The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (6 page)

Given the setback in court and Hoffa’s accession to the Teamsters presidency, it seemed advisable for Bobby to beat a tactical retreat. Additionally, the McClellan Committee’s investigation was now moving into the mainstream of the AFL-CIO, thereby jeopardizing Jack Kennedy’s bid for labor support in the 1960 presidential contest. But instead Bobby turned the assault against Hoffa into a siege. Perhaps it was Bobby’s youth or his wealth, or perhaps his headstrong temperament. Whatever the source, he was a man who, as his aide Joe Dolan said, “would give no quarter.”

To get Hoffa, Kennedy resorted to a full range of tactics, some outside the range of civil liberties. He blistered witnesses with invective for taking the Fifth, leading Alexander Bickel of Yale Law School to liken Kennedy’s breaching of the right not to self-incriminate to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hectoring style.
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Joey Glimco, the president of a Chicago Teamsters local, was one of those on the receiving end of Kennedy’s (and Senator McClellan’s) leading, ad hominem commentary:

KENNEDY [to Glimco]: And you defraud the union?

GLIMCO: I respectfully decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.

KENNEDY: I would agree with you.

MCCLELLAN: I believe it would.

KENNEDY: You haven’t got the guts to answer, have you, Mr. Glimco?

GLIMCO: I respectfully decline.

MCCLELLAN: Morally, you are kind of yellow inside, are you not?

GLIMCO: I respectfully decline.

When Kennedy surmised that subpoenas for documents wouldn’t do the trick, he resorted to extralegal means. He told the press that one of his investigators had gotten a look at a stack of Teamsters documents underneath the bed of a Teamsters employee by dating the maid who cleaned the house. But beyond the Perry Mason cat-and-mouse tactics, there was electronic penetration — the wiretap — and Kennedy grew fond of it.

With wiretapped conversations (legally derived) between Hoffa and New York gangster Johnny Dioguardi in hand, Kennedy summoned Hoffa back to the McClellan Committee. This round went to Kennedy, with Hoffa (who resolutely refused to take the Fifth) stumbling all over himself trying to keep some distance between himself and the New York mob.
Nemsweek
likened Kennedy to a “Boston terrier [that] barks and bites” — altogether darting, high-pitched, and energetic in pursuit.
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In news footage from the period, Hoffa looks ursine, glowering at Kennedy with a snarl on his lip as the chief counsel would walk into the hearing room to start the questioning. Then came the flinty stare — a “shriveling look,” as Kennedy described it. Hoffa would give his answers in a slow, meaty monotone until Kennedy would corner him. Then the veins in the squat, powerful neck would begin pulsing, the brow would lower slightly, and the eyes would flash. “Sometimes his façade of bluster and bluff would crack,” Kennedy later wrote, “and for an hour during a hearing he would appear morose, discouraged, and beaten. But the man has great stamina, and he would bounce back as forceful as ever.”
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Barry Goldwater witnessed a confrontation between Kennedy and Hoffa in the hallway of the old Senate building. The characterization he used to describe it was “animal anger.” Beyond the sharp exchange of words, there was a violent, physical tension between the two. But through the long months, the fury Kennedy felt toward Hoffa congealed into a respect for the latter’s implacable will to fight. Bobby’s own account includes descriptions of encounters with Hoffa that border on the convivial. He describes running into Hoffa one day in 1958 at the United States Courthouse Building in New York.

“Hello, Jimmy.”

“Hello, Bobby.”

Kennedy asked him about the Teamsters presidency. “Greatest job in the world,” Hoffa replied. Then Bobby asked him about the wiretap charge Hoffa was fighting.

“You can never tell with a jury,” Hoffa replied. “Like shooting fish in a barrel.”
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Thanks to the old mob practice of jury-tampering, Hoffa again beat the rap and kept his presidency. The war would go on.

