by Larry Tye
Bobby meant to get rough but not to unleash a tempest. The agents couldn’t reach Martin until 11:00 that night. After talking to him they placed a call to Courtney Evans, the FBI’s liaison with Bobby, to ask how they should handle the reporters. “It woke me up out of a sound sleep” at 2:00 A.M., Evans recalled. “The question asked was whether these reporters should be interviewed at once or whether this could be put off till the following day. Unfortunately, I didn’t check with anybody. I just made a decision predicated on the fact that if we could interview the president of a steel company at eleven or twelve o’clock at night, perhaps we could at least call three reporters on the phone, recognizing that we would have to wake them up.” The agents roused one reporter by telephoning at 3:00 that morning, met a second at his office at 6:30 A.M., and questioned a third later in the day. Reporters routinely phone sources in the middle of the night, but they don’t like it when anyone—most of all federal policemen—does the same thing to them, as they let the world know. The public’s understanding of the facts quickly snowballed into fantasy, with suggestions of not just journalists but steel executives getting woken, and not by the telephone but by agents violating the sanctity of their homes. Even the normally unflappable New York Times published a page one story with this screeching headline: STEEL: A 72-HOUR DRAMA WITH AN ALL-STAR CAST AND PLOT OF MANY SURPRISES. The chairman of the Republican National Committee called it “reminiscent of the days of Hitler and the Gestapo when the German people lived in fear of the knock on the door in the middle of the night.” Others suggested a conspiracy to embarrass Bobby, orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover, who, according to Evans, learned about the calls from him the next morning and told him they never should have been made.
In fact, Bobby and Jack were finally getting tough with big steel and it was working, with the companies backing down from their proposed price increases. Then the Kennedy brothers backed down from the grand jury and subpoenas that Bobby had promised, with the president reasoning that keeping the peace with the steel companies trumped finding out whether they had illegally fixed prices. Bobby blamed his brother for that retrenchment, saying that JFK felt “it was important to make up to business so that they would not consider him or the Administration antibusiness.” But the attorney general accepted full responsibility for the late-night telephone calls, even though he hadn’t ordered them and knew the calls would reinforce his image as ruthless. “Robert Kennedy didn’t try to wiggle out of this by saying: ‘Somebody—a minor FBI official—made that decision,’ ” said Evans. “He indicated that this was a decision of the department and was his responsibility. Of course, he didn’t know anything about it.” As for Bobby, he never regretted the White House’s flexing its muscles during the steel crisis, but he was more reflective than his critics realized about the “rather scary” potential that such power could be abused. “That potential, as far as the attorney general of the United States [is concerned], rests in a thousand ways,” he added. “If I started an investigation of you in your community, you’re ruined.”
Most of what he did as attorney general, whether it was going all out to put Hoffa and Cohn behind bars or snuffing out fires like the steel crisis, fit into his grand scheme. Occasionally he acted only because something or someone caught his notice, offering a glimpse into his heart. So it was with Sergeant Alvin York, the celebrated hero of World War I. York and the seven soldiers under his command had silenced deadly German machine gun nests and captured 132 enemy troops. That story won an Oscar for Gary Cooper, and it brought fame but not fortune to York, a subsistence farmer from Tennessee. Bobby learned that the seventy-three-year-old invalid owed $172,000 in federal taxes on the royalties from the book and movie about him, which he had donated to build a Bible school and a high school. Bobby was a sucker for a story like York’s and asked his staff, “What can we legally do to help?” Then he did it, getting the IRS to reduce what York owed, helping plan a fundraiser to cover the rest, and kicking in a thousand dollars of his own.
