Official and Confidential (46 page)

Edgar's knowledge of the President's bedroom secrets, exposure of which could most certainly destroy him, remained a constant threat. With just a sliver of an electoral majority, and with reelection in 1964 far from certain, the Kennedys could not afford to alienate the multitude of voters for whom Edgar represented order, the public good and the American Way. In the short term, at any rate, they were saddled with him.

When Robert Kennedy sent U.S. marshals to Alabama to protect the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists demanding the right to use public transport, he confronted more problems with the FBI. As white bigots attacked blacks in the
state, Kennedy was told, Edgar's agents just took notes and did nothing. FBI headquarters, which received specific warnings of collusion between the Ku Klux Klan and local police, failed to alert the Justice Department. Edgar was reluctant to do anything to alienate a vital constituency, the southern conservatives who supported him in Congress. And that put him on the side of the racists.

Edgar's immediate fight over racism, however, was sparked by Robert Kennedy's pressure on him to hire black agents. At first, rather than admit the only such ‘agents' were his own black servants, he simply took no notice. Later, at Kennedy's insistence, a few blacks were hired.
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For Robert Kennedy, though, civil rights took second place to a crusade that rankled even more with Edgar – the pursuit of organized crime.

On February 4, 1961, not two weeks into the presidency, Drew Pearson used his regular radio broadcast to report the first major battle in the younger Kennedy's war with Edgar. ‘The new Attorney General,' Pearson said, ‘wants to go all out against the underworld. To do so, Bobby Kennedy proposes a crack squad of racket busters, but J. Edgar Hoover objects. Hoover claims that a special crime bureau reflects on the FBI, and he is opposing his new boss.'

Both Kennedy brothers had served on the Senate Rackets Committee, John as Senator and Robert as Chief Counsel. John, though, admitted that he had done so only because his brother asked him to. His priorities were those of a politician, Robert's those of a zealot.

It was Robert, in his first Senate probe, who had exposed the extent to which organized labor was intertwined with organized crime. He had toppled Teamsters leader Dave Beck and sent him to jail. Then, in a second probe, he had struggled to nail Beck's corrupt successor, Jimmy Hoffa, an intensely personal feud that brought bitter confrontations with Hoffa and mafiosi like Giancana – live on national television.

Joseph Kennedy, with his longstanding ties to organized crime, thought all this madness. He tried to smooth things over during the run-up to the 1960 election, but Robert was beyond persuasion. As Attorney General, his fight against organized crime was to be more than a just cause, almost an obsession.

Robert hurtled into the Justice Department determined to bring real power to bear against the mob for the first time. Edgar greeted him, even before he had formally taken office, with an exhortation to fight Communism. ‘The Communist Party U.S.A.,' said his memorandum, ‘presents a greater menace to the internal security of our Nation than it ever has.' Kennedy disagreed. ‘It is such nonsense,' he said that year, ‘to have to waste time prosecuting the Communist Party. It couldn't be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides, its membership consists largely of FBI agents.'

Robert already knew Edgar was delinquent on organized crime. While in the Senate he had asked to see files on the mobsters arrested at Apalachin and had found the response pathetic. ‘The FBI,' he recalled, ‘didn't know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States. That was rather a shock to me … I sent the same request to the Bureau of Narcotics and they had something on every one of them.'

While Robert was on the road probing organized crime for the Senate, agents in far-flung FBI offices had received specific orders not to help him at all. The orders came directly from Edgar.

Before taking office, Robert had proposed a national crime commission, an intelligence clearing house to coordinate the work of the various agencies. Edgar had publicly shot down the notion, claiming such a federal authority would be ‘dangerous to our democratic ideals.' He dismissed as pests those who suggested it. For him they were just that, for they demanded a coordinated fight against the national crime syndicate, something Edgar claimed did not even exist.

