Two days later, a reporter queried Bobby on the story to date and what might lie ahead. Throwing out possibilities, he asked what if Hoffa, now caught red-handed, somehow escaped justice. “I’ll jump off the Capitol,” Kennedy answered.
Later that month, and awaiting Hoffa’s trial in federal court, the Rackets Committee turned its attention to Dave Beck. Senator McClellan opened the hearings by saying the panel had evidence that the union president had “misappropriated” $320,000 in union funds. Beck now took advantage of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
“I’m only doing it on the advice of my chief counsel, Senator Duff,” he told the committee, “who occupies or did occupy a position of honor in the United States Government comparable to what you now occupy.” Beck had hired former Pennsylvania senator James Duff, defeated for reelection the previous year, to defend him before the committee.
In the end, what hurt Beck more than the big theft was a smaller one. The Teamsters rank and file reacted negatively to the revelation that the labor boss had raised $76,000 in contributions for a union man’s widow, only to then pocket $12,000 of it for himself.
Ed Guthman, who’d brought Bobby to the investigation of Beck, was impressed with what he’d seen. He saw Kennedy as dedicated to bringing down big shots who exploited the average worker. He also liked him personally. “Bob kept his word that he would protect our sources within the union. I appreciated that, and respected the skill and tenacity with which he and his investigators went about their work.”
• • •
Since his censure, Joe McCarthy was now a spent force on Capitol Hill and in obvious decline. While Bobby regarded the once highly combative figure as now the most cooperative Republican on the Rackets Committee, the tragedy of the man was clear. “Drunk the last three times he’s been to the hearing,” he noted in his diary.
Lem Billings recalls Bobby taking him along on a visit to the McCarthys at home. Jean, the senator’s young wife, did most of the talking while Joe himself appeared to be in a stupor. “It was typical of Bobby,” Billings said, “to go and see somebody who was in trouble.”
That May, Bobby’s former boss died at Bethesda Naval Hospital due to inflammation of the liver. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who’d dominated the national press from early 1950 through 1954, had drunk himself to death. Kennedy received the news over the car radio at National Airport. “I was in the car with Daddy,” his daughter Kathleen, six years old at that time, told me. “I remember that he drove around three times—it was sad.” Later, in his diary Bobby wrote: “It was all very difficult for me as I feel that I have lost an important part of my life, even though it was in the past.”
The flag-draped coffin containing the body of Senator McCarthy was carried up the steps of the U.S. Capitol for services in the Senate Chamber following a funeral mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Seventy senators were in attendance. The burial took place the next day at St. Mary’s Church in Appleton, Wisconsin. Arriving there to pay his respects, Bobby asked a reporter he knew for a ride to the church, at the same time requesting that he not report on his being there.
Decades later, just before his own death, Edward Kennedy wrote of his brother’s steadfast loyalty to McCarthy: “He was castigated repeatedly for this, but he probably could not have made himself behave otherwise. Loyalty was one of my brother’s greatest virtues, and he would not toss over a friend just because he had fallen out of favor with the world.”
That June, Jimmy Hoffa went to trial in federal court for payments to the spy he’d placed on the Rackets Committee. Representing him was a rising Washington trial attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, who’d been defense lawyer for Joseph McCarthy in the hearings leading to his censure.
Kennedy, who’d had several lunches with the Holy Cross grad—now faced Williams as a prosecution witness. Given the film footage it held of the defendant handing an envelope to his plant on the committee staff, he had every reason to be confident of the government’s case.
Knowing he faced the damning evidence, the streetwise Williams saw the need for audacity. His chance of winning the case depended on the attitude of the jury, two thirds of whom were African American, to the defendant. Would they look at Hoffa in terms of the power he wielded or in terms of whom he represented? As a boss or as a champion of labor?
