A Response to the Lester Crown Role as a King Maker

After noticing the emerging role of the Crown family of Chicago in president-elect Obama's successful campaign for the oval office, I wondered why I had never heard of Lester Crown, listed on Forbes 400 with $4.8 billion, net worth.

I decided to check out the information available on the internet about Lester and his late father, Henry Crown, and I soon found these items in a 1996 article:

http://www2.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1996/11/18/BU49588.DTL&hw=assassinated&sn=009&sc=442

ON ECONOMICS: -- How Kennedy Assassination Affected Some Stock Prices
JONATHAN MARSHALL
Monday, November 18, 1996
....But the facts speak tellingly about how accidents of history can affect great fortunes.
A postscript for assassination buffs: No individual stood to lose more from the TFX scandal than Chicago investor Henry Crown, who owned 20 percent of General Dynamics. His personal attorney, Albert Jenner, became a senior staff attorney on the Warren Commission, in charge of investigating the possibility of a conspiracy.In later years, Jenner also represented Chicago labor racketeer Allen Dorfman. Dorfman's stepfather Paul, a leading figure in the Chicago mob, ran the Waste Handlers Union in Chicago in 1939 with Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's future killer.
Both Dorfmans hated the Kennedy family. Robert Kennedy had hauled them before a Senate crime panel in the late 1950s, where they took the Fifth Amendment.
Allen Dorfman was murdered, gangland-style, in 1983 in the company of another friend of Ruby, Irwin Weiner. Attorney Jenner obtained Weiner's acquittal in a 1975 federal labor racketeering case after the government's leading witness was shotgunned to death.
Weiner was called to testify in 1978 before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about his relationship with Ruby, including a phone conversation with Ruby shortly before the assassination. He said the call was innocent.
The committee was investigating the theory -- which it never proved -- that organized crime had Ruby silence Oswald to disguise its own role in the Kennedy assassination.....

Intrigued by what I read in the above article, I searched for confirmation:

And We are All Mortal: New Evidence and Analysis in the John F. Kennedy ...
by George Michael Evica - 1978 - 465 pages
Page 388

The Jenner-Henry Crown connection alone should have suggested
conflict of interests to those responsible for selecting the
Warren Commission's counsel .

and.....
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
by Peter Dale Scott - 1996 - History - 424 pages

At the time Jenner also was representing Henry Crown, a Chicago businessman close to Democratic political kingmaker Jake Arvey, in whose political machine ...

If the "happenings" I have described and documented here are coincidental, one could expect that fate or a supreme being is exercising a sense of humor with a mocking or a cynical tone, certainly intended to confuse, obscure, or both. If these things are coincidental, they provide by example a reasonable excuse for not resolving the "loose ends" surrounding the assassination of JFK through all of these 45 years.

To review in an outline:
1.) Henry Crown's investment in General Dynamics was hanging in the balance on the morning of November 22, 1963, as was the political career of LBJ. By kate afternoon, both men were in much stronger positions.

2.) Despite the fact that there was sworn testimony by Don B. Reynolds that LBJ's protege, Bobby Baker, had told him of a payoff to LBJ for his influence in the award of the TFX fighter jet contract to General Dynamics and Grumman, instead of to the lower bidder, Boeing, and that there was reprting by Drew Pearson that Henry Crown himself was lobbying lawmakers in an attempt to keep the TFX contract, Crown's personal attorney, Albert E. jenner was appointed to the Warren Commisssion, just three weeks after JFK was killed, Jenner was responsible for investigating whether JFK's death was a result of a conspiracy, and there was evidence that he could have personally known Jack Ruby, or known details of his involvement in organized crime in Chicago.
There was also evidence that Henry Crown was a financier of Chicago organized crime "investors", and that he was involved in business partnerships with Del Webb, in addition to their investments in the NY Yankees baseball team. Crown was also linked to Arnold Kirinsky, and, through Patrick Hoy and Baron Hilton, to mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, and to all of Patrick Hoy's intimate knowledge and acquaintances with mobe figures, due to his former positions in the "Pump Room" and as an executive with Sherman and Ambassador hotels. Crown had hired Hoy in 1960, and Hoy was the protege of the unique, Ernest L. Byfield and he was close to Irv Kupcinet, possibly Sidnery Korshak's best friend, Byefield abd Kupcinet were in constant contact with Chicago mob principles throughout their careers, and certainly Hoy also was.

3.) Lester Crown in 1950 married the daughter of J. Meyer Schine, theater and other real estate mogul. Robert F. Kennedy exposed Schine's son, brother of Lester Crown's wife, to the point where there was speculation that young Schine, Roy Cohn, and Sen. McCarthy were involved in some homosexual allaince. The Schine family owned thte Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles where RFK was fatally shot.

4.) Glady Rosenthal was once married to Ernest L. Byfield, was the mother of his two sons, and was the daugter of longtime residents of Byfield's Chicago Ambassador Hotel; her mother lived there during all the years Patrick Hoy was a manager there, and lived there until age 100, in 1970. Glasys leased her very ill equipped, from a standpoint of presidential security....estate in Virginia to JFK from late 1960 until early 1963, through mutual friend, William Walton, also a trusted confidant of RFK and a friend of late Kennedy brother, Joe. "Landlady Gladys has a son, Ernest L. Byfield Jr., who was a military officer and a mwmber of OSS in WWII, as an adult in the 1940's he certainbly was acquainted with Patrick Hou, Irv Kupcinet, and the mob element they all knew. What kind of background check did the FBI or OSS do before admitting Byfield Jr. into the OSS, and what kind of check did the Secret Service or FBI conduct on Gladys, her son, and on their 400 acre estate before or while JFK leased it?
What kind of background check did the FBI or Defense Dept. do on Henry Crown and Patrick Hoy before permitting them to be officers of General Dynamics, eligible to bid on and be awarded military weapons contracts?

