The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (30 page)

The IRS had launched an audit of Rosselli’s tax records in February 1962. Soon the FBI’s Mafia detail in L.A. reported that Rosselli was closeted with his tax attorney, Emmanuel Rothman, for hours on end each week, devising, no doubt, defensive measures against the audit. Federal agents were actually coming at him on two fronts — from the IRS Special Investigation Unit, which requested access to all of Rosselli’s tax-related files, and from the FBI detail, which secretly scrutinized all his banking and stock transactions (obtained through informants). The FBI had gotten their hands on the records of Monte Prosser Productions, a company owned by Rosselli that booked entertainment talent and owned several nightclubs. As FBI telexes revealed, the strategy was simple: to compare what Rosselli was reporting to the IRS and what the FBI’s surreptitious investigation revealed and, if there was a discrepancy, to indict him.
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The admissibility of the FBI’s evidence under the Fourth Amendment did not seem to be of particular concern.

Rosselli, normally a man of icy self-discipline who tended to play things light, grew openly bitter. “Jesus,” he told Rothman in July 1962, “I’m being run right into the ground — it’s terrible.” At around the same time, Rosselli told Joseph Shaw, brother of the former mayor of Los Angeles, “They are looking into me all the time — and threatening people and looking for enemies and looking for friends.”
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The FBI was all over Judy Campbell, Rosselli’s friend and Jack’s former paramour, tracing her calls, detailing all her bills, and monitoring the balance in her bank account, which averaged $24. The FBI had staked out her apartment and periodically broke in, apparently under orders from Hoover himself
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Rosselli’s status as a government agent earned him no quarter. During a plane trip back to Washington in 1962, he again voiced his frustration to an associate. This time he specifically referenced the “screwing” he was getting from Bobby Kennedy. “Here I am helping the government, helping the country, and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.”
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But there was little he could do on his own. He would need the authorization from a godfather to retaliate violently against the Kennedys. The same month Partin told his story about Hoffa’s threat to kill Bobby Kennedy, there were two other ominous encounters.

At the Scott Bryan Hotel in Miami, José Aleman Jr., a Cuban exile who was in debt, had a meeting with Santos Trafficante, who, Aleman said, owed his cousin a favor. Trafficante agreed to help Aleman by arranging a loan from Jimmy Hoffa. According to Aleman, in the course of a conversation about “democracy and civil liberties,” Trafficante suddenly made highly negative comments about President Kennedy: “Have you seen how his brother is hitting Hoffa, a man who is a worker, who is not a millionaire, a friend to the blue collars? He doesn’t know that this kind of encounter is very delicate. Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.” When Aleman said that he thought Kennedy would get reelected, Trafficante was more specific: “No, José. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.” Aleman later maintained that he reported this comment to two Miami FBI agents, George Davis and Paul Scranton, though it seems clear that had he done so, they would have forwarded it to the FBI director for his urgent consideration.
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If the FBI director did receive it, he alerted neither the Secret Service nor the attorney general.

Louisiana mob boss Carlos Marcello made the same threat, only this time the logic of murdering the president to stop the attorney general was made clear. By 1962 Marcello was a wounded animal. After being thrown out of the country in April 1961, he made it back only to be indicted for perjury and for falsifying a birth certificate. Additionally, the IRS had assessed him for over $835,000. Finally, adding insult to injury, both Marcello and his brother Joe had been subpoenaed to testify before the McClellan Committee, where they demonstrated a vulgar contempt for the proceedings.

One afternoon in September 1962, at his enormous swampland estate at Churchill Farms, Louisiana, Marcello expressed his vendetta in unmistakable language. The source of the account was Ed Becker, a private investigator from Las Vegas who had once done public relations at the Riviera Casino. Becker had come to New Orleans to meet with Marcello. After introductions and an interlude during which Marcello made some calls to check Becker out (interrupting, Becker later said, a story he was busy telling about his friend Johnny Rosselli), Marcello invited him out to Churchill Farms. They drove out along a narrow dirt road through the vast oozing bayou, with its mud-brown ponds and moss-hung gray cypresses. At the simple farmhouse, Marcello started pouring liberal rounds of Scotch for the party of four (which included two of his henchmen) as they listened to Connie Francis’s Italian songs and made small talk about sex and business. At some point, Becker expressed his distaste for Bobby Kennedy. Marcello suddenly erupted, leaping to his feet and shouting in Sicilian:
“Livarsi ’na pietra di la scarpa!
[Take the stone out of my shoe!].” Then he continued in English. “Don’t worry about that Bobby son of a bitch. He’s going to be taken care of.” When Becker replied that that would get him into “a hell of a lot of trouble,” Marcello was unmoved. “You know what they say in Sicily,” he told Becker, “If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off its tail, you cut off the head.” Still red-faced and fuming, Marcello said they would do it in a way to conceal their hand. He had already thought up a way to set up a “nut” to take the heat. “The way they do in Sicily,” he added.
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October 16, 1962

Washington, D.C.

A
t around 8:30 A.M., President Kennedy and Dave Powers walked from the family quarters in the White House to the second-story Oval Room for breakfast. The weather was unusually warm for late October — 66 degrees. Reports indicated that the radioactivity in the earth’s atmosphere was eleven micromercuries, one full unit increase from the day before.

