The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  As war with the United Kingdom became imminent, Kennedy even suggested that Roosevelt take a position of appeasement in the increasingly dire situation, which was unacceptable to the president and many others.

  “It seems to me that this situation may crystallize to a point where the President can be the savior of the world,” Kennedy wrote Roosevelt in September of 1938. “The British government as such certainly cannot accept any agreement with Hitler, but there may be a point when the President himself may work out plans for world peace.”16

  Soon after writing the letter, Kennedy resigned from his position and lost whatever chance he had had for his political aspirations. It would now be up to the Kennedy children to embody Joe’s lofty political goals. He did not require his children to succeed in business. He himself had been a tremendous success, and his children would not have to resort to begging, borrowing, or stealing. The elder Kennedy had taken care of that. His children would not work for, but inherit, a mass of wealth and power. For Kennedy, the business of his children would be success in politics.

  Rose and Joe’s first son, tall, handsome Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. would be introduced to the world by Honey Fitz in a way prophetic of Joe Kennedy’s lofty ambitions for the boy.

  “I’m sure he’d make a good man on the platform one day,” Honey Fitz said to the Boston Post. “Is he going into politics? Well, of course he is going to be president of the United States. His mother and father have already decided that he is going to Harvard, where he will play on the football and baseball teams and incidentally take all the scholastic honors. Then he’s going to be a captain of industry until it’s time for him to be president for two or three more terms. Further than that has not been decided. He may act as mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts for a while on his way to the presidential chair.”17

  A number of these predictions from the loquacious mayor were tongue-in-cheek, but the expectations of Joe Jr. would be almost on par with the forecast. Joe Jr., like his three brothers to follow, would attend Harvard and excel scholastically and athletically. While still pursuing an Ivy League education, Joe Jr. was encouraged by his father to run for governor of Massachusetts.

  The bar would be set high for all of Joe’s children. Failures and character flaws would be closely guarded secrets. Weakness was a source of shame for the Kennedys; they were winners, or they were nothing.

  Rosemary, Joe and Rose’s third child and first daughter, was a hard lesson to the clan. She was one of the best looking of the Kennedy daughters, but was slow to learn, and her trouble keeping pace with her brothers and sisters led to alleged uncontrolled bouts of rage as she grew older.

  Joe Sr.’s answer to Rosemary’s embarrassing behavior was an operation, a prefrontal lobotomy, performed in 1941 when Rosemary was twenty-three years old, permanently setting her mind to that of a five-year-old child. The surgery would not correct her behavior; it would erase it.

  Years later, it was surmised by Dr. James W. Watts, the surgeon who performed the operation, that Rosemary might not have been mentally retarded.

  “It may have been agitated depression,” Dr. Watts said. “You’re agitated, you’re shaky. You talk in an agitated way. All kinds of things go on in the eyes.”18

  It has also been surmised that Rosemary’s learning disability was a form of dyslexia. Be it depression, dyslexia, or mental retardation, Rosemary was a failure, not a Kennedy.

  “I am still very grateful for your help,” Joe Sr. would write to the superintendent at St. Colleta’s, an institution in Wisconsin where Rosemary would spend the rest of her life until her death in 2005. “After all, the solution of Rosemary’s problem has been a major factor in the ability of all the Kennedys to go about their lives’ work and try to do it as well as they can.”19

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy would live most of his life struggling with debilitating illness. He was told at one point that he would be lucky to live to forty years of age, even though the nation, through careful management of public relations, would see him as healthy, vigorous, and undamaged.

