by Larry Tye
He did, in a style that would become characteristic. First he replaced the young firebrand handling the case with a more seasoned lawyer who, as an Eisenhower holdover, added a bipartisan hue to the prosecution. After confirming with his legal team that there was enough evidence to indict, he took personal responsibility for the decision rather than disqualifying himself, which might have helped him with his brother, the Keogh brothers, and the public. He went so far as to call Eugene to give him a heads-up about the impending charges against his brother, a move of questionable legal ethics but consistent with his personal code of decency. And he never hid from his investigators his nervousness about their pursuing allegations that the congressman, too, was dirty, although he never interfered with their probe. He closed with an unrehearsed and revealing touch of humor. After giving the green light to prosecute, he placed his face on his oversized desk, wrapped his elbows around his head, and said to the aides who were with him, “Goddamn-it, I told my brother I didn’t want this job.” He half-joked with another assistant, “If you guys indict one more Democrat [JFK]’s going to put me on the Supreme Court to get rid of me.” And before the Keogh trial began he warned William Hundley, the Republican he had made lead prosecutor, “Remember, if we lose this case, you and I are going to look like a couple of real shits.”
Hundley won, sending Keogh to prison for two years. Political operatives at the White House were furious. The treasurer of the Democratic National Committee approached Bobby’s longtime investigator Walter Sheridan at a party “and said, ‘I can’t believe that you couldn’t have fixed that case,’ ” Sheridan remembered. “And I said, ‘Of course we could have, but that’s the difference [between] you and us.’ ” That difference was evident to nearly everyone at the Justice Department, especially the career attorneys, who from that instant were Kennedy men. “It said to us at the time that Kennedy would do whatever he had to do as attorney general, regardless of the political situation,” says Henry Ruth, then a young lawyer in the Organized Crime Section. “A lesser Attorney General might have stepped in and said, ‘I don’t want to indict this fellow,’ ” agreed Hundley. “While he was Attorney General, I think [Kennedy] probably indicted more people like this than any other Attorney General.”*2
It was true. In 1962 he indicted, convicted, and sent to prison as part of a kickback scandal George Chacharis, the mayor of Gary, Indiana, who had delivered 70 percent of his city’s votes to JFK and was being considered as ambassador to Greece. He indicted and won a nolo contendere plea from the gossip columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote under the pseudonym Cholly Knickerbocker. Cassini was a friend of Joe Kennedy’s, and he got in trouble when his public relations firm represented the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo without telling the U.S. government about it. Bobby was at his best in such sensitive cases. During his three years as attorney general, his office prosecuted two congressmen, three state supreme court justices, five mayors, two chiefs of police, and three sheriffs—all Democrats. Bobby understood the politics involved in each, and he insisted that the arguments be airtight and the accused be treated respectfully. JFK expressed anger at times, and more often annoyance, but he gave Bobby a wider berth than anyone else in government and on occasion used his brother’s scrupulousness to get himself off a particularly sharp hook. When a fat-cat donor to the Democratic Party complained to the president that Bobby was investigating him for antitrust infractions, Jack told him, “You’re a good friend and I’d like to help you. But I’m afraid we have an attorney general we can’t fix.”
Nobody saw anything funny about the case of James M. Landis, the former dean of the Harvard Law School who was as close as anyone to the Kennedy clan. Landis served with Joe on the Securities and Exchange Commission, succeeded him as chairman, acted as his lawyer, and assisted with his memoir. He helped Ted get into law school and helped Jack pilot his political career, first in Congress and continuing into the White House. Landis’s favorite was Bobby, whose confidence he boosted back when Joe used to ignore his third son, and whose merits he touted often enough to make Joe start to take notice. A brilliant academic and regulator, Landis drank too much and was pathologically absentminded, forgetting to bill Joe for legal services and letting slip the filing of first a single year’s income tax return, then a full five. The fact that he set aside in a separate checking account the money he owed made clear he hadn’t meant to cheat. But the Justice Department concluded in 1963 that it had no choice but to prosecute, and Bobby felt he had no choice but to disqualify himself from the case and watch his friend be sentenced to thirty days in prison.
