"Politics is like war. It takes three things to win..... The first is money and the second is money and the third is money." - Joe Kane (Kennedy's friend)

How Joe Made his Son President

The following are excerpts from : The Sins of the Father - by Ronald Kessler The Kennedy Men: Three Generations of Sex, Scandal, and Secrets - by Nellie Bly

JFK's First Campaign - 1946

JFK's First Senate Campaign - 1952

JFK's Presidential Campaign - 1960

- Having tried and failed, Joe Kennedy knew he could never become president, but his sons could. He quenched his thirst for power through them.
- Joe had hoped that his eldest son, Joe Jr would fulfill his dream. That dream ended in August 1944 when Joe Jr, a Navy pilot, was killed after volunteering for a dangerous secret bombing mission. Columnist and family friend Arthur Krock was convinced that the reason Joe Jr had volunteered for such a dangerous mission was to compensate for his father's reputation as a coward.

- In Palm Beach during Christmas of 1944, Joe gave his son Jack the orders: He was to take Joe Jr's place and enter politics. In 1957, Jack described the event, telling a reporter: "It was like being drafted. My father wanted his eldest son in politics. 'Wanted' isn't the right word. He demanded it."

- Joe would later brag that "I got Jack into politics. I told him that Joe Jr was deceased and that it was therefore his responsibility to run for Congress."

- In 1946, Joe Kennedy decided that the eleventh congressional district of Massachusetts, with it's high concentration of Catholic voters, would be the perfect launching pad for his son Jack's political career. There was only one problem: James Michael Curley, the former mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts, occupied the seat. Curley, however, was in danger of being indicted for mail fraud, and Joe decided that what the man needed most was some money.
- "Curley knew he was in trouble with the feds over the mail fraud rap," recalled Kennedy's friend Joe Kane. "The ambassador paid him to get out of his congressional seat......Curley figured that he might need the money."
- Joe paid Curley $12,000 through his bag man Joe Timilty. He promised additional campaign help if Curley chose to run again for mayor of Boston in the 1946 election, which Curley did. After being elected, Curley was sent to prison for mail fraud. He continued to serve from prison.
- To Joe, this was standard operating procedure, recalled Kane. "Everything he got, he bought and paid for. And politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money."

- On April 25, 1946, Jack Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination to Congress. The next month, Joe founded the Joseph P Kennedy Jr Foundation which began furiously pumping money into Catholic institutions in Jack's adopted district. The timing was not a coincidence, and led one Massachusetts congressman to describe the gifts as "political currency."

- Joe's main job now became running his son's campaign. In effect, he was the candidate, devising campaign strategy and making every financial and policy decision. To conceal his own role and the extent of Jack's financing, Joe paid for everything clandestinely and in cash.
- David Powers, who ran Jack's Charlestown headquarters described how Joe's aide would meet him "at the campaign's central headquarters, and then lead me into the men's room, where, putting a dime into the slot, he would take me into a closed toilet stall. Then, with no one able to watch us, he would hand me the cash, saying, 'You can never be too careful in politics about handing over money."
- Joe also arranged for Jack to receive a salary from the Maine and New Hampshire Theaters Company, which he owned. Joe could then deduct it as a business expense. In addition, two of Joe's theater employees took care of all the campaign expenses. For example, if Jack needed a rental car, he simply charged it to Joe's theater company.

- Jack's opponent in the primary election was a legitimate politician named Joe Russo. To insure that Jack won the primary campaign, Joe Kennedy paid Joseph Russo, a janitor, to also enter the race. This effectively confused the voters, and split the votes for Joe Russo.
- Russo the janitor recalled how Joe's friend Joseph Timilty and another man had visited him one day and asked him to run. In return, Russo said, "They offered me favors. Whatever I wanted." In fact, he said later, he wound up getting very little - occasional payments of $50 in cash.
- Even the aunt of the real candidate voted for the janitor, recalled Joseph A Russo, the real candidate's son. "They didn't leave anything unturned," he said. His father claimed that Kennedy's people had also arranged for other bogus candidates to "run in other areas to break up the Irish vote, or some other vote. They played for keeps."

