The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (12 page)

In February 1960 Recarey signed on, and was flown to Panama with twenty other Cubans for special training in underground resistance, chiefly demolition, recruitment, and communications. The CIA case officers found that, owing to their level of education and motivation, the Cubans learned quickly and were, in the words of one of those officers, “filled with fight.” Three months later, Recarey and the others were flown back to Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami, where for more than a month, under the tight supervision of three CIA officers, they exercised, passed the time in the barracks, and waited for an order to reinfiltrate. The Agency officers, known only by pseudonyms like “Carl,” scrupulously excluded the young Cubans from any briefing about the covert plan. From an intelligence standpoint, keeping covert assets in the dark was sound strategy, but it reflected a basic problem in the relationship: the Americans did not trust the Cubans; they understood almost nothing of the Cuban political culture; and they did not speak Spanish. To the Americans, Cuba had no other meaning than the destruction of Castro. Put bluntly, the exiles were expendable. The full expression of this attitude would be revealed on the reefs and beaches of the Bay of Pigs and in the dangerous phenomenon that would bedevil the Kennedy administration afterward — the “disposal” of the exiled Cubans.

But these issues did not concern either Jorge Recarey or his CIA handlers that October night. As the V-20 headed out into the open ocean, the challenge was to steer through the submerged shoals off the Cuban coast, dodge any Cuban patrol boats, and rendezvous with the friendly forces near Arcos de Canisi on the northeastern coast. As they came within sight of the coastal lights of Cuba about 3 A.M., the Cuban boat pilot, Eugenio Rolando Martinez (affectionately known as “El Musculito,” owing to his diminutive but potent proportions), began taking readings and sightings to effect the landing.
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Recarey felt his skin crawl. A jolt of fear struck the bottom of his stomach as he readied himself. He popped a tablet of Benzedrine to keep his energy up for the travail ahead, and waited. The boat maneuvered within several hundred yards of the surf, the engine idling down. Everyone searched the shore for some signal. Nothing. After thirty minutes of fruitless searching, the decision was made to abandon the mission and return to Florida. Recarey’s dangerous mission would have to wait for another day.

In that same third week of October 1960, Mafia leaders, in an effort to collect on Meyer Lansky’s $1 million bounty on the life of Castro and restore their billion-dollar enterprise in Cuba, put their assassination plan into operation. An FBI bug (code-named “Little Al”) in a tailor shop in downtown Chicago frequented by the leaders of the Chicago Outfit picked up a conversation in which Sam Giancana “assured those present that Castro’s assassination plot would occur in November.” Giancana was recorded as saying that he had already met the assassin-to-be.
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Although the intercepted conversation landed like a rocket back in FBI headquarters, Hoover chose to withhold the information from the CIA (which, given its own approach to the mob, would have been edified by the news) as well as from the Justice Department. His reasons? First, he trusted neither the CIA, for which he reserved a jealous animosity given its Cold War ascendance, nor Justice, most of whose chieftains were political appointees and therefore incapable of keeping secrets. Second, given that bugging was illegal under the Fourth Amendment and inadmissible in a prosecution, sharing it would have exposed Hoover and the Bureau. Third, as Anthony Summers and other writers have demonstrated, Hoover himself had been compromised by the Mafia.
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His homosexual relationship with his assistant, Clyde Tolson, was a known fact within mob circles. During Hoover and Tolson’s twice-yearly betting sojourns at the Santa Anita and Del Mar tracks, underworld figures like Costello and Rosselli fixed races and, for good measure, introduced Hoover and Tolson to lesser mob lights.

