Bradlee was close by the next morning as the new president placed a call to Edgar. ‘He was telling him how much he wanted him, was counting on him, to stay on … Laid it on a bit thick, I thought.’
Kennedy’s decision to reappoint Edgar was front-page news within hours. ‘He never discussed it with any of us,’ said Kenneth O’Donnell. ‘I think he made up his mind – “We’re not going to rock the boat at this moment.” He would not discuss it with me.’
As President, Kennedy would make light of the Edgar problem. He dismissed Edgar as a ‘master of public relations.’ ‘The three most overrated things in the world,’ he liked to say, ‘are the state of Texas, the FBI’ and whatever was exasperating him most at the moment. In private, he fumed.
Kennedy told the columnist Igor Cassini, a family friend, that he ‘knew’ Edgar was a homosexual. ‘I talked to him about it,’ said the novelist Gore Vidal, ‘and he gave me one of those looks. He loathed Hoover. I didn’t know then that Hoover was blackmailing him. Nor did I realize how helpless the Kennedys were to do anything about him.’
The bottom line was fear. ‘All the Kennedys were afraid of Hoover,’ said Ben Bradlee. ‘John F. Kennedy was afraid not to reappoint him,’ said the columnist Jack Anderson. ‘I know that because I talked to the President about it. He admitted that he’d appointed Hoover because it would’ve been politically destructive not to.’4
On the day Kennedy was elected, Edgar wrote him an unctuous letter. ‘My dear Senator, Permit me to join the countless well wishers who are congratulating you on being elected President of the United States … America is most fortunate to have a man of your caliber at its helm in these perilous days … You know, of course, that this Bureau stands ready to be of all possible assistance to you …’
Hours after writing the letter, Edgar asked Philip Hochstein, editorial director of the Newhouse newspaper group, to fly down to Washington from New York. ‘When I got to his office,’ Hochstein recalled, ‘I offered my congratulations on the announcement of his reappointment by the President-elect. He replied in a surly manner and said, “Kennedy isn’t the President-elect.” He said the election had been stolen in a number of states, including New Jersey, where my office was, and Missouri, where Newhouse had recently bought a paper …
‘It was quite a harangue, and I think Hoover wanted me to be part of a crusade to undo the election. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t tell anyone at the time. But later I saw what Hoover had told me reported accurately in a book by an author who knew Hoover well. Hoover wanted it published, one way or another … I remember, too, he called in an assistant – DeLoach, I think. He asked me to join DeLoach afterwards, that DeLoach had some interesting things to tell me. And the conversation with DeLoach was about Jack Kennedy’s women …’
‘I think he’s dangerous,’ Robert Kennedy would say of Edgar after his brother was dead. ‘But it was a danger we could control, that we were on top of, that we could deal with. There wasn’t anything that he could do.’
Robert knew this was far from the truth, that Edgar had been a constant maddening irritant to the Kennedy presidency. And, by the time John Kennedy flew to Dallas, dealing with the Director of the FBI had become a nightmare.
26
‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’
Oscar Wilde
Soon after the inauguration, workers at the Justice Department received strange orders. They were to retrieve a neglected piece of statuary from storage, dust it off and display it prominently in the Department hallway at Tenth Street and Pennsylvania. Then orders came to remove it – only to be followed by a fresh command to put it back again. And so on, several times.
The statue was of Stanley Finch, the forgotten first-ever head of the Bureau, one of three who had preceded Edgar as Director. Most people were by now under the impression that Edgar was the Director, the only one there ever had been. The resurrection of Finch’s bust was a reminder that there had been life before Edgar and, by implication, there would be life afterward. The orders to take it away, went the whisper, came from Edgar. The orders to put it back came from Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
The President’s brother had not wanted to run the Justice Department – he rightly anticipated protests about nepotism, lack of experience and youth. Still only thirty-five, he had never even practiced law. His one sure qualification was his loyalty to John Kennedy, in times that promised to be stormy.
‘I need you,’ the new president had told Robert over bacon and eggs a month after the election. In the end it was as simple as that. Robert Kennedy became the youngest Attorney General in 150 years.
