The Arrogance of Power (95 page)

11.
Lasky is best known for his books
JFK: The Man & the Myth
and
It Didn't Start with Watergate,
published in 1977, which trumpeted “the many sins—by his enemies—against Richard Nixon.” Behind the facade of regular journalist, Lasky was on “Dick” terms with Nixon from as early as 1949, during the Hiss episode. Dwight Chapin recalled finding him in 1962 in a cigar smoke–filled office with Murray Chotiner, “like a classic picture of the Tammany Hall back room.” The Rockefeller brothers put up sixty thousand dollars to underwrite a controversial biography of Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg when he was running for governor of New York in 1970. “If nobody else will print it, Lasky will,” Haldeman said on a 1971 White House tape. Many White House memos referred to the planting of stories with Lasky, and Nixon's 1972 reelection committee offered him twenty thousand dollars to write speeches. In January 1975, as Nixon made his first tentative moves to emerge from the obloquy of Watergate, Lasky was one of those who flew to California to celebrate his birthday. It was through Lasky that Lucianne Goldberg, who found notoriety in 1998 for her role in the
Clinton sex exposé, became a Nixon spy in the Democratic camp. (“Many sins”: Lasky, op. cit., back cover; “Dick”: Levitt and Levitt, op. cit., p. 135, and see
MO,
p. 491; de Toledano, ed., op. cit., p. 13; Chapin: Strober, eds.
Nixon,
op. cit., p. 340; Goldberg: Miller, ed.,
Breaking of the President,
op. cit., p. 503; “If nobody”: HRH to Mitchell-Nixon, July 6, 1971, WHT; 1972 Tittle-Kicklighter memo, June 6, 1973, FBI WFO 139 166; planting stories: Schorr, op. cit., p. 183; 1975: unidentified June 17, 1975, Vera Glazer clip; Lucianne Goldberg:
WP,
Feb. 4, 1998; Michael Isikoff,
Uncovering Clinton,
New York: Crown, 1999, p. 191.)

12.
Citing an article in the
National Review,
Lasky said a first wave of mailings, during the primary campaign, had been organized by a Kennedy worker named Paul Corbin. Nixon repeated the allegation in his memoirs. Corbin was described by Kennedy biographer Arthur Schlesinger as a “raffish and outrageous rogue . . . a fixture in Robert Kennedy's political operations . . . prone to reorganizing the truth.” While the author has not attempted to verify the
National Review
article, it seems Corbin was capable of perpetrating such abuses. Readers should note, though, that the mailings in question were directed not at Nixon but at a fellow Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, during the primary phase of the campaign. (Lasky, op. cit., p. 35;
MEM,
p. 775; Schlesinger,
RFK,
op. cit., p. 196–.)

13.
The “first marriage” claim—that Kennedy married a Florida socialite named Durie Malcolm in 1947—arose from an entry in a privately printed history of Malcolm's family. It stated flatly that among her several husbands was “John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England.” There is conflicting evidence on whether this information first reached FBI Director Hoover in 1960 or during the Kennedy presidency, in 1961. In 1997 John Kennedy's close friend Charles Spalding told author Seymour Hersh the marriage to Malcolm had indeed occurred and that he had “removed the marriage papers” at Kennedy's request. Malcolm has denied that she married Kennedy. While there were problems with Spalding's account—he was seventy-nine when interviewed and had short-term memory lapses—other evidence persuaded Hersh the story was credible. (Hersh, op. cit., p. 326–.)

14.
The statements about the alleged Democratic surveillance and eavesdropping are elements of a tangled tale. The two detectives not cited in the main text were former federal agent John Frank and former Washington police inspector Joseph Shimon. Frank said Bellino did run investigations for the 1960 Kennedy campaign committee and that he was given assignments by him but that he could not remember what they were. Shimon said Angelone asked him for help in a bugging operation against Nixon supporters based in Washington's Wardman Park Hotel. It is interesting to note that Frank was an associate of Horace Schmahl, the private investigator who allegedly claimed he helped frame Alger Hiss. Shimon was a witness to the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots. Bellino had once shared an office with Robert Maheu, a central figure in the CIA-Mafia plots and an aide to Howard Hughes. The interconnections of the characters in the 1960 eavesdropping allegations are curious, and the truth about their actions and motivations will probably never be fully known. The White House tapes show that Haldeman and Nixon discussed the exploitation of “some allusions to some probable Kennedy wiretapping in 1960” as early as February 1973, months before the claims by the alleged participants surfaced. (Frank-Shimon: report and affidavit, Box 120, Korff Papers, Brown University; Frank-Schmahl: see p. 73, chapter 8, Note 10; Shimon, plots: int. Joseph Shimon; Hougan,
Spooks,
op. cit., p. 279; Maheu-Bellino: Maheu, op. cit., p. 40; RN-Haldeman: WHT, Sept. 6, 1973,
AOP.
)

