The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (64 page)

233
  Quoted in
Time
, 4 January 1963.

234
  Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, p. 580.

Rendezvous: 1963

1
  Bradlee,
A Good Life
, pp. 345—46.

2
  Ibid., p. 346.

3
  In
Case Closed
, Gerald Posner concedes the existence of two photos showing Ferrie and Oswald together at a Civil Air Patrol get-together in the middle 1950s, pp. 142—48.

4
  This is the conclusion of the former chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey, and his co-author Richard N. Billings in
The Plot to Kill the President
(New York: Times Books, 1981), pp. 345—47.

5
  Gaudet draft memo, undated, untitled, from HSCA files (declassified by the CIA), AA.

6
  Five days after the assassination, Gaudet would telephone the local office of the FBI in New Orleans and tell Special Agent J. W. Miller that Jack Ruby, the Mafia operative who had just killed Oswald, had been in New Orleans to purchase some paintings from an art gallery on Royal Street.

7
  Summers,
Conspiracy
, p. 579.

8
  Wadden indicated Rosselli’s role in conversation with his former partner and head of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Division, William Hundley. Interview, Hundley.

9
  See Cable 1539, 3 October 1963, describing “Oswald” at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. HSCA, NA.

10
  Quoted in Rappleye and Becker,
All-American Mafioso
, p. 236.

11
  Lou Oberdorfer, the head of Justice’s Tax Division, later defended the targeting of tax investigations and prosecutions by pointing out that the Tax Division wouldn’t prosecute unless there were probability of victory. But in the field, the use of audits and investigations — as well as electronic bugs — against organized crime personalities was wide-ranging. Navasky,
Kennedy Justice
, pp. 58—59.

12
  Roemer,
Man Against the Mob
, p. 249.

13
  Attorney General’s telephone log, 23 April 1963, General Files. RFKP, JFKL.

14
  Quoted in Blakey and Billings,
The Plot to Kill the President
, pp. 239—40.

15
  Interview, William Hundley. Confidential interviews 38, 42 (former officials in the FBI). Hundley remembered taking the report home and that his deputy Henry Petersen and Jack Miller, the head of the Criminal Division, also viewed copies of the report. He expressed strong doubt that either of them leaked the document and denied ever doing so himself.

16
  Navasky,
Kennedy Justice
, p. 80.

17
  But in a sense Bobby Kennedy was also to blame. Kennedy had pushed the FBI to use every means at its disposal to attack the mob. According to the testimony of retired agents who served in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, Kennedy had been informed in visits to those cities about electronic surveillance efforts. Although he later denied that he had ever “ordered” their use (and, bureaucratically speaking, he had not), he clearly knew of and countenanced the FBI’s campaign to penetrate the mob’s inner sanctums. In so doing, he had adopted Hoover’s arrangement of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Victor Navasky has argued “that Robert Kennedy should have known but did not, that he should have asked but did not, that he is therefore chargeable with responsibility for the FBI’s illegal privacy invasions.”

18
  Scheim,
Contract on America
, p. 107.

19
  Rosselli was said to be furious at the description, possibly because the report of opulence would further spur the IRS or Kennedy’s Justice Department, or perhaps because he sensed that the consequence of press attention would only complicate his multitiered life. Of all the places he worked — L.A., Miami, Chicago, D.C. — Las Vegas was the one that he alone had created; and the Desert Inn was his sanctum of pleasure, fellowship and seamlessly-administered diplomacy:

Rosselli spends his leisure hours at the Desert Inn Country Club. He has breakfast there in the morning, seated at a table overlooking the eighteenth green. Between golf rounds, meals, steam baths, shaves and trims, Twisting, romancing and drinking, there is time for private little conferences at his favorite table with people seeking his counsel or friendship. It may be a newsman, a local politician, a casino owner, a prostitute, a famous entertainer, a deputy sheriff, a U.S. Senator, or the Governor of Nevada.

Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris,
The Green Felt Jungle
(New York: Trident Press, 1963), p. 191.

20
  Interview, French.

21
  Frank Ragano,
Mob Lawyer
(New York: Scribners, 1994), p. 144. Anthony and Robbyn Summers have revealed some holes in Ragano’s account in “The Ghosts of November,”
Vanity Fair
, December 1994, p. 112.

22
  HSCA, Final Draft Report, p. 274. AA.

23
  RFK also made a four-day trip (11—15 February 1963) to California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, examining the nature of poverty in the United States.
New York Times
, 12 February 1963.

24
  Kennedy testified in front of the Subcommittee on Labor of the House Committee on Education and Labor in May 1963. His testimony in the RFKP at JFKL is undated. See Robert F. Kennedy,
The Pursuit of Justice
(New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 30—38.

25
  O’Neil,
Life
, 26 January 1962.

26
  Interview, Dolores Huerta. Also Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, p. 852.

27
  Remarks by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy before the National Congress of American Indians, Bismarck, North Dakota, 13 September 1963, RFKP, JFKL.

28
  Quoted in Thompson and Myers,
The Brother Within
, p. 24.

29
  See Dictabelt Recordings, Civil Rights 1963, JFKL.

30
  Interview, O’Brien.

31
  Navasky,
Kennedy Justice
, p. 27.

32
  Interview, Powers.

33
  Guthman, We
Band of Brothers
, p. 232. Interview, Symington.

34
  Interview, William P. Mahoney Jr. Mahoney was the American ambassador to Ghana and visited with the president on 19 November 1963.

35
  Martin Luther King called the speech “a hallmark in the annals of American history.” President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana read passages of the speech to an aide, his voice breaking. Thirty-six percent of Americans interviewed on 16 June 1963 by the Gallup organization thought President Kennedy was advancing civil rights “too fast”; 32 percent thought “about right”; and 18 percent “not fast enough.” From March to June 1963, Kennedy’s approval rating in the South fell from 60 percent to 33 percent.