Williams’s bold stroke was to arrange for former heavyweight champion Joe Louis, a national hero for decades, to stop by the courtroom. There, in full view of those about to decide Hoffa’s fate, Louis offered a warm greeting of support to the defendant. It was a moment most of the spectators there that day would never forget. What had moved Louis to make such a dramatic gesture? A record company hired Louis in a “public relations” capacity soon after his appearance at the Hoffa trial. It had just received a $2 million loan from the Teamsters pension fund.
But with all the goodwill generated by Louis’s public support of Hoffa, Williams needed a clear explanation for the facts at hand. He still had to explain why his client was passing all that cash to a federal employee. The defense he conjured was tantamount to a magic trick. Yes, that was a manila envelope filled with money. Yes, it was being passed—right there on camera. The rabbit Williams now pulled from the hat was an imaginative and a narrowly plausible explanation.
The dramatic evidence the jurors had watched was evidence not of a crime, Williams declared, but rather a fee. What the scene had shown was a client—Hoffa—simply paying his own attorney for services rendered. The gambit was just enough for reasonable doubt. And it worked.
Kennedy, getting news of the acquittal, was devastated.
Ed Williams, meanwhile, was already enjoying his rout of the righteous Senate counsel. He recalled for all in earshot what young Kennedy had promised to do if he lost the case. “I’m going to send Bobby Kennedy a parachute for when he jumps off the Capitol dome.”
Williams, as a criminal lawyer, thought Bobby naive. “He divided everyone up. There are the white hats and the black hats. If you weren’t for him, then you were against him. There was no middle ground.”
Kennedy friend and biographer Arthur Schlesinger agreed. He believed Kennedy, for whom contests such as the Hoffa trial offered a moral battlefield, was frustrated by the constraints of the courtroom. The assumptions Bobby made about the Hoffas of the world, he thought, were “driven by a conviction of righteousness, a fanaticism of virtue, a certitude about guilt that vaulted over gaps in evidence.” What he failed to take into account was that justice isn’t always served, that the “white hats” don’t always win.
Two months later, Kennedy called Hoffa before the Rackets Committee. His acquittal, in the face of powerful evidence for conviction, had by now covered him with an aura of invincibility. And Hoffa knew it. “Don’t you know I could have you killed?” he brutally confronted one potential witness. “Don’t you know I could have you pushed out this window? I’ve got friends who would shoot you in your tracks someday while you’re just walking down the street. If I did it, no jury would even convict me. I have a special way with juries.”
Now having the union official on the stand before him, Bobby wasted no time establishing his criminality.
Kennedy: Since you’ve been with the Teamsters union, you’ve been arrested a number of times, haven’t you?
Hoffa: That is correct.
Kennedy: How many times, approximately, do you think?
Hoffa: Well, I don’t know, Bob. I haven’t counted them up.
Unlike Dave Beck, whom he hoped to replace, Jimmy Hoffa wanted to show how tough he was. For him, claiming the Fifth Amendment right not to give evidence that might tend to self-incriminate was a sign of weakness. Instead, he again and again clung to a failure of memory, all the while cloaking his passivity in a villainous demeanor.
Hoffa, Bobby would recall, “was glaring at me across the counsel table with a deep, strange penetrating expression of intense hatred. . . . There were times when his face seemed completely transfixed with this
stare of absolute evilness.”
Rather than avoid eye contact, Bobby had no trouble returning the dirty look. Hoffa, catching his eye, switched to winking at him. “It would drive the bastard crazy,” the labor boss said.
Chairman McClellan had given Kennedy a free hand to run the hearings. Again and again, the Teamster official would reply to Bobby’s questions saying he didn’t remember. It continued like this for four days. “We’ve proceeded to the point where the witness has no memory,” McClellan said. “And he can’t be helpful even when his memory is refreshed.” Finally, the chairman had had it. For him, the questioning of Hoffa had become “useless and a waste of the committee’s time.” Realizing they weren’t getting anywhere, he dismissed the witness.
Ed Guthman, still covering the hearings for The Seattle Times, could see what was driving Kennedy’s and McClellan’s persistence, as well as their frustration. The man testifying in front of them—leader of the country’s largest, most powerful labor union, with vast funds under his control—was repeating his MO. He seemed once again about to escape justice.
