The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (21 page)

The president’s view did not prevail. On November 13, in evident anticipation of “Phase II” of the assassination effort, Bill Harvey cabled the Mexico City CIA station to dispatch David S. Morales to JM-WAVE (the CIA’s base in south Florida) for permanent posting.
¹¹³
Morales, a Mexican-American CIA agent from Phoenix, was well known as the Agency’s top assassin in Latin America. He had served in Cuba from 1958 to 1960 in the American consulate in Havana. He had played a supporting role in Mexico City during the Bay of Pigs planning. Afterward he had openly described what Kennedy had done as
traición
(betrayal). Nicknamed El Indio because of his dark skin and Indian features, Morales was a man of explosive temperament and exceptional cunning, a master at his deadly game. In south Florida he was to team up with Johnny Rosselli. This would be a murderous coupling.

In New Orleans, another alliance had formed by the end of 1961. David Ferrie, having lost his job as an Eastern Airlines pilot for seducing young men, was spreading Marcello money among violently anti-Castro exiles, one of whom, Sergio Aracha-Smith, was a CIA informant. In June Ferrie had made a fiery speech to the Military Order of World Wars in New Orleans about the Bay of Pigs, saying “anyone could lie in the bushes and shoot the president.” The FBI field office noted that Ferrie was known in the New Orleans area for his work with the local Civil Air Patrol. One of Ferrie’s trainees, as a photograph would later show, was a teenager by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald.

December 19, 1961

West Palm Beach, Florida

B
obby liked to describe Jack as having “the guts of a cat burglar,” adding that it was their father who had bequeathed him this trait. Joe Kennedy may have given his sons the singular advantage of money, but he also passed on his intense fearlessness in taking risks. For both Jack and Bobby, he remained both a figure of awe, a titanic presence in their public and personal lives — shouting instructions to one or the other on the phone from Hyannis Port, telling Jack with a heavy arm across his shoulders that he would one day be regarded as a great American president, or warning Bobby to stay straight with Hoover. For all his flaws, he was there for them every day, as he had been for all his children, unstinting and devoted. In December 1961 this changed.

On his way back from a six-day trip to Latin America on December 19, the president stopped off for a quick visit with his father at his home in West Palm Beach. A few hours later, Jack reboarded Air Force One and continued on to Washington. His father went for a round of golf with his niece Ann Gargan. Suddenly feeling faint on the fairway of the 16th hole, the Ambassador — as his children continued to call him — returned home and went to bed. Hearing that he was not feeling well, Rose looked in on him. “There’s nothing I can do but pray,” his wife told the staff and went off for her own scheduled golf game.
¹¹⁴
Hours later, when his condition seemed to have become more serious, an ambulance was called. Within minutes of returning to the Oval Office late that afternoon, Jack got a call from St. Mary’s Hospital in Palm Beach advising him that his father had suffered a stroke. He immediately called Bobby, who was conferring with his Detroit organized crime strike force, and told him the news in a strangled voice, “Dad’s gotten sick.”
¹¹⁵

Together the brothers flew down on Air Force One to West Palm Beach and went straight to the hospital. Their father hovered near death; he was given the last rites. In the days that followed, Joe Kennedy inched back toward normality, but remained paralyzed from head to toe on his right side. He seemed to understand people when they talked to him, but in reply could only blurt out in a ruined, angry way: “No . . . No . . . No.” His doctors informed family members that the prognosis for recovery was not good. The family’s strong mast was broken.

Over the weeks that followed, no one seemed to take Joe’s stroke harder than Bobby, who surveyed doctors and experimental procedures all over the country in a search for a cure. There was none.
¹¹⁶
Bobby flew to West Palm Beach twice before Christmas. James Symington, who accompanied him on one of those trips, remembered that each time Bobby saw his father he himself would go into a state of disconsolate shock.
¹¹⁷

One year before, Joe had pressured Bobby to become attorney general and, as his father had predicted, Bobby had progressively taken command of the administration in the same way he had Jack’s 1952 and 1960 campaigns. But Bobby’s indispensable resource in every sense during “the very mean year of 1961,” as he later put it, had been his father.
¹¹⁸
Now he was alone.

