Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [153]
‘I think he’s dangerous,’ Robert Kennedy would say of Edgar after his brother was dead. ‘But it was a danger we could control, that we were on top of, that we could deal with. There wasn’t anything that he could do.’
Robert knew this was far from the truth, that Edgar had been a constant maddening irritant to the Kennedy presidency. And, by the time John Kennedy flew to Dallas, dealing with the Director of the FBI had become a nightmare.
26
‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’
Oscar Wilde
Soon after the inauguration, workers at the Justice Department received strange orders. They were to retrieve a neglected piece of statuary from storage, dust it off and display it prominently in the Department hallway at Tenth Street and Pennsylvania. Then orders came to remove it – only to be followed by a fresh command to put it back again. And so on, several times.
The statue was of Stanley Finch, the forgotten first-ever head of the Bureau, one of three who had preceded Edgar as Director. Most people were by now under the impression that Edgar was the Director, the only one there ever had been. The resurrection of Finch’s bust was a reminder that there had been life before Edgar and, by implication, there would be life afterward. The orders to take it away, went the whisper, came from Edgar. The orders to put it back came from Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
The President’s brother had not wanted to run the Justice Department – he rightly anticipated protests about nepotism, lack of experience and youth. Still only thirty-five, he had never even practiced law. His one sure qualification was his loyalty to John Kennedy, in times that promised to be stormy.
‘I need you,’ the new president had told Robert over bacon and eggs a month after the election. In the end it was as simple as that. Robert Kennedy became the youngest Attorney General in 150 years.
Robert had consulted Edgar, among others, before bowing to his brother’s will. And Edgar had told him, in an opaque sort of way, to take the job. When he did, Edgar wrote an obsequious note to say he was ‘very happy’ and praised him in the press. Yet each man, behind the other’s back, knew this was hypocrisy. ‘I didn’t like to tell him that,’ Edgar muttered to William Sullivan, ‘but what could I say?’ ‘He spoke of it,’ said Cartha DeLoach, ‘as the worst damn advice he ever gave in his life.’
John Kennedy’s right-hand man, Kenneth O’Donnell, recalled talking with Robert when he emerged from seeing Edgar. ‘I said, “Bobby, just tell me exactly what he said,” and he told me Hoover advised him to take it. But if I listened to the words carefully, [Edgar] was hoping he wouldn’t … I knew Hoover wouldn’t want him. He doesn’t want the Attorney General to be more important than him … He couldn’t want Bobby to have it, he couldn’t want that.’
The official portrait of Robert Kennedy, hanging today in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, shows a slim young man with rumpled hair, in leather jacket and T-shirt. The pictures of sixty-three of his predecessors are all, by contrast, sober-faced, predictable fellows in formal dress. Edgar wore the same drab uniform, kowtowed to the same conventions. More important, previous Attorneys General had been his superiors only in theory. For nearly thirty years, since the Roosevelt days, he had answered only to the President. With the arrival of Robert Kennedy, all that changed.
Kennedy burst into the Justice Department determined to effect change. Not satisfied with the office usually used by Attorneys General, he took over the great wood-paneled chamber normally used for conferences. Not content with the government furniture, he replaced it with large sofas, a sailfish over the mantel, and a