to handle the insurance on a large federal construction project. He told what little he knew of Ellen Rometsch and her associations at Baker's Quorum Club, the private club on Capitol Hill where senators and lobbyists shared drinks and other pleasures. And, finally, he told of selling life insurance to the vice president and being pressured in return to buy unnecessary advertisements on Johnson's television station in Austin, Texas---no one in Texas would be interested in buying insurance from a broker in suburban Maryland, 1,500 miles away. Reynolds also told of being compelled to provide Johnson with a stereo record player, as a kind of bonus. Bobby Baker had given the Johnson family a catalog, Reynolds testified, and Lady Bird Johnson had picked out the stereo she wanted. Reynolds was still being questioned at 2:30 P.M. when a secretary burst into the hearing room with the news from Dallas. Lyndon Johnson was now president of the United States, and no one was going to challenge his legitimacy because of a stereo set and a few thousand dollars' worth of television ads.

  Burkett Van Kirk remains convinced that Johnson would have been fighting for political survival had he remained vice president. "There's no doubt in my mind," Van Kirk told me in an interview, "that Reynolds's testimony would have gotten Johnson out of the vice presidency." The outnumbered Republicans on the Rules Committee tried to continue an investigation into Reynolds's charges, but the effort petered out after President Johnson told a news conference in January 1964 that the stereo set his family received had been a gift from Bobby Baker.

  As the deadly volley of shots was being fired in Dallas, an essential step in anot
her murder---one sanctioned by the Kennedy administration---was taking place in a Paris hotel room. An undercover CIA agent from Washington met with Rolando Cubela and gave him a specially prepared assassination device---a syringe full of poison designed to look and act like a fountain pen. The poison was meant for Fidel Castro. Cubela, a former student radical who had joined Castro's revolution in the mid-1950s, had become disaffected by 1959, and had talked since then of killing Castro. His recruitment, which took years to accomplish, was the best thing that happened to Desmond FitzGerald's Cuba task force all year, Sam Halpern, then of the CIA, told me in an interview. "Des thought [Cubela] was going to do it---get to Castro," Halpern explained. "Believe me, he thought he was going to do it."*

  Three weeks earlier, FitzGerald himself had flown to Paris to meet with the jittery Cubela, who was demanding a meeting with Bobby Kennedy before carrying out an assassination attempt. According to the CIA's 1967 Inspector General's Report on the planned assassination of Castro, the documents on file in FitzGerald's office showed that he had been authorized by his superior, Richard Helms, the director of clandestine operations, to tell Cubela that he was the "personal representative of Robert F. Kennedy." FitzGerald was further authorized to give Cubela "assurance of full U.S. support [for a coup] if there is change of the present government in Cuba." The IG Report quoted FitzGerald as explaining that he and Helms had discussed the question of going to Kennedy, and Helms told him that "it was not necessary to seek approval from Robert Kennedy for FitzGerald to speak in his name."

  Cubela, less jittery after FitzGerald's visit and the words inserted by the CIA at the last minute into the president's speech to the Inter-American Press Association, was all business at the meeting with the CIA's operative on November 22, according to the IG Report. At the moment the two men learned of Jack Kennedy's assassination, they were talking about delivering a large arms cache to Cuba in subsequent weeks. Cubela was visibly upset, according to the IG Report, asking the agent, "Why do such things happen to good people?"

  The Church Committee, confronted in 1975 with a strong possibility of the direct involvement of a Kennedy in the Castro assassination plotting, turned away. The committee dealt with the FitzGerald visit to Paris as it did with the telephone calls and visits from Judith Exner to Jack Kennedy at the White House---it accepted every denial at face value. Richard Helms, asked by the committee in 1975 whether FitzGerald could use Bobby Kennedy's name without Kennedy's personal approval, said yes. "I felt so sure," Helms testified, "that if I went to see [Robert] Kennedy that he would have said yes, that I don't think there was any need to." In its final report, the Church Committee made no judgment about Bobby Kennedy's role in the Cubela matter, noting that the evidence "falls into a pattern similar to that described in the discussion of post-Bay of Pigs activity in the Kennedy Administration." Former Kennedy administration officials consistently testified, the report said, that they knew nothing of assassination, and Richard Helms repeatedly testified that he believed "assassination was permissible in view of the continued press to overthrow the Castro regime."

  Sam Halpern had his own views, he told me in a 1997 interview. "I can't imagine either Dick [Helms] or Des [FitzGerald] going off and using Bobby Kennedy's name without checking. But that's the way it's written," he said with a shrug, as if to say, Of course the files would reveal nothing explicitly of a Kennedy role---to put in writing that the president's brother knew of assassination plotting was against every rule in the CIA book.

  The Inspector General's Report included, perhaps unintentionally, an epitaph for a slain American president who had stalked Fidel Castro for nearly three years: "It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro."

  * * *

  * "The hope," Kennedy declared in the 1961 speech, "is for a hemisphere where every man has enough to eat and a chance to work, where every child can learn, and every family can find decent shelter." The president did not say that military aid to Latin America, under the Alliance, had risen by 50 percent over the Eisenhower-era levels, with increasing emphasis on internal security and police training. For many Latin Americans, the Alliance was little more than a cynical means of providing arms for a regional war against communism, domestic opposition---and Fidel Castro.

