The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (24 page)

Shortly after his meeting with the president, the director called Richard Berlin, a top executive in the Hearst newspaper chain, and fed him a blind item for Walter Winchell’s nationally syndicated column. Gossip columnist Liz Smith later surmised that the item probably touched off “backstage maneuvering and rewriting at Winchell’s paper” when it finally surfaced on May 9, 1962: “Judy Campbell of Palm Springs and Bevhills is Topic No. 1 in Romantic Political Circles.”
⁴⁷

The blind item meant nothing in particular to the millions of Americans who read Winchell’s gossip column, but it had the impact of a torpedo on the White House. A short time later, Hoover detonated another charge in the press — a leading report that Jack had been previously married to a Florida socialite, Durie Malcolm, a petite blonde who was the recipient of his sexual attentions sometime in the late 1940s. When
Newsweek
decided to run a story relaying the rumor, Bobby ordered the FBI to provide
Newsweek
’s Washington bureau chief Ben Bradlee with the full file on the case. To get to the documents, Bradlee had to agree to show the president the finished story, which he did.
⁴⁸
The Kennedys were taking no chances.
Newsweek
ultimately debunked the marriage story, but Hoover had succeeded in terrorizing the president and the attorney general. The FBI director was confirmed in his position. Seymour Hersh later made a plausible case that Jack had indeed married Durie Malcolm sometime in 1947 as a kind of lark after a long night of drinking. There remains no documentation of this and Ms. Malcolm has always denied it.
⁴⁹

Bobby now tried to shore up the flank exposed by Hoover. The day the director lunched with the president (and a day before Jack left on a trip to the West Coast), Bobby called Jack and told him that he had to cease all contact with Frank Sinatra — that under no circumstances could he stay, as planned, at Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs. By this time, Sinatra, in a state of high excitement and expenditure in anticipation of the president’s visit, had installed twenty-five phone lines, built cottages for the Secret Service near his home, and even put a gold plaque in the bedroom where the president was to stay to commemorate the visit. Bobby called his hapless brother-in-law Peter Lawford and told him to tell Sinatra that the visit was off. Lawford, whose medium-sized star was very much hitched to Sinatra’s larger one, protested, but to no avail. When Lawford informed Sinatra of the decision, the singer went berserk. A short time later, according to his valet George Jacobs, he picked up a sledgehammer and began smashing the concrete pad that had been specially built for the president’s helicopter.
⁵⁰

The president’s entourage arrived in Los Angeles on the evening of March 23 and proceeded directly to Palm Springs, where the president stayed with singer Bing Crosby. The next day, who should show up at the Crosby compound wearing a dark wig but Marilyn Monroe, who spent the night with the president.
⁵¹
Given his brother’s furious admonition to control himself, Jack’s behavior seems pathologically reckless. A comment to his old partying buddy Senator George Smathers may provide a glimpse into the symptom formation: “While I’m alive, they’ll never bring it out. After I’m dead, who cares?”
⁵²

Hoover, meanwhile, was busy trying to dig deeper into the Kennedys’ role in the earlier CIA-Mafia plot to murder Castro. His purpose, again, was blackmail. In a memo to the attorney general the day after his meeting with the president, Hoover asked Kennedy to make a decision on whether or not to prosecute Arthur Balletti, the wireman who had been arrested a year earlier during the break-in that first revealed the CIA-Mafia alliance. If prosecuted in open court, Balletti might expose the whole plot. The CIA, Hoover informed Kennedy, was demanding that there be no prosecution as a matter of national security. Realizing that Hoover was setting him up, Kennedy immediately distanced himself from the whole matter. The head of Justice’s Criminal Division, Herbert J. Miller, conferred with his counterpart at the CIA, General Counsel Lawrence Houston, and reported back to the attorney general that he agreed with the CIA: Balletti should not be prosecuted. “This would not necessarily affect prosecution of Giancana for any other offenses,” Miller added. Translation: The attorney general’s war on the Mafia was still on, despite the non-prosecution of Balletti.
⁵³