One such was Eugene Hale Brading, a West Coast shooter who would later become a Lansky courier. Brading, who subsequently claimed to have met Hoover at Del Mar in the early 1950s, was the same man who was flown to Dallas on November 21, 1963, in a private plane and who was arrested on November 22, 1963, minutes after the Kennedy shooting, near the Dal-Tex Building facing Dealey Plaza. Testifying in 1978, Brading admitted to being in the building, claiming that he had gone there in search of a pay phone on the third floor.
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In its intercept of Giancana’s conversation in October 1960, the FBI paraphrased Giancana as stating that “the assassin had arranged with a girl . . . to drop a pill in some drink or food of Castro.” It is now clear that the assassin being referred to was Richard Cain, a blond, fair-complexioned twenty-nine-year-old with, as FBI Special Agent William Roemer described him, “a confident air, a jaunty step, and a big smile . . . too handsome, too charming, too sure of himself.” Cain also had an intelligence level that was off the charts.
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Cain was then serving as the Mafia’s infiltration agent in the Chicago Police Department. He was in charge of paying off hundreds of Chicago cops and detectives as well as tipping off the mob to the movements and investigations of the Chicago police. But Cain was never one to sit still for long. In March 1960, he got himself in trouble for beating to death a “jack-roller” (a mugger of gay men) in a Chicago police station, and a few weeks later led a police raid on a bordello during which he pocketed some $30,000. This was not consistent with the rules of either the Chicago mob or the police department but, given his close relationship with Giancana — it was rumored that he was Giancana’s illegitimate son — Cain was covered until he tried to bug the office of Mayor Daley’s chief investigator (to assist Republican state attorney Ben Adamowski, a fierce Daley opponent). He was caught in the act and suspended from the Chicago Police Department in September 1960.
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For Cain, the Castro hit represented a fresh opportunity. Within two weeks of his suspension, he showed up in a top-secret CIA telex regarding his plans to fly to Cuba with Jack Mabely, a Chicago
News
columnist.
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The head of the CIA’s office in Chicago, Robert P. B. Lohmann, reported that he was unclear about Cain’s purpose, only that he was fully fluent in Spanish and a pilot. In Miami, Cain worked out of Accurate Laboratories (a private investigation service that was a CIA front) and had meetings with Tony Varona (the Mafia’s Cuban strongman-in-waiting who was supposed to replace the assassinated Castro) and Angel Solano, a Trafficante henchman. He also met with Rosselli, who had flown down to Miami for his third round of assassination meetings with the CIA’s Jim O’Connell at the Aztec Hotel. The Castro hit was bringing together a hellish brew of murderous interests. The United States government was adding the ingredient Rosselli thought most critical to the advancement of Mafia interests — cover.

The Cain plot was to hit Castro at the Nacional Hotel in Havana (still nominally owned by Lansky associate Michael McLaney) when the Cuban leader dropped by, as he did on a regular basis, to visit one of his paramours. “The young woman,” a CIA memorandum said, would “service Castro and attempt to poison him.” Cain, a man who prided himself on never farming out any of his contracts, would be the team leader on the ground. He would then fly himself back to the United States. However, Cain was unable to get assurances of a secure place to land in Cuba. Castro, expecting to be invaded at any moment, had placed Cuban police and militia on high alert.

Reviewing the entire FBI and CIA file from the period, the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations summarized the situation in 1978: “The mob was then in a perfect position. If their private plot actually worked, and Castro died, then the syndicate had enormous blackmail potential against the CIA, which it could exercise at the opportune moment. However, if their intrigue backfired, then their position would be that they were only attempting to execute the wishes of their government.”
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November 8-9, 1960

Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and Forest Park, Illinois

J
ack Kennedy walked alone across the wide, sand-patched lawn that divided his Hyannis Port cottage from his brother Bobby’s within the oceanfront compound that Joseph Kennedy had purchased in 1928. It was 6:50 P.M., already dark. At a point between the two white clapboard cottages, the dunes fell away and the wind coming off the freezing water buffeted his face and snapped and pulled at his clothes.

As he climbed the wooden steps to the porch, he heard cheering coming from within the house. The thirty-five or so family members and key staff who had gathered to await the returns were delighted by the report of the first complete precinct from Cleveland: Kennedy 158; Nixon, 121.
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The report was largely meaningless, but as with any election-night vigil, returns — even bad returns — at least slake the tension of long-deferred wonderment about the outcome.

