The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (23 page)

And so it went. In Jakarta, while staying at Sukarno’s presidential palace, Ethel stuck the plug of her hairdryer into the wrong outlet and plunged the entire building into darkness. At the University of Indonesia, after having been hit in the face by a piece of fruit during his speech, Bobby talked down yet another large assemblage of anti-American communists.
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Three days before his arrival, the American embassy had been stoned in anticipation of his visit. Within days of his appearance, Bobby was walking Jakarta’s streets followed by tens of thousands of cheering Indonesians who seemed inspired by his youthful sincerity. As would happen in the 1968 campaign, the press, wary at first because of Bobby’s reputation as a ruthless enforcer, came to see him at close quarters as open and without affectation, seemingly tireless in his quest to understand. They became his uncritical admirers.

In his negotiations with the wily Sukarno, Bobby was at his bulldog best, alternatingly complimenting and excoriating the old man. At one point in their exchanges over Dutch West New Guinea and the release of the CIA pilot from an Indonesian jail, Kennedy angrily walked out of the room in which they were sitting only to return with the inquiry: “Am I to go back to the president and say that you will not tell us that you’ll stand by your word? Everybody tells me you’re a man of your word and the president believes that.”
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The negotiation produced no immediate results, but eventually Pope was released and war between Holland and Indonesia was averted.

After visiting India and Thailand, the Kennedys flew to Europe. In Rome, the press brought a motor scooter into Alfredo’s restaurant for Ethel, who promptly tried to drive it among the tables. (She later crashed a Vespa into a bus.) Bobby met with de Gaulle in Paris and Adenauer in Berlin, through which he made a triumphal tour on a snowy, bitter cold day. On February 28, they flew home — having covered 30,000 miles and fourteen countries in twenty-eight days. It was an exhilarating and edifying trip for them both. Bobby’s subsequent correspondence and schedule reveal that he nurtured relationships with scores of people he had met along the way — from prime ministers to chauffeurs, Marxist students to members of the United States armed forces.
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Over the months that followed, there was a steady stream of Japanese, Italian, Indonesian, Indian, German, and Ivoirien (from an earlier trip Kennedy had made to the Ivory Coast) visitors who came to receptions and dinners at Hickory Hill, where Ethel presided in her exuberant style.

Much was made in later years about the high culture Jackie Kennedy brought to the White House — from her elegant refurbishing of it, to the concerts given by cellist Pablo Casals. But as Peter Collier and David Horowitz have written, Hickory Hill, with its boisterous elan, was the real home of the New Frontier. There intellectual and physical engagement were equally prized and tested.
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Aside from the touch-football matches, the Hickory Hill seminars brought some of the best minds, from the pioneer environmentalist Rachel Carson to the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, into direct exchange with senior policymakers in the administration. The president usually didn’t attend, but on one occasion when he did he pressed Princeton historian David Donald about whether Lincoln was regarded as great because he was assassinated. Was that what it took?
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At times, the Hickory Hill seminars said as much about the sophistication of their hosts as they revealed about the state of American arts and science. When philosopher and Oxford don A. J. Ayer presented his theory of logical positivism, Ethel interrupted him. Where was God in all of this? she asked. Ayer pointed out that his field was philosophy, not theology, but Ethel asked again about the relevance of God. Bobby then muttered, “Can it, Ethel.” It remained canned until Ayer’s talk was concluded. Bobby then asked, “But don’t you believe in right and wrong?”
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There was something peculiarly American in the roving assembly of children and animals at Hickory Hill. There were seven children and fifteen animals (which included a horse, four ponies, a burro, three geese, three dogs) both inside and outside the house. When asked by a Japanese reporter how the attorney general relaxed, Ethel replied: “When he comes home, the children jump on his back.” Jackie made a comic drawing of the Hickory Hill scene, showing children hanging out of windows, on the roof, an old cook leaving by the back and the new one on the front porch, with Ethel looking frazzled by it all. Ethel was delighted by the drawing and hung it in the kitchen. Hickory Hill had a tennis court, a touch-football field, and two swimming pools. Ethel liked to initiate stuffy potentates like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor at dinner parties by pushing them into a pool fully clothed. At a Saint Patrick’s Day party, she put live bullfrogs on the tables as centerpieces. The pets ran wild over the large property; Brumus, a large, ill-tempered Newfoundland dog, ventured onto an adjoining property, mauled a neighbor’s dog, and tore the clothes of two of the neighbor’s children. Furious, the neighbor, James Brent Clarke Jr., wrote the attorney general, who after making amends to Mr. Clarke thereafter brought Brumus to his office, where the dog lay in a corner growling at unsuspecting visitors.
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For a host of unlikely people — from exiled Cubans to Washington orphans (the
Washington Star
of August 13, 1962, shows Bobby hosting one of his periodic weekend swimming parties for the children of Saint Ann’s Infant Home) — Hickory Hill was a sort of home away from home, open, unguarded, completely informal, and somehow, in retrospect, the symbol of a more innocent age.