Robert had consulted Edgar, among others, before bowing to his brother’s will. And Edgar had told him, in an opaque sort of way, to take the job. When he did, Edgar wrote an obsequious note to say he was ‘very happy’ and praised him in the press. Yet each man, behind the other’s back, knew this was hypocrisy. ‘I didn’t like to tell him that,’ Edgar muttered to William Sullivan, ‘but what could I say?’ ‘He spoke of it,’ said Cartha DeLoach, ‘as the worst damn advice he ever gave in his life.’
John Kennedy’s right-hand man, Kenneth O’Donnell, recalled talking with Robert when he emerged from seeing Edgar. ‘I said, “Bobby, just tell me exactly what he said,” and he told me Hoover advised him to take it. But if I listened to the words carefully, [Edgar] was hoping he wouldn’t … I knew Hoover wouldn’t want him. He doesn’t want the Attorney General to be more important than him … He couldn’t want Bobby to have it, he couldn’t want that.’
The official portrait of Robert Kennedy, hanging today in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, shows a slim young man with rumpled hair, in leather jacket and T-shirt. The pictures of sixty-three of his predecessors are all, by contrast, sober-faced, predictable fellows in formal dress. Edgar wore the same drab uniform, kowtowed to the same conventions. More important, previous Attorneys General had been his superiors only in theory. For nearly thirty years, since the Roosevelt days, he had answered only to the President. With the arrival of Robert Kennedy, all that changed.
Kennedy burst into the Justice Department determined to effect change. Not satisfied with the office usually used by Attorneys General, he took over the great wood-paneled chamber normally used for conferences. Not content with the government furniture, he replaced it with large sofas, a sailfish over the mantel, and a stuffed tiger by the fireplace. He fixed drawings done by his seven children on the wall with Scotch tape, and sometimes the children themselves appeared in the office. Often his dog, Brumus, a grouchy Labrador, lay growling on the rug.
When Kennedy wore a tie, it was Ivy League, and it often hung cheerfully askew. His blue button-down shirt gaped open at the neck, and the Attorney General’s legs spent half the day on the vast desk, not under it.
An Attorney General in shirtsleeves, Edgar told a colleague, looked ‘ridiculous.’ He and Clyde looked on in confusion, during a visit to Kennedy’s office, as the younger man sat throwing darts at a target on the wall. Their amazement turned to outrage when some of the darts missed altogether, piercing the ‘government property’ paneling.
Soon aides were reporting the discovery of beer cans on the ground outside, supposedly tossed from the Attorney General’s window. One wintry day, Edgar told friends, Kennedy had water pumped into the Department courtyard so his children could skate.
Years later, after Robert had been killed, Edgar would refer to him derisively as the ‘Messiah of the generation gap.’ Edgar had spent nearly forty years drilling conformity into his men and was rarely seen out of a tie, even on vacation. The Kennedy style, on what he viewed as his personal territory, offended him deeply.
Sometimes the affront was personal. Edgar was not amused, agents recall, when Kennedy took him to lunch at a People’s drugstore. Even the Labrador made its contribution to Edgar’s discomfiture – on the floor outside his office. Kennedy had a tendency to appear without notice in the Director’s office,
something no one in government had ever presumed to do. One afternoon he pushed past a horrified Miss Gandy to find the Director taking a nap.
Kennedy insisted on instant communication with Edgar and began by ordering the installation of a buzzer with which to summon the Director at will. Edgar had it removed, only to be confronted by telephone engineers putting in a hot line. The first time Kennedy used it, recalled former Assistant Director Mark Felt, ‘Hoover’s secretary answered. “When I pick up this phone,” Kennedy snapped impatiently, “there’s only one man I want to talk to. Get this phone on the Director’s desk immediately.”’
There was such a phone, and Edgar never came to terms with it. He would sometimes pick it up only to hear one of Kennedy’s children giggling on the other end. ‘Shall I get Hoover over here?’ former Justice Department attorney William Hundley recalled Kennedy saying. ‘And he would hit the goddamn button, and the Old Man would come in all red-faced. They’d start fighting with each other right there in front of me. No other Attorney General had ever done that to Hoover. I couldn’t believe it.’
