“Most cases, there are kickbacks,” said prosecutor Henry Peterson. “We’re arresting cops on the scene at some of the raids. Where we can, we’re including conspiracy, bribery, and tax evasion counts to bring in police, district attorneys, city officials, legislators on the take.”6
Attorney Ronald Goldfarb, in his book Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes, recounted the extreme methods of pursuing indictment:
Criminalizing the making of false statements to law enforcement officials and increasing the use of the hard-to-prove perjury laws were tough cases to make, but we’d have to resort to them. Both laws provided opportunities to close investigatory circles and pressure witnesses to cooperate or incriminate themselves. The false statement statute, for example, S.1001 of the federal penal code, made it a crime to lie in certain documents. We would snag racketeers for doing so on home improvement loans, naturalization documents, FAA loans, FCC radio-and telephone-operator license applications, IRS tax documents, and Small Business Administration and Veterans Administration loans. These were not the laws we preferred to use, but they were the ones on the books at the time.7
The attorney general ended the session before noon, so that he could travel back to Hickory Hill for a planned lunch with Robert Morgenthau and Silvio Mollo to discuss the future of the Justice Department. The rumor on Capitol Hill was that Morgenthau might have been Robert Kennedy’s replacement in the department while Kennedy went back to work as his brother’s campaign manager. Before Bobby left, he talked with Ronald Goldfarb about the indictment of a notable mobster using the dubious tactic of estate tax laws.
“Let’s break early,” Bobby said. “I’ll think about it. We’ll decide this afternoon.”8 It was the last time the group would meet.
That afternoon, Bobby was sitting by the pool with Morgenthau and Mollo awaiting the verdict in The United States v. Carlos Marcello. It was two years since the New Orleans Mafia chieftain had been deported, and now the government was trying to oust Marcello permanently on charges that he had reentered the United States illegally.
A conviction of the Mob boss would be another solid victory for Bobby’s war on organized crime.
The phone call that afternoon would effectively end that crusade. It would also end the attorney general’s probes into matters of the CIA and his war to extricate and possibly incarcerate the vice president.
The call came at 1:43 p.m. It was Hoover.
The director of the FBI told Bobby that his brother, the president, when riding through Dallas, had been fired upon and was hit.
“I think it’s serious,”9 Hoover said.
“Jack’s been shot,” Kennedy told his guests, unable to face them. “It may be fatal.”10
In the follow-up call from Hoover, at 2:10 p.m., it would be Bobby relaying the horrid details to the director.
“I called the attorney general to advise him that the president was in a very, very critical condition,” Hoover later wrote. “The attorney general then told me the president had died.”11
The death of President Kennedy signified the death of Bobby’s effectiveness in the Justice Department and a stay of execution for Hoover as the director of the FBI. Hoover’s tradition of going over the head of the attorney general and directly to the president, which had gone unimpeded until the Kennedys took office, would now continue. Lyndon Johnson, as president, would open the lines of communication with Hoover almost immediately after the death of President Kennedy. The pressing order of business would be to convince the public of a lone gunman.
The FBI “starting at 1:10 on November 22,” one Justice Department staffer recalled, “began pissing on the attorney general.” Almost immediately, “we stopped getting information from the FBI on the Bobby Baker investigation. Within a month, the FBI men in the field wouldn’t tell us anything. We started running out of gas.”12
Also dissipated was the hunt to end organized crime. The access that Bobby had enjoyed with the CIA would also be revoked; Johnson made sure of this by ordering CIA director John McCone to let the attorney general know his presence was no longer wanted, needed, or allowed.
With Johnson as the president, Bobby tumbled down the ladder of power. He was no longer the second most powerful man in the country, nor the third. And probably not the fourth.
“Suddenly it occurred to me,” said Justice Department attorney Bob Blakely, “it all depended on Robert Kennedy. And Robert Kennedy depended on John Kennedy. And the day the assassination went down, all that was over.”13
The morning after JFK’s assassination, Robert Kennedy was exposed to a scene that demonstrated just how quickly the paradigm in the Capitol had shifted. Upon entering the White House at 9:00 a.m. to gather up some of his brother’s personal items, Bobby came into contact with a distraught Evelyn Lincoln. When Lyndon Johnson had arrived at the White House as president that morning, he made a special point to expedite the removal of JFK’s secretary in an unemotional fashion.
“I have a meeting at 9:30 and would like you to clear your things out of your office by then so my own girls can come in,”14 Johnson said to Lincoln. Kennedy interceded on Lincoln’s behalf. Johnson, offering a minor concession, gave Lincoln until noon to vacate her office. Lincoln later formed her own views on the assassination. In a letter dated October 7, 1994, she expressed her belief that the “five conspirators, in my opinion, were Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA, and the Cubans in Florida.”15
Other reminders of the Kennedy administration were also quickly moved. Kennedy’s rocking chair, which the president had used to ease the debilitating pain in his back, was overturned in the hallway, making room for the Oval Office carpets to be cleaned. The red rug in the office, installed shortly before the Dallas trip, was quickly removed as well.
