The two men were so different in their approaches to government, however, that from the day Bobby stepped into office, much of what he did rankled Hoover. Although the FBI perpetuated an image of their leader as an intrepid G-man, Hoover was in essence the most brilliant Washington bureaucrat of the twentieth century, a career civil servant who could have been overseeing widgets as easily as agents.
There was precision in everything Hoover did, from the way he managed his Caucasian, conservative, white-shirted, clean-shaven agents to the niceties of his communication with the White House. He held a treasure trove of information on policymakers and presidents that had kept all presidents wary, helping to ensure his continued tenure. Most of what the agency did was documented in precise memos that ended up on the chief’s desk, the final product of a machine whose ultimate output was not the capture of criminals but the endless perpetuation of Hoover’s power.
The FBI director was consumed with fighting the American Communist party. He could not see that the party had been reduced to a few bedraggled militants surrounded by the FBI agents who had thoroughly infiltrated the organization. He refused to understand that the most serious internal danger the nation faced was organized crime. That said, the director had created a disciplined, professional organization that, for the most part, stayed within the broad parameters of the law and often rendered signal service that its opponents rarely acknowledged.
Bobby was an antibureaucrat who proudly flouted all the elaborate strictures of government, considering a day not won unless he had broken out of one tedious regimen or another or surprised some slumbering official with his unannounced appearance. Night or day, few Washington officials would have dared to arrive at their office without wearing a coat and tie. On weekends and evenings, Bobby was damned if he was going to dress like an ambitious bureaucrat, and he wandered the halls in T-shirts and sweaters. In meetings he flung his feet up on desks and brought his enormous dog, Brumus, into work, though the nation’s top law enforcement officer could have been fined fifty dollars or sentenced to thirty days in jail for so flagrantly violating government rules.
Bobby had scarcely been in office for a week when he showed up one evening around eight o’clock to visit the FBI’s printing unit, shaking hands with night-shift employees. That same evening he wanted to enter the FBI’s gym but was told the door was locked. So began a flurry of memos back and forth within the FBI about the unpredictable attorney general and his mysterious visits. In subsequent visits to the gym, the FBI monitored Bobby’s every move, even noting in a memo the number of push-ups he performed—ten to fifteen—during one half-hour session in the facility.
Hoover had created an agency in which no life or event went unmonitored. It was a trivialization of government, but the system he had created allowed Hoover to chronicle Bobby’s actions and record his utterances. The attorney general would never be able to escape from any questionable actions he took, or from any of the accolades he gave the director.
As he entered office, Bobby shared Hoover’s fixation with American communism, giving speeches and interviews that could as easily have been spoken by Hoover or Joe McCarthy. In March, Bobby went on the radio program of Senator Kenneth Keating, the moderate New York Republican, and said that the Communist Party remained as great a threat as during the Red Scare of the past decade because it “is controlled and to a large degree financially supported by a foreign government.” As much as many American liberals ignored the painful truth, evidence in recent years from Soviet archives shows that Bobby was correct in his second assertion: the parry had been largely controlled and financed by Moscow. However, by 1961 the Communist Party was decimated and probably controlled and financed more by the FBI, whose agents and informers may have made up about half of the minuscule party.
By the fall of his first year as attorney general, Bobby had come to the realization that the Communist Party was not a nefarious secret army of potential traitors with the power and will to subvert America. “They are not important numerically and present no grave menace to our security,” Bobby said in November in Los Angeles. Even as he said so, he made sure that he kept stroking Hoover. After his return from his West Coast trip, he called Hoover. The FBI director noted “that in regard to the trip which he recently made, he was impressed with my people in all of the cities where he traveled.”
