Observed Harry Belafonte, a friend to both King and Kennedy, “At last, Bobby’s moral center seemed to stir.”
On a Voice of America broadcast six days after the rioting at the Montgomery bus station, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy spoke of his family’s own history, about how “the Irish were not wanted when his grandfather arrived in Boston.” And he reminded listeners: “Now an Irish Catholic is president of the United States. There is no question about it—in the next forty years, a Negro can achieve the same position my brother did.”
James Meredith registers at the University of Mississippi, October 1962.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GENERAL
“He would have taken a bolt of lightning for Jack. All he cared about was his brother’s presidency.”
—JOHN SEIGENTHALER
As he settled into his new office in the Justice Department—six blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House—Robert Kennedy was having to choose his priorities as the country’s chief law enforcement officer. He soon discovered he still liked “chasing bad guys.”
Surprisingly, J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was less interested than he in pursuing organized crime. While he relished the FBI’s reputation as tommy-gun-toting “G-Men,” Hoover deployed the greatest number of his special agents shadowing the country’s dwindling number of Communists. He feared that agents would be corrupted by their dealings with the criminal syndicates. Stubbornly, he denied even the existence of a “mafia.”
As Hoover’s superior, Bobby was about to change all that. One of his first acts was to order a list of the country’s top organized crime figures along with strategies for apprehending them. Although the FBI made extensive use of wiretapping and bugging, Kennedy wanted more of it, and more training, all with newer technology.
He also recognized the crime-busting potential of tax records. That was, after all, the route by which the government had brought down notorious mobster Al Capone three decades earlier. His first step was contacting Mortimer Caplin, under whom he’d studied tax law at the University of Virginia. He wanted to know if his former professor believed in the use of tax returns as a legitimate means of establishing criminal activity. Getting the answer he wanted, he went forward with his plans.
“One of the things I’m going to do as attorney general is to take on organized crime in this country,” Bobby told Caplin, whom President Kennedy now named director of the IRS. Accepting the position, and referring to his new boss’s goal, Caplin said he couldn’t emphasize too strongly the importance he attached “to the success of the Service’s contribution to this overall program.”
Jimmy Hoffa remained high on Kennedy’s target list. “From the moment he was named attorney general, Bobby was determined to prosecute Hoffa,” recalled Nicholas Katzenbach, who was running Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. “He was convinced from his work on the McClellan Committee that Hoffa was evil, corrupt and capable of corrupting our political institutions.” The same was true of Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, the heir to Capone, whom Kennedy saw as “unstable as an animal,” who’d “kill people for kicks.”
But Bobby also found himself engaged by the issue of preventing young criminals from turning into hardened ones. At his first press conference as attorney general, he alluded to the growing problem of juvenile delinquency—a very real social issue, though one J. Edgar Hoover insisted on belittling as “muddle-headed” sentimentalism—and soon made it a department priority. In May 1961, President Kennedy brought into being the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, with his brother its chairman and Dave Hackett its director.
There was, as Hackett would say, a clear sense of shared identity for Bobby with the street kids for whom he hoped to make a difference. Poverty and race were the main underlying causes for their behavior, but Bobby found ways to identify with them. “It goes back to the very early days,” Hackett recalled. “Part of it was he was slight and small and was way down in a huge family. I think he was a misfit in school, and I think he was a misfit all the way through his whole career, in a way, in the best sense of the word.”
Bobby himself probably put it best with the answer he gave to his friend the reporter Jack Newfield, who’d asked him what he thought he might have been if not born a Kennedy. “Perhaps a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary.”
Now, professionally, he was both boss and mentor. “I started in the Department as a young lawyer in 1950,” Bobby would tell younger Justice attorneys, understanding the value of such a frank—and wry—approach. “The salary was only $4000 a year, but I worked hard. I was ambitious. I studied. I applied myself. And then my brother was elected president of the United States.” That way of meeting the nepotism issue head-on fell into the category he liked to refer to as “hanging a lantern on your problem.”
When it came to the men and women working for him at Justice, it was important that they trust his leadership, believing he’d always support them as needed, that he wouldn’t buckle to pressure and leave a Justice Department attorney hanging, his case thrown aside because of politics. From the outset, Bobby was endeavoring to build a team, loyal to him, loyal to each other.
One of his regular routines was to tour the floors of the Justice Department, introducing himself, but also stopping to listen. “Maybe at one o’clock in the afternoon he’d come into my office,” said John Seigenthaler, “and say, ‘Let’s go see what’s going on.’ ”
The two of them would then head off. Stopping in an office, he’d stick out his hand. “I’m Bob Kennedy. What are you working on?” Even though, according to Seigenthaler, he’d ask for only five minutes of the staff lawyer’s time, he wound up always staying longer, to learn more.
The lawyers working for him had, many of them, been junior officers during World War II, and this meant they were likely to have picked up aptitudes that served them well now. These included improvisation and working together, skills not often mutually compatible. Katzenbach, a navigator in the Army Air Corps, had been captured when his B-25 bomber was shot down; then, as a prisoner of war, he twice escaped only to be recaptured. John Doar and John Seigenthaler, who’d shown courage during the riot at the Montgomery bus station, had also been in the Air Corps.
