Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [154]
When Kennedy wore a tie, it was Ivy League, and it often hung cheerfully askew. His blue button-down shirt gaped open at the neck, and the Attorney General’s legs spent half the day on the vast desk, not under it.
An Attorney General in shirtsleeves, Edgar told a colleague, looked ‘ridiculous.’ He and Clyde looked on in confusion, during a visit to Kennedy’s office, as the younger man sat throwing darts at a target on the wall. Their amazement turned to outrage when some of the darts missed altogether, piercing the ‘government property’ paneling.
Soon aides were reporting the discovery of beer cans on the ground outside, supposedly tossed from the Attorney General’s window. One wintry day, Edgar told friends, Kennedy had water pumped into the Department courtyard so his children could skate.
Years later, after Robert had been killed, Edgar would refer to him derisively as the ‘Messiah of the generation gap.’ Edgar had spent nearly forty years drilling conformity into his men and was rarely seen out of a tie, even on vacation. The Kennedy style, on what he viewed as his personal territory, offended him deeply.
Sometimes the affront was personal. Edgar was not amused, agents recall, when Kennedy took him to lunch at a People’s drugstore. Even the Labrador made its contribution to Edgar’s discomfiture – on the floor outside his office. Kennedy had a tendency to appear without notice in the Director’s office, something no one in government had ever presumed to do. One afternoon he pushed past a horrified Miss Gandy to find the Director taking a nap.
Kennedy insisted on instant communication with Edgar and began by ordering the installation of a buzzer with which to summon the Director at will. Edgar had it removed, only to be confronted by telephone engineers putting in a hot line. The first time Kennedy used it, recalled former Assistant Director Mark Felt, ‘Hoover’s secretary answered. “When I pick up this phone,” Kennedy snapped impatiently, “there’s only one man I want to talk to. Get this phone on the Director’s desk immediately.”’
There was such a phone, and Edgar never came to terms with it. He would sometimes pick it up only to hear one of Kennedy’s children giggling on the other end. ‘Shall I get Hoover over here?’ former Justice Department attorney William Hundley recalled Kennedy saying. ‘And he would hit the goddamn button, and the Old Man would come in all red-faced. They’d start fighting with each other right there in front of me. No other Attorney General had ever done that to Hoover. I couldn’t believe it.’
In a stroke, Robert Kennedy had broken the mold that Edgar had fashioned over decades. He was asserting the authority of the Attorney General, which Edgar had eroded, and he was severing Edgar’s most treasured link of all, his one-to-one contact with the President himself. John Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, cannot recall a single phone call between the President and Edgar during the entire administration.
From the White House, Kenneth O’Donnell made it clear this was deliberate policy. If Edgar tried to call the President, he would be blocked by either Evelyn Lincoln or O’Donnell himself. ‘It gets back to the crux … Bobby is the boss, and for the first time in Hoover’s life he can’t go over the boss’s head.’
Having a boss at all was something that, at sixty-six, Edgar could never have borne easily; having Robert Kennedy as his boss was unthinkable. It was not just that Kennedy’s style was the antithesis of everything Edgar stood for. He had a driven quality, an absolute insistence on getting his own way that – when it did not inspire love and loyalty – triggered bitter enmity. It certainly triggered Edgar’s.
In the company of ‘his’ people, Edgar pulled no punches. He told Roy Cohn the younger Kennedy was an ‘arrogant whippersnapper.’ He spoke of him to Richard