Jack had joked two years before that the job of attorney general would give his little brother some legal experience, but even he would have found it a stretch to imagine that Bobby’s first courtroom appearance would be before the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in one of the most consequential cases in American history. Gray v. Sanders challenged Georgia’s apportionment system that gave rural voters disproportionate clout in primary elections for such statewide offices as governor,*10 a setup Bobby felt was unfair as well as unconstitutional. Before he could make that argument to the court, however, he needed to persuade his own solicitor general, Archibald Cox. A luminous legal mind burnished at Harvard made Cox perhaps the most influential and intrepid solicitor general in U.S. history, and he was unconvinced that federal court was the forum in which to challenge these state voting systems. Bobby knew that without Cox’s support the justices would look skeptically at anything he said. He also knew that ordering Cox to yield wouldn’t work and might impel him to quit. So the attorney general first invited the president’s top political aides to meet with him, Cox, and other Justice officials. When JFK’s men started talking politics, Bobby stopped them, saying it didn’t matter which party would gain, “malapportionment was simply wrong.” When Cox protested that there was no way to make a convincing argument for Kennedy’s “one man, one vote” approach, Bobby ended the meeting by saying, “Archie, I know you’ll find a way.” That closing remark was preplanned and “one of the shrewdest things I’ve ever heard somebody say,” said Bruce Terris, a smart young lawyer whose job with Cox gave him a front row seat at the backroom drama. As he and Cox returned to their offices, Terris added, “Cox said to me, ‘[Bobby] doesn’t understand.’ While I diplomatically did not reply, I thought about how much Kennedy did understand. He not only understood the fundamental legal-political issue but he understood his man, Archibald Cox.” The solicitor general ended up writing a magnificent brief, which was one of the very few he did entirely on his own and provided a compelling framework for Bobby’s presentation to the justices on January 17, 1963.
The attorney general brought along a cheering section that included his mother, wife, two sisters, younger brother, nephew, four of his seven children, and two sisters-in-law, one of whom was the First Lady. But all eyes were on Bobby, wearing the uniform of morning coat and striped trousers customary for government attorneys arguing before the Supreme Court. Most recent attorneys general had argued at least one case before the high court, but surely he was the first for whom it was his inaugural case. And he was one of the few lawyers who would actually invite the justices to interrogate him. All that made it the toughest ticket in Washington, remembered Terris. “Everybody in town wanted to see Bobby Kennedy get his teeth knocked out.”
With no text or even notes, the attorney general made what amounted to a four-page opening argument. Having deftly marshaled the solid support of the government behind his arguments, Bobby displayed a confidence that belied his inexperience and shone a rare spotlight on his legal brainpower. He reminded the justices what was at stake: “[Election] districts have been so arranged in certain areas of the United States that an individual in one area has 10, 15, 50 or 100 times the vote strength of an individual in another area.” He challenged the court to admit that the Georgia system “strikes at the very heart of the United States.” He drew laughs from the nine men in black robes by telling them, “We used to have, and I repeat used to have, a saying in my City of Boston which was vote early, and vote often. If—if you live in one of the small counties in the State of Georgia, all you have to do is vote early and you accomplish the same result.” As he sat down, Bobby bowed slightly to the bench, which included two old friends and a former deputy. Fourteen months later the justices, in a landmark eight-to-one decision, struck down the Georgia system and sanctified the principle—extolled so eloquently by the attorney general—that the vote of every American should count equally.
Archie Cox should have intimidated Bobby Kenne
dy. At Harvard Law School, he had served on the law review, a spot reserved for top achievers. He clerked for Learned Hand, one of history’s most-quoted judges, and came to Justice as a Harvard professor and the nation’s leading scholar on labor law.*11 Bobby came from a less esteemed law school where he finished in the middle of his class and had, since graduating, impressed many with his zeal and few with his scholarliness. He understood that, and he compensated brilliantly by filling the top ranks of his Justice Department with men more accomplished than himself—Rhodes Scholars and Yale Law graduates Byron White, Nicholas Katzenbach, and John Douglas as deputy and assistant attorneys general; Yale Law grad and Supreme Court clerk Louis Oberdorfer to run the Tax Division; Phillips Exeter, Yale, and Yale Law intellectual Burke Marshall to run Civil Rights; and Edwyn Silberling of Harvard Law overseeing the crackdown on organized crime. Even junior lawyers such as Terris carried impressive credentials: summa cum laude from Harvard College and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.
