The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (109 page)

Bobby might shrug off silly stories about the president that Hoover passed on, but he was judicious enough not to attack Hoover’s tales that had the hard ring of truth. At the end of January 1961, when Hoover received a cable from Rome, he made a note to send a memo to the attorney general. The cable dealt with a story in the weekly magazine
Le Ore
in which Alicia Darr Purdom talked about her supposed affair with Kennedy in 1951. Darr Purdom said that she would have been first lady except that she was “a Polish-Jewish refugee.” FBI records stated that in the early 1950s Darr Purdom had been a prostitute, “a notorious, albeit high-class, ‘hustler.’ “This was hardly the type of woman Kennedy would have contemplated marrying, but it was not the kind of story the administration wanted made public either.

Hoover understood the bureaucratic imperative of having his superiors sign on to any measure likely to prove controversial. He was not about to wiretap someone without getting Bobby’s approval, and during his term in office the attorney general reportedly approved more than six hundred wiretaps.
The FBI also placed nearly eight hundred bugs that picked up the words of the innocent as well as the suspected.

To place a bug, an agent usually had to break into the premises to plant a secret microphone. The transcripts could not be used in court, and the fruits of most of this surveillance not only rotted on the ground but also kept the FBI and other agencies from doing more legitimate police work. Hoover, however, could produce a piece of paper that Bobby signed on August 17, 1961, authorizing microphone surveillance, or “bugging.”

Bobby’s defenders claim that he may not have understood the distinction between the two forms of electronic surveillance, and that “perhaps … he did not want to know.” Willful ignorance is the most pathetic of excuses, especially in a man of Bobby’s abilities, and it is unlikely that it was true. Again and again he read transcripts or listened to conversations that could only have come from hidden microphones. He even proposed a wiretapping bill that would have stripped Americans of part of their civil liberties. In the White House, Mike Feldman oversaw proposed legislation usually by passing it on, but when he saw this bill, he was so upset that he went to the president, and the legislation never got out of the White House.

B
obby was so militant in his war against organized crime in part because the world that he was seeing was one in which the underground and the highest reaches of society at times appeared seamlessly integrated. John Mataasa, a former Chicago cop, often drove Giancana around and served as his bodyguard. He also boasted that he chauffeured Sinatra when he was in the Windy City, and that he had a letter of recommendation from William Randolph Hearst recommending his services to Otto Kerner, the governor.

Even before Bobby entered office, he knew that Sinatra had long ago soiled his name with his mob connections, and that it was his brother’s weakness to be associated with such a man. At the end of the inaugural gala, when Kennedy praised Sinatra for putting together the extravaganza, Bobby turned to Red Fay and said: “I hope Sinatra will live up to the public position the president has given him by such recognition.”

In recent years Sinatra had pushed his way to the head gangsters’ table and fancied himself a kind of ersatz Hollywood don, with the power to call on his dangerous friends whenever he needed them. In April 1961, Hoover talked to Bobby about Giancana, telling him that one of Giancana’s lieutenants, Joe Pignatello, was trying to get a lucrative liquor and gaming license in Las Vegas, fronting for the Chicago mob. Nothing happened in Las Vegas without connections, and Sinatra had gotten involved, speaking in favor of
his friend. Bobby sent a clear message that Sinatra’s name would not buy a free pass in his Justice Department. Again, Bobby could simply have made a few abstract remarks about justice, freedom, and the flag and let things fall as they were going to fall. But on that day he made it indisputably clear that he not only wanted the FBI to try to prevent the granting of the license, but wanted everyone to know that he, Robert F. Kennedy, was personally concerned. “The attorney general indicated we should be sure to indicate that we were speaking on his behalf and explain that he is quite concerned about it,” Hoover noted.

