Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (46 page)

While Bobby avoided controversial sleuths like Lane, Buchanan, and Kilgallen in the months after the assassination, he did not reject their suspicions about the case. But he was determined to keep his own inquiries into Dallas private. He was seen taking long walks in a Washington park with Allen Dulles, the former CIA director who had returned from the exile imposed on him by President Kennedy to become the dominant force on the Warren Commission. But Bobby never revealed what the two men discussed during these lengthy conversations. CIA veteran Sam Halpern later told
Washington Post
reporters Walter Pincus and George Lardner that RFK also secretly recruited a mobster from upstate New York to dig into his brother’s assassination. But the late Halpern was an unreliable source on the Kennedys, one of those CIA officials eager to portray the brothers in the most unflattering ways. And having Bobby, of all people, consort with mobsters would be a particularly lurid way of tarnishing his image.

Still, Kennedy was obviously in emotional extremis in these early months after Dallas, the kind of punishing state of mind where a man feels driven to take extraordinary steps. One day, Bobby went as far as to arrange a secret meeting with the man he considered Public Enemy Number One.

EARLY ONE MORNING IN
March 1964, Secret Service Agent Mike Howard and his partner had a surprise encounter with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Howard was one of the agents assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy in the months after Dallas. His eventful career had also included overseeing the Fort Worth leg of JFK’s Texas trip and taking Marina Oswald and her children into protective custody for a week after the assassination at a Six Flags motel outside Dallas. Years later, Howard would guard former President Johnson when he retired to his Texas ranch. While on duty with the former first lady, the agent sometimes drew the midnight shift. Sitting outside her bedroom, he would hear Jackie’s screaming nightmares.

One morning around seven, after another graveyard tour of duty—this time at Wexford, the weekend manor that Jackie had built in the Virginia horse country the last year of JFK’s life—Howard and his partner were leaving when they came upon Bobby Kennedy in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee. “Will you fellows, ah, be going past Dulles?” Kennedy asked the Secret Service agents. When Howard told him they would, he asked if he could ride with them.

Howard wondered why the attorney general did not have FBI men to ferry him around. But he later learned that J. Edgar Hoover, who had once been eager to put FBI cars at Kennedy’s service, had cut off all amenities for the attorney general after his brother’s assassination. As Howard soon discovered, it was not just transportation Bobby needed that morning. It was the Secret Service men’s intimidating presence.

Bobby asked the agents if they could stop at Dulles Airport on the way back to Washington, directing them to a remote spot on the tarmac where private planes landed. “I’ll need you to drive me out onto the air field and I’d like you to stay with me,” said Kennedy, and the two agents agreed. After the car was parked, Bobby got out and began walking toward a small plane that was sitting about fifty yards away, followed by Howard and his partner. About forty feet from the plane, Bobby turned to the agents and said, “Fellows, you wait right here.” As Kennedy approached, a fireplug of a man got off the plane followed by two hulking sidekicks. The Secret Service agents instantly recognized him: Jimmy Hoffa. To the agents’ amazement, Kennedy and Hoffa greeted each other and began conversing, as the attorney general showed a document to the Teamster leader, and Hoffa alternately nodded and shook his head. As the two men talked, Howard and his partner warily eyed Hoffa’s bodyguards. “One was built like a Green Bay Packer,” Howard recalled, “and the other wore dark shades and there wasn’t any doubt about what he had under both armpits—he was loaded.”

Howard and his partner could not believe what they were witnessing. “We weren’t expecting something like this at all,” he said. “This wasn’t part of our routine duty. We weren’t even supposed to be there!

“We could hear Bobby and Hoffa talking, but we couldn’t hear what was being said. But the thing that was a concern to us was what was going to happen. Hoffa had made it clear, at one time, that he would kill this son of a bitch if he got the chance. All of a sudden, I wasn’t sleepy anymore, I can guarantee you. We were wide awake, because we didn’t know whether there’d be a shoot-out right there or not.”

