Max Collins - Bye bye,baby

President Kennedy, his brother Robert, his wife Ethel, their many children, Peter and Pat Lawford, and their new best friend Pat Newcomb enjoyed a relaxing weekend at Hyannis Port. Much of Sunday (my really eventful day), they spent on the Manitou, a sixty-two-foot Coast Guard yacht. Photos reveal a smiling, happy clan, basking in the wind, spray, and sun.

On Monday afternoon I called the Justice Department and left my name and my number at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Bobby returned the call the next day, about that same time. Our conversation was brief.

“I need to see you,” I said. “It’s private and it’s personal.”

“Ethel and the kids are still at Hyannis Port,” he said. “They will be next weekend, too. But I’ll be at Hickory Hill, batching it. Can you join me for lunch Saturday?”

McClean, Virginia, was a labyrinth of macadam roads. I had been to Hickory Hill, the Robert F. Kennedy estate, a number of times, but it was one of those places you always thought you’d missed. Then there it was, up a steep incline back from the road, a big whitewashed brick house in a lush setting of trees and landscaped lawn. The house, dating back to the mid-1800s, had a pool and tennis court. Also horses with the grooms to go with them, gardeners, cooks, nurses, and a butler.

Apparently, like the family, much of the retinue was absent. The dogs that usually roamed the place must have been in kennels, and certainly the butler had the weekend off, because Bobby himself-in a pale pink short-sleeve shirt and tan chinos-met me at the red front door. I was in a polo and slacks, equally casual.

He gave me a big, vaguely embarrassed smile, offered his hand for me to shake, which I did, smiling back at him, perhaps not with as much warmth as before. He led me through the formally furnished home out onto the back terrace. That’s where we had lunch-at least one cook was on duty-open-faced steak sandwiches with hash browns. Steaks cooked to order, of course. We both had ours medium rare.

“Pretty strange, isn’t it?” he said, with that embarrassed smile, after touching his mouth with a linen napkin. “I feel like a ghost haunting my own house.”

“I’ve seen it livelier.”

And, the half dozen times I’d been there, also usually on the weekend, it was. During the day, Bobby roughhousing with his kids, engaging them in touch football, tree-climbing and swimming. At night, social gatherings and outright parties with an eclectic mix, from Harry Belafonte teaching guests the Twist to Kremlin contact Georgi Bolshakov arm-wrestling with Bobby (and losing). Assorted Kennedy hangers-on like Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers in push-up contests with Bobby (and losing).

Neither of us wanted dessert, and we had cold bottles of Coke instead of coffee. The sun was high and hot and the bottles sweated and so did we.

The luncheon talk remained small, but after, when he walked with me-Cokes in hand, down past the big hickory with its tree house, usually inhabited by one of the countless kids-he brought up Marilyn, if obliquely.

“Pat is a wreck,” he said. “Peter, too.”

“Is their marriage going to make it?”

He flashed me a look that said perhaps I’d overstepped. But he answered it, frankly: “Until Jack’s been reelected, it will… I think Peter and his friend Sinatra had words.” He shook his head. “I’ve never shared their fascination with that man.”

He meant Jack and Peter with Sinatra.

“Frank’s one of the few performers on a par with Marilyn,” I said. “What they call superstars.”

“He’s a bully. Little would-be thug.”

Coming from the diminutive Bobby, thought by many to be worthy of a similar appellation, this might have been comical. Neither of us, however, was in a light mood. We settled at a white metal table with matching chairs by the swimming pool, the massive white rectangular poolhouse looming nearby like another D.C. monument. Not much breeze, the pool’s aqua surface mirror-like, barely rippling.

He twitched the tiniest sad smile. “I don’t know what I can say, Nate. I liked Marilyn very much. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

“She thought the world of you and your brother. Figured you were going to change everything. That they’d have to carve one or maybe two more heads onto Mount Rushmore.”

He broadened his smile, in that endearing bucktoothed way, looking out at the glassy pool. His brown bangs were uncombed, his eyes somewhat bloodshot.

Finally he said, “If you think I’m responsible, you’re wrong.”

“You’re responsible for the cover-up.”

“I didn’t initiate it.” His blue eyes swung earnestly to mine. “Man to man? I accept responsibility for it. People looking after my interests took care of it.” He shrugged. “But I had no knowledge.”

“You don’t disagree with their actions? Your protectors?”

The eyes tensed. “We are talking about what happened after Marilyn’s death? The search of her house for damaging documents? Of course I don’t disagree. It’s a national security matter.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before bragging in the bedroom.”

He might have taken offense, but instead he just sighed. Stared out at the pool. “I’m not proud of it. Any of it.”

I sipped the Coke; warm already. “Maybe I should tell you why I’m here.”

Another look, this time sharp. “ This is why you’re here. Unloading recriminations on me.” And now a nasty smile. “But, Nate, you make an unlikely conscience.”

I almost laughed.

“You know, Eliot Ness was my friend,” I said.

“I know he was.”

“He wasn’t without flaws, none of us is, but he had a kind of ethical authority, a kind of moral vision, the likes of which I never saw in any other man. Half the time I thought he was a fool. The other half I admired him.”

Bobby shook his head, brushed bangs away from his eyes. “Pity he didn’t live to enjoy his fame.”

I nodded. “My point is, when I met you, not ten years ago? I thought I’d met another Eliot Ness.”

He grunted a laugh and waved that off.

“No, Bob-really. You took on these Outfit bastards, and were able to withstand whatever they threw at you. You were too rich to be bribed, too stubborn to be scared off, too Irish to give up. I admired that.”

He was smiling again, just a little, eyes back on the water. “You were a big help in those days, Nate. You’ve been a big help since.”

“Nice of you to say. Thing about Eliot is, I used to give him hell for appointing himself my personal Jiminy Cricket. It was a running gag with us-the idiot tried to be my conscience.”

That amused Bob. “Good luck to him.”

I grunted a laugh. “So it’s funny, ironic, and not a little screwed-up that I, of all fucking people, am sitting here playing your conscience.”

“I already have a conscience, thanks. Plenty of guilt to deal with. Haven’t you noticed I’m Catholic?”

“Without your mess of kids climbing the walls, it’s not as obvious. Anyway. The real reason I’m here.”

“Which is?”

I grinned at him, swigged some Coke. Then: “I’m turning myself in.”

“You’re what?”

“You’re the attorney general of these United States, right? Number one law enforcement official? Toppest top cop? Well, I’m turning myself in. I killed the son of a bitch who murdered Marilyn.”

He sighed, and looked away. “That black sense of humor of yours will get you in trouble someday.”

“No joke. He was a guy who worked for me, but he also worked for various other clients, doing surveillance, bugging Marilyn’s house. He was at his post when he got a call to go in and take care of the Marilyn Monroe problem.”

Now he looked at me. “And you killed him.”