The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (52 page)

The charges and countercharges between Hoover and Kennedy went on for weeks in the press. Edwyn Silberling, the former chief of Kennedy’s organized crime section, did not help his former boss’s position when he told
New York Times
reporter Leslie Whitten that he distinctly remembered a meeting in 1961 in which Kennedy demanded that the FBI step up its efforts to develop evidence against Cosa Nostra officials: “Everybody at the meeting knew he [Kennedy] was talking about electronic surveillance — parabolic microphones, spike microphones, bugs — that is micro-transmitters — the whole thing. ”
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Kennedy loyalists stuck to the position that Robert Kennedy would not lie. “I am absolutely persuaded that Bobby Kennedy did not know about the FBI buggings,” Katzenbach said. “I am also absolutely persuaded that any objective observer would believe that he did.”
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In December 1966, Jimmy Hoffa’s appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn his jury-tampering conviction refocused scrutiny on former attorney general Kennedy’s prosecutorial tactics. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, but in a close vote. Chief Justice Warren and Justice William O. Douglas wrote separate and vigorous opinions, questioning the government’s use of evidence from an informer planted inside of Hoffa’s leadership.
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For many liberals the scandal confirmed their view of Kennedy’s questionable record on civil liberties. In his State of the Union address to Congress, President Johnson, a man who routinely perused the salacious fruits of FBI surveillance of certain congressional personae, called for a ban on all forms of electronic eavesdropping except in matters of national security. As the Congress applauded, Kennedy sat there, embarrassed and galled.

At around this same time, Bobby was scourged by intimations and rumors of a far more terrible nature — that Jack had been killed by a conspiracy that Bobby had himself given life to. In the summer of 1966, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison launched an investigation of what he later claimed to be a New Orleans—based conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Central to the investigation was the movement and associations of David Ferrie. In mid-December 1966, Garrison brought Ferrie in for questioning. He also sent two of his investigators to Miami to follow up on a lead that brought Santos Trafficante into the loop of the inquiry.

The Warren Report was drawing new fire from serious scholars. Edward J. Epstein, in his book
Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth,
demonstrated that the Commission’s investigation had been sloppy and never proved that Oswald had acted alone or even was the killer. Dick Goodwin wrote a laudatory review of the book in the
Washington. Post’s Book Week,
calling for a new investigation by an independent group. A few days later, in a late-night conversation with Bobby at his UN Plaza apartment, Goodwin recounted his doubts about the Warren Commission.

“Bobby listened silently, without objection,” Goodwin later wrote, “his inner tension or distaste revealed only by the circling currents of Scotch in the glass he was obsessively rotating between his hands, staring at the floor in a posture of avoidance.”

He finally looked up when Goodwin was finished. “I’m sorry, Dick,” he said. “I just can’t focus on it.”

But Goodwin pressed the issue. “I think we should find our own investigator — someone with absolute loyalty and discretion.”

“You might try Carmine Bellino. He’s the best in the country.”

That was as much as Kennedy would say. The conversation shifted to Vietnam. At 2:30 A.M., they both retired to their bedrooms. Goodwin later described Bobby as pausing for a moment as he entered his bedroom and then looking toward him: “ ‘About that other thing.’ I knew instantly he meant the conversation about the assassination that had begun that evening. ‘I never thought it was the Cubans. If anyone was involved it was organized crime. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.’ ”
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Garrison brought Ferrie in for questioning in December 1966. If Ferrie broke, Marcello, with whom Ferrie had been closeted at Churchill Farms in the days before JFK’s assassination, stood to be questioned. It was a dangerous time for the conspirators. Either under instruction or by his own initiative, Johnny Rosselli launched a disinformation campaign to neutralize Garrison’s investigation. Rosselli’s chosen conduit was Edward P. Morgan, a Hoffa attorney who had also done work for Meyer Lansky and had strong contacts with senior officials in the CIA and the FBI. Morgan already knew the first part of what Rosselli told him: that he, Rosselli, had been the go-between in the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Castro. The second part Morgan did not know: that in the course of this operation there had supposedly been a disastrous reversal of fortune. A sniper team sent to Havana in 1963 under order of the attorney general had been captured, tortured, and redeployed back into the United States to assassinate President Kennedy.
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After accomplishing their mission, two of the snipers had escaped to New Jersey, where they were now in hiding.

