His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [163]
Throughout both primaries, voters heard the smooth, insouciant Sinatra voice singing “High Hopes” with the lyric reworked by Sammy Cahn:
K-E-double-N-E-D-Y,
Jack’s the nation’s favorite guy.
Everyone wants to back Jack,
Jack is on the right track.
And he’s got HIGH HOPES,
High apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes.
“I went into every tavernkeeper in the state and paid them twenty dollars to press that button and play Frank’s song for Jack, but that’s all he did in West Virginia,” said Corbin.
But unbeknownst to Corbin and the rest of Kennedy’s political operatives, Frank made a much more substantial contribution to the West Virginia primary. FBI wiretaps showed large Mafia donations to the state campaign that were apparently disbursed by Sinatra. This under-the-table money was used to make payoffs to key election officials. And Sinatra’s friend Sam Giancana dispatched Paul “Skinny” D’Amato to the state to use his influence with the sheriffs, who gambled in the illegal gaming rooms of Greenbriar County. These men controlled the state’s political machine, and many of them were gamblers who had been customers at Skinny’s 500 Club in Atlantic City; some still owed Skinny money, and others were more than happy to do him a favor, which was rewarded from a cash supply of more than fifty thousand dollars. Their job was to get the vote out for Kennedy—any way they could.
Owning a few politicians in Illinois, Giancana knew the advantages of being close to political power, and decided to help Frank help the Kennedy campaign, figuring that if JFK won, Frank would be able to put an end to the federal surveillance Giancana was now experiencing every time he turned around. It wasn’t that John F. Kennedy was his favorite candidate; he was simply the least undesirable at the time.
Kennedy had not wanted to enter the West Virginia primary, but after an indecisive win over Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin, where his victory was discounted because it came from strongly Catholic districts, it was felt he had to go into West Virginia to prove that he could draw Protestant votes. Frank was concerned about West Virginia because he knew that it was virulent anti-Catholic territory. Furthermore, the United Mine Workers there had already endorsed Hubert Humphrey in retaliation for Bobby Kennedy’s role as chief counsel of the McClellan rackets committee. This made Giancana’s money and men all the more important.
With Skinny D’Amato quietly working the hollows of West Virginia, Ambassador Kennedy recruited Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., to stump the state with his son, knowing that the Roosevelt name was revered throughout West Virginia. The ambassador also had FDR, Jr., send letters postmarked Hyde Park, New York—President Roosevelt’s home—to every voter, praising Senator Kennedy. The ambassador knew it would be almost impossible for any miner to vote against a man endorsed by the son of the president who gave coal miners the right to organize and to make a living wage for the first time in their lives. Throughout the state, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., held up two fingers pressed tightly together, saying, “My daddy and Jack Kennedy’s daddy were just like this.”
“Frank Sinatra would’ve done anything to get Jack elected, so it’s kind of ironic that he almost capsized the campaign early on when he tried to break the blacklist by hiring Albert Maitz,” said Peter Lawford. “God, was that a mess. The ambassador took care of it in the end, but it was almost the end of old Frankie-boy as far as the family was concerned.”
On March 21, 1960, Murray Schumach wrote a story in The New York Times disclosing that Frank had hired Maitz, one of the Hollywood Ten, to write a screenplay of The Execution of Private Slovik, a book by William Bradford Huie about the only American soldier executed by the U.S. Army for desertion since the Civil War. Frank planned to direct and