A collision was inevitable. Luther Huston, an aide to the outgoing Attorney General, went to see Edgar a few days after the inauguration. ‘I had to wait,' he recalled, ‘because the new Attorney General was there. He hadn't called or made an appointment. He had just barged in. You don't do that with Mr Hoover. Then my turn came and I'll tell you – the maddest man I ever talked to was J. Edgar Hoover. He was steaming. If I could have printed what he said, I'd have had a scoop. Apparently Kennedy wanted to set up some kind of supplementary or overlapping group to take over some of the investigative work the FBI had been doing. My surmise is that Mr Hoover told Bobby, “If you're going to do that, I can retire tomorrow. My pension is waiting.”'

News of the rift quickly leaked to the press. In Florida, after a round of golf with Tony Curtis, Joseph Kennedy tried to cover up. ‘I don't know where those ridiculous rumors start,' he told a reporter. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. Both Jack and Bob admire Hoover. They feel they're lucky to have him as head of the FBI. Hoover is a wonderful, dedicated man – and don't think Jack and Bob don't realize it.'

Behind the scenes, the father begged his sons to humor Edgar. A meeting at the White House in February 1961, one of only six occasions on which John Kennedy agreed to see Edgar during the presidency, was probably to arrange a truce. There was no stopping Robert, however, on organized crime. He got around Edgar's rejection of a crime commission by quadrupling the staff and budget of Justice's Organized Crime Section, and rammed expansion through whether Edgar liked it or not.

In the key target areas, New York and Chicago, the FBI resumed the drive Edgar had allowed to slacken once the fuss over Apalachin had died down. The New York office, where less than a dozen agents were working organized crime when Robert took office, would end up with 115 men assigned to the task. In Chicago, the team expanded from six agents to about eighty.

To demolish Edgar's old ‘no jurisdiction' excuse, Robert rushed through new laws. In 1960 a mere nineteen members of organized crime had been indicted. In the first year of the Kennedy presidency, 121 were indicted and 96 convicted.

FBI agents assigned to organized crime now came into their own. They liked Robert Kennedy and respected the way he came in person to consult them in the field. ‘Bobby got the fight going again,' recalled Chicago's Bill Roemer. ‘He was a great and most capable guy.'

‘Kennedy and his people came in full of piss and vinegar,' said Neil Welch. ‘They were down at the office on Saturdays, sending messages out all over the place. Kennedy was just so young and enthusiastic. We thought it was delightful. He just ran roughshod all over the mechanisms that had kept all the other Attorneys General at bay. It annoyed the hell out of Hoover. He couldn't control it.'

‘It's a disgrace,' Edgar told Agent in Charge Kenneth Whittaker. ‘Kennedy's immature, impetuous. He'll destroy in five minutes the respect the FBI has built up over the years.' ‘When Kennedy was after Hoffa,' Whittaker recalled, ‘and going around the field divisions telling Agents in Charge what to do, the word came down that, hey, he might be the Attorney General, but we weren't to do anything without clearance from Bureau headquarters.'

For all Edgar's obstruction, Robert's criminal targets were rapidly becoming enraged. Carlos Marcello and Sam Giancana became prime targets, mercilessly harassed by the agency that had left them at peace for so long.

The Kennedy family's different attitudes to organized crime were at their most extreme, and most potentially dangerous, when it came to Giancana. As the man who had reportedly helped John win the election with illegal votebuying, Giancana had hoped for an easy ride from the Kennedy Justice Department. What he got was a tough, ceaseless onslaught and, as his half brother Chuck put it in 1992,
the mobster felt ‘double-crossed.' ‘Here I am helping the government,' Giancana's henchman Roselli was overheard saying on a wiretap, ‘and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.'

On the evening of July 12, 1961, Giancana walked into a waiting room at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, on a routine stopover to New York, accompanied by his mistress Phyllis McGuire. Waiting for him were a phalanx of FBI agents, including Bill Roemer, one of the mobster's most dogged pursuers. Giancana lost his temper, and revealingly so.