Bobby Kennedy may have had a way with errant animals, children, and even the hard-bitten doubters in the press, but among the political insiders in Washington he was pure anathema. “You won’t have any trouble finding my enemies,” he once told a reporter. “They’re all over town.”
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The reason Washington players took exception to Bobby Kennedy was that in their world of posture and compromise, he would not play along. All of their seamy little deals and self-serving arrangements stood to be exposed, publicly audited, or even prosecuted, they feared, because he ranged so freely. A reporter once told him that a Republican would probably win state office in Illinois. “I hope so,” he replied. “The Democrat is a crook.”
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The steel crisis of April 1962 only exacerbated this impression of arrogant interposition. The ostensible issue was control of inflation through negotiated wage and price restraints. After getting commitments from the leading steel companies not to raise their prices and from the United Steelworkers not to move for wage increases, U.S. Steel CEO Roger Blough informed the administration that his company was raising its steel price. The president was furious. When the other steel companies followed suit, Kennedy suspected collusion and asked his brother to investigate. Bobby immediately ordered FBI agents to conduct interviews with those involved. Since the press had been covering the contest, this included reporters. In several instances, FBI agents made predawn visits without warning to those under suspicion. The attorney general then convened a grand jury to examine the prospect of criminal violations and to subpoena the records, both corporate and personal, of the steel executives.
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After seventy-two hours of nonstop government harassment and recriminations, including the president’s famous line, “My father always told me that steel men were sons of bitches,” Blough and the other steel executives threw in the towel and rolled back their prices. But the press and the business community raised a chorus of complaint about Robert Kennedy’s use of “naked power,” as the
Christian Science Monitor
put it, and his “agents of the state security police,” in the view of the
Wall Street Journal.
Professor Charles Reich of the Yale Law School wrote, “It was dangerously wrong for an angry president to loose his terrible arsenal of power for the purposes of intimidation and coercing private companies. ”
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The fact that national security was not even remotely involved made the tactics particularly reprehensible. Bobby himself conceded in 1964 that the whole episode was “rather scary. There’s no question about that. ”
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But a few months later, the episode was nothing more than grist for the Kennedys’ insouciant humor. At a party given by Steve and Jean Kennedy Smith, the president toasted the attorney general by relating a telephone conversation he had recently had with the president of Republic Steel, Jim Patton.

And I was telling Patton what a son of a bitch he was. . . . And he was proving it. Patton asked me, “Why is it that all the telephone calls of all the steel executives in all the country are being tapped?” And I told him that I thought he was being totally unfair to the attorney general, and that I was sure that it wasn’t true.

And he asked me, “Why is it that all the income tax returns of all the steel executives in all the country are being scrutinized?” And I told him that, too, was totally unfair, that the attorney general wouldn’t do such a thing.

And then I called the attorney general and asked him why he was tapping the telephones of all the steel executives . . . and the attorney general told me that was wholly untrue and unfair.

With his usual perfect sense of timing, Jack paused before continuing. “And, of course, Patton was right.”

Bobby then got to his feet to explain in mock seriousness the use of such extreme tactics. “They were mean to my brother. They can’t do that to my brother.”
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The spoof did reflect an evident truth about the fraternal order of power: Jack Kennedy could dance above it all, could even joke about the use of police-state tactics with a member of the press in the room, because the motive of family loyalty tended to make things excusable. Moreover, Jack remained popular among the insiders because he didn’t need to play the game for keeps — precisely because Bobby did.

March 22, 1962

Washington, D.C.

T
he business of Hoover’s lunch with the president on March 22 was blackmail; the concession the director sought was confirmation in his post as head of the FBI. Tensions between Bobby and Hoover had erupted in the press on January 6, when columnist Drew Pearson predicted that the attorney general would get rid of the FBI director.
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The Kennedy brothers in fact had already lined up a replacement for Hoover in the person of State Department security director William Boswell. The timing was poor. During Bobby’s month abroad, Hoover had had the time to prepare his trap. He sprang it on February 27, the day before Bobby’s triumphant return home, in the form of a top-secret memorandum to the attorney general that summarized Judy Campbell’s telephone contact with the president as well as her association with Sam Giancana. Another copy of the memo was sent to O’Donnell: “I thought you would be interested in learning of the following information which was developed in connection with the investigation of John Rosselli, a West Coast hoodlum.”
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As always, Hoover justified his blackmail of public officials in terms of information learned in the course of an ongoing FBI investigation.

Hoover arrived in his limo that day at the northwest entrance of the White House at one o’clock, greeted the president in the Oval Office, and then proceeded with him and O’Donnell to the dining room in the executive mansion. There is no record of the conversation, either in FBI files or the president’s office files. O’Donnell later described it as “bitter” and we know it went on for no less than four hours.
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The attorney general, as Hoover’s superior as well as the singular power in the administration, should have attended but did not. Perhaps in their desperation the brothers decided to two-track Hoover, or perhaps Bobby’s exclusion was a condition Hoover had exacted before agreeing to the meeting.

Whatever the case, President Kennedy was confronted with the fact that Hoover not only knew the full extent of his extramarital liaison with Campbell and her relationship with Rosselli and Giancana but had documented it. Did he also tell the president about the murder plot against Castro and Rosselli’s role in it, and the fact that the attorney general had, in fact, silently countenanced such a plot in May 1961? We do not know. He certainly informed Bobby of all of this. Harris Wofford later wrote, “Aside for the moral issues, the morass of potential blackmail in which the attorney general found himself must have appalled him and added to the revulsion he felt.”
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We have no account of Bobby’s reaction to this meeting, only that his own telephone log bulged with exchanges with the president during the third week of March 1962.
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The unfolding disaster was one of their own making: Jack for his own rank womanizing; and Bobby for a sin Machiavelli would have thought greater: wounding a prince rather than killing him outright.

Hoover may have been manipulated in the blackmail scheme by a more distant puppet master — Rosselli. First, Rosselli arranged the introduction of his former paramour and friend Judy Campbell to President Kennedy.
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Second, Rosselli knew about the FBI wiretap of his phone in his L.A. apartment, and therefore that the surveilled contents of his conversations would be transcribed and analyzed by federal authorities. He also knew of the war going on between the attorney general and the FBI director. Finally, Rosselli allowed Campbell to stay at his apartment when he was away from Los Angeles, which was often.
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In all probability, Hoover not only had evidence that around seventy calls were exchanged between the Oval Office and Campbell but actually had transcribed copies of some of the exchanges that came from the tap on Rosselli’s phone.