The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (13 page)

At about 11:30, Jack walked Jackie back to their cottage to wish her good night. By this time, a mobile TV unit, using the justification that it would take klieg lights forty minutes to warm up, had illuminated the cottage in a blinding glare. The country and its politics were on the threshold of a medium whose essential achievement was its intrusive immediacy, and whose justification was technique. History was about to become entertainment.

About a half hour later Kennedy crossed back to the command center to find a very different situation. In a low voice, Larry O’Brien gave Jack an update: the news was bad. They were losing Ohio, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Farm Belt, and Illinois and Michigan. “We’re running under our projections with about half in,” O’Brien told him. Kennedy listened impassively. His father was on the phone. Jack walked over to his father and raised a fist in greeting. In their family style, the old man grabbed the top of his fist with his free hand, enclosing it completely. Bobby continued to stare transfixed at the TV monitor.

As they watched Ohio fall out of reach, Jack’s composure finally broke. He shook his head and said disgustedly, “Ohio.” He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a swollen hand and distended thumb. There were bruises and scratches all the way up his forearm. “Ohio did that to me,” he said referring to his six trips to that state and final headlong run through southern Ohio toward the end of the campaign.

A few minutes later, someone called out, “Jack, we got Lyndon on the phone.”

Kennedy signaled for the phone. After greeting Johnson, he listened for a moment, smiled, and said, “Well, that’s good to hear.” He continued to listen, laughed, and said, “I don’t know.” After the usual salutations, Kennedy hung up.

“What did Lyndon have to say?” Bobby asked.

“He says, ‘I see we won Pennsylvania. What happened to you in Ohio?’ ”

There was laughter. Jack approached his brother and asked for an update. Bobby explained that four states were outstanding: Minnesota, California, Michigan, and Illinois.

There was silence as Jack looked at his father and Bobby. “Talked to Mayor Daley?”

Bobby shook his head and reached for a phone. Jack listened as Bobby spoke into the receiver. The tone was dry and sharp. “Mayor, we don’t have your vote.” He listened briefly. Jack, obviously displeased by the tone of his brother, took the phone. He greeted Daley, thanked him for all his help, and asked him how it looked. The room went silent except for the drone of the televisions and the intermittent ringing of phones. After Jack signed off, he looked at his brother and said, “He said we’re going to make it with the help of a few close friends.”
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Johnny Rosselli came out of the small office in the back of the Armory Lounge that served as Sam Giancana’s inner sanctum. The bar, which was located at 7247 West Roosevelt Avenue, in Forest Park, Illinois, was a nondescript one-story brick structure that dated back to the 1920s, when it served as a Capone-run speakeasy. Rosselli walked into a large room, where eight women sat behind tables on the phone. He went quietly from one to the next, listening as each woman reported the vote total from the wards each was covering. Sam Giancana stood at the office door watching Rosselli make the rounds.
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With him were two of his
capo regime
, Charles Inglese (known as Chuckie English), the boss of the 29th Ward, and Dave Yaras, whose central skill was execution but who also served as the leader of the 24th Ward. (Several months later the FBI would install a microphone behind the baseboard of Giancana’s inner office and gain critical information about the Chicago Oufit’s most secret workings, including its connection to the Kennedys.)
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Rosselli’s presence in Chicago was unusual since he had left it some thirty years before to do the Outfit’s business out west. But his diplomatic and organizational skills were critical in situations such as this and he had been called home. Doris Mulcahy, interviewed in October 1996, could no longer link particular hours with particular incidents that evening, only the apparition of Rosselli making the rounds and calculating the totals in his head.

The problem for the Kennedy campaign was that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was doing even worse than expected downstate, ultimately losing 93 of Illinois’s 105 counties. The critical question was: How much could Cook County deliver? Rosselli was probably working off Daley’s estimate that the necessary Kennedy vote margin from Chicago was 300,000.
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Whatever the case, there was the other unanswered question of
when
Chicago would report its vote. In their time-honored, statewide cat-and-mouse game, the Republicans and Democrats would hold back reporting votes, and then try to one-up the other by providing partial vote reports, nearly all vitiated by corruption.

