Read The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby Online

Authors: Richard D. Mahoney

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Historical, #United States, #Leaders & Notable People, #Political, #History, #Americas, #20th Century

The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (9 page)

BOOK: The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby
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May 10, 1960

Charleston, West Virginia

I
n the weeks that followed Joe Kennedy’s lunch in New York the Kennedy campaign for president foundered. In the Wisconsin primary on April 5, Senator Hubert Humphrey from neighboring Minnesota put up a spirited fight against Kennedy’s phalanx of paid professionals and nonstop barrage of mailings and advertisements. Kennedy’s strategy was to defeat the “Catholic issue” in a Protestant state, but from the start Protestant Wisconsonians seemed resistant to his appeal.
30

Campaign manager Bobby Kennedy, frequently bareheaded and coattess in the frozen March weather, drove desperately from town to town, personally recruiting volunteers and remorselessly pushing his staff round the clock. Family friend Charles Spalding later remembered being on a train with Bobby when it broke down several miles outside of town one night. Bobby simply jumped off and walked the rest of the way. On another occasion, Kennedy advance man Jerry Bruno got a late-night call from Bobby, who was lost and did not know what town he was in. Bruno asked him to describe some landmarks. “I’m looking out the window of a phone booth,” he told Bruno. “I see one bar, another bar, and on my side of the road a huge cow pasture with a bunch of cows staring at me, wondering who the hell is this jerk in the phone booth at midnight, in the middle of winter, in the middle of Wisconsin! I can’t ask someone, because there is nobody up at midnight to ask.”
31
In the end, Kennedy won by 8 percent over Humphrey (probably due to a Republican crossover in the open primary) but, in both a media and political sense, it was a defeat. The vote had broken on strictly religious grounds.

According to campaign lieutenant Larry O’Brien, there was “a terrible sense of gloom” in the Kennedy camp. In an interview with the dispirited Jack, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite raised the obvious question of whether a Catholic could be elected president and Kennedy fumbled the answer. At the end of the interview, Bobby stormed over to Cronkite and berated him in front of the producers for having violated “an agreement,” saying he would never again be allowed to interview Senator Kennedy.
32
Back in Washington, Lyndon Johnson huddled with senior aides in anticipation of Kennedy’s defeat in the May 10 primary in solidly Protestant West Virginia.

“West Virginians for Kennedy” had been working the state for a good fifteen months before the primary, but polling in early April 1960 showed Kennedy facing defeat by better than a 60—40 margin. Interviews with voters showed widespread antipathy to Catholics. After a brief rest in Montego Bay, Jamaica, in the wake of the Wisconsin primary, Senator Kennedy flew into West Virginia and began to work the small town cafes, hollows, and coal-mine entrances at shift change in brutal daily schedules. As Theodore White described it, “Up and down the roads roved Kennedy names, brothers and sisters all available for speeches and appearances; to the family names was added the lustrous name of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.”
33
Roosevelt’s father had brought dirt-poor West Virginia back from the economic dead during the Depression. Another West Virginia celebrity, New York Giant all-pro linebacker Sam Huff, was also pressed into doing campaign duty for Kennedy, who went on TV and explained his stand on the separation of church and state with exceptional force.

But it was not going to be easy, and Jack Kennedy, privately admitting that he expected defeat, flew to Washington on primary day morning to escape the press. What he did not know was that his father had mounted a massive vote-buying operation during the last week of the campaign, the likes of which West Virginia had never seen before.

The key element in the West Virginia primary was the printed “slate card” of approved candidates that Democratic unions, clubs, and a multitude of factions distributed to their followers in the days before the election. At the top of the slate card was the preference for president. The names of the candidates were chosen by a variety of union, party, and faction bosses, many of whom were given money, usually in the hundreds of dollars, in exchange for their exercise of preference.

