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TWENTY-SEVEN

Early in the evening of April 28, 1961, Judy Campbell sat on the edge of the bathtub in her suite at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago and waited. In the next room, the President of the United States was meeting with Sam Giancana, and Judy wanted to give them some privacy. She stayed in the bathroom for about twenty minutes; when the meeting was over and both men were preparing to leave, Jack Kennedy apologized to Judy for not being able to remain with her. He was on his way, he said, to address a Democratic Party dinner.

After Kennedy’s election as President, he had continued both his sporadic affair with Judy Campbell and his business association with Sam Giancana. Now, the assistance that the Mafia capo di tutti capi (boss of all bosses) could offer Kennedy was far more sinister than a few stolen votes. The April 28 meeting in Judy Campbell’s hotel room followed by just eleven days a major humiliation for the young Kennedy administration: the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion, a botched attempt by CIA-backed Cuban nationalists to oust the tiny country’s Communist dictator, Fidel Castro. President Kennedy told the nation that he took full responsibility for the failure of the operation.

He didn’t intend to fail the next time. Ridding America of the threat of a Soviet-controlled government ninety miles from Miami Beach became a major priority of the Kennedy White House. To achieve that goal, Operation Mongoose was put into effect: a White House-directed undercover effort to oust Castro by any means available. These included sabotage, the fomentation of dissent, guerrilla warfare, propaganda — even assassination.

Testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence in 1975 by a number of Kennedy administration officials, including White House aide Richard Goodwin and two former directors of the CIA, John McCone and Richard Helms, confirmed that “liquidation” of Fidel Castro had been discussed at top-secret meetings about Operation Mongoose. CIA attempts to kill Castro, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara by poison pills and exploding cigars had failed or been aborted by April 1961. In June, Los Angeles-Las Vegas capo mafioso Johnny Roselli organized an assassination team to ambush the Cuban dictator. That effort also failed.

Whether the President had direct knowledge of these attempts on Castro’s life has been a matter of speculation for years. The Intelligence Committee’s hearings, while revealing that a lax moral climate prevailed in the Kennedy administration, were not able to say definitively whether the U.S. government’s murderous exercises were directly sanctioned by the President. But John F. Kennedy was not a leader who distanced himself from his administration’s activities. It is likely that he was aware of the CIA efforts to kill Castro and of the recruitment of mob figures to carry out the plans. Now, with the revelations of Judy Campbell, it appears that Kennedy personally orchestrated at least some aspects of both these elements of Operation Mongoose.

Campbell, in a People magazine interview in 1988, said that she arranged ten meetings between Kennedy and Giancana and acted as their courier, carrying plain manila nine-by-twelve envelopes among Kennedy, Giancana, and Roselli: “There was no writing on them . . . nothing. They were sealed but not taped. They weighed about as much as a weekly magazine and felt as if they contained papers.” Campbell said she never considered opening them to see what was inside.

Campbell, who had solid documentation of her travels and was well represented on White House telephone logs, claimed never to have pondered the implications of what she was doing. She was, she said, a naive twenty-six-year-old who didn’t know exactly what business Sam Giancana was in. “Sam was one of the nicest, kindest people I knew,” she said. “I didn’t know he was a murderer. I wouldn’t have believed it.” She added that she didn’t figure out what she had gotten herself involved with until she was called before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975. “It finally dawned on me that I was probably helping Jack orchestrate the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro with the help of the Mafia.”

It is clear that Jack Kennedy, who was gaining a reputation for recklessness, was playing a particularly dangerous game. And his utilization of mob figures didn’t stop with international intrigue; on at least one occasion he accepted their help in extricating himself from a potential scandal.

Early in 1961, Peter Fairchild, a restaurateur, set out to sue his wife, a starlet named Judy Meredith, for divorce, citing adultery. Fairchild hired Fred Otash to assemble evidence that Judy had had sexual affairs with a number of men in Hollywood. When the complaint was prepared for submission to the court, the men were listed as “Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, etc. etc. etc.”

