Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  Sitting next to committee chairman John McClellan—a balding man three decades his senior with a hardscrabble Arkansas face and the deep, austere tones of a Southern minister—Bobby Kennedy seemed an unlikely crime-buster. He had the fresh-faced good looks and high-pitched voice of a Boston schoolboy. When he began questioning the hard-looking men who sat before him, men who had torn and scratched for their illegal slice of the American Dream, they found it hard to take him seriously. Hoffa winked at him. Sam Giancana giggled. But they soon realized they were in the crosshairs of a ferociously intelligent and doggedly prepared man who was determined to prove that he was tougher than they.

  Kennedy brought his confrontations with these men vividly to life in his 1960 book, The Enemy Within. He accused Hoffa of “personalizing” their battle in his book. But Kennedy himself brought a razor-sharp eye for detail to his descriptions of Hoffa and the other crime bosses that was nothing but personal. Hoffa and his lieutenants were “often bilious and fat, or lean and cold and hard,” he wrote. “They have the smooth faces and cruel eyes of gangsters; they wear the same rich clothes, the diamond ring, the jeweled watch, the strong, sickly-sweet-smelling perfume.” Kennedy returned to the subject of these men’s smell. It was feminine to him. It seemed to underscore how their brutality was the work of strutting bullies, not real men. “I was riding up in the elevator on my way to the hearing room when I was almost overcome by a heavy, sickly-sweet smell,” Kennedy wrote, describing a brush with a Hoffa hood named Joey Glimco. “I tried to remember what madam was testifying that day, until I got out and, walking down the hall with Glimco to the caucus room, realized that he was the source of the oppressive odor.”

  Kennedy seemed to get a charge from sparring with these men. One day the notorious New York labor enforcer Joey Gallo, who controlled the city’s jukebox business, strolled into his office “dressed like a Hollywood Grade B gangster.” His shirt, pants, and coat were all black. He had long, pomaded hair curling down the back of his neck. He leaned over and felt Kennedy’s carpet: “It would be nice for a crap game.”

  Kennedy was not amused. His committee had heard testimony from a jukebox distributor who had dared to resist Gallo’s crooked union. Gallo’s thugs jumped him after a meeting, cracking his skull open with steel bars. The man had shuffled into the Senate hearing room, a “thin, wan, pathetic figure,” still barely able to speak.

  As Gallo reached out to shake hands with Kennedy that day, the young investigator said, “So you’re Joey Gallo, the Jukebox King. You don’t look so tough. I’d like to fight you myself.” The gangster demurred. “I don’t fight,” he told Kennedy.

  Bobby’s older brother had sought to define himself with a lofty book about courage in politics. But The Enemy Within was a much grittier revelation of its author’s true character than JFK’s Profiles in Courage was of his. While John Kennedy chronicled the bravery of men he admired from a historical distance, Bobby wrote about men with whom he had personally clashed or whose life-and-death heroics he had passionately championed. He had climbed down into the underworld he was describing. He was part of the story.

  The rackets investigation defined Bobby the way World War II had defined Jack. And it made the two men brothers in arms. When Bobby talked his brother into joining him on the McClellan Committee, to make sure it was politically balanced enough to prevent Republican senators from declaring open season on organized labor, it afforded JFK one of his few displays of genuine courage during his Senate career. The experience would also help shape the Kennedy presidency. The young, dedicated investigators and reporters Bobby gathered around him on the committee—O’Donnell, Salinger, Sheridan, Seigenthaler, Guthman—would become the heart of his brother’s administration. It was fitting that JFK would announce his campaign for president in the Senate Caucus Room, where he and his brother had done battle with what Bobby bluntly called a “conspiracy of evil.”

  But Joseph Kennedy worried that his two sons had made a horrible error. In late December 1956, when Bobby went to Hyannis Port to celebrate Christmas with his family, his father confronted him about the labor rackets hearings, which had just begun. Joe Kennedy didn’t think the family should get mixed up in something like this. Bobby’s sister Jean later reported that the two men clashed with a kind of fury she had never seen erupt between them. Their father feared that Bobby’s investigative work would hurt Jack’s presidential chances by turning the labor movement against the Kennedys, Jean recalled. But there was clearly something more behind this unprecedented father-son tempest. Joe Kennedy was deeply alarmed by the path that his son was taking. What demons would Bobby stir up as he went crashing about the underworld with his avenging angels? “The old man saw this as dangerous,” recalled longtime Kennedy family crony Lem Billings. “He thought Bobby was naïve.”

