Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  Bobby needed Hickory Hill as a home base after all the moves he had made as a child, starting in Brookline, Massachusetts, then to Riverdale and Bronxville in New York, and off to London with his father the ambassador. He boarded at high schools in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, and at college and graduate school in Cambridge, Lewiston, and Charlottesville. He had spent summers in a seaside mansion overlooking Nantucket Sound, and winter vacations were in Joe’s six-bedroom compound on fashionable North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach. Married life had also meant perpetual moves, back and forth to Washington, then to a series of rented houses. Bobby would always be the glue that held together the world of his parents and siblings, a fact his father had acknowledged in 1955 by naming this son executor of his estate. But now, finally, Bobby had a home of his own and the stability he had coveted. His manor near the Potomac River provided a haven and a mooring. The move-in could not have been timed better: The family arrived at Hickory Hill just a month before Bobby’s dinner with Jimmy Hoffa, in the midst of a crusade against union graft that would upend his world and let him find himself.

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  U.S. SENATORS DIDN’T like ruffling feathers in that get-along era when everyone loved Lucy and father knew best—but they could and did when the people who elected them got angry enough. That is what happened in 1956 when a mobster tossed sulfuric acid into the eyes of Victor Riesel, a syndicated reporter investigating corruption in New York’s garment, construction, and trucking industries. The nation was incensed, and in January 1957, the Senate chartered a Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management to suggest legislative fixes that would make all labor and business organizations more open and honest. While the special committee promised to make its inquiry broad-based, from the start it focused on scandals brewing within the nation’s biggest and richest union—the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America. Senator McClellan and his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had already begun probing, but the Teamsters insisted that any look at labor practices be undertaken by the Labor Subcommittee and its more union-friendly chairman, Senator John F. Kennedy. JFK, whose eyes were on the White House, was glad to pass on the political hot potato, and a compromise was reached: McClellan would chair the new eight-member body, with four senators coming from the Labor Committee and the rest from McClellan’s Government Operations Committee. There would be equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans.

  That sounded even-handed, but McClellan would run what became known as the Rackets Committee with an authority nearly as absolute as Joe McCarthy had exercised in his investigations in the early 1950s, when McClellan and the other Democrats quit in protest. McCarthy was on the new labor-management panel, and his old aide Bobby Kennedy served as its chief lawyer and top researcher. Kennedy was initially skeptical about taking on the mighty Teamsters, whose truckers had the power to keep America moving or stop it in its tracks. He became convinced when Clark Mollenhoff, an intrepid reporter at the Des Moines Register and Tribune, brought him ever stronger evidence not just of the need for an investigation of labor vices, but of why the problem-plagued Teamsters was the place to start. “I assumed he was just another young lawyer who didn’t want to take on the job of fighting the labor racketeers,” recalled Mollenhoff. “I didn’t blame him completely, for there were few prosecutors with the interest and the courage.”

  In August 1956, Bobby signaled to his staff that it was about to launch one of the deepest and broadest congressional inquiries ever. His assistant assumed a four-inch-deep receipt box would be adequate to hold the file cards on sources, targets, and leads. Mollenhoff suggested she get a full drawer. Nobody imagined that the probe would stretch for three years and the index cards alone would fill three cabinets with fifty file drawers. Much of the media back then knew Bobby only as Jack Kennedy’s little brother, Joe’s socialite son, and McCarthy’s bulldog inquisitor. To the Teamsters, he appeared to be just the latest in a line of congressional investigators they had been able to outsmart and outlast. Liberals perceived him as a union buster who, if he kept an open mind, would see that management was the problem, not labor. He was about to defy all those low expectations, just as he had growing up as the forgotten child in a family of overachievers. He wasn’t sure what lay ahead but couldn’t wait to have at it.

