The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (19 page)

On July 11, Sam Giancana and his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, flew to Phoenix, where their hotel was bugged by the FBI. The couple then took an American Airlines flight to New York with a stopover in Chicago O’Hare. The date was July 13. At O’Hare, FBI agents Ralph Hill and William Roemer accosted McGuire and gave her a choice: either she could answer their questions on the spot (in which case she would not be served) or refuse and later face questioning before the federal grand jury. McGuire coolly agreed to be questioned on the spot and was led off by Agent Hill.

Roemer stayed with the incredulous Giancana, who became abusive after his girlfriend was led away. “Have you guys figured out how many men I’ve killed?” he asked the towering Roemer, a former Marine and heavyweight boxing champion at Notre Dame. “Why don’t you tell us, Mo?” Roemer sarcastically replied, using Giancana’s nickname.
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When Giancana realized Roemer would not be shaken by threats, he stormed back on the plane to retrieve McGuire’s coat and purse, figuring that he and McGuire were going to miss the flight to New York.

As Giancana walked back up the gangway, Roemer resumed his taunting: “I heard about you being a fairy but now we know, don’t we?”

Giancana went crazy. “You fucking cocksucker. Do you know who you’re talking to? I could have Butch come here right now with his machine gun and take good care of you.” When Roemer asked if Giancana was threatening a federal officer, the mob chieftain took another tack.

“Fuck Bobby Kennedy and your super, super boss.”

“Who is that?”

“John Kennedy,” Giancana snarled.

“I doubt if the president of the United States is interested in Sam Giancana,” Roemer responded.

“Fuck John Kennedy! Listen, Roemer. I know all about the Kennedys, and Phyllis knows more about the Kennedys and one of these days we’re going to tell all.”

The acrimonious exchange continued until Roemer, nothing if not fearless, announced to the crowd of onlookers that they were all in the presence of “this piece of slime, Sam Giancana. Boss of the underworld here in Chicago.”

Giancana concluded the exchange by noting darkly: “Roemer, you lit a fire tonight that will never go out.”

What exactly Giancana had on the Kennedys was unclear to Hoover, until he authorized the FBI in Chicago to install yet another bug, this one in the Armory Lounge, Giancana’s inner sanctum. In August, Roemer and company, after having detained the janitor and surreptitiously made a copy of his key, broke into Giancana’s hideaway office and placed a pineapple-sized microphone behind a baseboard. The agents strung the wire down through the basement and out through the parking lot, which they trenched to bury the wire. Giancana immediately gave the Bureau a full view of the complex and wide-ranging interests of the Chicago Mafia.
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The bug also revealed the deal Rosselli and Giancana thought they had with the Kennedys. As was his practice, Hoover shared the tapes with no one outside the Bureau, but one immediate result was that the FBI stepped up its surveillance of Rosselli.

Rosselli continued to work the murder-Castro operation in south Florida. Although the CIA had provisionally discontinued its joint venture with the mob, pending the reconsideration of Cuba policy in Washington, Rosselli “stayed in position.”
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He set up shop at an upscale motel in Key Biscayne and hosted barbecue cookouts for his Cuban friends. Always the sybarite, “there were speedboats on crystal waters and women in abundance,” as well as “optimistic projections of casino shares and cabinet positions once Fidel Castro was run out of Havana.” Rosselli also hooked up with John V. Martino, a former mob electronics technician in the Havana casinos who had just been released from prison in Cuba by the Castro regime. Based on his association with Rosselli, Martino would eventually end up on the periphery of the plot to kill President Kennedy and provide critical testimony of what really happened.

When Rosselli left Florida, the FBI had difficulty tracking his movements, as FBI telexes of the time attest. The tap they had put on Rosselli’s apartment phone in L.A. revealed little of value. (Rosselli likely knew of its existence and played along; a telephone, he once told an associate, “is a stool pigeon.”) Rosselli was also hard to track because he either rented cars or used those of friends, which impeded FBI physical surveillance.
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He had no retinue of bodyguards or backup cars, except on the rare occasion when West Coast shooter Jimmy Fratianno drove him. When he traveled by air, which was often, Rosselli never made reservations. He would show up at the airport ten minutes before a flight and pay for his ticket in cash. Accordingly, Rosselli rarely showed up on the flight manifest. Like a wolf trotting along a distant timberline, he was visible only when he chose to be, otherwise disappearing, as if by instinct, into the underbrush he knew so well.