Early on, surrounding himself with such a gifted staff backstopped Bobby and deflected insinuations that he wasn’t up to the job. Over time he learned how to manage his position in ways that made him and the government look good, such as getting Cox to author just the right brief in the one person, one vote case. Not knowing the legal fine points helped Bobby slice through legal argot and arrive at more fundamental truths affecting policy and politics. “I wouldn’t characterize Bobby as an intellectual,” said Teddy White. “I’d characterize him as something more important: the guy who can use intellectuals.” Bobby also was smart enough to know that filling a staff just with Ivy League gentlemen like Cox and Katzenbach would have made his department too high-minded and plodding, and not necessarily primed for action or change. So he recruited what Victor Navasky called “home-grown activists”—crusading journalists like Edwin Guthman and John Seigenthaler, street-smart investigators like Walter Sheridan, hard-nosed auditors like Carmine Bellino, and quietly savvy Washington hands like Joe Dolan.
JFK’s New Frontier*12 would become known for attracting what the journalist David Halberstam called America’s “best and brightest,” but within the Kennedy circle it was RFK’s Justice Department that drew envy for embodying Shakespeare’s “band of brothers.” Bobby’s staff took on his passions. They became his avenging angels. “It was really kind of like a love affair—for myself and for everybody else in the Civil Rights Division,” said John Doar, who helped run the division. “Justice has emerged as the most yeasty of all the Departments in the Administration—and by far the most important power base,” the journalist and former JFK speech writer Joseph Kraft pronounced in Harper’s Magazine. “The Department has been made available as a kind of emergency reservoir of talent and know-how, ready to serve the Administration wherever occasion requires. As one Justice Department aide put it: ‘We are the riot squad for the New Frontier.’ ”
The image of a riot squad would have horrified buttoned-down cabinet secretaries such as Dean Rusk at State and Douglas Dillon at Treasury, but it suited Bobby at Justice. He was mounting nothing short of a crusade, with dragons to slay, and he needed to be surrounded by knights disposed to assail, not to accommodate. He didn’t merely issue instructions to his aides; he led by example. He wandered the back corridors, opening office doors, extending a hand, and announcing himself to career Justice lawyers, as if they didn’t know, “I’m Bob Kennedy. What are you working on?” He did the same in every city he visited, introducing himself to assistant U.S. attorneys, street-level FBI agents, and prison guards. He didn’t make small talk. He couldn’t. When he asked what they were working on he actually wanted to know and waited for their answers. Each division chief had to file detailed written dispatches each night. Every senior staffer had to come to lunch every Tuesday and Thursday, ready to report. He granted his assistants more latitude than they had ever had—and he offered his help and the White House’s—but the job had to get done. He set the tone at his very first meeting: “Do your homework. Don’t let there be anything in your department that you don’t know. Know every damn thing!”
“The Kennedys didn’t wait….You learned as you went,” said press aide Ed Guthman, who had won a Pulitzer Prize before coming to work for Bobby. “I learned the first week, the first couple of days I was there that nobody was going to invite me to do anything….I could never go to Robert and say, ‘Gee, I didn’t know that.’ It had to be my business.” John Reilly, who was in charge of the U.S. attorneys, said Bobby’s “entire philosophy” boiled down to these favorite phrases: “Don’t tell me what you’re going to do. Tell me what you’ve done, and until you’ve done it, it really doesn’t mean anything.” Another favorite, according to Katzenbach: “Cut the shit, just do it.”
