Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [156]
The banter stopped, however, when the extent of Edgar’s snooping dawned on John Kennedy. ‘He was shocked at the welter of scandal,’ learned Hugh Sidey, then as now a Time correspondent in Washington. ‘He gasped and told his aides that he would never again read another such dossier.’ ‘I don’t want any part of that stuff,’ the President told Kenneth O’Donnell. ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I’d like to see the report they’ve got on me …’
As an agent at headquarters, Gordon Liddy saw files on Kennedy. From mid-1961, while on a headquarters assignment that included research on politicians, he perused numerous 5" x 7" cards packed with file references to the President’s past and present. ‘There was a lot,’ he recalled. ‘It grew while I was there, and kept growing.’
Edgar’s knowledge of the President’s bedroom secrets, exposure of which could most certainly destroy him, remained a constant threat. With just a sliver of an electoral majority, and with reelection in 1964 far from certain, the Kennedys could not afford to alienate the multitude of voters for whom Edgar represented order, the public good and the American Way. In the short term, at any rate, they were saddled with him.
When Robert Kennedy sent U.S. marshals to Alabama to protect the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists demanding the right to use public transport, he confronted more problems with the FBI. As white bigots attacked blacks in the state, Kennedy was told, Edgar’s agents just took notes and did nothing. FBI headquarters, which received specific warnings of collusion between the Ku Klux Klan and local police, failed to alert the Justice Department. Edgar was reluctant to do anything to alienate a vital constituency, the southern conservatives who supported him in Congress. And that put him on the side of the racists.
Edgar’s immediate fight over racism, however, was sparked by Robert Kennedy’s pressure on him to hire black agents. At first, rather than admit the only such ‘agents’ were his own black servants, he simply took no notice. Later, at Kennedy’s insistence, a few blacks were hired.1 For Robert Kennedy, though, civil rights took second place to a crusade that rankled even more with Edgar – the pursuit of organized crime.
On February 4, 1961, not two weeks into the presidency, Drew Pearson used his regular radio broadcast to report the first major battle in the younger Kennedy’s war with Edgar. ‘The new Attorney General,’ Pearson said, ‘wants to go all out against the underworld. To do so, Bobby Kennedy proposes a crack squad of racket busters, but J. Edgar Hoover objects. Hoover claims that a special crime bureau reflects on the FBI, and he is opposing his new boss.’
Both Kennedy brothers had served on the Senate Rackets Committee, John as Senator and Robert as Chief Counsel. John, though, admitted that he had done so only because his brother asked him to. His priorities were those of a politician, Robert’s those of a zealot.
It was Robert, in his first Senate probe, who had exposed the extent to which organized labor was intertwined with organized crime. He had toppled Teamsters leader Dave Beck and sent him to jail. Then, in a second probe, he had struggled to nail Beck’s corrupt successor, Jimmy Hoffa, an intensely personal feud that brought bitter confrontations with Hoffa and mafiosi like Giancana – live on national television.
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