In a stroke, Robert Kennedy had broken the mold that Edgar had fashioned over decades. He was asserting the authority of the Attorney General, which Edgar had eroded, and he was severing Edgar’s most treasured link of all, his one-to-one contact with the President himself. John Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, cannot recall a single phone call between the President and Edgar during the entire administration.
From the White House, Kenneth O’Donnell made it clear this was deliberate policy. If Edgar tried to call the President, he would be blocked by either Evelyn Lincoln or O’Donnell himself. ‘It gets back to the crux … Bobby is the boss, and for the first time in Hoover’s life he can’t go over the boss’s head.’
Having a boss at all was something that, at sixty-six, Edgar could never have borne easily; having Robert Kennedy as his boss was unthinkable. It was not just that Kennedy’s style was the antithesis of everything Edgar stood for. He had a driven quality, an absolute insistence on getting his own way that – when it did not inspire love and loyalty – triggered bitter enmity. It certainly triggered Edgar’s.
In the company of ‘his’ people, Edgar pulled no punches. He told Roy Cohn the younger Kennedy was an ‘arrogant whippersnapper.’ He spoke of him to Richard Nixon, just months into the presidency, as ‘that sneaky little son of a bitch.’ He sounded off about it on vacation, to the Weiss family in Florida and to his friends at the Del Charro. Billy Byars, Jr., the son of the oilman, recalls him ‘raving about Robert Kennedy, saying god-awful things. He despised him and didn’t hide the fact.’
When it suited him, on the other hand, he lied. ‘Attorney General Kennedy and I,’ Edgar wrote to Cardinal Cushing, a friend of the Kennedy family, ‘have worked most cordially together … We have not had a single difference.’
Kennedy’s people, meanwhile, found Edgar very strange indeed. Joe Dolan, a slim young lawyer, found himself lectured about weight problems for forty-five minutes – then briskly dismissed. John Seigenthaler, Kennedy’s administrative assistant, was harangued first about the way key newspapers were supposedly infiltrated by Communists, then about Adlai Stevenson’s alleged homosexuality. Edgar subjected first Robert, then the President himself, to a long briefing on the alleged homosexuality of Joseph Alsop, the distinguished journalist.
It was all bizarre to the Kennedys. For the first time, perhaps, men in power dared voice the notion that Edgar was not entirely sane. ‘He was out of it today, wasn’t he?’ Robert murmured to Seigenthaler when he emerged from Edgar’s lecture about Communists and pederasts. Kennedy staffers began to talk about Edgar’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days.
‘He acts in such a strange, peculiar way,’ Robert Kennedy was to say in 1964, on an embargoed basis, in an interview intended for use by future historians. ‘He’s rather a psycho. I think it’s a very dangerous organization. I think he’s become senile and rather … frightening.’
Sometimes through Robert, and sometimes in memos to the White House, Edgar quickly began playing on the President’s weakest characteristic: his womanizing. Ten days after the inauguration, an Italian magazine had published comments by Alicia Purdom, wife of the British actor Edmund Purdom. She claimed that in 1951, before either of them was married, she and Kennedy had had an affair. Had Joseph Kennedy not stepped in to end it, they would have married.
This was not picked up in the American press. Edgar, however, alerted by his man in Rome, promptly informed the President’s brother. Available information, and a heavily censored file, suggests the matter had been a worry even before the election, and that the family had paid a vast sum of money to hush the matter up. Allegations would reach Edgar that the reported affair with Purdom had involved a pregnancy. Stage by stage, as more of this came to his attention, he made sure the Kennedys knew he knew.
By now Pamela Turnure, who had been involved with the President in his Senate days, had – ironically – become press secretary to the President’s wife. Her former landlady, Florence Kater, still obsessed with the affair, once again tried to stir up trouble. Robert Kennedy’s office asked the FBI whether it knew anything about the matter and was told untruthfully that it did not. Edgar was playing games, and the brothers – mindful of how Edgar had used his Kennedy sex file to propel Lyndon Johnson toward the vice presidency – had to live with it.