Well before Joe’s stroke, General Maxwell Taylor had concluded that the fraternal order was not what rank or age suggested: Bobby was the senior brother.
¹¹⁹
Taylor had his reasons for thinking this. The president’s chronic state of pain transformed each day into something of a question mark. There were days Jack could tie his shoes by himself, and days he couldn’t. Despite his stoic drive, he was forced to take frequent baths, shots in his back, and to curtail his schedule. At times, such as when Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah visited him in the first week of March 1961, his face was unusually bloated. Under the care of Dr. Janet Travell, whose regimen included novocaine injections, barbiturate painkillers, orally ingested cortisone, baths, exercise, a shoelift that relieved the seesaw caused by his curved spine, and a braced corset, Jack’s health improved. But there were always episodes. A tree-planting ceremony during a state trip to Canada in the second week of May had re-injured his fragile lower back and transformed his trip to Vienna for the summit meeting with Khrushchev into an ordeal.
¹²⁰

As always, Jack rarely complained, but during the dark days of the Bay of Pigs, Bobby saw disturbing physical manifestations that were induced by either sleeplessness, stress, pain, or some combination. The president would rub his eyes, roll his head, and sit down suddenly as if he were dizzy. Bobby’s calls to Jack’s aide Kenny O’Donnell always began with a pointed inquiry: “How’s the president?”
¹²¹

The womanizing, which resumed after a postinaugural hiatus of a month or so, probably didn’t help, although Kennedy claimed it was the one thing that relaxed him. The “talent,” as the president called them, varied. There was a continuing stream of actresses and starlets, usually procured by Peter Lawford. Angie Dickinson, Lee Remick, and Marilyn Monroe were among the more notable and long-standing.
¹²²
Through former Lyndon Johnson aide and bagman Bobby Baker and other wheeler-dealers, Jack was able to troll Capitol Hill waters for party girls like Ellie Rometsch. Closer to home were Jackie’s secretary, Pamela Turnure, and two secretaries in the White House pool Jack referred to as “Fiddle” and “Faddle.” (The observant Jackie referred to these latter two as “the White House dogs.”)
¹²³
Beyond this, there were prostitutes and call girls that materialized at their appointed hour (it rarely took longer than that). Some of these, perhaps accepting their status, required little maintenance. Others, like Judy Campbell, came to believe that the president might leave his wife for them. Only one might have posed that contingency — Mary Pinchot Meyer, a sophisticated divorcee and successful painter of the colorist school whose affair with the president began in March 1961 and continued off and on until his death.
¹²⁴

Through all of this manic coupling, the Secret Service was obliged to perform extra duty — staking out trysting locations or hustling women in and out of the White House sub rosa. This caused discomfort among certain agents, particularly the more monogamous ones. Jackie, if not fully aware of all the names and faces, knew of her husband’s relentless philandering, but dealt with it as she always had — with a combination of occasional hurt and consistent hauteur. It did not prevent her from sharing her sexual favors with her spouse, nor at the same time from taking the children away for the weekend, knowing the predictable consequence back in the White House. Trained by both Jack and her father Black Jack to accept adultery as an ugly fact of family life, Jackie was capable of carrying on. Her sense of self-direction as well as her deep attachment to her children were somehow untouched, perhaps even strengthened. Jacqueline Kennedy emerged as a strong, driven, lonely woman who loved her husband in her own way and occupied a central space in his life with pride and supremely sure taste.

Joe Kennedy had always been Jackie’s closest ally in the family. His incapacitation not only jeopardized her access to money (since Jack never concerned himself with the family’s finances) but deprived her of the one person who sought to contain Jack’s extramarital sorties. Bobby had also been loyal and episodically attentive to her, as the stillbirth in August 1956 revealed, but he either didn’t realize or simply ignored Jack’s pursuit of other women.

