The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [268]
As tough and cynical as Jack could be, nothing in his previous political life suggests that he was so devoid of both scruples and common sense as personally to enlist the Mafia as his partner. Even if one wanted to imagine a Jack cynically subverting American democracy, it was unthinkable that either he or Giancana would use Exner as their go-between. Neither man had achieved his power through such monumental stupidity as picking up a woman in a nightclub and deputizing her a few weeks later to foster an unprecedented act of political corruption that, if discovered, would destroy both men. Giancana came from a mob culture that kept women in the bedroom or the kitchen; he neither confided in them nor for the most part involved them in criminal acts. Jack had an equally limited opinion of the role of women in the games of power.
Giancana may have been willing to participate in corrupting the American presidential election, but he had not committed so many crimes with impunity by leaving his fingerprints on the bloody knives and the bags of loot. And even those ready to imagine a John F. Kennedy who would have attempted to subvert American democracy surely must realize that he would have kept his own clear distance from such an act.
Exner took the overnight train to Chicago, where, she asserts, Giancana was waiting at the station for her in the morning. Giancana’s biographer tells a different tale of how she later made her connection with the mobster. “She came to Chicago for a week and wandered around the Ambassador West Hotel, making it plain that she was trying to get closer to Giancana and his Oak Park Home,” writes William Brashler. “Finally taking a room in the Oak Park Arms Hotel, she was seen coming and going from the hotel to the Giancana house for a few days after, then she left town.”
That was essentially the version that Giancana told Joe Shimon, a Washington, D.C., police officer who became associated with the accused murderer: “She found out about Sam and tried to find him in Oak Park,” Shimon recalled. “Everyone knew where he lived. She was hinting that she had great connections, that she could do a lot of good. Sam said, ‘Do you remember that strumpet? She was trying to get on the payroll?’”
Jack sat in front of the Dictaphone in his Senate office musing about his life. It is unclear whether he meant these remarks for the autobiography that he would one day write or for some other purpose. Whatever he intended, he would have little time for such recollections once the campaign began. He was in his early forties, but these were an old man’s words, reflecting back on the sweep of his days, seeking out the themes of his life. He was an immense puzzle of a man, his character so complex that no matter how one turned the pieces around and tried to put them together they never quite seemed to fit. There was the man Sorensen and Feldman observed, a brilliant tactician with a stunning quickness of mind and decision. There was another Jack whom Ben Bradlee, his journalist friend, and a few others saw, an American gentleman endlessly amused by the foibles of the human race. There was the man whom Smathers and some of his colleagues experienced, a Jack speaking the most vulgar argot of politicians, the language itself not nearly as low as the