The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [303]
There were, however, limitations on what he was likely to ask and what they were likely to be able to do. Joe was one of the wealthiest men in America. It was an unnecessary risk to have tainted Mafia money pouring into the campaign in vast amounts with all the chances of discovery and the possibility of blackmail. His own son Bobby was one of the vociferous enemies of Giancana and his kind. By working out an elaborate agreement with Giancana, Joe would have betrayed his own blood.
That the Mafia had its tentacles deep into American life did not mean that it had strength enough to lift a man to the White House. The mob, moreover, was ecumenical in its political concerns, purportedly making a half-million-dollar contribution to Nixon’s campaign. As for Giancana, he had power in Chicago, but for every vote that the Chicago Mafia controlled, Mayor Daley controlled a hundred. Across America the mobsters had their hooks into union locals and officials, but the unions largely backed Democratic candidates anyway, and in those instances the mob could only confirm what the unions were already doing. Even if Joe utilized his mob connections, as he probably did, it is simply unthinkable that Giancana and his cohorts could have been the crucial factor in the election.
The syndicate bosses, nonetheless, had reasons to think that in a Kennedy administration the FBI might back off from its interest in organized crime. Sinatra provided the campaign theme song, “High Hopes,” and Giancana and his associates had their own high hopes in Kennedy. Sinatra had boasted to Giancana that his friend Jack would ease up on the mob, and with that in mind Giancana had pushed Kennedy’s election.
The final rally is always a sentimental moment, even in the most dispirited of presidential campaigns, for whatever the polls might say, no matter what the aides might fear, it is not they who decide, but tens of millions of voters across the land. Jack’s campaign was ending in Boston, where the Kennedy saga had begun over a century before. The motorcade crawled through downtown streets so slowly that it took ninety minutes to move the two miles from his hotel to Boston Garden. Jack waved to sidewalks crowded with over half a million citizens who hoped their votes would help lift this son of Massachusetts to the White House. They shouted and they hooted and they yelped the way Boston Democrats had fifty-four years before when the torchlight parade celebrated his grandfather Honey Fitz’s ascendancy to the mayor’s office.
The car passed the old State House and rolled over the ground where the Boston Massacre took place, and where Rose had stood lecturing Jack and his brothers and sisters on the five heroic Americans shot dead by the British redcoats, their martyrs’ blood drenching the street. At times his mother had been a merciless pedagogue, but she had woven history into Jack’s very sinews, and he could see himself as someone walking in the firm steps of American patriots. His eyes were red, but as he waved and smiled, he gave no sign of collapse. Jack had his Methedrine-laced shots to provide their ersatz lift, but to a politician there was no shot like this, the pure amphetamine of politics, which lifted him beyond even the exhaustion of the two-month-long campaign.
The platform behind Jack at Boston Garden was jammed with every Massachusetts Democratic pol from Pittsfield to Yarmouth. There were those who had loved Jack from the day the scrawny veteran had first walked through the streets of East Boston. There were those who had always despised him and his benighted family and thought them the bane of party politicians. And there were many who had been indifferent. But they were all Kennedy men this evening, pressing toward their candidate. No one remembers, though, like the Kennedys—when you had signed on, what you had given, how long you had worked. A smile tonight