Joseph Kennedy, with his longstanding ties to organized crime, thought all this madness. He tried to smooth things over during the run-up to the 1960 election, but Robert was beyond persuasion. As Attorney General, his fight against organized crime was to be more than a just cause, almost an obsession.
Robert hurtled into the Justice Department determined to bring real power to bear against the mob for the first time. Edgar greeted him, even before he had formally taken office, with an exhortation to fight Communism. ‘The Communist Party U.S.A.,’ said his memorandum, ‘presents a greater menace to the internal security of our Nation than it ever has.’ Kennedy disagreed. ‘It is such nonsense,’ he said that year, ‘to have to waste time prosecuting the Communist Party. It couldn’t be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides, its membership consists largely of FBI agents.’
Robert already knew Edgar was delinquent on organized crime. While in the Senate he had asked to see files on the mobsters arrested at Apalachin and had found the response pathetic. ‘The FBI,’ he recalled, ‘didn’t know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States. That was rather a shock to me … I sent the same request to the Bureau of Narcotics and they had something on every one of them.’
While Robert was on the road probing organized crime for the Senate, agents in far-flung FBI offices had received specific orders not to help him at all. The orders came directly from Edgar.
Before taking office, Robert had proposed a national crime commission, an intelligence clearing house to coordinate the work of the various agencies. Edgar had publicly shot down the notion, claiming such a federal authority would be ‘dangerous to our democratic ideals.’ He dismissed as pests those who suggested it. For him they were just that, for they demanded a coordinated fight against the national crime syndicate, something Edgar claimed did not even exist.
A collision was inevitable. Luther Huston, an aide to the outgoing Attorney General, went to see Edgar a few days after the inauguration. ‘I had to wait,’ he recalled, ‘because the new Attorney General was there. He hadn’t called or made an appointment. He had just barged in. You don’t do that with Mr Hoover. Then my turn came and I’ll tell you – the maddest man I ever talked to was J. Edgar Hoover. He was steaming. If I could have printed what he said, I’d have had a scoop. Apparently Kennedy wanted to set up some kind of supplementary or overlapping group to take over some of the investigative work the FBI had been doing. My surmise is that Mr Hoover told Bobby, “If you’re going to do that, I can retire tomorrow. My pension is waiting.”’
News of the rift quickly leaked to the press. In Florida, after a round of golf with Tony Curtis, Joseph Kennedy tried to cover up. ‘I don’t know where those ridiculous rumors start,’ he told a reporter. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. Both Jack and Bob admire Hoover. They feel they’re lucky to have him as head of the FBI. Hoover is a wonderful, dedicated man – and don’t think Jack and Bob don’t realize it.’
Behind the scenes, the father begged his sons to humor Edgar. A meeting at the White House in February 1961, one of only six occasions on which John Kennedy agreed to see Edgar during the presidency, was probably to arrange a truce. There was no stopping Robert, however, on organized crime. He got around Edgar’s rejection of a crime commission by quadrupling the staff and budget of Justice’s Organized Crime Section, and rammed expansion through whether Edgar liked it or not.
In the key target areas, New York and Chicago, the FBI resumed the drive Edgar had allowed to slacken once the fuss over Apalachin had died down. The New York office, where less than a dozen agents were working organized crime when Robert took office, would end up with 115 men assigned to the task. In Chicago, the team expanded from six agents to about eighty.
To demolish Edgar’s old ‘no jurisdiction’ excuse, Robert rushed through new laws. In 1960 a mere nineteen members of organized crime had been indicted. In the first year of the Kennedy presidency, 121 were indicted and 96 convicted.
FBI agents assigned to organized crime now came into their own. They liked Robert Kennedy and respected the way he came in person to consult them in the field. ‘Bobby got the fight going again,’ recalled Chicago’s Bill Roemer. ‘He was a great and most capable guy.’
‘Kennedy and his people came in full of piss and vinegar,’ said Neil Welch. ‘They were down at the office on Saturdays, sending messages out all over the place. Kennedy was just so young and enthusiastic. We thought it was delightful. He just ran roughshod all over the mechanisms that had kept all the other Attorneys General at bay. It annoyed the hell out of Hoover. He couldn’t control it.’