Word got out that one of the et ceteras was President Kennedy, and before long Otash got a call from Johnny Roselli. He wanted to meet with Otash at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood — “at the request of the attorney general.” Warily, Otash agreed.

“I’m sitting there with Johnny Roselli,” Otash recalled, “and two FBI men are covering the meeting. Roselli says to me, ‘Listen, Otash, you’ve got yourself a problem. You’re in trouble. You’re fucking around with the White House here. What’s this shit that you’re gonna name Jack Kennedy as a correspondent in Judy Meredith’s divorce case? How can you name the President of the United States in a divorce case?’

“I said to him, ‘He fucked my client’s wife, that’s how! Who the fuck is that cocksucker! Who are you representing, anyway?’13

“He said to me, ‘I’m representing the Kennedys.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I couldn’t believe my ears — here’s Roselli, a guy who’s a fucking mobster, intervening on behalf of the White House. I used to have the prick under surveillance. I used to put guys like him in jail, and now he’s representing the President. I’m sitting there thinking, Wait a minute. What is this bullshit?”

There were other meetings, at least one of which Sam Giancana attended. Roselli asked Otash what it would take to “straighten things out.” Otash replied, “Very simple. Judy wants a hundred thousand dollars. My client isn’t gonna give her shit, because I’m gonna name Frank Sinatra as a guy who was fucking her, Sammy Davis as a guy who was fucking her, Dean Martin as a guy who was fucking her, Jerry Lewis, Jack Kennedy. My client has a real case for divorce, and he ain’t giving her a dime. Why don’t you have the Rat Pack throw a charity show, give Judy the money, and the case will go away.”

By the morning of the court hearing on the Fairchild divorce, nothing had been resolved. “I went into that courtroom,” Otash says, “prepared with the documents to have the complaint amended and name John Kennedy. I’m in the judge’s chambers and I’ve got all the papers and all of a sudden somebody hands a check to Judy’s lawyers. And the matter is settled. She got what she wanted. She sure as hell didn’t get it from her husband, my client. She got it from somebody else.” Giancana, Roselli, and their fellow mobsters understandably expected that with their various assistances to the Kennedy administration, the FBI would turn a blind eye to their illegalities. Bureau wiretaps in December 1961 recorded this exchange between Giancana and Roselli concerning the mob donations to the Kennedy campaign:

Giancana hadn’t told it right at all. Not only did J. Edgar Hoover’s men not lessen their campaign against the Mafia, they dramatically increased it. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had set as one of the highest priorities of his department the destruction of what he called “the enemy within,” and said, “I’d like to be remembered as the guy who broke the Mafia.” Kennedy authorized surveillance, harassment, and wiretaps of Giancana, Roselli, and dozens of other mob figures.

On February 27, 1962, Hoover sent Robert Kennedy a memorandum that outlined some of the information the Bureau’s surveillance had revealed: Judy Campbell had made phone calls to both Sam Giancana and the White House. The White House calls, Hoover told Bobby, were apparently being made to the President’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. Bobby undoubtedly told his brother about the memo, but the relationship between Jack, Judy, and Giancana didn’t stop. Hoover, informed that Campbell’s calls to the White House had not ceased since his memo to Bobby Kennedy, met with the President on March 22 to tell him that his department was aware of his affair with Campbell and of her relationship with Giancana.

Kennedy was furious. He intensely disliked Hoover, the sixty-six- year-old, staunchly right-wing self-styled protector of American values who had been entrenched as either assistant director or director of the FBI for forty years. Jack looked upon Hoover as a dangerous personal foe; when Judy Campbell told Jack that she was being followed by FBI men, he told her, “Ignore them. It’s just part of Hoover’s vendetta against me.” Now, the director had information he could use as an ace in the hole if Jack and Bobby tried to oust him as head of the Bureau. Still, the President did not sever his relationship with either Judy Campbell or Sam Giancana. When Judy expressed concern about the FBI surveillance of Giancana, Jack told her, “Don’t worry. Sam works for us.”

