Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (81 page)

The bitterness between the two men only deepened. Carter complained that Kennedy was not on the stage immediately at the conclusion of the speech, while Kennedy claimed that he'd done exactly what the president's men wanted, so as to not show Carter up. Kennedy then walked off the stage, when decorum demanded that the president leave first.

A Carter aide said ruefully, “He wanted to put that last wound into us.”
⁷⁹
In an interview with the former president years later, it was clear that the old animosities still existed.
⁸⁰

T
HE NIGHT OF
T
ED
Kennedy's speech, a family retainer, Paul Corbin, was standing on the floor of the convention with his friend Bill Schulz of
Reader's Digest
, watching Kennedy concede the nomination to Carter. Corbin hated Carter. He turned on his heel to leave, and as he was storming out, Schulz called after him, asking what his plans were now that Kennedy was out of the race.

Corbin, a Kennedy Democrat, labor organizer, former Communist agitator, and political troublemaker
par excellence
, yelled back, “I'm going to go work for Reagan!”
⁸¹

“
I can argue it both ways.
”

I
t would be too easy to call Paul Corbin “Runyonesque.” A better question might be which one of the two inspired the other.

Damon Runyon, the cocksure novelist, had a taste in his writings for the slangy-type phrase, and Corbin certainly “cracked wise.” Since they both lived in New York City in the 1930s, no one will ever know whether they knew each other, but one thing is for sure: they would have liked each other.

Runyon, the chronicler of the New York netherworld, drank heavily, smoked, and cheated on his wife. Corbin did all of these things, too, but was particular about his brand of cigarettes, smoking only blue-and-white Pall Malls. Runyon once quoted Ecclesiastes, with a twist: “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.”
¹
Corbin would have fixed the race or the fight so there would be no risk involved, at least for him. He then would have figured out how to get his enemies to bet the other way, to increase his payout.

Corbin, in later years, resembled the actor Barry Fitzgerald in
The Quiet Man
, gray-headed, lines deeply etched in his face. With his fedora, gangster-like black suits, gravelly voice, whispered late-night phone calls, nefarious deals, and bizarre collection of friends, he intrigued some. Most people who knew him, though, used obscenities in describing the diminutive, shadowy character. When he walked into a restaurant, he would greet the waiter by shouting, “Fellow worker!” and then ask how poor the working conditions and the pay were: “How do the bosses treat you around here? They treat you like shit, don't they?”
²
He had a variety of
mistresses throughout his life and even in his late seventies he was supporting a woman in Nashville who referred to herself as “The Wanton Woman.”
³

An FBI file was opened on Corbin in 1940
⁴
—only four years after he entered the country illegally from his native Canada
⁵
—and entries were still being made twenty-eight years later.
⁶
The initial report said he was 5'6” and weighed 145 pounds, with black hair and blue eyes. The bureau assigned him a number, 2417609.
⁷
For nearly three decades the FBI filled Corbin's ever-growing file with hundreds of documents, news clips, photos, arrest records, and informants' reports. He was under almost constant FBI surveillance through the 1940s and '50s and into the early '60s.

By the time of his death in early January 1990, Corbin had accumulated an FBI file of nearly two thousand documents. Yet when a Freedom of Information Act request was filed seventeen years later, the FBI held back several hundred pages, the oblique reason cited being “national security.” The documents that were released, if reluctantly, were heavily redacted.

The papers released by the bureau revealed the life not of an apparent national-security risk but of a crook and a rogue—sometimes charming, mostly not. His was a lifetime spent in labor, left-wing, and Democratic politics, but also in business and personal dealings with Republicans and conservatives. A common thread through the files was that Corbin liked to cheat, especially the system and his enemies, but also friends.

Corbin cheated even when he didn't have to, as when he played poker with his friends, just to see if he could get away with it. Democratic operative and later columnist Mark Shields, one of the most genial men in Washington, declined an invitation to a friendly weekly poker game that Corbin played in because he refused to sit at the same table, still detesting Corbin over some ancient disagreement. When Shields was told Corbin had died, he retorted, “Yeah? Prove it!”
⁸
Corbin was a man of utterly no convictions except self-interest and loyalty to a small circle of associates—and he grifted even them once in a while.

