[Hersh
hypothesizes Bobby Kennedy’s actions on the day of his brother’s assassination
in order to preview in a dramatic fashion the dark side of his administration.
It’s not false but it isn’t exactly true either, more like peering through a
kaleidoscopic peephole.]
It was the man closest to John F. Kennedy who needed to put aside his grief and begin immediately to hide all the evidence of Kennedy’s secret life from the nation – as well from the new president, who would be sitting in the Oval Office by early evening. When word came of his brother’s shooting, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the second most powerful man in Washington, was at his Hickory Hill suburban estate in Virginia having a casual lunch of clan chowder and tuna fish sandwiches with, among others, Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
In those first hours of horror, the president’s remarkable younger brother lived up to his reputation for pragmatism and toughness, notifying family members, worrying about the return of his brother’s body, answering legal queries from the new president, and, it seemed, losing himself in appropriate action. There would be time for mourning later. Now there was a state funeral to arrange and the president’s widow and children to console. Among his many telephone calls early that afternoon was one to McGeorge Bundy, the dead president’s national security advisor, who was told to protect Jack Kennedy’s papers. Bundy, after checking with the State Department, ordered the combinations to the president’s locked files be changed at once – before Lyndon Johnson’s men could begin rummaging through them.
Bobby Kennedy understood that public revelation of the materials in his brother’s White House files would forever destroy Jack Kennedy’s reputation as president, and his own attorney general. He had spent nearly three years in a confounding situation – as a guardian of the nation’s laws, as his brother’s secret operative in foreign crisis, and as a personal watchdog for an older brother who reveled in personal excess and recklessness.
The two bother’s had lied in their denials to newspapermen and the public about Jack Kennedy’s first marriage to Durie Malcolm in 1947, and had its record expunged from the Palm Beach courthouse by Jack’s friend Charles Spalding and a local attorney.
The president’s files would also reveal that Jack and Bobby were more than merely informed about the CIA’s assassination plotting against Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba: they were its strongest advocates. The necessity of Castro’s death became a presidential obsession after the failure of the Pay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, and remained an obsession to the end. White House files also dealt with three foreign leaders who were murdered during Kennedy’s thousand days in the presidency – Patrice Lumumba, of the Congo; Rafael Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic; and Ngo Dinh Diem, of South Vietnam. Jack Kennedy knew of and endorsed the assassinations of Lumumba and Trujillo before his inauguration. He was much more active in the fall of 1963, when a brutal coup d’etat in Saigon resulted in Diem’s murder. None of this would be revealed until this book and none of it was shared with Lyndon Johnson, then the vice president.
The vice president also did not know that Jack Kennedy’s acclaimed triumph in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was far from a victory: the world would emerge from fearful days of pending nuclear holocaust and be told that the president had stood firm before the Soviet threat and forced Nikita Khrushchev to back down. Little of this was true, as Bobby Kennedy knew. Knowing that their political futures were at stake, the brothers had been forced to negotiate a secret last-minute compromise with the Soviets. The real settlement – and the true import of the missile crisis – remained a state secret for more than twenty-five years.
There were more secrets for Bobby Kennedy to hide.
In the last months of the Eisenhower administration, a notorious gangster named Sam Giancana had been brought into the Castro assassination effort, with Senator Jack Kennedy’s knowledge. But Giancana was far more tan just another mobster doing a favor for the government – and looking for a favor in return. Giancana and his fellow hoodlums in Chicago, one of the most powerful organized crime operations in the nation, had already been enlisted on behalf of Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign against Republican Richard M. Nixon, providing money and union support; mob support would help Kennedy win in Illinois and in at least four other states where the Kennedy plurality was narrow. Giancana’s intervention had been arranged with the aid of both Frank Sinatra, who was close to the mob and the Kennedy family, and a prominent judge n Chicago, who served as an intermediary for a meeting, not revealed until this book, between the gangster and Jack Kennedy’s millionaire father, the relentlessly ambitious Joseph P. Kennedy. The meeting took place in the winter before the election in the judge’s chambers. A few months after the election, allegations of voter fraud in Illinois were reported to Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department – and met with no response. The 1960 presidential election was stolen.
