G-Man, page 74
As a child of wealth, Bobby knew instinctively that power could be exercised not just by imposing rules, but by flouting them. This, at least, was the message delivered by Brumus, a lumbering, slobbering Newfoundland dog who had been a gift from the famed satirist James Thurber. Bobby made a habit of bringing the dog into the office, where Brumus proceeded to mark territory by urinating on the carpets. According to legend, Brumus once deposited a steaming pile near the entrance to Hoover’s reception room. Hoover assembled an executive conference to determine what to do about the unnerving situation in which the attorney general was arrogantly flouting the law that forbade animals in federal offices. In the end, though, Brumus remained a fixture of the Kennedy Justice Department, a symbol of all that separated it from Hoover’s Bureau.[5]
By early February, the tensions between the two sides had become obvious enough to attract the attention of reporters. At The New York Times, thirty-three-year-old Anthony Lewis composed a celebratory feature about the new youth-oriented culture at Justice, describing how even the “most experienced and hard-boiled” government lawyers now grudgingly conceded that Bobby had managed to shake things up. In Lewis’s telling, everything that enraged Hoover—the casual dress, the erratic hours, the disregard for hierarchy—became evidence of a transformative and positive change. Where Hoover saw chaos and impudence, Lewis saw a much-needed infusion of energy. More than a change of policy, he noted a “sharp change in the mood of the Justice Department,” with staid federal attorneys suddenly swept up in the urgency of the new political decade. “As much as one can judge so vague a thing,” Lewis concluded, “morale has risen.”[6]
And that may well have been true at Justice, where Bobby was free to appoint his own deputies and make his own decisions. At the Bureau, Hoover still dominated the institutional culture, and his agents quickly came to regard the attorney general with contempt. They privately referred to Bobby’s office as “the playpen” or “rumpus room.” Letters to Hoover derided the man himself as a “boy wonder.” By late February, the situation was dire enough that one FBI official felt compelled to intervene with Bobby’s press secretary in an effort to get the attorney general to tone things down. “I . . . suggested that the Attorney General’s predecessors who were somewhat older than the present Attorney General functioned in a very dignified and sedate manner,” the official wrote. He assured Hoover that even Bobby’s own staff recognized “that the Attorney General has a very unorthodox and direct approach to everything—including the Bureau.”
The memo suggested that these were perhaps just growing pains, that the whole matter might “ ‘simmer down’ as the newness of the situation was overcome.” Hoover was not convinced. By the end of February, his early gestures toward cooperation began to give way to a growing intransigence. “If we are asked a question then we may answer it,” he wrote in response to the official’s memo. Other than that, Bobby should expect no further favors from the Bureau.[7]
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If it had just been a clash of cultures, Hoover and his thirty-five-year-old boss might eventually have reached some sort of accord. But the conflict also concerned real power and institutional prerogatives, matters on which Hoover saw little room for compromise. On January 23, just three days into his term as attorney general, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bobby was planning a “multi-agency drive” against organized crime, an area where it was implied that federal authorities—including the FBI—had fallen behind in recent years. To coordinate the effort, he proposed the creation of a federal Crime Commission, independent of any existing agency. Hoover viewed both ideas as threats to FBI prerogatives: the former an insult to what the Bureau was already doing, the latter a restriction on what it might yet do. He set out to teach his boss something about how the politics of crime and law enforcement worked in Washington.[8]
Looking back on this conflict, Kennedy partisans would claim that the attorney general was simply trying to fill a void created by the FBI, that Hoover had ignored organized crime until a young, farsighted superior showed up one day to set him straight. That explanation is only partly true. As Hoover liked to point out, the FBI made its name fighting organized crime in the 1930s: What were the Dillinger and Barker and Karpis gangs, if not “organized” criminal enterprises? Since then, his men had helped to investigate high-profile gangsters ranging from Irish mob boss Roger Touhy to Las Vegas mastermind Bugsy Siegel. His Ten Most Wanted list, established in 1950, often featured fugitives connected to organized crime. But Hoover had argued throughout that organized crime, like most other forms of illegal activity, was best addressed at the local level—and in any case, did not yet fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI. His approach served the purpose of insulating FBI agents from the temptations of graft, vice, and corruption that Hoover feared might undermine their squeaky-clean image. It was also in keeping with Hoover’s long-standing visions of the FBI as a professional model for local police, but not necessarily as a substitute for their manpower.[9]
His greater misjudgment, repeated well into the mid-1950s, was that organized crime itself existed only on a local rather than national level—that there was no Mafia, or national crime-boss syndicate, coordinating activities from the top down. But that idea, too, had collapsed long before Bobby came to office. In November 1957, state police in Apalachin, New York, raided a party at which several dozen crime bosses had gathered for a national confab. At that point, Hoover had conceded the need for federal action and secretly launched his own organized-crime initiative. That effort had been underway for more than three years when Bobby announced that the federal government would finally do something—indeed, anything—about the national problem of the Mafia. Hoover was not inclined to forgive the insult.
