The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (68 page)

Bobby took testimony and heard tales that would have made any public figure cautious about ever allowing himself to be vulnerable to blackmail. As a committee member, Jack heard much of the same testimony and surely should have learned the same lessons.

Mollenhoff sent Bobby a memo about Giancana’s Chicago that would have made most politicians draw back from letting friends and associates set them up with women. Mollenhoff told of Dan Carmell, an attorney for the Illinois Federation of Labor and a former Illinois assistant attorney general, who had recently jumped out of a Chicago hotel to his death just before he was to go on trial for white slavery. “The sworn statements of the girls involved … show the way that these girls operated from an apartment in North Chicago, and the way various political figures including at least one senator were brought into the web of Carmell’s labor influence,” Mollenhoff wrote. “Indications are that labor money was used for the transportation of these girls, and that this pattern of sex parties was used to trap political figures into situations where they were under the power of Carmell and the labor organizations he represented.”

This was not the kind of matter Bobby liked discussing. When he was taking testimony from a Portland madam, Bobby became so embarrassed that Chairman McClellan asked whether he might take over. Jack was not embarrassed at all by such talk. These hearings nonetheless were the most extraordinary warning that if he hoped to be president of the United States, he would have to conduct his personal life with a caution that did not come naturally to him.

B
obby and Jack were performing not only before a national television audience but also before their own family. Every day Ethel sat in the hearing room in a choice seat held for her by one of the guards. Jackie sat there many days too, as did Teddy whenever he could get away from his studies. Even Joe, as opposed as he was to this interminable spectacle, showed up at least once and sat watching his sons. It was a tableau of loyalty that helped to further the image of the Kennedys as a peerless family, steadfast to the core.

The audience watching on television and journalists writing feature articles on the Kennedys noted the youthful vigor of the two brothers seated side by side. Jack was thirty-nine, though he looked ten years younger, and thirty-one-year-old Bobby looked as if he could have just graduated from college. Of the one thousand letters the committee received one week, four hundred were what the New York
Daily News
called “mash notes,” most of them asking for autographed pictures.

The Eisenhower years were not a time when youth was considered to have special merit, but youthful Bobby identified with the young and tentatively began reaching out to them as his natural constituency. “It’s ridiculous to wait until a man is 40 to give him a responsible job,” Bobby said. “By that age he may have lost most of his zeal.”

Bobby was fearless intellectually and physically, and not just when the cameras were focused on him. A woman reporter from Joliet, Illinois, had disappeared, presumably murdered by the labor mobsters she had exposed in a series of articles. Stories like that only emboldened Bobby. He and his associate Jim McShane traveled to Joliet Prison to interview an inmate who said that he knew where the reporter was buried. The two men went with the prisoner to a farm field where Bobby took his turn shoveling in an unsuccessful attempt to find the body.

Bobby learned that all across the country lived brave people like this reporter who were willing to stand up to evil at the risk of their livelihoods and sometimes their very lives. It rankled Bobby that some of the Washington know-it-alls whispered that John Cheasty had told of Hoffa’s perfidy only because he wanted a job on the committee. Bobby knew that the sickly Cheasty had lost far more than he gained, and he was only one of scores of examples.

Sometimes even Bobby was dumbstruck by the quiet, unaccredited heroism of some of the witnesses. George Maxwell, a Cleveland labor relations consultant, agreed to testify before the committee that he had negotiated sweetheart contracts for major carriers with Hoffa. “I don’t understand it,”
Bobby beseeched him, realizing that even he himself was becoming cynical. “You will ruin yourself, your business, if you testify like that.” Maxwell replied, “I tell the truth, Mr. Kennedy.”

The great experiential moment of Bobby’s life lay in these hearings, which largely defined his view of the world and of the American people the way World War II had defined Jack’s worldview. Bobby saw now that there was corruption of a magnitude he had hardly imagined, an evil that threaded its way through American life. It was
The Enemy Within,
as he called it in his 1960 book about the committee’s work, though it had penetrated further than even he realized. He had also seen good on a scale that he had hardly imagined, and he knew that to betray these lonely acts of courage was to betray life itself. If one day he would romanticize certain groups of Americans, his faith grew out of a specificity of experience that he kept close to his heart.

