Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [158]
‘Kennedy and his people came in full of piss and vinegar,’ said Neil Welch. ‘They were down at the office on Saturdays, sending messages out all over the place. Kennedy was just so young and enthusiastic. We thought it was delightful. He just ran roughshod all over the mechanisms that had kept all the other Attorneys General at bay. It annoyed the hell out of Hoover. He couldn’t control it.’
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Edgar told Agent in Charge Kenneth Whittaker. ‘Kennedy’s immature, impetuous. He’ll destroy in five minutes the respect the FBI has built up over the years.’ ‘When Kennedy was after Hoffa,’ Whittaker recalled, ‘and going around the field divisions telling Agents in Charge what to do, the word came down that, hey, he might be the Attorney General, but we weren’t to do anything without clearance from Bureau headquarters.’
For all Edgar’s obstruction, Robert’s criminal targets were rapidly becoming enraged. Carlos Marcello and Sam Giancana became prime targets, mercilessly harassed by the agency that had left them at peace for so long.
The Kennedy family’s different attitudes to organized crime were at their most extreme, and most potentially dangerous, when it came to Giancana. As the man who had reportedly helped John win the election with illegal votebuying, Giancana had hoped for an easy ride from the Kennedy Justice Department. What he got was a tough, ceaseless onslaught and, as his half brother Chuck put it in 1992, the mobster felt ‘double-crossed.’ ‘Here I am helping the government,’ Giancana’s henchman Roselli was overheard saying on a wiretap, ‘and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.’
On the evening of July 12, 1961, Giancana walked into a waiting room at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, on a routine stopover to New York, accompanied by his mistress Phyllis McGuire. Waiting for him were a phalanx of FBI agents, including Bill Roemer, one of the mobster’s most dogged pursuers. Giancana lost his temper, and revealingly so.
He knew, he told the agents, that everything he said would get back to J. Edgar Hoover. Then he burst out, ‘Fuck J. Edgar Hoover! Fuck your super boss, and your super super boss! You know who I mean; I mean the Kennedys!’ Giancana piled abuse on both brothers, then snarled, ‘Listen, Roemer, I know all about the Kennedys, and Phyllis knows more about the Kennedys, and one of these days we’re going to tell all. Fuck you! One of these days it’ll come out …’
At the time, Roemer had no idea what Giancana meant. Today the ‘all’ is less mysterious. There was the Kennedy vote-buying, the plotting against Castro – and of course the womanizing. The mobster was in regular contact with Judith Campbell, the lover the President used as gobetween. He was also close to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford and would one day be overheard reminiscing with him about ‘the girls they used to produce for the Kennedys.’ The inference was that Robert, too, was not innocent of womanizing.
In early September 1961, according to former FBI Supervisor William Kane, an informant told the Bureau Robert Kennedy had recently been seen ‘out in the desert near Las Vegas with not one but two girls, on a blanket. Somebody in organized crime had taken telephoto pictures … and the word we got from our informants was that they were going to use it to blackmail the Attorney General. This was confirmed several times over from several different sources.’
Kane said Edgar digested this, then sent Courtney Evans, his liaison with the Justice Department, to warn Robert Kennedy. Kennedy listened without comment. Then he simply asked what Evans was doing for the holiday – it was Labor Day weekend – and ended the meeting.
Former Assistant Director Evans, though famously discreet, agreed the exchange ‘probably did happen as described. There were many times I had to go in with that sort of information. Mr Hoover would give instructions and I would carry them out. There was, I know, an effort to bring pressure