of Chicago Law School. She was the first woman to be Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and graduated first in the class of 1962. She loved living in Chicago and, after graduation, accepted a position there with Farmers Mutual Insurance Company. She specifically asked to work in major fraud investigation. She liked the challenge and rose to meet it. She had a talent for taking disparate events and scattered pieces of evidence and putting them together, gleaning a method, a motive, a conspiracy. In 1963 she left the private sector for government work. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy hired her to work on his organized crime unit, The Jimmy Hoffa Squad, as it was called. Abby had a nose for fraud, and fraud was the way the mob ran its whole national operation. Bobby Kennedy was pleased to have her. She moved to Washington, D.C. where she was a perfect fit. She was young, attractive, ambitious and smart. Then the President was murdered and everything at the Justice Department changed.
Bobby Kennedy had only one thing on his mind-who killed his brother? He recruited a small team of talented Justice Department lawyers to work only on that. Abby O’Malley was among them. Less than a year later, while only twenty-seven years old, Robert Kennedy handpicked her to take his investigation private. At first he put her in the Justice Department’s Boston office. This gave her easy access to his family’s resources and kept anyone in Washington from learning what the Special Assistant to the Attorney General really did. Shortly thereafter, Abby resigned from her government job and was hired by the legal department of a private investment firm, controlled by the Kennedys. Her position there served as cover for her real job-for which the family had allocated an unlimited budget-finding the person or persons responsible for the death of President John F. Kennedy. That mystery was finally solved and the investigation concluded in 1968. Less than a month later Bobby Kennedy was murdered.
Following his death, Abby O’Malley’s duties changed. Once Bobby Kennedy was confronted with the existence of Lacey’s confession, and its contents, once he was assured it was real, and that it was hidden away to protect Lacey, Abby’s job was to get it. Get it and destroy it. No cost was too much. That Bobby too was soon gone made no difference. From then on, while she appeared to be a high-level lawyer for an investment-banking firm, she devoted her efforts to a single mission-preserving the Kennedy mystique.
Rose had become depressed after Bobby’s death. In her melancholy, she said things to Abby, cried to her as only a mother could. To Abby O’Malley she said that which she could never have uttered in the earshot of her priest, her bishop or Cardinal Cushing. She was a good Catholic, but she was human. To keep the flame of Camelot burning brightly was to keep her boys alive and close. A woman of boundless energy and infectious enthusiasm had become despondent.
“Isn’t it enough he took my boys?” she wept in private to Abby. Was it God she spoke of, or Frederick Lacey? “Must he now destroy all they stood for?”
“No one can ever do that, Rose,” comforted Abby, still unsure. Could the wrath of God be directed through Lacey? Was Rose Kennedy in fear of each? Of both together?
“Oh, yes they can. They’ll ruin Jack now. With Bobby gone…” Rose paused for a moment and Abby could hear the upheaval in the old woman’s chest. The pain this woman felt at the death of the son who had always been her favorite stood exposed like fresh-butchered meat-raw, red and dripping blood. Abby expected her to cry out, Bobby! Bobby! Bobby! But she didn’t. Rose Kennedy wiped her eyes and nose with a nearby tissue, cleared her throat and said, “Without Bobby, there’s nobody to protect Jack. They’ll savage him.”
“No,” said Abby. “We will not allow that.”
“The women, Abby! The women alone will do it for them. I told Jack, but he didn’t listen. I told him ‘You’re the President of the United States, act like it!’ He never listened to me, and his father-he was no help. You watch, Abby. The business with the Monroe girl. The others too. Jackie will be of no help either. She’s done with us and if it weren’t for her children, I would…” She stopped herself just in time.
Abby O’Malley said, “Rose, I never believed all that would stay hidden, not forever. The President’s health also. People will find out and there will be those who will publicize it. It doesn’t matter. There might even be more. There may be things we don’t know, especially about his friends-deals they made, favors they called in-who knows what. Still, it won’t matter. I promise you. The American people love President Kennedy without reservation, for one reason and one reason only.” She looked at Rose, wanting to make sure the senior Kennedy was focused and completely lucid. “They love him because he was assassinated. And the same for Bobby. They love them both for the tragedy that took their lives, took them from us before their time. Nothing that is revealed will ever change that, unless the circumstances of their deaths, at the hands of Frederick Lacey, become known.”