  Sick, sometimes to the point of death, throughout his childhood, John struggled through an obstacle course of affliction. During the 1920s, he was racked with scarlet fever, bronchitis, chicken pox, ear infections, German measles, measles, mumps, and whooping cough.20

  John’s projection of youth and vitality hid darker truths. When in public during his presidential years, Kennedy would wear, under his clothes, a brace that would cover his entire midsection to address the injuries sustained to his back when his PT boat was sunk by the Japanese. He needed pellets of the steroid desoxycorticosterone acetate implanted in his back and thigh muscles every few months. Injections of Procaine, a local anesthetic, every few hours helped him walk without the aid of crutches.21 A double-fusion spinal surgery in 1954 left John with a metal plate in his back, and during a follow-up operation two months later, he was so close to death that he was delivered last rites by Father John Cavanaugh, personal priest to the Kennedy family.22 In the late 1950s, Kennedy began taking cortisone shots to control his Addison’s disease, which gave his face the puffy look notable in his later years. During his presidency, there was hushed talk of Kennedy having to resort to a wheelchair if elected to a second term.23

  Following his assassination, it was found that his adrenal glands had wasted away to almost nothing due to Addison’s disease.24

  John and his older brother Joe Jr., in competition to win glory for their nation, and more importantly for their father, would both join the war effort in the 1940s.

  John, the commanding officer of a PT boat that was blown in two in the Solomon Islands, became a war hero after saving the surviving crew. This enflamed the competitive nature of Joe Jr. because it was he who was meant to be the war hero and subsequently use the status to complement his career in politics.

  When, on Joe Sr.’s fifty-fifth birthday, with Joe Jr. in attendance, a guest toasted to the “father of the hero, of our own hero,” it was not a nod to Joe Jr. but to Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy. Joe Jr. was later found in his room by family friend Joseph Timilty sobbing uncontrollably. “By God, I’ll show them,” Joe Jr. muttered.

  Joe Jr. would end his short life by flying dangerous missions as a Navy pilot, trying to win glory. In August 1944, he signed up for a secret mission code-named “Aphrodite.” A PB4Y-1 patrol bomber, Zootsuit Black, was gutted and filled with 21,170 pounds of dynamite. Joe Jr., along with his co-pilot Lt. Wilford J. Willy, were to fly the plane aimed like a guided missile at a German V-1 rocket launching site, parachuting out once the plane was set to be guided by remote control.

  Earl Olsen, an electronics officer, discovered circuit problems on the plane prior to the mission, surmising that the arming-firing functions were faulty. Olsen presented his findings to Kennedy before the mission, and Joe Jr. was given the option to delay plans to correct the problems, but he refused.25 Glory would not wait.

  “I think I’m gonna fly it,” Kennedy said, “but thanks anyway, Oley, I know you mean well. I appreciate it.”26

  When the remote-control guidance system was switched on over the English Channel en route to the German rocket-launching site, an electrical malfunction set off a spark that ignited the heavily loaded plane, which disintegrated, vaporizing the crew.

  “I just had a feeling that plane wasn’t airworthy,” mechanic Willie Newsome, who removed the turret guns for the plane in anticipation of the mission, would say years later.27

  Joe Jr.’s death would be the first in a series of tragedies in the Kennedy family, later dubbed by the press as the “Curse of the Kennedys.” There was no curse, only a family whose privileged nature and commitment to excel led them to make reckless decisions.

  “You cannot live like that,” said Kennedy doctor Henry Betts. “You cannot always just repress everything—but with their sense of destiny and feeling that they are different—and they all really feel that they are different—they make a stronger effort at rep
ression than anybody I’ve ever seen.”28

  With Joe Jr.’s death, John would carry the heavy dreams of Joe Sr., whose political career was destroyed after his failed ambassadorship to the United Kingdom. For John, it would not be a choice.

  “I was drafted,” said John. “My father wanted his eldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it.”29

  It was not without intelligence and charm that John ascended through the ranks of government, but it also was not without Joe Sr.’s money and connections.

  “My father used his money to free us,” Bobby Kennedy once recalled.30

  The truth is more complex.

  Joe Kennedy did use his money to empower the Kennedy clan, but it was the ways that the money had been obtained that made them, unknowingly perhaps, slaves to their history. And it would be those feelings of freedom to do as they wished that would make the Kennedy brothers victims of their past. If anything was cursed, it was the money and the illusion of freedom it possessed. In reality, the chains were clasped tight, ready to drag either Kennedy down.