Despite his self-righteousness, Hoover was partly to blame for the fact that nobody, including the attorney general, recognized what the FBI was up to. In the wake of Apalachin, one agent recalled, “the press came knocking at Mr. Hoover’s door” with excited questions: “Who are these guys? How are they affiliated with each other? What is the nature of their business? Why were they meeting? Does this prove there is in fact such a thing as the Mafia?” But Hoover, uncertain about his jurisdiction, unclear about the nature of the problem, refused to answer.
Unbeknownst to the public, he did take action, however. As early as 1953, Hoover had authorized the creation of a small “Top Hoodlum Program” designed to target the most powerful mob bosses in major American cities. In the wake of Apalachin, that investigation expanded quickly. Agents soon determined that “the Mafia does exist in the U.S.,” in the words of one summary memo. “It exists as a special criminal clique or caste engaged in organized crime activity,” with members drawn primarily from those of “Sicilian Italian origin and descent.” When it came to fleshing out the details, however, progress had been fitful and often unsatisfying, with agents circling around their well-protected targets, unable to discover anything meaningful or to persuade anyone on the inside to talk. In response, Hoover had stepped up the pressure, vowing to give the initiative his “utmost personal attention.” But he still hesitated to discuss the issue in public.
Of all the field offices, Chicago came in for the greatest pressure from Hoover. He still recalled how Al Capone had once ruled the city, and how Purvis and the Chicago office had been forced to take up arms during the 1930s. In the late 1950s, as agents began to chip away at Mafia networks, they found direct ties back to Capone and to the criminal machine he had helped to build three decades earlier. Among the “top hoodlums” identified by the Chicago field office was Murray Humphreys, a tall and genial Welsh-born fixer who traced his professional roots all the way back to the Capone gang. Two decades younger but no less formidable was Sam “Momo” Giancana, whose squat frame, Sicilian background, and snarling demeanor better fit popular ideas of who and what a Mafia boss was supposed to be. By the time Kennedy came to office, Hoover’s office had labeled both men “armed and dangerous.” They reserved even choicer epithets for Giancana. According to the Bureau, he possessed a “vicious temperament” and “psychopathic personality” that made him especially fearsome.
Figuring out how to approach such a man—how to investigate him without endangering agents’ lives or showing the Bureau’s hand—had proved to be no simple matter. Hoover had rejected the use of undercover agents for fear that their activities might “embarrass” the Bureau. That had left three options: physical surveillance, informant recruiting, and the use of bugs or wiretaps. The first two came with outsize challenges, given their targets’ sophisticated methods for evading law enforcement and their brutally enforced code of silence. So Hoover had turned to microphones and wiretaps. Bugging technology was still awkward at best, with all-too-large microphones that had to be hidden behind walls and then connected directly to a Bureau outpost through a tangle of physical wires. Under the circumstances, though, Hoover “figured they had no choice but to go into bugging whole hog,” in the words of a Justice Department official.
