Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (24 page)

“Yes, he was amoral, sure he was,” observed
New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock, whom Kennedy treated as a family retainer. “I think only a Roman Catholic could possibly describe how you could be amoral and still be religious. That is, how you can carry an insurance policy with the deity and at the same time do all these other things…. I never had any idealism from the time I was a young reporter about anybody who touched the edges of politics or big business. So I was not shocked in the least. I expected, and still do, that politicians and big businessmen don’t have any morals.” But Bobby Kennedy held public men to different standards.

Joe Kennedy flew down to Washington some days to watch his two sons confront the country’s most infamous gangsters and racketeers in the ornate Senate hearing room. One can only imagine the feelings of pride and fear that must have collided within him as he watched Jack and Bobby clash with the sort of men he knew from his secret business world. When Bobby knew his father was going to be there, committee staff members observed, he acted in a nervous sort of way that he never seemed to when facing off against the hoodlums. As his father walked into the Senate Caucus Room, in his expensive New York–tailored suits and his banker’s homburg hat, “Bob was a little keyed up, a little tense,” recalled Ruth Watt, the McClellan Committee’s chief clerk. “There was a strong paternal influence over all the Kennedys. [Joe Kennedy] really was a strong, strong person…. When their father came to town, everybody hopped! I remember one time he came during the hearings and he was going back to Boston. They had Eastern Airlines, Jack Kennedy’s office, the SEC, and somebody else working on one reservation for him to get back to Boston!”

Bobby had enormous respect for his powerful father. But by plunging ahead with the rackets investigation, over his father’s impassioned objections, he had risked the sort of dramatic Oedipal split that both men had so far managed to avoid. Bobby was the son most like him, Joe Kennedy always liked to say—“he hates like me.” But Jackie Kennedy, who would draw so close to her husband’s younger brother, thought Bobby was “the least like his father.” Rose Kennedy saw the devout, sensitive side to her son. Never as emotionally effusive as her husband with their children, she was still calling Bobby her “own little pet” even when he was sixteen. In his role as the scourge of organized crime, Bobby had found a way to combine his father’s raging will with his mother’s religious purity. But Joe Kennedy knew how dangerous an enterprise this was.

Ruth Watt was an experienced Capitol Hill aide whose level-headed administrative skills helped ensure that the rackets hearings ran smoothly. But when some of the more menacing characters came before the committee, she felt deeply unnerved. “The scariest one,” she thought, was New York godfather Vito Genovese, who had murdered his way to the top of the Mafia, forcing Joe Kennedy’s old bootlegging partner Frank Costello into early retirement along the way. “I would stand in back of where the senators were when he was testifying, and he had the coldest eyes. He would look right through you and just make chills. He was about the coldest individual I think I’ve ever seen.”

With Bobby leading the witness interrogations, the hearings were fueled by a barely contained fury. He wanted America to shudder with the same outrage he felt when these men, who preferred the dark shadows of power, were summoned into the glare of the TV lights that filled the Caucus Room. The hearings, which dragged on for two and a half years and summoned more than 1,500 witnesses, provided the younger Kennedy with a national stage on which to wage his holy war for America’s soul. On days when celebrated villains were scheduled to appear before the committee, Bobby made sure that his older brother was there. He was already staging JFK’s presidential bid, and he knew these theatrical duels with the leading men of crime would add to his brother’s national luster. Hoffa would vow that if Bobby thought he was going to use him to get his brother elected president, it would “be over my dead body.” But that’s precisely what the younger Kennedy had in mind. “Two tousle-haired brothers from Boston are catching attention in Washington just now as young men who may have big careers ahead,”
U.S. News & World Report
informed its readers as the rackets hearings began making headlines.

On the days that handsome young Senator Kennedy strode into the Caucus Room, a bolt of media excitement crackled through the air. “I remember one day that [Jack] came into a hearing, it must have been when they knew he was going to run for the presidency because the press was flocking around him,” recalled Watt. “He hadn’t had any lunch and [his secretary] Evelyn Lincoln came in with a tray of lunch for him, and he took it and went into the telephone booth to try to eat it. The press was like this around him, so he never ate his lunch. I remember it very well, because he was in that little telephone booth with his lunch. No matter what he did it was news. When the Kennedys were around, you felt it in the air.”