Bobby believed that there was a vast underground army of betrayers within America more threatening than Communists. As attorney general, he set out to attack organized crime with a resolve and weaponry far beyond what had been brought to previous attempts. He had been obsessed with the mob since the days of his work on the McClellan Committee, and now he believed he had the power to end what he had begun. He quadrupled the number of attorneys in the organized crime division and sent them across the country attacking the gangsters where they nested, protected by corrupt local officials or a see-no-evil police atmosphere. The IRS targeted Mafia figures for audits, going after them with a merciless concern for detail that at times assaulted their civil liberties.
Many superbly dedicated FBI agents pursued this new enemy just as relentlessly, shadowing targeted individuals, wiretapping them, monitoring their businesses and homes, and tailing them wherever they went. Hoover, however, had been slow in turning them toward this implacable foe.
“Hoover was a miserable son of a bitch, but he was tough,” said William Hundley, chief of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section. “He was tough and shrewd and powerful. And you know, we got some movement from the FBI, but not what we would have liked. They hated us. And it wasn’t right. At that time, you know, they still had about half of their personnel in the FBI working on the domestic Communist Party. There wasn’t anything left except informants. And we wanted to move those guys into organized crime. And a lot of the individual agents, they wanted to do it. But it was a terrible struggle. I don’t think that Hoover had ever had an attorney general that didn’t kiss his ass. And Bobby didn’t kiss his ass.”
As Bobby read the files and listened to the various agents, he learned of America’s secret history. He came across names of entertainers he had admired, politicians with whom he had worked, and celebrated business leaders. In May, Bobby made a trip to the FBI offices in Chicago. The attorney general was a vociferous reader of FBI files, and by now he knew that determined special agents in Chicago were dedicated to going after the syndicate, tailing Sam Giancana, the local leader, and bugging his hangout at the Armory Lounge.
As soon as Bobby was introduced to the assembled agents, Marlin Johnson, the special agent in charge, began his prepared statement. Johnson spoke the language not of a gritty, hands-on cop but of a ward politician, praising his visitor and then touting his own accomplishments. “Mr. Johnson,” Bobby interrupted, “I didn’t come here to hear a canned speech about how magnificent you are…. We’ll listen to the agents who are out on the street, the men who are doing the work you think is so great.”
Later in the day William F. Roemer Jr., one of those agents, played a tape for the attorney general from a bug that had been placed in the Democratic headquarters in Chicago’s first ward. As Bobby sat there, he heard Pat Marcy, a Democratic organizer whom he had met during the campaign, talking to two cops about one of their colleagues who refused bribes. The three men decided that they had no choice but to murder the man. Bobby listened to the tape, asked Roemer to play it again, and said nothing more.
Bobby could have left that day and subtly scuttled an investigation that might one day touch on associates of the Kennedys. It was even possible that some of the accused would call out his father’s name. That was not just hypothetical, for according to Cartha DeLoach, the deputy director, in 1961 the FBI bugs heard Giancana talking of the $25,000 he had contributed to the Kennedy campaign.
Many Democrats would have cried foul at the bugging of Democratic Party headquarters, believing that the FBI was eavesdropping on a citadel of democracy in its pursuit of the corrupt. Bobby did not do that
either, but by word and deed he flailed the agents onward in their pursuit of the Mafia underground. Bobby had little use for the finer nuances of civil liberties. He did not always grasp that in defending the rights of those who least deserved them, one defended the rights of all. He had not flinched at hearing the results of the bugging of the Democratic offices in Chicago. It was a war out there, and Bobby wanted his brave soldiers to have the weapons that would let them win.
Bobby’s defenders suggest that he did not know that the bug had been placed there by the FBI but was told the Chicago police had put it there. That was hardly much of a distinction. If Kennedy had been opposed to breaking into houses and offices to place listening devices, he presumably would have been equally against any other law enforcement organization doing it and feeding misbegotten information to the FBI. It was perhaps more dangerous for local police to be placing bugs than the FBI, which at least would exercise some controls.
