The Dark Side of Camelot/Seymour Hersh/excerpt Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source: "Edmond J. Skip O'Neill" Sun, 9 Nov 1997 08:31:36 -0500 [Poster's Note: There are thousands of portraits of JFK on walls throughout Ireland and Irish-America. I think it more appropriate to have a framed shot of his trousers above the mantle, if they must. skip o'neill] The dark side of Camelot By Seymour Hersh John Kennedy was gunned down on a Dallas street 30 minutes after noon on November 22, 1963. His brother Robert, unquestionably the second most powerful man in Washington, was having a casual lunch of clam chowder and tuna sandwiches at his Hickory Hill estate outside Washington when the news came through. Bobby, who had been closer than any other man to the president, knew what he had to do. While America and the rest of the world reeled in shock, he began immediately to hide all evidence of the president's secret life. The combinations to the dead president's locked Oval Office files were changed at once - before anyone could begin rummaging through them. Bobby Kennedy had spent nearly three years as attorney-general, the guardian of the nation's laws. But he had also been the watchdog for an older brother who revelled in personal recklessness. He understood that public revelation of the material in the White House files would forever destroy Jack's reputation as president - and his own as attorney-general. What was he covering up? A great deal, as I have discovered over the past five years in interviews with Kennedy aides, friends, lovers and former secret service bodyguards. Jack and Robert Kennedy had lived and worked close to the abyss of revealed corruption and ensuing ruin, aware that they were just one newspaper story away from cataclysmic political scandal. Most dangerous of all were the president's links - political, financial and sexual - to the mafia. Some of this scandalous story has dribbled out over the past three decades. The full truth of this relationship, however, has never been revealed. The heart of the mafia link was a summit meeting between Joseph Kennedy, the father of Jack and Bobby, and Sam "Mooney" Giancana, the boss of the powerful organised crime syndicate in Chicago, early in the 1960 presidential election campaign. This summit, secret until now, flew in the face of Jack and Bobby's previous antagonism to organised crime and involvement with the Senate special investigating committee on labour racketeering. Joe Kennedy hoped Giancana would get out the Kennedy vote among the rank and file in the mob-controlled unions in Chicago and elsewhere and commit campaign contributions from the corrupt Teamsters' Union pension fund. An old friend, Judge William J Tuohy, set up the clandestine meeting with Giancana in his own Chicago courtroom. Robert McDonnell, one of the mob's leading attorneys, was there. "I showed up about five o'clock," McDonnell remembers. "The courts were just getting out, and darkness was enveloping the courtroom." He was introduced to Joe Kennedy. After 20 minutes or so, "we heard footsteps come into the courtroom and in walked Mooney Giancana". The ensuing presidential election was a cliffhanger in which a huge majority in Chicago enabled Kennedy to take the state of Illinois and beat Richard Nixon to the White House by the smallest of national margins. McDonnell said: "I don't know what promises were made. But I can tell you, Mooney had so many assets in place. They were capable of putting drivers in every precinct to help out the precinct captains, to get the voters out. And they had the unions absolutely going for Kennedy . . . I'm convinced in my heart of hearts that Mooney carried the day for John F Kennedy." Just what Joe Kennedy promised Giancana in return is not known, but the gangster was convinced he had scored the ultimate coup by backing a presidential winner. The heat would now be off the Chicago syndicate. Frank Sinatra's daughter, Tina, says that the singer also played a role in brokering Giancana's support for Jack Kennedy. Her father told him: "I believe in this man and I think he's going to make us a good president. With your help, I think we can work this out." G Robert Blakey, a former special prosecutor for the Justice Department, told me that FBI wiretaps, many of which have yet to be made public, demonstrated "beyond doubt, in my judgment, that enough votes were stolen - let me repeat that - stolen in Chicago to give Kennedy a sufficient margin that he carried the state of Illinois". "The surveillance in Chicago also establishes that money generated by the mob was put into the 1960 election," Blakey told me. In return, Giancana and his colleagues were convinced that "the Kennedys would do something for them". By the time the FBI in Chicago forwarded a report on the Illinois election to