At 3 A.M., in the very accurate memory of Kenny O’Donnell, Mayor Daley called him at Bobby Kennedy’s house to explain the ongoing dialectic: “Every time we announce two hundred more votes for Kennedy in Chicago, they come up out of nowhere downstate with another three hundred votes for Nixon. One of their precincts outside of Peoria, where there are only fifty voters, just announced five hundred votes for Nixon.”
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Daley’s claim that there was plenty of vote fraud downstate was undoubtedly true, but it obscured the greater reality that in Chicago a substantial percentage of election day votes had either been created, purchased, destroyed, or simply stolen in the manner of a very efficient Third World dictatorship. Many Chicago voters were no longer living; many of those living no longer lived in Chicago. In addition to the ghosts on the rolls, the prevailing practices of election officials at the polls bordered on subornation. An investigation in 1962 revealed, for example, that of the more than 300 votes cast in the 41st Precinct, 27th Ward, “not more than ten votes were cast in private.”
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The curtains of voting booths were often left open and voters were “assisted” in the act of voting by judges and precinct captains whose operating motto in terms of their total control of their habitat was later memorialized in a book title:
We Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent
.
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In mob-controlled precincts, unwanted votes on paper ballots were often destroyed. For Giancana and his confederates, voting was an essential racket. To get the results they wanted that election day, they deployed some 900
soldati
, as well as temporary operatives. On the mob-controlled West Side, Kennedy was averaging well over 80 percent; in the 29th Ward, legendary ward committeeman Bernard Neistein estimated the Kennedy-Nixon “take” at 27,000 to 500 (a 95 percent plurality).
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At a little before 4 A.M. back at Bobby Kennedy’s cottage, Jack called it quits for the night, saying, with no trace of irony, “The votes are all in. I can’t change any of them now.”
⁹⁶
He walked in silence with Cornelius Ryan (author of
The Longest Day
) across the illuminated expanse back to his cottage. Kennedy was still seven electoral votes short of the 269 needed to win. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the team wearily boarded the bus outside the compound on Scudder Avenue for the trip back to the Yachtsman Hotel.

Only Bobby Kennedy stayed, his voice gone hollow, the orbs of his eyes now slits, standing like a lone sentry. Waiting. Watching. Sometime later that morning, probably around 5:15, Daley called him with the news that Illinois would go to his brother. The margin was 8,858 votes — out of 4.75 million cast. Was the Chicago Mafia pivotal in the result? In the judgment of Notre Dame law professor and former chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations G. Robert Blakey, it was. Blakey told Seymour Hersh that based on his review of the transcriptions of FBI bugs in Chicago, “Beyond doubt, in my judgment, that enough votes were stolen — let me repeat that — stolen in Chicago to give Kennedy such a significant margin that he carried the state of Illinois.”
⁹⁷

In the end, Kennedy’s victories in Michigan and Minnesota put him over the top, but it was Texas and particularly Illinois that the Republicans jumped on. It quickly became a subject the Kennedy staff would not talk about. When Larry O’Brien asked Bobby later that morning about the possibility that Nixon would call for a federal investigation of vote fraud in Illinois, Bobby’s answer was direct: “There’s nothing he can do about it and therefore we don’t need to talk about it.” Throughout that day, however, as Ethel later remembered, “Bobby had that awful gnawing feeling that it could be reversed.”
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But it was not only the fractional victory and the manner of its achievement that gnawed at Robert Kennedy. He suspected something else: for all his work (fifteen months of eighteen-hour days); for all the distance (some 220,000 miles) his brother had traveled, most of them in physical pain; for all the money his father had spent, that at the end of this picture-perfect campaign, the Kennedy dream may well have been delivered by people who murdered for a living.

At the moment of victory he must have sensed that there was trouble ahead.

December 15, 1960

Washington, D.C.

