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A far more compelling reason for Kennedy’s decision to make the radio speech was provided by Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, who in 1960 privately told the New York Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger that MI5 had provided Roosevelt with a collection of intercepted Kennedy cables and telephone calls in which the ambassador was critical of the president. The cables were passed to Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill’s close friend and adviser, who, with Churchill’s approval, passed them along to FDR’s trusted aide Harry Hopkins. There is yet another version, which Joe Kennedy told Harvey Klemmer, who was surprised, as were many in London, at Kennedy’s last-minute endorsement of the despised Roosevelt. In his Thames TV interview, Klemmer recalled a later conversation with Kennedy about the radio address. “I said the press was speculating that FDR had dragged out an old tax return and said, ‘Joe, you wouldn’t want me to show this to the public, would you?’ And [Kennedy] said, ‘That’s a damn lie. I fixed that up long ago.’ So,” noted Klemmer, “there had been a tax mix-up at one time or another.”
Whatever the truth, the president and his ambassador had become two scorpions in a bottle: Kennedy could damage and perhaps destroy Roosevelt’s reelection chances by making public the Tyler Kent documents; Roosevelt, with Churchill’s help, had assembled an equally lethal dossier of telephone and cable intercepts. The full story lies buried, perhaps forever, in classified U.S. and British archives.
Kennedy’s half-hour radio speech on October 29 reassured Americans that the United States “must and will stay out of war.” No secret commitments had been made to the British by the Roosevelt administration, Kennedy said. And as for the oft-stated charge that the president was attempting “to involve this country in world war … such a charge is false.” The speech was jolting to those who knew what Kennedy really understood about Roosevelt’s war policy. In his memoirs, Arthur Krock noted: “The speech was out of keeping, not only with the wholly opposite view he had been expressing privately (to me, among others), but with Kennedy’s earned reputation as one of the most forthright men in public life.”
Three days after the election, Kennedy self-destructed. In an interview with Louis Lyons of the Boston Globe and two other journalists, he essentially declared that Hitler had won the war in Europe. “Democracy is finished in England,” Kennedy told Lyons. “Don’t let anybody tell you you can get used to incessant bombing. There’s nowhere in England they aren’t getting it.… It’s a question of how long England can hold out.… I’m willing to spend all I’ve got to keep us out of the war. There’s no sense in our getting in. We’d just be holding the bag.” The story made headlines. The American response was devastating for Kennedy: thousands of citizens wrote Roosevelt urging him to fire his defeatist ambassador. The British took it in stride, more astonished by Kennedy’s suicidal indiscretion in granting the interview than by its substance. Kennedy’s departure from London, during the Battle of Britain, with its nightly bombings and aerial dogfights, was seen by many as a cowardly retreat under fire. T. North Whitehead, one of the American specialists in the British Foreign Office, filed yet another caustic note in the office’s Kennediana file: “It rather looks as though he was thoroughly frightened when in London and has gone to pieces in consequence.”
The interview eroded Kennedy’s public support and ended his dreams of being elected to high public office in 1940. It also gave his enemies the courage to be his enemies.
Roosevelt finally lashed out at Kennedy after a private meeting with him at Thanksgiving; Kennedy was to be a weekend guest of the president and his wife at their estate at Hyde Park. It is not known precisely what took place, but Roosevelt ordered Kennedy to leave. Eleanor Roosevelt later told the writer Gore Vidal that she had never seen her husband so angry. Kennedy had been alone with the president no longer than ten minutes, Mrs. Roosevelt related, when an aide informed her that she was to go immediately to her husband’s office.
So I rushed into the office and there was Franklin, white as a sheet. He asked Mr. Kennedy to step outside and then he said, and his voice was shaking, “I never want to see that man again as long as I live. Get him out of here.” I said, “But, dear, you’ve invited him for the weekend, and we’ve got guests for lunch and the train doesn’t leave until two,” and Franklin said, “Then you drive him around Hyde Park and put him on that train.” And I did and it was the most dreadful four hours of my life.
Just what happened between the two men is not known, but Vidal, recounting the scene in a 1971 essay for the New York Review of Books, quoted Mrs. Roosevelt as wistfully adding, “I wonder if the true story of Joe Kennedy will ever be known.” (Discussing the scene years later, in an interview for this book, Vidal said he thought at the time that Mrs. Roosevelt’s real message was not only that the truth about Kennedy would not be known, but that it would be “too dangerous to tell.”)
Kennedy’s resignation as ambassador became official early in 1941. He would never serve in public office again.
Kennedy soon learned that having Roosevelt as an enemy meant having J. Edgar Hoover as an enemy, too. Published and private reports available to the White House and the British Foreign Ministry early in 1941 alleged that a notorious Wall Street speculator named Bernard E. “Ben” Smith had traveled to Vichy France in an attempt to revive an isolationist plan, favored by Kennedy, to provide Germany with a large gold loan in exchange for a pledge of peace. Kennedy, still intent on saving American capitalism from the ravages of war, was described in one British document as “doing everything in his power to try and bring this about.” Smith, known as “Sell ’Em Ben” in his Wall Street heyday, was identified as Kennedy’s emissary. In a confidential report to the Foreign Ministry dated February 4, Kennedy was reported to have sent Smith to visit senior officials of Vichy France in an effort to encourage “Hitler to try to find some formula for the reconstruction of Europe.… Having secured this, [Kennedy] hoped that, with the help of two prominent persons in England.… [he could] start an agitation in England in favour of a negotiated peace.” Roosevelt had learned of the Kennedy plan in advance, according to the Foreign Office report, and was able to abort it. Smith, a heavy contributor to Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign, did travel to Vichy France in late 1940, but the plan went nowhere. On May 3, 1941, nonetheless, Hoover—getting his facts wrong—told Roosevelt that the FBI had learned from a “socially prominent” source that Kennedy and Smith had met secretly with Hermann Göring in Vichy, “and that thereafter Kennedy and Smith had donated a considerable amount of money to the German cause.” There was no evidence that Kennedy went to Europe with Smith, and no evidence that a meeting with Göring took place; but Hoover clearly understood that the discredited Kennedy was fair game—at least inside FDR’s White House.
By December 7, 1941, with Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and America finally in the war, it was over for Joe Kennedy. Caught up in his ambitions and his fears for the world economy, he had failed to see how Franklin Roosevelt connected to the American people. Kennedy, with his relentless social climbing and political scheming, had been on the wrong side of the greatest moral issue in his life—the need to stop Hitler’s Germany. It was a mistake his son Jack would not make.
Joe Kennedy’s political ambitions shifted, with a vengeance, to his two oldest sons, who would become his political surrogates, and would get the benefit of his money, intellect, and willingness to do anything. Joe Jr. was completing navy flight training in Jacksonville, Florida; Jack, a navy ensign, was assigned to the headquarters of the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, where he was put to work writing daily and weekly intelligence bulletins.