- After Jack won the Democratic primary, Joe sold Somerset Importers Inc, freeing $8 million to help Jack in his campaign and insuring that his liquor holdings would not become an issue.

- Just as he had done with the rent for Jack's campaign offices, Joe paid cash for Jack's advertising. John T Galvin, who was in charge of the advertising, recalled that "It was handled so that very few people knew.....There was a campaign law that limited campaign contributions. It didn't affect us very much."

- Joe also received crucial support from his friends in the media. For example, William Randolph Hearst, who owned the Boston American newspaper, had one of his reporters check in at Jack's headquarters every day. No other candidate got such special attention. Joe also got Hearst to ignore Jack's opponent Michael Neville, the mayor of Cambridge, and the paper would not accept his advertising.

- Joe spent $300,000 on Jack's first campaign, according to House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill, equivalent to $2.2 million today. O'Neill said that the sum was six times what he himself spent in the same district during a tough race six years later. In O'Neill's view, Joe was the "real force" behind the Kennedys.
- "Joe Kennedy was an ongoing factor in Massachusetts politics," O'Neill said. "Every time a Democrat ran for governor, he would go down to see Joe, who would always send him home with a briefcase full of cash."

- On November 5, 1946, Jack Kennedy was elected to Congress. Seven days later, he filed a report with the Massachusetts secretary of state certifying that no money had been collected for, or had been spent on his campaign.

- Having been elected to Congress three terms, Jack Kennedy began a race for the Senate in April 1952, seeking the seat held by Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

- The race was still a toss-up when Joe Kennedy learned that John Fox, owner of the powerful Boston Post, was in desperate need of money. The Boston Post, which had a circulation of over 300,000, had been credited with helping defeat Michael Curley in his last campaign in 1949, and with being responsible for getting Maurice Tobin elected governor of Massachusetts. Under Fox, the Boston Post favored Republicans. The newspaper had endorsed Eisenhower for president, and was expected to endorse Lodge. Indeed, those close to Fox confirmed that he "hated JFK."
- Fox had bought the Boston Post in 1952 for about $4 million. As a down payment, Fox had paid $2 million for the newspaper, but the IRS immediately took it for back payment of his own taxes. The publisher soon found himself unable to pay his bills.

- It was generally assumed that the Boston Post would endorse Lodge, but Fox was desperate for funds, and Joe Kennedy was only too happy to help out. Two days before the election, following a private meeting with Joe Kennedy, Fox gave a front-page endorsement for JFK.
- Former Massachusetts state senator Robert L Lee said the Post endorsement of JFK was the "turning point" in the campaign. Lee believed that if Lodge had received the paper's endorsement, it "would have been sufficient to put him back in the Senate."

- During a House subcommittee hearing in 1958, Fox admitted that Joe Kennedy had given him a $500,000 loan late in 1952. He insisted that he "repaid it with interest," and that it had nothing to do with his paper's endorsement of Jack. Joe issued a statement saying that the loan - the equivalent of $2.7 million today - was "purely a commercial transaction for 60 days only with full collateral, at full interest, and was fully repaid on time....."
- Raymond Faxon, Fox's friend and vice president of the publisher's investment business, revealed the truth about the transaction for the first time years later.

- Faxon revealed that two days before the election, John Griffin, the editor-in-chief of the Boston Post, informed Joe that the paper was about to endorse Lodge. He also told him that Fox was desperately in need of cash, having been turned down for a loan by local banks. Joe called Fox and asked him to meet at a local club which Fox owned. In return for an endorsement of Jack, Joe offered Fox a loan that, contrary to what both men later said, carried no interest and was not fully collateralized. "Fox needed the money, and he got it from Joe," Faxon said. "It was $500,000. The whole thing was a payoff."
- Based on Faxon's recollection that a bank would have charged interest of about 5 percent at the time, the interest waived amounted to about $10,000, the equivalent of $54,000 today. Aside from that, making any loan to such a shaky financial operation without full collateral represented a bribe. "No bank would have made the loan," Faxon said. "The word 'payoff' was exactly what it was."