This began to change in 1961 when Bobby began rallying to Jack’s side on national and international crises. As soon as the president heard the East Germans were constructing a wall in the middle of the night to stanch the flow of refugees into West Berlin, he said, “Go get my brother.” On the issue of American funding of Ghana’s Volta Dam, on the other hand, Jack found Bobby’s presence less welcome. The attorney general opposed American aid because he thought President Nkrumah to be a “Black Castro,” a characterization bordering on the absurd. Bobby arrived late at the National Security Council meeting on September 5 in which the matter was to be decided and sat directly behind the president, who commented that he knew the attorney general had arrived because he could “feel the hot breath of his opposition down the back of my neck.” The president gave his brother the floor, listened to his strong disapproval of the funding, then gave the green light to the Volta River Project.
¹²⁵
At least on foreign policy, Bobby was more of an enforcer and intimate interlocutor than a decision maker. But this too was changing.

The Washington press began to refer to Bobby as “the second most powerful man in Washington.” In the presence of several White House reporters in the Oval Office, the president took a call from his brother, and with his hand over the phone whispered to them that it was indeed “the second most powerful man in Washington” on the line.

Bobby’s stick on policy matters was soon being brandished in personal areas. During the first months of 1961, the president had come under the treatment, if it could be termed that, of a New York doctor by the name of Max Jacobson, a veritable Dr. Feelgood. Jacobson’s specialty was to give his patients (among them Eddie Fisher and Jackie’s brother-in-law, Stanislaus Radziwill) cocktail injections of vitamins, enzymes, and amphetamines. The president grew so fond of Dr. Jacobson’s treatments that he brought him along on his trip to the Vienna summit with Khrushchev. In September 1961, Jacobson gave the president a shot directly into his throat before the hoarse-voiced Jack was to address the UN General Assembly. When Bobby got wind of this, he immediately procured the substance, sent it to the FDA for testing, and then confronted his brother with the fact that he was being injected with narcotics. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Jack replied. “It works.”

Joe Kennedy’s stroke only elevated Bobby’s preeminence within his talented family, but the cost was high. Having bought, bullied, and bulldozed his family’s way to power, Joe Kennedy understood the price and terms of its thirty-year trajectory. Bobby did not. Moreover, Joe Kennedy was feared by everyone, even by those who hated him and his sons. Gone now was the broker of the family’s dangerous alliance with the Mafia. Gone too was Hoover’s single ally in the Kennedy family. Bobby’s contempt for his enemies was now unleavened by any sense of limits or by the remotest calculation of their destructive power. He would cleanse them from his family and his country once and for all.

The Kennedy children rallied round their fallen patriarch. Jack flew up every weekend he could to Boston and would helicopter over to Hyannis Port; the old man watched from the porch as the helicopter landed. Jack would tease his father by telling him how closely he was consulting with all the people his father detested.
¹²⁶
Bobby and Ted were there as well every weekend. On one occasion, when the senior Kennedy staggered as he tried to get out of his wheelchair, Bobby rushed over the help him. The old man started screaming and tried to hit his son with his cane. Bobby fended off the blows and grabbed his father and kissed him: “That’s what I’m here for, Dad. Just to give you a hand when you need it. You’ve done that for me all my life, so why can’t I do the same for you now?”
¹²⁷

But it was Jackie who seemed to reach the Ambassador the most. One weekend at Hyannis Port, Dave Powers found them sitting together on the loveseat in the front room. She was holding his deformed right hand in hers, occasionally wiping away drool from the corner of his mouth and kissing him on the paralyzed side of his face. “Grandpa, I’m praying for you every day,” she told him. At this point the president walked in behind the two of them from the dining room. He stood there listening as Jackie continued talking to his father. “You know that Jack never would have married me without you,” she said, and put her arms around the crumbling old man.
¹²⁸

Powers remembered that Jack paused and lowered his head as he heard this.

Triumph