Even with the war on, Jack Kennedy still managed to find time for partying. Just before the end of the year he initiated a torrid affair with a married Danish journalist, Inga Marie Arvad, who was estranged from her husband, a Hungarian movie director named Paul Fejos. Arvad, a former beauty queen, had interviewed Hitler and briefly socialized with him and other leading Nazis in 1936, while covering the Olympics for a Danish newspaper. She had been spotted by Arthur Krock while attending the Columbia School of Journalism in 1941. Krock recommended her to Frank Waldrop, the editor of the isolationist Washington Times-Herald, and Waldrop hired her to write a fluffy human interest column that focused on new arrivals to wartime Washington. Jack Kennedy was among those she interviewed. The handsome twenty-four-year-old navy officer fell in love with the older, more experienced, and far more sophisticated former beauty queen.
The FBI, alerted to Arvad’s meeting with Hitler by a jealous fellow reporter on the Times-Herald, marked her as a potential Nazi spy and began an investigation into her background. One early allegation, eventually discredited, was that Arvad’s uncle was a chief of police in Berlin. By early 1942, J. Edgar Hoover, at the direct insistence of FDR, became personally involved in the Arvad investigation. The next step was classic Hoover. Walter Winchell, firmly established as the FBI director’s favorite columnist, published the following item on January 12: “One of Ex-Ambassador Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections. So much so she has consulted her barrister about divorcing her exploring groom. Pa Kennedy no like.” A few days later, Hoover personally relayed a warning to Joe Kennedy, as JFK told it, that “Jack was in big trouble and he should get him out of Washington immediately.”
Eager to save his son’s career, Joe Kennedy arranged for Jack’s immediate transfer to a desk job at a base in Charleston, South Carolina. Jack continued, nonetheless, to meet with Arvad for the next two months, as the FBI—at Hoover’s direction—maintained round-the-clock surveillance, wiretapping her in Charleston and at her apartment in Washington. Agents even broke into her apartment to plant eavesdropping devices and to search through her papers and other belongings. No evidence linking Arvad to any wrongdoing was found, but the FBI—and Hoover—accumulated a large file of explicit tape recordings of the lovers at play. Joe Kennedy was overheard on the FBI wiretaps discussing politics with his son, who, the transcripts showed, was writing drafts of his father’s speeches. One FBI summary, as reported in JFK: Reckless Youth, by the British biographer Nigel Hamilton, showed that Joe Kennedy had political ambitions at an early stage not only for Joe Jr., as is widely known, but also for his second-born son. The FBI summary said Jack told Arvad that his father had stopped fully defending his very unpopular political positions in public “due to the fact that he believed it might hurt his two sons later in public.” The FBI wiretaps further showed that Arvad, while involved with Jack Kennedy, was also spending some nights with Bernard Baruch, the international financier and stock market speculator, who was close to the White House.
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Young Kennedy’s involvement with Arvad dwindled by early March. Arvad got divorced in June 1942, moved to California, married the cowboy movie star Tim McCoy, and received her American citizenship. One of her references was Frank Waldrop, her former editor. In an unpublished essay written in 1978 and provided for this book, Waldrop, by then long retired, whimsically recalled how the much-ado-about-nothing FBI investigation had begun. A young female Times-Herald journalist who, wrote Waldrop, was Arvad’s rival for the attentions of the handsome Jack Kennedy, breathlessly informed him in the office one day that Arvad had been photographed in Hitler’s box during the 1936 Olympics. “That did it,” Waldrop wrote. “There was a row. So I took Inga by the elbow on one side and the other girl on the other and marched the pair of them over to the Washington field office of the FBI and told the agent in charge: ‘This young lady says that young lady is a German spy.’” At the time, Waldrop wrote, he did not know that a similar report by a fellow female student at the Columbia School of Journalism had been filed the previous year. “Nor did I guess what was going to happen next”—that a memorandum was sent by Roosevelt “directly to Hoover calling on him to have Inga ‘specially watched.’ How did FDR find out about Inga? Who broke in on his war planning to tell him about so trivial a matter, at the very time that the most critical moment of the war in the Pacific—the Battle of Midway—was in the making? I don’t know, though I have tried to find out.” In the end, Waldrop concluded, “Inga was no spy. Never had been. I have the official conclusions of the Department of Justice.”
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Waldrop’s assertions were confirmed in an interview with Cartha DeLoach, the FBI’s deputy director who worked closely with Hoover for nearly thirty years. “The investigation on Inga Arvad never conclusively proved that she was a German espionage agent,” DeLoach told me in 1997. “She had an amorous relationship with John F. Kennedy. And basically that’s what the files contained. She was never indicted, never brought into court, never convicted.”
Joe Kennedy understood what was going on. While some FBI field agents perhaps believed they were dealing with a true national security threat in the pretty Inga Arvad, the men at the top—Franklin Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover—were interested in payback, in reminding Joe Kennedy to stay in line and to remember that he was dealing with enemies who would be only too happy to hurt him. The FBI, as Joe Kennedy had to understand, had enough in its file on Jack Kennedy, complete with sound effects, to stop a future political career in its tracks.
Joe Kennedy knew what to do to safeguard his ambitions for his sons off at war. He had strayed from the church of Hoover and now sought redemption. In September 1943, Freedom of Information files show, Kennedy volunteered himself to the FBI bureau in Boston as a “Special Service Contact” and declared that “he would be glad to assist the Bureau in any way possible should his services be needed.” In a letter to Hoover, Edward A. Soucy, the agent in charge of the Boston Bureau, added: “Mr. Kennedy speaks very highly of the Bureau and the director, and has indicated that if he were ever in a position to make any official recommendations there would be one Federal investigative unit and that would be headed by J. Edgar Hoover.” A pleased Hoover accepted Kennedy’s offer and outlined, in a subsequent letter to Soucy, some of the requirements: “Every effort should be made to provide him [Kennedy] with investigative assignments in keeping with his particular ability and the Bureau should be advised as to the nature of these assignments, together with the results obtained.”
The full extent of Joe Kennedy’s machinations will never be known, but he left little to chance. The investigation into Inga Arvad and her relationship with Ensign Jack Kennedy had been supervised inside the Justice Department by James M. McInerney, who in 1942 was chief of the department’s national defense and internal security units. A former FBI agent, McInerney would remain in high policy positions in the Justice Department for the next ten years. In late 1952 McInerney successfully intervened to get Bobby Kennedy, just a year out of law school, a job as a staff attorney on the powerful Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In 1953 McInerney went into the practice of law as a sole practitioner, opening up a small office on F Street in downtown Washington. Joe Kennedy and his three sons, Jack, Bobby, and Ted, were among his first clients, and they remained certainly his most important ones. Over the next decade, James McInerney would handle many sensitive matters on behalf of the Kennedy family and Jack Kennedy’s presidential ambitions. Women were seen, bribes were offered, and cases were settled—all in secrecy.
