The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (29 page)

President Kennedy remained outraged at the army’s incompetence. The day after Meredith registered, he summoned army general Earle G. Wheeler and informed him and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that he wanted an investigation.
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His previous opinion of the “fucking brass hats” had dropped one rung lower: they were worse than arrogant — they were incompetent. This judgment would prove consequential in the Cuban missile crisis.

The president still seemed to tack cautiously on civil rights thereafter. He continued to “equivocate” (the word is Wofford’s) on the executive order that was to desegregate federal housing “with the stroke of a pen.” Finally, as he and the country were preparing for the long Thanksgiving weekend on the night of November 20, the White House issued a statement that the order had been signed. It was “deliberately sandwiched,” in the recollection of Theodore Sorensen, between two important foreign policy statements.
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Bobby, on the other hand, had moved further out on the civil rights frontier. His statement the day after the battle of Oxford, praising the federal marshals, the seven Ole Miss staff and administrators who had bravely assisted the marshals, Dr. L. G. Hopkins (an Oxford physician who had treated the wounded during the battle), and several Ole Miss students, was direct and strong. The following Saturday, he went even further in a widely publicized speech in Milwaukee: “We live in a time when the individual’s opportunity to meet his responsibilities appears circumscribed by impersonal powers beyond his responsibility. . . . But even today there is so much that a single person can do with faith and courage. . . . James Meredith brought to a head and lent his name to another chapter in the mightiest internal struggle of our time.”
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This was the statement about civil rights that the Kennedy brothers had up to then scrupulously avoided making — to frame the issue as a matter of personal courage, and to place it in a national context. Whenever Robert Kennedy identified public policy in moral terms, he was a difficult man to stop.

There was another consequence to the battle of Oxford. At no previous time had the Kennedy brothers deliberated and collaborated so closely in a crisis. Their techniques in communication and the use of personnel, their incrementalist style of process negotiation, their outrage at the military, even their emotional commiseration over the long night of September 30 and October 1 bound them more tightly together than ever before. Little did they know that within two weeks of the resolution of the Ole Miss crisis, Mississippi would again be the staging ground — this time for divisions of troops, squadrons of aircraft, and fleets of ships in anticipation of an invasion of Cuba to stop the Soviet Union from emplacing offensive nuclear missiles on the island.

October 1, 1962

Washington, D.C.

A
t first federal attorneys in Louisiana couldn’t believe what they were hearing — that Jimmy Hoffa had spoken in detail about murdering Bobby Kennedy. The source was Edward G. Partin, the secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 5 in Baton Rouge, who secretly approached Walter Sheridan, Kennedy’s top investigator into Hoffa’s activities, on September 30 to report that in June 1962 at the Teamsters Union’s headquarters in Washington a highly agitated Hoffa had taken him aside. “I’ve got to do something about that sonofabitch Bobby Kennedy,” he declared. “He’s got to go. Somebody needs to bump that sonofabitch off. . . . I’ve got a rundown on him. His house is here, like this, and it’s not guarded.” Hoffa then diagrammed the location of Hickory Hill with his fingers and said, “He drives alone in a convertible and swims by himself. I’ve got a .270 rifle with a high-power scope on it that shoots a long way without dropping any. It would be easy to get him with that. But I’m leery of it; it’s too obvious.” According to Partin, Hoffa also discussed getting someone to throw a bomb into Kennedy’s house “so the place’ll burn down after it blows up.” Partin told Sheridan he was willing to take a lie detector test to prove his truthfulness.
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Why had Hoffa brought Partin into his confidence about killing the attorney general? Partin later said, “Hoffa always just assumed that since I was from Louisiana, I was in [Carlos] Marcello’s hip pocket.”
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Sheridan flew back to Washington the next day, October 1, to alert Kennedy. He knew that the attorney general had worked through the night with the president, trying to resolve the bloody standoff at Ole Miss, but the danger, he felt, was real. Hoffa was a man practiced in murder, and Kennedy’s investigative dragnet was closing in on him. A grand jury in Nashville had indicted Hoffa for fraud under the Taft-Hartley Act and the trial was to begin in a matter of days.