He knew, he told the agents, that everything he said would get back to J. Edgar Hoover. Then he burst out, ‘Fuck J. Edgar Hoover! Fuck your super boss, and your super super boss! You know who I mean; I mean the Kennedys!' Giancana piled abuse on both brothers, then snarled, ‘Listen, Roemer, I know all about the Kennedys, and Phyllis knows more about the Kennedys, and one of these days we're going to tell all. Fuck you! One of these days it'll come out …'

At the time, Roemer had no idea what Giancana meant. Today the ‘all' is less mysterious. There was the Kennedy vote-buying, the plotting against Castro – and of course the womanizing. The mobster was in regular contact with Judith Campbell, the lover the President used as gobetween. He was also close to Kennedy's brother-in-law Peter Lawford and would one day be overheard reminiscing with him about ‘the girls they used to produce for the Kennedys.' The inference was that Robert, too, was not innocent of womanizing.

In early September 1961, according to former FBI Supervisor William Kane, an informant told the Bureau Robert Kennedy had recently been seen ‘out in the desert near Las Vegas with not one but two girls, on a blanket. Somebody in organized crime had taken telephoto pictures … and the word we got from our informants was that they were going to use it to blackmail the Attorney General. This was confirmed several times over from several different sources.'

Kane said Edgar digested this, then sent Courtney Evans, his liaison with the Justice Department, to warn Robert Kennedy. Kennedy listened without comment. Then he simply asked what Evans was doing for the holiday – it was Labor Day weekend – and ended the meeting.

Former Assistant Director Evans, though famously discreet, agreed the exchange ‘probably did happen as described. There were many times I had to go in with that sort of information. Mr Hoover would give instructions and I would carry them out. There was, I know, an effort to bring pressure on the presidency by organized crime.'

It is unlikely that at this stage, even with his resources, Edgar fully comprehended the complexities of the Kennedy relationship with organized crime. He simply did what he knew best – collected dirt, let the brothers know he had it and obstructed Robert Kennedy in ways that amounted to insubordination.

A Justice Department official, dispatched to the FBI's Chicago office to improve liaison, arrived to find the Agent in Charge had left town. Knowing Kennedy's man was on the way, Edgar had deliberately ordered him to Des Moines, Iowa. At headquarters he deliberately snubbed Kennedy himself. ‘The entire time Bob was Attorney General,' said Joe Dolan, ‘he had a Tuesday and Thursday lunch in his office with the Assistant Attorneys, myself and others invited, including Hoover. Hoover came to a couple of the lunches the first month, and after that he was a no-show.'

If Robert visited a field office, Edgar stayed away. When he did travel himself, there was a galling reminder that things had changed. Once there had been a picture of Edgar on the wall of every office, a lone Big Brother presence. Now it was flanked by one of President Kennedy, distributed across the country on the instructions of his brother.

This was a war of attrition. Yet Edgar and the brothers Kennedy continued to act out, as one writer put it, ‘an
Oriental pageant of formal respect.' Perhaps the Kennedys, used to years of inane courtesies between Edgar and their father, half-hoped to coexist with Edgar by stroking his ego, remembering his anniversaries and praising him in public. They would humor the old man, even if they thought him half-crazy. Edgar, an old hand at the game, sent this handwritten note to Robert on June 9, 1961:

Dear Bob,

… Your confidence and support mean a great deal to me, and I sincerely trust I shall always merit them.

Sincerely,

Edgar

A note from the President, December 5, 1961, when Edgar received his latest award:

Dear Mr Hoover,

The Mutual of Omaha Criss Award is further proof of the high esteem in which all America holds your record of untiring effort in the field of federal law enforcement … I am proud to add my congratulations to you and to express again my gratitude for your outstanding contributions to the nation.

Sincerely,

John F. Kennedy

Edgar, who replied that he was ‘touched,' had just received a tip-off that the President was planning to fire him. Agents were deployed in an intense investigation, as assiduous and as painstaking as that into any crime. Yet a few days later ‘Edgar' was thanking ‘Bob' for the invitation to his Christmas party, and making his excuses.

The Kennedys had a less than festive Christmas in 1961. On December 19, on the golf course at Palm Beach, the President's father suffered a debilitating stroke. His right side
and face were paralyzed, and though he lived on for eight years he would never speak intelligibly again. A few months earlier, when the press had carried stories of quarreling between John and Robert and Edgar, Joseph had been at hand to calm things down. From now on, though Edgar was to visit him during his recuperation, his role as peacemaker was over.