5.) In addtion to the wierdness of Henry Crown marrying the sister of the man RFK criticized in his fight with Roy Cohn, what are the odds that Henry Crown, Patrick Hoy, and Albert Jenner could be considered "persons of interest in any competent murder investigation of JFK, but that Crown's wife's family would own the hotel where RFK was shot, and that the woman once married to the mentor of Patricj Hoy would be leasing her estate to JFK?

6.) What are the odds that McNamara, as late as in 2004 and at age 88, would suddencly remarry; to a women who was married for 30 years to the son of Patrick Hoy's mentor Ernest l. Byfield, and that Mcnamara's bride's late husband was OSS, and that McNamara is not reported to know of her, even though JFK spent many weekends at Byfield Jr's mother's estate, to the point where JFK shut down the Bay of Pigs invasion while weekending at that estate, or that McNamara was ironically at the center of the TFX contract award?

7.) What are the odds, given Don B. Reynolds' explosive testimony that related to TFX kickbacks and Bobby Baker's 1963 resignation and also Nacy Secretary Fred Korth's resignation, as well as Evica's 1978 observation of Albert R. Jenner's blatant conflict of interest in his Warren Commission position, as well as the way JFK's death turned things do positively for Crown and LBJ, and RFK's belief that the Chicago mob had a hand in his brother's death, aggravated by all of the indications that Crown and Hoy had mob associations and business relations....that all of these wierd associations would be universally overlooked, until now?

My curiousity about the possibility of any recent McNamara statments related to his TFX decision, and Lester Crown's Obama support related publciity, fueled by McNamara's October-December marriage have gotten us here....but where are we, now, really?

Timeline:

1919: Henry Crown and several of his brothers, along with small investors in their Chicago neighborhood, form a business they name "Material Services Corp." to supply cement and other building materials to construction contractors from a small sand and gravel pit.

1930: Ernest L. Byfield, operating partner of Chicago's Ambassador and Sherman Hotels, and divorced spouse, Gladys Rosenthal, both marry new partners, Gladys Rosenthal Byfield "married Raymond F. Tartiere, a French banker". The marriage produced two sons, Hugh and Ernest L. Byfield Jr. Doris was the daughter of prominent Chicago immigrant, Benjamin J. Rosenthal, died in 1936, and her parents lived for many years at [Byfield's] the Ambassador Hotel....[Gladys' mother] Hannah Rosenthal continued to live at the Ambassador Hotel until her death in 1970 at the age of 100.

1946: James Ragen, operator of Chicago's "Al Capone gang", bookmaker's "racing news wire" service, formerly under the control of Moe Annenberg, encouraged by syndicated newspaper columnist, Drew Pearon, agrees to a lengthy series of interviews with the FBI, giving detailed information on mob principles, their criminal activity, and their stranglehold on the provision of supplies and services to legitimate businesses, as well as on illegal activity such as gambling and money laundering.
Pearson tells us in his "diaries", published in 1974....you can read it all yourself in this section of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK By Peter Dale Scott, pages 153 to 157. Peter Dale Scott tells us on page 155, that Drew Pearson wrote that the "mob hit" on James Ragen, after J. Edgar Hoover declined to provide protection fot this important witness:

...."Ragen knew not only the Capone outfit in Chicago, but gamblers and mob bosses all over the country, "including Annenberg's close friend, Meyer Lansky...."

..."I [Pearson] learned later that it pointed to the Hilton Hotel chain, Henry Crown, the big...financier in Chicago, (involved in Cook County real estate deals with Jake Arvey, the local Democratic political boss), and Walter Annenberg (son of the prewar wire-service owner Moe Annenberg).

Peter Dale Scott then relates:

"....The liberal Pearson's information is partly cooroborated by the right wing crime writers Lait and Mortimer, who reported that HENRY CROWN bankrolled Jake Arvey in real estate, just as he put up $3 million for Conrad Hilton to purchase the Waldorf Astoria. "The syndicate", they noted elsewher, "owns a controlling interest in three of the most importand hotel chanins in the country."

Pearson's disclosure .."Sidney Korshak, a lawyer frequently identified as the representative in Los Angeles of the Chicago mob. Korshak had also done business for HENRY CROWN; and the Hilton-Korshak retainer was in fact recommended by Patrick Hoy, a vice-president of HENRY CROWN'S company, Gerneral Dynamics, and a "close friend of both Hilton and Korshack."