  Joe Kennedy loved his sons more than anything else in life. His dominating presence in his children’s lives is part of American lore. But less appreciated is the Kennedy patriarch’s ever-watchful love. This paternal attentiveness shines through in the flurry of correspondence he dashed off to his offspring, particularly his sons, as he traveled the globe in his empire-building days. He instructed them on everything from manners and grooming to global affairs; he comforted them when they were homesick and dispirited at boarding school; he inspired them with grand visions of their future if they worked hard enough. Joe Kennedy was not just a tower of protective male strength in his children’s lives, he was a nagging, nurturing mother hen, who constantly instilled in them a sense of family pride and self-worth.

  “After long experience in sizing up people, I definitely know you have the goods and you can go a long way,” Joe pep-talked a seventeen-year-old Jack. But he needed to apply himself. Joe worried that his son was gliding a little too nonchalantly through his adolescence. Bobby, at sixteen, needed a different kind of love from his father. He lacked Jack’s easy self-confidence, he brooded about things. “I wouldn’t be too discouraged about the football team,” his father bucked him up. “After all, the value of playing football isn’t primarily playing on the first team—it’s the opportunity to meet a lot of nice boys and to get the practice of playing teamwork.”

  As the Kennedy brothers prepared to challenge the gods of the underworld—who, unmolested by the FBI, were enjoying a golden reign in post-war America—their father feared for his sons’ safety, and for good reason. Joe Kennedy knew these sorts of men, he had done business with them, they had helped him make a fortune in liquor distribution, both during and after the bootlegging days. He knew what they were capable of.

  Kennedy was precisely the type of predatory capitalist whom his son would summon before the Rackets Committee, a shrewd, law-skirting entrepreneur who took his business opportunities and his partners where he found them. He was a master at exploiting the wildly profitable frontiers of American enterprise, from his days as a Wall Street speculator to movie baron to whiskey bootlegger. Running liquor during Prohibition brought the kind of windfall profits the drug trade does today. But it also meant doing business with the Mafia if you valued your life, and Kennedy went right to the top to ensure the security of his business. He forged a partnership with Frank Costello, the dapper, politically wired “prime minister of the underworld” who began each day after leaving his fashionable Central Park West penthouse by getting groomed at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel barbershop. By the late 1940s, as Jack began the political career his father had urged upon him, Kennedy had cashed out of the liquor business, selling his distribution company, Somerset Importers, to New Jersey mobster Longy Zwillman. But the stain on the Kennedy name would remain an indelible part of the family’s folklore.

  “Yes, he was amoral, sure he was,” observed New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, whom Kennedy treated as a family retainer. “I think only a Roman Catholic could possibly describe how you could be amoral and still be religious. That is, how you can carry an insurance policy with the deity and at the same time do all these other things…. I never had a
ny idealism from the time I was a young reporter about anybody who touched the edges of politics or big business. So I was not shocked in the least. I expected, and still do, that politicians and big businessmen don’t have any morals.” But Bobby Kennedy held public men to different standards.

  Joe Kennedy flew down to Washington some days to watch his two sons confront the country’s most infamous gangsters and racketeers in the ornate Senate hearing room. One can only imagine the feelings of pride and fear that must have collided within him as he watched Jack and Bobby clash with the sort of men he knew from his secret business world. When Bobby knew his father was going to be there, committee staff members observed, he acted in a nervous sort of way that he never seemed to when facing off against the hoodlums. As his father walked into the Senate Caucus Room, in his expensive New York–tailored suits and his banker’s homburg hat, “Bob was a little keyed up, a little tense,” recalled Ruth Watt, the McClellan Committee’s chief clerk. “There was a strong paternal influence over all the Kennedys. [Joe Kennedy] really was a strong, strong person…. When their father came to town, everybody hopped! I remember one time he came during the hearings and he was going back to Boston. They had Eastern Airlines, Jack Kennedy’s office, the SEC, and somebody else working on one reservation for him to get back to Boston!”