As the FBI increased its surveillance of the mob in Chicago, Giancana and his henchmen expressed their outrage. Their fury would have been even greater had they known their tirades were being recorded. Early in December 1961, as the tape recorder whirled, one of Giancana’s associates, Johnny Formosa, talked to his boss. Formosa had just returned from a visit to Sinatra’s Palm Springs home. During his stay there, he said, Joe Kennedy had called the singer three times. Formosa had been trying to learn why the mob had been unable to cash in its chit with the Kennedys. Formosa recounted that the singer had explained that he had done everything he could. “I wrote Sam’s name down and I took it to Bobby,” Sinatra told Formosa. When that didn’t work, Sinatra said, he had talked to Kennedy’s father to see whether he could work his will on what the mob considered his double-crossing son.

“Well, one minute he says 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, I’m gonna talk to the man,’ “a peeved Giancana replied. “One minute he says he’s talked to Robert, and the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. So he never did talk to him. It’s a lot of shit.”

Giancana was probably correct in his assessment. It seems unlikely that Sinatra would have been capable of persuading Bobby to back off investigations of Giancana, or if he would have dared to make such a request face to face with the new attorney general. He may, however, have talked to Joe, who might have been more amenable, though hardly likely to have asked Bobby specifically to avoid prosecuting Giancana. It is probable that the vain, boastful Sinatra promised something from his Kennedy connections that neither he nor anyone else could deliver. Although Giancana may simply have been boasting, it seems likely that he did make various kinds of contributions to the campaign and now raged at both the Kennedys and Sinatra.

Bobby was apparently immediately made aware of Giancana’s allegations. On the bottom of the teletype from the Chicago bureau, Hoover had scrawled “&promptly” after his aide’s notation: “Memo to AG Being Prepared.”

“As the Bureau is aware, considerable information has been received … which reflects a serious rift between Giancana and Frank Sinatra,” the Chicago field office wired Hoover on January 18, 1962, “which stems primarily from Sinatra’s inability or lack of desire to intercede with Attorney General Robert Kennedy on behalf of Giancana.”

T
he FBI agents spread their great nets wherever the mob hierarchy was likely to venture, periodically pulling in all sorts of unseen creatures from the dark depths of American life. In Los Angeles, the FBI targeted John Rosselli as a second-tier figure, running wiretaps and bugs, interviewing his friends and associates, and observing his daily activities. The FBI had no idea that Rosselli had become the CIA’s agent in attempting to assassinate Castro, and they tried to explore every shadowy corner of his life. In their investigation they came upon the name of Judith Campbell (Exner), who led them to places that they had not expected to go.

FBI special agents noted in September 1961 that Rosselli was calling Exner when he came to Los Angeles, and he was later observed escorting her to Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. Her telephone records showed that she was telephoning Giancana in Chicago. She drove a 1961 Ford Thunder-bird that had been driven from Chicago to Las Vegas by the Mafia chieftain’s assistant, Joe Pignatello. Everything the FBI learned about Exner suggested that she had no income or substantial bank accounts, yet she had rented a fancy home in Palm Springs and a place in Malibu. Most surprisingly, Exner’s telephone records showed a number of calls to the desk of Evelyn Lincoln just outside the Oval Office.

By the end of February 1962, Hoover had all this information sitting on his desk. The FBI chief had a brilliantly astute awareness of the wages of power. Two decades before, he did not directly confront President Roosevelt with information making criminal accusations against his son James and Joseph P. Kennedy. He had written a memo so that he would have a legal record of how he had handled this matter and sent it to Roosevelt’s chief of staff by courier. This time he once again wrote a memo, addressed to the president’s assistant, in this case Kenny O’Donnell, and sent it by courier to the White House, as well as a second memo to Bobby. Once again Hoover had proof that the information had been received, but the president could always deny that he had seen the memo.

Hoover knew all about Kennedy’s sexual predilections and had previously passed on part of his knowledge to the attorney general. Hoover’s memo was so bland, however, that reading the words a thousand times
would not reveal whether irony, moralizing, or even veiled threats of exposure lay behind them. “The relationship between Campbell [Exner] and Mrs. Lincoln or the purpose of these calls is not known,” Hoover wrote.

When Joe Dolan, serving as Bobby’s acting deputy for an ailing Burke Marshall, walked into his office, Bobby shoved a folder of documents toward him. “What do you think of this?” Bobby asked, his even tone suggesting nothing of the potential importance of the memo. In his office Dolan carefully read documents that included the list of Exner’s telephone calls and other information, then returned to the attorney general’s office.