- Now that Joe had gotten Jack elected to the Senate, he told his son to find a wife. In May 1952, Jack Kennedy had been introduced to Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. When Jack brought Jackie to Hyannis Port in the spring following the election, Joe decided she would be Jack's wife.
- Jackie had "all the social ingredients that Joe Kennedy thought would help Jack achieve the presidency," wrote C David Heymann in A Woman Named Jackie. As usual, Jack did what his father told him to do, and on June 24, 1953 the couple announced their engagement.
-Jack's friend Lem Billings said, "Joe Kennedy not only condoned the marriage,
he ordained it."

"Jack, if you don't want the job, you don't have to take it. They're still counting votes up in Cook County." - Joe Kennedy

- If Joe Kennedy had one area of expertise, it was manipulating the media. Long before spin doctors and political gurus talked of "packaging" presidential candidates, Joe shaped Jack's image more effectively than any Madison Avenue executive. "We're going to sell Jack like soap flakes," Joe said.
- In fact, Joe routinely paid off publishers as well as public officials to get what he wanted. Thomas Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, recalled that Joe routinely "gave cases of Haig & Haig Pinch Bottle Scotch to press people - to people at the Globe, to political writers, and to a lot of people in Washington."
- Joe sent expensive jewelry to female columnists, a confidant said, and gave cash to others. "He distributed a substantial amount to journalists," the confidant said. In addition, "Reporters took consulting assignments. Some of these guys were pretty amenable to consulting fees and gifts." Columnists, especially, were "for sale" - not to mention politicians. For such purposes, Joe always kept large stashes of cash.
- Joe's friend and confidant Frank Morrissey recalled that Joe had once called him to Hyannis Port to help him move $1 million in cash from the basement of his home. "A big northeast storm was coming up, and the old man was afraid a lot of the cash would get wet," Morrissey said.

- Already, Joe had persuaded a top television executive in New England to give Jack lessons in going before a camera. "He was consumed by the fact that TV would make the difference in the presidential election," the executive said. As one aide put it, "The old politicians relied on their experience, but Joe and his boys left nothing to chance." Joe, it seemed, had "learned a lot of tricks from the movies" during his Hollywood days.

- Henry Luce, a long time friend and ally of Joe Kennedy, was editor-in-chief and principal stockholder in Time Inc. The founder of Time and Life, Luce was arguably the most powerful publisher in America, and Joe had cultivated their relationship since his Roosevelt days. For years, Luce had given Joe frequent and complimentary press coverage in the magazines he controlled, and Luce's equally favorable coverage of Joe's son had been critical to JFK's early campaigns.
- In 1956, Luce was vacationing with Joe on the Riviera when he cabled his editors and suggested they devote more space to Jack Kennedy, who "was emerging as a national figure."

- In November 1957, Fortune magazine listed Joe Kennedy as one of the sixteen wealthiest people in the country, with a net worth of $200 to $400 million.

- On December 2, 1957, Jack's smiling face appeared for the first time on the cover of Time magazine. As ordained by Joe, he had just begun his bid for the presidency.

- George Smathers, a family friend and Senator from Florida, claimed that "Joe had a good deal to do with getting Luce to put Jack on the cover of Time. Jack had not made any great record as a congressman or senator. It was nothing outstanding in terms of what others were doing. Lots of congressmen had more legislative accomplishments than Jack." Giving such prominence to a fledgling candidate was unusual, and the cover story which called Jack the "Democratic Whiz of 1957" gave him a tremendous boost.
- Just weeks before Jack appeared on the cover of Time, Joe had bragged to his friend Cardinal Spellman, "I just bought a horse for $75,000, and for another $75,000, I put Jack on the cover of Time." Spellman recalled that Joe was "very proud of the fact that he had spent $75,000, and now he would not have to spend as much on advertising." The sum was equivalent to $385,000 today. "He did not say whether he paid it directly to Luce," Spellman added.