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Edgar told Agent in Charge Kenneth Whittaker. ‘Kennedy’s immature, impetuous. He’ll destroy in five minutes the respect the FBI has built up over the years.’ ‘When Kennedy was after Hoffa,’ Whittaker recalled, ‘and going around the field divisions telling Agents in Charge what to do, the word came down that, hey, he might be the Attorney General, but we weren’t to do anything without clearance from Bureau headquarters.’
For all Edgar’s obstruction, Robert’s criminal targets were rapidly becoming enraged. Carlos Marcello and Sam Giancana became prime targets, mercilessly harassed by the agency that had left them at peace for so long.
The Kennedy family’s different attitudes to organized crime were at their most extreme, and most potentially dangerous, when it came to Giancana. As the man who had reportedly helped John win the election with illegal votebuying, Giancana had hoped for an easy ride from the Kennedy Justice Department. What he got was a tough, ceaseless onslaught and, as his half brother Chuck put it in 1992, the mobster felt ‘double-crossed.’ ‘Here I am helping the government,’ Giancana’s henchman Roselli was overheard saying on a wiretap, ‘and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.’
On the evening of July 12, 1961, Giancana walked into a waiting room at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, on a routine stopover to New York, accompanied by his mistress Phyllis McGuire. Waiting for him were a phalanx of FBI agents, including Bill Roemer, one of the mobster’s most dogged pursuers. Giancana lost his temper, and revealingly so.
He knew, he told the agents, that everything he said would get back to J. Edgar Hoover. Then he burst out, ‘Fuck J. Edgar Hoover! Fuck your super boss, and your super super boss! You know who I mean; I mean the Kennedys!’ Giancana piled abuse on both brothers, then snarled, ‘Listen, Roemer, I know all about the Kennedys, and Phyllis knows more about the Kennedys, and one of these days we’re going to tell all. Fuck you! One of these days it’ll come out …’
At the time, Roemer had no idea what Giancana meant. Today the ‘all’ is less mysterious. There was the Kennedy vote-buying, the plotting against Castro – and of course the womanizing. The mobster was in regular contact with Judith Campbell, the lover the President used as gobetween. He was also close to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford and would one day be overheard reminiscing with him about ‘the girls they used to produce for the Kennedys.’ The inference was that Robert, too, was not innocent of womanizing.
In early September 1961, according to former FBI Supervisor William Kane, an informant told the Bureau Robert Kennedy had recently been seen ‘out in the desert near Las Vegas with not one but two girls, on a blanket. Somebody in organized crime had taken telephoto pictures … and the word we got from our informants was that they were going to use it to blackmail the Attorney General. This was confirmed several times over from several different sources.’
Kane said Edgar digested this, then sent Courtney Evans, his liaison with the Justice Department, to warn Robert Kennedy. Kennedy listened without comment. Then he simply asked what Evans was doing for the holiday – it was Labor Day weekend – and ended the meeting.
Former Assistant Director Evans, though famously discreet, agreed the exchange ‘probably did happen as described. There were many times I had to go in with that sort of information. Mr Hoover would give instructions and I would carry them out. There was,
I know, an effort to bring pressure on the presidency by organized crime.’
It is unlikely that at this stage, even with his resources, Edgar fully comprehended the complexities of the Kennedy relationship with organized crime. He simply did what he knew best – collected dirt, let the brothers know he had it and obstructed Robert Kennedy in ways that amounted to insubordination.
A Justice Department official, dispatched to the FBI’s Chicago office to improve liaison, arrived to find the Agent in Charge had left town. Knowing Kennedy’s man was on the way, Edgar had deliberately ordered him to Des Moines, Iowa. At headquarters he deliberately snubbed Kennedy himself. ‘The entire time Bob was Attorney General,’ said Joe Dolan, ‘he had a Tuesday and Thursday lunch in his office with the Assistant Attorneys, myself and others invited, including Hoover. Hoover came to a couple of the lunches the first month, and after that he was a no-show.’