Eventually, the pathology of the hunter and hunted changed. Kennedy was soon regularly referring to Hoffa as “Jimmy” and Hoffa, at first polite, turned violently derisive, referring to Kennedy as a “sadistic little monster.” Going home late at night, Kennedy would stare out at the Teamsters’ headquarters on Louisiana Avenue. “My first love is Jimmy Hoffa,” he said sardonically one evening to John Bartlow Martin, a Kennedy friend and journalist. Perhaps to be a saint, it is necessary to find a devil. Perhaps in this particular devil, Kennedy found someone as to-the-death as he himself was. In
The Enemy Within
, Kennedy ran a photograph of “the expressive eyes and hands of Jimmy Hoffa” that made him look demonic. Over time, the devil became something of an incubus, invading Kennedy’s consciousness (it was said that the first word out of one of Kennedy’s toddlers’ mouths was “Hoffa”) and utterly exhausting him. By the end of 1957, Kennedy and his investigators had a hollow look about them. At around one o’clock one morning, Kennedy, on his way home, saw the lights in Hoffa’s office on and told Pierre Salinger to turn around and head back to the office: “If he’s still at work, we ought to be.”
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Martin, for one, thought there were remarkable parallels between Kennedy and Hoffa. To Bobby’s shock, Martin put them in print. They both were “aggressive, competitive, hard-driving, authoritarian, suspicious, temperate, at times congenial and at others curt.”

The McClellan Committee hearings made first-rate theater, with anywhere from 80 to 120 reporters in attendance. National radio and TV coverage was constant. The committee averaged about a thousand letters a week, some fan mail, some frightened appeals from trade unionists caught in the vice of racketeering. Beginning in March 1957, there was the first of a succession of stories in the major news magazines of the day.
Look, Life, Time
, and
U.S. News and World Report
all did spreads. The matrix of the stories was usually about Bobby versus Hoffa, but the bounce was the photographs of the telegenic Kennedy brothers.
Look
, which took eight thousand pictures of Jack and Bobby, gushed: “Two boyish men from Boston, with healthy shocks of hair, a father rich and benevolent, and minds honed at Harvard and by foreign travel, have become hot tourist attractions in Washington.”
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(Consistent with her total distaste for the political maelstrom into which she was now being pulled, Jackie is seen in the photos unsmiling and wearing dark glasses.) Jack may have put himself on the political map in his week-long run for the vice-presidential nomination in 1956, but Bobby’s investigation kept them on the air and the front page for months. Toward the end of 1957, Joe Kennedy slipped in to see one of the hearings himself in a kind of grudging benediction of his disobedient son.

In the two and a half years of the McClellan Committee hearings, of which each day, Bobby said proudly, was “like game day against Notre Dame,” 1,366 witnesses were interrogated. The final report ran to 20,432 pages of colloquy, analysis, and documents. For every hour a witness spent before the full committee, he was interrogated for five behind closed doors by the chief counsel. Through it all, there sat Ethel in the hearing chamber with her open, upturned face listening as Bobby, in his inelegant staccato, bulldozed his way through the witnesses. Only the birth of their son Michael caused her to miss two weeks, but then she was back cradling the infant in her arms, rapt, constant, and unquestioning in her devotion. And he was the same. The death of her parents in a plane crash in 1955, like the death of Bobby’s beloved sister Kick in 1948, only seemed to make each moment together more essential. The growing stampede of children, dogs, and horses at Hickory Hill seemed to represent not simply the proliferation of life but some warm and breathing hedge against the mortal precipice ahead. In many ways, these were the happiest days of their lives.

A seemingly obscure event took Bobby’s frontal attack against Hoffa and transformed it into the beginning of a long war against an even greater enemy. In November 1957, local law enforcement officials stumbled upon a national conclave of Mafia
capi di tutti capi
in upstate New York. The meeting, which had been called to stop the murderous infighting touched off by the execution of New York godfather Albert Anastasia, revealed the national infrastructure of La Cosa Nostra. The McClellan Committee now threw its net wider, subpoenaing Mafia overlords Anthony Accardo and Sam Giancana of Chicago, Joseph Profaci of New York, Santos Trafficante of Havana, and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans. What was unprecedented about the encounters that followed was not the appearance of these men (the Kefauver Committee had subpoenaed most of them in 1951), but the encyclopedic preparation Kennedy brought to his interrogation. He exposed them.