“In one particular instance, in a field office, one of his people asked him when Bobby was personally listening to the conversation on the tapes brought on by microphone, ‘Isn’t this illegal?’ “recalled DeLoach. “And he said, ‘Yes, everything about it is illegal.’ And then he demanded that we get better equipment. Later on he denied he knew anything about the usage of microphones. But he did and he encouraged that. It was explained to him on a number of occasions. And the material was brought over to him on a constant basis from microphones. He thoroughly understood that.”
Early on in his term, the new attorney general asked that fifty Treasury officials each year take a course in wiretapping and bugging, rather than the fifteen who were taking it in the Eisenhower years. The officer in charge said that it would be impossible to more than triple the number. “You look old to me,” Kennedy replied, dismissing the man. “You should think of retiring.” The man soon left Treasury, and a new, younger official took over to oversee the vastly increased load.
The FBI chief provided raw files to Bobby that were compilations of wiretaps, bugs, and overheard conversations, as well as informants’ tales of every stripe and degree of reliability. Hoover also sent his surrogates over to the Justice Department to inform the attorney general of the latest allegations and rumors involving the Kennedys, including a tale that the president had had a group of women with him on the twelfth floor of the LaSalle Hotel while the Secret Service surrounded the building. It was, as Bobby knew, “ridiculous on the face of it,” but it was a cunning move on Hoover’s part to pass on even the most questionable of tales, proving his loyalty and indispensability, while reminding the Kennedys that if he were a teller of tales, what tales he could tell.
Bobby might shrug off silly stories about the president that Hoover passed on, but he was judicious enough not to attack Hoover’s tales that had the hard ring of truth. At the end of January 1961, when Hoover received a cable from Rome, he made a note to send a memo to the attorney general. The cable dealt with a story in the weekly magazine Le Ore in which Alicia Darr Purdom talked about her supposed affair with Kennedy in 1951. Darr Purdom said that she would have been first lady except that she was “a Polish-Jewish refugee.” FBI records stated that in the early 1950s Darr Purdom had been a prostitute, “a notorious, albeit high-class, ‘hustler.’ “This was hardly the type of woman Kennedy would have contemplated marrying, but it was not the kind of story the administration wanted made public either.
Hoover understood the bureaucratic imperative of having his superiors sign on to any measure likely to prove controversial. He was not about to wiretap someone without getting Bobby’s approval, and during his term in office the attorney general reportedly approved more than six hundred wiretaps. The FBI also placed nearly eight hundred bugs that picked up the words of the innocent as well as the suspected.
To place a bug, an agent usually had to break into the premises to plant a secret microphone. The transcripts could not be used in court, and the fruits of most of this surveillance not only rotted on the ground but also kept the FBI and other agencies from doing more legitimate police work. Hoover, however, could produce a piece of paper that Bobby signed on August 17, 1961, authorizing microphone surveillance, or “bugging.”
Bobby’s defenders claim that he may not have understood the distinction between the two forms of electronic surveillance, and that “perhaps … he did not want to know.” Willful ignorance is the most pathetic of excuses, especially in a man of Bobby’s abilities, and it is unlikely that it was true. Again and again he read transcripts or listened to conversations that could only have come from hidden microphones. He even proposed a wiretapping bill that would have stripped Americans of part of their civil liberties. In the White House, Mike Feldman oversaw proposed legislation usually by passing it on, but when he saw this bill, he was so upset that he went to the president, and the legislation never got out of the White House.
Bobby was so militant in his war against organized crime in part because the world that he was seeing was one in which the underground and the highest reaches of society at times appeared seamlessly integrated. John Mataasa, a former Chicago cop, often drove Giancana around and served as his bodyguard. He also boasted that he chauffeured Sinatra when he was in the Windy City, and that he had a letter of recommendation from William Randolph Hearst recommending his services to Otto Kerner, the governor.
Even before Bobby entered office, he knew that Sinatra had long ago soiled his name with his mob connections, and that it was his brother’s weakness to be associated with such a man. At the end of the inaugural gala, when Kennedy praised Sinatra for putting together the extravaganza, Bobby turned to Red Fay and said: “I hope Sinatra will live up to the public position the president has given him by such recognition.”
