Bobby helped make sure that he was exalted in the general media. His father had taught him that nothing just happened. A few extraordinary humans made what was called history. Bobby had listened well. Calculated self-promotion did not embarrass him the slightest bit. Bobby had been so upset by Edward R. Murrow’s historic See It Now program opposing Joe McCarthy in March 1954 that nine months later he walked out of a speech that the journalist gave in Louisville. That didn’t prevent Bobby, however, from going on Murrow’s Person to Person show in September 1957; the New York Times reported that Bobby and Ethel “were charming and poised … and their five children were delightfully disheveled.”
In February 1958, Francis X. Morrissey, Jack’s executive secretary in his Boston office, wrote Bobby congratulating him on the honorary degree from Tufts University in Boston that he was about to receive. “We have been working on this for the last three months…. It is essential that you let no one know you have received it until they announce it from the University itself.” A month later Morrissey wrote Bobby again to alert him that when the Boston papers hadn’t initially run a picture of the counsel for the Senate Rackets Investigating Committee with his wife and new baby, Michael Le Moyne, he had taken steps to ensure that the Boston Traveler ran it.
Even the most personal and seemingly spontaneous moment could be as scripted as an inaugural address. Joe wrote Bobby: “I think some reporter should ask Bobby [Jr.] ‘where his Daddy is and what he is doing’ and Bobby’s answer should be ‘he’s chasing bad men like a cowboy.’” Bobby knew many reporters who would have been delighted to ask that question. Bobby was astutely cultivating journalists, the crucial element in creating his legend. In 1957 his Christmas gift list contained thirty-seven journalists, ten photographers, and sixteen radio and TV technicians. The next summer he invited them out to Hickory Hill for a swim and touch football.
Comradeship and calculation blended impeccably. Reporters gave Bobby their stories early and told him what had been edited out. Murray Kempton, a New York Post columnist proud of his fierce independence, identified so much with Bobby that he even suggested a letter that Bobby should write to two attorneys who opposed him.
With Bobby, there was always a bottom line, and the bottom line was that the journalists wrote to advance the Kennedys’ agenda. If they did not, if they fell short or gave aid to the family’s enemies, they soon learned about it. Jack Anderson wrote a largely adoring story on the Kennedy brothers for Parade magazine. Yet he received a two-page letter from Bobby detailing the errors that he said “ought to be cleared [up] … inasmuch as you may be writing or commenting on our family again at some future time.” “My objective has always been to report fearlessly, but accurately,” the chastised Anderson replied, presumably promising to write more carefully next time.
Bobby was livid over a Mike Wallace television interview in which, Bobby felt, Wallace urged a guest to name as a “degenerate” a police officer with whom the committee had worked. He contacted the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and asked “if there are some steps that the … Commission can take in matters such as this.”
Certain journalists saw themselves as cohorts in Bobby’s direct assault on the forces of evil in the labor movement and elsewhere. What he had was theirs, or so they thought, and what they had was his. These reporters knew they had crossed a forbidden threshold, but they saw a higher purpose. “Spoken bits of praise can be dropped into casual conversation without serious thought, and only because it seems a nice thing to say,” wrote Mollenhoff in December 1957, downplaying any verbal bouquets he might offer Bobby. “I want to put it on the record so it can be held against me.”
In the afternoons during the hearings, Bobby called in a group of sympathetic reporters and alerted them what to expect the next day. The reporters could write a first draft of their stories and add details the following day, thus keeping themselves several steps ahead of other journalists not so allied to the Kennedys.
However much Bobby sought to push his own name and accomplishments higher up in the coverage of the hearings, they in fact deserved to be on the front pages of America’s newspapers, played on live television during the day, and featured on the network news programs each evening. Many Americans had considered it tantamount to guilt when accused Communists and alleged racketeers took the Fifth Amendment. What did it mean when a parade of union leaders, consultants, and enforcers hid behind their constitutional rights, ducking questions that any honest labor official would presumably have answered forthrightly? Beck himself, when he finally appeared, was the master prevaricator, rambling on in a lengthy monologue before finally and seemingly reluctantly taking the Fifth Amendment. Bobby served not as dispassionate researcher gathering information to help Congress write laws but as a merciless prosecutor. His voice was taunting and disdainful. His questions moved from one specific detail to the next, pulling the noose so tightly around Beck’s neck that in the end he had no breath left for his endless prevaricating soliloquies. By the time Beck left, he was a broken man who would soon be convicted of federal tax evasion and state embezzlement charges and sentenced to prison.
