Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (84 page)

A short time after November 22, a bereaved RFK went through the Oval Office and gave Corbin many personal effects of the late President Kennedy's, including a cut-glass water pitcher that Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy cabinet had given to JFK on his birthday in 1961.

A
FEW MONTHS LATER
, Corbin found himself—and his friendship with Bobby Kennedy—under renewed scrutiny. In early 1964 the new president, Lyndon Johnson, caught wind of the fact that Corbin was orchestrating a “Draft Kennedy for Vice President” write-in effort in the New Hampshire primary. LBJ was no fan of the Kennedys, and the last thing he wanted was a restoration, even a partial one, of Camelot. Johnson had already stopped referring to the New Frontier and begun using his own catchphrase, the Great Society.

Johnson called John Bailey at the DNC to ask what he knew about Corbin.
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Corbin was the subject of at least nine presidential phone calls between February 10 and March 12, 1964, as LBJ reached out to Bailey, O'Donnell (who had stayed
on in the Johnson White House), Ben Bradlee, Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, and Larry O'Brien.
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On March 10, LBJ won the New Hampshire Democratic primary with ease. But RFK received nearly as many votes as a write-in candidate for vice president as Johnson did for the top spot on the ticket—an astounding 25,861 write-in votes versus the 29,635 votes that LBJ received.
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Corbin hadn't even traveled to New Hampshire, but by working the phones he had scored this victory for Bobby Kennedy, which was an embarrassment to President Johnson. John Seigenthaler's worries about Corbin and access to a telephone had been prescient.

Suddenly the FBI set its sights on Corbin again. In April 1964 agent N. P. Callahan sent J. Edgar Hoover an internal memo complaining that someone was protecting Corbin from Justice Department prosecution and FBI investigation. Agent Callahan was clearly frustrated by Corbin's prevarications. He wrote, “How familiar is the Attorney General [Robert Kennedy] with these unresolved contradictions and has the Department of Justice exhausted all possibilities of resolving them? At this point, I do not profess to know.—Especially, in view of the reported new political activities of Mr. Corbin, I am totally unwilling to regard the subject as closed.”
¹²⁴

President Johnson angrily had Corbin thrown off the DNC payroll in August 1964 (though it was reported that he had “resigned”). When LBJ told Kennedy he was getting rid of Corbin, the attorney general said, “President Kennedy wouldn't approve of that.” Johnson tersely replied, “But Bobby, I'm president now.”
¹²⁵

The Kennedy family—they of the long loyalties and even longer memories—put Corbin on the payroll of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, an enormous wholesale-goods business that Joe Kennedy had purchased in 1945. Corbin was still on the Merchandise Mart payroll at the time of his death in 1990.
¹²⁶
A news report in 1964 said that Corbin had also been placed on the payroll of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.
¹²⁷
The family was taking care of its own.

In September, a month after President Johnson forced Corbin out of the DNC, RFK resigned as attorney general in order to run for a U.S. Senate seat in New York. Naturally, Corbin was involved in the campaign. He ran around upstate New York making “his usual underhanded deals,” joked Walinsky.
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Eventually, though, Corbin stepped on so many toes that he was banned from the Empire State and had to operate out of New Jersey, according to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.
¹²⁹

The troublesome Corbin was mostly sidelined in the 1968 presidential campaign by old Kennedy hands Kenny O'Donnell and Larry O'Brien, who were
nominally in charge of the freewheeling operation. They prohibited Corbin from traveling, but made the mistake of giving him a phone and a desk at the headquarters in Washington. Corbin spent his days “trashing them,” said Walinsky. He once compared Corbin to RFK's dog, Brummus, a large Newfoundland, which RFK once told him “did not have a single redeeming social characteristic.” At Kennedy lawn parties, recalled Walinsky, “Brummus literally just walked up to some woman, lifted his leg, and drenched her. Paul was like a human version of Brummus.”
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When RFK was assassinated in June 1968, Corbin was shattered. His friend, his political protector, the center of his universe, was gone. He had loved Robert Kennedy and RFK had loved Corbin.
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But his friend's death did not exactly soften Corbin.

