The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (43 page)

On July 31, the FBI, acting on a tip, raided a resort cottage near Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, and confiscated more than a ton of dynamite, bomb fuses, striker assemblies, and Nuodex (from which napalm is made). Eleven men were arrested, including Mafia fixer Sam Benton, Rich Lauchli, and several Cuban exiles. Despite the apparent commission of at least three felonies, they were released by the FBI without charges the next day. Someone very powerful in the FBI or CIA had obviously interceded. Later the FBI reported that Michael McLaney, a Meyer Lansky partner in Miami, had supplied the explosives as well as the cottage, which was owned by his brother, William.
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Whatever the purpose of the cache, the raid did reveal a criminal communion among certain Mafia leaders, Cuban exiles, and the violent right wing — and one the FBI backed off from prosecuting.

By November, the CIA’s Chicago office still wasn’t sure what was brewing but came close when it reported: “Perhaps his [Sierra’s] mysterious backers are providing him with sufficient funds to keep the pot boiling.”
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On November 21 in Chicago, a Cuban exile, Homer Echevarria, commented in a meeting of exile activists that he was about to make an arms purchase “as soon as we take care of Kennedy.”

In addition to the Mafia role in spreading guns and exiled activists throughout the country, the Mafia also played a role in the so-called Bayo-Pawley mission, which was launched in June 1963. Shortly after the missile crisis, a letter was delivered to the Cuban exile community claiming that two or perhaps four Soviet army colonels wanted to defect to the United States These officers were said to know the location of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island, missiles that had never been removed by the Soviet Union despite its commitment to do so. The fact that a veteran anti-Castro raider, Eduardo Perez (whose nickname Eddie Bayo derived from the legendary guerrilla general who had trained Fidel and Che in Mexico) was determined to lead a sortie into Cuba to liberate the Russian officers lent a certain weight to this otherwise outrageous claim. Bayo was now an adherent of Alpha 66, the renegade outfit advised by the CIA’s David Phillips.

The other instigator of the rescue mission was John V. Martino, a Cuban-American released from a Castro prison in October 1962. Before his arrest he had installed security systems at Mafia casinos in Havana. After returning to Miami, Martino joined up with Rosselli, working out of his hotel in Key Biscayne. Within weeks of coming back, right-wing ghostwriter Nathaniel Weyl received a commission to write the memoir of Martino’s three-year incarceration, which was later published under the title
I Was Castro’s Prisoner
. Weyl was also assisting multimillionaire William D. Pawley — anti-Castro activist, former ambassador under Eisenhower, and founder of the Flying Tigers — with his memoirs.

After having shilled the project around reactionary circles in Florida, Martino and Bayo pitched the idea to Pawley, who in turn took it to JM/WAVE chief Ted Shackley. Pawley told Shackley that he had gotten a call from the chief counsel to the Senate Internal Subcommittee, Jay Sourwine, promising that chairman James O. Eastland of Mississippi would launch hearings if the Soviet officers were sprung. When Shackley learned from Pawley that Martino was involved, he was not pleased. He called Martino a “lowlife.” Shackley nonetheless signed on. The operation was a long shot but, if it panned out, a career maker. It might also serve to rehabilitate Shackley’s demoted mentor, Bill Harvey. CIA headquarters at first balked at the proposal, having been sufficiently embarrassed by renegade heroics by the Cuban exiles. Then Senator Eastland telephoned Ambassador Pawley to inform him, incredibly enough, that John Martino, a Mafia operative, had personally briefed him on the mission, called Operation Red Cross. The CIA gave Shackley the go-ahead.