That spring of 1957, Joe was quoted in the Boston Globe: “[Bobby’s] ‘a great kid. He hates the same way I do.’” Bobby was too much of a moralist to admit that he considered hatred a worthwhile emotion that could motivate a man as much as love. But when James R. “Jimmy” Hoffa, head of the Teamsters Central State Conference, Beck’s heir apparent, and the next hearing witness, appeared across the committee table, Bobby fancied that he could see “the look of a man obsessed by his enmity, and it came particularly from his eyes. There were times when his face seemed completely transfixed with this stare of absolute evilness.” What Bobby did not admit, or perhaps did not understand, was that he hated Hoffa and was as obsessed by him as much as Hoffa hated and was obsessed by Bobby.
Observers noticed immediately that there were certain similarities between the two men that only exacerbated their enmity. They both had a small man’s tenaciousness and constantly measured opponents who appeared larger than they were. They both cultivated the realities of power, not its mere appearance. They were men whose enemies had reason to shiver in their tracks.
Hoffa, however, had never needed the faux combat of the Harvard-Yale game to test his manhood. The son of a coal miner who had died when he was seven, the diminutive Hoffa made his way as a teenager to the docks of Kroger, where he found work unloading fruits and vegetables. He was hardly more than a kid, but he tried to organize the workers. Hoffa learned that a man spoke loudest with his fists, and louder still if he carried a club. He became a protégé of Farrell Dobbs, a Trotskyite labor leader who taught that behind the sleek gentlemen of the boardroom lay all the coercive violence of capitalism. Hoffa became a reformer who organized the unorganized, a fearless man in a time of fear, and he rose steadily up the union ranks. “Nobody can describe the sit-down strikes, the riots, the fights that took place in the streets of Michigan, particularly here in Detroit, unless they were part of it,” Hoffa said.
Hoffa soon lost whatever faith he had in the Left. What remained was a rude philosophy of power that saw life as little but an endless series of brutal exchanges. Us against them. Your gang against my gang. Hoffa came to value power for himself more than power for the men and women of his union. He bragged about coercing the companies into higher wages and better benefits, but in reality he was cutting sweetheart deals with owners, throttling those who stood up to protest, and selling out his brethren with impunity. What made him so dangerous was that most of these union men and women identified with good old Jimmy and his vision of the world and stood with him, electing him their new president. He took that as a mandate to expand his union and its power.
If Hoffa had abided by a gentleman’s code of conduct in the brutal brawls of the 1930s, he would have ended up a bloody pulp in the gutter. In his fight against Bobby, there was seemingly no blow that Hoffa was unwilling to strike. The committee sta
ff had hardly begun its investigation when, in February 1957, Bobby met with John Cye Cheasty, a former Secret Service officer and investigator, who told an extraordinary tale of just how far Hoffa was willing to go to sabotage the investigation. Cheasty said that Hoffa had paid him $1,000 as part of an $18,000 payment for getting a job on the committee and serving as his spy. Bobby went ahead and hired Cheasty, then fed him information to pass on to Hoffa, sometimes on a Washington street corner while undercover FBI agents filmed the meeting. It was a mark of Bobby’s obsession with Hoffa that he wanted to be present when the FBI arrested the union leader. The FBI realized how inappropriate that would be, however, and Bobby was not there when agents arrested Hoffa at the DuPont Plaza Hotel with some of the committee documents that Cheasty had given him in his possession. Hoffa seemed certain to be convicted and sent to prison.