In the final days of the campaign, using both planes and cars, Ambassador Kennedy’s office moved in hundreds of thousands of dollars (possibly over $1 million) in suitcases into the state. In Logan County, Democratic county chairman Raymond Chafin was approached by a man who had flown into the town of Logan that morning. He asked Chafin to support Kennedy and to put Kennedy’s name on the top of the slate card. Chafin replied he would need “thirty-five” to do this, meaning $3,500. He was given $35,000. Years later, in an interview with the author, Chafin pointed out that this payment only covered his own “Okie Justice” faction; that another payment was made to the larger “Ray Watts” faction in Logan County.
34
And this described the vote-buying operation in only one of West Virginia’s fifty-five counties.

Lesser amounts, usually in the $2,000 to $10,000 dollar range, were given to the county sheriffs. The late House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill described the pitch of one of Joe Kennedy’s real estate partners, Eddie Ford, as he did the family business by car: “Sheriff, I’m from Chicago. I’m on my way south. I love this young Kennedy boy. He can help the nation, by God. He’s got the feeling for it, you know. He’ll do things for West Virginia. . . . Here’s $3,000. Or here’s $5,000. You carry your county for him and I’ll give you a little reward on my way back.”
35
And they did. The payoff scheme may well have extended to Protestant churches as well, if one believes Hubert Humphrey’s published account of a conversation he later had with Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Catholic archbishop of Boston and Kennedy family prelate. Cushing told Humphrey that he and Joe Kennedy had chosen which West Virginia churches, particularly the black ones, to contribute to.
36
It stands to reason that Bobby Kennedy, as the campaign manager who was monitoring every possible vestige of the primary operation, knew about the vote-buying scheme, but we have no confirmation of this.

On May 10, 1960, by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent, Kennedy defeated Humphrey in West Virginia, a state the national press had said a Catholic could never win. The size of the victory, in the words of Theodore White, wrote “its message for every politician in the nation to see.”
37
Kennedy lieutenants Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell expressed the significance of West Virginia even more emphatically: “Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination in West Virginia, rather than at the national convention in Los Angeles two months later. . . giving him that opportunity to lick the religious issue in a showdown test that certainly must be a monument in American political history ”
38
There was, in fact, no monument to be found in the West Virginia primary, only another ugly illustration of the power of money in American politics.

As FBI tapes would later reveal, certain mafiosi such as Giancana, Rosselli, and bagman Skinny D’Amato believed that it was their money that had won the Kennedy victory in West Virginia.
39
Whether this was true did not matter. What mattered was the expectation it created.

March 4, 1960

Havana, Cuba

F
idel Castro had just gotten back from a trip to the Cienaga de Zapata, a vast, uninhabited marshland on the south of the island that thirteen months later would be the site of the Bay of Pigs.
40
He had spent much of the trip hanging out at military encampments, playing dominoes, telling the troops about Cuban history over rum and cigars, testing some of their new grenade-launchers himself. After getting back to Havana, it is probable that he spent the night, as he consistently did during this period, at the Eleventh Street apartment of his lover and revolutionary collaborator, Celia Sanchez.

That morning, as usual, he moved according to mood and impression, drawing energy and insight from the people he met, and literally making it up as he went.
41
In March 1960, Cuba’s turn toward the Soviet Union was taking on increasing force; there were discussions about trade deals and even arms shipments.

After sixty years as a de facto colony of the United States, Cuba’s shift of allegiance and Castro’s hostility toward the United States were causing mounting anger among a powerful phalanx of the American ruling class — Mafia overlords such as Meyer Lansky, for whom Havana gaming had been the crown jewel of an illicit empire; corporate chieftains of Standard Oil, United Fruit, and two dozen other multinational corporations; and the Eisenhower administration, whose CIA was already contemplating Castro’s demise.

Castro was also facing internal challenges. Almost every week brought reports of defections and plots within Cuba, including some by his own Sierra Maestra comrades-in-arms. Such rumors and episodic outbreaks kept the so-called
lider maximo
in a state of armed alert. Castro was seen on one occasion standing in his open jeep, M-1 in hand, speeding through the Havana neighborhood of Miramar at the head of a convoy to attack a group of insurrectionists. In keeping with his multiple obligations and also possibly to confound those plotting against him, Castro shuttled between four different offices — the military command post in the Vedado residential district, Sanchez’s apartment, a house he frequented near the Chaplin theater in Miramar, and the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, the organizational locus of the mass seizure of American and large-scale properties, including those of Castro’s own family.