(#ulink_f411ac97-1c91-5c99-9b42-ed826d1b7d7d) Kent, after seeing Costello, kept on talking. In a separate interview later in 1982 with the BBC’s Newsnight television show, he explained how easy it had been to smuggle the cable traffic out of the embassy code room. One source, he told the journalist Richard Harris, was to obtain cable copies that were “surplus and were to be incinerated … burnt in an incinerator.… Another source was that Ambassador Kennedy was having copies of important political documents made for his own private collection. Part of my function was to make these copies, and it was quite simple to slip in an extra carbon.” The BBC show reported that Kent, described as an “amateur,” had been followed for eight months by British counterintelligence before his arrest.
(#ulink_41b8a1ee-392a-5660-bc00-0628ebaba969) Arvad’s nickname for Baruch, Frank Waldrop told me, was “the old goat.” Baruch could be very indiscreet, Waldrop wrote in an unpublished essay made available for this book, and the FBI agents assigned to wiretap the Arvad apartment gossiped about Baruch’s many telephone conversations with her. During the early years of the war, Waldrop said, he often traded gossip with the old financier, sometimes over lunch on a bench in Lafayette Park, near the White House. “It was on just such a bench,” Waldrop recalled, “that I heard about what was going on down at Oak Ridge, Tennessee—something about a bomb made of split atoms—for which Baruch was helping put together the labor force. He told me to keep mum and I did, but that should signify that Baruch was a very heavy carrier of important information in World War II. And he was tickled to have Inga come up to visit him, weekends, at his place on Long Island. He also carried on long palavers with her on the telephone which the FBI faithfully took down.” It’s not known whether Hoover, an expert on double standards, intervened with Baruch, as he did with Joe Kennedy.
(#ulink_20c9a7d1-3c95-5557-80c1-5aee1f0b982b)In an interview for this book in 1995, the ninety-year-old Waldrop, who first met Joe Kennedy, a fellow isolationist, in the 1930s, said that “the best way I know how to tell you how much smarter Franklin Roosevelt was than Joe Kennedy” was by citing a classic FDR story that had been relayed to him by Edward A. Tamm, a senior aide to Hoover who later became a highly respected judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Tamm began, Waldrop said, by asking whether Waldrop “knew the difference between an amateur and a pro.” Waldrop said no. Tamm then told him the following: “FDR asked Hoover to come along to the White House. Hoover brought me along. He asked Hoover to get the goods on Jim Farley,” the politically contentious postmaster general who was suspected by Roosevelt of leaking inside stories to an anti-Roosevelt newspaper columnist.
“Hoover said, ‘I won’t do it.’
“FDR outraged: ‘What!’
“Hoover: ‘I won’t do it.’
“FDR: ‘I’m ordering you to.’”
At this point, Tamm told Waldrop, Roosevelt was “quick enough to realize something was up. He asked Hoover: ‘Why not?’
“Hoover: ‘I’ll put it on the other guy’”—the reporter—rather than wiretap a member of the cabinet.
“Roosevelt almost fell down laughing,” Tamm told Waldrop, “and said, ‘Edgar, I’m not going to tell you your business anymore.’”
Waldrop’s point was that Roosevelt was tougher than Kennedy in ways Kennedy could not fathom: “Joe never understood how FDR could smile and smile and be a villain. Joe thought once he was dealing with a friend, they could make a crooked deal.”
7 NOMINATION FOR SALE (#ulink_e8985bbc-93dd-53b6-937e-f16a4713f451)
John F. Kennedy’s rise is a story that has been told and retold in hundreds of biographies and histories. The senator, always suntanned, with his photogenic wife and daughter, was the subject of articles for national magazines month after month in the late 1950s. When he wasn’t being interviewed, the senator, who relied on speechwriters on his staff and those in the pay of his father, published scores of newspaper and magazine articles as well as the bestselling Profiles in Courage, which won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Kennedy’s political standing was given an enormous boost at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, when he narrowly lost a dramatic floor fight against Senator Estes Kefauver for the nomination as Adlai Stevenson’s vice presidential running mate in the party’s doomed campaign against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy’s grace and seeming good humor in defeat, and his boyish good looks—viewed by millions of television watchers—overrode his lackluster record in the Senate and made him an early favorite for the party’s nomination in 1960. Kennedy ran hard over the next four years, spending most weekends making speeches and paying political dues at fund-raising dinners across America.
He made his mark not in the Senate, where his legislative output remained undistinguished, but among the voters, who responded to Kennedy as they would to a famous athlete or popular movie star. From the start the campaign was orchestrated by Joe Kennedy, who as a one-time Hollywood mogul understood that his son should run for president as a star and not as just another politician. In an exceptionally candid interview in late 1959 at Hyannis Port with the journalist Ed Plaut, then writing a preelection biography of Jack, the elder Kennedy said that his son had become “the greatest attraction in the country today. I’ll tell you how to sell more copies of your book,” Kennedy told Plaut. “Put his picture on the cover.” Plaut made a transcript of his interview available for this book.
“Why is it,” Kennedy asked, “that when his picture is on the cover of Life or Redbook that they sell a record number of copies? You advertise the fact that he will be at a dinner and you will break all records for attendance. He will draw more people to a fund-raising dinner than Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart and anyone else you can name. Why is that? He has the greatest universal appeal. I can’t explain that. There is no answer to Jack’s appeal. He is the biggest attraction in the country today. That is why the Democratic Party is going to nominate him. The party leaders realize that to win they have to nominate him.
“The nomination is a cinch,” Joe Kennedy told the reporter. “I’m not a bit worried about the nomination.”
By the summer of 1960, with brother Bobby serving as campaign manager and father Joe as a one-man political brain trust—as well as secret paymaster—Jack Kennedy arrived at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles as an unstoppable front-runner who apparently had earned the right to be the presidential candidate by running in, and winning, Democratic primary elections across America. He had conducted a brilliant campaign that would set the standard for future generations of ambitious politicians, especially in its relentless tracking and cataloguing of delegate votes. One of Kennedy’s loyal aides, Ted Sorensen, would describe admiringly in Kennedy, his 1965 memoir, how Kennedy went over the heads of the backroom politicians and took his campaign to the people:
He had during 1960 alone traveled some 65,000 air miles in more than two dozen states—many of them in the midst of crucial primary fights, most of them with his wife—and he made some 350 speeches on every conceivable subject. He had voted, introduced bills or spoken on every current issue, without retractions or apologies. He had talked in person to state conventions, party leaders, delegates and tens of thousands of voters. He had used every spare moment on the telephone. He had made no promises he could not keep and promised no jobs to anyone.
What no outsider could imagine—and what Sorensen did not write about—was the obstacles overcome and the carefully hidden deals engineered as Kennedy achieved one political victory after another en route to Los Angeles.