36
  Quoted in Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, p. 370.

37
  Sorensen,
Kennedy
, p. 494.

38
  Wofford,
Of Kennedys and Kings
, p. 160.

39
  Quoted in Carl M. Brauer,
John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction
, p. 10.

40
  Quoted in Navasky,
Kennedy Justice
, p. 103.

41
  Ibid., p. 107.

42
  John F. Kennedy,
Profiles in Courage
(illustrated edition) (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1998), p. 42.

43
  Carl M. Brauer,
John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 153.

44
  Juan Williams,
Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954—1965
(New York: Viking, 1987), pp. 181—82.

45
  Ibid., p. 186.

46
  See “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” reprinted in Williams,
Eyes on the Prize
, pp. 187—89.

47
  Guthman and Shulman,
In His Own Words
, pp. 185—86.

48
  See transcript of conversation between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Governor Wallace, Montgomery, Alabama, 25 September 1963, RFKP, JFKL.

49
  Quoted in Navasky,
Kennedy Justice
, p. 218.

50
  Taped conversation, 12 May 1963, Participants: JFK, RFK, Marshall, McNamara, Wheeler, Salinger, Katzenbach, “Civil Rights — Birmingham ,” Item 86.2, JFKL.

51
  Guthman and Shulman,
In His Own Words
, p. 181.

52
  Stein and Plimpton,
American Journey
, pp. 120—21.

53
  Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days
, p. 963.

54
  Guthman and Shulman, eds.,
In His Own Words
, pp. 189—90.

55
  Interview, Harriman. The author also interviewed Carl Kaysen, Bundy’s deputy, who was part of the American negotiating team, as well as William R. Tyler, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.

56
  Joseph Kraft,
Profiles in Power
(New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 28.

57
  This judgment is drawn from interviews with British ambassador Ormsby-Gore as well as Kenny O’Donnell.

58
  This exchange took place at the meeting between the president and congressional leaders at 5 P.M. on 22 October 1962.
New York Times
, 5 October 1997.

59
  Allison, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,”
American Political Science Association
, September 1969.

60
  Interview, Ormsby-Gore.

61
  Mahoney,
JFK: Ordeal in Africa
, p. 156.

62
  Interview, J. Wayne Fredericks.

63
  Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days
, p. 248.

64
  Ibid., pp. 752—53.

65
  Hinckle and Turner,
The Fish Is Red
, p. 161.

66
  Russell,
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, p. 373

67
  Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days
, pp. 724—25.

68
  Ambassador Ormsby-Gore’s characterization of the president’s thinking.

69
  Interview, O’Donnell.

70
  See Summers,
Official and Confidential
, pp. 306—9.

71
  Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days
, p. 911.

72
  Interview, Harriman. The former governor requested that this and other comments not be attributed to him “until the appropriate time.” He died in 1986.

73
  Anderson,
Jack and Jackie
, pp. 347—48.

74
  Ibid., p. 326.

75
  The Kennedy Library contains 11 hours of White House dictabelt recordings from July through September 1963.

76
  Interview, Powers.

77
  Anderson,
Jack and Jackie
, p. 353.

78
  O’Donnell and Powers, “
Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye
,” pp. 430—31.

79
  Quoted in Russell,
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, p. 434.

80
  Interview, Bundy.

81
  McGeorge Bundy Memorandum for the President, “Further Organization of the Government in Dealing with Cuba,” 4 January 1963, NSF, JFKL.

82
  Corn,
Blond Ghost
, pp. 96—97.

83
  Interviews, Casares, Recarey.

84
  “Maximum Covert Action Program,” Standing Group Minutes, 18 April 1963, HSCA. Also in attendance were McGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, John McCone, Roswell Gilpatric, Edward R. Murrow, and Harvey’s replacement, Desmond Fitzgerald.

85
  See SN Memorandum to the Attorney General, 5 July 1963, RFKP, JFKL.

86
  See FBI Memorandum, RE: Anti-Fidel Castro Activities Internal Security, 105—1742, 19 July 1963, HSCA, AA.

87
  As quoted in Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, pp. 580—81.

88
  “U.S.-Cuba Relations, 1960—63: Neutrality Enforcement and the Cuban Exiles During the Kennedy Administration,” Congressional Research Service, p. 12.

89
  Ibid., p. 71.

90
  See Gaeton Fonzi,
The Last Investigation
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993), pp. 53—59.

91
  Hinckle and Turner,
The Fish Is Red
, p. 164.

92
  Quoted in Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, p. 585.

93
  Ayers,
The War That Never Was
, pp. 147—48. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. disputes this story on the grounds that the attorney general’s schedule book shows no Florida trips between April 27 and November 28, 1963. Kennedy’s schedule book, however, represents only a partial record of his appointments and trips.

94
  Quoted in Russell,
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, pp. 299— 300.

95
  Testimony of William Harvey before the HSCA, p. 68. Also see William Harvey, “Short Chronology from the Report of the Inspector General of the CIA,” Top Secret, HSCA.

96
  Mason Cargill Memorandum to the File, Subject: Project ZR/RIFLE and QJ/WIN, 30 April 1975, Commission on CIA Activities in the United States, HSCA.

97
  Report of the Inspector General of the CIA, 1967, HSCA, AA.

98
  Interview, Shimon.

99
  The FBI’s CIA liaison, Sam Papich, reported the meeting to Director Hoover. Harvey contacted Papich to ask that he be informed if Hoover told CIA director McCone. Hoover did not.

100
  Mason Cargill Memorandum to the File, Subject: Project ZR/RIFLE and QJ/WIN, 30 April 1975, HSCA.