The hearings made Bobby into a media sensation too. An effusive Jack Paar introduced him to his national
Tonight Show
audience on July 23, 1959 as “the bravest, finest young man I know.” Bobby, still unused to the media glare, came across as a shy, doe-eyed, slope-shouldered boy. At the end of the interview, the emotionally candid Paar blurted out that his guest was “like a baby.” But Bobby turned into a hard-jawed prosecutor that night when he began cataloging the many sins of Jimmy Hoffa and his cronies. “They feel they’re above the law,” Kennedy told Paar’s audience. “They feel they can fix judges and juries. Mr. Hoffa has said every man has his price. This country can’t survive if you have somebody like him operating. He won’t win in the end.”

The McClellan Committee dragged a variety of notorious figures into the national spotlight. Among them were men who would loom large in the lives of the Kennedys, such as mobsters Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Sam Giancana—each of whom would later join the secret war on Castro that would bring together the Mafia, the CIA, and Cuban exiles. (Even the name of a petty Chicago hood named Jack Ruby would surface during the long hearings, in connection with the Mafia’s Cuba intrigue.) But no witness filled the Senate hearing room with as much explosive tension as Jimmy Hoffa. The confrontations between the Teamster boss and the Kennedy brothers were epic. Even his more cool-headed older brother seemed to absorb Bobby’s heat when he sparred with Hoffa.

“I’d like to say something, Senator,” Hoffa burst out on one occasion, his voice full of contempt and provocation. Since the Kennedys, in their hatred for him, were trying to single him out from the rest of the labor movement for special federal punishment, why not “spell it out in the law, exempting everyone but Hoffa, okay?” JFK cut him off, his normally smooth sense of Senate formality suddenly gone. “We’re exempting everyone but hoodlums and racketeers and crooks,” he shot back, in a rush of anger and harsh Boston vowels.

But nothing matched the hatred and fury of the matches between Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy. To Kennedy, the labor boss represented the chilling nexus between the America that most people knew, the country of laws and ideals, and the one where the codes of the jungle prevailed. By the time Hoffa appeared before the Rackets Committee, he was on his way to amassing the kind of power that would make newspaper publishers, business tycoons, senators, governors—even presidential hopefuls—pay him respect. He dreamed of the day when he would take over one of the political parties—it didn’t matter to him whether it was the Republican or Democratic. As Robert Kennedy knew, this impressive national clout was built on blood and corruption.

In the Senate Caucus Room, the two men went at each other for hours, day after day. Committee member Barry Goldwater was astonished by the “animal anger” between them. “We were like flint and steel,” Hoffa said. “Every time we came to grips the sparks flew.”

At the witness table, Hoffa’s beady eyes flashed with a sharp intelligence. Despite ceaseless battering from Bobby and the committee members, the grimly determined labor boss never gave ground, always slipping away when it seemed he was backed into a corner. Occasionally Hoffa would weary of the bobbing and weaving and simply smack Kennedy with an epithet. “You’re sick. That’s what’s the matter with you—you are sick,” he spat at Kennedy one afternoon after a testy exchange with the Senate counsel.

But the most intense confrontations between Kennedy and Hoffa were silent. Kennedy later vividly described the eerie malevolence that seeped out of Hoffa as the two men engaged in combat: “In the most remarkable of all my exchanges with Jimmy Hoffa, not a word was said. I called it the ‘look.’ It was to occur fairly often, but the first time I observed it was on the last day of the 1957 hearings. During the afternoon, I noticed that he was glaring at me across the counsel table with a deep, strange, penetrating expression of intense hatred. I suppose it must have dawned on him about that time that he was going to be the subject of a continuing probe—that we were not playing games. It was the look of a man obsessed by his enmity, and it came particularly from his eyes. There were times when his face seemed completely transfixed with this stare of absolute evilness. It might last for five minutes—as if he thought that by staring long enough and hard enough he could destroy me. Sometimes he seemed to be concentrating so hard that I had to smile, and occasionally I would speak of it to an assistant counsel sitting behind me. It must have been obvious to him that we were discussing it, but his expression would not change by a flicker.