Kennedy’s most important primary victory came on May 10 in West Virginia. In his campaigning in the state, Kennedy directly confronted the religious issue, telling audiences, for example, that no one cared that he was a Catholic when he was asked to fight in World War II. He defeated Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota by more than 84,000 votes. In his memoir, Sorensen quoted another of Kennedy’s unsuccessful rivals for the nomination, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, as saying after the convention: “He had just a little more courage, … stamina, wisdom and character than any of the rest of us.”
Sorensen’s account, as with so much of the Kennedy history as told by Kennedy insiders, has many elements of truth but is far from the whole story. The Kennedys did not depend solely on hard work and stamina to win the primary elections en route to the Democratic nomination. They spent as never before in American political history. In West Virginia, the Kennedys spent at least $2 million (nearly $11 million in today’s dollars), and possibly twice that amount—much of it in direct payoffs to state and local officials.
A far more complete account of the campaign emerges in the unpublished memoir of one of Kennedy’s most trusted, and little-known, advisers during the 1960 campaign, Hyman B. Raskin, a Chicago lawyer who had helped manage Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956. Raskin had been recruited in late 1957 by Joe Kennedy, and secretly paid, to help plan and organize his son’s drive for the presidency. Raskin, who after the 1960 election retired to his law practice, died in comfortable obscurity in 1995 at the age of eighty-six in Rancho Mirage, California. His widow, Frances, later provided for this book a copy of his memoir, entitled A Laborer in the Vineyards, which contains a rare firsthand account of Joe Kennedy’s direct, and powerful, intervention in national politics on behalf of his son—interventions that were always hidden from the press. In Raskin’s account, the combination of unlimited campaign funding, Joe Kennedy’s high-level political connections, and Jack Kennedy’s strong showing in the Democratic primaries—especially his West Virginia victory—enabled the Kennedys to fly to Los Angeles knowing they had enough ironclad delegate commitments to win on the first ballot.
At the convention site, Raskin was entrusted with the all-important task of running communications. The Kennedys, in one of their political innovations, had leased a trailer and filled it with state-of-the-art communications gear that enabled the campaign’s backroom operators to reach the leaders of state delegations instantly. In his memoir, Raskin depicted the convention as anticlimactic for the campaign insiders: “We were confident that the [delegate count] numbers which the state reports produced would closely approximate those we had before the initial [convention] meeting was held.… It appeared impossible for Kennedy to lose the nomination. The votes merely needed to be officially tabulated; therefore, in my opinion, if he failed, it would be the result of some uncontrollable event.”
Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson’s last-minute declaration just days before the convention that he would, after all, be a candidate for the presidency—an announcement that created a flurry of press reports—was too little, too late, in Raskin’s view. “The front-runner was unbeatable,” he wrote. “For unknown reasons, some members of the press refused to concede the nomination of Kennedy, ignoring the arithmetic reported by their associates.… Johnson and his managers must have had access to the same information. Much of it was published and verifiable through Johnson connections in almost every state. Why then, I asked myself, did the anti-Kennedy forces continue their futile struggle?” Johnson stayed in the race until the presidential balloting and suffered an overwhelming defeat by Kennedy on the convention floor.
The fact that Kennedy had locked up the nomination weeks in advance of the convention was one of the campaign’s secrets. There were other secrets far more damaging, any one of which, if exposed, could cost the handsome young candidate his otherwise assured presidential nomination.
The most dangerous problem confronting the Kennedys before the convention was the hardest to fix, for it was posed by a group of reporters from the Wall Street Journal who were raising questions about the huge sums of cash that had been spent by the Kennedys to assure victory in the West Virginia primary. Their story, triggered by the instincts of an on-the-scene journalist, never made it into print.
Alan L. Otten, the Journal correspondent who covered the campaign, had been stunned by the strong Kennedy showing. He had spent weeks walking through the cities and towns of the coal counties and concluded, as he wrote for the Journal, that Humphrey would capitalize on the pronounced anti-Catholicism in West Virginia and win the Democratic primary handily. “Every miner I talked to was going to vote for Humphrey,” Otten recalled in a 1994 interview for this book. The reporter, who later became chief of the Journal’s news bureau in Washington, was suspicious when the votes were counted and urged his newspaper to undertake an extensive investigation into Kennedy vote buying. “We were fairly convinced that huge sums of money traded hands,” Otten told me.
Buying votes was nothing new in West Virginia, where political control was tightly held by sheriffs or political committeemen in each of the state’s fifty-five counties. Their control was abetted by the enormous number of candidates who competed for local office in the Democratic primary, resulting in huge paper ballots that made voting a potentially interminable process. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1960 campaign, The Making of the President, 1960, the journalist Theodore H. White noted that the primary ballots for Kanawha County, largest in the state, filled three full pages when published the day before in the Charleston Gazette. Sheriffs and other political leaders in each county made the process less bewildering for voters by putting together lists, or slates, of approved party candidates for each office. Some candidates for statewide offices or for important local posts, such as sheriff or assessor, invariably ended up on two, three, or more slates passed out on election day by campaign workers. The unwieldy procedure continues today.
The sheriffs and party leaders were also responsible for hiring precinct workers and poll watchers for election day. Political tradition in the state called for the statewide candidates to pay some or all of the county’s election expenses in return for being placed at the top of a political leader’s slate. Paying a few dollars per vote on election day was widespread in some areas, as was the payment for “Lever Brothers” (named after the popular detergent maker)—election officers in various precincts who were instructed to actually walk into the ballot booth with voters and cast their ballots for them.
The Journal’s investigative team, which included Roscoe C. Born, of the Washington bureau, spent the next five weeks in May and June in West Virginia and learned that the Kennedys had turned what had historically been random election fraud into a statewide pattern of corruption, and had apparently stolen the election from Hubert Humphrey. The reporters concluded that huge sums of Kennedy money had been funneled into the state, much of it from Chicago, where R. Sargent Shriver, a Chicagoan who had married Jack’s sister Eunice in 1953, represented the family’s business interests. The reporters were told that much of the money had been delivered by a longtime Shriver friend named James B. McCahey, Jr., who was president of a Chicago coal company that held contracts for delivering coal to the city’s public school system. As a coal buyer earlier in his career, McCahey had spent time traveling through West Virginia, whose mines routinely produced more than 100 million tons of coal a year. Roscoe Born and a colleague traveled to Chicago to interview McCahey “and he snowed us completely,” Born recalled in a series of interviews for this book. Nonetheless, the reporter said, “there was no doubt in my mind that [Kennedy] money was dispensed to local machines where they controlled the votes.”
Born, convinced that he and his colleagues had collected enough information to write a devastating exposé, moved with his typewriter into a hotel near the Journal’s office in downtown Washington. He was facing a stringent deadline—the Democratic convention was only a few weeks away—and also a great deal of unease among the newspaper’s senior editors.
