The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (14 page)

Then Jack spoke directly to Bobby. “If I can ask Dean Rusk to give up a career; if I can ask Adlai Stevenson to make a sacrifice he does not want to make; if I can ask Bob McNamara to give up a job as head of that company — these men I don’t even know . . . certainly I can expect my own brother to give me the same sort of contribution. And I need you in this government.”

With that, Jack pushed back his chair, got up, and left the kitchen. Seigenthaler looked at Bobby and said, “Let’s go, Bob.” “No, wait,” Bobby replied. “I’ve got some points to make.” Seigenthaler said, “There’s no point to make.” Jack walked back in. “So that’s it, General,” he said. “Let’s go.” That ended it. For a man as hard-headed as he was, Bobby didn’t put up much of a fight. His fealty to his father and his love and concern for his brother once again took precedence over his own wishes.

The announcement of the selection took place later that day on Jack’s front steps. Bobby later remembered: “Jack told me to go upstairs and comb my hair, to which I said it was the first time the president had ever told the attorney general to comb his hair before they made an announcement.” As they walked outside, Jack gave him further advice: “Don’t smile too much, or they’ll think we’re happy about the appointment.”
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Sam Giancana received the news “like a rabbit punch in the dark.” He immediately called Sinatra and harangued him. Giancana’s brother Chuck was to remember that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante all had the same question for Giancana: “What the fuck is Jack Kennedy up to?”
¹⁰⁷
In a more generic sense, Robert D. Novak, writing for the
Wall Street Journal
, saw the same problem: “Place a free-swinging, relentless political warrior named Robert Francis Kennedy in the Attorney’s General office, where even the most cautious of lawyers can collect enemies by the carload, and the result could be a mammoth record of accomplishment . . . or an unqualified disaster.”
¹⁰⁸

Joseph Kennedy must have at least sensed the dangers inherent in persuading Jack to make Bobby attorney general. In one sense, Joe was right to insist on the appointment. Bobby’s total loyalty and decisiveness were qualities the president-elect could not do without. Moreover, Bobby knew how to cover for Jack, whose health and marital truancy could damage or even ruin his presidency. But Joe also knew that on the matter of the Mafia, Bobby would do nothing but attack. As he reportedly told a chieftain in the Teamsters, “Everybody in my family can forgive — except Bobby.”
¹⁰⁹

Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana had made their cash contribution for precisely that reason — a little slack, a little forgiveness. And they thought, as did nearly everyone else, that the old man still gave the orders. But Bobby had already shown he would resist his father’s blandishments, and now he was the internal leader of the new administration. The irony, of course, was that Bobby was like his father — fearless in the fight and seemingly oblivious to the prospect of destruction. “Bobby is more like me than any of them,” as Joe Kennedy had observed. “He hates the same way I do.”
¹¹⁰
In
The Enemy Within
, there is this phrase: “If we do not attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us.”

For Christmas that year, Jack and Jackie gave Bobby a red leather, gold-embossed copy of
The Enemy Within
. Jack teasingly inscribed it, “To the Brother Within — who made the easy difficult, Jack, Christmas 1960.” Jackie’s inscription read, “To Bobby, who made the impossible possible and changed all our lives. With love, Jackie.”
¹¹¹

Jacqueline Kennedy was right: Robert Kennedy, unlike his brother, believed in the impossible. This made him both very promising — and very dangerous.

Ordeal

1961

January 18, 1961

Léopoldville, the Congo

T
wo days before his inauguration, John F. Kennedy spent the morning in Georgetown, conferring with his advisers and working on the final draft of his inaugural speech. He canceled his appointments that afternoon because a howling snowstorm had descended on the city. When Jackie told him that he couldn’t possibly remain in the house with his meetings and the coming and going of staff while she was trying to pack, he moved off to Bill Walton’s house to spend the rest of the day and night.

