The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (7 page)

In two comments, Joe Kennedy caught the strange duality within his third son. “Bobby,” he said, “feels more strongly for and against people than Jack — just as I do. . . . He hates the same way I do.” And later the old man described the other side. “Bobby is soft — soft on people . . . he has the capacity to be emotionally involved, to feel things deeply, as compared with Jack and that amazing detachment of his.”
⁷¹

The detached Jack usually sat alongside his younger brother in the hearings, listening, taking notes, and occasionally joining in the interrogation of the witnesses. Except for their collaboration in Jack’s Senate race in 1952, the two brothers had never really worked together until the McClellan Committee. There a crucial pattern emerged — Bobby blazing the path in his assault style and Jack, in his urbane, measured way, bringing up the rear. In 1958, Jack became the chair of the Senate Labor Subcommittee and developed legislation to implement the findings of the McClellan Committee. Though the Kennedy-Ives bill, as it was called, never made it into law, it was Jack’s most significant achievement in the Senate.
⁷²

Senator Kennedy was now traveling all over the country, giving speeches and laying the groundwork for his 1960 run. He continued to struggle with his health but somehow found time for his long-standing sport of chasing (and usually securing the favor of) glamorous women. Detached he might be, but Jack’s drive, sexual and political, was relentless; on the road he kept his crutches out of sight but close at hand. His father purchased a twin-engined, ten-seat DC-3 for Jack’s campaign trips, enabling him to receive injections, massages, and medicated rest between appearances. On one trip, he scrawled a note to himself: “Have got to stop pooning around.”
⁷³
But it was not to be.

His marriage to Jackie alternated between skirmish and cease-fire; their attachment was deep but troubled by his habits and her moods. The birth of their daughter, Caroline, however, provided the couple a delight that brought them closer. Jackie continued to forswear any politicking herself but helped Jack in his research into the Vietnam and Algerian wars, translating books from French and writing summaries of their conclusions. In July 1957, before an empty Senate chamber, Jack stood up and rhetorically committed a form of foreign policy blasphemy. He called on France to “face facts” and abandon its bloody war against Algerian guerrillas. The speech sent shock waves through Washington and the capitals of Europe, but it won Kennedy lasting gratitude from African nationalists.
⁷⁴
Critics then and later had a point in saying that aside from his looks and wealth, Jack was a conventional politician. But he was also one with an unexpected capacity for growth and insight.

For all of the propaganda and posturing necessary to his advancement, Jack was a fatalist who had traversed, in his sister Eunice’s phrase, “regions of doubt.” The deaths of Joe in the war and Kathleen in 1948, as well as his own brushes with death, confirmed his skeptical view of life. Perhaps because of this, he squeezed from each moment what stimulation there was, defining happiness, as he sometimes said, the way the Greeks had — “the full use of one’s faculties along the lines of excellence.” Jack viewed power as a worthy aesthetic pursuit. Bobby, on the other hand, saw it in terms of moral possibilities and tribal exigencies.

When Jack was on the road, Goldwater later recalled, Bobby was very protective of his brother’s interests, but back in the Senate, “he pushed Jack, was tough with him.” The difference between the two, Murray Kempton thought, was “the difference of those who are only properly oriented and those who are truly involved. ”
⁷⁵
But, even in the late 1950s, Bobby was already reorienting Jack. As later on civil rights, his older brother watched and listened from the rear as Bobby scouted the moral frontier and urged them on nearly every occasion to seize the high ground. Crisis by crisis, decision by decision, he was thus transforming his brother from a charming, somewhat dilatory, character into a political leader of moral dimensions.
⁷⁶
“Bobby is easily the most impressive man I’ve ever seen,” Jack said in 1961, implicitly measuring himself and his father secondarily.
⁷⁷

