The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (36 page)

Arthur Schlesinger was probably right in observing later that “both the Brigade and Castro received the wrong message.”
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But in another way, the spectacle summarized the beautiful and dangerous ambition of the Kennedys — their drive to take matters to the edge and beyond. The bright and swirling rage of the Cubans. The assassin seeded among the celebrants. Jack’s brave words and consummately theatrical touch. And, most of all, Bobby. His arrogance and overbrimming passion had brought his brother to this place — the bastard city, the habitat of killers.

And now Rosselli and the other murderers began circling, wolflike, for the kill.

Rendezvous

1963

April 9, 1963

Washington, D.C.

I
f there was one man in the long list of Joe Kennedy’s enemies whose ascent to fame had coincided with his descent into disgrace, it was Sir Winston S. Churchill. On the afternoon of April 9, from his wheelchair, the former ambassador looked out from a second-story window of the White House and watched as his son Jack made the former British prime minister an honorary American citizen at a ceremony held in the Rose Garden. Churchill’s son Randolph accepted the honor on behalf of his father, who was watching the ceremony on closed-circuit television in Great Britain.

Perhaps if his stroke had not robbed him of his voice or his ability to walk, Joe might have stopped it, or at least given Jack a piece of his mind. Then again, perhaps not. Joe Kennedy had long understood the trade: the vengeance of his enemies had required him to fade from public view and work his deals from the shadows. All for Jack. Now, bent over and drooling, he was a wreck of a man imprisoned in a wheelchair. He was vanishing. But his son was president. His son carried his name. The only sign left of his titanic will were those flashing blue eyes and his frequent screams of “No! No! No!”

That evening, at a small family dinner, the president teased his father about the ceremony for Churchill. “All your good friends showed up, didn’t they, Dad?” Jack then went down the list of Joe Kennedy’s enemies who had attended that day. “Bernard Baruch . . . Dean Acheson . . . he’s on both offense and defense, isn’t he, Dad?”
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The teasing was meant to engage him, distract him, and in the habitat of the Kennedys, it was the truest sign of affection.

Jackie was far gentler with her father-in-law. She took pains to introduce Ben Bradlee, who also attended the ceremony, as “Beebo” Bradlee’s son, reminding Joe Sr. that he had once coached a baseball team at Harvard on which Bradlee’s father had played. “You remember your friend Beebo,” Jackie said. “You said how much better looking he was than Ben.” “No! No! No!” was the response.
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Jackie and Kennedy cousin Ann Gargan had taken on the difficult chore of helping the old man walk to dinner — something he resolutely demanded to do. With Jackie supporting him on one side and Gargan on the other, kicking his right leg forward between steps, they managed to get him to the table. Bradlee later wrote, “The evening was most moving — sad and joyous at the same time, as the old man’s children tried to involve him, while he could only react with the sparkle of his eyes and a crooked smile.”

Bobby suggested that he and Teddy sing a two-part harp harmony, which they did. The ambassador tilted his head back to get a better look at them. Then Teddy provided an encore with his imitation of John Fitzgerald, Honey Fitz, Rose Kennedy’s father and the former mayor of Boston, “bearing down on the distinctive lisp to much applause.” When John-John knocked a drink into his grandfather’s lap, Ann Gargan cleaned it up as deftly and quickly as she did the drool that streamed down the right side of his mouth.

The usual place the Kennedys gathered to celebrate and cheer up their father was Hyannis Port. There, amid a chaos of grandchildren, the old man would sit on the front-room couch and listen to his children sing his favorite songs, such as “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” In his explosive frustration, Joe seemed only to be pacified when there were as many family members around him as possible. It said something about the Kennedys that, in spite of their wealth and obligations, they kept their father within their family, visiting him constantly, rather than consigning him to a clinic or rest home. Perhaps now that he could no longer overpower them and dominate every scene, they could express their love. Even Jack, who avoided public displays of touching, would kiss his father on his forehead. The old man would beam.