If Robert visited a field office, Edgar stayed away. When he did travel himself, there was a galling reminder that things had changed. Once there had been a picture of Edgar on the wall of every office, a lone Big Brother presence. Now it was flanked by one of President Kennedy, distributed across the country on the instructions of his brother.
This was a war of attrition. Yet Edgar and the brothers Kennedy continued to act out, as one writer put it, ‘an Oriental pageant of formal respect.’ Perhaps the Kennedys, used to years of inane courtesies between Edgar and their father, half-hoped to coexist with Edgar by stroking his ego, remembering his anniversaries and praising him in public. They would humor the old man, even if they thought him half-crazy. Edgar, an old hand at the game, sent this handwritten note to Robert on June 9, 1961:
Dear Bob,
… Your confidence and support mean a great deal to me, and I sincerely trust I shall always merit them.
Sincerely,
Edgar
A note from the President, December 5, 1961, when Edgar received his latest award:
Dear Mr Hoover,
The Mutual of Omaha Criss Award is further proof of the high esteem in which all America holds your record of untiring effort in the field of federal law enforcement … I am proud to add my congratulations to you and to express again my gratitude for your outstanding contributions to the nation.
Sincerely,
John F. Kennedy
Edgar, who replied that he was ‘touched,’ had just received a tip-off that the President was planning to fire him. Agents were deployed in an intense investigation, as assiduous and as painstaking as that into any crime. Yet a few days later ‘Edgar’ was thanking ‘Bob’ for the invitation to his Christmas party, and making his excuses.
The Kennedys had a less than festive Christmas in 1961. On December 19, on the golf course at Palm Beach, the President’s father suffered a debilitating stroke. His right side and face were paralyzed, and though he lived on for eight years he would never speak intelligibly again. A few months earlier, when the press had carried stories of quarreling between John and Robert and Edgar, Joseph had been at hand to calm things down. From now on, though Edgar was to visit him during his recuperation, his role as peacemaker was over.
Nor would Joseph be there, henceforth, to intervene in his sons’ tangled relations with the Mafia. From now on, the boys were on their own.
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‘Aside from the moral issues, the morass of potential blackmail in which the Attorney General found himself must have appalled him … How could the CIA and John Kennedy have been so stupid?… The potential for blackmail extended beyond Giancana. J. Edgar Hoover would also be able to hold these stories over John and Robert Kennedy as long as they lived.’
Harris Wofford, former Kennedy aide, 1980
On January 6, 1962, the columnist Drew Pearson made a daring prediction: ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ he said, ‘doesn’t like taking a back seat, as he calls it, to a young kid like Bobby … and he’ll be eased out if there is not too much of a furor.’
It was only a brief comment in a radio broadcast, but what Pearson said made ripples in Washington. Three days later, in a note to his brother, Robert Kennedy begged the President to keep a favorable reference to the FBI in his State of the Union address. ‘It is only one sentence,’ he told the President, ‘and it would make a big difference for us. I hope you will leave it as it is.’
On January 11, before the assembled throng of senators and congressmen, John Kennedy spoke of Vietnam, of civil rights and of taxes. Few could have noticed or cared as he rattled off a line praising the FBI – for its ‘coordinated and hard-hitting effort.’ This was a sweetener for Edgar, but the time for meaningful sweeteners was past.
A month earlier, Edgar’s spies had warned him not only that the Kennedys were planning to fire him, but that a specific candidate, State Department Security Director William Boswell, was in line for his job. And soon, having not deigned to see Edgar for the past year, Kennedy sent word that he ‘desired to speak with Mr Hoover.’
Edgar stepped out of his limousine at the northwest gate of the White House at one o’clock on March 22. He was ushered into the Oval Office, and then he and the President took the elevator to the dining room in the Executive Mansion. The only other person present was Kenneth O’Donnell.
The meeting was a long one. Four hours later, as Edgar was leaving, Kennedy aides Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger were on the way in. Their names were anathema to Washington conservatives, and the President refrained from introducing them. As he explained to them a few moments later, he ‘did not want to upset Mr Hoover too much.’