That afternoon Sheridan caught up with Kennedy as he was coming out of the Justice Department building on his way home. He related Partin’s story to Kennedy, who reacted calmly to the report. “What if that fellow passes the test?” he inquired with a wry smile. Sheridan replied he probably would. Kennedy shrugged, climbed into his car, and drove off.
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In the days that followed, the attorney general took no extra precautions about his safety, despite the urgings of his staff. He refused to accept a security detail.
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In his war against Hoffa, Kennedy was ready to use every weapon at his disposal, but having learned of Hoffa’s determination to kill him, Kennedy himself was content to remain unprotected. He would dare the fates.

In Bobby’s view, winning meant taking risks and sticking to your plan of battle. A security detail might tip off the enemy to a leak in his camp. When Jack himself leaked the Partin story to Ben Bradlee — and another one in which Hoffa had tried to silence a witness by poisoning him with arsenic — Bobby refused to confirm the Partin story and successfully pleaded with Bradlee not to print the second one. It would so terrify potential anti-Hoffa witnesses, Bobby told Bradlee, that the anti-Hoffa cause would collapse.
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Bobby Kennedy was determined, even desperate, to nail Hoffa. Although the Justice Department had committed thirty-five FBI agents, sixteen federal attorneys, and summoned thirteen grand juries, the Teamsters leader had escaped indictment.
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Bobby Kennedy took this failure personally. When a Time reporter asked him about it, the attorney general became “livid.”
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In 1962, Justice Department lawyers deliberated at length with Kennedy regarding which Hoffa investigations might produce convictions. Two seemed most promising: Hoffa’s fraudulent diversion of Central States’ pension fund into a Florida real-estate venture known as Sun Valley, a case the Eisenhower administration had dropped as a result of Hoffa’s intimacy with Richard Nixon; and the Test Fleet Corporation, a truck-leasing firm that Hoffa had incorporated in Tennessee in 1948 under, among others, his wife’s maiden name after he settled a Teamsters Union strike in favor of the trucking company. After betraying the Teamsters local — in violation of the Taft-Hartley Act — Hoffa profited to the tune of hundreds of thousands dollars in the sweetheart arrangement. In the Test Fleet case, assistant attorney general James Neal got a grand jury indictment against Hoffa, and a trial in Nashville was scheduled for October.
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Hoffa, meanwhile, was crisscrossing the country, attacking Bobby Kennedy as “a little hoodlum,” “the Boston bully boy,” who was spending millions of dollars of public money and “wiretapping me left, right, and center” to put him behind bars. The Teamsters Union leadership was going all out to stop the federal investigation. Hoffa had heard some of the mob tapes of Bobby Kennedy’s trysts with Marilyn Monroe, at least according to Hoffa attorney William Bufalino.
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But if this were so, the FBI’s cover-up in the aftermath of the actress’s death removed corroborating evidence of the relationship and thereby reduced the value of that material. In September, Teamsters’ lobbyists touched off a congressional protest from eleven congressmen as well as Senators Homer Capehart and Hiram Fong against the government’s persecution of Hoffa. Two weeks before the trial was to start, two of Hoffa’s “improvers” — men who fixed jurors through bribery or terror — showed up in Nashville.
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Shortly thereafter, Partin dropped his bombshell.

