Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  *6 “Lace curtain” Irish are, according to tradition, a family that can afford the luxury of fruit in the house even when nobody is sick.

  *7 McCarthy almost certainly wasn’t an anti-Semite, but as always, he gave better than he got, taking to the Senate floor to unfairly brand Pearson a “sugar-coated voice of Russia” (Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 181).

  *8 Bobby admired the “marvelous things” Hoover had accomplished as a mining engineer and in helping Europe after World War I, he told the TV interviewer David Frost in 1968. He also liked that Joe Kennedy had liked Hoover.

  *9 McCarthy’s probe was spurred in part by reports that material from the Signal Corps labs was turning up in the Soviet Eastern Bloc. That may have been true, but it was also true that the Russians had been U.S. allies during World War II, that they’d openly assigned representatives to the Monmouth labs then, and that as a result—and as a report by the Senate historian concluded years later—“espionage there [was] superfluous” (Executive Sessions, Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, vol. 1, first session, 1953, xxvii).

  *10 Four years later, evidence would emerge proving McCarthy and Cohn partly right—Moss was listed on the Communist Party rolls as they had charged, although whether she was a security risk continues to be debated—but by that time the senator was dead, Cohn was long gone from the limelight, and Moss had become as much a symbol of Cohn’s and McCarthy’s callousness as Peress had been of their self-righteous whistle-blowing (Friedman, “Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss,” Journal of American History, September 2007).

  *11 History has been even less forgiving, concluding that McCarthy overstated if not fabricated his charges of a Communist conspiracy, a verdict that Stan Evans argues is not merely unjust but the opposite of the truth. Documents he unearthed from American and Soviet archives demonstrate that McCarthy was not a reckless blacklister, says Evans, a journalist and pioneer of the conservative movement. The Russians, Evans maintains, were in fact relentless at infiltrating the U.S. government; high-level American officials covered up those embarrassing breaches, and in the end it was McCarthy himself who was blacklisted by liberal reporters and historians.

  Many conservatives, anxious to redeem not just the Wisconsin senator but their own tough stands during the Cold War, have embraced Evans’s thesis, which he laid out in meticulous detail in a 672-page book published in 2007. Others, however, say McCarthy did irreparable harm to conservative ideals and deserves the repudiation he got from his contemporaries and those who came after. “McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions,” William Bennett, secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan and White House drug czar under President George H. W. Bush, wrote in a book published the same year as Evans’s. “From this point on, it would only be necessary for disloyal people or groups to yell ‘McCarthyism’ to distract public attention from real problems.” (Evans, Blacklisted by History; author interview with Evans; and Bennett, America: The Last Best Hope.)

  *12 One unlikely fan was conservative commentator Stan Evans, McCarthy’s most passionate defender, who respected Bobby’s hard work for the Wisconsin senator as well as his unflinching allegiance. “To the end of McCarthy’s life,” Evans said in an interview shortly before his own death in 2015, “Bobby Kennedy was devoted to Joe McCarthy” (Author interview with Evans).

  *13 McCarthy died of acute hepatitis, which was exacerbated by his chronic alcoholism, which may have been exacerbated by manic depression. Bobby watched him slide downhill to the point where he came to hearings drunk and, near the end, couldn’t stand up straight and appeared to be “in a trance. His conversation was not intelligible.” (Herman, Joseph McCarthy, 329–31; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 172–73.)

  Chapter 2

  CRUSADING

  THE TWO MEN were like dogs itching for a fight, teeth bared, sniffing one another from head to tail and ready to snap. Each was keenly aware of the other’s standing and sway, although neither would admit wanting to be at what was billed as a get-acquainted dinner. They had never even said hello before, and never would again on anything approaching friendly terms. Yet there they were that snowy February evening in 1957, hovering at along table set for three in a tony suburb of Washington. Both already understood their fates would be linked, which is why they took time afterward to record in telling detail their recollections of the gathering. And when it was finished, the two would disagree over just about everything that was said and done during their two hours together.