“It reminded him of the president being assassinated, and he put another rug in the Oval Office with the presidential seal on it,”16 Cartha DeLoach said.
DeLoach, the FBI’s liaison to the Johnson administration would later, in 1967, notify top FBI officials that some White House aides privately questioned the official conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone assassin. DeLoach wrote in a memo: “In this connection, Marvin Watson [LBJ’s chief of staff] called me late last night and stated that the president had told him, in an off moment, that he was now convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the president felt that [the] CIA had had something to do with plot.”17 It was a move that Johnson would use on several occasions as president, always with a new “group” that he guessed was connected to the plot.
Shortly after the death of John Kennedy, on December 31, 1963, at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, President Johnson would tell Madeleine Brown that the assassination was pulled off by “Texas oil and those fucking renegade intelligence bastards in Washington.”18 Johnson’s daily schedule confirms his stay at the Driskill that New Years Eve, thus confirming Brown’s memory.
Author Alfred Steinberg also places LBJ at the Driskill that night: “On New Year’s Eve [1963], with his first presidential vacation almost over, Johnson paid a surprise visit to the drinking party that Washington reporters away from home were holding at the hotel. He had done handsomely for some of them during the vacation, and they were excited to see him now.”
LBJ’s presidential schedule lists the event at the Driskill as “White House Press.” He often trysted with his girlfriends at the Driskill.
In the dawn of his presidency, Johnson was making a quick transition to solidify power because he still feared a Bobby Kennedy coup.
“During all of that period,” Johnson said. “I think [Bobby] seriously considered whether he would let me be president, whether he should really take the position [that] the vice president didn’t automatically move in. I thought that was on his mind every time I saw him in the first few days.”19
Kennedy was merely trying to cope in those early months, his countenance a combination of fatigue, irritation, and anguish.
/> “I was upset about what had happened on the plane and the fact that [Johnson] came into the [Oval] office,” said Kennedy. “So by this time I was rather fed up with him.” In late December, Bobby, in an attempt at normalcy, threw a party at the Justice Department to celebrate the proficiency of “its for” the past three years. Hoover, normally not one to attend work functions, made an appearance. On arriving, the director was badgered by a still-game Ethel Kennedy, who teased him by speculating who might be the replacement for the director when he retired. She suggested a man on the Los Angeles Police Force whom she knew Hoover hated.20
However, retirement was not in the cards for Hoover. With Johnson in office, the mandatory retirement age was waived, and the director remained as head of the FBI in perpetuity. His position secure, Hoover began to show Kennedy hints of a renaissance of power.
“These people don’t work for us anymore,” Kennedy said. He was talking about Hoover and the FBI.21
The attorney general’s buzzer was removed from the director’s desk. Many employees hired during the Kennedy administration were fired, including Courtney Evans, the go-between from the director to the White House. Evans’s replacement would be Cartha DeLoach, a Johnson man.
With John Kennedy alive, Hoover was constantly wary of the whereabouts of the ubiquitous attorney general. “This certainly proves the point we have been stressing,” Hoover wrote early in Kennedy’s reign. “Our employees should always be busy; engage in no horse play and be properly attired. No one knows when and where A.G. may appear.”22
Kennedy was now, like his purpose, disappearing. In a cruel twist of fate, it was now Johnson in power, Hoover re-animated, and Robert Kennedy sidelined and ineffectual.
Hoover now openly gloated about brushing the attorney general off in the office and at functions. “For that matter, he ceased communicating with Bobby, reporting instead directly to LBJ,” said Kenny O’ Donnell.23
Bobby lasted only ten months as attorney general after his brother’s murder. In his final months in office, he was a shadow of his former self.
“He was a walking zombie in the Department of Justice from the day of the assassination to the day he left,” Blakely said. “I remember vividly the day I went up to say goodbye to him. Looking at him was like looking right through him to the wall. When we shook hands, his hand was limp.”24
The position of power did not matter to Bobby, for in losing his brother, he had lost himself. Bobby turned introspective in the months following his brother’s assassination, losing touch with public service and public life. His first appearance to the American people following the assassination was on Tonight, starring Jack Paar on March 13, 1964. On the show, Bobby was reserved, solemnly sitting facing Paar, with hands carefully folded in his lap. Fielding a question concerning his brother’s legacy, Kennedy answered slowly, many times staring into blank space, careful not to let the emotion, so close to the surface, from bubbling over.
“Well, I think really he made,” Kennedy said, stammering, “Americans feel young again. I think that … I think that he gave all of us more confidence in the country, more confidence that struggles involved in externally and internally would be successful. More confidence … in our … efforts … with those that are opposed to us. Also, he gave great confidence to people who lived in … other countries, great confidence in the United States and in its leadership and that we were dedicated to serve the principles and ideals and that we would live up to them and if necessary … fight for them. I think it changed over a period of years, our own feelings, as well as the feelings of peoples around the world.”25
In order to preserve the legacy of President Kennedy, Bobby, against his beliefs, would not challenge the conclusions of the Warren Commission.
