A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (29 page)

In 1960, Democrat Senator John F. Kennedy of
Massachusetts ran for President of the United States. He was the
second son of former Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy, the
man who said America should "do business" with Hitler because we
could not defeat him. JFK and his older brother Joseph Jr. set out
to distance themselves from "old man Joe." Both were war heroes.
Young Joe was killed in a daring aerial mission when the plane he
was carrying with sensitive materials destined for the atomic bomb
exploded in mid-air. John's Naval PT boat was sunk when a Japanese
destroyer rammed it, but the young Lieutenant (j.g.) subsequently
saved the lives of his crew, effectuating a courageous rescue.

Kennedy was elected to the Congress and the
Senate, but had little record. He was young, handsome and a
playboy, not considered a serious political figure. His marriage to
the lovely Jacqueline Bouvier had helped him politically, but he
remained a rambunctious character in his private life.

The Republican opponent was Richard Nixon, a
hated figure on the Left because of his staunch support of
Whittaker Chambers in the Alger Hiss affair. Nixon was one of the
most virulent anti-Communists in the nation, and had been elected
to Congress and the Senate in California by painting opponents as
sympathetic to the Communists. He was perhaps the first to
effectively demonize Hollywood for its Left-leaning ways.

With post-war California booming in
population growth, Nixon represented the new political power of the
West, and in 1952 the 39-year old junior Senator was chosen by
Eisenhower to be his Vice President. Nixon angered the Democrats
throughout the campaign and over eight years in office. He was a
"Red baiter" and staunch conservative by the standards of the era,
advocating "battlefield nuclear weapons" at Dienbienphu in 1954
(rejected by Ike); facing hateful mobs in a goodwill tour of Latin
America; and was the front man in a series of confrontations with
Nikita Kruschev.

Kennedy and Nixon squared off in a series of
televised debates. To listeners on the radio, Nixon had won. To TV
viewers, JFK had won big. His telegenic good looks won out in
contrast to Nixon's beady eyes and sweaty upper lip.

Kennedy stole the election from Nixon using
time-tested Democrat fraud techniques, honed in the back rooms of
Tammany Hall, the Pendergast machine that produced Harry Truman,
"old man Joe's" Boston, and the Hill Country of LBJ's Texas. In the
closest election yet held, JFK "won" when thousands of Democrat
votes in Cook County, the wards presided over by Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley, were duplicated in a "vote early, vote often"
scheme. In Texas, thousands of dead Texans "voted" for the
Kennedy-Johnson ticket. It was the same method LBJ had used to
steal the 1948 Senate election.

Nixon was immediately apprised of the fraud,
urged to contest the election. He felt that if he did that he would
be viewed as a "sore loser," his efforts at future political
viability hurt by his efforts at "hurting the country."

Kennedy took over the White House. He was the
youngest President in history, having turned 43 a little over two
months prior to his January 20, 1961 inauguration. He was also the
first Catholic. Kennedy's family escaped Ireland's potato famine
like so many other of their countrymen in the mid-19
^th
Century. They found America to the be the Promised Land.

It was the Fitzgeralds, not the Kennedys, who
first made a splash on the American political scene, however. John
Fitzgerald was elected Mayor of Boston. One of his best campaign
issues was his close identification with the Boston Red Sox,
arguably the greatest baseball dynasty of the first two decades of
the 20
^th
Century. In 1912, "Honey Fitz," as he was
known, made heralded public appearances with the Red Sox, a team
led by young phenom "Smoky Joe" Wood and future Hall of Famers Tris
Speaker and Harry Hooper. It was the year that Fenway Park was
built and Boston beat the hated New York Giants of John McGraw and
Christy Mathewson to capture the World Series.

"Honey Fitz," who consolidated his popularity
by handing out patronage and "walking around money" in the Boston
wards like a modern Santa Claus, had a lovely teenage daughter
named Rose. She was viewed as "Irish royalty," an "American
princess" of sorts, whose hand in marriage was coveted by every
ambitious, eligible young bachelor in Boston.

Enter Joseph P. Kennedy, a Harvard-educated,
upwardly mobile Irish Catholic who was bound and determined to
break into the Bunker Hill society long dominated by the Protestant
elites. Kennedy quickly established himself as an entrepreneur and
financier of the stock market. Handsome and slick, he won over
"Honey Fitz," then Rose's hand in marriage.

