The House of Kennedy(26)
Thankfully, the countries are able to come to a disarmament agreement, and the president comes out of the crisis with his reputation relatively intact.
Bobby Kennedy, on the other hand, has already had his own reputation stung by accusations that nepotism landed him the attorney general position at just thirty-five years old. “I can’t see that it’s wrong to give him [Bobby] a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law,” Jack quips, but it’s Bobby who takes the hits.
In the meantime, he’s already concocted another plan to dislodge Castro from power. In a November 1961 meeting at the White House, Bobby writes in his notebook, “My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run and operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites and Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.”
Operation Mongoose, a multiagency covert operation, is launched under Bobby’s oversight. “Get rid of the Castro regime, quote-unquote,” is the way the CIA officer Sam Halpern describes his orders—and when he asks for clarification on what “get rid of” means, he is told, “Sam, use your imagination.” What defies imagination, given RFK’s history with prosecuting the mob, is the recruitment of the Mafia. With Castro’s seizure of power, the Mafia has lost their lucrative casino businesses in Cuba, and they’re eager to assist.
Judith Exner is again tapped as a courier between Jack and Giancana, including helping to arrange a meeting between them in Chicago in her hotel suite, where she exiles herself to the bathroom while the president and the mob boss discuss strategy in the bedroom.
“I thought I was in love with Jack. He trusted me and I was doing something important for him,” Exner later reflects. “I guess I felt I was doing something important.” She claims not to have known what that something was, though, until over a decade later: “It finally dawned on me that I was probably helping Jack orchestrate the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro with the help of the Mafia.”
The Mafia’s plans ranged from sprinkling a CIA poison on Castro’s food to an exploding cigar and poison flowing from a pen. But the assassination plans don’t go anywhere, and are eventually superseded by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
President Kennedy never fulfills his father’s promise of protection for the mob from the Oval Office. Instead, his brother Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general, doubles down on his pursuit, making it his important mission to obliterate the American Mafia.
Giancana fumes, “My millions were good enough for ’em, weren’t they? The votes I muscled for ’em were good enough to get Jack elected. So now I’m a fuckin’ greaseball, am I?” according to Chuck Giancana, author of Double Cross, a biography of his mobster uncle. “Well, I’m gonna send them a message they’ll never forget,” Giancana threatens.
Menacing words like these are what keep Judith Exner silent for the next twenty-five years. “I’ve gone to great lengths to keep the truth from ever coming out, which is probably the only reason I’m alive today,” she tells People magazine in 1988. “I lied [to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee that investigated “Operation Mongoose” in 1975] when I said I was not a conduit between President Kennedy and the Mafia,” she says, adding, “I would never have known mobsters if it hadn’t been for Frank Sinatra.”
Is Frank Sinatra the key to it all? That’s what one woman in Newark, claiming to be psychic, writes to the FBI in March 1985. “Frank Sinatra is the main problem,” she declares. “He is responsible for the Kennedy curse: Joe, Jack, Bobby.”
The last line in Frank Sinatra’s FBI file reads, “Newark [FBI] considers the captioned matter closed,” but an explanation for the successive Kennedy tragedies remains very much an open matter.
Chapter 17
The November 22, 1963, final evening edition of the Boston Globe lies on the floor next to the bed of the ailing patriarch Joe Kennedy. The headline screams: “Extra! Extra! PRESIDENT SLAIN: Assassin’s Bullet Fells Kennedy on Dallas Street.”
America’s beloved president John F. Kennedy is dead, the third of Joe’s nine children to die a sudden, violent death.
The seventy-five-year-old patriarch, who had long boasted of his conquests in bed and in business and even bargained with the Mafia to send union votes to his son—had suffered a paralytic stroke nearly two years earlier, on December 19, 1961. Initially, through aggressive rehabilitation, he’d successfully battled back, relearning to walk with the aid of an engraved silver and black stick, a gift from his beloved daughter-in-law Jackie. But in recent months, his condition has drastically deteriorated.
A month earlier, on Sunday, October 20, 1963, President Kennedy had visited Hyannis Port. When Joe wheeled his chair onto the porch to say good-bye, Jack kissed his father on the forehead, turned to leave…then went back again, as if Jack believed he was seeing his father for the last time.
“He’s the one who made all of this possible,” Jack told his aide Dave Powers inside the helicopter, “and look at him now.”
His father seemed on the cusp of death.
But the man entering his final days will not be Joe.
Ted and Eunice break the terrible news of Jack’s assassination to their father, as Rose can’t bear to. “We have told him but we don’t think he understands it,” Rose said.