On December 13, 1961, he did appear on the FBI radar screen — in the course of a visit to Giancana’s bugged office at the Armory Lounge in Forest Park. The Chicago office of the FBI listened as Rosselli explained to Giancana about Sinatra’s efforts to slow down Bobby Kennedy.

ROSSELLI: I said, Frankie, can I ask you one question? He says [answer deleted] I took Sam’s name and wrote it down and told Bobby Kennedy, this is my buddy. This is what I want you to know, Bob . . . Between you and me, Frank saw Joe Kennedy three different times. Joe Kennedy, the father — he called him three different times.

GIANCANA: Called who?

ROSSELLI: Called Frank. So maybe he’s starting to see the light . . . you’re friends. He’s [Frank’s] got it in his head that they’re not faithful to him.

GIANCANA: In other words, the [campaign] donation that was made . . .

ROSSELLI: That’s what I was talking about . . .

GIANCANA: Well, one minute he tells me this and then he tells me that and then the last time I talked to him at the hotel down in Florida a month before he left, and he said, Don’t worry about it, if I can’t talk to the old man [Joseph Kennedy], I’m gonna talk to the man [President Kennedy]. One minute he says he’s talked to Robert, and the next minute he says hasn’t talked to him. So he never did talk to him. It’s a lot of shit. Why lie to me? I haven’t got that coming.

Giancana then told Rosselli that one of his shooters, Johnny Formosa, had offered to hit Sinatra and “take the nigger’s [Sammy Davis Jr.’s] eye out.”

ROSSELLI: He’s got big ideas, Frank does, about being an ambassador or something. You know Pierre Salinger and them guys, they don’t want him. They treat him like a whore. You fuck them, you pay them, and then they’re through. You got the right idea, Mo, go the other way. Fuck everybody. We’ll use them every fucking way we can. They only know one way. Now let them see the other side of you.

This was an ominous proposal for a measured man like Rosselli, but one Bobby Kennedy was never to know. Hoover now had a clearer view of the bargain Joe Kennedy had made with the Chicago Outfit. Hoover ordered the tapes to be flown to Washington for safekeeping and stepped up FBI surveillance of Sinatra, Giancana, and Rosselli, only to find out something even more shocking about America’s first family — that Joe Kennedy was
still
doing business with the Mafia. As he was gathering this package of poison, Hoover was also penning a note to Bobby and Ethel in response to their invitation to the Justice Department Christmas party: “It was indeed thoughtful of you to remember me. With my very best wishes to you both for a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Sincerely, Edgar.”
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The world had changed for the Mafia. Over 250 racketeers were indicted in 1961; 96 were convicted, compared with 19 in 1960. IRS audits now numbered in the hundreds. The FBI, emboldened by their surreptitiously derived knowledge of the Mafia’s inner workings, were shadowing and even publicly mocking Mafia leaders. Giancana told a friend: “I never thought it would get this rough. You told me when they put his brother in there we were gonna see some fireworks, but I never knew it would be like this. This is murder.”
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November 9, 1961

Washington, D.C.

O
n November 9, journalist Tad Szulc, then covering Cuba for the
New York Times
, had a conversation in the Oval Office with the president. Kennedy suddenly leaned forward in his rocking chair. “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?” he asked. Szulc was stunned and later recalled “blurting out a long sentence to the effect that I was against political assassination as a matter of principle and that, anyway, I doubted that this would solve the Cuban problem for the U.S.” The president smiled and leaned back in his rocking chair, saying that he was testing him. Szulc wrote that Kennedy had told him that “he was under terrific pressure from advisors in the Intelligence community to have Castro killed, but that he himself violently opposed it on the grounds that for moral reasons the United States should never be party to political assassinations. ”
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It was the same position Kennedy had expressed ten months earlier when Lumumba was assassinated. Despite the president’s opposition, there is persuasive evidence that Bobby Kennedy was the moving force behind a renewal of the effort to kill Castro.