During Castro’s first months in power in 1959, the American embassy in Havana reported to Washington that Castro’s exuberant style and slapdash schedule, which included raidlike stops for ice cream at Carmelo’s terrace cafe, were evidence of his youth (thirty-three) and Latin self-indulgence. By 1960, however, the embassy was communicating darker pathologies, which it characterized as involving “delusions of grandeur” and “tendencies toward paranoid violence.” Never did it detect Castro’s sure skill in framing and destroying his enemies. Nor did the embassy recognize that after twelve years in the murderous warren of Cuban revolutionary politics — the years in exile, in prisons, hiding out in the mountains, wading across the Rio Grande for secret meetings in the United States — Castro was a cunning man with a rat’s sense of when to strike first. Despite the tension that grew between the two countries, neither side was prepared to break off the relationship — that is, until March 4, 1960, when an incident occurred that converted Castro into an avowed enemy of the United States and sent both countries into a dark spiral of hatred.

At 5 P.M. that day there was an explosion on
La Coubre
, a French freighter that had docked in Havana’s inner harbor to unload seventy tons of military material Cuba had purchased from Belgium the previous year. Castro himself was dockside in minutes to direct the rescue operation of the burned and dismembered stevedores and crew members. At about 6 P.M., there was another explosion, this one killing Cuban soldiers and firemen and nearly injuring Castro as well. Castro, weeping and screaming orders to bring in trucks and medical personnel, remained on the scene until the dead, eighty-one in all, and wounded were attended to.

Castro immediately concluded that the United States was behind the disaster. Although the evidence was unclear, the effect on Cuba was like that on the United States when the
Maine
blew up in Havana harbor in 1898, burning the apparition of Spanish infamy into the American consciousness. The
La Coubre
incident left Castro and the mass of Cubans enraged at the apparition of such wanton murder and cowardice.
42
For Cuba, this coming to anger was its coming to power.

The next day, in a ceremony at the cemetery in Colon, Castro raged against the act, tears streaming down his face, at one point seizing his M-1 and shaking it over his head before the immense crowd. “Today I saw our nation stronger than ever. Today I saw our revolution more solid and invincible than ever. Cuba will never become cowardly. Cuba will not step back. The Revolution will not be detained. The Revolution will march ahead victoriously.” He ended by using for the first time the slogan that would be repeated thereafter:
Patria o Muerte. Venceremos
(Fatherland or Death. We will triumph).
43

Five days later, in a meeting of the National Security Council, President Dwight Eisenhower listened as Admiral Arleigh Burke proposed a coup d’état, noting that “any plan for the removal of Cuban leaders should be a package deal, since many of the leaders around Castro were even worse than Castro.” Less than two weeks later, on March 17, President Eisenhower secretly approved a policy titled “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime.” In July Eisenhower announced that the United States would stop purchasing Cuban sugar. Castro responded by seizing American oil-refining factories, sugar mills, and other assets whose total value came to $850 million. The Soviet Union promptly pledged to buy the balance of Cuba’s sugar quota, and Castro’s brother Raul flew to Moscow to negotiate the shipment of Soviet armaments.

The American leadership in Washington considered all of this, in Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s term, as “harrowing.” For a superpower with fleets in every ocean, armies on three continents, and a martial ideology, namely anticommunism, to justify the Pax Americana to its own as well as other peoples, armed insurgency in our own hemisphere was profoundly unsettling. To add to this, 1960 was of course an election year. The leading Democrat, Senator Kennedy, was using Cuba as an illustration of Republican weakness against communism. In campaign speeches Kennedy would charge that the threat of communism was now only “ninety miles from our shore.”

BOOK: The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby
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