Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [53]
Kroll—along with dozens of other volunteers—had the job of grinding through a pile of more than 150,000 letters to Kennedy that had remained unanswered since his campaign for the Senate in 1964. Kroll and the other staffers organized the letters by topic, and cranked out responses to each one. When he was not writing letters, Kroll served as a general office gofer.
The work was not exciting, but it came with one unusual perk: on weekends, Kennedy would open his Hickory Hill estate for the staff, even though the senator and his wife, Ethel, were typically away at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The people hanging out at Hickory Hill were ruled by staff aides in their early thirties—they were the only “grown-ups” around—and for Kroll and the other junior aides, Hickory Hill offered the perfect social swirl: a time to relax, pursue romances, and make contacts that would last a lifetime.
For those lucky enough to be invited to the official parties with the Kennedys themselves, almost anything seemed possible. Dogs, ponies, rabbits, and other animals belonging to the Kennedys’ eleven children roamed the grounds. Guests might include the Beatle John Lennon, the actress Judy Garland, and the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, along with other celebrities, politicians, and military officers. Washington’s grandees engaged in raucous drinking and dramatic escapades on the rolling lawn, on the tennis court, and in the pool area. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that at one party, Ethel Kennedy’s chair slipped off the edge of a poolside platform and she tumbled into the water along with it. As he was standing on the edge of the pool deciding whether or not to dive in after the senator’s wife, Schlesinger recalled, Lee Udall, the wife of the secretary of the interior, pushed him—fully clothed—into the pool, for the rescue.1 Dunking high-powered political people in the pool became a regular cocktail-hour prank.
It was as a junior observer of this milieu that Jules Kroll got an education in politics and business. An idealistic liberal inspired by Kennedy, he determined that he’d go into public service himself. And he also decided that he did not want to go into business, the way his father, Herman Kroll, did, opening up a small company called Book Printers, Inc. Kroll thought printing was a miserable business, and he wanted nothing to do with it.
After doing a short stint in the Coast Guard and joining the Coast Guard reserves, Kroll passed the New York bar exam in 1967 and went to work as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. But soon Kroll’s father became ill with a grueling staphylococcus infection that caused large carbuncles to erupt all over his body. Herman Kroll was out of commission while he battled the infection, which doctors later found had been contracted during a visit to the dentist. So Jules returned to the family printing business. In the 1960s, the printing business was awash in corruption and under the heavy hand of the Mafia. Kroll found printers scratching for ways to chisel a little more cash for themselves. Kickbacks, sweetheart deals, and intimidation tactics were everywhere.
“For an idealistic kid, it was a pretty demoralizing experience,” Kroll says. He was desperate to get out, and began plotting a way to get back into politics. His father recovered from his long-drawn-out illness, and the family wound down the company in 1971. That same year, Jules Kroll made a move to escape from business. He became a candidate for the New York City Council in Queens, where he ran up against the local Democratic political machine.