The stepped-up FBI campaign against organized crime infuriated mob leaders across the country, who accused Jack Kennedy of betrayal — he had accepted their help and then allowed them to be harassed. They made repeated attempts to convince the administration to “lay off,” often through Frank Sinatra, who begged Peter to “convince Bobby to lay off Sam.” Eager to please Sinatra, Peter agreed. He flew to Washington and met with Bobby in his Justice Department office.

The attorney general listened stonily as his brother-in-law pleaded Giancana’s and Sinatra’s case. Peter reminded Bobby of their contributions to the Kennedy campaign and asked if he couldn’t just ease up a little bit. To no avail. By now his anticrime campaign had become an obsession with the attorney general, whether or not his brother was in bed with the mob. And Peter Lawford may have been the worst choice to plead the mob’s case — Bobby and Peter had little use for each other, and both of them knew it. The essence of Bobby’s response was that Peter should mind his own business.

Peter went back to Sinatra, and Sinatra went back to Giancana, with a wholly unsatisfying report. The mob gradually came to realize that Sinatra was not as tight with the Kennedys as he had boasted he was. An FBI wiretap of a December 6, 1961, conversation between Giancana and Roselli revealed their growing anger with Frank’s unfulfilled promises.

With Sinatra failing to come through for them, the mob’s pressure on Peter became more direct. It was around this time that Milt Ebbins was sitting with Peter in Jimmy Durante’s dressing room at the Copacabana, where Jimmy and Peter were appearing together. “In walks Jimmy,” Ebbins recalled, “with two of the meanest-looking guys you’ve ever seen in your life. With these big-brimmed hats. Jimmy said, ‘Peter, I want you to meet my friends, Louie and Joe.’

“Peter looked up at them. I thought they were going to kill us. Poor Jimmy was scared to death. One guy says, ‘Hey, Lawford! Can’t you get Bobby Kennedy to lay off us, for crissakes? You’re his brother- in-law. Tell him to lay off!’

“Peter started to stammer and I told them that Bobby would probably work twice as hard against them if Peter went to plead their case. The guy said, ‘Maybe he’s right,’ and they left.

“Peter said, ‘What was that?’ Then he got tough and said, ‘Boy, I was watching those guys!’ I said, ‘You were watching them? They’d chew you up and spit you out.’

“Jimmy Durante said, ‘I’m really sorry. When those guys come in, forget it, you do what they want. I’m sorry.’”

The feeling on Ebbins’s part that “they were going to kill us” wasn’t that far off the mark. In another wiretapped conversation, Johnny Formosa, one of Giancana’s henchmen, told his boss, “Let’s show ’em. Let’s show those asshole Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it as if nothing’s happened. Let’s hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys. Lawford and that Martin, and I could take the nigger and put his other eye out.”

Other mafiosi, the FBI discovered, had made threats on the life of the President as well, a fact that J. Edgar Hoover never revealed to the Kennedy brothers. But both Bobby and Jack did feel the heat of possible public disclosure of the administration’s ties to organized crime in March 1962. Rather than end those ties, however, Bobby decided that the best course of action was to distance the presidency from the most visible link between the government and the mob: Frank Sinatra.

SINATRA HAD REVELED IN his relationship with the Kennedy White House. For months after the inauguration, he had insisted that friends listen — over and over again — to a recording of John Kennedy’s tribute to him at the gala. He loved it when Hollywood moguls asked him, “What do you hear from the White House?” Like Peter, if the President called him while he had influential visitors, Frank would feign nonchalance and boast that the President always sought his advice.

Just as he had in Paris when he thought Peter and Pierre Salinger had excluded him from a conversation, Sinatra would become enraged whenever he felt slighted by the Kennedys. Again and again he renounced his friendship with the President’s family, then curried favor to get back in their good graces. Early in 1961, Bill Asher was preparing a tape of the inaugural gala for presentation on NBC television. “It was never aired,” Asher related, “because of equal-time considerations or something, but in the process of editing it we decided to put a frame around it, and Frank agreed to have us shoot some new footage of him to include at the beginning and the end.