  To gear up, he hired accountants, lawyers, and other analysts, then borrowed more from the Internal Revenue Service and General Accounting Office. The staff eventually reached 104, with a hundred applicants for each opening. Most were in their late twenties and early thirties, enterprising, diligent, and certain they were right. Like their boss, they knew nothing about the underworld, and little about union statecraft or human frailties. But they worked harder than anybody except Bobby knew they could, interviewing an average of thirty-five witnesses to find one they wanted to testify publicly, then screening those few for up to five hours for each hour they would spend on the stand. Every field hearing required eight months of spadework by two investigators and six accountants. They tracked, minute by minute, the union officials’ hotel check-ins, gasoline purchases, phone calls to business partners and mistresses, and visits to lockboxes. Documents were stacked floor to ceiling, with each indexed and cross-indexed.

  Pierre Salinger went to work for the committee following the demise of the magazine he worked for, Collier’s. One night he threw a party for seventy-five overworked staffers. Bobby and Ethel didn’t leave until 2:30 in the morning, yet two and a half hours later, the beefy researcher was jolted awake by a call from Kennedy: “I’ll be by to pick you up in twenty-five minutes. We’ve got a big day coming up.” That spirit—part frat boy, part Marine—was infectious, and Salinger became one of a long list of Senate aides who stayed on with the Kennedys, in his case, as White House press secretary. Bobby, who had the only office with a door, captured that camaraderie when he posted on his wall excerpts from a speech by Winston Churchill: “We shall not flag or fail….We shall never surrender.”

  The Rackets Committee’s first target was a sitting duck. Dave Beck had started as a laundry truck driver and eventually clawed his way to the Teamsters presidency. The stocky, baldheaded Beck fancied himself the statesman of big labor, and he brought to his union a businesslike discipline, entree to the Eisenhower White House, and a sprawling headquarters a block from the Capitol that everyone called the Marble Palace (they called Beck “His Majesty the Wheel”). Along the way he dipped into the union treasury to support a lifestyle lavish enough to set off alarms for journalists like Mollenhoff and for Teamsters insiders, who passed on their suspicions to Kennedy and his forensic investigators. Although many of the incriminating files had been shredded, the committee early in 1957 pieced together evidence that Beck had taken $370,000 in membership funds that he did not intend to pay back. Among those whose pockets he picked was the widow of his best friend. Beck, who eventually would be convicted of income tax evasion and embezzlement, insisted it was all a case of bookkeeping errors. By the end of his hearings, Kennedy wrote, “Dave Beck had been shown to be cruel, stingy, avaricious and arrogant. But had he not been so arrogant, his other faults would not have been so pronounced.”*4

  Beck was a warm-up. Bobby had always been able to sniff out where the real power lay, and his target early on was the man who had been building a base in the Midwest that rivaled Beck’s on the West Coast. Nobody knew more about trucking than Jimmy Hoffa. In contrast to the hoity-toity Beck, Hoffa relished his image as the “Teamsters’ teamster.” He even looked like an eighteen-wheeler, built low to the ground and tough to roll over. Everything from his fingers to his disposition was thick and calloused. He lost his father at age seven, helped his mother feed the family by snaring birds and rabbits, and married a girl he’d met on a picket line after arriving for their first date with a bloody bandage on his head. He had been teargassed and billy-clubbed for the sake of the union. He had watched his brother get shot and, between 1937 and 1946, Jimmy
was arrested sixteen times, leading to three convictions. He hated lawyers, politicians, and puffed-up union men like Dave Beck. His disdain for the trappings of office that had ensnared Beck, combined with an utter lack of scruples, made Hoffa a tougher adversary and, for Bobby, a more alluring one.

  Their radically different backgrounds and outlooks made a Kennedy-Hoffa feud seem inevitable. Bobby grew up with the privileges that come with money and elite education; Jimmy prided himself on rising to the top of his field despite having started life as a strawberry picker and never making it past the ninth grade. Bobby had the leanness and elegant bones of an Irish setter; Jimmy was squat and rough-hewn like a pit bull. Truth telling was Bobby’s calling card and he prided himself on the accuracy of his recall. Jimmy loved weaving and reweaving yarns: Did Bobby stick around for dinner that night in 1957 at Eddie Cheyfitz’s house, as Jimmy said in his first book, or did he walk out without eating, which made for a better story in his second?