the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy had been installed as attorney-general. "I can tell you that the fact that it was stolen was brought to Robert Kennedy's attention," Blakey said. Nothing happened. No two men could have emerged from backgrounds more different than those of Giancana of Chicago and Jack Kennedy of Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. Giancana began his criminal career as a hit man for Al Capone. By the age of 20, he had reportedly murdered dozens of men. By the late 1950s, his operation was skimming millions of dollars off mob-dominated gambling casinos and controlled mobster and Teamsters' Union activities in Cleveland, St Louis, Kansas City, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Kennedy came from one of the most powerful political families in America and had lived a life of wealth and privilege. But he had much in common with Giancana. Each knew how to operate in secrecy; and each could rigorously compartmentalise his life. Above all, each was obsessed with women - and knew one called Judith Campbell Exner. By now, Exner is a familiar name in the annals of Kennediana. She burst onto the national scene in 1975, 12 years after Jack Kennedy's death, when she was ordered to testify to the Senate's Church committee on assassinations in the wake of the Watergate affair. She says now, however, that she did not tell the whole story either to the committee or in a subsequent book. She was too frightened. Giancana himself had been murdered the night before he was to meet a lawyer for the Church committee. In a series of interviews with me, she has now told the real, extraordinary story. It shows Jack Kennedy up as a giver and taker of bribes. With a Los Angeles childhood, a failed Hollywood marriage and brief affair with Sinatra behind her, Exner first met Jack Kennedy during a Sinatra "Rat Pack" party in Las Vegas in February 1960. Within a month, they were lovers. Three weeks later, while Kennedy was away campaigning, Sinatra introduced her to a man called Sam Flood. When Kennedy called that night, she told him about Flood. "Oh yes," said Kennedy. "Sam Giancana." A week later, she was staying with Kennedy at his house in Washington. His wife Jacqueline, pregnant with their second child, had just left for Florida. At the time, although Exner did not know it, Kennedy was having difficulties in the Democratic primaries. He had narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey, his rival, in Wisconsin and faced a tough fight in West Virginia. The primary there would be won, Kennedy knew, with millions of dollars in cash. The problem was not getting the money but getting it to the right people. After dinner one evening, "Jack asked, would I set up a meeting with Sam Giancana for him. I was a little surprised and I said, 'Well, yes. I'd be happy to. Why, or should I ask?' He said, 'Well, I think he can help me with the campaign.' And we talked about that. He said, 'When you leave here, call Sam.' He told me where he was going to be over the next five days and said, 'We'll arrange a convenient time for the both of us.' "He had this large satchel and he asked would I mind taking this to Sam. I said, 'Not at all.' 'But I want you to know what's in it.' He opened it and it was money." Kennedy made it clear, she said, that she was free to say no. "I assumed it was for the campaign," she said. "I didn't think there was anything strange going on. He was asking me to do something that I felt was very important to him. He was bringing me into his life, and that was very important to me." Exner told me that when she saw the money - perhaps as much as $250,000 in $100 bills - she asked if it would be safe. "He said, 'Yes, someone will be looking out for you on the train.' " Martin Underwood, a Chicago political operative, remembers shadowing her on the train journey on the orders of Kenny O'Donnell, Kennedy's close aide. She was met by Giancana, who "just took [the satchel] from my hand. Not a word was said". It was clear that "the plans all had been made without me, way ahead of time", she said. Exner insists she did not know then that Giancana was a mafia boss. "I really thought he was a gentleman; he was funny," she said. "Someone said he had a pink Cadillac or something like that. I've never met anyone who was so the opposite. He was well spoken. He was very conservative. He was just a very charming friend." With her help Giancana and Kennedy subsequently met in Miami, she said, and Kennedy told her the appointment had gone well. Kennedy also talked for the first time, Exner told me, about his wife. "He told me that they had come to an agreement that if he didn't get the [Democratic presidential] nomination, they were parting." In the early August of 1960, a few weeks after winning the nomination at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Kennedy