It is possible Rosselli and Martino actually believed in the Bayo-Pawley mission. It is equally possible that they were developing an elaborate alibi for another murderous contingency. On June 4, the day before the mission was to be launched, Martino and Bayo told an astounded Pawley that they had agreed to let Life magazine cover the raid in exchange for $15,000. Loren Hall, a Trafficante associate later investigated for his contact with Oswald in Dallas, claimed that the Mafia, not
Life
, had in fact put up the $15,000.
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On June 5, Pawley’s yacht, the
Flying Tiger II
, towing a smaller craft, set sail for its rendezvous point off the coast of Oriente province. Three days later, Pawley himself, accompanied by the ever-ready Rip Robertson, a
Life
photographer, Bayo, and nine other raiders boarded a CIA flying boat. (Pawley was so suspicious about the intentions of Bayo and his raiders that he locked them in the center cabin during the flight.) Off Baracoa, Cuba, they joined up with the yacht. Robertson passed out a full complement of arms to the fighters before they piled into the 22-foot craft and headed for the Cuban shore. The plan was to meet up with the
Flying Tiger II
two days later with the Soviet officers in hand. But Bayo and his comrades were never heard from again. Station chief Shackley later determined that the Soviet defection story had been cover for a “free-lance strike” by Bayo and the others.
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A review of Cuban army documents relating to the capture or killing of anti-Castro raiders, research done in June 1997, revealed no record of Bayo.

But the Bayo-Pawley mission fit nicely with Rosselli’s later claim that President Kennedy was assassinated by an anti-Castro sniper team sent in to murder Castro, captured by the Cubans, tortured, and redeployed in Dallas. Through the handiwork of Rosselli’s assistant, Jo Martino, the CIA,
Life
, Pawley, and Senator Eastland were all variously implicated.

On September 13, 1963, the
Dallas Morning News
confirmed that President Kennedy would be visiting Dallas on November 21 or 22. Several days later, Jack Ruby began telephoning Mafia and Teamsters Union operatives and hitmen all over the country, and made trips to New Orleans, Miami, and Las Vegas.
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According to the FBI, during his trip to Miami in early October Ruby met twice at different hotels with Johnny Rosselli.
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We do not know the nature of their exchange, only that subsequent to the Kennedy assassination, Ruby, a man described by Rosselli himself as “one of our boys,” stalked, murdered, and thereby silenced Oswald. This act shines out like a neon sign through the fog of controversy surrounding the president’s death. Jack Ruby, a wiseguy in training, had met with no less a figure in the Mafia than Johnny Rosselli, who was still communing with renegade elements of the CIA.

October 26, 1963

Amherst, Massachusetts

I
n May 1963, the president was invited to attend the October groundbreaking for the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College and accepted the invitation. He subsequently asked special assistant Arthur Schlesinger to prepare a draft on the theme of poetry and power that Frost had raised at the Inaugural. The president repeated one of Frost’s lines to Schlesinger: “ ‘I am one acquainted with the night.’ What a terrific line.”
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For most of their acquaintanceship, the relationship between the poet and the president had developed into an affectionate joust. Frost had come to the White House on four occasions (enjoining Kennedy at one point to “be more Irish than Harvard”) and been awarded the Presidential Medal on his eighty-eighth birthday. Frost and fellow poet Archibald MacLeish strongly urged the attorney general to push for the release of Ezra Pound from an Italian prison.
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In September 1962 the relationship had soured. Frost, returning from a trip to the Soviet Union during which he had seen Khrushchev, got off the plane in New York and told the press that the Soviet leader thought Kennedy “too liberal to fight.” The next day the quote was featured on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Kennedy was stung. “Why did he have to say that?” he asked Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.
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All went silent until the old man died the following January. Udall would later write that the trip to Amherst in October may have been an atonement of sorts on Kennedy’s part for not reaching out at the end. “We just didn’t know he was so ill,” Jack said to Frost’s secretary, Kay Morrison.
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Joining the president on Air Force One that Saturday morning were Udall, Schlesinger, and James Reed, an Amherst graduate and Jack’s former PT-109 buddy, who was then serving at Treasury. Udall told the president that he feared a woman he knew who was fanatically anti-Kennedy might appear and try to disrupt the ceremony. “So if you see me in the crowd struggling with a woman and rolling on the ground, you will know what is going on,” he told the president. “In any case, Stewart,” Kennedy replied, “we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”
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They landed at Westover Air Force Base outside of Springfield, Massachusetts. Their motorcade to Amherst wound through the Berkshires, swathed in gold and auburn at the height of Indian summer. At one point they passed by the Amherst hillside where Emily Dickinson had lived out her brief life.
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Kennedy by this time had reworked Schlesinger’s text, sharpening it and adding phrases of his own.
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At the ceremony, Archibald MacLeish welcomed the president as one who had “lived half a biblical lifetime” in the “soft, lovely hills” of western Massachusetts. He described Frost in terms of one who had a “lovers’ quarrel with the world” — as a poet who “made his finest music out of manhood.” MacLeish likened Frost to Oedipus, King of Athens:

