The Book of Bastards (17 page)

He was the movie-star handsome, Harvard-educated, wealthy son of a powerful Massachusetts family. Winner of both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. President. Hero. Martyr. Icon.

Womanizer. Plagiarist.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

As it turns out Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize — winning book
Profiles in Courage
was largely ghostwritten; most scholars think it was the work of future White House aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. But it made JFK look intellectually deep, and his father Joe worked hard to get one of his boys elected president and made sure the book got a mountain of publicity.

The fact that Jack Kennedy liked women is well established, and women returned the favor. It's also well-known that his wife was aware of his serial adultery. Once, Jackie even showed him a piece of lingerie left behind by one of his dalliances and asked him to return the item to the lady in question, as it wasn't Jackie's. Kennedy had quite a taste for Hollywood actresses, and had reportedly slept with a number of them including Angie Dickinson, Gene Tierney, and of course, Marilyn Monroe.

Kennedy and Monroe met for the first time when they attended a February 1962 party held in the president's honor at the home of his brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford. The sparks flew and they quickly began an affair.

She went on solo vacations with Kennedy, and stayed over at the White House while the First Lady was away. And then there was the whole singing “Happy Birthday” thing. Monroe fell in love with Kennedy; he viewed sex as something more along the lines of a tag-team sport. The affair couldn't last, and it didn't.

According to Kennedy confidant Florida Senator George Smathers, Kennedy ended things with Monroe in a particularly callous manner. After a day spent sailing on the Potomac, he told her he wasn't interested in getting a divorce. “You're not exactly First Lady material, Marilyn,” he said by way of letting her down.

And that was that.

Monroe's life had already been spiraling out of control for over a decade as a result of the long struggle with her manifold personal demons. Within months of the breakup, she was dead of a drug overdose. What Kennedy felt about her passing is not recorded.

Perhaps the most telling insight into Kennedy's attitudes regarding love, intimacy, and sex has been offered by Frank Sinatra's valet, George Jacobs. He knew Kennedy from the times the president was a guest at the singer's Beverly Hills home. In an interview given long after Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Jacobs said “His need was like that of Alexander the Great: to conquer the world. To him, Marilyn was one more conquest, a trophy — maybe the Great White Shark of Hollywood, but still a record, not a romance.”

Texas-born and hardened in the crucible of the Great Depression, Lyndon Baines Johnson grew up to be both an effective and a quotable bastard. He is known today largely for his role as John F. Kennedy's successor as president of the United States after Kennedy's assassination and for getting the nation embroiled in the unpopular Vietnam War. But Johnson was also likely the most successful majority leader in the history of the U.S. Senate.

Johnson began his political career as an aide in Texas state government, and proved himself capable of rousing people and getting things done. He was elected to the House in 1937 and held office there for twelve years. Johnson spent part of this time in the Naval Reserve during World War II, operating as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's eyes and ears in the Pacific Theatre. He even earned a dubious Silver Star award for observing fifteen minutes of combat time on a B-26 bomber run. In 1949 Johnson moved to the U.S. Senate. During his twelve years there, Johnson rose within the Democratic leadership, taking over as Senate majority leader in 1954 when the Democrats reclaimed the majority.

Johnson was, without doubt, the most effective Senate majority leader ever. He studied the senators working within his caucus and applied the “Johnson Treatment” to the ones from whom he wanted votes. Journalists Roland Evans and Robert Novak described the strategy as a combination of intimidation and cajolery; “an almost hypnotic experience” that “rendered the target stunned and helpless.”

He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, but lost. Johnson surprised many by accepting the offer to be Kennedy's running mate. Kennedy's staff knew he needed a Southerner on the ticket to land the South's electoral votes that year. Johnson met that goal, and he also (allegedly) assisted in the voter fraud that delivered Texas to Kennedy.

Vice President Johnson was publicly loyal to the president, but behind closed doors, he chafed at the public's love affair with the handsome young Kennedy. “Jack was out kissing babies,” Johnson once remarked, “while I was out passing bills.”

But when Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Johnson hit the ground running. He passed more sweeping social reform legislation than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. Johnson was responsible for so many things we take for granted today including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. These accomplishments, though, did little to save his career.

Johnson also escalated the war in Vietnam, and that cost him the White House in the long run. He retired from politics in 1969 and died in 1973.

