Curtis B. Trent, of Charleston, who served as executive assistant to Governor Barron, also recalled that the Kennedys “were spreading it around pretty heavy. I thought they spent two million dollars.” Trent, like Bonn Brown, insisted that he did not personally take any Kennedy money. “They were trying to push it off on us,” he recalled. “I’d explain to them that I was concerned with the governor’s race and not the president’s race.” Kennedy reacted typically to Trent’s refusal to help: “Bobby was so mad … just as angry as he could be.” Trent, like more than a dozen officials of the Barron administration, the most corrupt in the history of the state, was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to a jail term in 1969.
The Gabriel, Brown, and Trent accounts are buttressed by Rein Vander Zee, a former FBI agent who had been working since early January 1960 in Humphrey’s West Virginia campaign. Vander Zee was responsible for dealing with the sheriffs of West Virginia, and had—for a price—received their political commitments for Humphrey. “Four or five days before the primary,” Vander Zee, now living in Bandera, Texas, told me in an interview in 1995, “I couldn’t get some of my people on the phone. I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ and got in my car and started driving. They were laying out—the sheriffs—and I knew something was way wrong. The Humphrey signs were down and Kennedy signs were up. I met Sid Christie, who was supposed to be our man [in McDowell County] all the way. He was the absolute boss down there.” Vander Zee arranged a meeting with Christie in the rural town of Keystone. “We sat in his car across from a deserted movie theater, like a scene from The Last Picture Show. I said, ‘What can be done?’” Christie dryly responded: “It’s too late. I didn’t realize what a groundswell of support there’d be for this other fellow.”
Vander Zee said he and Humphrey later held a last-ditch conference with Wally Barron, the governor-to-be: “We asked him what had to be done. I always liked Wally.” Barron gave Humphrey the bad news: he was being vastly outspent by the Kennedys. “He said he had a figure [of Kennedy expenditures] that was something we couldn’t meet,” Vander Zee said. Years later, a West Virginia political professional told Vander Zee that he watched as Christie received a huge payoff from a Kennedy insider—at least $40,000, the professional said—“in green in a shoe box.” Kennedy received 84 percent of the Democratic primary vote on May 10 in McDowell County.
In the years after Kennedy’s assassination, many people would take credit for his strong showing in West Virginia.
In his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, published in 1976, Hubert Humphrey told of a 1966 meeting with Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, in which Cushing expressed anger at what he called the self-aggrandizement of various Kennedy aides, such as Ted Sorensen. “I keep reading these books by the young men around Jack Kennedy and how they claim credit for electing him,” Cushing told Humphrey. “I’ll tell you who elected Jack Kennedy. It was his father, Joe, and me, right here in this room.” Humphrey and an aide sat in stunned silence as Cushing told how he and Joe Kennedy had agreed that West Virginia’s anti-Catholicism could be countered by a series of cash contributions to Protestant churches, particularly in the black community. Cushing continued, Humphrey wrote: “We decided which church and preacher would get two hundred dollars or one hundred dollars or five hundred dollars.”
The most widespread misinformation about the West Virginia election involves the role of organized crime, which, according to countless magazine articles and books over the past thirty years, supplied the cash that enabled Kennedy to win. The allegations center on Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, the New Jersey nightclub owner who in 1960 became general manager of a Nevada gambling lodge owned in part by Frank Sinatra and his good friend Sam Giancana of Chicago. D’Amato’s account, as repeatedly published, is that he was approached by Joe Kennedy during the primary campaign and asked to raise money for West Virginia. D’Amato agreed to do so, with one demand: if Jack Kennedy was successful in gaining the White House, he would reverse a 1956 federal deportation order for Joey Adonis, the New Jersey gang leader. With Joe Kennedy’s promise, D’Amato raised $50,000 for West Virginia from assorted gangsters. D’Amato, who died in 1984, has been quoted as telling a business associate that the $50,000 was used not for direct bribes but to purchase desks, chairs, and other supplies needed by local politicians. After Kennedy’s election, D’Amato said, he reminded Joe Kennedy of his pledge. The father explained that the Adonis deal was fine with his son the president, but Bobby, the new attorney general, wouldn’t hear of it. There is no basis for disbelieving D’Amato’s account; but $50,000 in cash, when contrasted with what was really spent in West Virginia, was hardly enough to earn everlasting gratitude from the Kennedys.
D’Amato’s big mouth got him in trouble. Soon after taking office, Bobby Kennedy was informed by the FBI that D’Amato had been overheard on a wiretap bragging about his role in moving cash from Las Vegas to help Jack Kennedy win the election. A few months later, D’Amato suddenly found himself facing federal indictment on income tax charges stemming from his failure to file a corporate tax return for his nightclub. The indictment was brought to the attention of Milton “Mickey” Rudin, a prominent Los Angeles lawyer who represented Frank Sinatra and other entertainment figures.
“Skinny [was] Frank’s friend,” Rudin told me in a series of interviews for this book. “Bobby [Kennedy] and the Old Man [Joe Kennedy] knew the relationship. When Skinny got indicted, I got pissed and called up Steve Smith. I tell him I want to see him. He meets me at the University Club in New York. I order my gin. ‘What can I do for you?’ Smith asks. I tell him, ‘I’m unhappy about Skinny being indicted on the bullshit charges. It’s unfair. No taxes were paid because there was no profit.’” Rudin said he did not raise the issue of D’Amato’s political favors for the Kennedy campaign, but he did tell Smith, “This is a political act.” Smith responded, “Well, you don’t understand politics.” Rudin then said, “Well, I’m glad I don’t,” drank his gin, and left.
Steve Smith delivered a clear message, Rudin said: D’Amato had been overheard on FBI wiretaps talking about Las Vegas cash going to the Kennedys, and the indictment neutralized any possible damage from such talk. “If some guy like Skinny had anything to do with moving money,” Rudin concluded, “the way to handle him is to indict him so if he talked about it, it’d be [seen as] vengeance.” Rudin told me that he returned to Los Angeles thinking—and saying as much to Sinatra and others—that the Kennedys were going to be much tougher than some had thought.
Organized crime, as we shall see, played a huge role in Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard Nixon in November. But Jack Kennedy had more than a few campaign promises to gangsters to worry about, both before and after the election.
* Max Kampelman, Humphrey’s longtime friend and political adviser, recalled warning Humphrey not to run against Kennedy in West Virginia. In an interview in 1994, Kampelman said he “knew” that the Kennedys would put big money into the state and “steal the election—and we had no money.” An additional concern was Humphrey’s political future: “I told Hubert, ‘They’ll [the Kennedys will] kill you in West Virginia, and you have to run for reelection [to the Senate] in Minnesota. They’ll paint you as anti-Catholic, and there are a lot of Catholics in Minnesota.’” Humphrey nevertheless won reelection to the Senate in 1960.