A world away in the Congo, deposed premier Patrice Lumumba was loaded onto a plane bound for Elisabethville, located in the eastern part of the country. His transfer was ordered by Congolese on the CIA payroll. En route Lumumba was beaten nearly to death. Sometime the next morning, in a home outside the mining capital of Elisabethville, he was shot through the head.
¹
His fate may well have been the result of intertribal ferocity, but it provided a treacherous prologue to Kennedy’s thousand days in office, and posed immediately for the new president the question of whether murder should be used as an instrument of statecraft.

In November and December of 1960, ZR/RIFLE, a highly secret division within CIA headquarters under the command of William K. Harvey, had begun assembling a squad of assassins recruited from the ranks of organized criminals in Europe. Harvey, a squat, balding tank of a man with eyes that bulged because of a thyroid condition, had gotten the critical assignment after distinguishing himself as the commander of Operation Gold in 1955, which succeeded in tapping Soviet phone lines via a 500-yard tunnel into East Berlin. Until it was detected a year later, the tap gave the Americans key information about Soviet military plans and movements.
²
Harvey’s reputation among the tweedy Ivy League set then dominating the CIA was thereby made. He was a rough man for rough assignments, a “boom and bang” type. He drank martinis to excess, packed a .45 wherever he went, and freely resorted to obscenity in all kinds of company. With his aspect of an insolent fat plumber, he was not considered especially bright among the better born, but the appearance was misleading. Trained as an attorney, he had a penetrating command of intelligence work, with ten years experience in the field, and was a former FBI agent who understood the Hoover method of disguising tracks and disposing of enemies, bureaucratically or otherwise.

Harvey’s inventory of potential killers included two Corsicans holding French passports, Santelli and Garioni, Italians from the Trieste area “of questionable morality” who were “willing to use gun . . . ready to go to the end,” and a Belgian, Mozes Maschkivitzan, using the code name, QJ/WIN, who was asked to help with recruitment. After discussion through discreet intermediaries in Belgium, QJ/WIN boarded an Air France flight in Paris bound for Brazzaville on November 7. Two high-powered, scoped rifles as well as a poison potion derived from equine encephalitis (sleeping sickness) produced by the CIA’s Technical Services Division had already been sent by diplomatic pouch by ZR/RIFLE to Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo, for use against Lumumba.

Lumumba’s sin, in the view of the Americans, was his request for military assistance from the Soviet Union to repulse the Belgian intervention. In early September 1960 Congolese president Joseph Kasavubu removed Lumumba from office and placed him under house arrest. Recognizing Lumumba’s “magical powers” of persuasion, however, the CIA regarded this as only the first step — Lumumba should be assassinated. Declassified CIA cable traffic reveals that clandestine efforts by the CIA mission to get the poison into the house where Lumumba was incarcerated and then into something he would ingest had failed; hence the Agency initiated the sniper operation. In mid-December, another CIA-hired shooter from Europe, code name WI/ROGUE, also arrived in Léopoldville and approached QJ/WIN, telling him he was to be part of the execution squad.

In mid-November, as part of a foreign policy briefing provided by senior government officials, the president-elect learned in detail about Lumumba’s plight (though nothing at all about the CIA’s role in it). Having chaired the Senate’s African Subcommittee in 1959 and 1960 and having referred to Africa more than a thousand times in speeches during his campaign for the presidency, Kennedy brought a fairly probing understanding of the crisis to the discussion. A few days after his election, he had conferred with W. Averell Harriman, who had visited with Lumumba in August 1960 as part of a fact-finding trip for Kennedy. Harriman remembered the president-elect asking him, “Should we save Lumumba?” Harriman replied that he was not sure we could help him even if we wanted to.
³
With regard to the incoming administration’s attitude toward Lumumba, the State Department advised caution, but Washington was alive with rumors that Kennedy would seek Lumumba’s release.
⁴

On December 28, 1960, Lumumba broke out of his detention and made a desperate run to his stronghold in Stanleyville (now Kisangani). He was captured three days later, imprisoned in Léopoldville, but nearly escaped again. At this point, the American hirelings in place, Internal Security Chief Victor Nendaka and Colonel Joseph Mobutu, prevailed on President Kasavubu to give the order to eliminate him. The American role in the final days may well have been oblique, but ZR/RIFLE chief Harvey, perhaps looking to broaden executive action in Cuba and possibly the Dominican Republic, informed his superiors at the CIA that QJ/WIN had performed his mission: “(I)t should be noted that QJ/WIN was sent on this trip for a specific, highly sensitive operational purpose which has been completed.” Lumumba’s death was not confirmed until a month later.

