The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (108 page)

The Kennedys readily solicited advice from experts, often searching until they found someone to tell them what they wanted to hear. The doctor had been around the Kennedys long enough, and he was not about to be drawn too far into this family affair. “I don’t know, I don’t think it’s for me to tell you what to do,” he said, “but I can tell you that your husband is most happy when you’re there.”

The doctor told Rose as clearly as he could that if she cared about Joe’s happiness, she should be with her husband, but Rose was not satisfied with that answer. She called back several times, and each time he told her the same thing.

Rose left the institute for her summer at Hyannis Port, and soon afterward Ann returned. “Uncle Joe, the family has put me in charge of you,” she told him as he sat in his wheelchair, “and you’ll have to do as I say from now on.” The old man had what his nurse thought was “a wild look in his eyes.” Then his shoulders slumped. The prison of his marriage had become his only freedom, and even that was gone now.

After his holiday Dr. Betts returned to Horizon House, and he was startled to see that Ann was in charge now and Rose was gone. “I think she [Rose] made her decision, and she couldn’t cope, she could not cope with a bad situation,” Dr. Betts reflected. “And from that moment on Ann Gargan was in charge. Ann did not make him happy. She was devoted to him, but she was much more manipulative. He loved her and hated her. She stirred him up, and I personally think he would have been much happier to just settle down and be content with his wife for all those years.”

Joe traveled to Hyannis Port that summer with Ann, and though Rose was in the same house, it was his niece who was never away from his side. He was supposed to return to the institute for further rehabilitation so that he might learn to walk and talk again, but he never did. Ann had him dressed sometimes in a suit and tie, and on occasion he traveled to New York and sat behind his desk. He even flew once to Chicago.

Time had always been Joe’s friend, time and ritual and routine, his moments perfectly orchestrated. Now he sought the same control over his days, checking his watch to see that every minute of his diminished day was set as firmly as it had been when all was well. He turned away any therapist or guest who arrived even a minute late, and a family member who dared show up after the appointed hour was met with immense displeasure.

When the president came for the weekend, Joe would have his wheelchair moved out on the porch where he had a clear view of the helicopter carrying his son. He was always there too when the president departed and the helicopter lifted across the field where his sons had all once played football. He would sit and watch until the helicopter disappeared in the sky, and when they pushed him back into the house, sometimes the old man would be crying.

26
Dangerous Games

O
utside of the president, there was no one in government as important to Bobby as J. Edgar Hoover, the sixty-six-year-old director of the FBI. Although the FBI was an empire of its own, Bobby was technically Hoover’s boss, and the two men had to work together on a multitude of serious matters ranging from civil rights to organized crime. For years Bobby had been writing political valentines to the imperious Hoover, congratulating him in language that even Caesar might have found exaggerated. It was impossible, however, to embarrass Hoover by celebrating his greatness too effusively, and by dint of Bobby’s correspondence and his father’s equally fulsome tributes to the director, it might appear that the new attorney general and the FBI chief would work well in tandem.

The two men were so different in their approaches to government, however, that from the day Bobby stepped into office, much of what he did rankled Hoover. Although the FBI perpetuated an image of their leader as an intrepid G-man, Hoover was in essence the most brilliant Washington bureaucrat of the twentieth century, a career civil servant who could have been overseeing widgets as easily as agents.

There was precision in everything Hoover did, from the way he managed his Caucasian, conservative, white-shirted, clean-shaven agents to the niceties of his communication with the White House. He held a treasure trove of information on policymakers and presidents that had kept all presidents wary, helping to ensure his continued tenure. Most of what the agency did was documented in precise memos that ended up on the chief’s desk, the final product of a machine whose ultimate output was not the capture of criminals but the endless perpetuation of Hoover’s power.

The FBI director was consumed with fighting the American Communist
party. He could not see that the party had been reduced to a few bedraggled militants surrounded by the FBI agents who had thoroughly infiltrated the organization. He refused to understand that the most serious internal danger the nation faced was organized crime. That said, the director had created a disciplined, professional organization that, for the most part, stayed within the broad parameters of the law and often rendered signal service that its opponents rarely acknowledged.