As with many investigative newspaper stories, there was no smoking gun: none of the newspaper’s sources reported seeing a representative of the Kennedy campaign give money to a West Virginian. “We knew they were meeting,” Otten recalled in our interview, “but we had nothing showing the actual handing over of money.” The Journal’s top editors asked for affidavits from some of the sources who were to be quoted in the exposé; when the journalists could not obtain them, the editors ruled that the article could not be published. “The story could have been written, but we’d have to imply, rather than nail down, some elements,” Born said. “I really wanted to do it, but I can see that the editors would be nervous about doing it practically on the eve of the convention.” Other Journal reporters were told that Born and his colleagues had “gotten the goods,” as one put it, on the Kennedy spending in West Virginia. The columnist Robert D. Novak, then a political reporter on the Journal, recalled in an interview for this book hearing that the newspaper’s top management had concluded that the West Virginia money story could affect the proceedings in Los Angeles, and it was not “the place of the Wall Street Journal to determine the Democratic nominee for president.”
The Journal’s reporting team was far closer to the truth than its editors could imagine. Jack Kennedy had wanted a clean sweep in the April 5 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, aiming to defeat Hubert Humphrey in all ten of the state’s congressional districts, and he campaigned long hours to get one. He was bitterly disappointed when he won only six districts—and, most important, when his showing failed to discourage the equally hardworking Humphrey, who decided to continue his presidential campaigning in West Virginia. It was understood by professional politicians that Humphrey, too, would be putting in as much money as he could to meet the inevitable bribery demands of the county sheriffs. The Kennedy team also feared that other Democratic opponents for the nomination, Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson among them, would urge their backers to shove money into the state on Humphrey’s behalf in an effort to stop Kennedy and deadlock the convention.
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West Virginia thus became the ultimate battleground for the Democratic nomination, and the Kennedys threw every family member and prominent friend they had, and many dollars, at defeating Humphrey. At stake was not only Jack’s presidency, but Joe Kennedy’s dream of a family dynasty: Bobby was to be his brother’s successor.
In interviews for this book, many West Virginia county and state officials revealed that the Kennedy family spent upward of $2 million in bribes and other payoffs before the May 10, 1960, primary, with some sheriffs in key counties collecting more than $50,000 apiece in cash in return for placing Kennedy’s name at the top of their election slate. Much of the money was distributed personally by Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. The Kennedy campaign would publicly claim after the convention that only $100,000 had been spent in West Virginia (out of a total of $912,500 in expenses for the entire campaign). But what went on in West Virginia was no secret to those on the inside. In his 1978 memoir, In Search of History, Theodore White wrote what he had not written in his book on the 1960 campaign—that both Humphrey and Kennedy were buying votes in West Virginia. White also acknowledged in the memoir that his strong affection for Kennedy had turned him, and many of his colleagues, from objective journalists to members of a loyal claque. White stayed in the claque to the end, claiming in his memoir, without any apparent evidence, that “Kennedy’s vote-buyers were evenly matched with Humphrey’s.”
In later years, even the most loyal of the loyalists acknowledged what happened in the West Virginia primary. In one of her interviews in 1994, Evelyn Lincoln said, “I know they bought the election.” And Jerry Bruno, who served as one of Kennedy’s most dependable advance men in the 1960 campaign, similarly said in an interview: “Every time I’d walk into a town [in West Virginia], they thought I was a bagman. They used to move polling places if you didn’t give them the money. We didn’t do it better, but we got the people who at least were half-honest. The Hubert people—they’d take the money and then come to see us.”
The most compelling evidence was supplied by James McCahey, the Chicago coal buyer, who refused to cooperate with the Wall Street Journal in 1960. In a 1996 interview for this book, he revealed that the political payoffs in West Virginia had begun in October 1959, when young Teddy Kennedy traveled across the state distributing cash to the Democratic committeeman in each county. McCahey was told later that the payoffs amounted to $5,000 per committeeman, a total expenditure of roughly $275,000. McCahey, who left the coal business in Chicago for the railroad business (he retired in 1985 as a senior vice president of the Chessie System Railroads, in Cleveland), added that the Wall Street Journal’s suspicions of him were wrong: his assignment in West Virginia had not been to make payoffs but to organize the teachers in each county “and help them get out the word about Kennedy.” Through this assignment he was able to learn a great deal about what was going on in the state.
McCahey, a major fund-raiser in 1960 for Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, was also a strong Kennedy supporter and had been assigned to direct the Kennedy campaign in the southern districts of Wisconsin. After the disappointing results there, McCahey told me, Sargent Shriver telephoned and invited him to an important insiders strategy meeting in Huntington, West Virginia, that had been put together by Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and included Jack’s brother-in-law Stephen Smith, the campaign’s finance director. New polling was showing a precipitous drop in support for Kennedy among West Virginians; the subject of the meeting was how to get the campaign back on track. It was then, McCahey said, that he learned about Teddy Kennedy’s efforts the previous fall to pay for support from the county committeemen.
“It didn’t work at all,” McCahey told me. “You don’t go into a primary [in West Virginia] and spread money around to committeemen. The local committeeman will take your money and do nothing. The sheriff is the important guy” in each county. “You give it to the sheriff. That’s the name you see on the political banners when you go into a town.” McCahey further recalled being told at the meeting that Joe Kennedy believed that the buying of sheriffs “was the way to do it.”
The sheriffs, it was understood, had enormous discretion in the handling of the cash. Some would generously apportion the cash to their supporters; others would pocket most of the money.
McCahey recalled that his essential contribution was to tell the Kennedys “to forget what you’ve done and start again. I laid out a plan”—to organize teachers and other grassroots workers—“and they said go.” He also worked closely with Shriver in visiting the major coal-producing companies in the state, all of which he knew well from his days as a buyer. “I’d drop into the local coal places and ask the fellows, ‘What’s going on?’” McCahey acknowledged passing out some cash to local political leaders while at work in West Virginia, paying as much as $2,000 for storefront rentals and for hiring cars to bring voters to the polls on primary day. He knew that far larger sums of money were paid to the sheriffs in the last weeks of the campaign. “If they did spend two million dollars,” McCahey told me, with a laugh, in response to a question, “they figured, ‘Hell, let McCahey go [with his plan to organize teachers and the like].’ They had lots of angles.”
There is evidence that Robert Kennedy was, as Teddy had been earlier, a paymaster in the hectic weeks before the May 10 primary. Victor Gabriel, of Clarksburg, a supervisor for the West Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission who ran the Kennedy campaign that spring in Harrison County, recalled in an interview for this book a meeting before the election with Bobby and the ever-loyal Charles Spalding. Gabriel told the two men that he needed only $5,000 in election-day expenses to win the county for them. The exceedingly low estimate, Gabriel told me, caused Spalding to exclaim, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gabriel, eighty-two years old when interviewed in 1996, refused to take any more cash and delivered his county, as promised, on election night. Gabriel joined other Kennedy workers at a gala victory celebration at the Kanawha Hotel in Charleston. At some point during the party, he said, a grateful Bobby Kennedy ushered him into the privacy of a bathroom and pulled out a little black book. “You could have gotten this,” Kennedy told him, as he pointed to a page in the book, “to get people on the bandwagon.” Kennedy’s notebook showed that as much as $40,000 had been given to Sid Christie, an attorney who was the top Democrat of McDowell County, in the heart of the state’s coal belt in the south. The Kennedy notebook made it clear, Gabriel told me, that the campaign had “spent a bundle” to get the all-important support of all the sheriffs and political leaders in the south.