Born in Harlem to an energetic Abyssinian Baptist Church minister, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was an impressive man. He, too, was an ordained minister and the first black member of the New York City Council. Powell was also the first black congressman from the state of New York and one of the first from any state in the union since the end of Reconstruction in 1877. In 1937 he succeeded his father in his pulpit and began to work as a community organizer in his home neighborhood.

As such he was a stellar figure. Harlem's personal representative in Congress, a tireless worker for civil rights, Powell insisted that black visitors be allowed to dine with him in the “Whites Only” Congressional dining room and that the use of the word “nigger” be banned on the House floor.

He was also a tireless administrator, chairing the powerful House Education and Labor Committee in 1961. Working with President Lyndon B. Johnson, Powell even set a record for the number of bills to be introduced into legislation in a single session.

And yet Powell ran afoul of House ethics rules. He abused his committee's budget to the tune of funding unauthorized overseas trips for himself. These included weekend getaways to a home he owned in the British Virgin Islands. He was also missing sessions of the committee he chaired. It all looked (and was) highly improper.

By January 1967, the members of the House's Democratic leadership had seen enough. They stripped Powell of his chairmanship; a March 1 session of the entire body voted overwhelmingly to exclude Powell from the House.

Rather than fight his expulsion, Powell ran in the special election organized to pick the replacement for his Congressional seat. He won.

The House refused to seat him. This time Powell went to court. In its 1969 decision on the case
Powell v. McCormack
, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, stating that Congress did not have the Constitutional right to exclude him. So Powell went back to Congress, but he lost his seniority. He also went back to skipping sessions, rarely showing up even just to vote.

In 1970 Powell lost a primary challenge to a young Charlie Wrangell, the man who has held Powell's seat ever since, and who himself is no stranger to public controversy. Powell retired to the Bahamas and died in a Miami hospital in 1972. Despite the lackluster end to his Congressional career, Powell is memorialized by (among other things) the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. State Office, which sits on Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd. in Harlem.

Abe Fortas had an established career as a star lawyer: after all, he had been the primary attorney in several cases argued before the Supreme Court, including the landmark 1962 case
Gideon v. Wainright
, which established a citizen's right to legal representation. He was also a lifelong friend and confidante of President Lyndon B. Johnson. So when he was confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1965, Fortas seemed to have a long career on the Supreme Court ahead of him. Neither he nor anyone close to him could have foreseen his resignation under fire a short four years later.

This was partly because no justice had ever been successfully impeached for any reason during the long history of the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, since the Democratic Republicans had gone after Samuel Chase in 1804, no one had even bothered to try. Thanks to Fortas, all of that was about to change.

The first cloud on the horizon came when Johnson nominated Fortas to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1968. During the confirmation discussions in the Senate, concerns arose about a series of speeches that Fortas had given at American University. Fortas had been paid $15,000 for the speeches, but the university had not paid these fees: a number of private corporations had. If these companies ever had a case tried before the high court, Fortas's relationship to them could create a conflict of interest. These concerns helped derail his nomination.

A year later the revelation that he had signed a personal services contract with a $20,000 retainer from the personal foundation of a Wall Street financier was the final blow that finished Fortas's judicial career. The contract called for Fortas to receive $20,000 per year in addition to his retainer for the rest of his life. In exchange for this remuneration Fortas was to give “advice” to the family paying him.

“It was difficult for most people to fathom why Fortas, an astute attorney and author of a recent book that begins ‘I am a man of the law,' would so jeopardize his position,” A
Time
magazine article noted at the time. “Fortas's many connections in high places have gained him a reputation for wheeling and dealing in areas not uncommon for a corporate lawyer but of questionable propriety for a Supreme Court Justice. One fellow lawyer described Fortas as simply ‘avaricious.'”

And that's the really interesting part. It's true that $20,000 was not then and still isn't a small sum of money. But compared to the $150,000 per year that Fortas's law firm paid him before he was tapped for the high court, it's a drop in the bucket.

What's more, Fortas's own wife, also an attorney, was still employed at his old firm and bringing in $100,000 per year herself. It's not exactly as if Fortas needed the extra money. In the end, regardless of what it amounted to, Fortas took the money for the same reason so many other infamous bastards have done so: because he thought he could do it without suffering adverse consequences as a result. Turned out he was half right.

In the end the entire sordid affair amounted to an enormous conflict of interest, and since Johnson had left office that year, he was unable to save his old friend. Already wounded by the American University speakers' fees revelations, Fortas resigned on May 14, 1969.

He spent the next thirteen years until his death practicing law in Washington, D.C.