1949: Patrick Hoy is described as:
"July 18, 1949, Traverse City, Michigan
Subscription - Record-Eagle - NewspaperArchie - Jul 18, 1949
... flaming sword is something new on the fabulous Pump Room menu in Chicago as demonstrated by Patrick Hoy executive assistant to Ernest Byfield president ..."
...and in following year, 1950:

Feb. 20, 1950
...Died. Ernest Lessing ("Ernie") Byfield, 60, waggish Chicago hotelman (the two Ambassadors, the Sherman) and nightclub impresario (the Pump Room, the College Inn); of a heart ailment; in Chicago. Hotelman Byfield once defined the perfect hotelman as the "master of opposites. He needs to be a greeter and a bouncer, pious but ribald . . . noted as a connoisseur and competent as a plumber."
Patrick Hoy's career begins to take off:

Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football
By Dan E. Moldea
Published by Morrow, 1989
http://books.google.com/books?id=Q92BAAAAMAAJ&dq=He+had+been+recommended+to+Hilton+by+Patrick+Hoy&q=+Patrick+Hoy&pgis=1
Page 98


Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob
By Dan E. Moldea
Published by Viking, 1986
http://books.google.com/books?id=0vkdAAAAMAAJ&dq=He+had+been+recommended+to+Hilton+by+Patrick+Hoy&q=Patrick+Hoy&pgis=1

Page 339


Deep Politics and the Death of JFK By Peter Dale Scott pg.179
http://books.google.com/books?id=zWewDbarT3YC&pg=PA179&dq=He+had+been+recommended+to+Hilton+by+Patrick+Hoy

At this time Rosselli also went to Havana, where his contacts seem to have been made through his prewar work with Moe Annenberg's wire service. Blakey chose to link Roselli to Trafficante, by citing his "management role" in the Havana Sans Souci casino. More pertinent was probably the fact that the Sans Souci was operated, at this time, by Dave Yaras and Lenny Patrick, the suspected killers of James Ragen (9AH 948). Also at this time, Rosselli's most constant companion was "Major" Charles "Babe" Baron, a suspected murderer who was also brigadier -general in the Illinois National Guard. Baron was a protoge of Chicago Democratic machine leader Jake Arvey, as were Yaras and Patrick, and an even closer friend of Patrick Hoy, the Henry Crown employee at General Dynamics who arranged for Sidney Korshak to work for Hilton Hotels. Hoy was also general manager of the Sherman Hotelin Chicago, a hangout frequented by Ruby and Jones in 1947 (22 WH 366; 24 WH 518).
http://books.google.com/books?id=XlIiAAAAMAAJ&dq=Demaris+explains%3A+%22When+James&q=purported+friends&pgis=1

The Defender: The Story of General Dynamics
By Roger Franklin
Published by Harper & Row, 1986
Page 228


1950 MISS RENEE SCHINE BECOMES A BRIDE; Married to Lester Crown of ... The marriage of Miss Renee Helene Schine, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. Myer Schine of New York and Gloversville, N.Y., to Lester Crown, son of
Col. ...December 29, 1950

1959:Henry Crown and defense contractor General Dynamics negotiate a merger with the Crown family's Material Service Corp., resulting in Crown owning 20 percent of General Dynamic's stock and seats on the merged corporation's board.

1959: John J. Crown,
Henry's son and Lester's younger brother, begins work at Alebert E. Jenner's lawfirm, four years before Jenner's appointment to the Warren Commission....

news.google.com/archivesearch?
John J. Crown, judge, philanthropist
$2.95 - Chicago Sun-Times - NewsBank - Mar 6, 1997
John J. Crown, 67, a former Cook County Circuit Court judge and youngest son of ... In 1959, he joined the law firm of Jenner & Block. ... Ex-farmer, judge Crown remembered as 'wise,...
- Daily Herald - NewsBank

People
Pay-Per-View - Chicago Tribune - ProQuest Archiver - Aug 11, 1969
John J. Crown, vice president of Henry Crown & Co. and a partner in the law firm of Jenner & Block, was elected a director of the...

1960: Henry Crown becomes chairman of General Dynamic's board or Directors and "taps" Patrick Hoy: Kup's Chicago‎ - Page 53by Irv Kupcinet - Chicago (Ill.) - 1962 - 286 pages


During the years Patrick Hoy worked for Byfield's Chicago Hotels, newspaper columinist "Kup", Kupcinet practically lived at the "Pump Room" restaurant in the Ambassador Hotel:

The Lost World of Kup - Chicago Magazine - June 2004 - Chicago
,,In the days immediately following the death last November of Irv Kupcinet, the legendary Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist, his family prepared for a huge funeral. After all, Kup had spent six decades passing on mostly complimentary scoops about the rich and powerful.,,,
Kup had tapped a friendly style and a talent for listening to move from a tough West Side childhood into a role as the city's premier gossip columnist. Although he spent his entire career at what became the number-two paper in town, he was the columnist with the most clout-"the column you wanted to be in," says the former publicist Pat Matsumoto. At his peak, Kup was a celebrity news machine-producing six columns a week, moderating a late-night TV talk show, delivering color commentary on radio for the Chicago Bears.
He went out almost every night, using Booth One at the Pump Room, in the Ambassador East Hotel, as his office and salon. In those days before nonstop cross-country flights, Ernest Byfield, the Pump Room's founder, would send limousines to Union Station to corral the stars stopping in Chicago en route to New York or Los Angeles. Byfield made certain that celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall would land at Booth One, where Kup and Essee awaited them. A strawberry blonde, dressed and groomed with theatrical flair, Essee once gave the young Marilyn Monroe a disapproving once-over and ushered her into the ladies' room to show her how to apply makeup....