On March 24, 1959, Kennedy dragged Carlos Marcello, for the first time in his criminal life, through every suspected racket, payoff, and murder plot the chief counsel was able to dig up.
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With his opaque sunglasses reflecting the klieg lights and his defiant scowl never changing, Marcello took the Fifth sixty-six times. He left the hearing room with his brother Joe and Harvard-trained attorney Jack Wasserman deeply angered by Kennedy Sam Giancana was similarly galled. After taking the Fifth over forty times as Kennedy asked him about “bodies in trunks,” Giancana began to snicker. Kennedy stopped his questioning and looked at him: “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”

As he delved into their world, Kennedy was both horrified and fascinated by what he found. He would later describe their clothes (“black shirt, black pants, black coat”), their hair (“greased down” in the case of Johnny Dio, “long curls down the back of the neck” in the case of Joey Gallo) even their smell of “sickly-sweet cologne.” “They are sleek, often bilious and fat, or lean and cold and hard. They have smooth faces and the cruel eyes of gangsters.”
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Everywhere he looked, he saw violence and vengeance. The six-foot six-inch, three-hundred-pound Barney Baker, whom Kennedy described as Hoffa’s “roving emissary of violence,” calmly described the succession of dead men he had come to know in his line of work. (Baker would be in contact with Jack Ruby in the days before President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas in November 1963, according to Warren Report documents.) Bobby was actually amused by the “Academy Award performance” of New York’s serial executioner Joey Gallo, who looked at Kennedy’s rug and said it would be good for a crap game. “Crazy Joe” later claimed that he had called friends from Kennedy’s office to make commitments for Jack for president in 1960, and once stopped a man who had walked into Bobby’s reception area, frisked him for a weapon, and sent him packing. “No one is going to see Mr. Kennedy with a gun on him. If Kennedy gets killed now everybody will say I did it.”
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Bobby himself brushed off all offers of a security detail. He also evinced no hesitation to proceed with the investigations when Hoffa threatened to murder witnesses. After Kennedy unearthed evidence that Hoffa had “literally stolen” a Detroit local of the International Union of Retail Clerks, Hoffa told the man who had squealed to Kennedy: “Don’t you know I could have you killed? Don’t you know I could have you pushed out this window? I got friends who would shoot you in your tracks.” The man, Sol Lippmann, came to Kennedy “white and shaken,” and so scared he could hardly speak. He told Kennedy he would not testify against Hoffa.
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After two and a half years of investigation, tens of thousands of man-hours of investigation, and months of testimony, however, Hoffa remained unindicted. He actually seemed to feed off the pressure. Invited on the Jack Paar show, Bobby spent several minutes tearing into Hoffa, describing him as “completely evil.” Hoffa filed a $2.5 million libel suit against NBC. As he crisscrossed the country, consolidating control over the locals and raising the Teamsters banner in job actions, Hoffa dared Kennedy to keep after him: “If it is a question, as Kennedy has said, that he will break Hoffa, then I say to him, he should live so long.”
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Aside from Hoffa, the casualty list of crooked unionists exposed by the McClellan Committee was impressive: James G. Cross, president of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers, whose union was thrown out of the AFL-CIO; Maurice Hutcheson, president of the Carpenters Union, who was indicted; William E. Maloney, president of the Operating Engineers, who resigned; Anthony Valente, president of the United Textile Workers, who resigned; Max and Louis Block of the Meat Cutters Union, who were ousted; and seven Teamsters officials indicted and another sixteen either dismissed or resigned.

What came to be known as the “Bobby style” was developed during his days on the McClellan Committee. The investigation was a thirty-two-month marathon marked by ruthless focus and breakneck pace. Kennedy did not just work long, he worked fast. And he expected everyone else to do the same. He was tenacious. Once he locked onto something or someone, he didn’t stop grinding. Another distinguishing trait of the McClellan days was the absence of a command structure. Job descriptions and hierarchy meant little. The staff rallied to deal with emergencies as they came up. Given the low salaries, the staff might not have sustained the pace were it not for Bobby’s profound devotion to those with whom he worked. Jack always impressed people, but Bobby bound them to himself. In the long hours of work, in the occasional parties he would throw at Hickory Hill, Bobby would express, often through teasing, his recognition and admiration of their work. On Good Friday, Bobby ordered orchids for every woman on his staff. When Senator McClellan’s son was killed in an accident in 1958, Bobby flew back to Arkansas with him and stayed with the family. Back in Washington, Bobby would often drive the senator back to his apartment in the evening and sometimes spend the night with him. McClellan, a gruff, remote man, likened Bobby to a son.