- During an interview on ABC-TV in December 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt said that "Senator Kennedy's father has been spending oodles of money all over the country, and probably has a paid representative in every state by now." She said she had been told that Joe would spend "any money" to make his son the first Catholic president. Many people told her of money spent by Joe on Jack's behalf. "Building an organization is permissible," she said, "but giving too lavishly may seem to indicate a desire to influence through money."

- Joe solicited author William Bradford Huie to distribute cash to politicians who would help Jack, according to what Huie later told a Time reporter. Huie said he routinely made payoffs of $1000 (equivalent to $4800 today), and promised he would reveal more details, but died before he could.

- Meanwhile, Joe cranked up the media campaign. In October 1959, Look began running a series of articles about Jack. Prepared with the family's cooperation, they may as well have been written by Joe himself.
- One article declared that Jack was in excellent health, when in fact he had been diagnosed in 1947 as having Addison's disease, a failure of the adrenal glands. When a Boston reporter suggested that Jack should disclose his health history, a Kennedy aide replied, "No, old Joe doesn't want that to be done. We can't do it now."
- Another article tried to downplay Joe's role in the campaign, fictitiously reporting that Joe had little influence over his son and had no interest in spending money on political campaigns. "In political circles," the article claimed, "the Kennedy's are not regarded as big spenders."

- On January 2, 1960, Jack Kennedy formally announced his presidential candidacy, and declared that the White House must be "the center of moral leadership."
- Two months later, Jack began his affair with a former actress named Judith Exner. While seeing Jack, Exner was also seeing Sam Giancana, who was the head of the Chicago Mafia and a former partner in Joe's bootlegging business. Giancana, who was credited with at least two hundred killings, was considered one of the most powerful men in organized crime. He controlled betting, prostitution, loan sharking, and owned interests in three Las Vagas hotels.

- Jack and Bobby identified the West Virginia primary as key to winning the nomination. The state's nomination was ninety-five percent Protestant and a win there would convince convention delegates that Jack's Catholicism would not be an issue in the presidential election.
- Jack's opponent in the Democratic primary was Hubert Humphrey, the senator from Minnesota, who was beloved by West Virginia coal miners for his longtime union support and folksy, old-fashioned campaign style. But Humphrey's small-town ways were no match for the Kennedy bandwagon's deep pockets and high technology. There is no doubt that Jack's huge TV budget also helped.

- The Kennedy men were not content to rely on statesmanship alone. At Jack's request, Exner arranged a meeting for him with Sam Giancana, who agreed to use his influence with West Virginia officials to ensure victory there.
- Giancana sent his lieutenant, Paul "Skinny" D'Amato, into West Virginia to get out the vote. D'Amato met with sheriffs who controlled the state's political machine. He forgave debts many of them had run up at his 500 Club in Atlantic City and handed cash payments to others.
- FBI wiretaps reveal that Frank Sinatra also distributed large mob donations to pay off election officials.

- Years later, in a People magazine story, Exner described how she had introduced Sam Giancana to Jack, who asked for the mob's help in financing the campaign. While it is not documented, it is clear Giancana gave money to the campaign. After the election, an FBI wiretap picked up Giancana talking with Johnny Roselli, a mob associate. He said his donation had been "accepted", yet complained that Bobby Kennedy, whom Jack had appointed attorney general, was cracking down on organized crime. He said he expected that "one of these days, the guy will do me a favor...."
- Giancana apparently had believed that in helping Kennedy's campaign, he was gaining a friend in the White House and protection from future prosecution by the government.

- Meanwhile, Joe was funneling money to politicians to swing the West Virginia primary.