“But, Abby…,” said Rose, her voice rising above its normal high-pitched near scream.
“No buts.” Abby held up both hands. “The vast majority of Americans-the vast majority of people all over the world-believe the President was assassinated by a conspiracy. You know that. I know you know that.” Rose nodded silently, in acquiescence. “For as long as that notion of conspiracy is not confirmed, not proven-for as long as people feel they do not know who killed President Kennedy-his legend is safe. Camelot is safe. What you have struggled so long to build, is safe. Only Lacey can change that.”
“Oh, my God.” Rose Kennedy began crying again.
“Leave him to me,” said Abby. “I’ll take care of it.”
To do that she had to get her hands on Lacey’s document. Lacey himself was untouchable, but the document was another matter. Abby was single-minded and determined. She answered only to Rose Kennedy. The matriarch of the Kennedy family knew the awful truth, but Abby never told another living soul about Frederick Lacey’s confession. Except for Louis Devereaux. It was well known within the Kennedy compound that Abby did something very important and her authority was not to be questioned. Nothing about her task changed when Rose Kennedy followed her children into the arms of Jesus, albeit more peacefully than they had.
Abby met Louis Devereaux in Chicago, in 1971. He was twenty. She’d been invited back to her law school as part of a two-day seminar covering a wide range of legal topics. On the second morning, she sat on a panel discussing the Fourth Amendment. The then Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review, a young man from Louisiana named Louis Devereaux, delivered a paper in which he argued that the strictures of the Fourth Amendment did not apply to the President of the United States. Under certain circumstances, he maintained, the President’s power to investigate was basically without limit. Abby wasn’t sure he was serious, but she was fascinated with the skill of his presentation and the structure of his argument. She did, of course, pass off as a joke Devereaux’s idea that the President-any President-could break into someone’s house or office, secretly and without a warrant and, if caught, claim constitutional immunity. She did not fail to notice the subtle support for Devereaux’s claim expressed by some members of the panel after the young man’s paper. Louis was a force. He had a way about him. If he hadn’t convinced them, he sure scared them with the possibility. Later, when she stopped Devereaux in the hallway, she was even more impressed to realize he wasn’t at all committed to the ideas he’d just proposed. The thrill of the argument gave him a buzz. She admired that, her sense of the absurdity of others, very much a part of her character too. Abby liked to have fun. She recognized a kindred spirit and gave him her card. “Stay in touch,” she said. She meant it and he knew it. She was not the type to glad-hand people and he was certainly not the type to be glad-handed. They both saw something special in each other. Abby O’Malley fit exactly into Devereaux’s experience with his mother and sisters-older, strong, accomplished women. She was precisely the kind of person for whom he reserved his respect and admiration. The two of them shared a commonality of world-view-not a nitpicking uniformity on policy, but a grander agreement on the ultimate scheme of the universe. As well, they shared ambition and recognition of each other as someone they would surely meet at the top of the mountain. They were determined to greet one another at the summit as allies. They would never lose touch with each other.
Had either of them known that John Ehrlichman would read Devereaux’s Law Review article, expanding his Fourth Amendment idea, and then arrogantly spout the thesis of Presidential exception to the Senate Watergate Committee, they would have had a good laugh. Years later, when Devereaux listened to Nixon’s tapes, he was disappointed Ehrlichman failed to credit him. “That’s a great idea, John!” Nixon could be heard saying. “Where did you get it from?” Ehrlichman calmly claimed it as his own.
In 1975 Abby met and married David Lowenthal, a shy, gentle, sometimes mystical Fine Arts professor at Harvard. He was also a well-known sculptor. Their relationship would be intensely private. He was so absorbed with his pursuit of art and beauty that he never really learned the details of his wife’s job. She did not care much. She did not encourage his curiosity, not in that area. She wasn’t the type to come home telling stories of her day at work. He adored her and she him. That was all either needed. At more than one Boston party, David Lowenthal was heard to explain what his wife did by saying she had “something to do with investments.”
Abby O’Malley was a patient woman. She gave no ground as Frederick Lacey wilted slowly, living longer, much longer than anyone had a right to. The day he finally died, her decades of planning were over. Within minutes events were in motion.