Gabriel told me that he had no second thoughts about the relatively small amount of Kennedy money he had requested. “I told [Bobby] what I needed and didn’t take a damn dime more,” Gabriel said. “All I had to do was tell him fifteen thousand or twenty thousand, instead of five thousand, and I’d have got it. But I don’t operate that way. If you’re going to be for a man, be for him.” The sheriffs who took more than $5,000, Gabriel told me, were simply pocketing the money.
Two former state officials acknowledged during 1995 interviews for this book that they also knew of large-scale Kennedy spending.
Bonn Brown of Elkins was the personal attorney to W. W. “Wally” Barron, who was elected Democratic governor of West Virginia in 1960. He estimated the Kennedy outlay at between $3 million and $5 million, with some sheriffs being paid as much as $50,000. Asked how he knew, Brown told me curtly, “I know. If you don’t get those guys”—the sheriffs—“they will really fight you.” In his role as adviser to the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Brown met with Robert Kennedy and other campaign officials “and told them who to see and what to do, but stayed clear of it myself. Bobby was smart and mean as a snake. I think he had more to do with West Virginia”—the victory there, and the payoffs—“than any other person. Bobby ran it; he was the one who set it up.” Governor Barron was later convicted on bribery charges, and Brown was later convicted of the attempted bribery of a juror in the case.
Curtis B. Trent, of Charleston, who served as executive assistant to Governor Barron, also recalled that the Kennedys “were spreading it around pretty heavy. I thought they spent two million dollars.” Trent, like Bonn Brown, insisted that he did not personally take any Kennedy money. “They were trying to push it off on us,” he recalled. “I’d explain to them that I was concerned with the governor’s race and not the president’s race.” Kennedy reacted typically to Trent’s refusal to help: “Bobby was so mad … just as angry as he could be.” Trent, like more than a dozen officials of the Barron administration, the most corrupt in the history of the state, was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to a jail term in 1969.
The Gabriel, Brown, and Trent accounts are buttressed by Rein Vander Zee, a former FBI agent who had been working since early January 1960 in Humphrey’s West Virginia campaign. Vander Zee was responsible for dealing with the sheriffs of West Virginia, and had—for a price—received their political commitments for Humphrey. “Four or five days before the primary,” Vander Zee, now living in Bandera, Texas, told me in an interview in 1995, “I couldn’t get some of my people on the phone. I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ and got in my car and started driving. They were laying out—the sheriffs—and I knew something was way wrong. The Humphrey signs were down and Kennedy signs were up. I met Sid Christie, who was supposed to be our man [in McDowell County] all the way. He was the absolute boss down there.” Vander Zee arranged a meeting with Christie in the rural town of Keystone. “We sat in his car across from a deserted movie theater, like a scene from The Last Picture Show. I said, ‘What can be done?’” Christie dryly responded: “It’s too late. I didn’t realize what a groundswell of support there’d be for this other fellow.”
Vander Zee said he and Humphrey later held a last-ditch conference with Wally Barron, the governor-to-be: “We asked him what had to be done. I always liked Wally.” Barron gave Humphrey the bad news: he was being vastly outspent by the Kennedys. “He said he had a figure [of Kennedy expenditures] that was something we couldn’t meet,” Vander Zee said. Years later, a West Virginia political professional told Vander Zee that he watched as Christie received a huge payoff from a Kennedy insider—at least $40,000, the professional said—“in green in a shoe box.” Kennedy received 84 percent of the Democratic primary vote on May 10 in McDowell County.
In the years after Kennedy’s assassination, many people would take credit for his strong showing in West Virginia.
In his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, published in 1976, Hubert Humphrey told of a 1966 meeting with Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, in which Cushing expressed anger at what he called the self-aggrandizement of various Kennedy aides, such as Ted Sorensen. “I keep reading these books by the young men around Jack Kennedy and how they claim credit for electing him,” Cushing told Humphrey. “I’ll tell you who elected Jack Kennedy. It was his father, Joe, and me, right here in this room.” Humphrey and an aide sat in stunned silence as Cushing told how he and Joe Kennedy had agreed that West Virginia’s anti-Catholicism could be countered by a series of cash contributions to Protestant churches, particularly in the black community. Cushing continued, Humphrey wrote: “We decided which church and preacher would get two hundred dollars or one hundred dollars or five hundred dollars.”
The most widespread misinformation about the West Virginia election involves the role of organized crime, which, according to countless magazine articles and books over the past thirty years, supplied the cash that enabled Kennedy to win. The allegations center on Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, the New Jersey nightclub owner who in 1960 became general manager of a Nevada gambling lodge owned in part by Frank Sinatra and his good friend Sam Giancana of Chicago. D’Amato’s account, as repeatedly published, is that he was approached by Joe Kennedy during the primary campaign and asked to raise money for West Virginia. D’Amato agreed to do so, with one demand: if Jack Kennedy was successful in gaining the White House, he would reverse a 1956 federal deportation order for Joey Adonis, the New Jersey gang leader. With Joe Kennedy’s promise, D’Amato raised $50,000 for West Virginia from assorted gangsters. D’Amato, who died in 1984, has been quoted as telling a business associate that the $50,000 was used not for direct bribes but to purchase desks, chairs, and other supplies needed by local politicians. After Kennedy’s election, D’Amato said, he reminded Joe Kennedy of his pledge. The father explained that the Adonis deal was fine with his son the president, but Bobby, the new attorney general, wouldn’t hear of it. There is no basis for disbelieving D’Amato’s account; but $50,000 in cash, when contrasted with what was really spent in West Virginia, was hardly enough to earn everlasting gratitude from the Kennedys.
D’Amato’s big mouth got him in trouble. Soon after taking office, Bobby Kennedy was informed by the FBI that D’Amato had been overheard on a wiretap bragging about his role in moving cash from Las Vegas to help Jack Kennedy win the election. A few months later, D’Amato suddenly found himself facing federal indictment on income tax charges stemming from his failure to file a corporate tax return for his nightclub. The indictment was brought to the attention of Milton “Mickey” Rudin, a prominent Los Angeles lawyer who represented Frank Sinatra and other entertainment figures.