“During the 1958 hearings, from time to time, he directed the same shriveling look at my brother. And now and then, after a protracted, particularly evil glower, he did a most peculiar thing: he would wink at me. I can’t explain it. Maybe a psychiatrist would recognize the symptoms.”

They were a study in opposites. With his sawed-off, tightly coiled body, his blunt-cut, shiny Brylcreemed hair, and his cheap gabardine suits and floodwater pants, Hoffa looked every bit the working stiff he once had been. Born in a backwater Indiana town—the son of a coal driller who died when Jimmy was seven, leaving the family penniless—Hoffa had to scrap his way to the top. He led his first strike at the age of seventeen, a successful wildcat action on the loading docks of Detroit. To match the brute power of the trucking and warehouse companies he was fighting, Hoffa had to use his fists, turning to gangsters for more muscle when the labor battles grew uglier. As he shouldered his way up the Teamster ranks, he used the same blunt force to enforce discipline in his organization. The drivers and warehousemen for whom Hoffa brought home the bacon saw him as their hero, one of their own. But Bobby Kennedy saw him as a traitor to the labor movement, a man who sold out his hardworking membership by turning over their pension funds to hoodlums, cutting shady deals with employers, and crushing union dissent with savage violence.

Hoffa, in turn, looked at the Kennedy brothers as “spoiled rich kids” who never had to work a real day in their lives. With their boyish haircuts and well-cut suits, and their chosen aura, they represented everything that Hoffa had been denied. He drew from this deep pool of class resentment when he publicly attacked the brothers, dismissing their crusade to clean up the union movement as a ploy to emasculate organized labor. “All this hocus-pocus about racketeers is a smoke screen to carry you back to the days when they could drop you in the scrap heap,” he told Teamster members, adding that when big business fat cats used thugs as strikebreakers, no one raised a fuss, but “now we’ve got a few and everybody’s screaming.”

But in some ways, Hoffa and Kennedy were cut from the same cloth. Both men were tireless warriors who were less interested in lavish pleasures than they were in their higher causes—extending the power of the Teamsters in one case, and the power of his family in the other. “A Saturday night ice cream was Jimmy’s puritan style for a night on the town,” recalled Hoffa’s lawyer Frank Ragano. “He always appeared to be out of place in swanky restaurants and supper clubs, as if he knew that his inelegant clothes, white socks, and rough, ungrammatical speech disqualified him from acceptance in such places.” Bobby was equally Spartan in many ways. “He has little of the president’s peripheral interest in social intercourse and intellectual fashion,” a
Life
magazine cover story noted about Bobby in January 1962. “He does not enjoy nightclubs, the theater or big parties and shuns them when he can. He will occasionally sip at a drink or puff at a cigar, but for real debauchery he turns to chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup and extra-ice-cold milk.”

With the brutal clarity that only a diehard enemy can have, Hoffa saw another connection that bound him to Bobby Kennedy. He reminded Bobby of his father. “I’m no damn angel,” Hoffa growled. “I don’t apologize. You take any industry and look at the problems they ran into while they were building up—how they did it, who they associated with, how they cut corners. The best example is Kennedy’s old man.” This is how the real world worked, Hoffa knew—powerful men on their way up, whether they were self-made tycoons like Joe Kennedy or labor moguls like himself, had to “cut corners.” Snot-nosed “Booby,” as he liked to call him, just didn’t get it.

Or maybe he did. While clawing his way through the tunnels of American corruption, Bobby Kennedy came upon proof of his father’s involvement with the underworld, according to Rackets Committee member Barry Goldwater. “It just killed him,” Goldwater said.

Years later, Robert Lowell asked Bobby what character in Shakespeare he would like to be, and he picked Henry the Fifth. Of course. Young Prince Hal, the monarch in waiting who rebels against the heavy family expectations hanging over him—until he finally proves his worth on the battlefield. Bobby used Henry’s famous speech before the Battle of Agincourt to inspire his own troops at the Justice Department. But it was Henry’s father he wanted to talk about that day. He read to Lowell the death speech of Henry the Fourth, in which the dying king ruefully considers the lot of powerful patriarchs—those “foolish over-careful fathers [who] have broke their sleeps with thoughts, their brains with care, their bones with industry.” And for what? Only to bequeath their children a poisoned inheritance, “the canker’d heaps of strange-achieved gold.”