With John Kennedy dead and out of power, Hoover’s trump card was more valuable. Information connecting the late president to Sam Giancana through Frank Sinatra and his former lover Judith Campbell could destroy the fond recollection of Camelot, which had been built up by the press. Hoover not only had information in his files detailing countless brushes with John and female admirers, he now had dirt on Bobby as well.
In late 1961, JFK began an affair with Marilyn Monroe, which lasted until the spring of 1962, when he sent out his brother to end things between the president and the blonde bombshell. Delivering the message, Bobby himself became entangled with her.
“It wasn’t Bobby’s intention,” actor Peter Lawford, brother-in-law to the Kennedys, recalled, “but they became lovers and spent the night in our guest bedroom. Almost immediately, the affair got heavy. It was as if she could no longer tell the difference between Bobby and Jack.”26
The director could tell the difference, and from time to time would remind Kennedy that the intelligence could be leaked at any moment. In July 1964, Hoover let Bobby know that information regarding the scandal had been circulated and would be released. The writings would “make reference to your alleged friendship with the late Miss Marilyn Monroe,” warned Hoover. “He will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate, and that you were in Miss Monroe’s home at the time of her death.”27
Bobby was hogtied. Gun to the head, he issued the view that “There is no question that he [Oswald] did it on his own and by himself. He was not a member of a rightwing organization. He was a confessed Communist, but even the Communists would not have anything to do with him. Ideology, in my opinion, did not motivate his act. It was a single act of an individual protesting against society.”28
In the words of biographer Evan Thomas, though Bobby “gave lip service to the single-gunman explanation, he never quieted his own doubts.”29
For the duration of his remaining years, Bobby held the belief that it was an inside job. Following his brother’s death, he unhesitatingly followed his instincts in an attempt to flesh out his suspicions. The story was further developed in David Talbot’s story about Bobby’s private investigation, Brothers.
Shortly following the assassination, Bobby went to the Director of the CIA John McCone fueled by the information that he already had regarding a CIA/Mafia partnership.
“You know, at the time, I asked McCone,” Bobby said later, “if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.”30
In Talbot’s analysis, Kennedy knew that the information concerning his brother’s assassins would not be available to many, especially in an agency of secret affairs that compartmentalized specific activities, making them knowledgeable to a select few in the ranks. McCone, who became director following the abrupt firing of Allen Dulles, was not privy to information concerning the existence of Mafia–CIA collusion. This was confirmed in testimony by, among others, Bill Harvey, Richard Helms, and McCone himself.
“A mansion has many rooms,” said Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton. “I’m not privy to who struck John.”31
This did not halt Bobby’s belief in a conspiracy, which he privately confided to close associates. Bobby confided in Dick Goodwin, an advisor to the president, who believed as he did.
“We know the CIA was involved, and the Mafia. We all know that,” Goodwin said. “But [exactly] how you link those to the assassination, I don’t know.”32
Though Bobby trusted Goodwin, he still spoke to him about the assassination in cryptic tones. The subject hit too close to home.
“About that other thing,” Bobby said to Goodwin at the tail-end of a late night conversation. “I never thought it was the Cubans. If anyone was involved, it was organized crime. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”33
In his time as senator, Bobby continued his search for knowledge on the death of his brother. In a recent interview, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said that his father had believed the Warren Commission report to be a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship,” and that investigators hired by Bobby had found that Ruby’s and Oswald’s phone records prior to the assassination “were like an inventory” of Mafia figures.34
&n
bsp; Bobby maintained a safe view on the assassination publicly throughout his tenure as a senator in the mid–1960s and while he was running for president in 1968. In Brothers, Talbot recounts a speech that Kennedy made at San Fernando Valley State College on March 25, 1968. He finished his declaration and entered into a question and answer session. After fielding questions concerning his feelings about troop de-escalation in Vietnam and peace initiatives in different parts of the world, the queries shifted to the death of his brother. A question was raised concerning the archives related to President Kennedy’s death, which remained hidden from public view.
“Who killed John Kennedy? We want to know,” cried a female student. Other students screamed in the background. “The archives! When will the archives be opened?”
After a long pause, Bobby answered sharply, “Your manner is overwhelming.” Clearly miffed by the presentation of the question, Bobby still felt the need to respond.
“Could I just say that … and I haven’t answered this question before … but there would be nobody more interested in all of these matters as to who was responsible for the uh … uh,” Bobby stopped, hesitating for a moment to speak his most private words aloud to the public and changed direction to a more sterile, safe place … death of President Kennedy … than I would. I have seen all matters in the archives. If I became president of the United States, I would not … I would not reopen the Warren Commission report. I stand by the Warren Commission report. I have seen everything in the archives, and it will be available at the appropriate time.”35
Privately, Bobby felt differently, and it certainly was hard to mouth words he didn’t believe. At a later campaign event only days before his own assassination, he said just the opposite, according to his former Press Secretary Frank Mankiewicz. When asked if he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s death, he answered with a simple, one-word answer: “Yes.” Mankiewicz recalled “I remember that I was stunned by the answer. It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down the questioning—you know, ‘Yes, now let’s move on.’”
The Man Who Killed Kennedy Page 35