“Skinny [was] Frank’s friend,” Rudin told me in a series of interviews for this book. “Bobby [Kennedy] and the Old Man [Joe Kennedy] knew the relationship. When Skinny got indicted, I got pissed and called up Steve Smith. I tell him I want to see him. He meets me at the University Club in New York. I order my gin. ‘What can I do for you?’ Smith asks. I tell him, ‘I’m unhappy about Skinny being indicted on the bullshit charges. It’s unfair. No taxes were paid because there was no profit.’” Rudin said he did not raise the issue of D’Amato’s political favors for the Kennedy campaign, but he did tell Smith, “This is a political act.” Smith responded, “Well, you don’t understand politics.” Rudin then said, “Well, I’m glad I don’t,” drank his gin, and left.
Steve Smith delivered a clear message, Rudin said: D’Amato had been overheard on FBI wiretaps talking about Las Vegas cash going to the Kennedys, and the indictment neutralized any possible damage from such talk. “If some guy like Skinny had anything to do with moving money,” Rudin concluded, “the way to handle him is to indict him so if he talked about it, it’d be [seen as] vengeance.” Rudin told me that he returned to Los Angeles thinking—and saying as much to Sinatra and others—that the Kennedys were going to be much tougher than some had thought.
Organized crime, as we shall see, played a huge role in Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard Nixon in November. But Jack Kennedy had more than a few campaign promises to gangsters to worry about, both before and after the election.
(#ulink_46b0b535-748e-58fc-ad9f-0068a6e7f970) Max Kampelman, Humphrey’s longtime friend and political adviser, recalled warning Humphrey not to run against Kennedy in West Virginia. In an interview in 1994, Kampelman said he “knew” that the Kennedys would put big money into the state and “steal the election—and we had no money.” An additional concern was Humphrey’s political future: “I told Hubert, ‘They’ll [the Kennedys will] kill you in West Virginia, and you have to run for reelection [to the Senate] in Minnesota. They’ll paint you as anti-Catholic, and there are a lot of Catholics in Minnesota.’” Humphrey nevertheless won reelection to the Senate in 1960.
8 THREATENED CANDIDACY (#ulink_4589d9fe-2c4f-5e50-abf1-567b43d02b35)
Jack Kennedy emerged from West Virginia as the man to beat, but there were still many dangers that threatened his drive for the presidency. At least four women could control his destiny. One of them was Marilyn Monroe, the American film goddess whose affair with Kennedy had begun sometime before the 1960 election and would continue after he went to the White House.
Like his father, Jack Kennedy had a special fondness for Hollywood celebrities. The celebrated and gifted Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson, emerged as a sex symbol in the early 1950s and worked her way through husbands, lovers, pills, liquor, and psychiatric hospitals until her death, apparently by accidental suicide, in August 1962. Some published accounts place the beginning of the Kennedy-Monroe relationship in the mid-1950s, as Monroe’s second marriage, to the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was unraveling and she was beginning a romance with the playwright Arthur Miller, who would become her third husband. Her affair with Kennedy was by all accounts in full bloom as the presidential campaign was getting under way. Many of their rendezvous were at the Santa Monica home of Peter and Patricia Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and sister, who were Monroe’s close friends. There has been published speculation that Monroe became pregnant by Kennedy and had an abortion in Mexico; the full story may never be known, but accounts of her affair and abortion have been published again and again since her suicide and his murder.
In interviews for this book, longtime friends and associates of Monroe and Kennedy acknowledged that the two stars, who both enjoyed living on the edge, shared a powerful, and high-risk, attraction to each other. “She was a beautiful actress,” George Smathers, Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate, told me. “Probably as pretty a woman as ever lived. And Jack—everybody knew he liked pretty girls. When he had the opportunity to meet Marilyn Monroe, why, he took advantage of it, and got to know her a little bit.” The attraction went beyond sex. Monroe had a quirky sense of humor and a tenacious desire to learn. “Marilyn made Jack laugh,” Patricia Newcomb, who worked as a publicist for Monroe in the early 1960s, explained in an interview for this book. There was also a family connection that went beyond the Lawfords. Charles Spalding, who was a trusted intimate of Kennedy’s by the late 1940s and remained so until the president’s assassination, clearly recalled a private visit by Monroe to the family enclave at Hyannis Port, where she was welcomed enthusiastically as a friend of Jack’s—even though he was married.
Monroe’s repeated crack-ups did not diminish her looks or her ability to appeal to men. “Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate glamour girl,” Vernon Scott, a longtime Hollywood reporter for United Press International, told me in an interview. “She was gorgeous and she was funny. She had more sex appeal than any woman I ever saw, and I’ve seen lots of them. She was probably every man’s dream of the kind of woman he’d like to spend the rest of his life with on a desert island. She was much smarter than people gave her credit for. She never did or said anything by accident.”
Monroe was said to be deeply in love with Kennedy. After her death, John Miner, head of the medical legal section of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, was given confidential access to a stream-of-consciousness tape recording Monroe made at the recommendation of her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, a few weeks earlier; Miner put together what he considered to be a near-verbatim transcript of the tape. After obtaining permission from the Greenson family, Miner ended thirty-five years of silence by making the transcript available for this book in 1997. Many of Monroe’s comments dealt with her sexuality; her extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm—in very blunt language—were meant only for the analyst’s couch, but her lavish admiration for Jack Kennedy could have been read from a podium:
Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander-in-chief. He says do this, you do it. He says do that, you do it. This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry, no person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans. People who can’t afford it will get good medical care. Industrial products will be the best in the world. No, I’m not talking utopia—that’s an illusion. But he will transform America today like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the Thirties. I tell you, Doctor, when he has finished his achievements he will take his place with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as one of our great presidents. I’m glad he has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the President is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Show business people who worked behind the scenes with Monroe described a hard edge beneath the glamour. There were repeated breakdowns and repeated threats to tell the world about her relationship with Kennedy—threats that could have damaged his candidacy, and threats that only increased after he got to the White House. “What happened,” George Smathers told me, “was that she, [like] naturally all women, would like to be close to the president. And then after he had been associated with her some, she began to ask for an opportunity to come to Washington and come to the White House and that sort of thing. That’s when Jack asked me to see what I could do to help him in that respect by talking to her.” Monroe, Smathers said without amplification, had “made some demands.” Smathers said he arranged for a mutual friend to “go talk to Marilyn Monroe about putting a bridle on herself and on her mouth and not talking too much, because it was getting to be a story around the country.” It had happened before. Charles Spalding recalled that at one point during the 1960 campaign, when Monroe was on a liquor and pill binge, Kennedy asked him to fly from New York to Los Angeles to make sure that she was okay—that is, to make sure that Monroe did not speak out of turn. “I got out there, and she was really sick,” Spalding told me. With Lawford’s help, “I got her to the hospital.”
