The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (2 page)

JFK’s assassination was not a subject I ever thought I would research. Practically every frame of the Zapruder film has occasioned its own book. There seemed to be enough of them. But in my twenty-year journey as a Kennedy scholar, first on Africa, then on Vietnam, I had gotten glimpses of spectral linkages between that event and the administration itself. Ralph Dungan, a White House aide during the Johnson administration, once related to me how LBJ had told him, only days after the assassination, that JFK had died because of “divine retribution.” And then there was Bobby’s strange phone call only hours after Jack’s assassination to a Cuban safe house in Washington. “One of your guys did it,” he said, apparently referring to the anti-Castro Cubans living there. He asked director of the CIA John McCone whether the agency was involved in the murder. This was, to say the least, an extraordinary question. Another spectral link was Joe Kennedy’s lunch with senior members of the Chicago Mafia in February 1960, when he tried to talk them into giving money to his son’s presidential campaign. These were the same people his other son had vowed to bring to justice.

In the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations dug deeply into the motives and the roles of everyone from the anti-Castro Cubans to renegade CIA operatives and the Mafia. In so doing, it built a formidable record. But one critical question remained unanswered: what was the relationship between the Kennedy administration and the Kennedy assassination?

In 1995, having completed a term as Arizona’s secretary of state, I decided to try to answer that question. I reread transcripts of the interviews I’d done in the light of new scholarship published while I was in public office. I began traveling to Florida to interview Cuban exiles, to Chicago to look at the fading traces of the Kennedy-Mafia connection, and to Havana to search through Cuban records and gather recollections of the murderous contest between the Kennedy administration and the Castro regime. I also waded through FBI and CIA files, and spoke again to some of the principals I had once interviewed about other matters.

The story that emerged from the swirl of events and characters permitted no detached discourse; it was, rather, a narrative journey into the trackless wood through which Joe, Jack, and Bobby Kennedy had made their way History as the Kennedys lived it was neither orderly nor obvious in its unfolding; it was a struggle in which the characters of the three men, and their interaction with one another, led to their fate — a struggle in which pride and avarice, fear and strength, and, above all, ignorance of what lay ahead provided them with an ill-fitting armature of engagement.

Armed with their ambition and their money, agnostic to their enemies, they moved onto the public stage as no family had before in American history, trying to understand and somehow master the terrain of their time. “Always the next hill, always the next hill,” was the way one Kennedy lieutenant described Bobby’s relentless drive. They moved beyond the normal boundaries of political power, crossing into a murderous frontier where their enemies, whose faces they knew, were waiting for them.

At the moment he received the news from Dallas on November 22, 1963, Bobby Kennedy sensed a terrible thing — that he himself had somehow contributed to his brother’s murder. That is what this story is about.

Summer 1929

Nantucket Sound

T
he story became a JFK favorite. One summer day when Bobby Kennedy was three and a half he went sailing with some of his brothers and sisters in a yawl in Nantucket Sound. Suddenly, he jumped into the chilly water and vainly struggled to swim. His brother Joe pulled him out before he went under and hauled him back into the boat. But Bobby jumped in again, intent on learning how to swim or drowning in the attempt. Jack would later observe: “It either showed a lot of guts, or no sense at all, depending on how you looked at it.”

Crusades

1951 – 1959

October 19, 1951

Saigon, Vietnam

W
hen thirty-four-year-old congressman John F. Kennedy landed at the French air base near Saigon, he and his brother Bobby and sister Pat were met by what appeared to be “half the French army” in full regalia.
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The fact that the Americans were now providing about 50 percent of the French munitions and supplies in France’s war against the communist Vietminh lent a certain cachet to the congressman’s visit. It also made him a target for Vietminh terror.