asked Exner to hand over a second satchel of money. Exner had sublet an apartment in New York, where Giancana stopped by to pick it up. A few days later Exner set up a meeting there for Kennedy and Giancana. "I went into my bedroom," she told me, "and waited until they were finished talking." Exner said she was convinced it was Kennedy, and not Giancana, who "made the decision that I was the perfect person" to be a conduit. "I was the one person around him who didn't need anything from him or want anything," she said. "He trusted me." The next stage in her deepening involvement came after Kennedy's election victory in November 1960. The issue now was not graft but murder. Kennedy asked her "to take some information to Sam. We had a conversation much like the conversation regarding the money. He explained to me what it was about and he wanted me to be able to say no if I wasn't comfortable doing it". What the documents in the envelope were about, she was told, was getting rid of Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader. "I knew what they [the documents] dealt with. I knew they dealt with the 'elimination' of Castro and that Sam had been hired by the CIA. That's what Jack explained to me in the very beginning. "I have to emphasise," Exner told me, "that he didn't say anything about assassination. I use that word now because I know more about it now than I did then. I was aware of 'elimination', which in my mind just meant removing him from office." Over the next year, Exner made 10 or more trips to Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, the Chicago mob's west coast representative, with envelopes from President Kennedy. "I remember one trip," Exner said, "where I left the White House and went to Chicago and just stayed at the airport for one hour, Sam looked at the documents, put them in the envelope, and gave them back to me. I flew to Las Vegas, gave them to Johnny Rosselli. I left them there and went to California. But very quickly I was back on a plane to Washington. Very often that's the way it was." Bobby Kennedy became "very much a part of all of this", she said. After making love in the White House, she and the president usually had dinner and "Bobby would come in and bring the information in a manila envelope to Jack", she told me. "And they would discuss a little bit about it. And Bobby would often put his hand on my shoulder and ask, 'Are you still comfortable doing this? We want you to let us know if you don't want to.' " There were occasions when she left the White House documents with Giancana or Rosselli; other times the men quickly scanned the papers and returned them to her, for delivery back to Kennedy. The envelopes were always sealed, but she never went through the documents, she told me. She did recall hearing names bandied about as the Kennedy brothers talked between themselves, but they meant nothing to her. She always understood, she said, that the papers handed to her for delivery did not originate in the FBI and assumed that they came from the CIA. She delivered her final envelope, she said, sometime late in 1961. She also arranged two more meetings for the president with Giancana during 1961, Exner said. One was on April 28 - less than two weeks after the disastrous Bay of Pigs attempted invasion of Cuba by CIA-backed anti-Castroites. They met at her hotel room in Chicago, where Kennedy was attending a political dinner. The president, Exner said, shook hands with Giancana, who called him Jack - and not Mr President. In March 1962 an angry Jack Kennedy telephoned Exner, she remembers. "He said, 'Go to your mother's and call me'." Exner did so and Kennedy warned her that her home phone was not safe from an FBI wiretap. He said he had just held a meeting with J Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss, "and Hoover had told Jack that he knew, first of all, about Jack's relationship with me. And he also knew that I was carrying documents regarding the Castro assassination plot to Sam Giancana and John Rosselli for Jack. And he knew that they worked for the CIA. "He called him an SOB and said, 'He tried to use, you know, this information as leverage.' [Kennedy's] attitude was 'the gall of the man' to try and intimidate him. He was absolutely livid." The president, Exner added, "was well aware that Hoover knew every move that he made, and he did not care. That's the reckless side of Jack - that he would allow himself to be in that position. I mean, he never should have been involved with me". She said the Kennedys "wanted to get rid of Hoover and they couldn't, because of the information that Hoover had on them - not just Jack". Exner was referring, perhaps, to another facet of her relationship with Kennedy, one that she discussed with great reluctance in our interviews: in 1962 she had begun