Bobby was an antibureaucrat who proudly flouted all the elaborate strictures of government, considering a day not won unless he had broken out of one tedious regimen or another or surprised some slumbering official with his unannounced appearance. Night or day, few Washington officials would have dared to arrive at their office without wearing a coat and tie. On weekends and evenings, Bobby was damned if he was going to dress like an ambitious bureaucrat, and he wandered the halls in T-shirts and sweaters. In meetings he flung his feet up on desks and brought his enormous dog, Brumus, into work, though the nation’s top law enforcement officer could have been fined fifty dollars or sentenced to thirty days in jail for so flagrantly violating government rules.

Bobby had scarcely been in office for a week when he showed up one evening around eight o’clock to visit the FBI’s printing unit, shaking hands with night-shift employees. That same evening he wanted to enter the FBI’s gym but was told the door was locked. So began a flurry of memos back and forth within the FBI about the unpredictable attorney general and his mysterious visits. In subsequent visits to the gym, the FBI monitored Bobby’s every move, even noting in a memo the number of push-ups he performed—ten to fifteen—during one half-hour session in the facility.

Hoover had created an agency in which no life or event went unmonitored. It was a trivialization of government, but the system he had created allowed Hoover to chronicle Bobby’s actions and record his utterances. The attorney general would never be able to escape from any questionable actions he took, or from any of the accolades he gave the director.

As he entered office, Bobby shared Hoover’s fixation with American communism, giving speeches and interviews that could as easily have been spoken by Hoover or Joe McCarthy. In March, Bobby went on the radio program of Senator Kenneth Keating, the moderate New York Republican, and said that the Communist Party remained as great a threat as during the Red Scare of the past decade because it “is controlled and to a large degree financially supported by a foreign government.” As much as many American liberals ignored the painful truth, evidence in recent years from Soviet archives shows that Bobby was correct in his second assertion: the parry had been largely controlled and financed by Moscow. However, by 1961 the Communist Party
was decimated and probably controlled and financed more by the FBI, whose agents and informers may have made up about half of the minuscule party.

By the fall of his first year as attorney general, Bobby had come to the realization that the Communist Party was not a nefarious secret army of potential traitors with the power and will to subvert America. “They are not important numerically and present no grave menace to our security,” Bobby said in November in Los Angeles. Even as he said so, he made sure that he kept stroking Hoover. After his return from his West Coast trip, he called Hoover. The FBI director noted “that in regard to the trip which he recently made, he was impressed with my people in all of the cities where he traveled.”

Bobby believed that there was a vast underground army of betrayers within America more threatening than Communists. As attorney general, he set out to attack organized crime with a resolve and weaponry far beyond what had been brought to previous attempts. He had been obsessed with the mob since the days of his work on the McClellan Committee, and now he believed he had the power to end what he had begun. He quadrupled the number of attorneys in the organized crime division and sent them across the country attacking the gangsters where they nested, protected by corrupt local officials or a see-no-evil police atmosphere. The IRS targeted Mafia figures for audits, going after them with a merciless concern for detail that at times assaulted their civil liberties.

Many superbly dedicated FBI agents pursued this new enemy just as relentlessly, shadowing targeted individuals, wiretapping them, monitoring their businesses and homes, and tailing them wherever they went. Hoover, however, had been slow in turning them toward this implacable foe.

“Hoover was a miserable son of a bitch, but he was tough,” said William Hundley, chief of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section. “He was tough and shrewd and powerful. And you know, we got some movement from the FBI, but not what we would have liked. They hated us. And it wasn’t right. At that time, you know, they still had about half of their personnel in the FBI working on the domestic Communist Party. There wasn’t anything left except informants. And we wanted to move those guys into organized crime. And a lot of the individual agents, they wanted to do it. But it was a terrible struggle. I don’t think that Hoover had ever had an attorney general that didn’t kiss his ass. And Bobby didn’t kiss his ass.”