In the late 1980s, Corbin, who for years had been very close to Robert Kennedy's family, convinced two of his conservative friends to contribute to the debt retirement of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, RFK's eldest daughter. She'd lost a race for Congress, so Corbin took his conservative friends to Hickory Hill, longtime residence of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. There, at the reception, he ushered them around as if he'd just delivered tribute. Corbin's out-of-place right-wing friends gamely went along, chatting with Ethel, the kids, and the dozens of liberals who had gathered. Their one stipulation was that Corbin tell no one that they had contributed money to a Kennedy. One month later, in Chuck Conconi's gossip
column in
Washingtonian
magazine, an embarrassing item appeared detailing how two conservatives had given money to Kathleen.

They smelled a rat and burned a phone line to Corbin. He responded with that rough little laugh of his and as much as admitted that he'd called Conconi. As much as cheating people, he loved upsetting them, especially the high and mighty of Washington. Whenever he saw Ted Kennedy, he was forever embarrassing him, doing such things as telling him to get his suit pressed.
⁹

As a result—and for hundreds of other reasons—Corbin made enemies as easily as eating breakfast. He was loved by a handful that understood him and hated by hundreds more who understood him. At his sparsely attended funeral in January 1990, his longtime friend and pallbearer Bill Schulz quipped, “There wasn't a wet eye in the house.”
¹⁰

Kennedy Townsend said simply, “He was a rascal. He created trouble. He upset people.… He didn't respect people.” As she was preparing for her wedding, Corbin went to her future husband to give him conjugal advice. “Make her come to you” was Corbin's gravelly counsel to Kathleen's beau.
¹¹

In 1989 Corbin had known for several months he was dying of cancer. Despite their rocky relationship, Teddy Kennedy had arranged for Corbin to get preferential treatment at the National Institutes of Health. A young friend of Corbin's would often drive him there, and sometimes Corbin would get in the car and with black humor say, “Well, it's Boot Hill for me!” Other times, he wanted his friend's assurance that God loved and forgave all.
¹²
Yet when an old friend, Ray Thomasson, went to see him in late 1989, Thomasson grew weepy and tried to hug the frail old man. “What the hell are you trying to do, kill me?” was Corbin's grumpy response.
¹³
Joseph Sweat, another friend, asked Corbin how he was feeling. “Goddamn it, how the hell do you think I'm doing, you son of a bitch? I'm dying!”
¹⁴

On his last Christmas, Kathleen's mother, Ethel Kennedy, and several of her children went to his home to sing Christmas carols for the failing man. He hadn't completely lost his humor. “I really must be going,” he joked, making allusions to hearing crooning heavenly angels.
¹⁵
When Corbin died, the Kennedy clan turned out in force for his wake and funeral. For years, the children of Robert and Ethel Kennedy called Corbin “Uncle Paul.”

Kennedyite John Seigenthaler, one of the most ethical and moral men in American politics, delivered a touching eulogy for one of the most unethical and immoral men ever to work in American politics.

M
UCH OF
C
ORBIN'S LIFE
had been spent one step ahead of the law, grand juries, the FBI, and union thugs wanting to beat him up. Even into his late sixties, he
was still evading investigating committees, including a congressional committee formed in 1983 to try to solve a crime. Someone in 1980 had stolen top-secret debate-briefing books from deep inside the Carter White House and had clandestinely given them to the Reagan-Bush campaign. Three years later, when the theft became known, the city of Washington was in an uproar over the scandal, which became known as “Debategate.” Congressman Donald J. Albosta, Michigan Democrat, headed the congressional investigation, and the FBI and everybody in the national media were trying to find out who'd stolen the Carter briefing books.

Albosta's committee interrogated hundreds of witnesses, and the FBI interviewed as many suspects, including a Carter White House aide, Bob Dunn, who had known Corbin for years. John Seigenthaler said Dunn had “worked his way into Paul's life.”
¹⁶
Dunn was also a protégé of Ted Kennedy ally Pat Lucey, who would become John Anderson's running mate in 1980. Pat's daughter, Laurie, worked in the Carter White House as well. Both Luceys were close friends of Corbin's.

