The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [239]
Bobby was livid over a Mike Wallace television interview in which, Bobby felt, Wallace urged a guest to name as a “degenerate” a police officer with whom the committee had worked. He contacted the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and asked “if there are some steps that the … Commission can take in matters such as this.”
Certain journalists saw themselves as cohorts in Bobby’s direct assault on the forces of evil in the labor movement and elsewhere. What he had was theirs, or so they thought, and what they had was his. These reporters knew they had crossed a forbidden threshold, but they saw a higher purpose. “Spoken bits of praise can be dropped into casual conversation without serious thought, and only because it seems a nice thing to say,” wrote Mollenhoff in December 1957, downplaying any verbal bouquets he might offer Bobby. “I want to put it on the record so it can be held against me.”
In the afternoons during the hearings, Bobby called in a group of sympathetic reporters and alerted them what to expect the next day. The reporters could write a first draft of their stories and add details the following day, thus keeping themselves several steps ahead of other journalists not so allied to the Kennedys.
However much Bobby sought to push his own name and accomplishments higher up in the coverage of the hearings, they in fact deserved to be on the front pages of America’s newspapers, played on live television during the day, and featured on the network news programs each evening. Many Americans had considered it tantamount to guilt when accused Communists and alleged racketeers took the Fifth Amendment. What did it mean when a parade of union leaders, consultants, and enforcers hid behind their constitutional rights, ducking questions that any honest labor official would presumably have answered forthrightly? Beck himself, when he finally appeared, was the master prevaricator, rambling on in a lengthy monologue before finally and seemingly reluctantly taking the Fifth Amendment. Bobby served not as dispassionate researcher gathering information to help Congress write laws but as a merciless prosecutor. His voice was taunting and disdainful. His questions moved from one specific detail to the next, pulling the noose so tightly around Beck’s neck that in the end he had no breath left for his endless prevaricating soliloquies. By the time Beck left, he was a broken man who would soon be convicted of federal tax evasion and state embezzlement charges and sentenced to prison.
That spring of 1957, Joe was quoted in the Boston Globe: “[Bobby’s] ‘a great kid. He hates the same way I do.’” Bobby was too much of a moralist to admit that he considered hatred a worthwhile emotion that could motivate a man as much as love. But when James R. “Jimmy” Hoffa, head of the Teamsters Central State Conference, Beck’s heir apparent, and the next hearing witness, appeared across the committee table, Bobby fancied that he could see “the look of a man obsessed by his enmity, and it came particularly from his eyes. There were times when his face seemed completely transfixed with this stare of absolute evilness.” What Bobby did not admit, or perhaps did not understand, was that he hated Hoffa and was as obsessed by him as much as Hoffa hated and was obsessed by Bobby.
Observers noticed immediately that there were certain similarities between the two men that only exacerbated their enmity. They both had a small man’s tenaciousness and constantly measured