Dolan knew full well how extraordinary it was that Bobby was even showing him this material. Bobby was secretive about family matters, walling off this world from those who served him and his family. Bobby looked up, and Dolan spoke with the wry wit that was his trademark: “Mrs. Lincoln shouldn’t take calls like that.”

“So what do you think?” Bobby asked. In a normal world Bobby would have gone over to the White House and spoken confidentially to his brother, but Dolan realized that was not what the attorney general wanted to do. “I think I’ll write Mrs. Lincoln a little memo,” Dolan said, having astutely grasped what Bobby wanted. “Do it today,” Bobby said.

Dolan wrote a memo outlining what Hoover had discovered. Sensing the importance of the matter, he hand-delivered the memo to Evelyn Lincoln in the White House. “Joe, I’m shocked,” Lincoln said, recalling the famous line in
Casablanca
when Captain Renault claims to have learned about gambling in Rick’s Café.

S
inatra had introduced Exner to the president. Bobby had all kinds of memos about Sinatra’s contacts with organized crime, and it was hardly wise that his brother intended to spend a weekend at Sinatra’s Palm Springs house. Kennedy, however, did not think of Sinatra as a political operative, but as a fellow sexual swordsman and bon vivant who offered him beautiful women and good times. Bobby realized that his brother would have to seek his pleasures elsewhere. The onerous task fell to him of calling Sinatra and telling him that in late March 1962 the president would be staying elsewhere.

Sinatra, like the president, was a man who thought he could have it all, a friendly greeting at the White House and a seat at the head table of the mob, accolades for his noble liberal politics and a personal life of excess. He had already built a helicopter pad for the president and lined up a weekend of assorted entertainments. He raged at Bobby, screaming at him into the phone, infuriated as much over the embarrassment as the insult itself. After
hanging up, he went out to the helicopter pad and broke the concrete slab into pieces with a sledgehammer.

Just before Kennedy set off for his West Coast trip, he had lunch with Hoover. Neither man left a record of what was said that day. Although Exner claimed that Kennedy saw her later, by all documentary evidence he did not. He seems to have ended the relationship the way it began, as just another of his occasional trysts to be dismissed and forgotten.

In Palm Springs, Kennedy may not have had Sinatra to gather a bouquet of Hollywood’s rosebuds for his pleasure, but he had an even sweeter treat in store. Marilyn Monroe arrived to spend the evening with the president. The blonde actress was the benchmark of American sexual fantasy. Even the president was not immune to the dream of sleeping with her, and for months he had been pestering his brother-in-law Peter Lawford to set up an assignation.

Monroe appears to have viewed Kennedy not only as a political star in a firmament far above Hollywood but as an epic hero. In talking to her analyst, she spoke about him as a man who walked in the shoes of Jefferson and Lincoln. “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.” As for Kennedy, he may have suffered from the common male failure of taking almost as much pleasure in having his male cohorts know about his conquest as in the act itself. “Well, she loved him, and she was a beautiful girl,” Smathers reflected. “He took her down the Potomac on the presidential yacht two times. And God she loved Jack. After he was president. She was all over him, of course, he liked her very much. But he was already married and everything. So he had to be reasonably discreet. But he’d take a lot of guys, take a lot of his old buddies out when he had someone like Marilyn, and they’d all be around, five of us, or a bunch of us, where he could blame it on any one of his friends.”

O
n August 3, 1962, Bobby and his family flew to San Francisco for the start of a summer vacation. He was not one for sedate excursions, and he spent the weekend at the ranch of John Bates in northern California, driving back into the city Sunday evening to stay at Red Fay’s home.

Early in the morning on Sunday, August 5, Sergeant Jack Clemmons was led into Monroe’s bedroom in her home on Helena Drive. The actress’s nude body lay under a sheet. Beside her corpse stood her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and Dr. Hyman Engelberg, her physician. An autopsy revealed that the body of the troubled actress was full of Nembutal.