The Dark Side of Camelot Read online

  Moments after the call to Draznin, Kennedy dashed to the Pentagon, and with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and others flew by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, the home base for Air Force One, in suburban Maryland. A crowd of three thousand saddened Americans watched quietly as the presidential plane landed a few minutes after six o'clock. There was a sorrowful embrace between the president's brother and his widow. A small entourage, Bobby among them, then followed the body to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where an autopsy was to be performed.

  Despite his grief, Kennedy continued to focus on the need to protect the Kennedy reputation. At the hospital, he took Evelyn Lincoln aside. "Bobby said to me that Lyndon's people were digging around in the president's desk," Lincoln told me in the most candid interview she ever gave, shortly before her death in 1995. She and her husband were at her desk packing her files of presidential papers by eight o'clock the next morning, she said, and were called into the Oval Office by President Johnson at eight-thirty. "He said, 'I need you more than you need me'"---a remark Johnson made to all of the Kennedy staff aides---"and then said, 'I'd like for you to move out of the office by nine A.M.'" Mrs. Lincoln immediately reported to Bobby Kennedy, who was waiting in a room nearby. "He couldn't believe it," Mrs. Lincoln said. "He got Johnson to agree to twelve noon." Johnson eventually decided to delay a few days before moving into JFK's office, but Bobby Kennedy was taking no chances; he had already ordered that his brother's Oval Office and National Security Council files be packed overnight and shipped to a sealed office by the crack of dawn on Saturday, November 23.

  The president's personal papers and the White House tape recordings ended up in the top-secret offices of one of Jack Kennedy's most cherished units in the government---the Special Group for Counterinsurgency, whose mission was to battle communist-led wars of liberation in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The Special Group's third-floor corridor in the nearby Executive Office Building was the most secure area of the White House complex, with armed guards on patrol twenty-four hours a day. The president's papers and tape recordings were now safe.

  One final act of cover-up occurred in the early-morning hours of Saturday, November 23, as Bobby Kennedy and an exhausted Jacqueline Kennedy returned to the White House, accompanying the body of the fallen president. There was a brief meeting between Kennedy and J. B. West, the chief White House usher, who turned over the Usher's Logs---the most detailed records that existed of the visitors, public and private, to the president's second-floor personal quarters. The logs provided what amounted to a daily scorecard of the president's sex partners, who were usually escorted by David Powers, JFK's longtime personal aide. The logs, traditionally considered to be the public records of the presidency, were never seen again by West, and are not among the documents on file at the Kennedy Library.

  Bobby Kennedy knew, as did many of the men and women in the White House, that Jack Kennedy had been living a public lie as the attentive husband of Jacqueline, the glamorous and high-profile first lady. In private Kennedy was consumed with almost daily sexual liaisons and libertine partying, to a degree that shocked many members of his personal Secret Service detail. The sheer number of Kennedy's sexual partners, and the recklessness of his use of them, escalated throughout his presidency. The women---sometimes paid prostitutes located by Powers and other members of the so-called Irish Mafia, who embraced and protected the president---would be brought to Kennedy's office or his private quarters without any prior Secret Service knowledge or clearance. "Seventy to eighty percent of the agents thought it was nuts," recalled Tony Sherman, a former member of Kennedy's White House Secret Service detail, in a 1995 interview for this book. "Some of us were brought up the right way," Sherman added. "Our mothers and fathers didn't do it. We lived in another world. Suddenly, I'm Joe Agent here. I'm looking at the president of the United States and telling myself, 'This is the White House and we protect the White House.'"

  Another Secret Service agent had the unceremonious chore of bringing sexually explicit photographs of a naked president with various paramours to the Mickelson Gallery, one of Washington's most distinguished art galleries, for framing. In a reluctantly granted interview in mid-1996, Sidney Mickelson, whose gallery framed pictures for the White House in the 1960s (and continued to do so for the next three decades), acknowledged that "over a number of years we framed a number of photographs of people---naked and often lying on beds---in the Lincoln Room. The women were always beautiful." In some cases the photographs included the president with, as Mickelson carefully described it, "a group of people with masks on." Another memorable photograph, Mickelson added, involved the president and two women, all wearing masks. "The Secret Service agent said it was Kennedy," Mickelson told me, "and I had no reason to doubt it." The photographs were always of high quality, Mickelson added, similar to those taken by official White House photographers.

  Mickelson told me that the procedure for handling the extraordinary material was always the same. A Secret Service agent would arrive at his shop---ten blocks from the White House---early in the morning with a photograph. "I'd look at it, take the measurement, and then he'd take it back." The agent would return that evening, after the gallery closed, and wait once again in the same room with Mickelson until he completed the framing. He never had a chance, Mickelson told me, to make a copy of a photograph---something he thought about doing---because "the Secret Service agent was always with it."

  Mickelson, who was seventy years old when we spoke, told me that he had remained especially troubled by the photographs, and his role in framing them, because at the time his shop was deeply involved in the restoration of the White House, managed by the first lady. "I had a very good relationship with Jackie and I respected her," Mickelson said. "But," he added with a shrug, "my feeling is whatever the White House sends me ...