In the weeks following the Bay of Pigs at top-secret hearings, a board of inquiry consisting of the attorney general, General Maxwell Taylor, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Allen Dulles heard the testimony of everyone from brigade frogman Bias Casares to Marine commandant David Shoup about the genesis and gestation of the debacle — Castro’s T-33s, the uncharted reefs, the nonexistent “mass uprisings,” etc. What remained unadmitted was the president’s own feeble display of management. “Johnny, you didn’t say yes but you didn’t say no,” was Bobby’s rather paternal admonition.
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The brothers communicated constantly on Cuba during those weeks and their joint position appeared to be seamless, but there were differences. The Bay of Pigs confirmed the president’s gut-level distrust of the generals and admirals, with their tidy and categorical prescriptions on the efficacy of force. Kenny O’Donnell would remember Kennedy mocking air force general Curtis LeMay after a meeting, making fun of the “fruit salad” on his chest and his simple-minded pronouncements.
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Kennedy did not follow up on his angry threat to “split the CIA into a thousand pieces,” but it did reveal his antipathy to the paramilitary busybodies who had gotten him into the mess in the first place. It was also revealing that Jack forwarded a communication to Bobby from Senator Mike Mansfield, who had written him on May 1: “If we yield to the temptation to give vent to our anger at our own failure, we will, ironically, strengthen Castro’s position.” Mansfield recommended that the United States disengage from the anti-Castro groups and stop the verbal attacks.
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Disengagement was probably not an option the president considered, but it is clear he opposed the idea of an invasion of Cuba. Reacting to the calls for military action against Castro, from Richard Nixon among others, he told his old friend Paul Fay, “We’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe . . . puts so-called national pride above national reason. Do you think I’m going to carry on my conscience the responsibility for the wanton maiming and killing of children?”

Jack Kennedy was at heart an ironist who recognized the limits of will and power. His close friend David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador to the United States, described his sense of “the fatality of activism.”
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His reading reflected this. The president liked Ian Fleming’s new novel,
On Her Majesty}s Secret Service
(“I think James Bond fucks about three women in four countries — or vice versa” was his amused precis) but it was Barbara Tuchman’s
The Guns of August
that he encouraged friends and advisors to read. Tuchman depicts the vainglorious lock-step of the oligarchs of pre — World War I Europe as they steered their countries off the cliff and into the abyss of total war. Revisionists of the Kennedy record, perhaps rightly, might point to the martial rhetoric about “the hour of maximum danger,” but Kennedy had little faith in military intervention. Gore Vidal thought that Kennedy’s most unusual gift was “an objectivity which extends to himself. He can discuss his own motives with a precision not usual in public men, who tend to regard themselves tenderly and according to the rhetoric of the day.”
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He was downright contrite about the Bay of Pigs and repeatedly expressed his personal sense of guilt. After Blas Casares appeared in early May before the board of inquiry, he was brought over to the White House for a visit with the president. “You fought bravely,” Kennedy told Casares. “You’re not responsible for the fiasco.” Casares then reached into his pocket to pull out the radio messages he had saved from the
Blagar,
messages that detailed the brigade’s abandonment. One of the president’s military aides, thinking the twenty-one-year-old was about to draw out a weapon, grabbed his wrist to restrain him. Kennedy waved off the aide and Casares handed the messages to the president, asking if he had read them. Kennedy thumbed through them for a few seconds, then responded that he had. Casares asked why the United States had provided no air cover for the exiles. Kennedy replied, “I can’t answer that question, Mr. Casares. Someday I hope to.”
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There was no particular sense of contrition, much less perspective, evident in Bobby Kennedy’s attitude toward Cuba — only action. His crusade against Castro, which took form during the Bay of Pigs postmortem, was a dark admixture of emotion and crude miscalculation. It had the character of a vendetta. Bobby saw Castro the way he saw Hoffa: as a betrayer of his people and a poseur, who, with the right formula of assault, could be taken down. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described his attitude at the time as “hysterical.”
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As in the 1960 campaign, shrouded in self righteousness and determined to win at any cost, Bobby was willing to justify the means for the end.