  † James Johnston, a lawyer on the Church Committee, said in a 1995 interview for this book that he had been told of the president's signal of support for Cubela by Seymour Bolton, a senior CIA officer who was assigned as liaison to the Church Committee in 1975. Bolton's revelation came after Johnston and a colleague presented him with a prepublication draft of the committee's final report on assassinations for review. "Bolton had no objections about classification," Johnston said, "but he went into orbit over the implication that the CIA was a rogue elephant." It was at that point that Bolton told Johnston that in 1963 he had "carried a paragraph [to the White House] to be inserted into Kennedy's November 18 speech" to the Inter-American Press Association. At their meeting, Johnston told me, Bolton (who died in 1985) was incensed at the implication that there was "any difference between Kennedy's policy and the CIA policy."

  * In March 1988 historian Gordon H. Chang published "JFK, China, and the Bomb" in the Journal of American History, arguing that "it is doubtful" that Kennedy's policies toward China "were consistent with the interests of international peace." In the article, Chang quoted a State Department official as revealing that the president, during a White House dinner with André Malraux, the French minister of culture, stated that the Chinese "would be perfectly prepared to sacrifice hundreds of millions of their own lives" to carry out their aggressive foreign policies. The State Department official, William R. Tyler, an assistant secretary of state, was further quoted in Chang's article as recalling, in an oral history for the Kennedy Library, that the president said he believed that the Chinese attached a "lower value" to human life.

  * Corbin had contempt for many of the old Kennedy pals, and did not let up after the assassinations of Jack and Robert Kennedy. Sometime in late 1968, after the death in June of Robert Kennedy, Dolan told me, there was a reunion of Kennedy aides. Dolan approached Corbin with a plea for peace, saying, in essence, "We may have had our differences, but we worked for a great man." The two men threw their arms around each other in a bear hug. As they did so, Dolan told me with a laugh, Corbin whispered, "Bobby never trusted you." When Corbin himself died in early 1990, John Seigenthaler eulogized him as "sharing one abiding, dominating trait of character" with Bobby Kennedy: loyalty. "Loyalty was a bond of trust," Seigenthaler said, according to a copy of his remarks, "a first tenet of faith. I think all of us in the room knew and felt and benefited from that loyalty of Paul Corbin. Between Bob [Kennedy] and Paul, the loyalty grew to a shared love."

  * In a column published in Time magazine on May 18, 1987, Sidey gave a slightly different version, moving the scene of the action from a pool to a bedroom. "One insider," he wrote, "claimed that Kennedy reinjured his weakened back during a bedroom tussle at a party in Bing Crosby's Palm Springs, Calif., house, which the President was using in September, 1963, thus forcing him to return to a rigid back brace. That brace held him erect in the limousine two months later in Dallas after the first gunshot struck him. The second shot killed the still upright President." Sidey wrote the column after Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, a Democratic candidate, was forced to withdraw from the 1988 presidential campaign upon being publicly linked to a woman who was not his wife. Sidey's account attracted little attention.

  * Halpern told me that a CIA scientist spent a weekend turning the fountain pen given to Cubela into, in effect, a hypodermic needle. The pen was filled, in the end, with Black Flag 40---a commercially sold insecticide---as the poison. The contrast between the James Bond image of CIA technicians devising elaborate weapons of murder and the reality, Halpern added, was often unclear even to the men at the top of the agency. He noted th
at Vice Admiral William Raborn, who replaced McCone as CIA director in 1965, was fond of watching Get Smart, a television sitcom that featured an intelligence operative who took off his shoe and talked into it to reach another agent hundreds of miles away. One morning, Halpern said, Raborn telephoned and asked a senior CIA scientist "to get some of those gadgets for the men in the field." He was told that the devices did not exist.

  EPILOGUE

  Robert F. Kennedy's despair over the murder of his brother was heightened by the fact that he could do nothing to avenge it.

  He and Jacqueline Kennedy were convinced that the president had been struck down not by communists, as J. Edgar Hoover and many others believed, but by a domestic conspiracy. Even if they had no clear idea of who ran it or the motives behind it, one immediate suspect was Sam Giancana, who had been overheard by the FBI since early 1961 claiming again and again that he had been double-crossed by Jack Kennedy after helping to elect him in 1960.

  Thus the private telephone call was made on the evening of November 22 to Julius Draznin, the Chicago expert on labor racketeering for the National Labor Relations Board. "We need help on this," Bobby Kennedy said. "Maybe you can open some doors [with] the mob. Anything you pick up, let me know directly." Draznin was instructed to stay in contact through Angie Novello, Kennedy's faithful secretary at the Justice Department. Draznin told me in a 1994 interview for this book that he understood Kennedy's reference to the mob: "He meant Sam Giancana." Two days later, on Sunday, November 24, Jack Ruby, a Dallas barkeeper with ties to organized crime in Chicago, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, as the world watched on television.

  Draznin recruited a few friends who were also in law enforcement, and over the next few weeks the ad hoc group looked for ties between Oswald and the Chicago mob and also pulled together an enormous dossier on Ruby. But the group could find no evidence that Sam Giancana's henchmen had anything to do with Kennedy's assassination. "I said, 'Bobby, I'm drawing a blank,'" Draznin told me. "'Nothing here.'"