Corbin was on the funeral train carrying RFK's remains from the service in New York to Washington for burial. On the train, a bereaved Kennedy man who had often knocked heads with Corbin sidled up to his old adversary and offered an olive branch. Crying uncontrollably, Joe Dolan, who had been RFK's top aide on Capitol Hill, said to Corbin, “Let's let bygones be bygones.”

Corbin squinted at the weeping Dolan and growled, “Bob never trusted you.”
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A
FTER THE FUNERAL
, S
EIGENTHALER
saw the rough time Corbin was having and advised him to leave Washington and politics. Seigenthaler, who had become editor of the
Nashville Tennessean
, urged Corbin to move to Nashville to better deal with his grief. In Nashville, Seigenthaler tried to put Corbin into several business deals, including a publishing venture, but Corbin had trouble with the other partners. In his first meeting with the others, Corbin promised to “only skim 10 percent off the top.” The partners laughed, thinking Corbin was kidding.
¹³³

Corbin then got involved with the Country Music Wax Museum and delighted all by taking the boots off such wax figurines as Johnny Cash and wearing them around town. He became an immediate hit with the locals and cultivated a young activist, Bob Dunn, a student at Vanderbilt. He later helped Dunn get a job on the staff of his friend Governor Pat Lucey.
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Slowly recovering from his anguish, Corbin looked to get back into politics. In the 1970s he made a run at doing business with Tennessee governor Ray Blanton but was rebuffed.
¹³⁵
Blanton's tenure was marked by charges of corruption. He was accused of selling pardons, in particular to a double murderer whose father was a political supporter. Once he left office, Blanton was pursued by the FBI for illegally selling liquor licenses.
¹³⁶
He was convicted and sentenced to federal prison, although the conviction was later overturned on a technicality.
¹³⁷

Corbin was also an early organizer in a string of Minnie Pearl fast-food restaurants, but only made more enemies, including former Republican congressman Robin Beard, who lost his shirt in Corbin's scheme when it went belly-up. In another caper, Corbin became close to Lafayette C. “Fate” Thomas, a sheriff in the Volunteer State who went to federal prison for, among other crimes, having prisoners work on his summer home.
¹³⁸
Thomas and Corbin had once traveled to Moscow together and Thomas said that “Corbin almost got him thrown into a Russian prison.”
¹³⁹

A Corbin crony claimed that Corbin helped out with Lamar Alexander's gubernatorial campaign by spreading disinformation about Alexander's primary opponent, Jake Butcher.
¹⁴⁰
Corbin himself later bragged to some poker friends that he had the goods on Democrat Al Gore. Joseph Sweat, one of Corbin's associates in Tennessee, remembered that Corbin accused Gore, then a young congressman, of renting rooms in a motel in Cookeville to watch pornography. “That god-damn Gore, he is up there in a motel … watching those dirty movies!” Corbin exclaimed. Asked how he knew, Corbin replied, “The desk clerk, I paid him a little bit and he gave me the receipt.”
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In the late 1970s Corbin went back to Washington. But he was held at arm's length by the Carterites, because they didn't know him or, even worse, because they
did
know of him, at least his reputation of being a Kennedy man. Naturally he supported Ted Kennedy's presidential bid in 1980. The senator himself, however, was dubious about Corbin, despite his long history with the family. Corbin had no formal role in the 1980 Kennedy campaign except to “stir up trouble,” according to Walinsky. Walinsky did not take a role but left no doubt as to his loyalties. When asked about supporting Carter, he simply replied, “Fuck him.”
¹⁴²

Some others in the Kennedy family, including Kennedy brother-in-law Steve Smith, who was running the campaign, were happy to have Corbin's help. Corbin hated Carter and his people. According to Seigenthaler, Corbin once got a hold of a phone bank and “screw[ed] up the Carter campaign headquarters telephones.”
¹⁴³
Corbin claimed that his prank took out all the Carter campaign's phones in New York City.