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2004/The-Lost-World-of-Kup/index.php?cp=4&si=3....Over the years, Kup expanded his roster of sources to include the underworld. He ran into "the boys" at clubs on Rush Street or at places like the Chez Paree. Kup treated them in his usual manner-a "Hi, buddy," a slap on the back, and an expectation that they, like anyone else, would be a source of tips. And they were. Audri Adams, who handled publicity for the Pump Room, says Kup got items from Tony Accardo, Sam Giancana, and Gus Alex, all major Mob figures.
When Bugsy Siegel was shot to death in the Beverly Hills mansion of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, in 1947, a True magazine reporter named Mike Stern called Kup. Hill had been hiding out, and Stern had heard she was living on money funneled to her by a local Mob bookkeeper. Stern guessed correctly that Kup might know him. Kup arranged a dinner at the Blackstone Hotel, and the bookkeeper mentioned in passing that Hill was staying in a small town in Montana. Stern found her and got his scoop. Why didn't the mobsters retaliate against Kup? Stern, now 93, says they liked him. And by then he was too powerful to harm.
And he was very close to Sidney Korshak, the Los Angeles–based Mob lawyer, a childhood friend from the West Side. Korshak, who died in 1996, was an incomparable source of news for Kup, not only about Mob matters but also about Hollywood (he represented studios and studio heads) and labor (ditto unions and union bosses). In 1958, when the Sun-Times moved from its old building on Wacker Drive to its later home on Wa-bash Avenue and the river, Louis Spear faced a refusal by paper handlers to unload a shipment of newsprint that had arrived by water. Spear contacted Korshak, and with one telephone call, Korshak sent the paper handlers to work......

www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2004/The-Lost-World-of-Kup/index.php?cp=6&si=5

Accompanied by his lawyer and his brother Joe, a football coach at Taft High School, Kup flew to Los Angeles. His friend Sidney Korshak "took care of them," Louis Spear says. Korshak identified the body..... [After Kupcinet's daughter, Karyn was murdered in Los Angeles in late November, 1963...]

Sidney Korshak, 88, Dies; Fabled Fixer for the Chicago Mob
New York Times - Jan 22, 1996By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR. Sidney R. Korshak, a labor lawyer who used his reputation as the Chicago mob's man in Los Angeles to become one of Hollywood's ...

November 22, the Day Remembered: The Day Remembered‎ - Page 130by Dallas Morning News, Morning News Staff Dallas 1, Dallas Morning News - History - 1990 - 154 pages
"Afterward, he came over and said, 'Hi, I'm Jack Ruby from Chicago.' Right away he started dropping names, Irv Kupcinet of the Chicago Sun-Times and Dingy ...

Forgive My Grief: A Critical Review of the Warren Commission Report on the ...‎ - Page 20by Penn Jones - 1967
Yet another of those many strange coincidences: I. v Kupcinet and Jack Ruby grew up and were acquainted with each other in the same neighborhood in Chicago. ...

1960: Jacqueline Kennedy, the White House Years‎ - Page 225by Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer - 1971 - 362 pages
Then Bill Walton suggested Glen Ora, a four-hundred-acre estate near ... Since, at the time, Mrs. Kennedy was still hospitalized after the birth of her baby ...

Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies‎ - Page 237by J. B. West, Mary Lynn Kotz - Biography & Autobiography - 1973 - 381 pages
When the Eisenhowers redecorated it from the rustic mountain lodge President Roosevelt enjoyed, they made it super-secure. Glen Ora had only a makeshift ...

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis‎ - Page 117by Stephen Birmingham - Biography & Autobiography - 1978 - 242 pages
Monnet was shocked by the lack of security at Glen Ora. Later he said, "Anyone could have come up that drive and shot him on his own lawn. ...

John F. Kennedy: A Biography‎ - Page 747by Michael O'Brien - Biography & Autobiography - 2005 - 971 pages
20 Before the inauguration, the artist William Walton assisted Jackie in renting Glen Ora, forty miles west of Washington, located in the horse and hunt ...

Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years - Google Books Result
by David Talbot - 2007 - History - 478 pagesAnd to tell you the truth, [when we first met], he thought I was a lot more famous than he was." Walton met Kennedy in the late 1940s in Georgetown,

Not everyone was straight at the Kennedy Roundtable - Brothers ...
The story involved William Walton, a gay friend of both JFK and Jackie Kennedy, who continued to be granted cozy access to the first couple after they moved ...