  On one side of the table sat James Riddle Hoffa, a top lieutenant in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who knew his union president, Dave Beck, was about to self-destruct—knew because he almost certainly had leaked the most incriminating evidence of Beck’s wrongdoing. On the other side was Robert Francis Kennedy, the Senate investigator to whom Hoffa had fed that dirt, and who just hours before had confirmed that Hoffa had planted a spy on Kennedy’s staff. The only other person present was Eddie Cheyfitz, a smooth-tongued Washington lawyer and fixer who had worked for the Teamsters and was hosting the dinner at his home in hopes, he said, that each guest would leave less wary of the other.

  “Cheyfitz kept telling me that Hoffa was a good influence….He said Hoffa would answer any questions I had and was anxious to talk to me,” Kennedy said later. Hoffa was getting similar advice to give Kennedy a chance: “I said, ‘For what?’ [Cheyfitz] said, ‘He’d like to talk to you.’ I said, ‘I got nothing to talk to him about.’ ”

  Hoffa greeted Kennedy with a handshake that was strong and firm, but “immediately I was struck by how short he is—only five feet five and a half,” remembered Kennedy, who at five nine didn’t tower over many men. Cheyfitz had a drink and offered one to his guests; both refused, Hoffa because he never touched alcohol, Kennedy because he drank sparingly and only with friends. The talk at dinner was limited to things that didn’t matter and wouldn’t make either man feel he had given ground. “I do to others what they do to me, only worse,” Hoffa said matter-of-factly. Bobby joked that “maybe I should have worn my bulletproof vest.” When they were done eating Cheyfitz’s roast beef they moved to the living room, Kennedy standing in front of the fireplace while Hoffa sat on the sofa. Again, the talk was halting and more about the past than what lay ahead. What little information Jimmy volunteered about his union was, according to Bobby, “a complete fabrication.” Cheyfitz’s détente was not to be.

  At 9:30 Ethel telephoned for Bobby. “She probably called to see if you’re still alive,” Hoffa deadpanned. In a voice meant for everyone to hear, Kennedy said, “I’m still alive, dear. If you hear a big explosion, I probably won’t be.” Then he made his apologies for leaving early. “As I was going out the door, Hoffa said: ‘Tell your wife I’m not as bad as everyone thinks I am,’ ” Bobby wrote in his memoir. “I laughed. Jimmy Hoffa had a sense of humor. He must have laughed himself as he said it. In view of all I already knew, I felt that he was worse than anybody said he was….

  “On my way home I thought of how often Hoffa had said he was tough; that he destroyed employers, hated policemen and broke those who stood in his way….When a grown man sat for an evening and talked continuously about his toughness, I could only conclude that he was a bully hiding behind a façade.”

  Hoffa’s renderings of the evening were even more florid. He, too, used their handshake to measure “what kind of fellow I got,” and Kennedy’s fingertip delivery came up wanting: “I said to myself, ‘Here’s a fella thinks he’s doing me a favor by talking to me.’ ” The rest of the evening reinforced that impression. “The only word that described him is ‘condescending,’ ” Jimmy wrote in his first autobiography. “He asked me numerous personal questions: How much money did I make? How did I happen to get into the union? Why hadn’t I tried to go to college? Clearly he was puzzled over the fact that a kid from a poor family, lacking education, could rise to
the top of the largest union in the nation.”

  Five years later, in his second memoir, Hoffa remembered new details: “ ‘I’d like to talk to Hoffa alone,’ Kennedy told Cheyfitz almost as if he was speaking to the butler. ‘I came here to get some things straight in my mind,’ Kennedy said after Cheyfitz left the room. ‘That’s okay with me,’ I told him.” Bobby insisted the Teamsters were infested with racketeers. Jimmy begged to differ: “We don’t, absolutely do not and never have had, any underworld connections.” Then, out of nowhere, Kennedy laid down a challenge: “ ‘Hoffa, I’ll just bet that I can beat you at Indian hand wrestling.’ ”

  “I leaned back in my chair and looked at him as if he was crazy,” Jimmy recalled. “I couldn’t believe he was serious but he stood up, loosened his necktie, took off his jacket, and rolled up his sleeve….Like taking candy from a baby, I flipped his arm over and cracked his knuckles on to the top of the table. It was strictly no contest and he knew it. But he had to try again. Same results….He just got up, his face red as fire, rolled down his sleeve, put on his jacket, and walked out of the room. He didn’t even stay for dinner. I’m damn certain in my heart that Robert F. Kennedy became my mortal enemy that night.”