Those men working for Kennedy learned from the start not to stand on ceremony, and not to stand around waiting for orders. “In the next three and a half years,” Guthman wrote, “I don’t recall Bob saying very often that he was going to have a meeting and that he would like me to attend, or that he was going somewhere and wanted me to accompany him. He expected us to anticipate his needs and act accordingly.”
What struck me personally, early in the 1970s when I first met Paul Corbin—a loyalist close to the new AG—was his reference to him as “Bob.” I would learn it was the name Kennedy’s loyalists used regularly, eschewing the family nickname entirely.
One early observation Kennedy made on his excursions through the building was the lack of minority attorneys at Justice. “Did you see any Negroes?” he asked Seigenthaler one day. It was then that he learned there were only eight African Americans working at Justice, each in a custodial job. Pursuing the matter further and being told that applications from men and women of color were nonexistent, he refused to accept the excuse. Instead, he began sending letters to law schools saying that the Justice Department was open to hiring black graduates.
“We’re not seeking to give Negroes preference,” he wrote. “But we’re not getting any applications, and we want these young people to know that they will not be excluded because of their race. Will you please make a special effort to let Negroes know? Because we fear that over a long period they have been excluded.”
During that first December of Jack’s presidency, an event took place that changed everything, entirely altering the world he, his mother, and his brothers and sisters knew. Joseph P. Kennedy suffered a debilitating stroke, one that left him unable to express hims
elf. Bobby received word in his office at Justice. By afternoon he was flying with Jack to the family home in Palm Beach.
Capable now only of muttering “no,” their once famously powerful—overbearing, manipulative, and ever critical—father was reduced to being a man trapped entirely inside himself, his rage at his fate daily visible on his paralyzed face.
• • •
The January 26, 1962, issue of Life magazine featured Attorney General Kennedy on its cover. Billing him as “The No. 2 Man in Washington,” the piece’s author, Paul O’Neill, began the article with the knowing observation that his subject disliked being called “Bobby.” The only person in government with the acknowledged right to do this, readers learned, was his brother, the president. Otherwise, “he wears that diminutive as restively as a hair shirt.”
The article described the way the attorney general had revamped White House operations following the Bay of Pigs. It credited his decisive summoning of federal marshals and later the National Guard to the Montgomery church where Martin Luther King, the Freedom Riders, and their supporters were surrounded and held captive. It emphasized the importance of his seat on the National Security Council. Robert Kennedy, wrote O’Neill, is “wondrously qualified for the multiple roles in which he has so confidently cast himself.”
What stands out most is O’Neill’s spotlight on Bob Kennedy’s personal characteristics. Among those he cites are his “contempt for liars,” his role in the Kennedy family as “chief of the clan” since his father’s stroke, and his “idealism in the extreme.”
Such feelings led him to a kinship with those wanting to commit themselves to this country. Once coming across a naturalization ceremony in a Brooklyn courthouse, Bobby asked if he might say a few words. As he often did, he invoked the experience of his forebears. “When my grandparents came to Boston not so many years ago, they found signs outside employment offices which read, IRISH NEED NOT APPLY—but I want you to remember that my brother has been elected president of the United States.”
O’Neill found himself fascinated by the contradictions in Bobby. “He seems to be genuinely horrified,” he wrote, “to learn that some helpless fellow human has been pushed around by a price fixer, a crooked politician or a conniving labor leader—although his impulse to smite the wrongdoer usually precedes his impulse to bemoan the victim.”
That spring, the issue of price-fixing commanded the attention of both Kennedy brothers, and, this time, labor was the victim not the transgressor. Early in April, the United Steelworkers union’s leaders signed an agreement with the major producers. Forgoing a wage increase, they accepted a new contract offering only a modest upgrade in fringe benefits—estimated at 10 cents an hour. The Steelworkers did so because they were relying on President Kennedy’s personal assurances that management—the top brass at U.S. Steel had sought his support in the matter—was committed to fighting inflation.
Four days after signing the new labor contract, Roger Blough, U.S. Steel’s CEO, requested a meeting with the president. There he handed him a press release announcing the company’s intention to raise its prices 3.5 percent. “You’ve made a terrible mistake,” Jack told Blough, his anger barely contained. “You’ve double-crossed me.”
The news grew worse. Within twenty-four hours, five other steel companies made public the exact same price hike. Learning this, the president was swift in his response. At a press conference, he used his own already celebrated inaugural words to heap contempt on Blough et al. “Some time ago, I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country. And I asked the steel companies. In the last twenty-four hours, we had their answer.”
But the Kennedys had more than shame with which to strike at the steelmakers. They had hard evidence of illegal collusion. Just before U.S. Steel declared its price hike, a wire service story had quoted Edmund Martin, president of rival Bethlehem Steel, questioning an increase on economic grounds. “There shouldn’t be any price rise,” he had said; the market wouldn’t support it.