For Guthman, however, the difference lay in Hoffa’s pursuers. They weren’t ready to quit. “With McClellan and Bob, pressure from Beck and Hoffa had the opposite effect. The more evidence of improper financial transactions, gangland connections and oppressive use of power that they found, the harder they investigated and the more determined they became to see that law violations were prosecuted and that new laws were enacted to curb the expanding power of corrupt union leaders.”
The effect of Hoffa’s acquittal—in his 1957 criminal trial—was to enhance his stature among his million and a half members. After all, hadn’t he beaten the law? That October, he was elected to replace the discredited Dave Beck as the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Despite Hoffa’s continued rise, Bobby’s crusade earned him the admiration of the man who’d brought him into the fight. “You have carried a candle that has been a beacon to hundreds of reporters and editors, thousands of politicians and labor leaders, and literally millions of the rank-and-file labor union members and their families,” Clark Mollenhoff wrote Bobby soon after the union election. “You may go ahead to higher office than committee counsel, but it is doubtful if anything you do will have greater force for good government and clean labor than what you have done this year.”
The following months proved even harder for Bobby on the Hoffa front. “This year seems to have been tougher than last,” he wrote in 1958. “I feel like we’re in a major fight. We have to keep going, keep the pressure on or we’ll go under.”
Called yet again before the Rackets Committee, Hoffa showed himself once more as an exasperating and exhausting witness. At one session lasting into the evening, he gloated at the obvious fatigue on Bobby’s face. “Look at him, look at him!” Hoffa raged openly to the committee. “He’s too tired. He just doesn’t want to go on.”
Yet, weary as he was, Bobby wasn’t about to abandon the fight. His battle with the crooked and dangerous labor boss brought out in him a spirit he’d lacked before. While it wasn’t the first time he’d faced public combat, in previous contests—the challenge to Lodge; the McCarthy period—he’d seen too much of the dirtiness on both sides. The drive to take down Jimmy Hoffa was different. It refreshed the altar boy in him, and, unlike any other role before, even as tough as it’d become, it suited him perfectly. “He wasn’t frustrated during that period,” Lem Billings recognized. “This is when he blossomed. He wasn’t the angry young man anymore, and he was much more pleasant to be around because he hadn’t this terrible feeling that he wasn’t contributing. For the first time in his life, he was happy.”
He could see it himself: “My first love,” Bobby said with no little irony, “is Jimmy Hoffa.” But the further irony was now Hoffa’s own, self-inflicted plight, damned by the company he’d deliberately chosen to keep. Asked whether he thought Hoffa might be capable of reform, of cutting off his underworld connections, Bobby’s reply was knowing and dark. He can’t do it, was his answer. They won’t let him. “He wouldn’t live.”
In April 1959, the Kennedy team held its first strategy session for the upcoming presidential campaign. Though he was to have the major role in running the operation, Bobby gave priority for the moment to a project of his own. Staying at Hickory Hill, his stately home in Northern Virginia, he worked on The Enemy Within, a memoir detailing his efforts on the Rackets Committee. The publishers trumpeted it as “a crusading lawyer’s personal story of a dramatic struggle with the ruthless enemies of clean unions and honest management.”
In its pages the reader looks back with him at the frightening alternate universe of the rogue figures he’d been battling. Of Dave Beck, who’d crumbled before his eyes, he wrote: “Now he was dead, although still standing. All that was needed was someone to push him over and make him lie down as dead men should.” Bobby accused Jimmy Hoffa of continuing to operate “a conspiracy of evil.”
You also meet here in Bobby’s narrative such hard men as John Dioguardi, known as “Johnny Dio,” the garment industry racketeer charged in the acid-blinding of labor columnist Victor Riesel; Frank Kierdorf, the arsonist who on his last job turned himself into a human torch, whose dying words to the police officer trying to gain a confession were “go fuck yourself”; and, finally, Momo Salvatore “Sam” Giancana, the Mafia hitman and Al Capone’s Chicago successor, known for hanging his victims on meathooks.
