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Nemesis
Peter Evans
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Nemesis
Peter Evans
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About This Book
Peter Evans's biography of Aristotle Onassis, Ari, metwith great acclaim when it was published in 1986. Ariprovided the world with an unprecedented glimpse of theGreek shipping magnate's orbit of dizzying wealth, twistedintrigues, and questionable mores. Not long after the bookappeared, however, Onassis's daughter Christina and hislongtime business partner Yannis Georgakis hinted toEvans that he had missed the "real story" -- one that provedOnassis's intrigues had deadly results. "I must begin, "Georgakis said, "with the premise that, for Onassis, BobbyKennedy was unfinished business from way back..."
His words launched Evans into the heart of a story thattightly bound Onassis not to Jackie's first husband, but tohis ambitious younger brother Bobby. A bitter rivalryemerged between Bobby and Ari long before Onassis andJackie had even met. Nemesis reveals the tangled thread ofevents that linked two of the world's most powerful men intheir intense hatred for one another and uncovers thesurprising role played by the woman they both loved. Theirpower struggle unfolds against a heady backdrop ofinternational intrigue: Bobby Kennedy's discovery of theGreek shipping magnate's shady dealings, which led him tobar Onassis from trade with the United States; Onassis'sattempt to control much of Saudi Arabia's oil; Onassis'suntimely love affair with Jackie's married sister LeeRadziwill; and his bold invitation to First Lady Jackie tojoin him on his yacht -- without the president. Just as theself-made Greek tycoon gloried in the chance to stir thewrath of the Kennedys, they struggled unsuccessfully tobreak his spell over the woman who held the key to all oftheir futures. After Jack's death, Bobby became ever closerto Camelot's holy widow, and fought to keep her frommarrying his sworn rival. But Onassis rarely failed to getwhat he wanted, and Jackie became his wife shortly afterBobby was killed.
Through extensive interviews with the closest friends, lovers, and relatives of Onassis and the Kennedys, longtimejournalist Evans has uncovered the shocking culmination ofthe Kennedy-Onassis-Kennedy love triangle: AristotleOnassis was at the heart of the plot to kill Bobby Kennedy.Meticulously tracing Onassis's connections in the world ofterrorism, Nemesis presents compelling evidence that hefinanced the assassination -- including a startling confessionthat has gone unreported for nearly three decades. Alongthe way, this groundbreaking work also daringly paintsthese international icons in all of their true colors. FromEvans's deeply nuanced portraits of the charismatic Greekshipping magnate and his acquisitive iconic bride to hisprobing and revelatory look into the events that shaped anera, Nemesis is a work that will not be soon forgotten.
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One
The Blood Trade
Were one to ask me in which direction
I think man strongest,
I should say, his capacity to hate.
—H. W. BEECHER, 1813–1884
Robert Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis met for the first time at a cocktail party given by the English socialite Pamela Churchill* at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in the spring of 1953—the year Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married John F. Kennedy.
Pamela Churchill was a shrewd networker long before the term had been invented, and her guest list had been drawn from the elite of the American establishment and the world’s richest people. Daughter of an English baron, and the former wife of Randolph Churchill—the drunkard son of the British prime minister—Pamela, who would become the model for the elegant tramp Lady Ina Coolbirth in Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers,1 knew the great and near great of five continents. It was said that for legendary amounts of money, she had slept with many of them.
She had known Bobby since 1938, when his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was the American ambassador to England. She and Bobby’s older sister Kathleen were debutantes together in the last London season before the start of World War II, and had remained friends until Kathleen’s death in a plane crash in 1948.
Onassis was not such an old friend. Since Pamela’s ex-husband Randolph had introduced them in the South of France several months earlier, however—an introduction that Onassis said had cost him £2,000 (some £40,000 in today’s currency)—the Greek shipping millionaire had become a close one (her lover, he said; not so, she protested, although her veracity in such matters was as questionable as Onassis’s). Onassis was far too earthy for her tastes, Pamela told friends.2 An unmistakeable arriviste, he possessed a volatile temper, especially when he’d had too much to drink, and his habit of smashing plates and making scenes in restaurants offended her English sensibilities.