The strategy “worked beautifully,” in the official’s assessment, providing Hoover with first a trickle and then a flood of information about the nation’s most elusive and influential crime bosses. In July 1959, the Chicago office succeeded in planting a bug at a would-be tailor shop frequented by Humphreys. In truth, the building was a secret meeting place where he met with fellow “hoodlums” and spoke freely about their plans. FBI agents nicknamed their microphone “Little Al,” in honor of the late great Al Capone.
Hoover listened in via daily transcripts shipped to Washington. His demands required grueling work from agents and clerks; each day, they not only transcribed the conversations but also provided interpretive notes explaining to Hoover who was talking and what they might be talking about. Through the bugs, Hoover learned of the extensive gambling and prostitution networks maintained by Humphreys, along with his plans for retaliation against rivals and hand-in-glove relations with Giancana. The mobsters even spoke of something called the Commission, a group of major crime bosses who met regularly to divide up territory and negotiate disputes. The Chicago office worried about sending that news on to Hoover. “Hadn’t Mr. Hoover been saying for years that there was no national body of organized crime?” Chicago agent William Roemer asked. “Our evidence amounted to heresy!” But after demanding that the recording be sent to Washington for review, Hoover accepted the new reality.
The bugs were far from perfect instruments of law enforcement. Because they often entailed illegal trespass, their evidence could not be used in court. Those dubious origins also meant that—as with SOLO, Venona, and so many of his most cherished secret operations—Hoover continued to stay quiet about what the Bureau was doing. He did not share everything he knew with the Justice Department, for fear that leaks and sloppy handling of information might expose and destroy the entire operation. Even so, he did not take kindly to Bobby’s suggestions that the country suddenly needed an organized-crime initiative and a new federal Crime Commission to run it.[10]
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Given the Kennedy family’s history, organized crime was a strange choice of priorities in any case. Joe Kennedy’s investment portfolio was rumored to brush up against organized crime “at a hundred points,” in the words of writer Burton Hersh. So were his social habits, which included countless hours gambling and womanizing in Las Vegas, the country’s improbable new playground for organized crime. John Kennedy inherited some of his father’s preferences and questionable contacts, despite his family-man image. Bobby had carved out a more distinctive profile, less the bon vivant than the flashing, hot-tempered enforcer of his own political vision. As counsel for the McClellan Committee, he had made his name as the great Washington scourge of “labor racketeering,” the ill-defined realm where union corruption met with organized-crime activity. To the befuddlement of many Democratic allies, his investigations took him deep into the bowels of industrial unions and urban political machines, two key party constituencies. Now they also put him up against Hoover, whose help had been “absolutely invaluable,” as he acknowledged in The Enemy Within, his fast-paced 1960 book on the committee’s activities.[11]
Hoover responded not by openly defying his boss’s orders (he rarely did that) but by setting out his own priorities and following them through. If an organized-crime push was coming, he wanted to be out in front, prepared to show that the FBI could and would do what was needed. In Chicago, the epicenter of the Bureau’s organized-crime effort, he increased the main squad from five men to seventy. He also encouraged agents to show off just how much the Bureau had already done. In February, the Justice Department asked for a “full-scale investigation” of Humphreys, the very man the FBI had been bugging for well over a year. At that point, Hoover ordered the Chicago office to share its intelligence, hoping to show that the FBI had not, in fact, been lying down on the job. The one exception involved direct knowledge of the FBI’s bugs, most of them top secret and installed illegally. There, he encouraged agents to use “suitable phraseology” to obscure what was happening, at least until they could sort out whom to trust within the Kennedy Justice Department.