  Yet for all their attempts to accentuate their differences, Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy had more in common than either could acknowledge. Both were determined to outwork their colleagues and each other, with Bobby heading back to the office when he saw the lights on in Jimmy’s nearby office and Jimmy, once he heard that story, routinely leaving them on when he left for the night. Each had hard eyes that didn’t let go. Both compensated for insecurity about being short with outsized bluster. Each had a distinctive tic—Jimmy twirled his ruby ring around his stubby finger, Bobby twirled a lock of hair around his lean finger. Both wore white socks with dress suits and did push-ups in the office. Bobby was one of the few who could outcharm Jimmy, or be even surlier, depending on his audience and mood. Each was self-justifying and un-blushingly competitive, qualities that inspired steadfast friends and mortal foes alike. Journalists compared both men to coiled steel traps—and each knew better than anyone else how to set off the other.

  Kennedy suspected from the beginning that Hoffa, anxious to replace his nominal boss, was the ultimate source of the juicy morsels he had been fed about Beck’s malfeasance. He grew more convinced when Hoffa denied it. What Bobby knew for sure was that a lawyer named John Cye Cheasty had turned up in his office saying that Hoffa paid him to get a job with the committee, then to pass sensitive information back to the ambitious Teamsters leader. Kennedy hired Cheasty and turned him into a double agent. On the afternoon of Kennedy’s get-acquainted dinner with Hoffa in February 1957, the FBI was taking pictures of Cheasty handing committee documents to Hoffa, who showed his gratitude by handing back a wad of bills. A month later, on the evening of March 13, agents sprang their trap: Cheasty passed on another stack of records, Hoffa thanked him and put the manila envelope into his pocket, and when he walked back into his hotel the Teamsters official was surrounded by G-men. They arrested him on federal bribery and conspiracy charges and brought him to the federal courthouse just before midnight. On hand to gloat were Bobby and Ethel, who’d been tipped off by J. Edgar Hoover and in turn roused all the reporters they could find.

  It was the opening salvo in a clash that would last both of their life-times, and that was imprinted—asymmetrically—in each of their minds. “He stared at me for three minutes, with complete hatred in his eyes,” Bobby recalled. “Then somehow we got into a discussion about who could do the most push-ups.” Jimmy said he could manage thirty-five; Bobby insisted he could do more. It was a childish exchange—who was tougher?—but no more so than their supposed arm wrestling at Cheyfitz’s dinner. Hoffa remembered the late-night scene at the courthouse this way: “I said, ‘Listen, Bobby, you run your business and I’ll run mine. You go on home and go to bed. I’ll take care of things. Let’s don’t have no problems.’ He was very unhappy because I called him Bobby. He’s a kid, a spoiled kid.” They agreed on one thing about the encounter: Bobby was so confident Jimmy would be convicted that he told reporters if it didn’t happen, “I’ll jump off the Capitol.”

  Hoffa’s trial that summer showed how cocky Bobby had been in underestimating him. The union boss retained as his attorney the storied trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, who had represented Joe McCarthy and Dave Beck and, just a year before, had offered Bobby a job at his law firm. Now Williams was ready to do whatever it took for Jimmy. He used his role in jury selection to seat as many blacks as possible—in the end, eight out of the twelve. Williams then portrayed the chief prosecution witness and even the judge as segregationists, and the defense as civil rights pioneers. The boxing champ and black icon Joe Louis made a surprise appearance in the courtroom, courtesy of the Teamsters, and, in full view of the jury, greeted Hoffa like an old friend.*5 Whether it was Williams’s legal arguments or his theatrics that made the difference, the jury quickly pronounced the Teamsters boss not guilty. Hoffa, who could have spent thirteen years in the slammer, reacted even quicker: “I sent [Bobby] a parachute. I also sent along a one-word note. All it said, in great big letters, was: ‘JUMP!’ ” As for Kennedy, he reacted with “utter disbelief” when a congressional aide handed him a note saying Hoffa had gotten off. And, as always, he needed someone to blame. It must have been the “unpreparedness and ineffectiveness of the Government attorneys who prosecuted the case,” he said, in contrast to Williams’s wizardry. Even worse were the jurors, two of whom had multiple convictions for drunkenness while another had been fired from his government job after refusing to answer a lie detector test on whether he was a homosexual. “Such people are not prohibited from jury service,” Bobby noted, “but they certainly are persons the Government might find antagonistic to the aims of law enforcement in a criminal court.”