Hoffa hired attorney Edward Bennett Williams, a brilliant, mercurial gladiator who had a lyrical love for the law and a street fighter’s instincts. Williams defended Hoffa with every weapon at his disposal, from the high-soaring eloquence of his defense to the low subterfuge of suggesting that Cheasty was anti-black and having Joe Louis, the black former heavyweight boxing champion, flown in from Detroit to embrace Hoffa in the courtroom in front of the twelve-person jury, eight of whom were black.
Bobby was in the midst of conducting hearings when Angie Novello, his secretary, passed a note to him. Bobby glanced at the message and turned back to the witness as if nothing of moment had happened. No one in the room could have imagined that the message contained the news that Hoffa had been found not guilty. Later, when Bobby walked into the committee’s office, he sensed the despairing mood of his colleagues. “Come on now,” he said. “Let’s get to work. We have a lot of work to do. No sitting around.”
Bobby’s father had brought up his sons to step over defeat and move on. Unlike his associates, thirty-one-year-old Bobby did not bemoan the verdict as a disgrace to the American system of justice. He did not underestimate his opponents, and his conclusion was judicious, fair, and bitter. He credited “the work of Williams, his effective defense attorney, plus Hoffa’s own strong testimony, together with the unpreparedness and ineffectiveness of the government attorneys who prosecuted the case.”
When Hoffa returned to testify before the committee again, he forcefully defended his stewardship of the union. At times, Bobby’s questions got close to their mark. Then Hoffa flicked the queries away, feinted for a while, and moved forward to rake the chief counsel with a few tough blows of his own. Hoffa took exquisite pleasure in taunting Bobby. “Oh, I used to bug the little bastard,” he recalled fondly. “Whenever Bobby would get tangled up in one of his involved questions, I would wink at him. That invariably got him.”
The invective that Hoffa slung in Bobby’s direction was merciless. At one point he described his adversary to a reporter as “a young, dim-witted, curly-headed smart aleck and a ruthless little monster.” Bobby had never come up against anyone like this. In his attempts to bloody Hoffa and his associates, Bobby at times sounded like McCarthy at his inquisitional worst. “Is there any question in your mind that Mr. Goldblatt [secretary-treasurer of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union] is a Communist, Mr. Hoffa?” he asked rhetorically. “You haven’t got the guts to [answer], have you, Mr. Glimco?” he accused another union official who took the Fifth Amendment.
What Bobby and his associates exposed was a dark hidden kingdom in which corrupt labor unions, willing local politicians, organized crime, and amoral business executives all worked in harmony while Washington leaders and most of the press looked the other way. Hoffa treated a criminal conviction as a worthy reference for work in the Teamsters.
As the parade of witnesses passed through the Senate hearing room, there was a seamless meld between corrupt unions and organized crime. One of the many witnesses was Sam Giancana, the reputed head of the Chicago mob, who had muscled into the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to take over the lucrative jukebox business in Chicago. If physiognomy was fate, Giancana might have run a small restaurant or dry cleaners. Instead, the nondescript,
balding “businessman” with a taste for show business and pretty women had a reputation as a pathological killer. Bobby asked him whether he disposed of his enemies “by having them stuffed in a trunk.” When he took the Fifth Amendment in a laughing way, Bobby taunted him: “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”
The exchange played well on national television, but it was silly gamesmanship. Bobby was indulging in what Yale law professor Alexander M. Bickel would later call “relentless, vindictive battering” of reluctant witnesses.
Beyond that, Giancana was a vicious man who could call up a hired killer with the nod of his head; Bobby was foolish to take such seeming pleasure in taunting such a man.
When Bobby and Jack stared across the committee table at mobsters such as Giancana, they were looking evil straight in the face. In all the hours of testimony the Kennedy brothers heard endless accounts of just how far such men went to protect their illegal turf. Intimidation. Coercion. Bribery. Assault. Murder.
Bobby took testimony and heard tales that would have made any public figure cautious about ever allowing himself to be vulnerable to blackmail. As a committee member, Jack heard much of the same testimony and surely should have learned the same lessons.
