Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [99]
Over the period from ’57 to ’59, Kennedy also had to build bridges with another key power in the Democratic Party: labor. Kennedy had started his Capitol Hill career on the Education and Labor Committee and made a name for himself by being tough on suspected Communist sympathizers among the union leaders. Now Bobby and he were targeting the corrupt ones.
The Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, to be famously known as the “Senate Rackets Committee,” was formed in January 1957. Senator John McClellan initiated the temporary panel to investigate the rivalry between Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa for the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Both men were accused of bribery and, in Hoffa’s case, fraud. McClellan brought Bobby Kennedy with him from the Government Operations Committee. He named him chief counsel and investigator. Bobby, in turn, named Ken O’Donnell, his administrative assistant, as his top aide.
Jack worried what this would do to him politically. Bobby’s new job now associated his brother with the Republicans and pro-management Democrats who dominated the committee. Any attacks on organized labor by Bobby Kennedy, a bulldog in pursuit of his goals, would be seen by labor and its political friends as an attack by Jack.
Bobby understood this. “If the investigation flops . . . it will hurt Jack in 1958 and in 1960, too. . . . A lot of people think he’s the Kennedy running the investigation, not me. As far as the public is concerned, one Kennedy is the same as another Kennedy.”
That mention of 1958 alluded to Jack’s reelection campaign. Seeing his weak opposition, Senator Kennedy begged Republican pals back home in the Commonwealth to put up a stronger candidate so he could at least prove something. What he ended up demonstrating was his overwhelming support among Massachusetts voters as he defeated the martyred Vincent J. Celeste, representing the Republicans, 1,362,926 to 488,318. The result of this rout was that Joe Kennedy at last saw great worth in Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien. Not only had they delivered the goods; they’d done so without taking up much of Jack’s precious time. The efficiency of their performance had the effect of ensuring less interference from Joe, who now trusted the pair of them, in the big contest to come.
The Rackets Committee managed to strip Dave Beck of his title as president of the Teamsters Union and also to expose, by use of wiretaps, a plot set up by Hoffa and organized crime figures to establish phony locals to vote him in as president. This was new ground Bobby Kennedy was plowing. Over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Director J. Edgar Hoover still refused even to recognize the existence of the Mafia.
That November a meeting of organized crime figures in Apalachin, New York, was discovered by local police. But when Bobby Kennedy asked the FBI for records on the bosses, he discovered it had none. So he opened up his own hearings. The star witness was Salvatore “Sam” Giancana, heir to Al Capone. Kennedy interrogated him about his operations, which included hanging his victims on meat hooks and stuffing them into trunks of cars.
Robert Kennedy:
Would you tell us anything about any of your operations, or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question?
Sam Giancana:
I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer may tend to incriminate me.
Kennedy:
I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.
Bobby Kennedy was both fearless and relentless. On the wall of his office, buried in the basement of the Senate Office Building, was a quotation from Winston Churchill: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall never surrender.” It didn’t win him any friends in the labor world, or in those political fiefdoms where union leaders freely