  "No other White House did this."

  John F. Kennedy's recklessness may finally have caught up with him in the last weeks of his life. One of his casual paramours in Washington, the wife of a military attaché at the West German Embassy, was believed by a group of Republican senators to be a possible agent of East German intelligence. In the ensuing panic, the woman and her husband were quickly flown out of Washington, and Robert Kennedy used all of his powers as attorney general, with the help of J. Edgar Hoover, to quash investigations by the Congress and the FBI. The potential damage of the presidential liaison was heightened, as the worried Kennedy brothers understood, by the ongoing sex scandal involving John Profumo, the British secretary of state for war, that was riveting London---and the British tabloids---throughout the summer of 1963. The government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan barely survived the scandal.

  Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price, nonetheless, for his sexual excesses and compulsiveness. He severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast trip in the last week of September 1963. The pain was so intense that the White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace that locked his body in a rigid upright position. It was far more constraining than his usual back brace, which he also continued to wear. The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.

  Those braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald's first successful shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president remained erect---and an excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the head. Kennedy's groin brace, which is now in the possession of the National Archives in Washington, was not mentioned in the public autopsy report, nor was the injury that had led to his need for it.

  November 22, 1963, would remain a day of family secrets, carefully kept, for decades to come.

  * * *

  * Morgenthau would not learn until he was interviewed for this book that Robert Kennedy had planned to tell him that afternoon that he was res
igning his cabinet post and wanted Morgenthau to replace him as attorney general. Joseph F. Dolan, who was one of Kennedy's confidants in the Justice Department, said in a 1995 interview for this book that Kennedy "was going to run" his brother's 1964 reelection campaign.

  * The tape recordings remained in direct control of the Kennedy family until May 1976, when they were deeded to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. In a report issued in 1985, the library acknowledged that it was "impossible to establish with any certainty how much might have been removed" from the collection prior to 1975. "That at least some items were removed cannot be doubted." Some Dictabelt tapes of telephone conversations were also discovered to be in the possession of Evelyn Lincoln after her death in 1995.

  2

  JACK

  Jack Kennedy was a dazzling figure as an adult, with stunning good looks, an inquisitive mind, and a biting sense of humor that was often self-mocking. He throve on adoration and surrounded himself with starstruck friends and colleagues. Women swooned. Men stood in awe of his easy success with women, and were grateful for his attentions to them. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Kennedy's close friends remain enraptured. When JFK appeared at a party, Charles Spalding told me, "the temperature went up a hundred and fifty degrees."

  His close friends knew that their joyful friend was invariably in acute pain, with chronic back problems. That, too, became a source of admiration. "He never talked about it," Jewel Reed, the former wife of James Reed, who served in the navy with Kennedy during World War II, said in an interview for this book. "He never complained, and that was one of the nice things about Jack."

  Kennedy kept his pain to himself all of his life.

  The most important fact of Kennedy's early years was his health. He suffered from a severe case of Addison's disease, an often-fatal disorder of the adrenal glands that eventually leaves the immune system unable to fight off ordinary infection. No successful cortisone treatment for the disease was available until the end of World War II. A gravely ill Kennedy, wracked by Addison's (it was undiagnosed until 1947), often seemed on the edge of death; he was stricken with fevers as high as 106 degrees and was given last rites four times. As a young adult he also suffered from acute back pain, the result of a college football injury that was aggravated by his World War II combat duty aboard PT-109 in the South Pacific. Unsuccessful back surgery in 1944 and 1954 was complicated by the Addison's, which severely diminished his ability to heal and increased the overall risk of the procedures.

  Kennedy and his family covered up the gravity of his illnesses throughout his life---and throughout his political career. Bobby Kennedy, two weeks after his brother's assassination, ordered that all White House files dealing with his brother's health "should be regarded as a privileged communication," never to be made public. Over the years, nonetheless, biographies and memoirs have revealed the extent of young Jack Kennedy's suffering. What has been less clear is the extent of the impact his early childhood illnesses had on his character, and how they shaped his attitudes as an adult and as the nation's thirty-fifth president.

  Kennedy's fight for life began at birth. He had difficulty feeding as an infant and was often sick. At age two he was hospitalized with scarlet fever and, having survived that, was sent away to recuperate for three months at a sanatorium in Maine. It was there that Jack, torn from his parents and left in the care of strangers, demonstrated the first signs of what would be a lifelong ability to attract attention by charming others. He so captivated his nurse that it was reported that she begged to be allowed to stay with him. Poor health plagued Jack throughout his school years. At age four, he was able to attend nursery school for only ten weeks out of a thirty-week term. At a religious school in Connecticut when he was thirteen, he began losing weight and was diagnosed with appendicitis. The emergency operation---a family surgeon was flown in for the procedure---almost killed him; he never returned to the school. Serious illness continued to afflict Kennedy at prep school at Choate, and local physicians were unable to treat his chronic stomach distress and his "flu-like symptoms." He was diagnosed as suffering from, among other ailments, leukemia and hepatitis---afflictions that would magically clear up just as his doctors, and his family, were despairing. Once again, he made up for his sickliness with charm, good humor, and a winning zest for life that kept him beloved by his peers, as it would throughout his life.