J
UST BEFORE
T
EDDY
K
ENNEDY
officially jumped into the campaign in the fall of 1979, President Carter's ambassador to Mexico, Pat Lucey, abruptly quit his post and took a position in the Kennedy campaign. When he resigned, Lucey bluntly told reporters about his loyalty to the Kennedy family and his intentions to help Teddy.
¹⁴⁴
It struck at least a few in Washington as odd that Lucey's loyalty to Carter was so tenuous. He had been given a plum diplomatic assignment and enjoyed a close friendship with Vice President Walter Mondale. Years later Mondale said of Lucey's resignation,
“We were pissed at that.”
¹⁴⁵
On the other hand, the Carter White House had been leaking stories dumping on Lucey's work since the previous summer. Lucey was steamed. The Carter team was good at making unnecessary enemies.

Lucey's daughter, Laurie, had been working in the Carter White House at the time as a confidential assistant to Landon Butler, deputy to Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan.
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But just days before her father quit his post in Mexico, she resigned from her White House job.
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Around the same time that Laurie Lucey was leaving the White House, Bob Dunn was coming in. Dunn went to work for Carter's head of scheduling, Phil Wise. Dunn was Pat Lucey's longtime aide, having worked for the governor in Wisconsin and then having accompanied Lucey to Mexico when he was appointed ambassador.
¹⁴⁸
And Dunn was Corbin's friend. Their friendship went back to 1971, according to Dunn.
¹⁴⁹

“Dunn's new job has attracted some attention since Lucey joined the campaign for Sen. Kennedy,”
National Journal
reported at the time.
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But it should have done more than attracted “some attention”; Corbin's close relationships with Dunn, Laurie Lucey, and Pat Lucey should have set off alarm bells in the Carter White House. The Carter team took no action.

In 1980 Corbin should have been enjoying retirement and grandchildren, like most other men his age. Not Corbin. He hated kids. Instead, he was still plotting shadowy deals, still scheming against his enemies. In fact, the old man orchestrated the biggest heist of his life: stealing—and delivering to the Reagan campaign—President Carter's secret debate briefing books.

I
T WAS AT THE
1980 Democratic convention in New York, as Ted Kennedy gave the best speech of his life, that Corbin yelled to his friend Bill Schulz, “I'm going to go work for Reagan!”

Schulz's friendship with Corbin was odd, but that was the way Washington often worked. Schulz, a friendly bear of a man, had been a founding member of Young Americans for Freedom, had worked for syndicated conservative columnist Fulton Lewis, and by 1980 was the Washington editor of
Reader's Digest
, often derided by liberals because of its conservative content. (Reagan was one of its most ardent readers.)

Way back in 1961, material on Corbin's Communist affiliations had been leaked to Schulz. He called Corbin at the Democratic National Committee and said, “Mr. Corbin, I am an assistant to Fulton Lewis, the columnist and radio commentator. I wanted to get your reaction to a report that I have.… Individuals have identified you in closed-door testimony before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities as a one-time member of the Communist Party USA.” Corbin growled back, “Mr. Schulz, you can kiss my fucking ass!” Then he hung up.
¹⁵¹

Sixteen years later, in 1977, they were reintroduced at a poker game at GOP operative Dave Keene's home in Alexandria, Virginia. Keene said, “You might not know Paul Corbin.” Corbin replied cryptically, “I know Mr. Schulz. We had a conversation once.”
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Keene's father, a labor organizer in Wisconsin, had also had a run-in with Corbin, like everybody else, it seemed. “Didn't my father once have you beaten up and thrown into a ditch?” Keene asked the grizzled little man. Corbin replied, “Yeah, but the son of a bitch is dead!”
¹⁵³

Just after the Democratic convention in 1980, syndicated columnist Charles Bartlett, a fixture on the Washington social scene, introduced Corbin to Bill Casey. Bartlett was great company, up on all the latest gossip, and knew everybody in Washington. He had famously introduced John Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party in 1951.
¹⁵⁴
Bartlett called Casey and told him Corbin could help Reagan.
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In August, Corbin contacted Casey and proposed to assist Reagan, ostensibly with organized labor. Casey agreed, putting Corbin on retainer to the Reagan campaign. Thus the former Communist organizer Paul Corbin (and former business partner of Joe McCarthy) began to work for the ardently anti-Communist Ronald Reagan.