Murray Kempton saw beyond the image of Bobby as the ruthless prosecutor and brother-keeper and recognized that his philosophical core was that of a “Catholic radical.” The crusade against the Mafia was a struggle between good and evil. The same went for Soviet communism. In both these battles, thought Bobby, America was weak because America was materialist, undone by the greed of the “respectables,” as he called them, the money-changers and their inevitable attorneys whose concept of justice was soiled by profit. “The paramount interest in self,” Kennedy wrote in
The Enemy Within
, “in material wealth, in security must be replaced by an actual, not just vocal, interest in our country, by spirit of adventure, a will to fight what is evil, and a desire to serve.”
⁷⁸
He detested “America the Crass,” an antimaterialism essentially drawn from his Franciscan view of Catholicism. The problem is that politics is the art of the possible, not the impossible. The feast days of the saints, more often than not, commemorate the price of the radical’s attempt to reorder society — martyrdom. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, that durable seer of the Washington scene, thought Bobby was miscast in the political trade; he should have been a “revolutionary priest.”
⁷⁹

Within the hellish bunkers of organized crime, Bobby discovered thousands of prominent Americans trafficking with gangsters, to their moral peril. But what about Kennedy’s own father, whose business dealings had skirted the dark territory of the underworld? Did Bobby see his father for what he was? Hoffa for one was quick to point the finger: “I’m no damn angel. . . I don’t apologize. You take any industry and look at the problems they ran into while they were building up — how they did it, who they associated with, how they cut corners. The best example is Kennedy’s old man.”
⁸⁰

On several occasions in the course of his investigation, Bobby Kennedy heard allegations about his father’s collusion with members of organized crime. Shortly before he was to testify before the committee, Al Capone’s former attorney, Abraham Teitelbaum, reportedly told the chief counsel that he might reference his father in testimony if he, Teitelbaum, was not dismissed. Teitelbaum was called but said nothing about Ambassador Kennedy. (In
The Enemy Within
, Bobby refers to Teitelbaum’s offer to help Senator Kennedy as ransom Teitelbaum was willing to pay if it would get him released from testimony.)
⁸¹
Senator Goldwater remembered “rumors flying” about Joe Kennedy, but said that Bobby “played it smart.” After a speech in Milwaukee in early 1959, in which Bobby, in response to a question as to whether the Kennedys had been subjected to any “threats or promises of political support,” responded affirmatively, adding that he did not take them seriously. Why had he not reported these to the committee? Senator Mundt asked. Kennedy replied that he had not since “they had never affected the work of the staff.” Bobby’s reply, in his own words, “caused considerable furor” and the McClellan Committee convened to decide what to do. It was decided that henceforth all such approaches be disclosed.
⁸²

We do not know precisely what Bobby knew about his father’s relations with the likes of Frank Costello, the so-called Prime Minister of the Underworld, Sam Giancana, the godfather of the “Chicago Outfit,” or Morris (Moe) Dalitz of the Mayfield Road Gang.
⁸³
He undoubtedly knew that there had been contact — not a surprising thing — and that the gangsters were intent on making the most of it, if necessary, behind the scenes. As would later become manifest in the case of Frank Sinatra, Bobby sought to cauterize this ulcerous association. Jack, on the other hand, took a more casual view, possibly because he did not view the underworld as the embodiment of evil, or perhaps because he tended to appraise individuals without presentiment. Beginning in 1959, the senator was spotted by the Las Vegas office of the FBI in the company of Sinatra and certain mafiosi. In Tucson, Arizona, he went to mass with Smiling Gus Battaglia, an underboss in one of the New York families. Battaglia later attended a fund-raiser for Jack in Phoenix in 1959.
⁸⁴

Contact and even political communion between the Mafia and national politicians were widespread in the 1950s and afterward. Lyndon Johnson benefited from Mafia payoffs while he was a senator, according to Jack Halfen, a convicted tax evader, who claimed the mob gave LBJ $500,000. Vice President Richard Nixon had a deep relationship with the Mafia, as Carl Oglesby charges: “He began as a Syndicate person in direct connection with Syndicate people.”
⁸⁵
But neither Johnson nor Nixon had a brother on a Mafia search-and-destroy mission. Or a father who continued to traffic with the underworld. The compartmentalized way in which Jack and Bobby worked with their father made any resolution of this cross-purpose unlikely. The old man was still the senior partner in the triumvirate and he acted unilaterally. The implicit understanding was that he would put money where it counted, pull the strings, and do the deals. The less Jack and Bobby knew about this, the less they would have to answer for. The two-track approach had worked well up to this point. But it depended on Joe Sr.’s ability to contain the deals and Bobby’s willingness not to challenge them.