They also had to live with efforts by Edgar, from the very beginning, to torpedo White House nominees he did not like. Pierre Salinger, who had been named as Press Secretary, was astonished to get a call from Time inquiring about an allegation that he had received Communist training as a child. Salinger cleared the matter up – his ‘Communist training’ had consisted of a vacation spent at a summer camp run by the Longshoremen’s Union – and Time explained that the tip-off had come from Edgar’s office. Then Edgar personally warned John Kennedy that Salinger had once been in jail. This was true. As a young reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, he had posed as a prisoner to write a series of articles on jail conditions. Salinger’s appointment went ahead.
As John Kennedy examined FBI reports on potential appointees, he was astounded by their keyhole quality, by the obsession with sexual innuendo. One celebrated episode involved the account of how an American ambassador, caught with a married woman, had escaped through a bedroom window without his trousers. Pressed by the FBI for his reaction, Kennedy eventually sent word that he ‘wished his diplomats could run faster.’ Told of a White House secretary’s promiscuity, he just chuckled. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘I never knew she was that way.’
The banter stopped, however, when the extent of Edgar’s snooping dawned on John Kennedy. ‘He was shocked at the welter of scandal,’ learned Hugh Sidey, then as now a Time correspondent in Washington. ‘He gasped and told his aides that he would never again read another such dossier.’ ‘I don’t want any part of that stuff,’ the President told Kenneth O’Donnell. ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I’d like to see the report they’ve got on me …’
As an agent at headquarters, Gordon Liddy saw files on Kennedy. From mid-1961, while on a headquarters assignment that included research on politicians, he perused numerous 5" x 7" cards packed with file references to the President’s past and present. ‘There was a lot,’ he recalled. ‘It grew while I was there, and kept growing.’
Edgar’s knowledge of the President’s bedroom secrets, exposure of which could most certainly destroy him, remained a constant threat. With just a sliver of an electoral majority, and with reelection in 1964 far from certain, the Kennedys could not afford to alienate the multitude of voters for whom Edgar represented order, the public good and the American Way. In the short term, at any rate, they were saddled with him.
When Robert Kennedy sent U.S. marshals to Alabama to protect the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists demanding the right to use public transport, he confronted more problems with the FBI. As white bigots attacked blacks in the state, Kennedy was told, Edgar’s a
gents just took notes and did nothing. FBI headquarters, which received specific warnings of collusion between the Ku Klux Klan and local police, failed to alert the Justice Department. Edgar was reluctant to do anything to alienate a vital constituency, the southern conservatives who supported him in Congress. And that put him on the side of the racists.
Edgar’s immediate fight over racism, however, was sparked by Robert Kennedy’s pressure on him to hire black agents. At first, rather than admit the only such ‘agents’ were his own black servants, he simply took no notice. Later, at Kennedy’s insistence, a few blacks were hired.1 For Robert Kennedy, though, civil rights took second place to a crusade that rankled even more with Edgar – the pursuit of organized crime.
On February 4, 1961, not two weeks into the presidency, Drew Pearson used his regular radio broadcast to report the first major battle in the younger Kennedy’s war with Edgar. ‘The new Attorney General,’ Pearson said, ‘wants to go all out against the underworld. To do so, Bobby Kennedy proposes a crack squad of racket busters, but J. Edgar Hoover objects. Hoover claims that a special crime bureau reflects on the FBI, and he is opposing his new boss.’
Both Kennedy brothers had served on the Senate Rackets Committee, John as Senator and Robert as Chief Counsel. John, though, admitted that he had done so only because his brother asked him to. His priorities were those of a politician, Robert’s those of a zealot.
It was Robert, in his first Senate probe, who had exposed the extent to which organized labor was intertwined with organized crime. He had toppled Teamsters leader Dave Beck and sent him to jail. Then, in a second probe, he had struggled to nail Beck’s corrupt successor, Jimmy Hoffa, an intensely personal feud that brought bitter confrontations with Hoffa and mafiosi like Giancana – live on national television.
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