Free The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby by Richard D. Mahoney

Acknowledgments
    M y association and friendship with the exceptional staff, past and present, of the John F. Kennedy Library have made this book possible. Megan F. Desnoyers, William Johnson, Suzanne K. Forbes, Jo August, Sheldon Stern, John Stewart, Alan Goodrich, Jim Cedrone, Dan Fenn, and William W Moss made the going bearable and, at points, even easy. They of course bear no responsibility for the result. My selection in 1987 as the John F. Kennedy Scholar by the Kennedy Library and the University of Massachusetts at Boston enabled me to do much of my research for this book.
    I should also thank the staffs of the National Archives and Records Services, the Library of Congress, the FBI records office in Washington, D.C., the Adlai E. Stevenson Papers at Princeton University, the Chicago Crime Commission, and the Centro de Estudios Sobre America in Havana.
    Among those who read portions of the manuscript along the way, made useful suggestions, and always encouraged to me to push on: Donavon Ostrom, Paul Erickson, Stanley Sheinbaum, Bill Gilliam, Chenoweth Moffat, Grant W. Johnson, Mary Jo West, and my sisters Noel Shambayati, Eileen Mahoney, and Mary Mahoney. My mother, Alice D. Mahoney, as always, provided criticism, insight, and the indispensable service of taking care of my daughter, Molly.
    I should recognize others who went out of their way to assist me: Oliver Stone, Mayra I. Alvarado, Blas Casares, Andrew and Teresa Molander, Jorge Recarey, Eric J. Farber, Robert Scheer, Samuel E. Belk III, Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, Peter McClennen, Samuel G. Vagenas, Kenneth and Katrina Carlsen, Paul Rosen-feld, Gene Fisher, and my teaching assistants at The American Graduate School of International Management, Thunderbird: Nozar Afkhami, Laura Wente, Elka Popova, Marilyn Edelman, and Mark A. Staehle. Each semester my foreign policy seminar students at Thunderbird gladly read portions of the manuscript, and they deserve recognition for what improvements they made.
    Among Kennedy friends and lieutenants who were especially helpful: Dolores Huerta, Harris Wofford, Angela Novello, the late W. Averell Harriman, the late George W. Ball, the late Kenneth P. O’Donnell, the late David F. Powers, the late Lord Harlech, the late Edmund A. Gullion, and the late Cesar Chavez. There are those in Havana and Miami for whom printed recognition would imperil their persons, but who provided information and guidance in this project. I thank them as well.
    Without my father’s friendship with the Kennedys and his attentive support for each of his nine children, including myself, I would not have attempted this journey. Without the unusual skill and grace in execution of my editor, Timothy Bent, I would not have completed it.

Introduction
    M y father was a friend of Robert F. Kennedy and an ambassadorial appointee of John F. Kennedy. He, and consequently the rest of our large Irish-American family, admired the Kennedys uncritically, a sentiment that was reinforced by the nature of their deaths. One of the last things Robert Kennedy did on June 5, 1968, in his suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before going downstairs to accept victory in the California primary was to make a list of friends he wanted to call when he got back to his room later that night. Among them was my father.
    In March 1974, when I first went to the Federal Records Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, which then housed the Kennedy papers, I did so more in the manner of a pilgrim than a scholar. I was a member of the faithful, looking for evidence, even relics, of the blessed era. I would sit for hours in the poorly heated research room reading JFK’s office files and the oral histories of RFK’s brief run for the presidency six years earlier. I became friends with the late Dave Powers, then curator of the Kennedy Library, who had been Jack Kennedy’s best friend. I would often drop by his office in the late afternoon and listen to him tell stories about the Kennedy