by Larry Tye
Liberals over the years were even less forgiving. “Though Bobby helped clean a lot of hoodlums and corrupt dictators out of the labor movement, he acted much as had [Joe] McCarthy, equating invocation of the Fifth Amendment with confession of guilt and treating a Congressional investigation as a pillory in which people he disliked could be held up to public scorn,” wrote the muckraking journalist I. F. Stone. Paul Jacobs, of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, conceded that “Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Union are the antithesis of what I believe a union leader and a union ought to be” and that Bobby was right to go after them—but within limits that Bobby never understood. He exceeded his committee’s mandate by interfering in union affairs, meddling in the judiciary’s oversight of the union, and otherwise making life miserable for Hoffa. “Although I have nothing in common with Hoffa, the union leader, Hoffa, the citizen, is me,” added Jacobs. “His rights are the same as mine and require the same protection.”
Bobby felt his liberal critics failed to appreciate that it took an unrelenting interrogator to bring down an incorrigible malefactor like Jimmy Hoffa. He also believed, with more justification, that he hadn’t gotten credit for the tangible accomplishments of his hearings. They had given AFL-CIO president George Meany the evidence he needed to expel the Teamsters from the federation. A federal court named a three-man board of monitors to police the union and propose reforms.*11 While Bobby couldn’t get the Eisenhower Justice Department to indict as many Teamsters officials as he wanted or to win convictions in cases it did bring, more than twenty targets of its investigations were sent to prison. And while he never won over his liberal detractors, and eventually gave up trying, he did make a fan out of the conservative Barry Goldwater. At first the senator thought Bobby was “a mean little asshole” and the Rackets Committee “was just a vehicle for Jack’s campaign for president.” But watching how hard Bobby worked—he “never left the staff offices—I mean, never—before midnight, subpoenaing hundreds of witnesses and chasing down thousands of documents”—Goldwater came away impressed: “It turned into a forced march and Bobby was like a Marine platoon leader.”
Kennedy’s investigations also generated such public outrage at union abuses that in 1959 Congress overwhelmingly passed, and the president signed, a law requiring unions to hold secret elections, submit annual financial reports to regulators, and make other reforms. Although the legislation tilted more to business and against labor than the Kennedy brothers had hoped, it proved a boon to the movement for democratic unions and a model for crime control laws. At his final hearing on the Teamsters, Bobby tipped his hat to Jimmy for inadvertently helping Congress see the need for long-delayed reforms: “You do remain still the best argument for the passage of the bill.” To which Jimmy answered, “This is still America.”
The exchange provided an apt postscript to the rackets inquiry, which lasted three years, generated four million words of testimony from 1,525 witnesses, and boasted a bigger budget, staff, and visibility than the Teapot Dome scandal, the Army-McCarthy hearings, or any previous Capitol Hill inquiry. But that point and counterpoint would not be the last between Kennedy and Hoffa. Bobby called his bestselling memoir on those years The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee’s Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions.*12 The title was a twist on Joe McCarthy’s notion that America was being subverted by embedded Bolsheviks. For Bobby, the depravity of Communism had been replaced by the venality of crooked unions like the Teamsters, which he called a “conspiracy of evil.” He still inhabited a heaven-and-hell world—you were either a child of God or in the grip of Lucifer—but now Jimmy Hoffa had replaced Roy Cohn at the top of his enemies list. And young idealist that he was, he still saw his life’s work as a crusade.
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*1 An open-faced sandwich consisting of bread, cheddar cheese, and butter, cooked in a skillet. Bacon can be added, along with eggs and/or tomatoes.
*2 Alan Dabbiere, the current owner of Hickory Hill and a history buff, debunks the standard press account that it had served as headquarters for the Civil War general George B. McClellan, since the mansion wasn’t built until five years after the end of the Civil War. And while Jack did turn over the property to Bobby, Dabbiere says the owner of record before and immediately after that transfer was their father, Joe Kennedy.
*3 Half a century later, Ethel sold Hickory Hill for just over $8 million and the Emancipation Proclamation for $3.8 million.