  The Kennedy-Hoffa battle was joined. In the next venue, the red-carpeted, marble-columned Caucus Room where his Senate panel met, Bobby didn’t have to rely on lawyers beyond his control or on proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, he sought to demonstrate how Hoffa had enriched himself at the expense of his rank-and-file members, and the case that best defined the alleged self-dealing involved a truck leasing company called Test Fleet. Shortly before the company was formed in 1948, Teamsters drivers in Detroit had gone on strike against a huge new-car hauler called Commercial Carriers, which wanted to replace driver-owned trailers with its own rigs. The walkout seemed to be working until Hoffa ordered the strikers back to work and arranged a settlement that gave Commercial the terms it wanted. Commercial, in turn, handed Test Fleet a lucrative deal that included a loan to buy its hauling equipment, the use of Commercial’s accountants, and, over eight years, profits of $155,092 to the company’s two owners. Jimmy’s wife, Josephine, was one of those proprietors, the wife of his Teamster associate the other—facts not immediately apparent since both were doing business under their maiden names.

  What did the unusual arrangement prove? Nothing, maintained Hoffa. There was no tit for tat with Commercial, and launching Test Fleet let him see the trucking business from the inside, the same way he did when he bought part or all of an investment company, wholesale grocery firm, brewery, racetrack, professional prize fighter, or Florida land scheme. Kennedy called that hogwash: “The Teamsters who never got their jobs back after the 1948 strike thought that Hoffa did not have to own a company to have ample feeling for the problems of employers….The strikers were bitter then. They are still bitter.” The Test Fleet matter wasn’t settled then, and it wouldn’t be until five years later, when Jimmy and Bobby faced off in a setting with stricter rules and higher stakes.

  Hoffa’s selling out his drivers for self-enrichment violated Kennedy’s precepts of fairness and fealty. Even more unforgivable was that Jimmy was eroding the integrity of the Teamsters by abetting the actions of union thugs and betraying reformers like lifelong trucker Floyd Hook of Pontiac, Michigan. Hook and other rank-and-filers were meeting one night in a union hall when a fleet of twenty-five black Cadillacs rolled into town, each full of men with clubs. At their head was Hoffa, who, as Kennedy pieced together based on evidence presented to his committee, “had come to instill in these people some
understanding of the proper place of union members in his Teamsters.” Hook continued complaining about two union officers he said were taking payoffs from employers in return for not enforcing worker protections. The result, Kennedy said, was that “the Hook family began to be subjected to vicious persecution.” A car followed Floyd. Another car stayed parked across from his home, and calls warned him to “tell your children to be careful on the way to school today, it would be unfortunate if a truck ran them down.” Floyd’s wife had a “nervous breakdown” and left to live with relatives in Indiana. He stayed to fight—until he was fired and, with no backing from the union, had to leave Michigan and join his wife in Indiana. When the committee probed, it learned that Hoffa was getting a share of the kick-backs that had angered Floyd.

  Again, Kennedy described this as typical for Hoffa—of “the convicted killers, robbers, extortionists, perjurers, blackmailers, safecrackers, dope peddlers, white slavers and sodomists who were his chosen associates.” Again, Hoffa insisted the only pattern was that Bobby Kennedy—“a vicious bastard” with “a psychotic mania to ‘get’ me at any cost”—didn’t understand the trucker’s rough-and-tumble world. “I’m not saying that everyone all down the line was lily-pure,” he added. “What I’m saying is that there wasn’t much I could do about isolated instances or wrongful action when there were no responsible complaints, when the leadership refused to complain, when the finances were sound….And I had not put those leaders in office.”*6