  When John Kennedy was seeking the highest appointment in the country, it would be Joe’s old bootlegging connections that would help secure the election.

  Chicago Mafia kingpin “Mooney” Giancana had a hand in Kennedy’s success in the 1960 presidential run, persuaded by an intermediary, entertainer Frank Sinatra, with cash and the promise of pardoning future criminal offenses.

  Other members of the underworld were recruited. Many of the nation’s top mafiosi met Joe Kennedy at Felix Young’s restaurant in Manhattan for a dinner meeting during the campaign.

  “I took the reservation,” said a hostess at Young’s. “And it was as though every gangster chief in the United States was there. I don’t remember all the names now, but there was John Rosselli, Carlos Marcello from New Orleans, the two brothers from Dallas, the top men from Buffalo, California, and Colorado. They were all top people, not soldiers. I was amazed Joe Kennedy would take the risk.”31 Joe Kennedy understood well the connection between the democratic machines in Chicago, New York, and Buffalo and the Mob. Kennedy’s organized crime associates leaned on the machine to deliver for JFK.

  “If Jack had known about some of the telephone calls his father made on his behalf to Tammany Hall-type bosses during the 1960 campaign, Jack’s hair would have turned white,”32 Kenny O’Donnell later wrote. John and Robert Kennedy were certainly aware of their father’s connections to the Mob. As attorney general, Robert Kennedy ordered wire taps on some Chicago mobsters, only to learn from the taps that the targets were talking to his father.

  John Kennedy was naïve to the dangers of the Mob and seemed to get a thrill out of consorting with Mob associates. His affair with Judith Exner Campbell, whom he met through Sinatra and shared carnally with both Sam Giancana and Sinatra, exemplifies this. Another example would be Tampa Mob head Santo Trafficante Jr.’s 1957 run-in with John Kennedy in Havana. Kennedy had no problem accepting Trafficante’s offer for a private sex party at one of his hotels, the Commodoro. Trafficante later watched through a two-way mirror as John had his way with three courtesans.33

  While his father and brother used organized crime to their own ends, Bobby Kennedy was out to end it, due largely to his experience as chief counsel to the US Senate Labor Rackets Committee from 1957 to 1959. Bobby Kennedy had come to believe that the Mafia element would destroy the country if left to continue without proper systems in place to hold it accountable for its actions

  “The point I want to make is this,” Kennedy wrote in The Enemy Within, his literary warning regarding the scale and danger of organized crime. “If we do not on a national scale attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us.”34

  Perhaps with more knowledge of how the Mafia already had its hooks in his family and indeed in the government itself, Bobby would have proceeded with more trepidation. Perhaps, but there are indications that Bobby also had knowledge of his father’s underworld indiscretions.

  When poet and friend Robert Lowell asked Bobby about what Shakespearean character he would most like to be, he picked the one he believed he most resembled: Henry V or Prince Hal. He later read to Lowell the swan song of Henry IV, who Bobby believed most resembled Joe Sr., who he felt resembled one of the “foolish over-careful fathers [who] have broken their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care, their bones with industry,” adding that what was left for the Kennedy children was, “the canker’d heaps of strange-achieved gold.”35

  “Henry IV. That’s my father,” Bobby told Lowell.36

  As Bobby looked upon Joe Sr. as the father who misused his power to desirable effect, he looked to himself as Hal, the confused boy who tried to find a way to extricate the sins of the father and forge the path of family and country.

  The Kennedy brothers could also easily be compared to Icarus, the illfated Greek whose waxen wings were forged by his father, Daedalus. Joe Sr. constructed the careers of John and Bobby much like Daedalus constructed the wings of Icarus. The father, as architect, sees the limitations of his construct, but the son perceives the construct as limitless. Much as, against the advice of his father, the sun would melt the wax that fastened the wings tight to Icarus, the Kennedys would also take unneeded risks, flying too high for their wings to carry them.