Bobby’s name would always be linked with his obsessed campaign to convict Jimmy Hoffa, but his team of investigators went far beyond the Teamsters Union. He even investigated the
New York Times,
whose editorial support his brother would soon be seeking in his presidential race. He took startling testimony that the greatest paper in America had made payments to reach favorable agreements with the Teamsters. In all, the committee and its 100-member staff, interviewing 1,525, witnesses and taking testimony that filled 59 volumes of official hearings, presented strong evidence of corruption in at least 15 unions and more than 50 companies.

Bobby’s critics on the left accused him of destroying unions, but he celebrated union reformers who stood up to corruption and whose victories would ensure a stronger movement. His critics on the right said that he avoided investigating Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers, but in fact the committee looked at the UAW and found little seriously wrong. Sadly, this congressional investigation, the most monumental in half a century, achieved a result hardly commensurate with the enormous effort and resources put into it. Congress did enact a labor reform bill, and a year after the committee disbanded, twenty figures in labor and business had gone to jail. But as Bobby himself admitted, there was “appalling public apathy”; by the measure of congressional mail, practically no one in America cared deeply about labor corruption. Beyond that—and this was not something that Bobby conceded—he had helped make Hoffa a folk hero to the Teamster rank and file, a working-class Houdini who had wiggled out of all the handcuffs and jails in which his enemies had sought to confine him. The union president sat behind his nine-foot-long mahogany desk in a Washington office far more spacious and impressive than the Oval Office. He ate gourmet meals prepared by chef Jean Grihangne, and when he had eaten too richly, he
worked out in the tiled gymnasium that he had built for his use. He had hopes of expanding the Teamsters into other areas of American life.

As for Bobby, he too had become a hero to millions of Americans. “At thirty-three years old, this quiet little fellow is the most exciting guest we’ve had in years,” Jack Paar told his late-night audience on national television during Bobby’s appearance in June 1959. “I think that Robert Kennedy is the bravest, finest young man I know.”

Bobby was a man who never forgot, and when he left the committee after three years in 1959, he was as consumed with the Teamster leader as when he had first met him. He believed that Hoffa stood at the center of a contagion of evil that had to be stopped or the whole nature of America would change. He had other work to do now in helping to elect Jack president of the United States, but it was clear that one day these two implacable enemies would meet again on another field of conflict.

J
Jack did not have the same visceral feeling about corruption and evil that Bobby had. His most passionate political concern remained foreign affairs. In July 1957, Jack gave a speech in the Senate on the tragic situation in Algeria, where the French were brutally repressing a guerrilla movement seeking independence. The speech was a revelation to many. One of those listening that day was Howard E. Shuman, administrative assistant to Senator Paul Douglas. Shuman, like many of his peers, considered Jack “an extraordinary minor figure” in the Senate. Yet as the aide listened, he thought, “My God, this is really great stuff.”

jack called for the United States to take the lead “in shaping a course for political independence for Algeria.” In that North African country, half a million French troops were fighting a people attempting to throw off the heavy yoke of colonialism. It was an ugly, vicious war, an endless cycle of torture, bombings, and reprisals. The bloody conflict was tearing apart not only Algeria but France itself. America had fought its own war for independence, and if not for the exigencies of the cold war, Washington policymakers might well have stood foursquare on the side of the Algerians. France, however, was a prominent member of NATO, and the Eisenhower administration stood with its ally and looked away from the tumult in North Africa.

Jack was a determined student of history, and it appalled him how little his country had learned from its misguided support of French colonialism in Vietnam. He told his colleagues: “Did that tragic episode not teach us, whether France likes it of not, admits it or not, or has our support or not, that their overseas territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably going
to break free and look with suspicion on the Western nations who impeded their steps to independence?”