“I have found it always true,” Machiavelli observed, “that men do seldom or never advance themselves from a small beginning to any great height except by fraud or force.” Certainly Joe Kennedy understood this. The price of power was not merely financial, it was moral — and you paid it. For Bobby, however, this was wrong. His crusade against the Mafia was not only dedicated to ridding the country of its pernicious influence, but also to severing its connection to the Kennedy family. In August 1959, he quit the crusade and returned to his role as the lesser brother to lead Jack’s campaign for the White House. Jimmy Hoffa predicted that Bobby’s assault had ended, but he was wrong. It had only begun.

The Campaign

1960

February 29, 1960

New York City

O
f the small group of Mafia overlords in America — the so-called
capi di tutti capi
— only Sam Giancana, the rat-faced former wheelman for Al Capone, had accepted Joseph P. Kennedy’s invitation to lunch. The two were well acquainted. In 1959, Kennedy had invested in the syndicate-developed Cal-Neva Lodge near Reno, which opened two years later. (Kennedy’s son-in-law, Peter Lawford, would be the partner of record.)
¹
What transformed their relationship into a secret alliance, however, was Giancana’s steel-smooth mob compatriot, Johnny Rosselli, who had known Joe Kennedy since the early ’30s in Hollywood. It was Rosselli, at Joe Kennedy’s request, who organized the New York lunch.

By 1960, most Mafia chieftains had no use for Joe Kennedy. First he had competed against them during Prohibition in the smuggling and sale of illicit liquor, and afterward, on occasion, he had ignored their territorial imperative on the sensitive matter of liquor distribution. In 1944, without sufficient clearance, Kennedy had sent one of his agents, Miami Beach gangster Tom Cassara, to Chicago to arrange a Haig & Haig distributorship.
²
The man was shot dead within hours of arriving. In the middle 1950s, Kennedy reportedly cheated his sometime partner Frank Costello in a business deal in which Kennedy had fronted the purchase of a piece of Manhattan property and then pocketed the entire profit on its sale.
³
Rosselli, a trusted confederate of Costello (informing for the FBI during this period, Mafia capo Edward Cannizziro described Rosselli as a “Costello man”), had smoothed over bruised relations.
⁴

As Senator John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency moved into high gear in the first months of 1960, his father sought out Rosselli to help him arrange a summit meeting with Mafia leaders. But the best Rosselli could do was to get the Chicago Outfit to attend and, interestingly enough, the attorney Mario Brod, a friend of James J. Angleton, chief of counterintelligence for the CIA. Brod’s practice combined top-secret work for the CIA’s counterintelligence wing with legal troubleshooting for friends in the syndicate.
⁵

According to Brod, Joe Kennedy’s lunch at Felix Young’s restaurant in Manhattan on February 29 started badly. The New York and Boston families didn’t show.
⁶
Those attending were asked to make their bodyguards wait outside the restaurant, which in the murderous world of the mob was a troubling request. Kennedy himself arrived fifteen minutes late. Finally, inevitably, the subject of Robert Kennedy’s investigative attack on the Mafia arose.

Under the circumstances, no one but Joe Kennedy would have attempted such an encounter. But the Ambassador (as he was known), a man of epic will who had bluffed and bulled his way to enormous wealth and political power, was not to be dissuaded from seizing any opportunity to put his son in the White House. In the 1930s, he had harbored that ambition for himself, but with the shipwreck of his diplomatic career the objective had shifted to his sons.
⁷