serving as a conduit for payoffs to the president from a group of California businessmen interested in obtaining defence contracts. "What was going on was there were payoffs," Exner told me. "I took payoffs" from the California businessmen to Kennedy in the White House. "I didn't want to go to Jack" with payoff money, she told me. But "I asked Jack about it and he thought it was a good idea". She recalled three contract proposals for which she took payoffs into the White House. "One envelope was for an unmanned vehicle on land," Exner said. "It was one of the first of its kind - unmanned robotics." She remembered, she said, that the vehicle was "massive, the size of a tank". The second project, she said, involved a new procedure for desalinisation. The final contract proposal dealt with avionics for a fighter plane. Asked who initiated the process of sending payoffs to the president, Exner told me: "It came from both sides. I know everybody was working together. I saw when there were transfers of cash. They were all in it." She personally delivered the money, Exner told me, along with envelopes containing technical data, to Kennedy. Exner said she had never before discussed her role in bringing bribes to the president because she had no receipts for the money or other evidence, and she was convinced nobody would believe her. There was another troubling episode. Late on August 7, 1962, an FBI agent called William Carter was on duty watching Exner's apartment on Fontaine Avenue, in west Los Angeles, when he realised he was observing a break-in. Two young men climbed onto a balcony. One man stood watch as the other slid open a glass door and entered. After 15 minutes or so - more than enough time to sort through records or install a wiretap - the pair fled. Without informing the police, Carter's superiors at the FBI tracked the break-in team to a getaway car rented by a former FBI special agent named I B Hale, of Fort Worth, Texas. The two men who had entered Exner's apartment were identified as his twin sons, Bobby and Billy. I B Hale - now dead - was at the time in charge of security for the General Dynamics Corporation, one of two defence firms intensely competing for the right to manufacture a new generation of air force and navy combat planes known as the TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental). General Dynamics was in bad shape in 1962. It had lost more than $400m in the previous two years, and the $6.5 billion TFX contract was essential for its survival. The prospects were not favourable, however. Its main competitor, Boeing, was without question the favourite of the American air force and navy. Service chiefs were flabbergasted in November 1962 when Robert McNamara, the defence secretary, chose General Dynamics for the contract. The issue was so contentious that a Senate inquiry began in 1963. Its investigators soon found that Kennedy had been involved in the decision, though he had denied it. The inquiry was abandoned after Kennedy's death; but the break-in at Exner's apartment, which has never been reported before, raises an obvious question: was Jack Kennedy blackmailed? The TFX, later renamed the F-111, became one of the most criticised defence projects in modern history. Exner's involvement with Kennedy ended after she told him she was pregnant in the late summer of 1962. They agreed that she could not keep the baby, and "he asked, 'Would Sam [Giancana] help us?' I spoke to Sam and he said yes". In Giancana's eyes, Exner insisted, "he was helping me. You know, a lot of people can say, 'Oh boy, this is just something else he [Giancana] could hold over Jack's head.' I don't care what they say, I know what he did for me". Giancana responded to news of her pregnancy by asking her to marry him. "I told him, 'Sam, you don't want to marry me.' And he just said, 'You deserve to be asked'." She then slept with Giancana, but she denies she was having affairs with both men at the same time. "It was the one time with Sam and it was an emotional response to his loving kindness and caring for what I was going through. I would hardly say that that was having a simultaneous affair with two men." She was out of Jack Kennedy's personal life by the autumn of 1962. There were dozens of other women for him - and Bobby Kennedy found someone else to liaise with organised crime. Afterwards, "I sensed I was in terrible danger" both from organised crime and the government. In her view they were moral equivalents: "There is not good and bad. No black hats, no white hats. They were all out for themselves." She is, she says, still sleeping with a gun under her pillow. (c) Seymour Hersh 1997 Extracted from The Dark Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersh (Little, Brown, Inc, New York.) ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcov-11.14.97-23:50:11-27633