There was the essential reality. As Jack saw it, nationalism, not communism, was the unstoppable tide sweeping across Asia and Africa, and his nation, once a colony itself, had to ride with that tide, not against it. Within a few years, Jack’s words would sound self-evident. But in the summer of 1957, this was a daring, controversial statement that won him more condemnation then praise. Of the 138 editorials that Jack’s office clipped and saved, 90 of them criticized him.

Among prominent Democrats, Stevenson was particularly incensed at what he considered Jack’s ill-timed, inopportune call for Algerian independence. Nonetheless, for the first time Jack’s voice had resonated with progressive intellectuals across America and the world. He had struck a deep resonant chord among the Algerian guerrillas listening to his words in French on the Voice of America and among other young Africans and Asians, who heard the voice of an America that had long been silent.

Jack’s father was appalled at his son’s speech. He had no use for liberal moral posturing, hand-wringing, and loud moaning over the brutal realities of power in the world. Worse yet, if Jack was to become president, he could not be climbing out on limbs that might prove rotten or could be sawed off by his opponents safely ensconced on the ground. Despite his disapproval, Joe was as supportive as ever. “You lucky mush,” Joe told Jack over the phone. “You don’t know it and neither does anyone else, but within a few months everyone is going to know just how right you were on Algeria.”

On a Saturday evening a month after giving his speech in the Senate, Jack appeared before the Americans for Democratic Action at the Astor Hotel in Manhattan. He had arranged to meet there with Arnold Beichman, a reporter who had just returned from an unprecedented visit with the guerrillas in Algeria that had been the basis of a
Newsweek
cover story. Jack had a genuine liking for brave reporters, and he asked Beichman to meet with him after the event. After Jack said his good-byes, the two men walked out of the Astor Hotel and along Broadway. Beichman told Jack that the guerrillas had heard his speech while sitting in their mountain hideaway. They had asked all kinds of questions as they sat eating lamb stew with their guest. Who was this man Kennedy? How come this Kennedy was so influential? Why couldn’t he get independence for Algeria?

As they hurried along the late-night streets of Manhattan, Jack peppered Beichman with questions. Jack mentioned an Algerian lobbyist at the UN. It was a name that few people other than foreign policy experts on North Africa would even know, and Beichman was impressed. “What do you think of him?” Jack asked. “Is he to be trusted?”

Jack kept talking as they walked into the Commodore Hotel on Lexington Avenue. Beichman was surprised that Jack was staying in such a second-rate hotel, but he followed him over to a bank of elevators where Jack pushed a button. “I’ve got a very important date,” Jack said, suddenly grinning. “Sorry I can’t invite you up.”

18
The Rites of Ambition

J
ack could have stepped forward now and stood as the great champion of colonial peoples, whether they resided in Algeria or Indonesia or Poland. At far less political risk, he could have stood his ground as an articulate spokesman for eventual Algerian independence. Instead, as was his pattern, he stepped gingerly back, telling his staff that he was “wary of being known as the senator from Algeria.”

Just as nationalism and the struggle for independence was the great international moral issue of his time, so civil rights was the great domestic moral issue. On this issue, Jack was even more reluctant to take a leading role. He was instinctively a moderate, tempering his progressive instincts on foreign policy and social issues with a conservative wariness of the dangers of wrenching change. He cared to some degree intellectually about the plight of blacks in the segregated South, but he did not have the liberal passion of his colleague Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who cried out in a loud, fervent voice that enough was enough, wrongs had to be righted, and righted now.

Jack stood with some of his more reactionary colleagues on several technical matters as the 1957 civil rights bill worked its way through Congress. Unlike the vociferous Humphrey, Jack was wooing southern Democrats to stand behind his presidential banner, but his refusal to stand forthrightly with his liberal colleagues was perhaps something more than narrow pragmatism. As he had with some of the procedural votes on McCarthy, he ended up looking like a man of expediency. The charge rankled him. “It’s awful … you know what they say about you, but they say this … [was] an attempt to appease the South,” he told Burns. “Politically it was a mistake.”