*4 What really stuck in Bobby’s craw was how “Beck ‘mothered’ his son….He never allowed Dave, Jr. to go out alone, insisted on ordering all the meals, selected all his friends, even though the younger Beck was a grown man. As a result, Dave, Jr. had become a jellyfish….I knew by this time something about the crimes Dave Beck, Sr. had committed as president of the Teamsters Union, but to me his attitude toward his son was his worst sin” (RFK, Enemy Within, 41–42).
*5 Bobby’s team said Louis was brought to Washington at the expense of the Teamsters and was eventually given a job through Teamsters contacts. Jimmy said one of his lawyers was Louis’s girlfriend and eventually his wife, and that’s why the boxer came. He also said prosecutors were equally brazen in appealing to Negro jurors by having a Negro lawyer on their team. Louis and Hoffa weren’t old pals, although they were longtime acquaintances. And Hoffa, who referred to blacks as “jigs” and “niggers,” was no civil rights hero. (Sheridan, Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, 36; Hoffa and Rogers, Trials of Jimmy Hoffa, 152–53; Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses, 109; and Neff, Vendetta, 81–83.)
*6 Harold Gibbons, a member of the Teamsters General Executive Board, gave the McClellan Committee an even more rousing defense: “In three years of investigation in connection with our union, reputed to be completely dominated by racketeers and hoodlums, one hundred and six names were mentioned. We searched high and low for sixteen of these names and never found them….Nine of these names we found to be members of the union who had never held any position other than as members….Thirty-four of those mentioned were former officers or employees but who were no longer associated with the Teamsters….There were thirteen, as a total, who could be said to be law-breakers who were at the time we filed this report still members of the Teamsters and holding office. Out of a membership of more than 1,700,000, that’s not a bad record. It seems to me that in a three-year investigation as widespread as it was, that to be able to come up with only thirteen violators…was a case of the mountain having labored and brought forth a mouse” (Trials of Jimmy Hoffa, 168–69).
*7 Not everyone was a fan. A Teamsters lawyer called him a “vicious little monster.” Bobby’s reply: “I’m not so little.” (Seigenthaler OH, December 24 and 26, 1974, 121, Southern Oral History Program, and Harwood, “With Bobby Kennedy,”June 5, 1988.)
*8 Playhouse 90 was a series of ninety-minute television dramas that aired on CBS from 1956 to 1960.
*9 While Bobby was focused on Senate business during the day, “they were running for President in our office after five o’clock in the evening,” when Bobby and his friends would gather to plot strategy for Jack’s 1960 bid, recalled Ruth Young Watt, chief clerk for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Ruth Watt OH, September 21, 1979, 181, U.S. Senate Historical Office).
*10 Bobby got his wake-up call two years earlier, when he started accompanying narcotics agents in New York on their late-night, bare-knuckled busts of drug dens. The young lawyer never forgot the lessons he learned of the seedy sides of Manhattan and, by extension, America (Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life, 70–71).
*11 John Cassidy, a young lawyer working for the Board of Monitors, remembers being with Hoffa standing at a window looking down into a crowded street in Washington: “He said, ‘Cass, come over here. I want to tell you something. You see all those people out there, what do you think of them?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. They look like average people to me, coming and going about their daily business.’ He said, ‘Do you think I could buy any of those people?’ I said
, ‘I don’t know, Mr. Hoffa.’ I always called him Mr. Hoffa. And he said, ‘Let me tell you something, you don’t understand the law under which we operate. We, the human race.’ I said, ‘What’s your view of those people?’ He said, ‘Well, I could buy any one of them you can see, it’s just a question of how much I have to pay.’ I looked at him and said, ‘Do you really believe that?’ He said, ‘In my heart, I believe it.’ ” “That,” adds Cassidy, who later worked for Bobby at the Justice Department, “was Jimmy Hoffa” (Author interview with John Cassidy).
*12 That is the one and only book Hoffa read as an adult, according to the investigative reporter Lester Velie (Velie, Why Jimmy Hoffa Had to Die, 131).