  He was correct about the outcome if not the timing. Their bad blood began even earlier and would stain both men’s lives until each died prematurely at the hands of an assassin. Given the influence each wielded, even at that formative point in their careers, the feud would become one of the defining relationships of America in the 1950s and stretching into the ’60s. Hoffa was on his way to taking over the Teamsters, and Kennedy was one of the few people capable of slowing his rise. It was Big Labor versus Big Government at a moment when both exercised more power than they ever had or would.

  His nearly three years busting racketeers and chasing Hoffa would define Bobby in the public mind even more than the work with Joe McCarthy that he went out of his way to soft-pedal. To fans, this was Bobby finding his path as a missionary. He unraveled layer upon layer of union fraud and battled labor bosses on behalf of a besieged rank and file. To doubters, it was young Kennedy applying the worst lessons of McCarthyism. He ridiculed witnesses who relied on the Fifth Amendment and got branded with a label of ruthless that he would never escape. Both were half right. He was harnessing the conviction as a crusading reformer that would mark his public career, but he was doing it with a single-mindedness and self-righteousness that would earn him legions of enemies as well as admirers. The notion of nuance still eluded him. There remained, at this second critical stage of his career, a fine line between Bobby the white knight and Bobby the zealot.

  —

  BOBBY HAD REJOINED the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in February 1954, three years before his get-to-know-you dinner with Hoffa, taking up the newly created post of counsel to subcommittee Democrats in a Senate still controlled by Republicans. A year later, when the Democrats took back the Senate and the subcommittee, Bobby’s life suddenly got better. His side now controlled the hearings and the choice of villains and vices to target. McCarthy remained a member but had been defanged the day the Senate condemned him. The senator who mattered most now was Chairman John McClellan, a crusty, conservative fifty-eight-year-old Arkansan who was as straitlaced as McCarthy was peacockish. Like McCarthy, McClellan let his top lawyer run the show day to day, which suited Bobby so well that he stayed for a total of five and a half years. That was longer than any job he had held, or any he would have later.

  McClellan grew close enough to Kennedy during those years that he would liken him to a son, but it was Bobby’s actual father who cinched this posting, as he had earlier ones. “I want you to give my son a job. I think it would be good exposure for him—push along his career,” the elder Kennedy told McClellan. How much he wanted it was clear in the checks Joe made out to the senator. Senate secretary Bobby Baker says it was $50,000 a year, starting before Bobby graduated from law school and paid as a retainer to McClellan’s law firm in Little Rock. McClellan, in a letter to Joe Kennedy seven months after Bobby began his new job, didn’t mention an amount but said, “I am grateful for the assistance you gave me in my recent campaign for re-election. You were most kind and generous to do it.”

  The first order of business for the new subcommittee majority was to clean up old business from when it was under McCarthy’s control. In March, Bobby opened a fresh set of hearings into the Army’s promotion of the dentist Irving Peress, documenting forty-eight instances of the Army’s having mishandled the case but adding that they were not “inspired by subversive interests,” as McCarthy had alleged. He also sifted through McCarthy’s files on Communist subterfuge in defense installations, again finding the evidence thin. He assured a newspaper reporter that his panel was not “a whit less interested in rooting Communists out of government than it was when Senator McCarthy ran the show.” But his actions belied his promise. Mere months after McClellan and Bobby took over, the subcommittee reverted to its pre-McCarthy mission: rooting out government fraud and waste, a task especially appealing to Senate Democrats with a Republican president running that government.

  Probes like those seldom cracked the headlines, largely because they were boring. The case of Air Force secretary Harold Talbott broke the mold. He had used his Pentagon stationery and influence to drum up business for a company of efficiency experts in which he had been a partner and his family still owned an interest. Bobby learned about the conflict of interest from Charles Bartlett, a Kennedy friend and Washington correspondent for the Chattanooga Times. The committee counsel was deterred neither by his senators’ admiration of Talbott nor by the fact that the sixty-seven-year-old secretary was part of Joe Kennedy’s social set in Palm Beach. “I talked to Bobby about doing a sort of joint investigation, which we did. He used the committee’s facilities, and I used what I could,” recalled Bartlett. “We finally got to a hearing, which was highly dramatic because there was not a Senator who supported what we were doing….It was only Bobby’s persistence that made a success of the hearings, which finally broke in such a way that the President had to request Mr. Talbott’s resignation.” Bartlett walked away with the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, while Bobby notched a reputation as a bulldog auditor and prosecutor.