  Bobby had enormous respect for his powerful father. But by plunging ahead with the rackets investigation, over his father’s impassioned objections, he had risked the sort of dramatic Oedipal split that both men had so far managed to avoid. Bobby was the son most like him, Joe Kennedy always liked to say—“he hates like me.” But Jackie Kennedy, who would draw so close to her husband’s younger brother, thought Bobby was “the least like his father.” Rose Kennedy saw the devout, sensitive side to her son. Never as emotionally effusive as her husband with their children, she was still calling Bobby her “own little pet” even when he was sixteen. In his role as the scourge of organized crime, Bobby had found a way to combine his father’s raging will with his mother’s religious purity. But Joe Kennedy knew how dangerous an enterprise this was.

  Ruth Watt was an experienced Capitol Hill aide whose level-headed administrative skills helped ensure that the rackets hearings ran smoothly. But when some of the more menacing characters came before the committee, she felt deeply unnerved. “The scariest one,” she thought, was New York godfather Vito Genovese, who had murdered his way to the top of the Mafia, forcing Joe Kennedy’s old bootlegging partner Frank Costello into early retirement along the way. “I would stand in back of where the senators were when he was testifying, and he had the coldest eyes. He would look right through you and just make chills. He was about the coldest individual I think I’ve ever seen.”

  With Bobby leading the witness interrogations, the hearings were fueled by a barely contained fury. He wanted America to shudder with the same outrage he felt when these men, who preferred the dark shadows of power, were summoned into the glare of the TV lights that filled the Caucus Room. The hearings, which dragged on for two and a half years and summoned more than 1,500 witnesses, provided the younger Kennedy with a national stage on which to wage his holy war for America’s soul. On days when celebrated villains were scheduled to appear before the committee, Bobby made sure that his older brother was there. He was already staging JFK’s presidential bid, and he knew these theatrical duels with the leading men of crime would add to his brother’s national luster. Hoffa would vow that if Bobby thought he was going to use him to get his brother elected president, it would “be over my dead body.” But that’s precisely what the younger Kennedy had in mind. “Two tousle-haired brothers from Boston are catching attention in Washington just now as young men who may have big careers ahead,” U.S. News & World Report informed its readers as the rackets hearings began making headlines.

  On the days that handsome young Senator Kennedy strode into the Caucus Room, a bolt of media excitement crackled through the air. “I remember one day that [Jack] came into a hearing, it must have been when they knew he was going to run for the presidency because the press was flocking around him,” recalled Watt. “He hadn’t had any lunch and [his secretary] Evelyn Lincoln came in with a tray of lunch for him, and he took it and went into the telephone booth to try to eat it. The press was like this around him, so he never ate his lunch. I remember it very well, because he was in that little telephone booth with his lunch. No matter what he did it was news. When the Kennedys were around, you felt it in the air.”

  The hearings made Bobby into a media sensation too. An effusive Jack Paar introduced him to his national Tonight Show audience on July 23, 1959 as “the bravest, finest young man I know.” Bobby, still unused to the media glare, came across as a shy, doe-eyed, slope-shouldered boy. At the end of the interview, the emotionally candid Paar blurted out that his guest was “like a baby.” But Bobby turned into a hard-jawed prosecutor that night when he began cataloging the many sins of Jimmy Hoffa and his cronies. “They feel they’re above the law,” Kennedy told Paar’s audience. “They feel they can fix judges and juries. Mr. Hoffa has said every man has his price. This country can’t survive if you have somebody like him operating. He won’t win in the end.”

  The McClellan Committee dragged a variety of notorious figures into the national spotlight. Among them were men who would loom large in the lives of the Kennedys, such as mobsters Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Sam Giancana—each of whom would later join the secret war on Castro that would bring together the Mafia, the CIA, and Cuban exiles. (Even the name of a petty Chicago hood named Jack Ruby would surface during the long hearings, in connection with the Mafia’s Cuba intrigue.) But no witness filled the Senate hearing room with as much explosive tension as Jimmy Hoffa. The confrontations between the Teamster boss and the Kennedy brothers were epic. Even his more cool-headed older brother seemed to absorb Bobby’s heat when he sparred with Hoffa.