  His loyal friend K. LeMoyne Billings, who was a classmate at Choate, waited years before revealing how much Kennedy had suffered. "Jack never wanted us to talk about this," Billings said in an oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, "but now that Bobby has gone and Jack is gone, I think it really should be told ... Jack Kennedy all during his life had few days when he wasn't in pain or sick in some way." Billings added that he seldom heard Kennedy complain. Another old friend, Henry James, who met Jack at Stanford University in 1940, eventually came to understand, he told a biographer, that Kennedy was not merely reluctant to complain about pain and his health but was psychologically unable to do so. "He was heartily ashamed" of his illnesses, James said. "They were a mark of effeminacy, of weakness, which he wouldn't acknowledge. I think all that macho stuff was compensation---all that chasing after women---compensation for something that he hadn't got." Kennedy was fanatic about maintaining a deep suntan---he would remain heavily tanned all of his adult life---and he once explained, James said, that "it gives me confidence.... It makes me feel strong, healthy, attractive." A deep bronzing of the skin when exposed to sunlight was, in fact, one of the symptoms of Addison's disease.

  Kennedy had few options other than being strong and attractive; his father saw to that. Joseph Kennedy viewed his son's illness as a rite of passage. "I see him on TV, in rain and cold, bareheaded," Kennedy told the writer William Manchester in 1961, "and I don't worry. I know nothing can happen to him. I tell you, something's watching out for him. I've stood by his deathbed four times. Each time I said good-bye to him, and he always came back.... You can't put your finger on it, but there's that difference. When you've been through something like that back, and the Pacific, what can hurt you? Who's going to scare you?"

  Jack was always striving to be strong for his father; to finish first, to shape his life in ways that would please Joe. Jack's elder brother, Joseph Jr., always in flourishing health, had been his father's favorite, the son destined for a successful political career in Washington. With Joe Jr.'s death in 1944 as a naval aviator, Jack became the focus of Joe Kennedy's aspirations. In Jack's eyes, his father could do little wrong. Many of Jack's friends thought otherwise, but learned to say nothing. "Jack was sick all the time," Charles Spalding told me in 1997, "and the old man could be an asshole around his kids." During a visit to the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, Florida, in the late 1940s, Spalding said, he and his wife, Betty, were preparing to go to a movie with Jack and his date, Charlotte MacDonald. Spalding went upstairs with Jack and Charlotte to say good night to Joe, who was shaving. The father turned to Charlotte and said scathingly, "Why don't you get a live one?" Spalding was appalled by the gratuitous comment about his best friend's chronic poor health and couldn't resist making a disparaging remark about Joe Kennedy to Jack. The son's defense of his father was instinctive: "Everybody wants to knock his jock off, but he made the whole thing possible."

  Charles Bartlett, another old friend, saw both Joe Kennedy's toughness and his importance to his son. Bartlett, who became friends with Jack in Palm Beach after the war, declared that Joe Kennedy "was in it all the way. I don't think there was ever a moment that he didn't spend worrying how to push Jack's cause," especially as his son sought the presidency in 1960.

  "He pushed them all," Bartlett, who later became the Washington bureau chief of the Chattanooga Times, told me in an interview for this book. "He pushed Bobby into the Justice Department, and he made Jack do things that Jack would probably rather not have done. He was very strong; he'd done things for the kids and wanted them to do some things for him. He didn't bend. Joe
was tough." And yet, Bartlett added, "I just found that, in so many things, his judgment down the road was really enormous. You had to admire him."

  Jewel Reed vividly recalled her first visit to a family gathering at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the intense energy Joe Kennedy focused on his children. "The table was dynamic, and Mr. Kennedy was checking up on everybody about whether they had come in first or second or third in tennis or yachting or whatever," she said in an interview for this book. "And he wanted them to be number one. That stuck with me a long time. I remembered how intensely he had focused on their winning."

  There was a high cost, Reed added. "His values that he imposed upon his children were difficult. His buying things. I hate to use the word bribery, but there was bribery in his agenda often." During Jack Kennedy's first Senate campaign, in 1952, Reed said, when he stunned the experts by defeating Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., "the billboards in Massachusetts came to about a quarter of a million dollars. That was a long, long time ago, and a quarter of a million was an awful lot of money." Reed also said that Joe Kennedy purchased thousands of copies of Profiles in Courage, Jack's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, published in 1956, "to keep it on top of the bestseller list. I don't know what he did with all those books. That was bribery in a way. He was pushing, and if it cost money, he paid it. I'm sure that the children couldn't have felt comfortable about that."

  The point, Reed added, was that Joe Kennedy "loved his family. It was very evident, and I remember Teddy [Edward M. Kennedy, Joe's youngest child] paying tribute to his father in saying that he was always there when they needed him. And that's saying a lot."