Kennedy sat down at the breakfast table with Powers and scanned the four daily newspapers stacked on the table. (He even looked over the New
York Herald-Tribune,
twenty-two subscriptions of which had been canceled by the president because of the paper’s supposed editorial bias.) Powers was reading the sports page, which featured coverage of the seventh game of the World Series. He predicted to the president (correctly, as it turned out) that the Yankees would beat the San Francisco Giants and win the series later that afternoon. Jack’s interest in the outcome reflected a more fundamental concern: when the World Series ended, the fall elections began.
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One issue in electoral question was the administration’s foreign policy. All the papers that morning ran the story that former president Eisenhower had criticized the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy as weak. Senator Keating was continuing his assault on Kennedy’s Cuba policy, claiming that he now had “100 percent proof” that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. Asked the previous month what he was going to do about Cuba at a press conference, the president had quipped: “I’m not for invading Cuba — at this time.”
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There was laughter, but not in Havana or Moscow.

Sometime around 9 A.M., McGeorge Bundy appeared at the door and the president, standing up, invited him in. It was illustrative of Kennedy’s management style that though he knew Bundy had requested to see him about an “urgent matter,” he had made no effort to inquire what it was. As they stood before the pale yellow sofa in the room, Bundy gave him the news: the Joint Photo Interpretation Unit (directed by the CIA) had concluded, after hours of analysis of aerial reconnaissance photos, that the Russians were building offensive nuclear missile sites in Cuba.
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The president immediately asked Bundy to get the attorney general on the phone. They spoke briefly. The president told Bobby that there was “great trouble” and asked him to come to the White House immediately.
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As with so many of their conversations, there is no record of the exchange. Interviews done for this history with four of the principals involved indicate that at the start of the missile crisis the president and his brother determined they faced two challenges: to get the Russian missiles out of Cuba and to contain the war impulses of their own generals and admirals as well as their followers on Capitol Hill. Bobby became the chief executor of this most delicate and dangerous strategy.
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At 11:45 that morning, Bobby and several other senior defense and foreign policy officials selected by the president received a full briefing, complete with blown-up photographs and charts. The president later described his reaction as one of “stunned surprise.”
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But Bundy had written him a top-secret memo on August 31 regarding the establishment of “surface-to-surface nuclear missiles which could reach the United States from Cuba.”
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Bobby had worried about the same thing: “Cuba obtaining (nuclear) missiles from the Soviet Union would create a major political problem here.”
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Anticipating just such a contingency for almost six weeks, American U-2 spy planes had photographically scoured Cuba for evidence of missiles. During September, however, the U-2 cameras had been blocked by a succession of heavy weather fronts, which had thrown up huge masses of dark cumulus between the planes and their intended targets. Scattered Cuban refugee reports had indicated that long crates were being transported along Cuban roads, and these are what had touched off the voluble Senator Keating. Air Force intelligence had moreover recently reported that at least six hundred Soviet ships (loaded with crates on deck that looked like those used to move Ilyushin bombers) were steaming in the general direction of Cuba.
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What in fact stunned the president and other senior officials was Khrushchev’s deliberate and repeated deception about his intentions. In early September, Khrushchev had put a new Russian ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. Dobrynin personally assured Bobby on September 4 that no offensive weapons would be stationed in Cuba. Bobby’s back-channel Soviet contact in Washington, Georgi Bolshakov, was even more specific: citing his recent discussion with Mikoyan, he told Kennedy point-blank that the only missiles Castro would be getting were defensive antiaircraft missiles.
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At precisely this time, however, work was beginning on the launching pads for the sixty-six medium and intermediate-range missiles then being shipped to Cuba. If the cloud cover had not lifted for another two weeks, or if Soviet rocket general S. I. Biryuzov had properly camouflaged the sites (he was later described by Mikoyan’s son, Sergo, as “a fool”), Khrushchev’s October gamble would have turned into a November coup. Nuclear-tipped Russian rockets, trigger-ready, would have been aimed at American cities.
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As it was, the Kennedy administration initially believed that it had a matter of days to get them out.

The other reason for the sensation of “stunned surprise” was domestic. The administration was on the political defensive in the fall of 1962. Eisenhower’s description of Kennedy’s foreign policy as weak was not merely partisan. The price of engagement in the Third World was mounting, and there were no discernible signs of success, much less victory. The U.S.-financed and costly UN peacekeeping operation in the Congo had bogged down. Secessionist Katanga was still on the loose. The Alliance for Progress had foundered, in the view of many, because the regimes of Latin America receiving foreign aid would not accept conditions of political and social reform. In Vietnam, the dispatch of American military advisors was neither containing the Viet Cong nor strengthening Diem’s ability to restrain his vicious in-laws, the Nhus.

But in a political sense, Cuba represented the biggest headache. Operation Mongoose, because it was top secret, provided the administration no anticommunist credits. Throughout the late summer of 1962, while the Soviet Union was shipping MIG fighters, heavy tanks, and patrol boats, as well as forty thousand troops, the administration, in the words of its critics, did little more than maintain that it did not object to “defensive weapons.” But to the imperious rulers of the Time-Life empire, Henry and Clare Booth Luce, this was mere appeasement.
Time, Life,
and even
Reader’s Digest
made plain their belief that a military showdown with Castro was required.
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The president’s problems, however, went deeper than the press and Republican criticism. The American military, shamed by Kennedy’s order to stand down in the Bay of Pigs, was oiling up its war machine. As early as October 1961, the Joint Chiefs had approved an invasion plan called Operation X in which 100,000 troops would land in Cuba accompanied by heavy aerial bombardment. In August 1962, the Pentagon announced that the armed forces were going to conduct large-scale military exercises dubbed Philbriglex-62 in the Caribbean. The marines were going to invade the mythical Republic of Vieques and liquidate a mythical dictator named Ortsac (Castro spelled backwards).
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In the first days of the missile crisis, the Joint Chiefs immediately began scrambling fighter-bomber and naval craft under the rubric of war games, before Secretary McNamara pointedly reminded them that this was no game and that there was civilian rule in the American system of government.