Joe Kennedy may have been a shell, but even the fading reflection of his influence seemed to keep them together. He had once rescued Jackie from a failing marriage and then stayed beside her. He had once critically surveyed Steve Smith, Peter Lawford, and Sargent Shriver as prospective sons-in-law, but once the consecration had been made, he had actively incorporated them into the family circle. For all his faults, his family had always been his prize. He had not justly earned all the wealth that he had accumulated, but this he had — and the family’s repayment was vital to him.

April 25, 1963

New Orleans

E
arly that morning, Lee Harvey Oswald, an unemployed twenty-four-year-old former defector to the Soviet Union, arrived in New Orleans after an overnight bus ride from Dallas. What Oswald did that summer of 1963 — whom he associated with and why — remains at the heart of the controversy of whether or not he was part of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.

When he first got to New Orleans, Oswald moved in with the family of Charles “Dutz” Murret, a bookmaker in the Marcello syndicate. Murret had been a surrogate father to Oswald during his troubled youth. Marcello himself was in desperate legal straits during this period. In May the United States Supreme Court declined to review his appeal against the deportation order banishing him from the country. He had one avenue left to save himself: to beat the charges of perjury and conspiracy that Robert Kennedy had brought against him regarding his illegal reentry into the United States in June 1961. The trial date was set for November 1963. In addition to the government’s legal assault on Marcello, the attorney general had ordered FBI director Hoover in January to do more to penetrate the Louisiana syndicate and bring down Marcello.

Oswald the “loner,” as he was later described, was anything but alone that summer. Many of his associations contradicted his professed sympathies for the cause of Castro’s Cuba. He got a job at the W. J. Reily coffee company, known for its anti-Castro position, and later was seen passing out pro-Castro leaflets that bore the stamped address of Guy Banister’s violently anti-Castro organization, whose offices were located at 544 Camp Street. On another occasion, after repeatedly offering his services to anti-Castro militant Carlos Bringuier, Oswald initiated a fistfight with Bringuier’s group that landed him in the papers and in jail. Emile Bruneau, a liquor store owner with ties to the Marcello family, bailed him out. Oswald was also seen in the company of Banister and David Ferrie, the bizarre, hairless former Eastern Airlines pilot who had once commanded the teenage Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol.
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Ferrie, a trained hypnotist with a mail-order doctorate in psychology, was then working as a strategist and researcher in Marcello’s case against deportation. Ferrie was, despite his checkered employment history, a man of singular talent and savage will, who admitted to FBI investigators in November and December 1963 that he had spoken violently against President Kennedy. Six witnesses confirm seeing Ferrie and Oswald together in Louisiana in the summer of 1963.
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Other evidence exists of Oswald’s associations with anti-Castro characters. When a man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald applied for and received a Mexican tourist card (FM 824085) in New Orleans on September 17, the individual who received the tourist card with the previous number (FM 824084) was William George Gaudet, the right-wing editor and publisher of
Latin American Report,
who had close ties to the local office of the CIA. Gaudet later admitted under oath that he had seen Oswald one day “in deep conversation with [Banister] on Camp Street right by the post office box. They were leaning over and talking and it was an earnest conversation.”
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Gaudet said his impression was that Banister was asking Oswald to do something for him.
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Years later, Guy Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, remembered a visitor to their office in the weeks before the assassination: Johnny Rosselli
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Washington attorney Tom Wadden, a longtime friend and attorney of Rosselli’s, subsequently confirmed Rosselli’s role in plotting to kill the president.
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The conclusion, although ultimately based on circumstantial evidence, is that Marcello had his “nut” and the men who could operate him.