"Brothers" Salon Books
A week after the assassination, Bobby and his brother's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy -- who shared his suspicions about Dallas -- sent a startling secret message to Moscow through a trusted family emissary named William Walton. The discreet and loyal Walton "was exactly the person that you would pick for a mission like this," his friend Gore Vidal later observed. Walton, a Time magazine war correspondent who had reinvented himself as a gay Georgetown bohemian, had grown close to both JFK and Jackie in their carefree days before they moved into the White House. Later, the first couple gave him an unpaid role in the administration, appointing him chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, but it was mainly an excuse to make him a frequent White House guest and confidant.
After JFK's assassination, the president's brother and widow asked Walton to go ahead as planned with a cultural exchange trip to Russia, where he was to meet with artists and government ministers, and convey an urgent message to the Kremlin. Soon after arriving in frigid Moscow, fighting a cold and dabbing at his nose with a red handkerchief, Walton met at the ornate Sovietskaya restaurant with Georgi Bolshakov -- an ebullient, roly-poly Soviet agent with whom Bobby had established a back-channel relationship in Washington. Walton stunned the Russian by telling him that the Kennedys believed Oswald was part of a conspiracy. They didn't think either Moscow or Havana was behind the plot, Walton assured Bolshakov -- it was a large domestic conspiracy. The president's brother was determined to enter the political arena and eventually make a run for the White House. If RFK succeeded, Walton confided, he would resume his brother's quest for détente with the Soviets.
Robert Kennedy's remarkable secret communication to Moscow shows how emotionally wracked he must have been in the days following his brother's assassination. The calamity transformed him instantly from a cocky, abrasive insider -- the second most powerful man in Washington -- to a grief-stricken, deeply wary outsider who put more trust in the Russian government than he did in his own. The Walton mission has been all but lost to history. But it is one more revealing tale that sheds light on Bobby Kennedy's subterranean life between his brother's assassination and his own violent demise less than five years later. .."

William Walton Is Dead at 84; Headed Federal Fine Arts Panel - New ...
William Walton, who as chairman of the Federal arts commission presided over the construction and restoration of several of the best-known monuments in ...

1962: Read the three article excerpts and draw your own conclusions, too wierd, coincidental?

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3720/is_199711/ai_n8778577 The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 1997 by Hersh, Seymour
The uncensored FBI reports and cables on the August break-in at Exner's Los Angeles apartment, made available for the book under the Freedom of Information Act, were urgently forwarded, in code, to J. Edgar Hoover. An FBI summary from the Los Angeles bureau, dated August 17, 1962, told Hoover something he already knew, even if some of his California agents didn't realize it. The summary described Exner as being in contact with Giancana and Rosselli and with Evelyn Lincoln. It also told Hoover something he didn't know; the Hale family and General Dynamics were linked to the break-in. "A man answering the description of the individual who entered (Exner's) apartment was observed leaving the area in an automobile registered to former Special Agent I.B. Hale who resides in Fort Worth, Texas," the summary said. "Our Dallas office has advised that. . . Hale is employed at General Dynamics. . . in charge of security." The summary noted that the crime its agents witnessed "is not being disseminated to the Los Angeles Police Department at this time."

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20031005&slug=standoff05 October 5, 2003
Robert Hale grew up in affluent circumstances in Fort Worth, Texas.
His father was I.B. Hale, an FBI agent who later worked for defense contractor General Dynamics.
While in high school, Bobby Hale eloped to Florida with Kathleen Connally. She was 16 and the daughter of John Connally, later to become the Texas governor wounded in the Dallas assassination of President Kennedy.....

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,945439-2,00.html ...She said she met Kennedy in Las Vegas in 1960 at a party given by "a friend." The friend was Singer Frank Sinatra; one former Kennedy aide understood that Sinatra and J.F.K.'s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, owned a piece of a nightclub where Judy once worked as a hostess. A month after she met the President, Sinatra brought her together with Giancana, who later introduced her to
Roselli. Both gangsters knew of her affair with Kennedy, but she insisted that neither of them tried to encourage or make use of it.
Last Call.
By her account, she visited Kennedy at the White House more than 20 times, usually for intimate lunches. The Senate committee learned that on one occasion, while she was staying with Roselli and Giancana at Miami Beach's Fontainebleau Hotel, she made a side trip to Palm Beach to spend time there with Kennedy. Judy claimed that she received countless telephone calls from him, and she seemed to dial his number quite often as well. White House logs show that during a 54-week period in 1961 and early 1962, she telephoned Kennedy 70 times from her home in Los Angeles, Oak Park and other spots....
...The end of her friendship with Kennedy apparently came when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose sleuths learned of the affair during their investigation of Giancana and Roselli, had lunch with Kennedy at the White House on March 22, 1962. No one knows what the two discussed during the time that they were alone. But Hoover had made a point of being briefed beforehand about Judith Campbell's disconcerting friendships with both gangsters and a President. And according to White House logs, the last known telephone call between J.F.K. and Judy came only a few hours after the luncheon.

1964: The "FBI Report"
Among the charges and rebuttals:
> Reynolds said that Bobby Baker had told him that "the leader" —meaning then Vice President Lyndon Johnson— had "interceded" to make sure that the controversial $10 billion TFX fighter-bomber contract was awarded to General Dynamics Corp. The so-called FBI report quoted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as saying that any claim of official pressure brought to bear about the TFX contract was "definitely and categorically" wrong.

1968: Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in a kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The Ambassador is owned by the family of Lester Crown's wife. Her brother was G. David Schine, the staffer on the 1954 McCarthy unAmerican activities hearings staff, drafted into the US Army. McCarthy and his assistant Roy Cohn investigated the Army in response to it's unrepsonsiveness to Cohn's numerous request for special treatment for draftee Schine...