A
t 6:45 on this December morning, Bobby Kennedy walked out of his home in McLean, Virginia, accompanied by his best friend John Seigenthaler, a lanky thirty-three-year-old former reporter for the
Nashville Tennessean.
Seigenthaler had lived upstairs in Kennedy’s home in October 1959 while editing Kennedy’s book on the Mafia.
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It was cold. A snowstorm the previous weekend had left a ghostly five-inch carpet that had drifted against the trees and hollows of Hickory Hill, his white brick antebellum home, which had once served as the Civil War headquarters of General John McClellan.

Kennedy and Seigenthaler got into the dead-cold Cadillac convertible. They were driving to President-elect John F. Kennedy’s Georgetown home to inform him that Bobby would not be serving in his administration. Bobby had already told Jack in Hyannis Port the morning after the election that he didn’t want to be his attorney general. There was one problem: Joe Kennedy was absolutely insistent that Jack appoint Bobby attorney general; he told Jack he would need someone he could trust utterly. On the night of December 14, Bobby called Jack to confirm that he wanted out. “This will kill my father,” Bobby said as he dialed his brother’s number. Jack, however, insisted they discuss it in person in the morning over breakfast.
¹⁰⁰

Bobby and Seigenthaler crossed the Potomac on Chain Bridge en route to Georgetown. Kennedy, deeply tanned from a post-election vacation in Mexico, had celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday three weeks before. Except perhaps for his deep-set blue eyes, which projected an opaque, hardened, and at times brooding gaze, he looked five years younger than his age. His weight since the election was back up and gave him the appearance of a middleweight wrestler — compact, slump-shouldered, with thick, articulated forearms and heavily muscled legs. During the eight-mile trip to Jack’s, Bobby had nothing to say. His mind was made up. He wanted out. He had told Jack he was “tired of chasing bad guys.” But it probably went beyond that.
¹⁰¹
In the long, cruel grind of the campaign, he had angered and disturbed a great many people. Even within the tribe there were now reservations about him. Dave Powers, as loyal a lieutenant as the Kennedys ever had, likened him in print to the ferocious Ty Cobb, a man who would win at any cost, who would attack other players in the clubhouse, spike them with his cleats when he slid into a base.
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When Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt sent a substantial cash contribution to the campaign, Bobby ordered Ralph Dungan to take a plane straight to Texas and hand the money back. “This man will have to be prosecuted if we’re elected.”
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Winning at any cost meant the pursuit of ends over means and, for a man like Robert Kennedy, who believed in sin, this was immoral. It also violated Oscar Wilde’s maxim, “One should be very careful in the choosing of one’s enemies.” Bobby’s tendency to play his politics for keeps, keeping score, holding ground, and hitting back with a vengeance, was now extending beyond the campaign. After the election, he put in a call to William Mahoney, a Phoenix lawyer who had run the Arizona campaign. He told Mahoney he needed a “shit list” of those who had promised to help and then had sold out to Nixon.
¹⁰⁴
It was as if he couldn’t help himself from pouring it on, and so he wanted out, wanted to travel around the world, or write a book, or become a college president, or run for governor of Massachusetts. He lunched with his old traveling companion and fellow radical, Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who agreed with him that he should try something new.

Over a breakfast of bacon and eggs in the small breakfast nook of the president-elect’s narrow brick townhouse, Jack ticked off the emerging roster of cabinet appointments, commenting on them in terms of the politics or the merits of their selection. Finally Bobby said to him, “Now, Johnny. Can we talk about my situation?”

The president-elect replied at length, directing his observations more to Seigenthaler than to his brother. “There really is no person with whom I have been intimately connected over the years. I need to know that when problems arise I’m going to have somebody who’s going to tell me the unvarnished truth, no matter what.” Giving examples of Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk as people he respected but did not really know, he spoke of the critical nature of civil rights: “I don’t want somebody who is going to be faint-hearted. I want somebody who is going to be strong, who will join with me in taking whatever risks . . . and who would deal with the problem honestly.”
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