Mollenhoff sent Bobby a memo about Giancana’s Chicago that would have made most politicians draw back from letting friends and associates set them up with women. Mollenhoff told of Dan Carmell, an attorney for the Illinois Federation of Labor and a former Illinois assistant attorney general, who had recently jumped out of a Chicago hotel to his death just before he was to go on trial for white slavery. “The sworn statements of the girls involved … show the way that these girls operated from an apartment in North Chicago, and the way various political figures including at least one senator were brought into the web of Carmell’s labor influence,” Mollenhoff wrote. “Indications are that labor money was used for the transportation of these girls, and that this pattern of sex parties was used to trap political figures into situations where they were under the power of Carmell and the labor organizations he represented.”
This was not the kind of matter Bobby liked discussing. When he was taking testimony from a Portland madam, Bobby became so embarrassed that Chairman McClellan asked whether he might take over. Jack was not embarrassed at all by such talk. These hearings nonetheless were the most extraordinary warning that if he hoped to be president of the United States, he would have to conduct his personal life with a caution that did not come naturally to him.
Bobby and Jack were performing not only before a national television audience but also before their own family. Every day Ethel sat in the hearing room in a choice seat held for her by one of the guards. Jackie sat there many days too, as did Teddy whenever he could get away from his studies. Even Joe, as opposed as he was to this interminable spectacle, showed up at least once and sat watching his sons. It was a tableau of loyalty that helped to further the image of the Kennedys as a peerless family, steadfast to the core.
The audience watching on television and journalists writing feature articles on the Kennedys noted the youthful vigor of the two brothers seated side by side. Jack was thirty-nine, though he looked ten years younger, and thirty-one-year-old Bobby looked as if he could have just graduated from college. Of the one thousand letters the committee received one week, four hundred were what the New York Daily News called “mash notes,” most of them asking for autographed pictures.
The Eisenhower years were not a time when youth was considered to have special merit, but youthful Bobby identified with the young and tentatively began reaching out to them as his natural constituency. “It’s ridiculous to wait until a man is 40 to give him a responsible job,” Bobby said. “By that age he may have lost most of his zeal.”
Bobby was fearless intellectually and physically, and not just when the cameras were foc
used on him. A woman reporter from Joliet, Illinois, had disappeared, presumably murdered by the labor mobsters she had exposed in a series of articles. Stories like that only emboldened Bobby. He and his associate Jim McShane traveled to Joliet Prison to interview an inmate who said that he knew where the reporter was buried. The two men went with the prisoner to a farm field where Bobby took his turn shoveling in an unsuccessful attempt to find the body.
Bobby learned that all across the country lived brave people like this reporter who were willing to stand up to evil at the risk of their livelihoods and sometimes their very lives. It rankled Bobby that some of the Washington know-it-alls whispered that John Cheasty had told of Hoffa’s perfidy only because he wanted a job on the committee. Bobby knew that the sickly Cheasty had lost far more than he gained, and he was only one of scores of examples.
Sometimes even Bobby was dumbstruck by the quiet, unaccredited heroism of some of the witnesses. George Maxwell, a Cleveland labor relations consultant, agreed to testify before the committee that he had negotiated sweetheart contracts for major carriers with Hoffa. “I don’t understand it,” Bobby beseeched him, realizing that even he himself was becoming cynical. “You will ruin yourself, your business, if you testify like that.” Maxwell replied, “I tell the truth, Mr. Kennedy.”
The great experiential moment of Bobby’s life lay in these hearings, which largely defined his view of the world and of the American people the way World War II had defined Jack’s worldview. Bobby saw now that there was corruption of a magnitude he had hardly imagined, an evil that threaded its way through American life. It was The Enemy Within, as he called it in his 1960 book about the committee’s work, though it had penetrated further than even he realized. He had also seen good on a scale that he had hardly imagined, and he knew that to betray these lonely acts of courage was to betray life itself. If one day he would romanticize certain groups of Americans, his faith grew out of a specificity of experience that he kept close to his heart.
The Kennedy Men Page 52