The false story threw up four principal barriers against any investigation that might lead to the real killers of President Kennedy:

1. The CIA. It was obvious to Rosselli and anyone in the know that the CIA, in particular Allen Dulles, a Warren Commission member, had covered up the CIA’s violent relationship with anti-Castro Cubans and the fact that Oswald, as Senator Richard Schweiker later said, “had the fingerprints of Intelligence all over him.”
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   The CIA had serious reason to block anything that would expose its sometime partner in capital crime — Santos Trafficante.
   
2. The FBI. The reason Hoover had lied so extensively while assisting the Warren Commission was probably to cover up the Bureau’s gross incompetence. The director had censured no fewer than seventeen Special Agents after the fact for lapses and investigative errors. It could be expected that the FBI would play the same role in shutting down Garrison.
   
3. Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy had publicly announced his support for the Warren Commission’s findings. If Garrison broke anything open, the senator could call for a new federal investigation. What better way to blackmail him into silence than by suggesting that Kennedy himself had caused the assassination by conspiring to kill Castro?
   
4. Lee Harvey Oswald. The turnaround theory, involving the redeployed sniper team, matched Oswald’s known profile as a pro-Castro sympathizer and “explained the ubiquitous presence of Cubans in the Kennedy plots [and] anticipated the possibility that Garrison or another investigator would trace a hit team back to Trafficante’s Miami — where else would Castro’s sharpshooters make their U.S. beachhead?”
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Morgan had forwarded Rosselli’s story to Drew Pearson via Pearson’s partner, Jack Anderson. Pearson was impressed enough with the story that he sent it to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who turned it over to the Secret Service. James Rowley, the head of the Secret Service, in turn relayed it to Hoover, who buried it: “Consideration was given to furnishing this information to the White House,” the internal FBI memo read, “but since this matter does not concern, nor is it pertinent to, the current administration, no letter was sent.”
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In the third week of January, President Johnson learned about it directly from Pearson.

In New Orleans, Garrison took Ferrie, who now feared for his life, into protective custody. On February 21, he released Ferrie to confinement in his own apartment. He was found dead the next morning. The coroner ruled the cause cerebral hemorrhage, but authorities found two unsigned typewritten suicide notes. Acting attorney general Clark told the president that the FBI believed that Ferrie had died of natural causes.
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Twelve hours later, the body of the other witness Garrison’s investigators were seeking in Miami, Eladio del Valle, was found in a Miami parking lot. He had been tortured, his head split open with an ax, and shot through the heart for extra demonstrative measure.
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This was
omerta
the old-country way.

Garrison brandished these deaths, particularly del Valle’s, as evidence of a conspiracy, and his allegations took on weight. To slow Garrison down, Rosselli now tried to go public with his turnaround story, again through his attorney Edward P. Morgan. Someone, supposedly “from the inside of Garrison’s office,” leaked another version of the story to Texas Governor John Connally, who immediately called the president. On the evening of March 2, he told Johnson that his “secret report” revealed that “Castro and his people heard the whole story” about the CIA’s scheme to kill the Cuban leader from the assassination teams that had been captured. Castro had also learned, Connally said, that “President Kennedy did not give the order to the CIA, but that some other person extremely close to President Kennedy did. They did not name names, but the inference was very clear. The inference was that it was his brother.”
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The president, who was in a raging mood over a speech Bobby Kennedy had given that morning attacking America’s war in Vietnam, briefed Connally on the impact of that speech in the Congress. The next day Pearson published his extraordinary claim that Robert Kennedy had approved an assassination plot that backfired on his brother.