Later, as Kennedy and the Secret Service men drove back to Washington, there was no conversation in the car. “He didn’t say a word about it—not a word,” Howard recalled. And the Secret Service men were too professional to ask anything about the extraordinary meeting. “That was something you didn’t do.”

Why did Kennedy confer with his long-time nemesis that day? His Justice Department had finally won a conviction against the slippery Hoffa, on jury tampering charges in Nashville, and the following month it would put the Teamster boss on trial again, for defrauding the union’s Central States Pension Fund of $20 million. This might have been the subject of the two men’s conversation that morning on the landing field. But as investigative journalist Gus Russo has speculated, it might also have been Dallas. Perhaps Kennedy wanted “to look into Hoffa’s eyes while asking him if he had anything to do with his brother’s killing—as he had done with, among others, John McCone of the CIA.”

It has long perplexed assassination researchers why Robert Kennedy did not put the formidable power of the Justice Department behind the probe of his brother’s murder. If anybody had the means and motive to solve the crime, it was the attorney general of the United States. Kennedy’s inertia is partly explained by the enervating gloom that settled over him in the months after Dallas. But another explanation is suggested by Howard’s remarkable story. When Kennedy did marshal the energy to pursue leads on his brother’s case, he could not rely on the government’s investigative apparatus. Kennedy’s official power began slipping away the minute his brother was killed. It was so weakened by March 1964 that he could not depend on the FBI to protect him during a nerve-twisting meeting with his top criminal target. There is something deeply poignant about the attorney general of the United States reduced to hanging around his sister-in-law’s kitchen in hopes of borrowing her Secret Service protection.

Increasingly marginalized by Lyndon Johnson—a man he regarded as a usurper and who eyed him in return with burning suspicion—and the new president’s malevolent courtier, Hoover, Kennedy was powerless to mount a full assassination investigation in 1964, even if he had possessed the will. It was the FBI chief who moved quickly to bring the investigation under his control, ignoring the attorney general in the process.

Hoover’s contempt for Kennedy’s authority became so blatant after Dallas that Ed Guthman, the tough newspaperman who was still serving as the attorney general’s press secretary, stormily confronted Hoover deputy Cartha DeLoach over lunch in early March. Guthman was outraged at the way that Hoover and his coterie—before “the president’s body was even cold”—had begun to snub the attorney general, communicating directly with the new occupant of the White House and feeding LBJ’s rampant paranoia with tales of Bobby’s disloyalty. “It pissed me off. I mean what the hell…to get fucked around like that by Hoover,” Guthman later told me. “As soon as President Kennedy was killed, Bob Kennedy might just as well not have existed as far as he was concerned.”

After an initial exchange of pleasantries that afternoon, the lunch meeting soon grew heated. Guthman was blunt in his assessment of the FBI director’s behavior: it was “chickenshit” and “unmanly.” The words surely inflamed the hypersensitive Hoover when “Deke” DeLoach dutifully reported back to his boss—a man of “monstrous ego,” in the deputy’s own words, who ruled the FBI like “the Great and Powerful Oz.”

Hoover and his men were clearly moving “to consolidate [their] position with President Johnson,” Guthman observed, “and went out of their way to really stick it in, and hard” against Kennedy. At a time when Bobby could barely function, lost in his fog of grief, Guthman found the FBI czar’s behavior “cruel and unnecessary…we had no illusions about what had happened or what changes in power [had taken place].” But Hoover needed to keep reminding Kennedy of his fall, to punish the young man—once called the second most powerful person in Washington—for his short-lived dominion over him.

There was a time when Kennedy would have directly confronted Hoover himself. But in his final months at the Justice Department, sleeping and eating intermittently, he seemed to shrink even physically before the eyes of his friends and colleagues. Bobby took to wearing JFK’s old clothes, but wrapping himself in the comforting leather skin of his older brother’s bomber jacket, he seemed like a lost boy. “He looked to me like a man who is just in intense pain,” said his friend John Seigenthaler, after visiting Washington to check in on Bobby. “He looked to me like a man hurt, I mean, you know, just physically hurt.”