For reasons of security, the State Department had recommended that Congressman Kennedy exclude Vietnam from his seven-nation itinerary in October 1951.
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Saigon was a city under siege, the scene of anonymous grenade throwing during the day and nightly bombings by the Vietminh. Some of the terror was random, some targeted.
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In April, American diplomat Edmund Gullion had witnessed the assassination of the head of the French Surete. In July, a Vietminh sapper had succeeded in getting close enough to French general Chanson to blow them both up, along with a provincial governor.
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Pro-French agents roamed the city at night, detaining and sometimes executing suspected communists. The morning brought scenes of bodies, sometimes headless, drifting down the Saigon River. Despite this spectacle of tension and atrocity, Saigon, which in Vietnamese means “gift to the foreigner,” still extended its languorous allure. Outside the wire netting around hotels like the Majestic, and beyond heavily armed troop cordons that protected government buildings, slender Vietnamese girls in white
ao dais
still plied their trade on the wide, tree-lined boulevards under the yellow glow of gaslights.

In addition to Vietnam, Kennedy planned to visit other countries in the throes of violent insurgency or civil war, such as Korea and Malaysia, as well as the newly independent states of Israel and India. The conviction in Washington was that the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union would be won or lost in the outcome of the nationalist upheavals attempting to shake off Europe’s colonial grasp. Kennedy had joined the Republican right in its assault on President Harry Truman for having done nothing to stop the “onrushing tide of communism from engulfing all of Asia.”
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This was the prevailing view of the day. The “loss” of China to communism in 1949 and the catastrophic stalemate in Korea had produced a paroxysm of anger and self-doubt in Washington. Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that the reason Americans had “died for a tie” was that within the United States government itself existed “a [communist] conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black as to dwarf any in the history of man.”

Kennedy was not the only American politician — Congressman Richard M. Nixon was another — to sense that there was critical ground to be gained or lost on this issue. By touring the anticommunist front personally, Congressman Kennedy could return as an authoritative voice on containment in Asia.
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After four desultory years in the House, he was preparing to run in 1952 statewide in Massachusetts for either governor or senator.

If there was one distinguishing trait about Jack Kennedy among his peers outside the House chamber (where he was sometimes referred to as “Mattress Jack” for his sexual truancy), it was his flair for foreign policy. His first book,
Why England Slept
, stimulated in part by a two-month sojourn in Europe between his freshman and sophomore years at Harvard, had delineated the reasons for Great Britain’s somnolence in the late 1930s in the face of Nazi rearmament and aggression. (One critic thought a more apt title might be
While Daddy Slept
, in reference to his father’s accommodating attitude toward the Nazi onslaught while serving as the American ambassador in London.)
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The book revealed Jack Kennedy to be a decided internationalist. More important, perhaps, it also showed a willingness to challenge the patriarch’s exacting will. Whatever the old man’s reservations about Jack’s thinking, he suspended his beliefs in order to prime the national press about his son’s trip. He also made sure Jack saw all the right people en route — Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Matthew Ridgway, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian nationalist and leader of the so-called nonaligned world.

The risk of a Vietminh attack notwithstanding, the most immediate danger to Congressman Kennedy, who gingerly made his way down the gangway of the military transport plane, was his own shattered health. He had only recently gotten off crutches following seven weeks of therapy designed to ease the pressure on his chronically painful back. A botched operation at the end of World War II had resulted in a metal plate being placed against his spine and had left an open eight-inch wound that had suppurated off and on for months. “Is any stuff running out of it?” his friend Charles Spalding remembered Jack asking as he hobbled along the beach in Hyannis Port.
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For all the pain, Jack’s humor survived. He wrote a friend that he wished “the doc had just read one more book before picking up the saw.” To another, he sardonically described his own future as being moved to “the Old Sailors’ Home probably to be issued a rocking chair, a sunny place on the lawn — with the thanks of a grateful Republic ringing in my ears.”
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He was dying, he admitted to journalist Joseph Alsop, not because of his back but rather from Addison’s disease, an insufficiency in adrenal production that left its victims fatally vulnerable to infection. “The doctors say I’ve got a sort of slow-motion leukemia, but they tell me I’ll probably last until I’m forty-five.”
¹⁰
What slowed Jack’s decline was dexacortisone, which was injected daily into his thighs. Later he started taking 25 milligrams of cortisone orally each day, and received boosters of pain-killing novocaine directly into his back. All of these treatments became a carefully guarded family secret, attributed in news releases when Kennedy was intermittently hospitalized to “recurrent malaria and war-related injuries.”