15.
According to the 1992 book
Double Cross
by Giancana's brother Chuck and his nephew (and godson) Sam, Giancana said words to this effect in late October 1960, at Meo's Norwood House restaurant in Chicago.
Double Cross
attracted justified criticism for its claims about the Kennedy assassination, but an interview with Sam Giancana (the nephew and coauthor) encouraged the author's feeling that core parts of the book reflect the authentic memories of Chuck Giancana. (Ints. Sam Giancana.)

16.
Michael Ewing, longtime staff assistant to Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, interviewed Partin in 1977 on the recommendation of Walter Sheridan. Partin's account remained consistent with what he had told Sheridan in the sixties, with the exception that Sheridan quoted him as originally having named a figure less than five hundred thousand dollars. Also present at the meeting when the money was handed over, according to Partin, was Washington lobbyist Irving Davidson. Davidson, who later denied that Marcello even knew Hoffa, had arranged the meetings between Hoffa and Oakley Hunter (see p. 214); Sheridan said he later located information confirming the Marcello donation while working in the Kennedy Justice Department. (Int., corr. Michael Ewing: Moldea,
Hoffa Wars,
op. cit., pp. 108, 260.)

17.
The accountant, Phillip Reiner, had been chosen in 1957 as the front man behind whose name the true origin of the loan could be concealed. Then, he had shared office space with the Hughes law firm of James Arditto and Frank Waters. By 1960 the Arditto-Waters partnership had been dissolved, and Reiner and Arditto were at loggerheads. In August 1960, according
to Reiner, full documentation of the loan to Don Nixon was delivered to his home with other files he had left behind in the Arditto office. Arditto, for his part, told the police that his office had been burglarized. His widow speculated in 1996 that Reiner had purloined the material to sell it to the Kennedy team. (
Reporter,
Aug. 16, 1962; int. Clare Arditto.)

18.
Nixon's concession was expressed in a wire to Kennedy the next morning. (Nixon,
Six Crises,
op. cit., p. 398.)

19.
For the best analysis of the figures, see Appendix A in Theodore White's
The Making of the President: 1960.

20.
There were also allegations of vote fraud in Texas. A shift of a mere 4,491 votes in Missouri, or minor changes in the count in New Mexico, Hawaii, and Nevada, could also have changed the result. For a study of the possible permutations, see Wicker, op. cit., p. 251–.

1.
St. Johns had known Nixon from childhood. In 1962 he described her as having been a “close friend and adviser” since 1947. (See p. 151, and Nixon,
Six Crises,
op. cit., p. xi.)

2.
The CIA's Cuban exile force gathered by April 1961 for the infantry-style Bay of Pigs landing numbered only fourteen hundred men—this to confront Castro's army of thirty-two thousand plus a two hundred-thousand-man militia. In mid-December 1960 it numbered only about five hundred. The decision to switch from guerrilla training to an infantry invasion had been made only a month earlier. (Exile strength Apr. 1961: Kornbluh, ed.,
Bay of Pigs,
op. cit., p. 277; Castro forces: Trumbull Higgins,
The Perfect Failure,
New York: Norton, 1987, p. 70; mid-December 1960: Wyden, op. cit., p. 55; decision to switch: Kornbluh, ed.,
Bay of Pigs,
op. cit., p. 277.)

3.
In a 1998 chronology, based on the latest official releases, U.S.-backed action against Cuba developed as follows in the latter part of 1960. Talk of shifting from guerrilla warfare plans to a possible amphibious operation began in late summer, as did the first documented CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. A cable from CIA headquarters to the field first described a plan for a fifteen-hundred-man invasion on October 31. Four days later this was followed by an order to change training operations in line with the new concept. The change was relayed to Eisenhower's Special Group on November 8–9, coincident with election day. As president-elect Kennedy was briefed by CIA Director Dulles and Deputy Director Bissell on November 18 and by outgoing President Eisenhower on December 6. Training and recruitment for the proposed invasion were stepped up in January 1961, in the weeks before Kennedy's inauguration.