- Tip O'Neill recalled that Eddie Ford, a Boston real-estate man, "went out there with a pocket full of money." O'Neill said Ford would "see the sheriff, and he'd say to the sheriff, 'Sheriff, I'm from Chicago. I'm on my way south. I love this young Kennedy boy. He can help this nation, by God. He'll do things for West Virginians. I'll tell you what. Here's $5000. You carry your village for him or your county for him, and I'll give you a little reward when I'm on my way back.' "
- O'Neill said, "They passed money around like it was never seen."

- One of the most important contributions Joe Kennedy made to his son's campaign was to create the Ken-Air Corporation, purchase for it a $385,000 Corvair twin-engine turboprop airplane, and then lease it to the candidate for the ridiculous sum of $1.75 a mile. Joe got a large tax deduction, while the plane gave Jack a tremendous advantage over Hubert Humphrey in the Democratic primary.
- While Humphrey either wasted time waiting around airports for commercial flights or lumbered about in his campaign bus, Jack Kennedy sped here and there in his private plane, covering more territory in less time and at less expense.

- In providing the cash for Jack's campaign, Joe Kennedy used the Catholic Church and, in particular, Cardinal Cushing. One of the couriers told author Peter Maas how it worked:

For example, if Boston area churches had collected $950,000 on a particular Sunday from collections, Joe would write a check for $1 million to the diocese, deduct it as a charitable contribution, and receive the $950,000 in cash. Thus, in this example, the church got a contribution of $50,000, Joe could deduct the entire amount on his income tax, and he could use the money to pay off politicians without fear that it would be traced.

- "The cash is untraceable," Maas said. "Part of the money goes to the diocese. He gets a contribution from Joe Kennedy for more than what the cash is. It's brilliant. Nobody can trace the money."

- In 1966, Cushing admitted that he had played a role in making payoffs to ministers. He told Hubert Humphrey, "I'll tell you who elected Jack Kennedy. It was his father, Joe, and me, right here in this room." Cushing explained that he and Joe decided which Protestant ministers should receive "contributions" of $100 to $500. As cushing described the tactic, "It's good for the church, it's good for the preacher, and it's good for the candidate."

- Maas also recalled that as a writer for the Saturday Evening Post he interviewed a political operative in one dirt-poor town in West Virginia who told him his county was for Humphrey. "A few weeks later, I interviewed him again, and he said the county was for Jack. I asked what had changed, and he said with a smile, 'My workers each got $20, and I got $150. We're for Kennedy."

- When Jack Kennedy narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey in theWest Virginia primary, Humphrey withdrew from the presidential race. It was the most important victory of Jack's campaign.

- On July 11 the Democratic National Convention nominated John F Kennedy for president. Some party leaders were leery of Jack, however. Truman opposed him, telling reporters, "I'm not against the Pope, I'm against the Pop." Eleanor Roosevelt regarded Jack as one of "the new managerial elite that has neither principles nor character."

- On November 8, 1960, John F Kennedy was elected president, defeating Republican Richard Nixon. Jack received 34,226,731 votes to 34,108,157 for Nixon. The popular vote margin, 118,574, was the equivalent of a win by one vote in every precinct in America.
- Kennedy's Electoral College majority was 303 to 219. The winning margin was provided by the state of Illinois, where in the eleventh hour, the votes that came in from Cook County's mob-dominated West Side put Jack over the top.
- "Actually, and this goes without saying, the presidency was really stolen in Chicago, without a question, by the Democratic machine," recalled mobster Mickey Cohen. "I know that certain people in the Chicago organization knew that they had to get John Kennedy in."

- In the weeks before his inauguration, Jack began interviewing candidates for more than seventy key posts in the new administration. At one point he complained to his father, "Jesus Christ, this one wants that, that one wants this. Goddamn it, you can't satisfy any of these people. I don't know what I'm going to do about it all." Joe Kennedy replied, "Jack, if you don't want the job, you don't have to take it. They're still counting votes up in Cook County."