As Bobby read the files and listened to the various agents, he learned of America’s secret history. He came across names of entertainers he had admired, politicians with whom he had worked, and celebrated business leaders. In May, Bobby made a trip to the FBI offices in Chicago. The attorney general was a vociferous reader of FBI files, and by now he knew that determined special agents in Chicago were dedicated to going after the syndicate,
tailing Sam Giancana, the local leader, and bugging his hangout at the Armory Lounge.

As soon as Bobby was introduced to the assembled agents, Marlin Johnson, the special agent in charge, began his prepared statement. Johnson spoke the language not of a gritty, hands-on cop but of a ward politician, praising his visitor and then touting his own accomplishments. “Mr. Johnson,” Bobby interrupted, “I didn’t come here to hear a canned speech about how magnificent you are…. We’ll listen to the agents who are out on the street, the men who are doing the work you think is so great.”

Later in the day William F. Roemer Jr., one of those agents, played a tape for the attorney general from a bug that had been placed in the Democratic headquarters in Chicago’s first ward. As Bobby sat there, he heard Pat Marcy, a Democratic organizer whom he had met during the campaign, talking to two cops about one of their colleagues who refused bribes. The three men decided that they had no choice but to murder the man. Bobby listened to the tape, asked Roemer to play it again, and said nothing more.

Bobby could have left that day and subtly scuttled an investigation that might one day touch on associates of the Kennedys. It was even possible that some of the accused would call out his father’s name. That was not just hypothetical, for according to Cartha DeLoach, the deputy director, in 1961 the FBI bugs heard Giancana talking of the $25,000 he had contributed to the Kennedy campaign.

Many Democrats would have cried foul at the bugging of Democratic Party headquarters, believing that the FBI was eavesdropping on a citadel of democracy in its pursuit of the corrupt. Bobby did not do that either, but by word and deed he flailed the agents onward in their pursuit of the Mafia underground. Bobby had little use for the finer nuances of civil liberties. He did not always grasp that in defending the rights of those who least deserved them, one defended the rights of all. He had not flinched at hearing the results of the bugging of the Democratic offices in Chicago. It was a war out there, and Bobby wanted his brave soldiers to have the weapons that would let them win.

Bobby’s defenders suggest that he did not know that the bug had been placed there by the FBI but was told the Chicago police had put it there. That was hardly much of a distinction. If Kennedy had been opposed to breaking into houses and offices to place listening devices, he presumably would have been equally against any other law enforcement organization doing it and feeding misbegotten information to the FBI. It was perhaps more dangerous for local police to be placing bugs than the FBI, which at least would exercise some controls.

“In one particular instance, in a field office, one of his people asked him
when Bobby was personally listening to the conversation on the tapes brought on by microphone, ‘Isn’t this illegal?’ “recalled DeLoach. “And he said, ‘Yes, everything about it is illegal.’ And then he demanded that we get better equipment. Later on he denied he knew anything about the usage of microphones. But he did and he encouraged that. It was explained to him on a number of occasions. And the material was brought over to him on a constant basis from microphones. He thoroughly understood that.”

Early on in his term, the new attorney general asked that fifty Treasury officials each year take a course in wiretapping and bugging, rather than the fifteen who were taking it in the Eisenhower years. The officer in charge said that it would be impossible to more than triple the number. “You look old to me,” Kennedy replied, dismissing the man. “You should think of retiring.” The man soon left Treasury, and a new, younger official took over to oversee the vastly increased load.

The FBI chief provided raw files to Bobby that were compilations of wiretaps, bugs, and overheard conversations, as well as informants’ tales of every stripe and degree of reliability. Hoover also sent his surrogates over to the Justice Department to inform the attorney general of the latest allegations and rumors involving the Kennedys, including a tale that the president had had a group of women with him on the twelfth floor of the LaSalle Hotel while the Secret Service surrounded the building. It was, as Bobby knew, “ridiculous on the face of it,” but it was a cunning move on Hoover’s part to pass on even the most questionable of tales, proving his loyalty and indispensability, while reminding the Kennedys that if he were a teller of tales, what tales he could tell.