As Bobby Kennedy knew, president Kennedy and Sam Giancana shared not only a stolen election and assassination plotting; they also shared a close friendship with a glamorous Los Angeles divorcee and freelance artists named Judith Campbell Exner. Interviews for this book have bolstered the claims of Exner, who first met Kennedy in early 1960, that she was more than just the president’s sex partner, that she carried documents from Jack and Bobby Kennedy to Giancana and his colleagues, along with at least two satchels full of cash. Exner, in a series of interviews for this book, further admitted that she delivered money, lots of it, from California businessmen directly to the president. The businessmen were bidding on federal contracts.
There was further evidence of financial corruption in Kennedy’s personal files. As the president’s 19645 reelection campaign neared, Kennedy was put on notice by newspaperman Charles Bartlett, his good friend, that campaign contributions were sticking to the hands of some of his political operatives. “No books are kept,” Bartlett wrote the president in July 1963, “everything is cash, and the potential harvest is clear . . .I am fearful that unless you put a personal priority on learning more about what is going on, the thing may slip suddenly beyond your control.”
Robert Kennedy understood, from his own investigations, that there was independent evidence for the Bartlett allegations: one of the attorney general’s political confidants had assembled affidavits showing that money for JFK’s reelection campaign was being diverted for personal use. The Bartlett letters could not be left for Lyndon Johnson.
Yet another group of documents that had to be removed dealt with Jack Kennedy’s health. Kennedy lied about his health throughout his political career, repeatedly denying that he suffered from Addison’s disease. But as Kennedy and his doctors knew, the Addison’s, which affects the body’s ability to fight infection, was being effectively controlled – and had been since the late 1940s – by cortisone. Far more politically damaging was the fact that the slain president had suffered from venereal disease for more than thirty years, having repeatedly been treated with high doses of antibiotics and repeatedly re-infected because of his continual sexual activity. Kennedy was also a heavy user of what were euphemistically known as ‘feel-good’ shots- consisting of high doses of amphetamines- while in the White House. Dr. Max Jacobson, a New York physician who administered the shots, was a regular visitor to the White House and accompanied the president on many foreign trips; his name was all over the official logs. Jacobson and his shots were a source of constant friction between the president’s personal aides and some members of his Secret Service detail, whop persistently tried to keep the doctor, and his amphetamines, away from the White House.
[The audio tapes and taping system Kennedy had set up in the Oval office also had to be removed on that fateful day, along with National Security Council files, and shipped to a secured location.]
One final act of cover-up occurred in the early-morning hours of Saturday November 23, as Bobby Kennedy and an exhausted Jacqueline Kennedy returned to the White House, accompanying the body of the fallen president. There was a brief meeting between Kennedy and J.B. West, the chief White House usher, who turned over the Usher’s Logs- the most detailed records that existed of the visitors, public and private, to the president’s second-floor personal quarters. The logs provided what amounted to a daily scorecard of the resident’s sex partners, who were usually escorted by David Powers, JFK’s longtime personal aide. The logs, traditionally considered to be the public records of the presidency, were never seen again by West, and are not among the documents on file at the Kennedy Library. . . .the sheer number of Kennedy’s sexual partners, and the recklessness of his use of them, escalated throughout his presidency. The women – sometimes paid prostitutes located by Powers and other members of the so-called Irish Mafia, who embraced and protected the president – would be brought to Kennedy’s office or his private quarters without ant prior Secret Service knowledge or clearance. “Seventy to eighty percent of the agents thought it was nuts,” recalled Tony Sherman, a former member of Kennedy’s White House Secret Service detail, in a 1995 interview for this book. . .
John F. Kennedy’s recklessness may finally have caught up with him in the last weeks of his life. One of his casual paramours in Washington, the wife of a military attache at the West German Embassy, was believed by a group of Republican senators to be a possible agent of East German intelligence. In the ensuing panic, the woman and her husband (pimp) were quickly flown out of Washington, and Robert Kennedy used all his powers as attorney general, with the help of J Edgar Hoover ( always concerned to protect the reputation of the office of the president) to quash investigations b Congress and the FBI
Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price, nonetheless, for his sexual excesses And compulsiveness. He severely tore a back muscle while frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast trip in the last week September 1963. The pain was so intense that the White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace that locked his body in a rigid upright opposition. It was far more constraining than his usual back brace, which he also continued top wear. The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.
The braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald’s first shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president remained erect – and and excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the head. Kennedy’s extra brace, which is now in the possession of the National archives in Washington, was not mentioned in the public autopsy report, nor was the injury that had led to his need for it.