We do not live, I know, in Athens. We live now in an insignificant, remote small suburb of the universe. . . . Homer’s heroic world, where men could face their destinies and die, becomes to us, with our more comprehensive information, the absurd world of Sartre, where men can only die. And yet, though all the facts are changed, nothing has changed in fact: we still live lives. And lives still lead to death. And those who live a life that leads to death still need the gift that Oedipus gave to Athens — the gift of self, of beaten self, of wandering, defeated, exiled self that can survive, endure, turn upon the dark pursuers, face its unintelligible destiny with blinded eyes and make a meaning of it: self, above all else, without self-pity.
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Kennedy was clearly moved by MacLeish’s words and warmly shook his hand. John J. McCloy, president of Chase Manhattan Bank, then introduced the president. Kennedy described Frost as preeminently two things: “an artist and an American”:

A nation reveals itself, not only by the men it produces, but by the men it honors. . . . The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to a nation’s greatness. But the men who question power make a contribution that is just as indispensable — for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. Our national strength matters — but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. . . . His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against the self-deception and cheap consolation. “I have been,” he wrote, “one acquainted with the night.”

It is hardly an accident that Frost coupled poetry and power; for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads a man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. Where power corrupts — poetry cleanses.
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Back in Washington the “corruptive” quality of power seemed especially in evidence on that very day. A front-page story in the
Des Moines Register
alleged that certain “prominent New Frontiersmen” had availed themselves of the sexual services of Ellen Rometsch, a beautiful refugee from East Germany who had been deported in August 1963 amid rumors of compromising dalliances, including several with the president. The article, written by Bobby’s old friend Clark Mollenhoff, raised the FBI concern that “her activity might be connected with espionage.” Bobby tried to close the breach by spiking the source of the story — the FBI — to prevent it from being republished in other papers. When that failed, he dispatched his old McClellan Committee lieutenant LaVerne Duffy to Germany to convince Ms. Rometsch to close her mouth. But Senator John Williams of Delaware now had the account and, according to the
Register
article, was planning to bring it before the Senate Rules Committee the following Tuesday.
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The administration was now in real danger.

What had prompted Hoover to move from his normal mode of blackmail to open political assault? Bobby’s intimation that the FBI director would be retired in Jack’s second term was undoubtedly one stimulus. Another could well have been Bobby’s interest in exposing the corruption of his other enemy, Lyndon Johnson. Thanks to an impending Senate investigation of Johnson’s former aide Bobby Baker — the so-called 101st senator — on charges of corruption, the vice president’s own career was now on the firing line.

Bobby later denied that he had ever targeted the vice president or Bobby Baker, but he said this in 1964, when he was trying to coexist with Johnson. Given Johnson’s nearly pathological level of paranoia, it’s possible he imagined that the attorney general was gunning for him when in fact he wasn’t. Whatever the case, in October 1963, Johnson felt he had cause to counterattack. On October 18, longtime Johnson protégé Fred Korth, who had taken John Connally’s place as navy secretary, was forced to resign. The Justice Department had revealed “indiscreet use” of navy stationery by Korth but Korth’s misdeeds definitely went beyond this.
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Bobby Kennedy’s former boss Senator John McClellan was threatening to hold Senate hearings on Korth’s conflict of interest with regard to the development of a new fighter, the TFX, by Texas-based General Dynamics.
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Further, there were reports of secret payoffs (which Donald Reynolds, one of Bobby Baker’s associates, later told the Congress amounted to $100,000) to get the contract.
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The vice president, with the support of Secretary McNamara, appealed to the president to keep Korth, but the attorney general prevailed. Within days of Korth’s resignation, the hearings to investigate Baker were scheduled. The problem for Vice President Johnson — and Texas governor Connally — was that if Baker were drawn and quartered over his ties to the Mafia and Texas oil interests they both might go down with him.