  “I’d like to say something, Senator,” Hoffa burst out on one occasion, his voice full of contempt and provocation. Since the Kennedys, in their hatred for him, were trying to single him out from the rest of the labor movement for special federal punishment, why not “spell it out in the law, exempting everyone but Hoffa, okay?” JFK cut him off, his normally smooth sense of Senate formality suddenly gone. “We’re exempting everyone but hoodlums and racketeers and crooks,” he shot back, in a rush of anger and harsh Boston vowels.

  But nothing matched the hatred and fury of the matches between Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy. To Kennedy, the labor boss represented the chilling nexus between the America that most people knew, the country of laws and ideals, and the one where the codes of the jungle prevailed. By the time Hoffa appeared before the Rackets Committee, he was on his way to amassing the kind of power that would make newspaper publishers, business tycoons, senators, governors—even presidential hopefuls—pay him respect. He dreamed of the day when he would take over one of the political parties—it didn’t matter to him whether it was the Republican or Democratic. As Robert Kennedy knew, this impressive national clout was built on blood and corruption.

  In the Senate Caucus Room, the two men went at each other for hours, day after day. Committee member Barry Goldwater was astonished by the “animal anger” between them. “We were like flint and steel,” Hoffa said. “Every time we came to grips the sparks flew.”

  At the witness table, Hoffa’s beady eyes flashed with a sharp intelligence. Despite ceaseless battering from Bobby and the committee members, the grimly determined labor boss never gave ground, always slipping away when it seemed he was backed into a corner. Occasionally Hoffa would weary of the bobbing and weaving and simply smack Kennedy with an epithet. “You’re sick. That’s what’s the matter with you—you are sick,” he spat at Kennedy one afternoon after a testy exchange with the Senate counsel.

  But the most intense confrontations between Kennedy and Hoffa were silent. Kennedy later vividly described the eerie malevolence that seeped out of Hoffa as the two men engaged in combat: “In
the most remarkable of all my exchanges with Jimmy Hoffa, not a word was said. I called it the ‘look.’ It was to occur fairly often, but the first time I observed it was on the last day of the 1957 hearings. During the afternoon, I noticed that he was glaring at me across the counsel table with a deep, strange, penetrating expression of intense hatred. I suppose it must have dawned on him about that time that he was going to be the subject of a continuing probe—that we were not playing games. It was the look of a man obsessed by his enmity, and it came particularly from his eyes. There were times when his face seemed completely transfixed with this stare of absolute evilness. It might last for five minutes—as if he thought that by staring long enough and hard enough he could destroy me. Sometimes he seemed to be concentrating so hard that I had to smile, and occasionally I would speak of it to an assistant counsel sitting behind me. It must have been obvious to him that we were discussing it, but his expression would not change by a flicker.

  “During the 1958 hearings, from time to time, he directed the same shriveling look at my brother. And now and then, after a protracted, particularly evil glower, he did a most peculiar thing: he would wink at me. I can’t explain it. Maybe a psychiatrist would recognize the symptoms.”

  They were a study in opposites. With his sawed-off, tightly coiled body, his blunt-cut, shiny Brylcreemed hair, and his cheap gabardine suits and floodwater pants, Hoffa looked every bit the working stiff he once had been. Born in a backwater Indiana town—the son of a coal driller who died when Jimmy was seven, leaving the family penniless—Hoffa had to scrap his way to the top. He led his first strike at the age of seventeen, a successful wildcat action on the loading docks of Detroit. To match the brute power of the trucking and warehouse companies he was fighting, Hoffa had to use his fists, turning to gangsters for more muscle when the labor battles grew uglier. As he shouldered his way up the Teamster ranks, he used the same blunt force to enforce discipline in his organization. The drivers and warehousemen for whom Hoffa brought home the bacon saw him as their hero, one of their own. But Bobby Kennedy saw him as a traitor to the labor movement, a man who sold out his hardworking membership by turning over their pension funds to hoodlums, cutting shady deals with employers, and crushing union dissent with savage violence.