Bobby had picked his staff with that kind of mental toughness in mind, and most who didn’t have it didn’t last. It was no accident that so many of his deputies had been to war—Ramsey Clark with the Marines, Katzenbach as a navigator and prisoner of war, Byron White as an intelligence officer and winner of two Bronze Stars. These were square-jawed warriors with an instinct for executing a mission and impatience with flabby bureaucracy. Few, however, had Bobby’s stamina, as they learned in the winter of 1963. It had started with a joke, when one day the Marine Corps Commandant showed the president an old order from President Teddy Roosevelt saying that every Marine should be able to walk fifty miles in twenty hours. JFK wondered aloud whether contemporary Marines were up to the challenge, and it soon became a national craze, with civilians from Boston to Burbank trying to see how far and fast they could walk. Never to be outdone, Bobby invited four unlucky aides to join him before dawn on a Saturday morning when the mercury was hovering at twenty and their path was covered with ice and snow. Some had the sense to wear hiking shoes, but the attorney general had on penny loafers. By late afternoon three had dropped out as a helicopter swooped in for a closer look. “Maybe there’s an emergency and I’ll have to go back?” Bobby said hopefully to Guthman, his remaining companion. The copter turned out to be a photographer from Life magazine anxious to see the attorney general’s progress. At mile thirty-five, Guthman’s legs stiffened to the point where he had to stop. “You’re lucky your brother isn’t president of the United States,” Bobby whispered as he pushed on. His final time—recorded in Life under the headline A LITTLE STIFF FOR A MAN OF 37 and a picture of him recuperating in stocking feet—was seventeen hours and fifteen minutes.
The new mood was conspicuous in Bobby’s fifth-floor office. There actually were two walnut-paneled offices, with most of the previous attorneys general working out of the private back one and reserving the bigger, more baronial one up front for ceremonial purposes. Bobby did the opposite. The old setup was like “being on a desert island without girls,” he complained. The new one let him keep open his door so any staffer could walk in. When he shouted, as he liked to do, a secretary or administrative assistant could hear him and run in. The back office was reserved now for lunches with staff or family and to display his endless photographs of Kennedys at play. Adding to the new sense of informality were his tie and hair that were always askew, and an open shirt collar with sleeves rolled up.*13 Sitting behind his desk, he looked less like the attorney general than a copyboy hamming it up while the boss was away. Comfortable sofas replaced old, stuffy furniture. Each richly paneled wall had a unique motif. Scotch-taped to the one nearest his desk were the children’s watercolor sketches and a crayoned Mona Lisa. A stuffed sailfish caught off Acapulco hung over the hearth and a stuffed tiger guarded the stone fireplace that blazed all winter, sometimes providing the occasion to roast hot dogs and marshmallows. Formally framed photographs of his predecessors still hung there, along with the WPA-style allegorical murals, but they suddenly looked fusty. Bobby jettisoned his autographed picture of boxer Floyd Patterson when the heavyweight champ lost his title. Kennedys had never liked losers.*14
Ethel helped with the renovation. It was her idea to put picnic tables, awnings, chairs, a
nd a snack bar in the courtyard of the Justice building, and to pipe in music at lunchtime. A gym went in on the roof. Groups of new lawyers who had never been on the fifth floor were ushered up to meet the boss. Randomly selected messengers, file clerks, and telephone operators, whom past attorneys general might or might not have acknowledged, got invitations to the annual judicial reception at the White House. For Evelyn Wright, an elevator operator he loved to gossip with, Bobby sent his chauffeur to make sure she and her husband arrived in style. Then he introduced them to the president. None of this surprised his new secretary, Jayne Lahey, who was on crutches and in a full leg cast after a terrible car accident. Bobby had her driven home the night of the presidential inaugural—but only long enough so she could change into her gown and be driven back to the galas. “He had a tremendous feeling for people in need,” Lahey said. Bobby also invited secretaries and clerks to sit in when he was delivering testimony they had typed or copied. “Although I have served under ten Attorneys-General, no one before you has ever seen fit to reach this far down the ladder and include a person of my position in ‘The Mainstream of History,’ ” Bessie M. Greene, who ran the mimeograph room, wrote in a thank-you note. “This is what sets you apart from other men. You have a heart and you use it.”