Chapter 3
BROTHER’S KEEPER
OUTGOING PRESIDENT DWIGHT Eisenhower pinpointed the precise instant when Richard Nixon lost the closest presidential contest in the twentieth century. It was not when John Kennedy wooed the South by picking Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, or when he outcharmed Nixon in the first-ever presidential debates. The moment, Ike said, came just two weeks before the 1960 election, when the Kennedy brothers made a “couple of phone calls.” Jack placed his from a hotel bed near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bobby dialed a Georgia judge from a pay phone on Long Island. Neither call lasted more than a few minutes and both expressed concern that Rev. King had been sentenced to four months on a road gang for a traffic-related violation. Together they helped spring the civil rights leader. Nixon sensed that he, too, should say he regretted King’s imprisonment, but he didn’t, and neither did Eisenhower. The Kennedy calls were barely noticed in white America, but millions of leaflets trumpeted the news at black churches on the final Sunday before the election in a pamphlet titled “ ‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.” Nixon captured less than a third of the black vote, a steep drop from Eisenhower’s 1956 total and enough to account for the razor-thin victory by Kennedy, who in black America had been the least popular of the Democrats running for president that year.
The legend of those calls has grown with each telling. JFK’s to Coretta Scott King was said to be an instinctive reaction to an injustice he couldn’t abide. RFK at first reamed out the campaign aides who had encouraged his brother. Thinking it over, he decided Jack and his advisers had been right and, ignoring his own staff, Bobby spontaneously telephoned the sentencing judge and asked him to change his mind. Over time the calls were said to have altered not just the 1960 balloting but racial politics in America for the rest of the century and beyond, with the Republican Party becoming increasingly anathema to African Americans and attractive to white southerners.
That the telephone conversations shaped the election and the partisan divide was true. What lay behind them, however, is a perfect instance of the Kennedys’ skillful political manipulation and mythmaking. Statecraft came naturally to Jack, but Bobby had to work to cultivate such skills. By the campaign’s end, however, Bobby not only learned all that Jack could teach, he set a new paradigm for engineering a path to the White House—along both the high road and the low—that would embolden even such hardened politicians as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. That crucial year of electioneering also gave new resonance to the expression “the Kennedy brothers.” Each came to depend on the other in ways that were inconceivable in their younger years, and that would lead to a historic sharing of presidential duties and intimacies.
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BOBBY’S SCHOOLING IN running a campaign came on the job, and on the run, starting back in 1946. That was when Jack made his first bid for office, for a congressional seat that included parts of Honey Fitz’s old House district along with the neighborhood where P.J. had been a Democratic ward boss. A dashing warrior back home now with his six medals, Jack neither needed nor wanted much help from his kid brother Bobby, who was fresh out of his naval tour in the Caribbean and lacking any obvious expertise or acumen. The candidate was already beset by well-intentioned relatives. Honey Fitz made sure that his namesake met every one of his aging cronies, while Joe stage-managed the campaign from his perch at the Ritz Hotel, enlisting pollsters and public relations mavens and dispensing upwards of $250,000. “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes,” he crowed to a friend. And when another candidate for the Eleventh District seat offered to help Jack with some future bid if he would stay out of the current congressional race, the elder Kennedy patiently explained that “my son will be President in 1960.” Jack’s sisters, meanwhile, hosted house parties and handed out leaflets, with help from Jean’s college roommate, Ethel. As for Bobby, Jack only half jokingly told his Navy buddy Red Fay that “it’s damn nice of Bobby wanting to help, but I can’t see that sober, silent face breathing new vigor into the ranks….One picture of the two brothers together will show that we’re all in this for Jack. Then you take Bobby out to [the] movies or whatever you two want to do.”
It was a quintessential case of an older sibling patronizing a younger one, and Bobby didn’t hide his hurt. But wanted or not, he was determined to help and knew exactly where he wanted to apply his efforts. In a Democratic district like the Eleventh, the real action was in the primary, and the most formidable of Jack’s nine opponents was the former mayor of Cambridge, which accounted for a third of the district. Bobby marched into his brother’s Cambridge headquarters, still in his sailor’s suit, and assigned himself three wards in Italian East Cambridge that were the city’s poorest and Jack’s longest of shots. He knocked on doors, shook hands until his were raw, and ate spaghetti whenever it was offered. Bobby wanted no part of the political hacks who made headquarters their home. His kind of people were the neighborhood half-pints, the kids he joined in pickup games of softball, basketball, and, his favorite, football. At least one Cambridge pol took notice: “All that propaganda that the Kennedys were the high-hat kind was dissipated in my area by Bobby playing with those kids.” Primary day put to rest another myth: that Bobby couldn’t help. While Jack beat his closest opponent by a two-to-one margin, Bobby showed his mettle in enemy territory that his brother hadn’t wanted to contest. Jack lost Bobby’s wards, but he won twice as many votes there as anyone thought possible.