Through his aides, Johnson demanded on March 17 that the FBI interview Morgan. The FBI’s Cartha DeLoach resisted, saying that Morgan didn’t want to be interviewed and that the FBI did not want to encourage “publicity seeker” Garrison. The White House finally ordered the FBI to comply.

On March 20, FBI agents spoke with Morgan for two hours in his Washington office at 300 Farragut Building. Morgan, who was already well known in FBI circles, immediately set the ground rules: “He [Morgan] was not stating or implying his clients were either directly or indirectly involved in the death of the president or could be prosecuted in that regard — the Statute of Limitations has not run out on conspiracy to kill.”
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Morgan said that “if he were a government investigator assigned to unravel all facets of the assassination of President Kennedy he would first concern himself with the topic of the Castro plot.” He did not mention the attorney general’s role in particular, only that the project to kill Castro had “the highest governmental approval.” He then took the agents through the process by which the plot to kill Castro had rebounded on President Kennedy.

Morgan described Rosselli, without naming him, as “a high type individual of the Catholic faith whose conscience bothered him.” According to Morgan, the client, “when hearing the statement that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of President Kennedy, laughs with tears in his eyes.” It was an unusual moment — a Mafia murderer confirming that there had been a conspiracy to kill the president in order to force the federal government, its own hands dirty, to cover up that very assassination by neutralizing Garrison. Morgan avowed his client would not deal with Garrison and found it “inconceivable that an agency of the government which conducts intelligence-type investigations outside the United States has not come forth to make this most important data available to the Warren Commission.” President Johnson then demanded that the CIA do just that — brief him on its role in the Castro plots. He later charged that the Kennedys had been running “a damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean.”
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Now the CIA was on the chopping block.

Garrison’s own investigation had by this time undergone a bewildering shift, consistent with the maneuvering going on in Washington. Garrison dropped his inquiry into the Mafia and, on March 1, 1967, arrested businessman Clay Shaw on charges that he conspired to kill President Kennedy. Named in the subsequent indictment were fourteen CIA officials who had allegedly co-conspired with Shaw, including a former deputy director of the CIA, General Charles Cabell. Why this complete change of direction? Many contend that Carlos Marcello had gotten to Garrison, underwriting construction of an expensive home and picking up gambling debts. For good measure, Rosselli met with Garrison in Las Vegas, further compromising him. (Garrison, later under fire for his mob connections, vehemently denied that the meeting ever took place.)
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CIA officials understood the game Rosselli was playing and commented in a top-secret internal memo: “The Rosselli-Garrison contact in Las Vegas is particularly disturbing. It lends substance to reports that Castro had something to do with the Kennedy assassination in retaliation for American’s attempts on Castro’s life. We do
not
know that Castro actually tried to retaliate, but we do know there were plots against Castro. Unhappily, it now appears that Garrison may also know this” (emphasis in original).
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Rosselli’s legend had molded itself perfectly to the confederacy of bureaucratic self-interest in Washington. In the end, Johnson’s hatred for Robert Kennedy was not enough to pry open the rotten trunk of the Warren Commission.

As Marcello’s operatives rolled over Garrison, a farcical denouement was taking place. Mafia front men, in order to spring Hoffa, moved on the man who had once been Bobby’s star witness against Hoffa, Ed Partin. The first effort was to bribe Partin to recant his testimony in exchange for a $1 million payment from Marcello
consiglieri
D’Alton Smith, but this did not work. In June the demoralized and desperate Garrison made a sensational claim: that Ed Partin, the man who in 1962 had warned Bobby Kennedy that Hoffa was conspiring to kill him, was himself involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
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Facing an eight-year sentence in the federal penitentiary, Hoffa launched into a last-ditch effort for a Supreme Court rehearing. It was denied.