Kennedy walked into the dining room of his brother’s cottage, which had been transformed into a command control center. A tangle of cords and cables laid on the floor. There were tables with phones staffed by fourteen operators and a separate set of phones with dedicated lines for the chieftains — Kenny O’Donnell, Dick Donahue, Larry O’Brien, Ralph Dungan, and the campaign manager himself, Bobby Kennedy. Around the room were lounge chairs, typewriters, and four television sets, and trays full of finger sandwiches, compliments of the Mayfair Catering Service, on the tables.
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The candidate, his face puffy from his recent nap and bone-deep fatigue, was nattily dressed. He wore a Scottish tweed jacket over a white cotton shirt, tan twill trousers, green necktie, and brown loafers. He walked over to his father, who stood next to Bobby, arms folded, both staring expressionlessly at a TV screen. Neither looked up as Jack joined them.

The election-night drill for Democrats normally followed predictable patterns, but that evening even hard-bitten pros like O’Donnell and O’Brien lost their bearings in the seesaw that was about to take place. The quadrennial rule for Democrats was to ignore the early-evening trickle of Republican votes (and certainly any projections based on it), and wait and pray for a huge, urban industrial Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and Eastern tide between about nine and midnight that would reach a crest with the southern returns, and then hang on as the long, slow Republican countertide of the Farm Belt, the Rocky Mountain states, and the far West rolled in from midnight till about 3 A.M.
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The characteristically trenchant Bobby Kennedy had concluded that morning, “We better see a margin of 2.5 million or better by midnight.”
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Associated Press’s first summary total, which chattered out at 7:15 P.M. in an upstairs baby room, fell along predicted lines: Nixon 203,628; Kennedy 166,963. Jack look a little peeved when his brother-in-law Peter Lawford, just in from Hollywood, came sprinting down the stairs in his socks with the torn-off sheet, presenting it to the candidate as if it were some wounded bird. Some minutes later there was better news: Walter Cronkite announced that Kennedy was winning Connecticut by 100,000. Kennedy’s three sisters, Jean, Eunice, and Pat, along with Ethel, cheered. Jacqueline Kennedy, eight months pregnant and recently arrived at the cottage, sat on a white loveseat behind them with a polite smile on her face.

Jack went upstairs to talk to his pollster Lou Harris, who was working off his calculations (essentially based on Truman’s victory in 1948 and Stevenson’s loss in 1952) to project the Kennedy vote. Just then, CBS News, touting its IBM mainframe and a small sea of number-crunchers in the background, made the startling projection (based on 500 precincts) that Nixon would win in an electoral landslide, placing the odds against Kennedy at 100 to 1. A low groan emanated from downstairs, but Jack was matter-of-fact: “That’s bullshit.”
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Looking at the thirty-two-year-old Harris, surrounded by reams of paper and holding a slide rule, he gleefully encouraged him to prove it: “It’s Lou against the machine,” Kennedy said with a broad grin on his face. He bit off the end of a Havana Royal panatela and lit up.
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Moments later he returned downstairs, went over to Jackie, helped her up, and announced, “Well, we’re off to dinner.” As they walked out, their friend Bill Walton joined them for the walk back to their cottage. Over dinner, as Mrs. Kennedy was putting five-year-old Caroline to bed, Kennedy asked Walton, an internationally recognized painter, to appraise a seascape he had painted. “A primitive,” was the reply from Walton.

About an hour and a half later at 10:45 P.M., the Kennedys returned with Walton to Bobby’s cottage. The urban industrial tide from Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey was now flowing strongly in Kennedy’s direction. On the so-called “totalizers,” or number tabulators, Kennedy was now ahead by over 1 million votes. Jackie, who had joined them, went over to her husband upon seeing the numbers and quietly said, “Oh, Bunny, you’re president now.” “No . . . no . . . it’s too early yet,” he replied.

In the Hyannis Port Armory, where two hundred or so press people were gathered, anxious to file their stories, a burly man with a sour face and the suspicious manner of a detective mounted the platform. As Theodore White later described it, “[H]e jounced heavily to see whether it would bear the weight of the full presidential party.” All eyes watched him as he was joined by other plainclothesmen. In their effort to extract the most immediate common denominator of meaning, the press took this to mean that Kennedy had been elected. CBS then ran the tape of California’s Governor Pat Brown, who predicted that Kennedy would take the state by 800,000.
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Kennedy, either out of tension or disbelief, shook his head; he had never thought of California as a Kennedy state.