Bobby Kennedy once charged through Washington’s bureaucratic fortresses like a blazing revolutionary, determined to inflame the government with a sense of Kennedy mission. The attorney general “was frequently an insurgent, and his country was the beneficiary of the insurgency,” Edward R. Murrow would tell Bobby in a wistful thank-you note after receiving a pair of the cufflinks that were given to the core members of the Kennedy administration on Christmas 1963. But without his inspirational leadership, Kennedy’s crusades at the Justice Department began to lose their fervor and some of his young prosecutors began to drift away.

When Bob Blakey—who had served on his organized crime task force and would one day play a key role in reopening his brother’s case—dropped by Kennedy’s office to say goodbye, he was stunned by the transformation his once-dynamic boss had undergone. “He seemed absolutely devastated. He used to have these piercing eyes—when he was looking at you, you knew it. The day I came into his office, he was idly playing with that big dog of his, Brumus. He looked at me with vacant eyes. Instead of his usual vigorous handshake, his hand felt like a piece of meat.”

To friends like Seigenthaler, it seemed as if Kennedy’s body-wracking grief after Dallas was intensified by something else, a haunting sense of remorse. It was as if he felt responsible in some way for his brother’s murder. “That must have been part of his agony,” Blakey observed. “This terrible sense—is there something I did, or failed to prevent, that backfired against the president?” He was supposed to be his brother’s sleepless watchman, but he had failed him.

There was something else that undoubtedly weighed on Kennedy in those dark months, another reason he seemed immobilized, unable to confront the truth about his brother’s assassination. It was first speculated about in a provocative monthly magazine called
The Minority of One
that was published by a brilliant, Polish-born survivor of Auschwitz named Menachem Arnoni.

The Minority of One
, whose board of sponsors included Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, lived up to its defiant motto: “the independent monthly for an American alternative dedicated to the eradication of all restrictions on thought.” Its founder, known to his readers as M. S. Arnoni, ran his magazine with the fearless abandon of a man who had “lived a thousand lives, and…died a thousand deaths,” as he declared in a 1965 speech on the Berkeley campus, where he addressed the audience in the striped uniform of a Nazi concentration camp inmate. With his tragic, European sense of the world, Arnoni inveighed against the dangers of militarism and the threat of a new and final world war, displaying a passion and intellectual acuity rarely evident in the American press. Long before Walter Cronkite signaled the mainstream media’s disaffection with the war in Vietnam,
The Minority of One
was regularly denouncing it as a moral disaster. And while the rest of the press was rushing to close the case on the assassination of President Kennedy, Arnoni insisted on raising sharp and disturbing questions about the official version, publishing the work of pioneering dissidents on Dallas like Lane, Sylvia Meagher, and Vincent Salandria. The monthly’s carefully documented dissections of the Warren Report and intriguing explorations into the identities of Oswald and Ruby would catch the attention of men in Bobby Kennedy’s circle, who read and corresponded with the journal.

The most disquieting essay on the assassination ever published by Arnoni might have been one he wrote himself in the January 1964 issue. In the piece—which ran on the cover of the magazine under the title “Who Killed Whom and Why? Dark Thoughts About Dark Events”—Arnoni raised the chilling possibility that Kennedy’s assassination was a regime change engineered at the top levels of government. Deep into his essay, Arnoni made another disturbing conjecture—one that might further explain Bobby’s paralyzed condition after Dallas. “The possibility can by no means be dismissed that important men in Washington do know the identity of the conspirators, or at least some of them, and that these conspirators are so powerful that prudence dictates that they not be identified in public,” Arnoni suggested. “Let us make the ‘fantastic’ assumption that President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy know or believe that the murder was planned by a group of high-ranking officers who would stop at nothing to end American-Soviet negotiations. However strong their desire to avenge John F. Kennedy, what course would be open to them? To move against such formidable conspirators might start a disastrous chain of events. It could lead to American troops shooting at other American troops. It could lead to a direct take-over by a military clique. To avert such catastrophes, it might well be considered prudent to pretend utter ignorance, in the hope that the conspirators might be removed from power discreetly, at a later date, one by one.”