“If grandfather is so close to President Kennedy, why didn’t he stop the trial?” asked Landis’s six-year-old granddaughter, voicing the chagrin shared by the adults who knew him, including Bobby. The attorney general didn’t stop the trial, but he did act—first to ensure that Landis would serve his time at a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison, then to transfer him from a public health hospital on Staten Island, where he was barely surviving, to the better equipped and more humane Columbia Presbyterian. Even that had consequences. Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general who took over the case when Bobby bowed out, said it would open Bobby to charges of cronyism. Bobby shot back: “If any goddam reporter wants to say that the Kennedy administration, having prosecuted one of the best friends they’ve ever had—somebody who’s been practically a father to me…if they want to say that, having prosecuted him, having exposed him to the public through this, that we are now soft on criminals by having him serve that stupid thirty days in some degree of comfort, they can just go to hell!” With fifty years of hindsight, Katzenbach concludes that “Bobby had the power to do something that he thought was the right thing to do and there was no legal reason why he shouldn’t do it. The only reason why he shouldn’t do it, which I was probably oversensitive to, was that he would be criticized for doing it, which he was. He was always willing to be criticized.”*3
If his handling of Keogh and Landis suggested that Bobby generally went where the facts and his heart took him, his handling of Frank Sinatra showed he didn’t always. Sinatra, who by then had Oscar and Emmy awards to go with his chart-topping record albums, had raised millions and campaigned nationwide for Jack in 1960. He had even recorded a version of his hit “High Hopes” with lyrics like “Everyone wants to back Jack, Jack is on the right track.” Bobby’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, an original member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack,*4 loved palling around with Frank. So did Jack. The problem was that Sinatra had another pack of friends that included mobsters Mooney Giancana of Chicago, Lucky Luciano of New York, and half the casino operators in Las Vegas. That was no surprise to the FBI, IRS, or the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Sinatra’s name also turned up in enough probes by Bobby’s own Organized Crime Section that he ordered it to prepare a memo detailing Sinatra’s Mafia ties and recommending action.
Bobby had been suspicious of Frank from the beginning of the 1960 campaign. As attorney general, he urged his father to rescind an invitation to Sinatra to visit him on the Riviera. Likewise, he advised JFK to cancel a planned weekend stay at Sinatra’s compound on Frank Sinatra Drive in Palm Springs. Frank was devastated and, said Lawford, “he called Bobby every name in the book.” After all, the crooner had expanded his home with just such a presidential visit in mind, adding cottages for the Secret Service, constructing a heliport, even raising a flagpole like the one at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. To make matters worse, the president ended up staying at the Palm Desert home of Bing Crosby, Frank’s rival and an avowed Republican.
Bobby wasn’t bothered by the singer’s tirades, but he had to have been unnerved by the series of reports he got from his aides in 1962 and 1963 spelling out Sinatra’s business and personal relationships with a bevy of underworld figures. Justice’s lead investigator had been allowed to talk to Sinatra associates “but was precluded from any immediate contacts with SINATRA or his staff,” according to the FBI, which in a trademark Hoover ploy
was quietly keeping tabs on the Justice probe. Still, department lawyers managed to assemble enough damning material that the head of the Organized Crime Section recommended a full-blown inquiry. Katzenbach scribbled in the margin “makes sense to me.” Bobby disagreed, and no investigation was launched.
Did he back off out of gratitude to Sinatra for his role in electing Jack? Was he afraid of stirring up the hornet’s nest that prosecutors had unearthed of Jack’s ties to Frank, and Frank’s to the women Jack caroused with, some of whom also were sleeping with Mafia men? Or was it, as Kennedy defenders insisted, that the Justice Department had too few resources and more serious crooks to chase? Dougald McMillan, who wrote the reports to Bobby on Sinatra, says the attorney general had a mantra when it came to bringing down the Mob: “Peel the banana, meaning go to the guys on the periphery and turn them as witnesses against those in the center. I thought Sinatra was an ideal candidate for that.” But McMillan never got the permission he sought, or even a clear answer. “No one said no, but no one said yes.”