Albosta's investigation produced a report totaling nearly 2,500 pages, yet the congressmen on the panel never solved the crime—even as the answer was right under their noses.
¹⁷
In an interview years later, Stu Spencer explained, “[Bill] Casey had some guy that got the book for him, and he gave it to [Jim] Baker.”
¹⁸
Baker confirmed this, saying that Casey “gave it to me. He said, ‘Here is something that you might give to your debate prep team,’ and I thumbed through it … sent it down to [David] Gergen or somebody.”
¹⁹

It was Paul Corbin, a Democrat late of the 1980 Ted Kennedy campaign, who—with a little help from some friends—stole the Carter briefing books and gave them to Ronald Reagan's campaign.
²⁰

H
IS NAME AT BIRTH
was not Corbin but Kobrinsky. His parents, Nathan and Anna Kobrinsky, were Jewish émigrés from Russia.
²¹

Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Corbin was a troublemaker from an early age. His sister recalled how Corbin at age five kicked their grandmother in the shins.
²²
Years later, after Corbin came to New York, FBI documents indicated a “possible cancellation of CORBIN's naturalization due to his subversive activities.”
²³
U.S. immigration officials apparently deported him to Canada on several occasions in the 1930s because of his illegal status, but Corbin just sneaked back into the United States.
²⁴

In mid-November 1940 he registered with the Selective Service, though he did not bother to become an American citizen until 1943. In 1943 Corbin also
joined the Marines and served as a cook in the Pacific.
²⁵
He later claimed to some friends in Tennessee that while in the Pacific, he had shot and killed a Japanese soldier trying to steal food.
²⁶
He also claimed that he'd led a platoon.
²⁷
Previously he had told the FBI “that he had been a major in the Canadian Army.” In typical FBI understatement, the bureau observed that he seemed to be a “prevaricator.”
²⁸
Indeed, with Corbin it was sometimes difficult to know where the cock-and-bull ended and the truth began.

In 1939 Corbin abandoned his first wife and young daughter in Brooklyn and headed for Minnesota and Wisconsin.
²⁹
His first wife, Seena, happened to be his first cousin. He did not again lay eyes on his only child, Darlene, until she was fourteen, and then only for ten minutes.
³⁰
Corbin freely admitted to the FBI under questioning that he sent money to his wife only “from time to time,” but he lied about his previous arrests—and later he even claimed that his wife had abandoned
him
.
³¹

On the day of his divorce from Seena in 1944, Corbin married Gertrude McGowan, whom he had met during the war. Gertrude apparently lied on her marriage license: she claimed that she'd never been married, although an FBI investigation uncovered that she had once been listed as “Gertrude Cox” and “previously married to Harvey Cox, whom she divorced for non-support in 1938.”
³²

Years later, Corbin's only daughter alternately sympathized with and criticized her father. On the one hand, she said she “didn't respect him as a human being.” On the other hand, she admitted that she understood why he had abandoned her mother: Seena was “crazy as a loon.”
³³
Darlene was an elderly woman at the time she was interviewed, but it was clear she had to be Paul Corbin's daughter: in conversation she had absolutely no compunction against hurling obscenities.

Out in the Midwest, Corbin ran afoul of various law-enforcement agencies. Purporting to represent a number of unions, he threatened businesses with strikes unless they bought ads in union publications. The publications were fraudulent, and Corbin pocketed the ad money. The FBI file noted another scam, one that led to his arrest in September 1940: Corbin, “an excellent dice-man, had ‘taken the house’ at a local saloon, which unfortunately was owned by a deputy sheriff.” The FBI report called Corbin and his associates “amateur hoodlums.” After spending three days in custody he was let off upon paying costs and pleading not guilty.
³⁴
Only a month later, Corbin was arrested for “obtaining money under false pretenses” and was freed again after pleading not guilty.
³⁵
According to FBI records he was taken into custody twice more in 1941, including another arrest for obtaining money under false pretenses. Apparently none of the charges stuck, since he was found not guilty by the municipal judge in Wisconsin.
³⁶
Corbin was
fingerprinted at least four times, including when he was registered as an alien in late December 1940.
³⁷