November 22, 1963, would remain a day of family secrets, carefully kept, for decades to come.
It was the man closest to John F. Kennedy who needed to put aside his grief and begin immediately to hide all the evidence of Kennedy’s secret life from the nation – as well from the new president, who would be sitting in the Oval Office by early evening. When word came of his brother’s shooting, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the second most powerful man in Washington, was at his Hickory Hill suburban estate in Virginia having a casual lunch of clan chowder and tuna fish sandwiches with, among others, Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
In those first hours of horror, the president’s remarkable younger brother lived up to his reputation for pragmatism and toughness, notifying family members, worrying about the return of his brother’s body, answering legal queries from the new president, and, it seemed, losing himself in appropriate action. There would be time for mourning later. Now there was a state funeral to arrange and the president’s widow and children to console. Among his many telephone calls early that afternoon was one to McGeorge Bundy, the dead president’s national security advisor, who was told to protect Jack Kennedy’s papers. Bundy, after checking with the State Department, ordered the combinations to the president’s locked files be changed at once – before Lyndon Johnson’s men could begin rummaging through them.
Bobby Kennedy understood that public revelation of the materials in his brother’s White House files would forever destroy Jack Kennedy’s reputation as president, and his own attorney general. He had spent nearly three years in a confounding situation – as a guardian of the nation’s laws, as his brother’s secret operative in foreign crisis, and as a personal watchdog for an older brother who reveled in personal excess and recklessness.
The two bother’s had lied in their denials to newspapermen and the public about Jack Kennedy’s first marriage to Durie Malcolm in 1947, and had its record expunged from the Palm Beach courthouse by Jack’s friend Charles Spalding and a local attorney.
The president’s files would also reveal that Jack and Bobby were more than merely informed about the CIA’s assassination plotting against Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba: they were its strongest advocates. The necessity of Castro’s death became a presidential obsession after the failure of the Pay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, and remained an obsession to the end. White House files also dealt with three foreign leaders who were murdered during Kennedy’s thousand days in the presidency – Patrice Lumumba, of the Congo; Rafael Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic; and Ngo Dinh Diem, of South Vietnam. Jack Kennedy knew of and endorsed the assassinations of Lumumba and Trujillo before his inauguration. He was much more active in the fall of 1963, when a brutal coup d’etat in Saigon resulted in Diem’s murder. None of this would be revealed until this book and none of it was shared with Lyndon Johnson, then the vice president.
The vice president also did not know that Jack Kennedy’s acclaimed triumph in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was far from a victory: the world would emerge from fearful days of pending nuclear holocaust and be told that the president had stood firm before the Soviet threat and forced Nikita Khrushchev to back down. Little of this was true, as Bobby Kennedy knew. Knowing that their political futures were at stake, the brothers had been forced to negotiate a secret last-minute compromise with the Soviets. The real settlement – and the true import of the missile crisis – remained a state secret for more than twenty-five years.
There were more secrets for Bobby Kennedy to hide.
In the last months of the Eisenhower administration, a notorious gangster named Sam Giancana had been brought into the Castro assassination effort, with Senator Jack Kennedy’s knowledge. But Giancana was far more tan just another mobster doing a favor for the government – and looking for a favor in return. Giancana and his fellow hoodlums in Chicago, one of the most powerful organized crime operations in the nation, had already been enlisted on behalf of Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign against Republican Richard M. Nixon, providing money and union support; mob support would help Kennedy win in Illinois and in at least four other states where the Kennedy plurality was narrow. Giancana’s intervention had been arranged with the aid of both Frank Sinatra, who was close to the mob and the Kennedy family, and a prominent judge n Chicago, who served as an intermediary for a meeting, not revealed until this book, between the gangster and Jack Kennedy’s millionaire father, the relentlessly ambitious Joseph P. Kennedy. The meeting took place in the winter before the election in the judge’s chambers. A few months after the election, allegations of voter fraud in Illinois were reported to Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department – and met with no response. The 1960 presidential election was stolen.
As Bobby Kennedy knew, president Kennedy and Sam Giancana shared not only a stolen election and assassination plotting; they also shared a close friendship with a glamorous Los Angeles divorcee and freelance artists named Judith Campbell Exner. Interviews for this book have bolstered the claims of Exner, who first met Kennedy in early 1960, that she was more than just the president’s sex partner, that she carried documents from Jack and Bobby Kennedy to Giancana and his colleagues, along with at least two satchels full of cash. Exner, in a series of interviews for this book, further admitted that she delivered money, lots of it, from California businessmen directly to the president. The businessmen were bidding on federal contracts.