In that sense Hoover sought to produce what Bobby most wanted: evidence that could be used in federal prosecution. During the late 1950s, the Top Hoodlums program had operated mainly as a counterintelligence effort, in which the Bureau gathered information without regard for any potential of courtroom prosecution. “Our goal was to learn the innermost secrets of the mob and then use that information in an attempt to thwart its operations,” Roemer explained, not to face down “the mob” before a judge or jury. Now Hoover ordered the field offices to shift directions and to focus on investigations likely to bring “top hoodlums you currently have under investigation to trial in the immediate future.” He attached “extreme importance” to achieving “a successful prosecutive conclusion”—and thus to pleasing the new attorney general.[12]
If this looked like cooperation, though, it was cooperation with limits. And it was Hoover, not Bobby, who defined what the limits would be. From Bobby’s first days in office, Hoover concluded that he could live with a stepped-up organized-crime effort, essentially more of what the Bureau was already doing. What he could not abide was the other half of Bobby’s proposal: the formation of a Crime Commission with the power to override FBI authority and to set the federal law enforcement agenda. Just days after Kennedy’s inauguration, the United Press wire service ran an article outlining Hoover’s view that “the daily exchange of information” between FBI agents and local law enforcement still offered the country’s most effective crime-fighting model. The article pointed out that “FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover has cited this type of cooperation as an argument against establishment of a federal crime commission, favored by some officials.”[13]
Within a few weeks, the dispute was serious enough to inspire speculation about whether the president and his brother would tolerate such open defiance, even from a legend such as Hoover. On February 23, Hoover made his way to the White House for a briefing, his first of the new presidential administration. Aware of growing tensions, the media speculated that the president had summoned Hoover in order to fire him. Hoover put out a different version of events. “He is not going to resign and he is not going to be asked to resign,” the sympathetic columnist Paul Harvey announced on March 8, relying on FBI tips. The real purpose of the meeting, Harvey explained, was to discuss how to reconcile Bobby’s desire for a Crime Commission with Hoover’s opposition to it.[14]
Whatever was said at the meeting, in the following weeks Bobby’s enthusiasm for the commission dropped markedly, while his public praise of Hoover notably increased. His final acquiescence came on April 6, during his inaugural press conference as attorney general. His status as the president’s dashing younger brother drew a crowd, with 174 reporters, along with two radio teams, crammed into his football field of an office. Bobby took the opportunity to outline a sweeping vision for fighting organized crime, just as he had suggested from the moment of his appointment. This time, however, there was no mention of a Crime Commission. Instead, he called for eight new laws that would give the FBI greater power and discretion to combat organized crime.[15]
For anyone paying close attention, the reversal was astonishing. Bobby had come into office calling for an independent commission, outside Bureau control, to take the reins of federal law enforcement. Now he was championing legislation that would serve to enhance Hoover’s power. “It is my firm belief that new laws are needed to give the FBI increased jurisdiction to assist local authorities in the common battle against the rackets,” Bobby announced, without acknowledging any change of heart whatsoever.[16]
Reporters felt Bobby did surprisingly well for a greenhorn, combining an ambitious agenda with a touch of the Kennedy charm. Behind the scenes, though, it was Hoover who carried the day. Less than three months into the new administration, he proved that he was still a man to be reckoned with, and sent the new attorney general down to his first public defeat.[17]
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A second defeat came just days later—and it, too, involved organized crime, though not in a way that either Hoover or Bobby quite anticipated. On April 17, after months of planning, the CIA dispatched fourteen hundred half-trained Cuban exiles onto the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, where the socialist turned communist Fidel Castro had led a successful revolution two years earlier. Castro’s troops made quick work of the invading force. As things fell apart, President Kennedy balked at sending air cover because the entire operation was supposed to come off without any hint of American involvement. The attempt at secrecy failed. On April 20, three days after the invasion, he tacitly acknowledged American backing, a dispiriting and embarrassing loss in “the eternal struggle of liberty against tyranny.”[18]