Nixon had been enraged when less than a month before the election Kennedy repeatedly attacked the Republican administration for giving insufficient aid to the anti-Castro exiles. Nixon later charged that Kennedy had deliberately put him at a disadvantage, making an unfounded allegation when he well knew from secret briefings that plans were in place to overthrow Castro and knew too that Nixon could not rebut the charge without breaching national security. Instead, in his final television debate with Kennedy, Nixon told the American public Kennedy's proposals for toppling Castro were “most dangerously irresponsible” and would risk a dangerous confrontation with the Soviet Union. Even allowing for electioneering license, this was a real liberty with the truth since operations to overthrow Castro were precisely what were under way. In
Six Crises
Nixon defended this strategy as a necessary step to protect the government's secret plans. In a later interview he said it was the “only
political
position that was salvageable. . . .” At the time, press aide Herb Klein revealed in 1995, Kennedy's charges on Cuba made Nixon “so angry it was difficult to prepare him for the debate.” He was still fulminating on the subject in private as president eleven years later, the White House tapes reveal. Just what Kennedy knew about in advance of the plans to topple Castro, and from whom, remains the subject of debate. Nixon's accusation that the CIA debriefed Kennedy on the Cuba plot may, ironically, have been misplaced. There is evidence he got his knowledge from another source. In any case, the CIA's plans were hopelessly insecure. (1998 chronology: Kornbluh, ed.,
Bay of Pigs,
op. cit., p. 275–; RN rage: Nixon,
Six Crises,
op. cit., p. 353– [paperback version];
MEM,
p. 220; Nixon article,
Reader's Digest,
Nov. 1964, and see Wicker, op. cit., p. 232; Klein, op. cit., p. 94; “only political”:
Washington Star,
Apr. 26, 1978; “so angry”:
San Diego Union-Tribune,
Dec. 19, 1995; still fulminating: June 23, 1972, WHT (retranscribed for author by Robert Lamb), and see July 5, 1971, WHT, AOP, p. 23; what JFK knew: Strober, eds.,
Kennedy,
op. cit., p. 325; Hersh,
Camelot,
op. cit., p. 175–; Weber, op. cit., p. 17; Grose, op. cit., p. 507,
San Diego Union,
March 25, 1962.)

4.
Nixon never got over his preoccupation with Cuba. On becoming president in 1969, he promptly ordered the CIA to step up covert action against Castro at a time it was being wound down. He sought legislation to prevent Americans from helping the Cuban economy. In 1970, when U.S. reconnaissance detected the apparent construction of a Soviet naval base in Cuba, a genuine concern, Nixon demanded an immediate CIA briefing on “
any
kind of action which will irritate Castro.” In 1971 the CIA supplied a consignment of African swine fever virus to
anti-Castro operatives, who then smuggled it into Cuba. An outbreak of the disease followed six weeks later, requiring the slaughter of half a million pigs to avert an epidemic. The same year Nixon posed for photographs with the family of a Cuban exile whose ship had been attacked and captured by a Castro gunboat. Testimony suggests that, also in 1971, the CIA was involved in a plot to assassinate Castro during a visit to Chile and that Howard Hunt, former CIA agent turned White House Watergate conspirator, told associates another “assassination team” was being readied in Spain. Fellow Watergate burglar Bernard Barker said Hunt “mentioned something about planning for the second phase of the Bay of Pigs around the beginning of Nixon's second term.” (RN, step up: Raymond Garthoff,
Detente & Confrontation,
Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985, p. 88, n. 37; legislation: Ehrlichman, op. cit., p. 142; “
any
kind of action”: Kissinger,
White House Years,
op. cit., p. 142; swine fever:
Newsday,
Jan. 9, 1977;
Nation,
March 9, 1998; Fidel Castro speech to 68th Inter-Parliamentary Conference, Sept. 15, 1981 [Cuban government release]; RN posted: Fonzi, op. cit., p. 137; Hunt on “team”: notes of int. Howard Liebengood and Frank Saunders, Jim Hougan papers, provided to author; Hunt “mentioned”: memo re: Barker int., Sept. 13, 1973, Box 99, WSPF, NA; ints. Bernard Barker and Howard Hunt [the latter a denial].)

5.
The Nixons' accounts of this family discussion are not entirely consistent one with another.