Bobby sat out that year’s general election and the next two congressional races, all of which Jack won with hardly any competition. But he was enticed back in 1952, when Jack gave up his secure House seat to take on three-term U.S. senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. The Lodges, Episcopalians and Brahmins, treated the post as their birthright—much as the Kennedys would later. Counting the time served by Henry Jr.’s grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather, the Lodges had represented Massachusetts in the Senate for nearly fifty of the previous one hundred fifty years. For most Democrats, challenging a Legion of Merit winner and entrenched incumbent like Lodge would have seemed pointless, especially in a year when the Republicans had the recent supreme Allied commander atop their ticket. For the Kennedys, father and sons, it was just the attention-getting gambit that could catapult thirty-five-year-old Jack onto a trajectory toward the White House. “Lodge was the major figure in the state and perhaps in the country,” Joe would say, adding that if you could beat him, “you beat the number one person.” What he didn’t say, but everybody knew, was that the race was also a grudge match: Thirty-six years before, Lodge’s grandfather had defeated Kennedy’s in a race for the Senate.
This time Bobby played the reluctant brother. He was busy launching his own career at the Justice Department and not eager to sink himself back into the family dynamics that he knew would play out during the campaign. Besides, the campaign already had a manager, Mark Dalton, who had run the 1946 congressional race and recently left a thriving law practice when Jack invited him back. None of that mattered to Joe. In the spring of 1952 he accused Dalton, to his face, of spending funds without producing results and having no clue how to unseat a senator that everyone but Joe thought was invulnerable. Dalton listened, then quit at the very moment when the campaign should have been k
icking into gear. Bobby had persuaded his Harvard friend Kenny O’Donnell to sign up the previous December. Now, at Jack’s direction, O’Donnell was calling Bobby to say he was the only one who could regain control of the campaign—and of the ex-ambassador. “I don’t know anything about Massachusetts politics…I just don’t want to come,” Bobby answered, although he knew that his stepping forward would be the only way to get his father to back off. A week later he telephoned O’Donnell to say, “I’m coming up; I’ve thought it over, and I suppose I’ll have to do it.”
His first challenge was to give voters a reason to invest in a new senator. After years of war, America had settled into a self-satisfied prosperity—one in which three of five families owned a car, two of three had a telephone, and the average household earned $3,900 a year, which wasn’t bad since the average new home cost just $9,050, gas was twenty cents a gallon, and a postage stamp could be had for three cents. The men and women of Massachusetts were equally content with themselves and with their existing senator. On the main issues of the day, there was little to distinguish the moderate Kennedy from the moderate Lodge. Both wanted the United States engaged with the world and Russia contained. Both favored unions but thought they needed reforming. Both liked budgets that balanced and smaller government. Each had earned a Harvard degree, bore the chiseled countenance of a statesman, and came wrapped in a compelling story of wartime gallantry. What set his brother apart, Bobby realized earlier than anyone else, was Jack’s ineffable magnetism—his quiet persuasiveness, idealism without ideology, and the sense that he represented something better without his having to say specifically what. Those were precisely the qualities that had hypnotized young Bobby when the brothers summered together on Cape Cod, and that Bobby wouldn’t realize until years later that he possessed, too. The press called it Kennedy magic. By comparison, Lodge seemed too high-society and too yesterday; he was, after all, fifteen years older and had roots that ran back to the Puritans. Kennedy hadn’t just gotten off the boat—his family had been here for two generations. But more recent arrivals like him—Irish and Italian, Jews and Slavs—far outnumbered Mayflower Yankees in the Bay State.