Looking back, McMillan gives Bobby the benefit of the doubt while acknowledging the tangled family web that made the attorney general’s task so impossible: “I believe that if it had been left to Bobby, he would have opened an investigation on Sinatra. But it appears obvious that the Kennedy election campaign was deeply indebted to Sinatra, and perhaps to Giancana. That’s my explanation for Bobby’s failure to give me the go-ahead to open an investigation on Sinatra. Because I never, not one time, heard of him killing any other investigation. He was always gung-ho to go after the Mob.”
He was even more gung-ho in his pursuit of two enemies of old, Jimmy Hoffa and Roy Cohn. Hoffa earned a team at the department that was virtually dedicated to him. Justice officials labeled it the Labor Rackets Unit, Teamsters operatives called it Operation Big Squeeze, and the world knew it as the Get-Hoffa Squad.*5 The department had not managed to get him when Eisenhower was president and Bobby was feeding it everything he could dig up at the McClellan Committee. Now Jack was president, Bobby was the country’s chief crime buster, and all the resources of the government could and would be mobilized to settle a score and put him away.
The effort expended was unprecedented. Just as Bobby had once subjected Hoffa to the most unrelenting congressional assault ever aimed at an individual, now he made his bête noire the most indicted man in America. Fifteen grand juries were impaneled to consider evidence against the Teamsters president (Hoffa counted twenty-nine). Sixteen lawyers worked exclusively on the Hoffa cases, along with thirty FBI agents and a series of other investigators (Hoffa said it was half of the attorneys at Justice and half of the FBI). While the Get-Hoffa group technically was a unit within a section within a division, Walter Sheridan, its director, reported directly to the attorney general. Sheridan was an ex-FBI man, not an attorney, and his primary qualifications were his close friendship with Bobby and knowing more than anyone else about Hoffa from his days at the Rackets Committee. The depth of Bobby’s interest would become clear during the Cuban missile crisis, when, between meetings on the epic confrontation of superpowers, Bobby and Sheridan conferred over the phone on progress in the latest Hoffa trial.
Bobby focused his attention primarily on a case that had stuck in his craw when he first exposed it in congressional hearings five years earlier, in which Hoffa and his partner had made a million dollars from the Test Fleet trucking company for which he once settled a strike. The complaint rested on such arcane legal arguments—involving federal labor law and complicated kickback schemes—that a government lawyer had to explain them after adjournment each day to the court reporter in Nashville, where the trial was held in 1962. The government could muster only misdemeanor complaints, but Bobby was so determined to win that he and his team insinuated within the Hoffa camp an informant named Edward Grady Partin. Partin had been languishing in jail on charges including kidnapping, rape, and manslaughter, any one of which was more serious than everything facing Hoffa and the accumulated burden of which made Partin anxious to curry favor with prosecutors. His spying turned up stunning allegations, not about the case at hand but about Hoffa’s attitude toward Bobby. The Teamsters leader told Partin about three different ways he imagined having the attorney general killed: blown up at Hickory Hill using plastic explosives; shot with a high-powered rifle; or murdered while traveling in the South, with the crime pinned on archsegregationists. “Somebody,” Partin quoted Hoffa as saying, “needs to bump that sonofabitch off.” Hoffa denied everything and, pointing to Partin’s “criminal records from coast to coast dating from 1943,” branded his accuser a “fraud and liar.”*6
The Nashville trial was historic. “Never,” Navasky pointed out, “had the government devoted so much money, manpower and top level brainpower to a misdemeanor case.” When the proceedings ended in a hung jury and a mistrial, the government cried foul. Hoffa, it said, hadn’t trusted his fate to luck or jury discretion. He tried to bribe several jurors, sometimes with the offer of a job promotion, other times with easy money. At a trial in Chattanooga in 1964 the bribery evidence stuck and the Teamsters president, who started out facing a mere misdemeanor, stood convicted of a felony. After all the indictments dating to that first arrest in 1957 for trying to buy his way into the Rackets Committee files—and all the acquittals—Bobby had his man. Hoffa was sentenced to eight years in prison for jury tampering, and in a separate case that ended just before Bobby left office, he would get five more years for fraud.