On May 7, Houston and the CIA’s director of security, Colonel Sheffield Edwards, briefed the attorney general about the details of the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Castro, including Rosselli’s recent operational prominence. Kennedy said very little. When the briefing was concluded, he observed, “I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime, with gangsters, you will let the attorney general know before you do it.”
⁵⁴
Of course, the whole briefing was phony, as the Church Committee — formed in 1974 to investigate intelligence activities — later suggested. Kennedy had known of such plots for over a year and done nothing to stop them. To the contrary, throughout the summer and fall of 1961, he had demanded action to eliminate Castro. Meetings to do just that had taken place within the Justice Department and CIA. In June 1961, Lansky protégé Norman “Roughhouse” Rothman, an acquaintance of Rosselli and Jack Ruby who had supervised slot machines at mob casinos in pre-Castro Cuba, met CIA officials in the deputy attorney general’s office in the Justice Department. Rothman claimed that he had “the personnel and capabilities to attack or sabotage any target in Cuba,” including the elimination of Fidel.
⁵⁵
It seems impossible to believe that Kennedy did not hear of this. Nor is it possible to believe that he also did not read Hoover’s memo of April 1961, setting forth the use of the Mafia against Castro. The fact that there is a notation in his handwriting on the May 22, 1961, memo from Colonel Edwards is but one confirmation of the obvious.
⁵⁶

Ardent Kennedy biographers would later alight upon a description of Bobby’s unhappy visage at the May 7 meeting (“steely eyes . . . jaw set . . . voice low and precise”) provided by the CIA’s Lawrence Houston during testimony before the Church Committee to suggest his surprise and disaffection. The evidence suggests the opposite: Bobby had long known about the Mafia’s role.
⁵⁷
Were he so surprised and angered when he supposedly first learned of the plotting at the May 7 meeting, why did he not simply give the order to stop it? In the memorandum of record prepared after their meeting with Kennedy, Houston and Edwards stated that they had told him the plot to kill Castro had been suspended. The fact that it had not been suspended is yet another indication of the cover-up involved. On May 9, to lengthen the paper trail, Bobby met with Hoover, who noted in his memo after their meeting of his “great astonishment” at the use of
mafiosi
— though he too had known about such use for over a year.
⁵⁸
Despite this charade, the CIA continued to consort with Rosselli for the purpose of murder.
⁵⁹

The entire spectacle showed both arrogance and remarkable deficiency of judgment on the part of the attorney general. To abandon the whole enterprise and bury the record of his knowledge seemed the expedient course. But Bobby wanted it every way: he wanted the Kennedy name protected, the Mafia destroyed, and Castro eliminated. This was hubris of destructive proportions, calling to mind Jack’s prophetic comment about the idea of killing Castro: “If we get into that kind of thing, we’ll all be targets.”

As Jack’s sexual policeman and political protector, Bobby undertook another tricky rescue mission in late May — to contain the increasingly outspoken disaffection of one of the president’s jilted lovers, Marilyn Monroe. The affair might have tailed off into sullen oblivion were it not for Peter Lawford, who had the idea of helping Marilyn revive her lagging career by singing “Happy Birthday” to the president at a gala event at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962. It turned into something more than that. Sans bra and panties, Monroe appeared in a $12,000 dress made of nothing but beads and designed by Jean-Louis of Marlene Dietrich fame. As the panicky Monroe — who was in a holding room, fortifying herself with drink as she tried to remember the special lyrics to the song — dallied, master of ceremonies Lawford milked the emotions of the largely male crowd by twice announcing the entrance of Monroe to a drum-roll, then shrugging his shoulders when she failed to show.
⁶⁰