As shocking as the story was, it was a logical result of Kennedy’s assault against organized crime, which in 1962 went into overdrive. Armed with five new racketeering laws, he targeted no fewer than 991 suspects via Special Prosecution Units, using Justice’s Central Intelligence Unit. Kennedy traveled throughout the country, forging personal links between the twenty-five federal investigative agencies, Justice Department strike teams, and local law enforcement departments. The effect on the Mafia was devastating. In 1962 alone indictments numbered over 350, convictions 138; the following year, 615 were indicted, 266 convicted.
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The critical element was that these prosecutions were aimed, through capo-level informants and plea bargains with street
soldati
— wise guys — at the nation’s top gangsters. The Patriarca family in Rhode Island and the De Cavalcante mob in New Jersey were prosecuted out of business. When Joseph Valachi, a member of the Genovese family then in prison, murdered a Mafia inmate he thought had a contract to kill him, federal agents moved in quickly. They offered Valachi life instead of the death penalty if he would talk. He did talk — for days, it turned out — naming names, detailing hits, and exposing the cruel underside of the rackets. He also employed the term La Cosa Nostra to describe the nationwide mob network in which discipline was enforced through an ancient Sicilian code of conduct. When the
Saturday Evening Post
published Valachi’s confessions, it caused a collective national shudder. Some huge and unseen enemy was lurking in America. FBI bugs revealed that Mafia chieftains across the country were in a state of fury and foreboding due to the Valachi revelations.
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By the summer of 1962, Bobby’s favorite United States district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, had gotten indictments on all but two of the
capi di tutti capi
in the New York City area. In Chicago, despite the increase in FBI agents placed on the Mafia detail — from five in 1960 to some seventy by the end of 1961 — and the bugs installed in two Outfit meeting places, prosecutions came more slowly. Corrupt Cook County judges, the deep mob penetration in both the Chicago police department and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, not to mention congressional friends, threw up a barrier of sorts against the feds.
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But Giancana was rattled, as the altercation the previous summer at O’Hare Airport had demonstrated. The attorney general’s personal attention to the war — whether in trips to the field or in seeding his best young attorneys — seemed essential to maintain the pressure. In cities of lesser size like Dallas and Miami, Hoover’s policy of tactical coexistence with local mob forces remained the order of the day.

In March 1962, the attorney general flew to Los Angeles to address a conference on crime prevention. In his speech, Kennedy detailed the extraordinary results produced by the cross-fertilization of local, state, and national investigation and intelligence sharing: fifty-seven indictments in California; the conviction of Rosselli lieutenant Frankie Carbo for extortion (an investigation developed initially by the LAPD); and the indictment of Johnny Rosselli’s old rival Mickey Cohen for tax evasion.
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Rosselli was not mentioned in the speech and was probably in Florida at the time doing the CIA’s business. But two critical areas of federal action directly affected Rosselli, who was still the Mafia’s preeminent ambassador-at-large. The first was Kennedy’s new racketeering laws, which targeted interstate trafficking in numbers, wagers, equipment, and “interstate travel to promote or engage in illegal business enterprises.” This was the essence of Rosselli’s role among the nation’s mob families as well as the Teamsters Union, and the new laws made him vulnerable to federal attack. The second was tax investigation and indictment — a proven winner for the “G.” Sixty percent of the federal cases against Mafia figures related to tax evasion. Internal Revenue Service commissioner Mortimer Caplin made no secret of the fact that he regarded the IRS as an arm of law enforcement. “The Attorney General,” he wrote, “has requested the Service to give top priority to the investigation of the tax affairs of major racketeers,” who would be subjected to “ ‘saturation type’ investigation. . . . Full use will be made of available electronic equipment and other technical alds.”
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When an IRS regional director refused to allow a Justice Department attorney to view a file, he was removed. On another occasion the attorney general assembled all the regional directors in a lecture hall and told them that if he thought they were doing a good job, he wouldn’t have put them in a lecture hall.
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Former attorney general (and later Supreme Court justice) Robert Jackson summarized the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: “That he pick people he thinks he should get rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” This is precisely what Kennedy and his assistant attorney generals were doing — picking individuals, not cases — and it was a clear breach of procedural separation between Justice and the IRS as well as individual liberties. It was nonetheless effective.
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