  Bobby, referred to by Adlai Stevenson as “the Black Prince,” would stop at nothing to meet his desired ends. When he was given the powers of attorney general in 1960, there were only nineteen indictments of organized crime members; by the time of John’s assassination there were over six-hundred. The emotional Bobby did not just want to strip the Mob of their power. At times, he worked to embarrass them.

  During the McClellan Committee’s anti-Mob hearings in the late 1950s, Bobby certainly had trouble holding back his contempt when faced with top-level Mob heads. An exchange between him and an uncooperative “Mooney” Giancana reveals Bobby’s ire:

  KENNEDY: “Would you tell us if you have opposition from anybody that you dispose of them by having them stuffed in a trunk? Is that what you do, Mr. Giancana?”

  GIANCANA: “I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.”

  KENNEDY: “Would you tell us anything about any of your operations, or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question?”

  GIANCANA: “I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.”

  KENNEDY: “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”37

  Later, as attorney general, Bobby would attempt to disrupt Mooney at every turn, ordering FBI agents to watch him at restaurants, at his home, and during his leisure, trailing him to and interfering with golf games.38

  According to Justice Department prosecutor Ronald Goldfarb, Bobby and his aides were considering extreme measures with Giancana. “They said to me what do you think of this idea? The grand jury calls in Giancana, and we offer him total immunity on everything he’s ever done in his whole life, as long as he agrees to talk about every crime the Mafia has ever committed. Of course, he can’t possibly do that, so he’s got to go to jail, and the federal rule is you can only throw someone in jail for contempt for the life of a grand jury, which is eighteen months. But they had a plan: The day Giancana gets out of jail, they say, we call him back to another grand jury and ask him the same question. This goes on and on. Life imprisonment for Sam Giancana? So I think, oh my God, they’re really thinking about doing this—they’re going to take the Mafia leaders one by one and put them in jail indefinitely.”39

  Even though Goldfarb saw Bobby’s actions as courageous and inspired him to join the fight, he also saw the extreme risk involved in Kennedy’s attempt to punish the very people who had helped put the Kennedy brothers in office.

  “He was burning the candle at both ends, pressing the Mob like he did even after his family had used them for favors,” Goldfarb said. “How in God’s name he th
ought he was ever going to get away with this, I don’t know. But they were the Kennedys—they came from a family where the father had done all of that, and they still reached the absolute top. I couldn’t have slept at night knowing what Bobby did! But these people were different.”40

  Surely Joe knew the dangers of Robert Kennedy’s pursuit of organized crime. Perhaps the father had a plan to scale back Bobby’s relentless attacks on the Mafia dons, who had helped them obtain power. The old ambassador certainly knew his son Robert’s views on organized crime. On Christmas 1956, Joe Kennedy and his son clashed. The elder Kennedy made Bobby aware that he was “deeply, emotionally opposed, and father and son had an unprecedentedly furious argument,” said Bobby’s sister, Jean Kennedy Smith.41 Family friend Lem Billings, present at the engagement, concurred. “The old man saw this as dangerous, not the sort of thing or the sort of people to mess around with,”42 said Billings.

  The elder Kennedy was never able to put a stop to his son’s meddling with the Mafia. If he had intentions to, they eventually perished. Whatever Joe might have had planned to rectify the darkening situation, it was lost on December 19, 1961, when Joe Kennedy suffered a crippling stroke, which confined him to a wheelchair for the remainder of his years. The stroke paralyzed his body and left him unable to speak.

  Frank Sinatra saw the ambassador’s stroke as a deathblow to the Kennedys. Ol’ Blue Eyes knew of the favors the Mob did for the Kennedy presidential campaign and that Joe was the only one who could pay up.

  “The tragedy was Joe Kennedy getting a stroke,” said Gore Vidal, a Kennedy family friend. “He could have settled the problem with the Mafia in two minutes.”

  After Joe’s stroke, Robert Kennedy pursued Mafia chieftains Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santo Trafficante of Tampa. Kennedy’s relentless pursuit of the Mob would later ensure its involvement in a conspiracy with Lyndon Johnson, elements of the CIA, and Texas oilmen to murder his brother.