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he jotted down: “Fighting thousands of miles from home in a jungle war in the most difficult terrain in the world—man to man—with the majority of the population hostile and sullen—or fighting guerilla warfare. The more troops we send the more will pass across the frontier of the battle. It will be another Korea without the limited terrain.” That was a terrifying vision, in the middle of the American century, a crippled giant slowly bleeding to death on ground it neither knew nor wanted. “The U.S. is willing to make any sacrifice on behalf of freedom,” he noted, but he wondered whether “American servicemen [can] be the fighters for the whole free world, fighting every battle, in every part of the world.” There, as Jack saw it, was the tortured dilemma.

Bobby was drawn to the sounds of controversy wherever he heard them, and early in 1954, they were heard nowhere in Washington louder or more stridently than on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he had only recently left. He returned this time as minority counsel on the Democratic side.

It was in some ways a curious appointment. Bobby still liked Joe McCarthy, whom most of the Democrats on the committee considered their nemesis. Bobby shared with the Wisconsin senator a hard-nosed, fundamentalist, militant anticommunism. McCarthy was a proud Catholic who stopped priests on Capitol Hill when he saw them to pay his respects. Bobby would have done the same whereas Jack would have rushed by seemingly embarrassed to be seen with them. McCarthy was tough-talking, unpretentious, fun to have up at Hyannis Port, the kind of man with whom Bobby felt comfortable.

Like McCarthy, Bobby was a hater. He hated in the way that some men loved: consumed with his hatred, he brought to it all his mental and emotional strength. He usually chose the targets of his vituperation with exquisite judgment. Seated across the committee table was one of the persistent hatreds of his life, Roy Cohn.

“Bobby did come back,” Cohn recalled in his autobiography. “But … he didn’t come back to fight McCarthy, he came back to fight me.” Soon after Bobby joined the committee, Cohn writes, the new minority counsel sought out McCarthy’s secretary and told her: “I want to give you a message. In these hearings, I’m going to do nothing to hurt [McCarthy]. In fact, I’m going to protect him every way I can, and I still feel exactly the same way as I always have about him. But I’m really out to get that little son of a bitch Cohn.”

In what became known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senators were presented with compelling evidence of a conspiracy to thwart the legitimate workings of American government. The culprit, however, was not a Communist or a fellow traveler, but Roy Cohn and his boss, Joe McCarthy. Cohn had used his power to see that their colleague G. David Schine, now a private in the U.S. Army, received special treatment and was relieved of such tasks as peeling potatoes or cleaning his rifle. The more the facts were presented, the more outrageous McCarthy became in his attempts to attack those who criticized him. And the more he scowled and vilified his enemies, the more millions of Americans watching on television saw a McCarthy they had not seen before.

While this compelling drama played out, Bobby and Cohn glowered at each other across the table. Cohn recalled that “whenever I said anything or tried to do anything, he would always have this smirk on his face, which I suppose was designed to get under my skin and did get under my skin.” Unlike his nemesis, Bobby had a brilliantly focused hatred that made him an immensely dangerous enemy.

Bobby understood that the sword that would reach Cohn’s heart was tipped with a poisonous mixture of humor and ridicule. On June 2, 1954, Bobby wrote a memo for Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson to help prepare him for the next day’s hearings. Cohn had testified that Schine was investigating the Communist infiltration of the making of the atomic bomb. “As you were on the atomic energy committee over in the House, you might wish to pursue