It may never be known whether or not Kennedy tried to fire Edgar that day. The Kennedy Library says it has no record of what was said at the lunch. Nor does the FBI – even though Edgar normally wrote a memo following a visit to the White House. We do know the meeting went badly. Kenneth O’Donnell, interviewed years later, would say only that the President eventually lost patience. ‘Get rid of that bastard,’ he hissed to his aide. ‘He’s the biggest bore.’
Since the mid-seventies, when a Senate inquiry probed the nation’s darker intelligence secrets, the encounter has had a special significance. Edgar sat down with the President armed with dirt more explosive than even he was used to – much of it, ironically, obtained thanks to Robert Kennedy’s pursuit of Mafia boss Sam Giancana.
Edgar had learned, even before Eisenhower left office, that there was a plot to kill Fidel Castro and that Giancana was somehow involved. Early in the Kennedy presidency he discovered Giancana was working with the CIA; and by March 1962 he knew that Judith Campbell, who was in touch with Giancana and Johnny Roselli, was one of the President’s lovers. While his attention was drawn to this by his agents, Edgar may even have learned something of it directly from Roselli, who is said to have socialized with him at La Jolla.
Edgar knew, too, of Giancana’s threat to ‘tell all’ about the Kennedys and, from a recent wiretap, that Giancana and Roselli had discussed obtaining a ‘really small’ receiver for bugging conversations. In that same conversation they had spoken of ‘Bobby’ and when he would next be in Washington.
The Director of the FBI, then, had evidence that the President of the United States was intimate with a young woman who was close to a Mafia boss who was involved with the CIA in a plot to assassinate a foreign leader – a plot that Edgar had every reason to suspect the President had authorized. And that, all the while, the FBI was ruthlessly pursuing that same Mafia boss on the orders of the President’s younger brother.
Any Director of the FBI would have been justified in bringing such a scenario to the President’s attention. With his malice toward the brothers and with the threat of dismissal hanging over him, Edgar must have relished doing so.
Judith Campbell, now known by her married name, Exner, has revealed that Edgar indeed brought her name up that day. ‘Jack called me that afternoon,’ she said. ‘He told me to go to my mother’s house and call him from there. When I did, he said the phone in my apartment wasn’t safe. He was furious. You co
uld feel his anger. He said that, at their meeting, Hoover had more or less tried to intimidate him with the information he had. He’d made it clear that he knew about my relationship with Jack, even that I’d been to the White House, that I was a friend of Sam and Johnny Roselli, and that Jack knew Sam, too. Jack knew exactly what Hoover was doing. Knowing that Jack wanted him out of office, he was in a way ensuring his job – by letting Jack know he had this leverage over him.’
According to Campbell, there was something even more damaging to hide. Early in the presidency, Kennedy had repeated his folly of the election period – by meeting again with Giancana. The new contacts, Campbell said the President told her, ‘had to do with the elimination of Fidel Castro.’ Kennedy also used Campbell as a courier, on some twenty occasions, to carry sealed envelopes to Giancana.
Campbell’s account cannot be dismissed. It is specific in dates and details and is supported by travel documents, her annotated appointment book and official logs recording three of her visits to the White House. Giancana’s brother Chuck has also spoken of contacts between the Mafia boss and Kennedy during the presidency and of Campbell’s delivering envelopes.
Most historians now accept that the Kennedy brothers were involved in the Castro plots. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, we know, they no longer trusted the CIA. It is therefore conceivable that, given his existing relationship with Giancana, the President may have chosen to deal directly with the mobster about Castro murder plans. To have done so would have been foolhardy, but it would fit with Kennedy’s love of intrigue.
According to Campbell, the President said the envelopes he sent to Giancana contained ‘intelligence material’ to do with the plots. The envelopes were sealed, however, and she never saw the contents for herself.1 Whatever they contained, John Kennedy was playing a horrendously dangerous game. Giancana had hoped that his help – first in getting the President elected and then with the Castro operation – would be rewarded with federal leniency. Yet Robert Kennedy’s onslaught on organized crime not only included Giancana among its targets; he was singled out for especially intensive harassment.