“Then there was some rift between Frank and the Kennedys, and Joe Kennedy called me and said, ‘I want you to take Frank Sinatra out of every inch of that show — I don’t want his face anywhere in it.’ It wasn’t easy — Frank was a big part of that show — but I managed to do it.”

Ten days later Joe Kennedy called Asher and told him to put Frank back in. Asher did. Then he called again and told the director to take Frank out. Finally, Asher had had it, and told Joe: “Mr. Kennedy, you might not be aware of this, but I work for a living, and I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.”

Finally the souvenir tape of the gala was complete — with Sinatra in it — and Joe Kennedy asked Peter to bring it to Palm Beach so that he could see it. Peter and Milt Ebbins flew down and showed Joe the film, and when Sinatra found out about it he exploded.

“Frank went crazy,” Ebbins recalled. “He thought this was some kind of big premiere for the film of the inaugural, and that he should have been invited. I tried to explain that it was a spur-of-the-moment private showing for Joe Kennedy. He screamed at me, ‘Then why the fuck were you there, Ebbins?’ I said, ‘I go everywhere with Peter, Frank; you know that.’ Well, he stayed mad a long time over that one.”

Frank got over it when he was invited aboard the Kennedy yacht Honey Fitz in September. He arrived in Hyannis Port with a case of wine, a dozen bottles of champagne, and two loaves of Italian bread. The presidential flag flying over the Kennedy compound revealed that John F. Kennedy was there. Frank regaled the other guests, who included Peter and Pat, Ted Kennedy, and the Rubirosas, with stories of his audience with Pope John XXIII in Rome. “All your friends in Chicago are Italian, too,” Peter said, laughing.

It wasn’t just Sinatra’s ego that thrived on his association with the First Family; his pocketbook benefited too. In 1957, Frank had signed a three-million-dollar deal with ABC for a television series (one that was occasionally aired opposite The Thin Man). To save Frank money on his taxes, the fee was to be deferred over several years. When the show was canceled, the Internal Revenue Service disallowed the deferral and insisted that Sinatra pay taxes on the money as though it had all been paid to him in the first year.

The IRS hit Frank hard, assessing daily penalties and interest on the additional amount they were demanding, and Frank was unable to pay the taxes. Frantic, he asked for Joe Kennedy’s help. Peter set up an appointment with his father-in-law for Frank and his attorney, Mickey Rudin. Joe knew how to bend, work with, and circumvent many of the tax laws, and he gave Sinatra advice that reduced the tax bill to sixty-five thousand dollars, saving him over a million dollars.

But by 1962 Sinatra’s friendship with the President’s family had become a public embarrassment for the administration. Above and beyond Frank’s mob ties, which might explode in the Kennedys’ faces at any minute, they soon came to realize that Sinatra was a lightning rod for criticism. There was so much negative publicity about the yacht trip that Pierre Salinger felt compelled to deny that Frank had been in Hyannis Port as a guest of the President. Rather, he said, Frank had come to review Bill Asher’s souvenir recording of the inaugural gala with Joe Kennedy.

Peter’s membership in the Rat Pack had whipped up bad press, and he was continually forced to defend himself against criticism that his Hollywood antics were beneath the dignity of a brother-in-law of the President of the United States. “There is no ‘clan,’” Peter protested. “There is only a group of people who enjoy getting together. I mean, it makes us sound like children — like we all wear sweatshirts that say ‘The Clan’ on the back and Frank with a whistle around his neck. They make us sound so unsavory.”

The problem, of course, was that many of Sinatra’s associates were unsavory, a fact that hit very close to home with Peter when Puccini failed for that very reason. Among the restaurant’s regular clientele was Sinatra’s friend Mickey Cohen, who had been the head West Coast mafioso since Bugsy Siegel’s murder in 1947. One evening in 1961 the squat, glowery Cohen walked into Puccini and saw comedian Red Skelton’s manager dining with actor George Raft.

“Mickey Cohen was very good friends with Red Skelton,” Milt Ebbins recalled, “and there were rumors that Red’s manager was having an affair with Red’s wife. Cohen saw this guy, walked over to his table, jumped up on the booth, and started kicking him. Raft tried to stop him and Cohen hissed, ‘You shut up, Raft, or you know what you’re gonna get.’”

