'No, Gangsters Didn't Murder JFK'

Author explores the delicate dance of mobsters and presidents

Author Eric Dezenhall, who worked briefly in the Reagan administration, writes in the current issue of the digital magazine Airmail that a White House colleague once declared that the Mafia had killed President Kennedy “as if this was a fact.”

The article is a sort of teaser for Dezenhall’s new book, “Wise Guys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents, and the Deals they Made.”

In the book Dezenhall explores how different presidents have interacted with the Cosa Nostra. He notes how Franklin Roosevelt sought the help of the Mob during World War II — not only to protect major ports from Nazi sabotage, but in preparation for the allied invasion of Sicily.

FDR’s successor Harry Truman also apparently owed some of his success to the Mafia, and the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were not without their brushes with mobsters.

In the article Dezenhall suggests that it was the Kennedy patriarch, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who was behind any vote fraud hanky-panky in Illinois in the 1960 election that brought JFK to power.

He also notes that the president’s brother and choice for attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, became apoplectic when he learned the CIA had approached organized crime to assassinate Fidel Castro. (Though, according to Dezenhall, RFK kept pushing for Castro’s demise, with JFK’s knowledge.)

Nevertheless, Dezenhall adds in a parenthetical: “… no, gangsters didn’t murder JFK.”

He also suggests that “… Nixon’s knowledge of the gangland plots to kill Castro while Nixon was vice president may have triggered Cuban operatives to break into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate offices.”

He doesn’t note, in the article anyway, that Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and James McCord were high-ranking CIA men, only recently retired, and the others involved — Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis — were all CIA operatives and veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Dezenhall previously co-authored a book with Gus Russo, who has argued that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy at the behest of the Communist Cuban government.