The Passage of Power (16 page)

In 1953, his father got him the job with McCarthy’s committee. Later his work with this committee would be glossed over, excused by saying he didn’t really believe in McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign. He did.
“I
felt it was work that needed to be done then,” he was to say. And on another occasion:
“At
the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States … and Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.” When he resigned in July of that year, it wasn’t because he disapproved of McCarthy’s tactics, but because of a feud with chief counsel
Roy Cohn—whose job he wanted, and didn’t get, and with whom he almost came to blows—and because he didn’t get a promotion on the committee staff. And he remained loyal to McCarthy, in 1955 walking out of a banquet because the speaker, television commentator
Edward R. Murrow, was going to attack the senator; in 1957 not only attending McCarthy’s memorial service in Washington but flying to Wisconsin for the demagogue’s funeral. And when he returned to the committee after the Democrats took over the Senate and made him counsel in January, 1955,
the belligerence, unabated, was given the armor of governmental authority, and what friends already saw as an extremely moralistic view of the world became even more apparent.

“For him the world is divided into
black
and white hats,” his wife, Ethel, once said. “Bobby can only distinguish good men and bad.” In a nationally televised series of hearings he brought the black hats—organized crime figures tied in with labor unions such as Momo “Sam” Giancana, “Crazy Joey” Gallo, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo,
Joey Glimco—before the Senate Rackets Committee, where they found themselves confronted by a young man with icy blue eyes staring, glaring, at them with an unnerving intensity. As he questioned them, hunching forward over the committee dais as if he wanted to get at them physically, his right arm would jab out with each question in a movement reminiscent of his brother’s when his brother was giving a speech, except that Jack Kennedy’s hand was open for emphasis and entreaty; Robert Kennedy’s hand was balled up; sometimes the thumb stuck up from it, sometimes the forefinger pointed out, but essentially it was a fist. And the questions the chief counsel asked made it clear that to him a witness’s invocation of the constitutional right against self-incrimination was proof of guilt (Giancana: “I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer may tend to incriminate me.” Kennedy:
“Would
you tell us anything about any of your operations or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question?” Giancana: “I decline to answer.” Kennedy: “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.” To Glimco: “And you defraud the union?” “I respectfully decline to answer.” “You haven’t got the guts to answer, have you, Mr. Glimco?”). The chief counsel was no less confrontational when the microphone was off—“You’re
full
of shit,” he kept repeating to one witness during a brief recess—or in private, as in a meeting in his office with Joey Gallo.
“I
walk into Kennedy’s office and he gets mad at me. He says, ‘So you’re Joey Gallo, the Juke Box King. You don’t look so tough. I’d like to fight you myself.’ I hadda tell him I don’t fight.”

It was conservatives who would, later, first call him a “Torquemada,” but many liberals wouldn’t dispute the comparison. The liberal journalist
William Haddad was told by a friend to go down to the hearings if “I wanted to see a fascist at work,” and came back feeling, “He was in the McCarthy mode.”

The only time Kennedy himself seemed on the defensive—
“a
little keyed up, a little tense”—was when Joe Kennedy showed up to watch a hearing. He had more respect for his son now.
“Bobby
hates like me,” he is reported to have said.