Background:

MISS RENEE SCHINE BECOMES A BRIDE; Married to Lester Crown of ... The marriage of Miss Renee Helene Schine, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. Myer Schine of New York and Gloversville, N.Y., to Lester Crown, son of
Col. ...December 29, 1950

Robert Kennedy and His Times - Google Books Result
by Arthur Meier Schlesinger - 2002 - Biography & Autobiography - 1066 pagesIn the meantime, G. David Schine had been threatened by the draft; ... that a black man named Robert Hall had left a copy of the Daily Worker in her house, ...books.google.com/books?isbn=0618219285... RFK: "inexcusable actions in the Schine case, Senator McCzrthy and Mr. Cohn merit severe criticism". pg.113

Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture - Google Books Result
by Thomas Doherty, Thomas Patrick Doherty - 2003 - History - 305 pages... fidgeted the counsel for the Democrats, Robert F. Kennedy. ... G. David Schine was the scion of the wealthy hotelier and theater owner J. Meyer Schine. ...books.google.com/books?isbn=0231129521...

CALIFORNIA SYMBOL OF AN ERA IS IN DECLINE - New York Times
For a year the hotel's owner, the family of J. Myer Schine, ... The darkest, perhaps, was the night in 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, after winning ...query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=travel&res=9B0DE1D81F31F933A15755C0A961948260 - 64k - Cached - Similar pages -
Part of Hollywood Past Dies in Closing of Hotel
In May the owners of the hotel, the J. Myer Schine family, closed about three- quarters of the rooms because they failed to meet fire standards. ...January 5, 1989 - Reuters
Crash Kills G. David Schine, 69, McCarthy-Era Figure - New York Times
G. David Schine, a catalytic figure in the fierce drama that brought to a climax the chapter ... hotel and real estate empire of his father, J. Myer Schine. ...query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E1DC1E39F932A15755C0A960958260&se...

Roy Cohn, Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer, Dies at 59Mr. Schine was the son of J. Myer Schine, a multimillionaire who owned a string of hotels and movie theaters. Mr. Schine, who received no pay, was billed as ...
COHN THREATENS TO 'GET' SENATOR FOR GIBE AT SCHINE; Assails ... 16 at a breakfast at the New York apartment of the young man s parents, Afar. and Nfrs. J. Meyer Schine. Secretary Stevens had said that Senatdr McCarthy ...
COHN THREATENS TO 'GET' SENATOR FOR GIBE AT SCHINE; Assails Jackson in Exchange With Kennedy, Whom He Challenges to Fight
By W. H. LAWRENCE
June 12, 1954, Saturday

1970: Patrick Hoy Sent to Federal Prison in Bank Loan Fraud Scheme
Ledgers Show Hoy Did Not Repay Crown's Sons
Pay-Per-View - Chicago Tribune - ProQuest Archiver - Sep 23, 1970 Accounting ledgers made public yesterday in Federal District Court revealed that Patrick H. Hoy never repaid $156738 he borrowed from the Eons of Henry ...

Unbelieving Hoy Goes to Prison
Pay-Per-View - Chicago Tribune - ProQuest Archiver - Nov 24, 1970Patrick H. Hoy stood outside the bars of the federal lockup sipping coffee from a paper cup yesterday and searched for words to explain how he felt about ...

1976: Lester Crown granted immunity in exchange for testimony against Illinois legislators he admitted under oath to involvement in paying cash bribes to:

Corruption in the legislature: Cement Bribery Trial - ii761206.html
Corruption in the legislature Cement Bribery Trial. IT WAS SPRING. .... Albert E . Jenner, Jr., attorney for Lester Crown and an architect of the package ...

1985: LESTER CROWN BLAMES THE SYSTEM - Free Preview - The New York Times
New York Times - Jun 16, 1985LESTER CROWN BLAMES THE SYSTEM. By WAYNE BIDDLE (NYT); Financial Desk. June 16, 1985, Sunday. Late City Final Edition,