On February 13, 1961, in the Oval Office, Kennedy family photographer Jacques Lowe was taking some shots of the president when Evelyn Lincoln, the president’s secretary, announced that United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson was calling and that it was urgent. Kennedy told Mrs. Lincoln to put Stevenson through. He picked up the phone and listened for a few seconds before bringing his right hand to his face in shocked dismay at the word of Lumumba’s murder. Lowe’s photograph captured a face seized in a furrowed and anguished grimace.

Beyond his reaction to Lumumba’s murder, the specter of assassination, shadowed the new president. He spoke of it often with close friends like Dave Powers and even appraised his own prospects for it matter-of-factly. It also haunted Jackie. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote of a post-election day in fall 1960 in Hyannis Port. Labor leaders Walter Reuther and Jack Conway were spending an afternoon on the beach with the Kennedys. Conway later remembered his talk with Jackie. “She was really obsessed with this whole idea of the change in her life, in Kennedy’s life. How do you protect against assassinations?” Reuther, who like his brother Victor had himself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, observed that you can’t let precautions run your life; you can’t stop living.

After the Lumumba murder came a torrent of accusations from Africa and Asia about the role Western powers, specifically Belgium, had played in the killing. Nonaligned leaders such as Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah sent accusatory letters to Kennedy about America’s role. In reply, Kennedy was emphatic about his position on assassination: “It . . . should be . . . vigorously investigated and condemned,” he wrote Nasser. But the new president’s view did not stop — or even slow — the murder train gaining speed in south Florida.

Two weeks after the president’s letters to Nkrumah and Nasser, Jim O’Connell flew down to Miami for his third round of meetings about Castro with Giancana, Rosselli, Trafficante, and their go-between Robert Maheu. On March 12, 1961, in a suite at the luxurious Fontainebleau Hotel, the poison pills and $10,000 were passed to Rosselli. The choice of the site for this transfer foreshadowed what lay ahead.

The Fontainebleau was as close to an arch of triumph as the Mafia ever erected in the United States. Built in 1954, the hotel contained a vast open mezzanine of polished white marble with black bow-tie pattern trim.
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The three garish chandeliers in the lobby were said to weigh a ton apiece. Joe Fischetti, the man who scheduled performers and events, and who also happened to be Al Capone’s cousin, was the Fontainebleau’s greeter. Downstairs was a shadowy bar-disco named the Boom Boom Room. When he arrived on that particular weekend, O’Connell found the Fontainebleau fairly swarming with mafiosi in town to attend their favorite sporting event, a heavyweight championship fight. In this case it was the third match between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson, the Swede who had beaten Patterson in their initial match but lost to him in the second. If that were not attraction enough, the mob’s favorite entertainer, Frank Sinatra, was headlining.

When Washington, D.C., police inspector Joe Shimon arrived at the Fontainebleau to accompany Rosselli to the fight, he found the hotel filled with FBI agents in their mass-merchandised suits following their charges around as part of Hoover’s Top Hoodlum Program (THP). Shimon did not recall in later years whether any of the special agents recognized him or Maheu (a former FBI agent) and the rather unusual company they were keeping, only that Rosselli and Giancana led two of the agents on a “wild goose chase” with Maheu, in turn, tailing the agents.
⁶

All of this made Giancana nervous, particularly when Sinatra (who tended to turn from bully to bootlick in the presence of mafiosi) kept calling Giancana’s suite. The Chicago don considered Sinatra an “untrustworthy bigmouth” who liked to brag about the heavy company he had been keeping. Late one evening, probably March 13, Rosselli passed the poison pills and the money to a small, reddish-haired Afro-Cuban by the name of Rafael “Macho” Gener in the Boom Boom Room, a location Giancana thought “stupid.”
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