The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (37 page)

Elsewhere the FBI lockstep encountered violent resistance. In April 1963, at the Brooklyn funeral of the father of one of Carlo Gambino’s Brooklyn
capo regime
, Special Agent John P. Foley entered Immaculate Heart Church with a camera in hand to film the attendees. Suddenly, he was grabbed, thrown out of the church, and pistol-whipped with his own revolver. The attorney general telephoned Foley in his hospital room to express his concern and thanks.
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Later, one of Gambino’s men was beaten and dumped in a garbage can, apparently by FBI agents. Mafiosi raged in private against the government. An FBI bug picked up Stefano Magaddino suggesting that the Mafia “should kill the whole [Kennedy] family.”
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Brave as many FBI agents proved themselves in the war against the Mafia, their director conspired to slow down the assault. On May 16, 1963, Hoover formally delivered to the Justice Department a single copy of a two-volume document titled “The Skimming Report,” which detailed the inner mechanics of the Mafia’s massive and untaxed diversion of gambling profits in Las Vegas. This report was largely based on two years of electronic surveillance of the homes and hotel offices of some twenty-five mafiosi in the Las Vegas area. Three days after the report was handed to Justice, however, someone gave a copy to the Mafia. All over the country, FBI bugs began picking up commentary among gangsters that revealed that the government had been compromised. The FBI promptly pointed at William Hundley, the head of Kennedy’s Organized Crime division at Justice, as the one responsible for the leak. It noted that Hundley had taken the report with him on a flight to the University of Notre Dame to give a speech. Someone might have seen it.
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Hoover, who was strongly opposed to revealing FBI sources and was himself compromised by the mob, had the motive as well as the means to leak highly charged materials.
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Hundley did not.

The attorney general ordered that the bugging of Mafia offices and homes in Las Vegas be stopped, but the damage was done: the mob now knew the government had sown its offices and phones with electronic devices, and further, that the information derived from this illegal invasion could never be used in court. Indeed, the Mafia could now sue the government. The leak of The Skimming Report, moreover, may well have kept the FBI from detecting evidence of a plot to murder the president.
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That summer Kennedy used the shattering testimony of Joseph Valachi — the attorney general told the nation it was “the greatest intelligence breakthrough in the history of organized crime in America” — to propose a battery of new laws that would enable the government to offer immunity from prosecution to witnesses and broaden the federal right to wiretap. One mafiosi who would read about the testimony of Valachi and Kennedy before Congress was Jack Ruby. A copy of the
New York Daily Mirror
of September 8, 1963, was found in his possession after his arrest for the murder of Oswald.
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The publication of an inside account of mob-controlled Las Vegas titled
The Green Felt Jungle
further fractured the mystique of
omerta
. The book also blew Johnny Rosselli’s cover. In a telling portrait he was etched as the sophisticated and glamorous don, “soft-spoken and polite,” a man of gourmet taste and perfect clothes who “owns no property, has no visible interests in any hotel-casino, and is unemployed. . . . The rough edges of the old torpedo days have been polished to a fine patina of masculine gentility. Gorgeous showgirls hover about him like pigeons waiting for a crumb of bread.”
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The government was meanwhile closing in on Jimmy Hoffa. By June 1963 over two hundred Teamsters Union officials had been indicted. Ed Partin, the erstwhile Teamsters boss in Baton Rouge, had offered Justice Department lawyers details about Hoffa’s role in jury-tampering. One Justice attorney recalled the day Partin walked into the court to testify at Hoffa’s trial on the charge: “You could see the blood come up in Hoffa’s face.”
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Partin took the stand and for five days underwent a withering cross-examination by eight of Hoffa’s attorneys. He held up under the attack. Hoffa was heard snarling at one of his attorneys: “That son of a bitch is killing us.” Exiting from an elevator in the court building, Hoffa ran into a federal prosecutor and spat in his face.

Tampa-based attorney Frank Ragano, who represented Santos Trafficante and Hoffa, later recounted that the Teamsters president was furiously demanding that the president be assassinated. On July 23, 1963, Ragano said that he and Hoffa were at Teamsters headquarters deliberating on cases when Hoffa instructed him to tell Trafficante and Marcello when next he saw them, “Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend and Carlos to get rid of him, kill that son of a bitch John Kennedy. This has got to be done. Be sure to tell them what I said. No more fucking around. We’re running out of time — something has to be done.”

Ragano claimed that when he conveyed Hoffa’s message to Trafficante and Marcello, “They looked at each other in a way that scared me. They took it seriously.”
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The House Assassinations Committee concluded in 1979: “There is solid evidence that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante — three of the most important targets for criminal prosecution by the Kennedy administration — had discussions with their subordinates about murdering President Kennedy. Associates of Hoffa, Trafficante, and Marcello were in direct contact with Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed the ‘lone assassin’ of the president.”
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April 26, 1963

Williamsburg, Virginia

I
t was Bobby’s idea but Jack would get the credit: the Kennedy administration would create a domestic peace corps, drawing on the enthusiasm and energy of young Americans to serve the poor and forgotten here at home. The president appointed his brother to chair a cabinet committee to study the idea. As usual Bobby transformed the responsibility into a mission. He broke away from his schedule one Friday afternoon in April 1963 and drove to Virginia’s Eastern State facility for the mentally ill. He was revolted by what he saw:

The children were inside, standing in a room which was bare but for a few benches. The floor was covered with urine. Severely retarded patients were left naked in their cubicles, which suggested kennels, made of an elevated mattress enclosed on three sides by high marble sides and covered on the fourth side by wire mesh so thick you could barely see through it. Patients were washed by a device resembling a carwash — a spraying mechanism through which patients could be directed without the need of anyone to touch them.