Young Joe used influence and bribes to avoid
service in World War I. In the Roaring '20s economy that developed
after the U.S. won the war, he became one of the wealthiest men in
the world. Rose produced a large brood of children. Joe became one
of the early investors in silent movies. On trips to Hollywood he
had numerous affairs with glamorous actresses, including the great
star Gloria Swanson.

In the late 1920s, Kennedy had inside
information about a coming stock market collapse. Instead of using
his influence to warn the nation in time to avoid a financial
meltdown, he "sold short" millions of shares; in essence, betting
on the collapse. When "Black Monday" hit in October of 1929,
Kennedy made many more millions out of the nation's misery.

When Prohibition became law, Joe entered
into partnership with the Mafia to "bootleg" whiskey into the
country. To this day, the Kennedy family still gets a kickback for
every case of Canadian Club imported into America. The illegal
whiskey business made Kennedy wealthy beyond imagination.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s,
the Kennedy's lived like American kings. Later, JFK said he
"learned about the Great Depression in books." Joe Kennedy wanted
to be President of the United States. The landslide defeat by Al
Smith, a Catholic Democrat who lost to Republican Herbert Hoover in
1928, demonstrated that in his prime the country was unprepared to
elect a Catholic. He set out to become a mover and shaker behind
the scenes, helping fellow Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt win the
Presidency in 1932.

FDR rewarded Joe Kennedy by appointing him
as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James. It was in many ways an
even greater honor than the White House; an Irish Catholic was now
the American Ambassador in Great Britain. But Joe's tenure in
London was a stormy one. Initially popular, with the British press
enamored by his large, rambunctious family, the advent of World War
II became his undoing.

In September of 1939, the German Blitzkrieg
began. Only England stood up to Adolf Hitler. After appeasing
Hitler at Munich in 1938, British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain was ousted in favor of the hard-line conservative
Winston Churchill, who vowed to oppose Hitler "on land . . . on the
sea . . . and in the air." Joe Kennedy, on the other hand, publicly
stated that the English would lose to Germany; that the U.S. could
not defeat Hitler; and that since this was the reality of the
situation, Americans might as well make the most of it by working
with Hitler. Kennedy's attitude was also fueled by virulent
anti-Semitism.

Despite an official "isolation" policy, the
United States sided with Churchill's England. Kennedy's stance made
him
persona non grata
in England and a source of scorn in
many American quarters. When America entered the war after Pearl
Harbor in 1941, Kennedy was a pariah. He never repudiated his
remarks and made it clear that he wanted to avoid war with Germany
so his sons would not have to fight it.

But his sons disagreed with their father.
Joseph Jr. was the eldest. Handsome, charismatic, a Harvard scholar
and athlete who had unlimited political potential, Jack went
against the wishes of his father and joined the Army Air Corps as a
fighter pilot. Late in the war, he volunteered for a risky
assignment, delivering dangerous materials for use in the planning
of the atomic bomb. Something went wrong and his plane exploded,
killing him instantly. His father immediately blamed Roosevelt for
"getting us into this war that killed by son."

Next in line was John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
named after "Honey Fitz." He, too, disagreed with Joe. While
visiting pre-war Europe, young JFK saw first hand the rise of
militarism in Germany and the tepid appeasement of pacifist
England. He wrote a Harvard treatise called
While England
Slept
, which criticized the Chamberlain government for failing
to stem the Nazi tide. Joe Kennedy arranged to have it published,
figuring that his son's disagreement with him over war policy would
act as a fallback position later should America enter and win the
war he opposed.

After Pearl Harbor, Jack entered the Navy.
Like his brother Joe, he could have avoided military service since
his father had the connections to make it so. In some ways,
however, both sons were "forced" to join because if they did not,
they would have been excoriated politically. In this most political
of families, that was unacceptable. However, both Joe and John did
believe in the war effort wholeheartedly.

Jack took over the famed PT 109 and became a
war hero, albeit by "accident" since he himself claimed his own
poor navigation of the small boat was responsible for it being
sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer. After saving his crew, he
was made into a huge hero, mostly on the strength of a public
relations machine financed by his father, and a movie starring
Cliff Robertson.