The special Crown-General Dynamics relationship has thus reached a natural milestone, a father-to-son power shift, in the midst of the most damaging attack ever on the company's business reputation.
For a year, the country's third-largest defense contractor has been investigated by the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the Securities and Exchange Commission and several Congressional committees. Its chief executive, who oversaw the production of some of the nation's most vital weapons, recently retired under the threat of being banned from military contracting. Top officials have been accused of contract fraud, stock manipulation and bribery, charges they deny. General Dynamics has been fined $676,283 for giving gifts to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the retired director of Navy submarine programs, who was censured last month for accepting those gratuities over a 16-year period. Indeed, the company's very name has come to symbolize a grassroots concern about corruption in the defense industry that has helped derail the Administration's military buildup.
During a daylong conversation last week in the company's suburban Washington office - the first extensive interview granted by anyone in the Crown family since the storm over General Dynamics business misconduct began a year ago - Lester Crown proffered an interpretation of the company's woes, seeking to absolve the company of any fault except perhaps lack of sufficient foresight.
Despite the damage suffered by General Dynamics over the past year and the Navy's order that the company establish ''a rigorous code of ethics for all officers and employees with mandatory sanctions for violation,'' Mr. Crown, who has been a board member for 11 years, insisted that ''there isn't a cultural, ethical change required in this company.''
Discussing what he called the company's ''foolishness and stupidity'' in not confronting problems with improper overhead billings, he said: ''We didn't do anything wrong, but it wasn't right either.''
What emerged from the interview with Mr. Crown was a portrait of a deeply troubled company: He portrayed senior management as either unaware or unconcerned about improper billings and top officers who were blindsided by recent attacks from the former manager of its Electric Boat shipyard, P. Takis Veliotis. Mr. Crown described a powerful corporation unable to find a way to stem the tide of criticism - first from antagonistic Congressional committees and then from the pro-military Reagan Administration - that has deeply blemished its reputation.
''I have to say there was some foolishness and stupidity on our part not to look ahead and say 'What could this look like on the front pages?' '' said Mr. Crown, reflecting on the millions of dollars of improper overhead expenses, including country club memberships and dog kennel fees, that a House committee discovered were charged against Pentagon contracts.
Dressed in a dark pinstriped suit that is a common uniform of power in Washington, the man whose 21 percent holding in General Dynamics is worth more than $650 million, seemed ill at ease with questions and at first refused to have his picture taken. Nonetheless, he was insistent that the company was a victim of an imperfect procurement system.......For General Dynamics, the troubles have created an unprecedented corporate maelstrom. For Lester Crown, however, it is but the second major tempest in his career. Mr. Crown, heads the Material Service Corporation, a General Dynamics subsidiary and the original Crown holding. In 1974, the United States District Court for Northern Illinois named him and four Material Services associates as unindicted co-conspirators in a case involving bribery of Illinois state legislators. He has consistently declined to discuss any aspect of that case.
But others are not so reticent. ''Bribery is a major felony involving serious moral turpitude,'' said Representative John D. Dingell in a letter regarding the episode that he wrote to Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger earlier this year. As chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight subpanel, Mr. Dingell has spearheaded Congressional inquiries into the company's business conduct. ''The election to, and the retention on, the Board of Directors of an individual who admittedly was involved in the commission of a major crime is a statement of the integrity of the management of our nation's largest defense contractor.''
But others have staunchly defended Mr. Crown. ''Lester Crown is, and always has been, truly a moral person,'' wrote M.J. O'Brien, a family friend and president of Marblehead Lime, a General Dynamics unit, in a letter to Mr. Dingell last April. He added that Lester Crown's seven children had been ''well schooled in the Judeo-Christian ethic of hard work and honesty.''
Albert E. Jenner Jr., who was Republican counsel during the Watergate hearings and has long been a member of the General Dynamics board, said: ''Lester is a splendid person. He's very careful not to have the board believe he is the major domo of this corporation,'' but Mr. Jenner conceded that Mr. Crown was not just one among equals...."


EX-AIDE'S CHARGES OPENED FLOODGATES
Copyright Boston Globe Newspaper May 27, 1985
Second of three parts
General Dynamics ended the year 1982 in good spirits. Total sales were up 22 percent, net income up 30 percent over the year before. Moreover, it had just purchased Chrysler's tank division, maker of the Army's M1 tank. Already thriving on big contracts for Air Force jets and Navy submarines, General Dynamics had thus placed itself in the unique position of building major weapons systems for all three military services. The prospects for 1983 seemed positively exhilarating.
But the fortune tellers at General Dynamics had not counted on P. Takis Veliotis.-.... Lewis appointed Lester Crown, son of Henry Crown, a General Dynamics director, to the corporation's board in 1974 without telling the other directors or stockholders that Lester had been named an unindicted co- conspirator in a bribery and cover-up scheme in Illinois. Nor was this mentioned in Lester's application to the Defense Department for a top secret security clearance - which he was given and still has..."