Perhaps this was why Joe Kennedy Sr. had recommended that third son Bobby, recently graduated from the University of Virginia law school, and sister Patricia accompany Jack on the seven-week trip. Jack had not previously traveled on international fact-finding trips with family members and there had been health problems out of the range of his specialists, their drugs, and the protective cover of his family. On a trip to England in 1948, Jack had become gravely ill, and word of his disease had nearly gotten into the press. (Lord Beaverbrook’s physician, Daniel Davis, told Pamela Churchill, “That young American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.”)
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But he somehow recovered. Once back in the United States, off his supposed deathbed, Jack soon rediscovered his lifelong delight in pursuing pretty women between political appearances. This was a tricky practice in a puritanical age, one that had nearly gotten him cashiered out of the navy in 1942, for romantically consorting with Danish ingenue Inga Arvad, whom the FBI believed was a Nazi agent. Then — and later — Jack seemed oblivious to the risks in it all, despite his father’s furious intercession. He eventually shipped out to the South Pacific and became a decorated hero, a status he later preferred to dismiss: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

Jack moved through his life both afflicted and charmed, shadowed and romanced by the possibility of death. Toward the end of World War Two, he kept a loose-leafed notebook that contained official and personal accounts of the deaths of his brother Joe and brother-in-law Billy Hartington, who were both killed in the European theater in 1944. Jack jotted down a quotation from British novelist and diplomat John Buchan: “He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.”
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He admired courage above all other traits and, in the poetry he could recite by heart, felt death beckoning. This preoccupation had a paradoxical effect on Jack. It made him fatalistic about the human prospect, but coldly resolved once engaged in the fight. For all of this, his political ambition during the late ’40s and early ’50s seemed fitful, and it wasn’t clear whether Kennedy had the drive to become president or merely to remain a playboy. His father and younger brother were the ones who bridged that difference.

Until his death in an experimental bombing mission over France in August 1944, Joe Jr. had carried the grail of his father’s ambition to make a Kennedy president. Joe was an athletic and winning young man with matinee-idol looks. So deep was the wound left by Joe Jr.’s death that his father could not even open
As We Remember Joe
, the book of remembrances Jack had given his father for Christmas. Jack wrote: “I think that if the Kennedy children amount to anything now or ever, it will be due more to Joe’s behavior and his constant example than to any other factor.”
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The melancholy conclusion was that the best among them was dead and gone. What was left, in the unwanted phrase of the Kennedys, was the second string.

World War Two had breached the family like a wrecking ball. Joe Kennedy had traversed the golden salient during the 1920s and 1930s — making millions on the stock market, millions from Hollywood through the buying and selling of three studios, millions during Prohibition and afterward from bootlegging and cornering control over key liquor imports, and finally being appointed as the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1938. By the middle 1940s, this had all crumbled. Joe Jr. was killed, as was son-in-law Billy Hartington, Kathleen’s husband. Kathleen herself died in an air crash in 1948. Jack was a near-invalid. The war had left the Kennedy patriarch himself a reviled man who could neither admit nor expiate his disgrace as a World War Two defeatist and anti-Semite. There was something dark, even Faustian, about the old man’s effect on others. As penetrating a judge of human character as Franklin Roosevelt had told Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau on more than one occasion his reason for sending Kennedy to London: “He’s too dangerous to allow around here.”
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Joe Kennedy’s solace — the one thing he lived for other than making more money — was his sons. He told people that he himself was a caterpillar. His sons would be his butterflies.