With Joe Jr. gone and the war over, Joe Sr.
decided Jack would take his brother's place politically. Next in
line was Robert, who joined the Navy at the end of World War II.
The Harvard-educated Robert would become a lawyer with a degree
from the University of Virginia, and Jack's most-trusted
advisor.

Jack at first wanted to pursue journalism
and in fact covered the first meeting of the United Nations in San
Francisco, but he was unable to say no to Joe's entreaties that he
run for Congress in Boston in 1946. The Kennedy money could not be
overcome. Neither could Jack's youthful appeal to the ladies. The
playboy politician was elected, but found Washington boring when
not dallying with secretaries and other women who made up much of
the D.C. party scene.

After Jack was elected to the U.S. Senate in
1952, Joe decided he needed to be married. The perfect political
wife materialized as if by magic in the form of Jacqueline Bouvier,
a society girl from New York. Her father, "Black Jack" Bouvier, was
a bit of a rapscallion, but her
bona fides
- namely her
Catholicism - were in order. She was beautiful, intelligent and
cultured. The Kennedy wedding was the social event of 1953.

Jack never established himself as a Senator
of substance, achieving little record in the 1950s. He often missed
sessions and made numerous trips to Florida with his pal, the
bachelor Congressman George Smathers, to party with girls he was
not married to. When Jackie gave birth to the couple's first child,
daughter Caroline, Jack and Smathers were on "bikini patrol" off
the Florida coast.

When Jack's name was bandied about as a
possible Vice Presidential running mate for Illinois Governor Adlai
Stevenson in 1956, Joe began to think about the logical next step:
his dream of a Kennedy in the White House. Planning on how to
position Jack for the Vice Presidency quickly changed to a strategy
for the
Presidency
. When Jack demurred, Robert made the
point that the Republicans seemed to have a lock on the White
House. Dwight Eisenhower was the most admired of all American
heroes. Richard Nixon seemed to be like a prince-in-waiting until
the throne was his. Courageous men who seemed to embrace the
Republican "warrior spirit" had won World War II. The Democrats
were, thanks to Joseph McCarthy, considered the party of Alger
Hiss, Soviet spies and Communist "fellow travelers."

Robert said the Democrats needed a change in
direction after old school pols like Stevenson, twice a loser, had
failed to bring home victory. The idealism of the young Jack and
Robert, he said, could only be implemented if they had "the power."
Joe insisted his money would give them just that.

"If not now, when?" Robert asked
rhetorically. "If not us, who?"

In the late 1950s, Robert became almost as
well known as his older brother when he went to work as an
investigator in the McClellan hearings investigating Mob corruption
of organized labor, pitting him in direct confrontation with
AFL-CIO boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Nixon was the polar opposite of Kennedy, yet
they were friends, "like brothers," according to Nixon. Both were
freshman Congressmen in the "war veteran's" class of 1946. "Old man
Joe" may have been a Nazi appeaser but was virulently
anti-Communist, probably a by-product of anti-Semitism and the fact
that many of the Communist "fellow travelers" were liberal
Jews.

He gave the anti-Communist Nixon money for
his Congressional and Senate campaigns. Robert Kennedy even worked
for Joseph McCarthy, a close family friend of Joe Kennedy's, before
his investigations of the Mob and management of his brother's
political affairs.

In 1961, Major League baseball was expanding.
With the Dodgers and Giants having broken ground in California
three years earlier, and with jet travel now common place, the West
was where the future lay, in sports as in politics. Nixon
represented a symbiosis of the two. A former scrub football player
from Whittier College who squired his wife, Patricia, at USC
football games (where she was a student), Nixon was a rabid sports
fanatic.

Having lost to Kennedy, Nixon was now
looking for his next high-profile opportunity. It came in the form
of the Commissionership of baseball. Los Angeles Dodgers owner
Walter O'Malley, a Republican and Nixon supporter, wanted a
Californian. With the creation of the Angels in 1961, along with
the new Washington Senators replacing the old senators (now the
Minnesota Twins), and with the National League set to add the New
York Mets and Houston Colt .45s in 1962, the influence of the West,
particularly California, was paramount. But Nixon turned the job
down.