THE ORDEAL OF LESTER CROWN - Free Preview - The New York Times
New York Times - Dec 7, 1986
"....On July 30, the examiner delivered his decision. Crown's security clearance was upheld. But within three weeks, the Pentagon returned to the attack, filing for an appeal. Crown's lawyers - the defense team was headed by Lloyd N. Cutler, counsel to President Carter, and Leonard Garment, counsel to President Nixon - say they were astonished. As of early last month, the matter was still unresolved.
The Pentagon maintains that Crown's role in a Chicago bribery scandal 14 years ago makes him unfit to hold the security clearance given him as a board member of St. Louis-based General Dynamics. But the case raises other issues, as well. It hinges on the battle between the Pentagon and Congress over misconduct and cost overruns by defense contractors, including General Dynamics. And it spotlights the power exercised by one family over a public company essential to the national defense effort. ON THE 12TH FLOOR OF THE MERCANTILE EX-change Building in Chicago's Loop is a regal office dominated by a huge mahogany desk. The room is unoccupied now - Henry Crown, the tough-minded financier who created the Crown empire, is 90 years old and mortally ill. Down the hall is a second office, more like a den, with a few papers placed neatly upon a small desk and one wall covered by family photographs. Here sits Henry's second son, Lester. Over the last decade, he has gradually assumed direction of the empire - the 23.2 percent stake in General Dynamics worth more than $700 million, significant positions in other public companies and private holdings in major industrial and real-estate enterprises. (See box, page 42.) Lester Crown's hair is just beginning to show signs of gray. He is tall, with a quiet, controlled manner, but the first mention of his security-clearance case unleashes hidden fury and resentment. ''I'm angry over the time and effort this has cost me, my family and my friends,'' he says. ''The whole thing is unwarranted.''
According to a Government report, his troubles began in February 1972 when he was president of Material Service Corporation. The sand and gravel business, the nucleus of the family fortune, was now a division of General Dynamics. He gave $8,000 of his personal funds to a $50,000 industry political slush fund, intended for a group of legislators in the Illinois General Assembly to smooth the passage of a bill to raise highway weight limits for ready-mix concrete trucks. The measure was vetoed by Gov. Richard Ogilvie, and the contributors to the slush fund received their money back. But eventually, to mollify the legislators involved, Crown and another company split a second, $30,000 payment.
Meanwhile, seven officers and employees of Material Service were padding their expense accounts -''at the direction of Crown,'' according to the Government report - and reimbursing their boss. The project was cut short when Material Service was subpoenaed by a Federal grand jury investigating corruption in the industry.
The family turned to Albert E. Jenner Jr., a lawyer and longtime friend who is on the board of General Dynamics. ''Whenever the kids got into trouble,'' Jenner says, ''they never bothered the old man. They talked to me, and I got them out of trouble.'' In return for his cooperation with the grand jury, Lester Crown was granted immunity from prosecution.
In May 1974, Crown was elected to the board of directors of General Dynamics, and two months later the Defense Department approved his application for a top-secret clearance. The results of the grand jury proceedings did not become public until December. Neither the members of the board nor the Pentagon had been told of the bribery case.
HE CROWN FAMILY WAS NO stranger to the political wars. When Henry Crown and his brother founded Material Service in 1919, he learned to play ball with the city's Democratic machine, which ran on generous political contributions. Says James O'Brien, chairman of a Material Service subsidiary, ''Henry played by the rules, such as the rules were.'' In the process, he turned the company into a money machine that made him a millionaire within five years.
In 1959, seeking liquidity for the family business, Crown sold Material Service to General Dynamics for a package of convertible preferred stock worth $51.6 million. Six years later, the board of directors voted to call the issue, offering him the choice of converting his shares to common stock or selling them back to the company for $104 million. He sold in 1966 and spent the next four years buying his way back in, joined by his friend Nathan Cummings, chairman of Consolidated Foods. ''It was emotionalism that drove us back,'' Lester Crown says today.
Henry Crown moved quickly to consolidate his control, loading the board of directors with his cronies and setting up an executive committee that became the company's policy-making body. And he lured David S. Lewis away from McDonnell Douglas Corporation to run General Dynamics.
Henry Crown had three sons - Robert, the oldest; Lester and John, who today is a Cook County judge. ''We ate and slept business,'' Lester recalls. During the summer, he and his brothers loaded cement trucks and worked alongside dynamite crews. When it came time for college, Lester enrolled at Northwestern University to study chemical engineering and went on to receive an M.B.A. from Harvard in 1949...."

1986:
Governor helped Crown keep US security OK
Chicago Sun-Times - NewsBank - Aug 4, 1986Gov. Thompson, who granted industrialist Lester Crown immunity from prosecution in a bribery case as a federal prosecutor more than 10 years ago, ...

Excerpt:Gov. Thompson, who granted industrialist Lester Crown immunity from prosecution in a bribery case as a federal prosecutor more than 10 years ago, also gave Crown a recent character reference for the Defense Department.
Both U.S. senators from Illinois also heaped praise on Crown, who was seeking to keep his top-secret defense clearance. So did a nationally known bipartisan cast of character witnesses. A Defense Department hearing examiner Thursday ruled that Crown may retain his security...


1993: Mother of Ernest L. Byfield Jr., owner of 400 acre Glen Ora estate leased by JFK from 1960 to 1963, dies at age 100:
OBITUARIES;Gladys R. Tartiere, Philanthropist, Dies
Pay-Per-View - Washington Post - ProQuest Archiver - Mar 5, 1993Gladys R. Tartiere, 100, a supporter of service and social organizations who ... Ernest L. Byfield Jr. of Middleburg; a sister, Elaine R. Moseley of St. ...

2004: Former daughter-in-law of Gladys Rosenthal Byfield Tartiere, and widow of Gladys' son, Ernest L. Byfield Jr., WWII OSS member and later a marketing and advertising executive, Diana Massieri Byfield, marries 88 year old Robert S. McNamara, US Secretary of Defense in the JFK and LBJ administrations, and thte man who approved the award in 1963 of the TFX contract to General Dynamics....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3686-2004Sep7.htmlWedding Bells for Robert McNamaraBy Roxanne RobertsWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, September 8, 2004; Page C01

".... McNamara will wed his Italian-born sweetheart, Diana Masieri Byfield, next week in a ceremony in Italy. .........McNamara has been single since 1981, when his first wife died of cancer. He was introduced to the 70-year-old Byfield four years ago by mutual friends, shortly after she was widowed. The two have traveled abroad, notably to China and last year to Rome, where one of her ancestors was beatified by the pope for liberating Vienna from the Ottoman Turks in 1683. They will be married in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Italy, on Sept. 16 in a private ceremony. "We're not allowing anyone else to come," he said with a laugh. The couple will honeymoon in Sardinia, then split their time between homes in Middleburg and the Watergate in Washington........Byfield was born in Aviano, Italy, and still has a thick accent, although she came to the United States more than 40 years ago. As a teenager she showed horses and drove rally cars. She was married for more than three decades ..."

Background:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?as_ldate=1993&as_hdate=2008&q=mcnamara+tfx&lnav=od&btnG=Search
NEW JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER CAN OVERCOME HISTORICAL FAILURES, MILITARY...
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - NewsBank - Nov 19, 1996In the early 1960s, then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara ordered a radical change. ... The result was the Tactical Fighter (Experimental) or TFX. ...

Copyright 2008 T James Scully