Although Onassis was attracted to Pamela’s world, and knew he would be accepted more easily if he adopted the elegant dress, language, and manners of their class—much as his brother-in-law, Stavros Niarchos had done—he refused. “I won’t play the hypocrite for anyone,” he told his young, English-educated wife Tina, daughter of the 1930s shipping king Stavros Livanos, when she tried to break him out of his Greek chrysalis and repackage him as an English toff.3
Nevertheless, Pamela Churchill was a practical woman, and it was clear that her interest in Onassis had been rekindled—and her sense of tolerance restored—by the news that he had just bought the principality of Monaco. More precisely, hiding behind a maze of Panamanian fronts, he had acquired SBM,* a moribund property company that owned an Edwardian pile of real estate in Monte Carlo, including the casino, the yacht club, the Hotel de Paris, and about one third of the principality’s 375 acres.
Situated between the oil fields of the Middle East and the markets of Europe and North America, Monte Carlo was a perfect base for Onassis’s operations. The climate pleased him, the social life met with Tina’s approval, and the principality was tax free.
Overnight, Onassis had become famous; suddenly, everything he did was news. His wealth, as well as the hints of something undisclosed about his past, made wonderful copy. More than just another rich Greek, this small, dark, sybaritic figure with sensual heavy-lidded eyes was recognized in the street. Women began to proposition him as if he were a movie star; he took to wearing dark glasses and engaged a public relations man. Reporters dubbed him the “king of Monaco” (a tabloid ennoblement that did not go down well with Rainier, the prince of Monaco). He gave interviews on how to handle women: “I approach every woman as a potential mistress,” he said. “Beautiful women cannot bear moderation; they need an inexhaustible supply of excess.”
But his love affair with the media was not entirely motivated by ego. His cultivated image as a mysterious but magnanimous rags-to-riches tycoon also “sanctioned his sharp deals,” in the words of one American aide.4 And no deal had been sharper than his acquisition, five years earlier, of ten U.S. surplus T2 tankers. Because of their size and strategic significance, the ships had been forbidden to foreigners, but at $1.5 million each, they had been an irresistible purchase for Onassis, and with the help of a U.S. corporation fronted by three American citizens, he easily circumvented the exclusion clause and bought them.*
Robert Kennedy also became front-page news for the first time in 1953. And if the 1950s were not to be his glory years, as they were for Onassis, they were unquestionably heady ones.
Small and more Irish and intense than his brothers, with a psychology coiled tightly as a spring, after graduating from the University of Virginia Law School in 1951 Kennedy took a job in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. Assigned to menial legwork on tax-fraud cases in a district office in Brooklyn, he quit after only a few months to work on his older brother Jack’s senatorial campaign. After Jack was elected in 1952, though, twenty-seven-year-old Bobby felt stranded, a lawyer with no courtroom experience and no certain way to turn. His father suggested that he join Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, an offshoot of a low-profile committee on government operations, which McCarthy had turned into a power base for his notorious communist witch-hunt.
Although not yet his own ism, McCarthy was already notorious and dangerous. No politician of the age, said the writer Richard Rovere, had “surer, swifter access to the dark places of the American mind.”5 Although he had never been able to prove his charge that 205 Communists had infiltrated the State Department,* McCarthy continued to use innuendo, and allegations of Communist conspiracies to destroy America, to exploit the fears and frustrations of a nation weary of the war in Korea and worried by Communist advances in eastern Europe and China. Although John Kennedy strongly advised against it, Bobby decided it would be exciting to expose corruption and uncover Communist plots; he told his father to go ahead and talk to McCarthy about giving him a job.6
Joe Kennedy had been a financial backer of McCarthy for some time,7 although how much he poured into the Republican senator’s coffers is still not known.* Nevertheless, the amount was apparently sufficient to stop McCarthy from going to Massachusetts to stump for John Kennedy’s Republican opponent when the future president was running for the Senate in the Eisenhower landslide year of 1952—a move many believe ensured Kennedy’s victory.
Joe Kennedy may thus have felt he had McCarthy in his pocket when he asked him to appoint Bobby chief counsel on his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. But McCarthy said he had already promised the job to Roy Cohn, a young assistant U.S. attorney in New York with his own well-established reputation for anti-Communist zeal (he had helped to convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as atomic spies). All McCarthy could offer Bobby was a job as Cohn’s assistant counsel.
