The president’s files would reveal that Jack and Bobby Kennedy were more than merely informed about the CIA’s assassination plotting against Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba: they were its strongest advocates. The necessity of Castro’s death became a presidential obsession after the disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, and remained an obsession to the end. White House files also dealt with three foreign leaders who were murdered during Kennedy’s thousand days in the presidency—Patrice Lumumba, of the Congo; Rafael Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic; and Ngo Dinh Diem, of South Vietnam. Jack Kennedy knew of and endorsed the CIA’s assassination plotting against Lumumba and Trujillo before his inauguration on January 20, 1961. He was much more active in the fall of 1963, when a brutal coup d’état in Saigon resulted in Diem’s murder. Two months before the coup, Kennedy summoned air force general Edward G. Lansdale, a former CIA operative who had been involved in the administration’s assassination plotting against Fidel Castro, and asked whether he would return to Saigon and help if the president decided he had to “get rid” of Diem. “Mr. President,” Lansdale responded, “I couldn’t do that.” The plot went forward. None of this would be revealed until this book, and none of it was shared with Lyndon Johnson, then the vice president.
The vice president also did not know that Jack Kennedy’s acclaimed triumph in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was far from a victory. The world would emerge from fearful days of pending nuclear holocaust and be told that the president had stood firm before a Soviet threat and forced Premier Nikita Khrushchev to back down. Little of this was true, as Bobby Kennedy knew. Knowing that their political futures were at stake, the brothers had been forced to negotiate a secret last-minute compromise with the Soviets. The real settlement—and the true import of the missile crisis—remained a state secret for more than twenty-five years.
There were more secrets for Bobby Kennedy to hide.
In the last months of the Eisenhower administration, a notorious Chicago gangster named Sam Giancana had been brought into the Castro assassination effort, with Senator Jack Kennedy’s knowledge. But Giancana was far more than just another mobster doing a favor for the government—and looking for a favor in return. Giancana and his fellow hoodlums in Chicago, one of the most powerful organized crime operations in the nation, had already been enlisted on behalf of Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign against Republican Richard M. Nixon, providing money and union support; mob support would help Kennedy win in Illinois and in at least four other states where the Kennedy plurality was narrow. Giancana’s intervention had been arranged with the aid of both Frank Sinatra, who was close to the mob and the Kennedy family, and a prominent Chicago judge, who served as an intermediary for a meeting, not revealed until this book, between the gangster and Jack Kennedy’s millionaire father, the relentlessly ambitious Joseph P. Kennedy. The meeting took place in the winter before the election in the judge’s chambers. A few months after the election, allegations of vote fraud in Illinois were reported to Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department—and met with no response. The 1960 presidential election was stolen.
As Bobby Kennedy knew, President Kennedy and Sam Giancana shared not only a stolen election and assassination plotting; they also shared a close friendship with a glamorous Los Angeles divorcée and freelance artist named Judith Campbell Exner. Interviews for this book have bolstered the claims of Exner, who first met Kennedy in early 1960, that she was more than just the president’s sex partner, that she carried documents from Jack and Bobby Kennedy to Giancana and his colleagues, along with at least two satchels full of cash. On one train trip from Washington to Chicago she was followed by a presidential advance man named Martin E. Underwood, who told in a 1996 interview of being ordered onto the train by Kenneth O’Donnell, Jack Kennedy’s close aide. “Kenny suggested it might be a good idea,” Underwood told me, “to go to Chicago by train. I said, ‘What train?’ It was the same train Judy took.” He watched, he said, as Exner got off in Chicago and handed a satchel to a waiting Sam Giancana. Exner, in a series of interviews for this book, further admitted that she delivered money, lots of it, from California businessmen directly to the president. The businessmen were bidding on federal contracts.
There was further evidence of financial corruption in Kennedy’s personal files. As the president’s 1964 reelection campaign neared, Kennedy was put on notice by newspaperman Charles Bartlett, his good friend, that campaign contributions were sticking to the hands of some of his political operatives. “No books are kept,” Bartlett wrote the president in July 1963, “everything is cash, and the potential for a rich harvest is clear.… I am fearful that unless you put a personal priority on learning more about what is going on, the thing may slip suddenly beyond your control.”
Robert Kennedy understood, from his own investigations, that there was independent evidence for the Bartlett allegations: one of the attorney general’s political confidants had assembled affidavits showing that money for JFK’s reelection campaign was being diverted for personal use. The Bartlett letters could not be left for Lyndon Johnson.
Yet another group of documents that had to be removed dealt with Jack Kennedy’s health. Kennedy had lied about his health throughout his political career, repeatedly denying that he suffered from Addison’s disease. But as Kennedy and his doctors knew, the Addison’s, which affects the body’s ability to fight infection, was being effectively controlled—and had been since the late 1940s—by cortisone. Far more politically damaging was the fact that the slain president had suffered from venereal disease for more than thirty years, having repeatedly been treated with high doses of antibiotics and repeatedly reinfected because of his continual sexual activity. Those records would be hidden from public view for the next thirty years. There is no evidence he told any of his many partners. Kennedy also was a heavy user of what were euphemistically known as “feel-good” shots—consisting of high dosages of amphetamines—while in the White House. Dr. Max Jacobson, the New York physician who administered the shots, was a regular visitor to the White House and accompanied the president on many foreign trips; his name was all over the official logs. Jacobson and his shots were the source of constant friction between the president’s personal aides and some members of his Secret Service detail, who persistently tried to keep the doctor, and his amphetamines, away from the White House. Jacobson’s license to practice medicine was revoked in 1975.
Jack and Bobby Kennedy were even tougher than their most ardent admirers could imagine. They seemed to glide unerringly through the nearly three years of his presidency, with its constant domestic and foreign crises. But in reality they lived and worked on the edge of an abyss. The brothers understood, as the public did not, that they were just one news story away from cataclysmic political scandal.
How to keep secrets and carry on their activities was something they had learned from their father, a successful financier and controversial public official, who masked how much money he had and how he earned it, and from their maternal grandfather, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, a corrupt Boston politician who simply ignored the unpleasant realities of his public life. Jack and Bobby Kennedy also learned from their father and grandfather that—as Kennedys—they could enjoy freedoms denied to other men; the consequences of their acts were for others to worry about.
The family’s main antagonist was J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who knew and was eager to take advantage—so the family was convinced—of the darkest Kennedy secrets, including the fact of Jack’s marriage to Durie Malcolm. Hoover’s biographers have told in compelling detail of Hoover’s ability to collect damaging political and personal information about the men in the White House and use it as a weapon. The relentless FBI director had been keeping score on the Kennedys, father and sons, since the early 1940s and was appalled by their public and private excesses. But the Kennedys understood that Hoover, for all of his moralizing, was a firm believer in the institution of the presidency, and could be counted on in moments of crisis, even those involving angry women looking