One question continues to hang over the Get-Hoffa Squad: Was Bobby Kennedy conducting a vendetta against Jimmy Hoffa? He surely was, just as federal authorities had against Al Capone, Screw Andrews, and other organized crime targets. With each of them, the justice system worked in reverse: Instead of starting with a crime and searching for the criminal, it started with a presumed criminal and looked for a crime to justify locking him up. Few second-guessed that approach with villainous masterminds like Capone or callous murderers like Andrews. Hoffa is more ambiguous. No doubt he broke some laws and bent more. But Teamsters members had elected him, then reelected him, because he won contracts nobody else could and made drivers proud of their work. Dedicating a crack unit of lawyers and investigators to Jimmy Hoffa meant fewer resources to chase mobsters, blue-collar criminals, and other enemies of justice. Bobby was convinced that nobody was more dangerous than Hoffa for corrupting not just the Teamsters but the labor-management equilibrium and our democracy itself. Yet his idealism had cost him his objectivity. So single-minded was his pursuit that he accomplished the unthinkable: He made people feel sorry for Hoffa. “If you indict someone enough, you’re probably playing Russian roulette,” says Jimmy’s son James, the current president of the Teamsters. “Eventually you’re going to find a jury” that will convict.
“It’s like Ahab and the whale,” agrees Navasky, who studied the case in depth. “[Bobby] became fixated on this evil guy who stood for absolute evil and then it became a macho contest. He was going to show him, and his own sense of self was at stake as long as this evil guy was at large.” Jimmy himself, in a rare moment of self-awareness, offered this reflection on his long grudge match with Bobby Kennedy: “A corrupt Jimmy Hoffa is no great danger to the United States of America. There are police forces and law-enforcement agencies to take care of a Jimmy Hoffa, courts of law to try him and jails to incarcerate him, if he truly violates the laws. The real menace is a vindictive cabinet officer with power over the courts, who by threat or coercion can force weak men to do his bidding and thus make [a] mockery of the forces of law and order.”*7
Bobby would have dismissed that meditation as malarkey, but he was genuinely conflicted over the fate of his archfoe. In the years since their get-acquainted dinner, Bobby’s us-versus-them rendering of the world had begun to soften. The upshot with Hoffa was that the attorney general “was delighted with the conviction and unhappy that he was going to go to jail,” Kenny O’Donnell surmised, adding, “1957 was one thing, seven years later Bobby had grown up
an awful lot and I don’t think anybody exulted in anybody going to go to jail that had been around that much, seen enough jails, seen enough prisons.”*8
Roy Cohn was the other old enemy Bobby revisited from his perch at the Justice Department. Their simmering hatred had never subsided and tensions flared anytime they encountered each other. Three rows apart on a plane from Hyannis to New York, they didn’t speak or even glance at each other. When Bobby was seated near Cohn at Orsini’s, an upscale restaurant in New York, Cohn turned to him and said, “Who’s going to move, you or me?” (Bobby had the headwaiter change his table.) When they had worked for Senator Joe McCarthy, Cohn had the senior title and the upper hand, and he wielded them to keep Bobby in his place and doing his bidding. Now their positions were reversed.
“It’s a toss-up between you and Jimmy Hoffa as to who’s number one on [Bobby’s] list,” another old McCarthy staffer, Jim Juliana, told Cohn after Kennedy was named attorney general. Juliana advised Cohn to “get out of town.” Neil Gallagher witnessed their battle up close in the early 1960s when he was a congressman from New Jersey. When Cohn offered to use his press contacts to help win support for the Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill, “Bobby went nuts,” Gallagher says. “He said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with that son of a bitch.’…Kenny O’Donnell picks up Bobby and pushes him against the wall. He says, ‘What the hell’s more important, the civil rights bill or your hard-on for Roy Cohn?’ ”