It was more than a passing disappointment to Bobby; irritated at being passed over in favor of Cohn, who was eighteen months younger than Bobby, the young lawyer began showing signs of a bitter competitive streak that Onassis would ruthlessly exploit in years to come.8
“Bobby felt he was getting nowhere,” an old family friend said, recalling Kennedy’s frustration at having to settle for the role of Cohn’s assistant counsel. “He was angry and got mad at people all the time. A lot of people thought he was an asshole.”9 His new brother-in-law, George Skakel, considered him a “chicken-shit little bastard,” and couldn’t see what his sister Ethel saw in “the little prick.”10 Rather more elegantly, Jackie Kennedy would later tell Onassis that Bobby had “a gift for estrangement.”11
But even friends who were used to seeing Bobby take his frustrations out on others were puzzled by his angry reaction to Onassis’s presence at Pamela Churchill’s soiree on that spring evening in 1953. “Their contempt for each other was palpable…a definite sense of physical challenge was in the air,” said British diplomat Sir John Russell.12
Bobby Kennedy and Ari Onassis, men who could bully as well as charm—short, rumpled-looking men whose clothes always appeared to be off the rack, no matter how much they’d cost. “I never saw either one of them in a suit that was pressed, or shoes that weren’t scuffed,” said one mutual acquaintance.13 They must have looked strangely out of place among Churchill’s elegant guests at the Plaza Hotel that spring evening. Bobby was twenty-seven years old; Onassis was fifty-three, but pretending to be six years younger. Sir John thought it very odd that two men born a quarter of a century and a world apart should vie with each other “like a couple of Kilkenny cats.”14
When Sir John Russell called Churchill the following day, she was clearly aroused by the clash of egos. “My, those two fellows bared their tribal qualities last night, didn’t they though?” She had never seen Bobby’s eyes icier, or bluer, she said. They were just like his father’s “after Joe has done something truly unconscionable.”
Sir John, a man deeply versed in the more scandalous gossip of London society, knew that Pamela’s familiarity with the color and chill of Joe Kennedy’s eyes when he had behaved badly was more than mere guesswork. Later, in Truman Capote’s roman à clef, Lady Ina Coolbirth would describe how, when she was Kathleen Kennedy’s weekend houseguest, at age eighteen, she had been raped by Kathleen’s father when he slipped into her bed in the small hours.
The real offense, however, was not Joe’s ravishment of her but his failure to leave her some tangible proof of his gratitude. At breakfast, complained Pamela’s acquisitive alter ego in the novel: “There was never a wink or a nod, just the good old daddy of my schoolgirl chum. It was uncanny and rather cruel; after all, he’d had me and I’d even pretended to enjoy it; there should have been some sentimental acknowledgement, a bauble, a cigarette box…”15
The story was a familiar one to anyone who knew Churchill well. Capote, who was counted among her closest friends, assured Joe Fox, our mutual editor at Random House, that Ina Coolbirth was “not based on Pamela Churchill—she is Pamela Churchill.”*
Is it possible, therefore, that Bobby Kennedy simply lost his cool because he suspected that Onassis—a man who made a point of discovering the indiscretions as well as the weaknesses of his friends—knew about his father’s infamous conduct and who knows what other Kennedy secrets Pamela might have let slip? Certainly, despite all his brashness, Kennedy was easily unsettled. But is it a sufficient explanation for their head-on collision at Churchill’s party, and what turned out to be the start of a mutual hatred that would fester for the rest of their lives?
“My wife, Aliki, said that she thought each had recognized in the other something he despised in himself, and that rather made sense to me,” Sir John would later tell me.16 But, insightful as Aliki’s observation might have been, there was also another and more immediate reason why the two men had taken an instant dislike to each other when they came face to face for the first time.
While Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn were hunting down subversives in the State Department and making themselves notorious, Bobby Kennedy completed a brief investigation into an alleged influx of homosexuals into the State Department, then embarked on a study of trade—“the blood trade,” McCarthy would later call it, with his instinct for a grabby headline17—between America’s allies and Red China, whose forces were fighting U.S. troops in Korea.
For weeks, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his necktie pulled loose.18 Bobby had raked through the Lloyds of London shipping index, Maritime Commission records, CIA reports, and Naval Intelligence records.19 That spring, his revelation that over three hundred ships owned by the New York Greek shipping families were regularly trading with Red China brought him his first national newspaper headlines. It didn’t make sense, he declared at his press conference, that “our major allies, whom we’re aiding financially, should trade with the communists who are killing GIs.”20
But patriotism was a meaningless concept to Onassis, and he was furious at what he regarded as the meddling of a politician who was simply in a hurry to make a name for himself.
Although none of Onassis’s vessels were involved in “the blood trade,” he was concerned that Kennedy’s harangues against the Greek shipowners could raise questions about how they had been able to acquire so many of the prohibited T2 tankers engaged in the trade. In turn, this might breathe fresh life into a flagging FBI investigation into his own criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States government with his acquisition of T2 tankers five years earlier.
At any other time he would have lost little sleep over the matter. Even if all his T2s were repossessed by the United States, they had already made him at ...