Finally the moment came. Lawford did his tongue-in-cheek best: “Because, Mr. President, in the history of show business, perhaps there has been no one female who has meant so much . . . who has done more . . . Mr. President, the
late
Marilyn Monroe!” The Garden fairly exploded in applause as Milt Ebbins pushed a tipsy Monroe out onto the stage, across which she fairly shimmied to the podium (the dress was so tight she had to be stitched into it). Lawford removed Monroe’s white ermine stole and she stood there like a celestial vision, throwing off a thousand shafts of reflected light. “It was like a mass seduction,” said Richard Adler.
Time
columnist Hugh Sidey later told historian Ralph Martin, “You could just smell lust.” She breathed heavily into the microphone, tapped it a couple of times with her nails (this occasioned another roar from the crowd), and slowly and languorously sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

As if this was not enough, the president then walked onstage and, with Monroe standing beside him, took over the microphone. He thanked her with a grin on his face: “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.” The gamesman was just where he wanted to be — right on the edge.

Afterward there was a party hosted by entertainment chieftain Arthur Krim. Attendee Adlai Stevenson later wrote about Monroe: “I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful . . . my encounters, however, were only after breaking through the strong defenses established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.”
⁶¹
Stevenson’s metaphor could hardly have been more precise. There was a wild and consumptive quality to Bobby’s interest in the actress. He was clearly smitten. Monroe only stoked the flame by backing Bobby up against a wall, to his total consternation, while Jack and Bill Walton looked down on them from a staircase above, “rocking with laughter” at the scene below. Jack spent that night with Monroe but thereafter ignored her calls. She was alternatingly depressed and incensed by this. Anthony Summers, author of the biography
Goddess,
reports that Monroe went into another “narcotic nosedive.”
⁶²
Out of personal concern for her and political concern for the president, Lawford telephoned the family protector. Bobby flew out to Los Angeles in late May. In the course of the afternoon with Monroe at the Lawfords’ Santa Monica home, he fell into her sexual embrace in a bedroom that was bugged.
⁶³

Summers has amply detailed the extraordinary cross-fertilization of FBI and Mafia surveillance of Bobby’s affair with Monroe. There were FBI memos detailing his comings and goings to the Lawford house, as well as Monroe’s Brentwood home and the apartment she continued to keep nearby in Beverly Hills.

Bobby seemed as much drawn to her vulnerability as to her ripe allure. In his biography of RFK, Arthur Schlesinger may have caught the quality of their longing: “There was something at once magical and desperate about her. Robert Kennedy, with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did.”
⁶⁴
Her attraction to him, it seemed, was the hunger of the marooned, and his was like the frozen current that once thawed sweeps all before it. At points, Monroe sent Bobby droll telegrams, such as the one responding to his invitation to a party at Hickory Hill: “Unfortunately I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. After all, all we demanded was our right to twinkle.”
⁶⁵

Monroe’s diary, according to her friend and neighbor, Jeanne Carmen, reflected her hopes about Bobby: “She thought Bobby would be her passport to becoming a great lady. I saw the stuff in Marilyn’s diary — things about Jimmy Hoffa and Fidel Castro. It didn’t mean anything to me because I was just a stupid young girl and couldn’t have cared less if they all killed each other.”
⁶⁶
Monroe believed that Robert Kennedy was going to marry her, and she said so to more than one person. It was probably this as much as any intimation of the mass surveillance going on that fractured their affair. Around the third week in June 1962, Bobby stopped taking her telephone calls. The affair, from his standpoint, was over.

But for Monroe it was not. Furious and disconsolate, she told Lawford that she was going to tell the world what the Kennedy brothers had done to her. Had this happened, it is difficult to see how Jack and Bobby could have survived politically. But between her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, who administered sedatives of all kinds, and the intermittent application of human palliatives like Lawford and Jeanne Carmen, she held her tongue. The Lawfords took her up to the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe for a weekend in late July That night Monroe imbibed a nonstop diet of barbiturates and alcohol and, if Rosselli is to be believed, had sex with both Sam Giancana and Frank Sinatra. In Chicago for a meeting, Rosselli observed sardonically to Giancana, “You sure get your rocks off fucking the same broad as the brothers, don’t you.”
⁶⁷