The union leader Bobby focused on was
Jimmy Hoffa of the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a man in whom, he said, he saw
“absolute
evilness.” In his dealings with Hoffa, Robert Kennedy demonstrated another trait. He tried to trap Hoffa on a bribery charge, boasting that the case was so airtight that if the Teamster boss wasn’t convicted, he would jump off the Capitol dome. But Hoffa wasn’t convicted. Then he indicted him on an illegal wiretapping charge; when, at a first trial, the jury deadlocked, he brought the union leader to trial again on
the same charge, and he was acquitted.
“Frustrated
to the point of fury,” as one account put it, Kennedy never stopped trying to influence the public against Hoffa, through reports of his committee, a steady stream of inflammatory press releases and the use of “friendly reporters to propagate” the image of Hoffa that he himself saw; one reporter was given a key to the committee offices so that he could obtain information about Hoffa while Kennedy could deny he had leaked it. And when, in 1961, Kennedy would become attorney general, and had at his command, as the journalist
Nick Thimmesch writes,
“the
full arsenal” of the government’s legal powers, he used them. Forming an elite “Get Hoffa” squad in the Justice Department, he launched an all-out campaign against the union leader, in which he also deployed the FBI and the
Internal Revenue Service. At one time, fourteen separate grand juries were probing the Teamsters. Protests over Kennedy’s tactics came not just from congressmen and senators of both parties who felt that Hoffa’s corruption and brutality did not justify the tactics that Kennedy was using against him, but from the
American Civil Liberties Union. Kennedy never changed them, and, finally, in 1964, he got a conviction. It had taken seven years—but he had gotten it.
“When
Bobby hates you, you stay hated,” Joe Kennedy told a friend. And he hated Lyndon Johnson. Years before, the two men would pass in the halls of the Senate Office Building.
“This
was the Leader, the
Leader,
” says a reporter who covered the Senate. “Everybody gave him deference. Bobby could barely look at him.”

As for Johnson, his feelings were in many respects the same. He took every opportunity to rub in his dislike of Robert Kennedy. Passing Bobby in the Senate corridor, he would greet him as
“Sonny
Boy.” The difference, at this stage in their careers, was their status. Johnson, whose eye missed nothing in the Senate world, was watching Bobby’s work with the
McClellan Committee. “He’s
a
snot-nose, but he’s bright,” he told
Bobby Baker. And once he gave him a compliment. When, after the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by launching
Sputnik
in October, 1957, proposals were being made for a Senate investigation, Johnson said that an investigation would be successful
“if
it had someone like young Kennedy handling it.” But these were the compliments of a senator about a staffer. In the Senate world, staffers were employees, and that was all they were—on a decidedly lower level than senators, and so they were regarded. If Johnson had some matter regarding the McClellan Committee to discuss, he discussed it with McClellan, Kennedy’s boss. He disliked Kennedy but didn’t take him seriously.

Yet Bobby Kennedy understood things about running for the presidency that Lyndon Johnson didn’t. He had learned some of them on the floor of the 1956 convention during the brief, hectic battle with
Estes Kefauver. When he had asked his senatorial boss and patron,
John McClellan, to give his brother
Arkansas’ vote, McClellan had told him,
“Just
get one thing through your head.… Senators have no votes; I’m lucky to be a delegate;
Orval Faubus is the Governor of Arkansas, and that’s it, and where he goes the Arkansas delegation goes.” Bobby
Kennedy had learned what Lyndon Johnson hadn’t: the insignificance of senators in the convention equation; Lyndon Johnson didn’t realize that but the young staffer did. And he had learned that he didn’t know who
did
have significance. At the 1956 convention,
“Bobby
and I ran around like a couple of nuts” trying to get votes, Ken O’Donnell was to recall. “A joke; we didn’t know two people in the place.” That was not a situation that Bobby let continue. Jack Kennedy had learned that it was the young people who mattered; Bobby Kennedy knew
which
young people mattered, and how to win to his brother’s cause the ones who mattered, how little courtesies could mean a lot.
“It
really struck me that it wasn’t the issues which matter. It was the friendships. So many people said to me … they were going to vote for
Estes Kefauver because he had sent them a card or gone to their home. I said right there we should … send Christmas cards and go to their homes.”