Monroe’s instability posed a constant threat to Kennedy. Michael Selsman, one of Monroe’s publicists in the early 1960s, depicted her as “a loose cannon” who toggled between high-spirited charm and mean-spirited cruelty. “Sometimes she had to put on this costume of Marilyn Monroe. Otherwise, she was this other person, Norma Jean, who felt abused, put-upon, and unintelligent. As Marilyn Monroe, she had enormous power. As Norma Jean, she was a drug addict who wasn’t physically clean.”
Vernon Scott told me that the other, insecure Monroe “made herself known to me one night” after he had concluded a newspaper interview with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Scott had a date with his wife-to-be and, as he and Monroe continued to chat over two bottles of champagne, he began looking at his watch. Monroe noticed and asked if he was going out. Scott said yes. “And she said,” Scott recounted, “sniffling a little bit and feeling sorry for herself, that everybody had somebody else to go to, everybody had dates, except her. She said, ‘I’m Marilyn Monroe. Everybody thinks the phone rings all the time with men asking me out. Well, everybody’s afraid to date Marilyn Monroe or ask her for a date.’ And she began crying, with mascara running down her face. And her eyes were red and she looked like kind of a clown. Her nose was red. She began sobbing. I tried to cheer her up and told her that I was sure most men would be delighted to take her out. She said, ‘Well, they don’t have the nerve to call me, not the right ones. And once in a while I meet a nice guy, a really nice guy, and I know it’s going to work. He doesn’t have to be from Hollywood; he doesn’t have to be an actor. And we have a few drinks and we go to bed. Then I see his eyes glaze over and I can see it going through his mind: “Oh, my God. I’m going to fuck Marilyn Monroe,” and he can’t get it up.’ Then she started howling with misery over this. I just bent over double laughing. And she began pounding on me—‘It’s not funny.’
“But,” Scott told me, “this was not Marilyn Monroe. Norma Jean would never have allowed Marilyn to look like that, but she did this one time. So I saw [Norma Jean] as a frightened, insecure, young puppeteer that was running this machine known as Marilyn Monroe. It was very touching and somewhat sad. And I liked her all the more for it.”
Monroe’s affair with Kennedy was no secret in Hollywood. In early January 1961, before the inauguration, Michael Selsman was informed about the relationship. “It was the first thing I was told,” Selsman said. “We had to be careful with this. We had to protect her, we had to keep her [private life] out of print. It’d be disastrous for me. It wasn’t hard in those days. It was a different era. Today it would be impossible to keep anything resembling that a secret.” Patricia Newcomb, who worked in the same public relations office with Selsman, also recalled knowing that her client “had been with the president,” and added: “It never occurred to me to talk about it. I couldn’t do it.”
James Bacon, who spent much of his career covering Hollywood for the Associated Press, said in an interview for this book that Monroe, whom he had befriended early in her career, had given him a firsthand account of her relationship with Kennedy as early as the campaign. “She was very open about her affair with JFK,” Bacon told me. “In fact, I think Marilyn was in love with JFK.” Asked why he didn’t file a story about the affair, Bacon said that in those days, “before Watergate, reporters just didn’t go into that sort of thing. I’d have to have been under the bed in order to put it on the wire for the AP. There was no pact. It was just a matter of judgment on the part of the reporters.”
Bacon added that he understood Kennedy’s “fascination with Hollywood. This is where the beautiful girls are, you know, and that’s why JFK loved it out here. He was a man who was addicted to sex, and if you want sex, this is the place to come.”
Kennedy was placing his political well-being in the hands of a group of Hollywood actresses, reporters, and publicists. His confidence that the affair with Monroe would remain secret was all the more perplexing because he was, even before he declared his candidacy, the target of a letter-writing campaign by a middle-aged housewife named Florence M. Kater, who decided in 1959 that her mission in life would be to force the Washington press corps to deal with Kennedy’s womanizing. Kater learned more than she wanted to know about the senator’s personal life after renting an upstairs apartment in her Georgetown home to Pamela Turnure, an attractive aide in Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy and Turnure were conducting an indiscreet affair that involved many late-night and early-morning comings and goings, to Kater’s consternation. Turnure moved to another apartment a few blocks away. In late 1958 Kater ambushed Kennedy leaving the new apartment at three A.M. and took a photograph of the unhappy senator attempting to shield his face with a handkerchief.
The encounter rattled Kennedy, and he struck back. A few weeks later, Kater alleged, she and her husband were accosted on the street in front of her home by the angry Kennedy, who, waving his fore-finger, warned her “to stop bothering me. If you do it again,” Kater quoted Kennedy as saying, “or if either of you spread any lies about me, you will find yourself without a job.” Kennedy eventually asked James McInerney, the former Justice Department attorney who had been retained in 1953 by Joe Kennedy, to try to muzzle Kater; the loyal McInerney spent dozens of hours in an attempt to convince her to stop her campaign.
McInerney met seven times with Kater, she later wrote, but for once the usual Kennedy mix of glamour, power, and money didn’t work. In May of 1959, Kater mailed a copy of the photograph and an articulate letter describing her encounter with Kennedy to fifty prominent citizens in Washington and New York, including editors, syndicated columnists, and politicians. Her letter and photograph also ended up on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, as similar letters would over the next four years. The FBI, of course, began keeping a file on Kater, one obtained under the Freedom of Information Act for this book. In the letter Kater explained that, as an Irish Catholic, she had been a “warm supporter” of Kennedy; she had taken the photograph in the belief that “shock treatment” was needed. “But Senator Kennedy thought his behavior was none of our business,” Kater wrote. “We think he’s wrong there; it’s part of the package when you’re a public figure running for the Presidency.”
Kater became even more obsessed as Kennedy neared the Democratic nomination, and she continued sending out scores of letters complaining that the senator was a hypocritical womanizer who was morally unfit to be president. Kater was not taken seriously by the national press corps, but she came close to attracting media attention. On May 14, 1960, just four days after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, she approached him at a political rally at the University of Maryland carrying a placard with an enlarged snapshot of the early-morning scene outside Pamela Turnure’s apartment. Kennedy ignored her, but a photograph of the encounter was published in the next afternoon’s Washington Star, along with a brief story describing her as a heckler. Kennedy’s aides denounced the photograph on her placard as a fake, Kater later wrote, and no questions were ever asked of the candidate, although Kennedy’s ongoing relationship with Turnure was no secret to the reporters covering his campaign or to campaign aides.
For all his apparent anger at Kater, Kennedy seemed to enjoy the added tension. Spalding told me of his concern at the time about the immense political liabilities posed by his friend’s constant womanizing. “I used to think he was crazy to do this stuff.” The risks were obvious: Kennedy’s campaign stance as a practicing Catholic and a responsible husband and father would be fatally undercut by a sex scandal. Steeling his courage, Spalding raised the issue at one point with Kennedy. “Well, if you’re worried about this,” Kennedy responded, “let me show you these pictures.” The candidate then pulled out a series of photographs—those mailed by Kater—showing him leaving the Turnure apartment.