Skelton’s manager wound up in the hospital, and the incident made the newspapers. “From then on,” Ebbins says, “the restaurant was filled with police department undercover guys every night, and nobody wanted to eat there anymore. It was a terrific restaurant, but now everybody looked on it as a hangout for Sinatra’s Mafia friends and they were scared to come to it.”

Bobby Kennedy saw that Sinatra’s links to the mob had become uncomfortably public and that assumptions could be made about the President’s relationship with Sinatra. At a staff meeting, one of the Justice Department’s young attorneys complained to Bobby, “We are out front fighting organized crime on every level and here the President is associating with Sinatra, who is in bed with those guys.”

The attorney general asked the lawyer to prepare a full report for him, but he was well aware of Sinatra’s associations, and he knew that the time had come to sever ties with the singer.

TWO MONTHS EARLIER, in January 1962, Peter had made a request of Sinatra: the President was coming to Southern California on a political trip in March. Could Jack stay at Frank’s Palm Springs house for a few days?

Could he? Sinatra immediately began a massive construction project designed to make the property suitable as the Western White House. He built separate cottages for the Secret Service men, installed a communications bank with twenty-five extra telephone lines, poured a huge concrete heliport, and had a solid gold plaque inscribed “John F. Kennedy Slept Here.”

“It had been kind of a running joke with all of us in the family,” Peter later said. “He even erected a flagpole for the presidential flag after he saw one flying over the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. No one asked Frank to do this.”

A few weeks before the trip, Bobby prevailed on the President to break off his public ties with Frank Sinatra once and for all. “Sam Giancana has been a guest at that same house,” the attorney general told his brother. “How is it going to look? There are too many people who know about Sinatra’s ties to these guys. We can’t take the risk, Jack.”

Jack liked Sinatra and thought Bobby was being an alarmist. “What difference does it make?” he asked. Bobby argued forcefully about the sensitivity of the situation, and the President finally was convinced that it would be better for him to stay elsewhere. Bobby telephoned Peter and told him to let Frank know that the President’s plans had changed.

Peter could feel the blood drain from his face as he listened to Bobby’s words. He knew what Sinatra’s reaction would be, and he didn’t want to witness it. He tried to persuade Bobby to keep the President’s plans just as they were; when he could not he called Jack and tried to appeal to the President’s affection for and gratitude to Sinatra. It didn’t work. “I can’t stay there while Bobby’s handling the investigation [of Giancana],” Jack told the frantic Peter. “See if you can’t find me someplace else.” Peter protested that Frank would be extremely upset. “You can handle it, Peter,” Jack replied. “We’ll take care of the Frank situation when we get to it.”

Given an unenviable task, Peter was, he admitted, frightened. He telephoned Sinatra with the news, using as an excuse the Secret Service’s concerns about security shortcomings on his property. Sinatra was devastated. After Peter’s call he muttered to himself again and again, “What am I gonna tell my kids?” He put a call through to Bobby, hoping to change the decision. The attorney general bluntly told Sinatra the truth — that his questionable associations made it impossible for the President to stay at his house.

“Frank was livid,” Peter said. “He called Bobby every name in the book and then rang me up and reamed me out again. He was quite unreasonable, irrational really. [Frank’s valet] George Jacobs told me later that when he got off the phone, he went outside with a sledgehammer and started chopping up the concrete landing pad of his heliport. He was in a frenzy.”

Sinatra’s anger grew when he learned that Jack had decided to stay at Bing Crosby’s nearby estate. “He felt that I was responsible,” Peter said, “for setting Jack up to stay at Bing’s — the other singer and a Republican to boot. Well, Frank never forgave me. He cut me off like that — just like that!”

Although he had had nothing to do with either decision, Peter took the brunt of Sinatra’s fury. The singer refused Peter’s phone calls, told associates that he wanted nothing more than to punch him in the face, and wrote him out of two upcoming Rat Pack movies, 4 for Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods. (For the latter film, Frank hired Bing Crosby!)