In May 1963, in testimony before the Labor Subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee, Kennedy described in stark language the cruelty of life for the disadvantaged in America.
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He told the congressmen about a family of eleven he had encountered that had been living in their car for three months. Two of the children slept in the trunk. Their mother was seriously ill and their father was out of work. Young Americans, Kennedy said, should be asked to invest a year of their lives in serving their fellow citizens: “We are convinced that Americans are equally willing to take on the toughest jobs in this country, whether in a city slum, an Indian reservation, or a mining town. . . . Every sixth citizen needs our help; and there are five of us who should help him.”
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The triumph of the Cuban missile crisis seemed to allow each of the Kennedy brothers to go his own way in 1963, and to project a more humane form of power. Jack, the political gamesman, elected to risk his political standing for the cause of peace. Bobby, the enforcer, increasingly entered his life’s calling as a champion of the abused and neglected.

Paul O’Neil of
Life
had once suggested that Bobby Kennedy was two different men. One was the dry, hyperprocessing attorney general whose face, O’Neil wrote, looked at you “like a miller sizing up a log he was about to cut.”
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He was blunt and ungracious, all results and no reflection. The other man was someone who could suddenly pick up a visiting black schoolchild and sit him on a table, then answer his questions for twenty minutes in language perfectly calibrated to the youth. In the streets of Harlem and Cleveland, visiting the Indian reservations and the state hospitals, and around his Hickory Hill pool with orphans, he could help underdogs, touch them, and maybe give them the courage to change their lives. He could be like his childhood heroes, the saints, performing works of mercy and challenging those in power. There were others in America who had spoken for the forgotten. But Bobby’s intensely personal dedication to change the lot of the poor and the brutalized coupled with his political power was unique, and served to quicken the cast of conscience in America.

As always, he was drawn to this mission by his wide array of friendships. His prep school friend David Hackett, then serving as the executive director of the president’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (with Bobby as chairman), persuaded him that “delinquency” was nothing more than a code word for the real problem — poverty. Another friend was Representative Edith Green, an Oregonian who had been a Kennedy organizer in 1960. His sister Eunice had worked with delinquents in Chicago and joined Bobby in recommending to Jack the creation of a domestic peace corps to enlist dislocated, antisocial teens into the cause of social recovery.

The attorney general’s inquiry into the need for a domestic peace corps led him to the plight of the county’s 400,000 migratory workers; 90,000 of these worked fewer than twenty-five days a year. Kennedy’s relationship with California farmworker organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, whose acquaintance he had made in the 1960 campaign, would later mature into a friendship that changed Kennedy’s public life.
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Of all the invisible Americans consigned by race and circumstance to deprivation, none were so invisible in 1963 as the American Indian. They didn’t vote, didn’t protest, didn’t integrate, and mostly remained within their distant and impoverished reservations as part of the vast federal archipelago of colonialism. Americans generally regarded them as pathetic souls, somewhere between simpletons and drunkards. Beginning in February 1963 the attorney general began traveling to reservations. By August, he began speaking publicly about Indians, and the language he used was shocking to those in government. In Bismarck, North Dakota, on September 13, 1963, he spoke to the National Congress of American Indians. After fifteen or so minutes of describing what de Tocqueville called the “natural genius” of America’s native peoples, Kennedy turned to their current state:

Adult Indians today have half as much education as other Americans. Their annual incomes are between one-fourth and one-third as large, and their rate of unemployment is between six and seven times the national average. Their health is so poor that their rate of infant mortality is nearly twice that of any other racial group in the country.

He called this a “national disgrace” and cited the central reason for their plight — racism.
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This was now his shining cause, and nowhere did it shine so consequentially as in the war for justice for black Americans.

Jack admired Bobby’s compassion, but it was his brother’s decisiveness that he relied on. “With Bobby,” he once remarked, “I have been witness to the testing of his judgment a hundred times. My confidence in him had emerged over years of watching him make decisions under great pressure without ever letting the pressure affect the outcome.”
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Listening to the low-fidelity recordings from the Oval Office in 1963 as the president, the attorney general, and others discussed civil rights, one notes a formal tone to their exchanges. Only the humor, sudden and sometimes sharp, conveys the nature of the bond that existed between them.
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It was Jack’s belief that his brother, in addition to all his other contributions, had transformed the Department of Justice into the best department in the federal regime. At work in his office, Bobby was all motion and decision, whiplashing his associates, descending abruptly into the ranks of his six hundred attorneys, crossing swords with his key lieutenants on points of strategy, battling the tendency toward group-think by his questioning of himself and others in the course of strategy sessions. The moods came and went — “rain and sunshine,” one subordinate termed them. On a good day, he would summon a junior attorney without warning and take him out to lunch at Hickory Hill; on a bad day, he would return scores of calls, demanding to know the reason for the call and settling the matter with a decision, an assurance, or a cold dismissal. At times he would barge into meetings late, remain standing for a period of minutes, bark out a decision, and walk out. He knew he was feared, and he used it.

As Larry O’Brien recalled, he was especially effective because, first, he dispensed with the usual bonhomie and punctilio; second, traded only with the most powerful, when he had to; third, was the equivalent of the president in tone, look, and manner — “only he wasn’t, so the president’s prerogative was preserved.”
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His drive, his demand for action — even his moods — delivered a singular charge of energy and rigor into his own department and other areas of government.