  Rose Kennedy was surprised by—and proud of—her son’s inquiry and its outcome. “I can’t imagine Bob investigating some one as old & matured & as social as Talbott,” she wrote her husband in France in July 1955. “You would eat it up.” He did, as reflected in his letter to Ethel that same month: “We have been reading in the papers over here about Bobby and Talbott and also the foreign radio stations have carried the Peress summation, so Bobby is gradually earning a place in the sun that he so well deserves.”

  Bobby and his team claimed a number of scalps in addition to Talbott’s. Their hearings ended the careers of Interstate Commerce Commission chairman Hugh Cross (possible influence peddling) and Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert Tripp Ross (millions in military contracts went to his wife). But some witnesses he accused pointed the finger back at him. Mella Hort, a former government contract administrator, testified that she had confessed to wrongdoing only after Bobby and an aide “closeted” her in a “hot room” where she was “browbeaten, badgered and kicked around” to the point where “I’d have sworn I put the crack in the Liberty Bell.” Kennedy, she said, “can be sweet as sugar, and then the next moment—bam.” On its own, Hort’s testimony would seem self-serving, but it reflected a pattern with Bobby, according to Ralph de Toledano, a conservative syndicated columnist who tallied the purported misdeeds in his book RFK: The Man Who Would Be President. “Bobby,” de Toledano wrote, “had demonstrated once more that he was dedicated to the Kennedy precept: The important thing is to win.”

  Bobby never denied wanting to come out on top, although he never understood how slippery the slope was between fervor and fanaticism. When he worked late into the night, it went without saying that his staff would as well. He ran ins
tead of walked up stairs. He pre-interviewed witnesses to avoid the kinds of embarrassing surprises during public hearings that had plagued Roy Cohn and Senator McCarthy. That kind of meticulousness and intensity was built into Bobby’s DNA. People increasingly understood what Joe Kennedy meant when he said, admiringly, that “when Bobby hates you, you stay hated.” Invited to a testimonial dinner for his old adversary Cohn, Bobby declined, writing, “It is my feeling that being anti-Communist does not automatically excuse a lack of integrity in every other facet of life.”

  Such ferocity made some journalists like de Toledano into lifelong critics, but it won over many who saw Kennedy and McClellan evolving into the most effective spotlight team on Capitol Hill. Under Bobby, “the committee has plowed into some remarkable chapters of misdoings—numerous charges of graft and corruption in the handling of Government contracts for military supplies, a charge that public office was used for private gain,” Cabell Phillips wrote in a long profile in The New York Times. “Kennedy is the meticulous researcher and compiler of evidence; McClellan the shrewd and implacable cross-examiner. Between them they make a great deal of sense and a great deal of progress on whatever chore the Senate assigns to them.” Clark Mollenhoff, a journalist who would win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the union rackets, went a step further: “No history of American labor can be written that does not include an account of the dramatic nine-year period in which a sternfaced senator from Arkansas and a boyish-appearing lawyer from Boston rocked the worlds of labor and politics.”

  Nobody started out more skeptical about Kennedy during those Senate staff years than William O. Douglas, the most impassioned civil libertarian ever to sit on the Supreme Court. He anguished over Bobby’s apparent disdain for the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination: “I didn’t like to see this committee put a man on the stand just to see how many times they could get him to say, ‘I invoke the Fifth Amendment.’ ” He thought Bobby was “very aggressive,” “always overcompensating,” and not the kind of person one would choose to spend extended time with. So when Joe Kennedy suggested that Douglas take Bobby along on his trip to the Soviet Union, the justice reacted by looking for a way not to. Douglas found Joe “a crusty reactionary and a difficult man,” but he knew the critical role the Kennedy patriarch had played in getting President Roosevelt to appoint him first to the Securities and Exchange Commission, then to the high court. Joe also served as “a kind of father image” for her husband, recalled Mercedes Douglas, his wife at the time. “Bill would do anything for Joe.”