In the end, though, Hoffa remained the most despicable figure for Bobby. “Every man has his price,” the union boss frequently announced, bragging of his ability to control the very institutions society had built to bring down such outlaws as him. Often adding, “I have every politician in town in my office.” His pervasive influence was more than Kennedy could bear. It was what drove him, for three years, to fight the malignancy Hoffa represented in our national body.
“The tyrant, the bully, the corrupter and corrupted are figures of shame. The labor leaders who became thieves, who cheated those whose trust they had accepted brought dishonor on a vital and largely honest labor movement. The businessmen who succumbed to the temptation to make a deal in order to gain an advantage over their competitors perverted the moral concepts of a free American system,” he concluded in The Enemy Within.
There’s that word again: “moral.” It was the all-important one for Bobby Kennedy. In the campaign that followed, the Kennedy brothers would be lionized for the quest in which chief counsel Bobby had taken the lead to push corruption out of the American labor movement. It had, he wrote, brought into public view the values Bobby Kennedy held dearest. They were the concluding words of Bobby’s book: the “toughness and idealism that guided our nation in the past,” a “spirit of adventure, a will to fight what is evil, and a desire to serve.”
Bobby on the floor of the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ENFORCER
“. . . and keep me out of it.”
—JACK KENNEDY
“How do you expect to run a successful campaign if you don’t get started?” Bobby Kennedy demanded of his brother, now launched on his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. “A day lost now can’t be picked up on the other end. It’s ridiculous that more work hasn’t been done already.”
After hearing that rebuke late in 1959, Jack’s quiet aside to Red Fay was equally telling: “How would you like looking forward to that voice blasting into your ear for the next six months?”
One of the candidate’s strengths was his instinct for spotting the talents of others, and understanding how best to use them. It wasn’t his brother’s company he now sought, but his competence. Bobby understood. “It doesn’t matter if they like me or not,” Bobby would say. “Jack can be nice to them. . . . Somebody has to be able to tell them ‘no.’ ” Jack Kennedy trusted Bobby to say “no” more emphatically and to speak for him more authoritatively than anyone else.
This included confrontations Jack wished to avoid. To win the Democratic Party’s nomination was the first step, but to gain that meant shoving all possible rivals off the course. Most urgently, he needed first to know who they were.
An important assignment now fell to Bobby. He couldn’t be blamed for not welcoming it. Lyndon Johnson, the man most likely to emerge as the greatest threat to Jack’s presidential ambitions, had been denying any interest in it.
But was he telling the truth? A master of the political balance sheet—who owed what to whom—Johnson preferred to control information rather than dispense it. And because of their history of mutual antipathy—not to mention Johnson’s contempt for Joseph P. Kennedy—sending Bobby down to Texas to conduct reconnaissance didn’t seem the most obvious choice.
As Senate majority leader since early 1955, Johnson had both taken and made every advantage he could to strengthen his power. It helped that President Eisenhower focused his strengths mainly on national defense and foreign policy, leaving domestic matters to Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn.
Not surprisingly, Bobby Kennedy was a contrarian when it came to Johnson’s reputation as a shrewd, forceful leader. To him, Johnson merely happened to be in the right place at the right time, benefiting from the confluence of a large Democratic Senate majority and a Republican president less interested in at-home issues.
But the Kennedy effort badly needed to know what Johnson was up to in 1960. Bobby, on Jack’s orders, arranged to visit the Texan at his ranch. For him, it would be setting off for alien territory—the spread near Stonewall, Texas, where Johnson had been born and would always call home. It became even more alien when he was dragooned into a deer hunt. Knocked to the ground by the recoil from his shotgun, Bobby had to endure a gloating rebuke from his host. “You’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man!” Johnson told him. For someone who’d played varsity football and taken on Jimmy Hoffa, that couldn’t have sat well.
Bobby Kennedy Page 14