By the last week in September 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was appearing in two places at once. When he was supposed to be in New Orleans about to take a bus to Mexico City, a man calling himself Harvey Oswald petitioned the office of the Selective Service in Austin, Texas, for a revocation of his dishonorable discharge from the Marines. The next day, when Oswald was spotted on the bus to Mexico City, “Leon Oswald” showed up at the Dallas apartment of Silvia Odio in the company of two Latins, one of whom later called Odio to tell her that Oswald was “an expert marksman. . . kind of loco.” In Mexico City, Oswald called the Soviet embassy and was tape-recorded by a CIA tap. The CIA station then reported that the man spoke “broken Russian,” though the real Oswald was relatively fluent. CIA surveillance of the Soviet and Cuban embassies later took a picture of a man who was described in a secret cable as “apparent age 35, athletic build, circa 6 feet, receding hairline, balding top.” Oswald was in fact 24, 5 foot 9 inches, with no bald spot.
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Carlos Marcello was not the only Mafia chieftain vowing vengeance against the Kennedys. The nearly eighty electronic bugs the FBI had placed in the inner sancta of gangster families revealed panic and murderous loathing toward the Kennedys. In Philadelphia, mob capo Willie Weisberg, swore, “With Kennedy, a guy should take a knife . . . and stab and kill that fucker. . . . Somebody’s got to get rid of that fucker.”
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But nothing in the record indicates that Bobby Kennedy was ever made aware of these threats. The FBI bureaucratically reasoned that, as always, the highest imperative was to protect sources, especially illegal ones.

In 1963 no fewer than 318 gangsters were indicted. IRS investigations, such as the one launched on Rosselli, numbered over two thousand that year.
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Benefiting from electronically derived knowledge of the Chicago Outfit, the FBI had adopted face-to-face confrontation with the mafiosi. In April, Washington approved the field office’s proposal to initiate round-the-clock “lockstep surveillance” of Sam Giancana and others. Roemer, Rutland, and seven other agents began tailing Giancana by a matter of a few feet, following him in three or four cars, and sometimes blockading him when he tried to leave his home or parking lots. Roemer later described the technique:

We
literally
lockstepped him. We used nine men on each twelve-hour shift, twenty-four hours a day. If he went to dinner, we went with him. If I was on the shift and he got up from the table to go to the men’s room, I’d get up and be at the next urinal. I found that really bugged him. He had shy kidneys. He couldn’t do it when I was right there.
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At times Giancana, drawing on his old skills as a Capone wheelman, broke away from the tail at high speed. But the special agents would always catch up, snickering and laughing at him. On the golf course, the FBI foursome, playing behind Giancana and compatriots, would often drive their balls in and around the Giancana party. The lockstep exercise completely disrupted the Chicago Outfit’s effort to establish casinos in the Dominican Republic by making it impossible for Giancanca to meet with his top gambling experts. When Giancana, a wedding-and-funeral Catholic, attended mass at St. Bernadine’s one Sunday, the FBI detail, all practicing Catholics, located in the pew behind, offered guidance: “Kneel down, asshole.” Giancana was soon reduced to a ranting spectacle.

Against the advice of his lieutenants, Giancana filed suit against the United States Government in federal court on June 27, claiming that he had been “harassed. . . humiliated. . . [and] embarrassed” and asking for an injunction to protect his civil rights. Giancana himself was the star witness, detailing the alleged harassment and offering as evidence a five-minute color video of Roemer and company in action. Roemer later thought that Giancana’s testimony provided the opportunity to cross-examine him on his role as godfather of the rackets and the execution of certain individuals. But under instruction from the attorney general, the government offered no defense, claiming simply that the court lacked jurisdiction. When FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Marlin Johnson took the stand, he refused to respond thirteen times: “I respectfully decline to answer the questions based on instructions from the United States attorney general.” For this, Johnson was held in contempt and fined $500. The court also ordered that the FBI maintain specified distances between its agents and Giancana. The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s injunction two weeks later, but the outcome coincided with a leak “from Justice Department sources” (almost certainly J. Edgar Hoover) to
Chicago Sun-Times
reporter Sandy Smith that Sam Giancana had done work for the CIA.