Sinatra did agree to see Milt Ebbins, who went to Frank’s office and spent three hours pleading Peter’s case. Ebbins told Sinatra that Peter was “innocent,” that it was Bobby who had made the initial decision that Jack shouldn’t stay at his compound, and that it was Jack’s golfing partner Chris Dunphy, not Peter, who had arranged for Jack to stay at Bing Crosby’s house. He also leveled with Sinatra and told him the reversal of plans had been prompted by the fact that Bobby was investigating some of the singer’s friends.

“None of it worked,” Ebbins recalled. “Frank just wrote Peter off. And Peter was destroyed. He loved Frank. He loved being a part of the Rat Pack. And all of a sudden he was on the outs. Not only did he lose the Rat Pack movies, but a lot of other opportunities as well — I know we lost a couple of Billy Wilder pictures.” Peter tried desperately to get back into Sinatra’s good graces. When the President arrived in Los Angeles, Peter asked him to “give Frank a call.” Ebbins put the call through, and Sinatra’s valet thought it was a joke. “Ebbins has gone off the cliff,” he told Frank. “He says the President wants to speak with you.” Ebbins put Jack on the line and he had a pleasant, inconsequential chat with Sinatra. There was no mention of what had transpired, and Sinatra wasn’t much mollified by the call. A few months later, Peter and Milt were at the White House, and Ebbins suggested that Peter ask Jack to invite Sinatra for a visit. “I can’t go to the President of the United States and say, ‘You gotta invite Frank Sinatra to the White House,’” Peter protested. “All right,” Ebbins replied, “we’ll both do it.”

Ebbins did the talking. “Jack,” he began, “would it be possible to invite Frank here for lunch? He was such a good friend.”

“Okay,” the President responded. “We’ll have a big Italian dinner here on Monday.” Ebbins relayed the invitation to Frank, who was hesitant at first but agreed to fly into Washington for the soiree. Ebbins made arrangements to have Sinatra picked up by helicopter at Dulles International Airport and flown to the White House. Sinatra had been there before, but always secretly; he used a back entrance to avoid reporters. The same precautions would have to be taken this time — and the dinner was possible only because the First Lady was out of town. “Jackie hates Frank and won’t have him in the house,” Jack had told Peter.

In Sinatra’s honor, Kennedy flew in an Italian chef from New York who prepared veal piccata and fettuccine Alfredo. But the afternoon of the dinner, the singer’s secretary, Gloria Lovell, called Milt Ebbins to say that Frank was ill and couldn’t attend. “Isn’t there some way he can make it?” Milt protested. “This is the President of the United States. If he’s dying he’s gotta come.” No, Lovell said, Frank had the flu and was really too ill to make it.

The dinner party went ahead without Sinatra. A few days later, Lovell told Ebbins the real reason Frank hadn’t been able to come: Marilyn Monroe, with whom he was having an affair, was depressed and had wandered out of his house and disappeared. “He spent the whole day looking for her,” Lovell said. “He was worried sick that she was going to hurt herself. That’s why he didn’t go to the dinner.”

Later, Sinatra got another invitation to the White House, this time for lunch, and things went off without a hitch. But he never again had a good word for Peter Lawford. It was clear that while Sinatra had forgiven all his other cronies their trespasses, he was not going to allow Peter back into the inner sanctum. Beyond all else, it was clear that Frank Sinatra no longer liked Peter Lawford.

The Sinatra debacle sent Peter reeling into a depression, one punctuated by bouts of heavy drinking. The whole sordid incident reinforced in him the feeling that his life was out of his own control, and it impressed on him anew the negative aspects of being related to the President. He felt diminished by the loss of so central a relationship in his life, felt his financial security undermined by the career roadblocks Sinatra had already begun to set up against him, and felt his physical safety threatened by the mob’s fury against the Kennedys and the Rat Pack.

Matters went from bad to worse. Added to Peter’s myriad of troubles was a new one: just as Sinatra had been weeks before, Peter soon found himself “worried sick” about Marilyn.

13 Judy Meredith has denied that she ever slept with Jack Kennedy.