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Robert hurtled into the Justice Department determined to bring real power to bear against the mob for the first time. Edgar greeted him, even before he had formally taken office, with an exhortation to fight Communism. ‘The Communist Party U.S.A.,’ said his memorandum, ‘presents a greater menace to the internal security of our Nation than it ever has.’ Kennedy disagreed. ‘It is such nonsense,’ he said that year, ‘to have to waste time prosecuting the Communist Party. It couldn’t be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides, its membership consists largely of FBI agents.’

Robert already knew Edgar was delinquent on organized crime. While in the Senate he had asked to see files on the mobsters arrested at Apalachin and had found the response pathetic. ‘The FBI,’ he recalled, ‘didn’t know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States. That was rather a shock to me … I sent the same request to the Bureau of Narcotics and they had something on every one of them.’

While Robert was on the road probing organized crime for the Senate, agents in far-flung FBI offices had received specific orders not to help him at all. The orders came directly from Edgar.

Before taking office, Robert had proposed a national crime commission, an intelligence clearing house to coordinate the work of the various agencies. Edgar had publicly shot down the notion, claiming such a federal authority would be ‘dangerous to our democratic ideals.’ He dismissed as pests those who suggested it. For him they were just that, for they demanded a coordinated fight against the national crime syndicate, something Edgar claimed did not even exist.

A collision was inevitable. Luther Huston, an aide to the outgoing Attorney General, went to see Edgar a few days after the inauguration. ‘I had to wait,’ he recalled, ‘because the new Attorney General was there. He hadn’t called or made an appointment. He had just barged in. You don’t do that with Mr Hoover. Then my turn came and I’ll tell you – the maddest man I ever talked to was J. Edgar Hoover. He was steaming. If I could have printed what he said, I’d have had a scoop. Apparently Kennedy wanted to set up some kind of supplementary or overlapping group to take over some of the investigative work the FBI had been doing. My surmise is that Mr Hoover told Bobby, “If you’re going to do that, I can retire tomorrow. My pension is waiting.”’

News of the rift quickly leaked to the press. In Florida, after a round of golf with Tony Curtis, Joseph Kennedy tried to cover up. ‘I don’t know where those ridiculous rumors start,’ he told a reporter. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. Both Jack and Bob admire Hoover. They feel they’re lucky to have him as head of the FBI. Hoover is a wonderful, dedicated man – and don’t think Jack and Bob don’t realize it.’

Behind the scenes, the father begged his sons to humor Edgar. A meeting at the White House in February 1961, one of only six occasions on which John Kennedy agreed to see Edgar during the presidency, was probably to arrange a truce. There was no stopping Robert, however, on organized crime. He got around Edgar’s rejection of a crime commission by quadrupling the staff and budget of Justice’s Organized Crime Section, and rammed expansion through whether Edgar liked it or not.

In the key target areas, New York and Chicago, the FBI resumed the drive Edgar had allowed to slacken once the fuss over Apalachin had died down. The New York office, where less than a dozen agents were working organized crime when Robert took office, would end up with 115 men assigned to the task. In Chicago, the team expanded from six agents to about eighty.

To demolish Edgar’s old ‘no jurisdiction’ excuse, Robert rushed through new laws. In 1960 a mere nineteen members of organized crime had been indicted. In the first year of the Kennedy presidency, 121 were indicted and 96 convicted.

FBI agents assigned to organized crime now came into their own. They liked Robert Kennedy and respected the way he came in person to consult