In recent years Sinatra had pushed his way to the head gangsters’ table and fancied himself a kind of ersatz Hollywood don, with the power to call on his dangerous friends whenever he needed them. In April 1961, Hoover talked to Bobby about Giancana, telling him that one of Giancana’s lieutenants, Joe Pignatello, was trying to get a lucrative liquor and gaming license in Las Vegas, fronting for the Chicago mob. Nothing happened in Las Vegas without connections, and Sinatra had gotten involved, speaking in favor of his friend. Bobby sent a clear message that Sinatra’s name would not buy a free pass in his Justice Department. Again, Bobby could simply have made a few abstract remarks about justice, freedom, and the flag and let things fall as they were going to fall. But on that day he made it indisputably clear that he not only wanted the FBI to try to prevent the granting of the license, but wanted everyone to know that he, Robert F. Kennedy, was personally concerned. “The attorney general indicated we should be sure to indicate that we were speaking on his behalf and explain that he is quite concerned about it,” Hoover noted.
As the FBI increased its surveillance of the mob in Chicago, Giancana and his henchmen expressed their outrage. Their fury would have been even greater had they known their tirades were being recorded. Early in December 1961, as the tape recorder whirled, one of Giancana’s associates, Johnny Formosa, talked to his boss. Formosa had just returned from a visit to Sinatra’s Palm Springs home. During his stay there, he said, Joe Kennedy had called the singer three times. Formosa had been trying to learn why the mob had been unable to cash in its chit with the Kennedys. Formosa recounted that the singer had explained that he had done everything he could. “I wrote Sam’s name down and I took it to Bobby,” Sinatra told Formosa. When that didn’t work, Sinatra said, he had talked to Kennedy’s father to see whether he could work his will on what the mob considered his double-crossing son.
“Well, one minute he says he tells me this and then he tells me that and then the last time I talked to him at the hotel down in Florida a month before he left, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, if I can’t talk to the old man, I’m gonna talk to the man,’ “a peeved Giancana replied. “One minute he says he’s talked to Robert, and the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. So he never did talk to him. It’s
a lot of shit.”
Giancana was probably correct in his assessment. It seems unlikely that Sinatra would have been capable of persuading Bobby to back off investigations of Giancana, or if he would have dared to make such a request face to face with the new attorney general. He may, however, have talked to Joe, who might have been more amenable, though hardly likely to have asked Bobby specifically to avoid prosecuting Giancana. It is probable that the vain, boastful Sinatra promised something from his Kennedy connections that neither he nor anyone else could deliver. Although Giancana may simply have been boasting, it seems likely that he did make various kinds of contributions to the campaign and now raged at both the Kennedys and Sinatra.
Bobby was apparently immediately made aware of Giancana’s allegations. On the bottom of the teletype from the Chicago bureau, Hoover had scrawled “&promptly” after his aide’s notation: “Memo to AG Being Prepared.”
“As the Bureau is aware, considerable information has been received … which reflects a serious rift between Giancana and Frank Sinatra,” the Chicago field office wired Hoover on January 18, 1962, “which stems primarily from Sinatra’s inability or lack of desire to intercede with Attorney General Robert Kennedy on behalf of Giancana.”
The FBI agents spread their great nets wherever the mob hierarchy was likely to venture, periodically pulling in all sorts of unseen creatures from the dark depths of American life. In Los Angeles, the FBI targeted John Rosselli as a second-tier figure, running wiretaps and bugs, interviewing his friends and associates, and observing his daily activities. The FBI had no idea that Rosselli had become the CIA’s agent in attempting to assassinate Castro, and they tried to explore every shadowy corner of his life. In their investigation they came upon the name of Judith Campbell (Exner), who led them to places that they had not expected to go.
The Kennedy Men Page 84