So why, then, did Bethlehem and its other competitors suddenly fall into line with U.S. Steel? To make his case for price-fixing, the attorney general needed to see for himself the exact language Martin had used in that meeting. To accomplish that, he would have to have the notes of reporters who’d been there. Such documentation would be persuasive evidence the steel industry chiefs had been colluding, that Bethlehem was simply following the leader.
The orders to the FBI agents went out after midnight. They began knocking on reporters’ doors at 3 a.m., looking for notebooks. “The attorney general asked us to call you,” one agent told a Wall Street Journal reporter.
By the time Bobby arrived at work that morning, those predawn appearances had already raised a ruckus. But he quickly understood where the buck stopped. “I get some credit when FBI agents do something good,” he said. “I’ll take the heat when they goof.”
Later, at a private party, the Kennedy brothers lampooned the aggressive tactics they’d put into play when they’d forced the steel companies to reverse themselves. “Why is it that all the telephone calls of all the steel executives in all the country are being tapped?” Jack quoted Thomas Patton, head of Republic Steel. “And I told him that I thought he was being totally unfair to the attorney general, and that I’m sure it wasn’t true.”
He went on: “And he asked me, ‘Why is it that all the income tax returns of all the steel executives in all the country are being scrutinized?’ And I told him that, too, was totally unfair, that the attorney general wouldn’t do such a thing. And then I called the attorney general and asked him why he was tapping the telephones of all the steel executives and examining the tax returns of all the steel executives . . . and the attorney general told me that that was totally untrue and unfair.”
Now came Jack’s punch line: “And, of course, Patton was right.” It was followed by Bobby’s: “They were mean to my brother,” he explained, interrupting the president. “They can’t do that to my brother.”
• • •
Chicago mobster Sam Giancana was well known to the FBI—and also to Bobby Kennedy, who’d been tracking him since his days on the Rackets Committee. As attorney general he’d maintained the heat, keeping him under continual surveillance. This was despite the fact that his father had enlisted the mobster’s help in the 1960 election. It was such behavior on the son’s part that enraged Giancana.
In late February 1962, in duplicate memos sent to the attorney general and presidential aide Ken O’Donnell, J. Edgar Hoover informed the two men of troubling information. The bureau had hard evidence that Judith Campbell, a young woman close to Giancana, was involved in an ongoing relationship with the president. Two years earlier, she’d been introduced to Jack by Frank Sinatra. Since his earliest days as a young crooner, Sinatra had been known both to hang out with and be indebted to underworld figures.
Confronted by this irrefutable government evidence—coming from an agency that at least on paper was subject to his control—Bobby immediately took action on two fronts. Overcoming his longtime practice of staying out of his brother’s sexual affairs, he knew he now had no choice.
First, taking care to use trusted emissaries, he passed on to the president the fact that the FBI was sitting on phone records he needed to know about. Specifically, Hoover had logs of seventy calls between the White House and Campbell, who he said was enjoying a relationship with Giancana. Still, learning that the FBI had the goods on him was not enough for Jack. It took the director’s visit to the Oval Office the next month, when he handed the president a memo detailing Campbell’s ties to both him and the murderous gangster, to end it.
The president had scheduled an upcoming weekend visit to Sinatra at his Palm Springs estate. His brother now talked him out of it. “Johnny, you just can’t associate with this guy,” he informed him. The trip was canceled. And so was their friendship.
It had been in the early months of the new presidency, back in May of 1961, that Bobby had receiv
ed word from Hoover of how the CIA had, during the previous administration, approached Giancana for help in ridding Cuba of Castro. The agency assumed that the mob—ever since the revolutionary leader had shut down its highly profitable gambling interests on the island—had good reason to want Castro disposed of. So, Hoover knew, did Bobby. He’d signed a report, after all, declaring there could be “no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor.” Hoover figured he’d be a ready listener to hear about this “dirty business” involving Giancana.
Even with the ending of JFK’s affair with Judith Campbell, Bobby could see that the Giancana-Kennedy connection still held menace. Having succeeded in severing Jack’s ties to both Giancana’s mistress and Frank Sinatra, he now wanted a clear statement from the CIA. Did the United States continue to be involved in a kill-Fidel plot? In May of 1962, at his request, he received an official briefing in which he was told that the Bay of Pigs fiasco had marked the end of that conspiracy involving Giancana. “I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you’ll let the attorney general know,” Bobby said.
Keeping his brother free from scandal was his priority. Yet Bobby left no one in doubt, least of all his CIA contacts, that he wanted Fidel Castro gone.
• • •
On the evening of President Kennedy’s inauguration, an air force veteran named James Meredith had applied to the University of Mississippi. Knowing that Ole Miss did not permit African Americans to attend, he followed up with an eloquent two-page letter to the Justice Department. In it, he stated his desire to enroll at Ole Miss, explaining at the same time he realized it would be a goal he’d be unable to accomplish on his own. The “delaying tactics” used by the state, Meredith explained, would mean that he’d neither be accepted nor rejected, but simply kept at bay.
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