And he had learned other lessons after the convention, traveling on the campaign trail with Adlai Stevenson. Adlai’s people didn’t like him—Arthur Schlesinger, a Stevenson man then, remembered that Bobby,
“making
notes, always making notes … huddled by the window in the rear of the bus or plane, seemed an alien presence, sullen and rather ominous, saying little, looking grim and exuding an atmosphere of bleak disapproval”—but they had little choice other than to accept his presence; they needed the Catholic vote, and they felt the Kennedys could deliver it. If Schlesinger, by accident, got to know him better, and to like him (finding themselves seatmates,
“we
fell into reluctant conversation.… To my astonishment he was altogether pleasant, reasonable and amusing. We became friends at once”), for most of the rest of Stevenson’s entourage, getting to know him didn’t work the same way; by the end of the campaign he had thoroughly alienated them. Nonetheless, the notes he had taken became a case study of how to run (actually, since it was Stevenson he was observing, how not to run) a campaign. As one journalist put it, “after the Stevenson campaign … Bobby knew every single thing there was to know about a campaign. He just squeezed all that absolutely dry.” During 1957 and 1958 and part of 1959, he spent most of his time on his McClellan Committee job (and in 1959 he wrote a book,
The Enemy Within,
about his work with the committee), but, in September, 1959, the book completed, the committee post resigned, Bobby Kennedy headed out—full-time—on the campaign trail. Christmas cards were not the only message he was sending now. “Bobby Kennedy
holds
his head down and looks up through his eyebrows,” one newspaperman wrote. “Throw an arm around those shoulders and the big white teeth might snap at you.… The Kennedys are chill dishes indeed. But you feel they know what to do in a hot fight.” This impression was not exaggerated. Old-time politicians—men familiar with the harsher aspects of politics—would talk for years about Bobby Kennedy on the trail of the votes his brother needed.

Governor
Mike DiSalle controlled
Ohio’s delegates, and he wasn’t for Jack Kennedy; he had opposed him in 1956. But DiSalle wanted the honor of running
as Ohio’s favorite son candidate in the state’s primary. The Kennedys told him he could run unopposed if he publicly endorsed Jack Kennedy, and committed the delegation to him before the convention. If he didn’t, DiSalle was told, he would find himself in a fight in the primary against an old rival,
Ray Miller, Cleveland’s Democratic leader, who had been trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to win control of the state for himself—and Miller would be backed by the Kennedys. Aware that Kennedy backing meant not only Kennedy endorsements but Kennedy money, DiSalle, nonetheless, in a tense meeting with Jack Kennedy, remained evasive, thinking he was in a negotiation. His next meeting was with Jack’s brother. Connecticut’s boss
John Bailey, who accompanied Bobby,
“does
not shock easily,” O’Donnell was to recall, but “he told me later that he was startled by the going-over that Bobby had given DiSalle.” Precisely what he told him has not been recorded—did he warn DiSalle that the Kennedys would, by backing Miller, take the state away from him? DiSalle was to describe the session as
“stormy
” and Bobby Kennedy as
“fierce
”—but at the end the Kennedys had what they wanted. “What could I have done?” DiSalle was to tell friends. “Those Kennedys play real rough.” Out beyond Ohio, in those crucial western states, Bobby worked on the men who held the “pieces of power,” turning into votes the friendships his brother Ted had made with them.

Newspaper articles were beginning to appear about Bobby Kennedy now. In describing him, many of them used the same adjective: “ruthless.” Bobby hated that adjective. Men who dealt with him, however, did not feel it was inaccurate.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S SUPPORTERS SAW
how much his wavering was hurting his chances. Rayburn told Johnson’s aide
Booth Mooney that he had tried
“to
get Johnson to let it be known quietly, without any public announcement, that he would” eventually become a candidate; “That was the only way, the Speaker said, to prevent … men of power … from lining up behind some other candidate,” but Johnson still wouldn’t allow that. His insistence on secrecy hamstrung Jenkins’ organizing efforts. The Kennedy organization was
“extremely
effective,” George Reedy was to recall, “and most of us really wanted to get out and counter, and we thought it could be countered … despite the fact that he [Johnson] was a southerner. After all, Kennedy was … testing the old saw that a Catholic could not be President; and we saw no reason why we couldn’t test the old saw that a southerner couldn’t be President …, especially since this was a southerner who actually managed to pass the first civil rights bills through the Congress in eighty-two years.… We wanted to get out, and really fight at it. But he would not permit us to do it.”
“We’ve
had more trouble between us about this damn campaign than anything within my memory,” Rayburn told
Bobby Baker. “Lyndon’s using his friends to raise money and court delegates and he’s making them as well as himself look silly.”