Tales from the Attic: My brief moments with the Kennedy story

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith - In 1957 I was a 19 year old sophomore with a summer job as a reporter for WWDC News in Washington. Upon graduation I came back  to WWDC. Among the people I interviewed was Jimmy Hoffa.  I also covered a Senate investigation of the Teamsters Union. Among those seated at the long panel table was young John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts. His brother, Robert, served as a counsel for the committee. At one point, a prostitute witness made an off-color comment that brought guffaws from the audience; and Bobby’s own giggles were amplified by his mike. The chair, John McClellan, rapped his gavel and told Kennedy that “This is not a joking matter.” It would be the only time I ever saw a Kennedy look chastened.

The testimony of Hoffa went like this:

Robert F. Kennedy: Did you say, “That S.O.B., I’ll break his back”?

Jimmy Hoffa: Who?

Kennedy: You.

Hoffa: Say it to who?

Kennedy: To anyone?

Hoffa: Figure of speech… I don’t even know what I was talking about and I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Kennedy: Uh… Mr. Hoffa, all I’m trying to find out, I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. I’m trying to find out whose back you were going to break.

Hoffa: Figure of speech… figure of speech.

Later, I wrote in a 1959 letter:

The Kennedy brothers came to Washington to do good and did very well. Jimmy Hoffa, who’s astute if corrupt, told me once in the midst of the rackets hearing, “Bobby Kennedy is trying to make headlines for his brother so he can get him to the White House, but he can’t find his way out of this room.”

It could be that what happened in that hearing room helped to lay the groundwork for Kennedy’s later assassination – if theories of a mob hit are true. Certainly Hoffa hated the Kennedys and Washington investigative author Ron Goldfarb wrote that in “August 1962, Hoffa recruited an aide to kill RFK. In February 1963, John Kennedy told Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee that Hoffa had recruited an assassin to kill the attorney general." In 1995 Goldfarb wrote in the Washington Post: "While Kennedy himself publicly supported the official conclusion that Oswald acted alone, he privately speculated about the possibility of conspiracy. He told at least two of his close aides that he thought the mob was behind the assassination."

Frank Ragano, long-time lawyer for both Santos Trafficante Jr. and Hoffa, wrote a memoir with NY Times reporter Selwyn Raab in which he recalled several conversations between the two mobsters:

Trafficante: Somebody is going to kill those sons of bitches. It’s just a matter of time.

Hoffa: Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend and Carlos [Marcello] to get rid of him, kill that son of a bitch John Kennedy. This has got to be done. Be sure to tell them what I said. No more fucking around. We’re running out of time – something has to be done.

After JFK’s assassination, Ragano claimed that Marcello told him, “When you see Jimmy, you tell him he owes me, and he owes me big.”

And Trafficante thought they had got the wrong man: “We shouldn’t have killed John. We should have killed Bobby.”

Goldfarb quotes the brother of Sam Giacana as boasting, “We took care of Kennedy. The hit in Dallas was just like any other operation we’d worked in the past.” Writes Goldfarb: “Sam Giancana himself was murdered in 1975 just days before he was suppose to talk to the Senate intelligence committee about plots to kill Castro.”

He also notes that “Two biographies of leading mobsters report that Marcello exclaimed, ‘Don’t worry about that Bobby son of a bitch. He’s going to be taken care of ‘ According to one participant Marcello told his listeners he would recruit some nut to kill Kennedy so it couldn’t be traced to him, ‘like they do in Sicily.'” Marcello would later deny the quote.

As Goldberg – who went on to work for Bobby Kennedy and knew a lot about organized crime – wrote in a 2009 article for Daily Beast:

"Drawing on incriminating tapped phone conversations, new literature and investigations, and Trafficante’s lawyer’s 1994 memoir (Frank Ragano’s Mob Lawyer), I concluded that the assassination was generated by Jimmy Hoffa. Oswald was, as he claimed, a patsy. It was a mob touch to use someone to carry out their deadly assignments, and then to kill that person to avoid detection."

THE AUTHOR, 2nd FROM RIGHT, INTERVIEWS JFK RIGHT AFTER HE ANNOUNCED HIS PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDACY. Photo by Hank Walker, Life Magazine.

If Goldfarb was right, then during my introduction to journalism, I not only interviewed John F. Kennedy but one of those responsible for his assassination. After graduating from college, I interviewed JFK moments after he had announced he was running for president, a photo of which appeared in Life Magazine.  Later, in January 1961, I made my only foray into the world of network television. I was hired for Kennedy’s inauguration by CBS News as a news editor. Along with fellow WWDC newsman Ed Taishoff, I sat all day capped with a headset in a ballroom of the Hotel Washington, turning phone calls from CBS correspondents into stories which were then placed on Walter Cronkite’s personal news ticker.

Meanwhile, the military draft was breathing down hard and the Coast Guard had accepted me for its officer candidate school…Eventually I would end up as operations officer aboard the CG cutter Spar out of Bristol RI. Our job was maintaining aids to navigation and heavy weather search & rescue. In November 1963 we were also assigned to take two 40 foot patrol boats to be used to guard John F. Kennedy when he was vacationing in Florida. At a flank speed of 15 knots it had taken us days to get to Florida and days to get back. I had the conn as we finally pulled up to the dock at Bristol with everyone anxious to go ashore.

We weren’t more than a hundred feet off the dock when a crew member came out on the  deck below and called up to the bridge, “President Kennedy’s been shot.” I thought: what a stupid thing to say at a time like this. I edged the ship up gently to the pier, got the lines properly secured and went below. Only then did I realize that it was true. Despite days away from home port, no one left the ship for three hours as we huddled around the mess deck's television.