There was further evidence of financial corruption in Kennedy’s personal files. As the president’s 19645 reelection campaign neared, Kennedy was put on notice by newspaperman Charles Bartlett, his good friend, that campaign contributions were sticking to the hands of some of his political operatives. “No books are kept,” Bartlett wrote the president in July 1963, “everything is cash, and the potential harvest is clear . . .I am fearful that unless you put a personal priority on learning more about what is going on, the thing may slip suddenly beyond your control.”
Robert Kennedy understood, from his own investigations, that there was independent evidence for the Bartlett allegations: one of the attorney general’s political confidants had assembled affidavits showing that money for JFK’s reelection campaign was being diverted for personal use. The Bartlett letters could not be left for Lyndon Johnson.
Yet another group of documents that had to be removed dealt with Jack Kennedy’s health. Kennedy lied about his health throughout his political career, repeatedly denying that he suffered from Addison’s disease. But as Kennedy and his doctors knew, the Addison’s, which affects the body’s ability to fight infection, was being effectively controlled – and had been since the late 1940s – by cortisone. Far more politically damaging was the fact that the slain president had suffered from venereal disease for more than thirty years, having repeatedly been treated with high doses of antibiotics and repeatedly re-infected because of his continual sexual activity. Kennedy was also a heavy user of what were euphemistically known as ‘feel-good’ shots- consisting of high doses of amphetamines- while in the White House. Dr. Max Jacobson, a New York physician who administered the shots, was a regular visitor to the White House and accompanied the president on many foreign trips; his name was all over the official logs. Jacobson and his shots were a source of constant friction between the president’s personal aides and some members of his Secret Service detail, whop persistently tried to keep the doctor, and his amphetamines, away from the White House.
[The audio tapes and taping system Kennedy had set up in the Oval office also had to be removed on that fateful day, along with National Security Council files, and shipped to a secured location.]
One final act of cover-up occurred in the early-morning hours of Saturday November 23, as Bobby Kennedy and an exhausted Jacqueline Kennedy returned to the White House, accompanying the body of the fallen president. There was a brief meeting between Kennedy and J.B. West, the chief White House usher, who turned over the Usher’s Logs- the most detailed records that existed of the visitors, public and private, to the president’s second-floor personal quarters. The logs provided what amounted to a daily scorecard of the resident’s sex partners, who were usually escorted by David Powers, JFK’s longtime personal aide. The logs, traditionally considered to be the public records of the presidency, were never seen again by West, and are not among the documents on file at the Kennedy Library. . . .the sheer number of Kennedy’s sexual partners, and the recklessness of his use of them, escalated throughout his presidency. The women – sometimes paid prostitutes located by Powers and other members of the so-called Irish Mafia, who embraced and protected the president – would be brought to Kennedy’s office or his private quarters without ant prior Secret Service knowledge or clearance. “Seventy to eighty percent of the agents thought it was nuts,” recalled Tony Sherman, a former member of Kennedy’s White House Secret Service detail, in a 1995 interview for this book. . .
John F. Kennedy’s recklessness may finally have caught up with him in the last weeks of his life. One of his casual paramours in Washington, the wife of a military attache at the West German Embassy, was believed by a group of Republican senators to be a possible agent of East German intelligence. In the ensuing panic, the woman and her husband (pimp) were quickly flown out of Washington, and Robert Kennedy used all his powers as attorney general, with the help of J Edgar Hoover ( always concerned to protect the reputation of the office of the president) to quash investigations b Congress and the FBI
Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price, nonetheless, for his sexual excesses And compulsiveness. He severely tore a back muscle while frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast trip in the last week September 1963. The pain was so intense that the White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace that locked his body in a rigid upright opposition. It was far more constraining than his usual back brace, which he also continued top wear. The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.
The braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald’s first shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president remained erect – and and excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the head. Kennedy’s extra brace, which is now in the possession of the National archives in Washington, was not mentioned in the public autopsy report, nor was the injury that had led to his need for it.
November 22, 1963, would remain a day of family secrets, carefully kept, for decades to come.
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