The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [388]
Joe traveled to Hyannis Port that summer with Ann, and though Rose was in the same house, it was his niece who was never away from his side. He was supposed to return to the institute for further rehabilitation so that he might learn to walk and talk again, but he never did. Ann had him dressed sometimes in a suit and tie, and on occasion he traveled to New York and sat behind his desk. He even flew once to Chicago.
Time had always been Joe’s friend, time and ritual and routine, his moments perfectly orchestrated. Now he sought the same control over his days, checking his watch to see that every minute of his diminished day was set as firmly as it had been when all was well. He turned away any therapist or guest who arrived even a minute late, and a family member who dared show up after the appointed hour was met with immense displeasure.
When the president came for the weekend, Joe would have his wheelchair moved out on the porch where he had a clear view of the helicopter carrying his son. He was always there too when the president departed and the helicopter lifted across the field where his sons had all once played football. He would sit and watch until the helicopter disappeared in the sky, and when they pushed him back into the house, sometimes the old man would be crying.
26
Dangerous Games
Outside of the president, there was no one in government as important to Bobby as J. Edgar Hoover, the sixty-six-year-old director of the FBI. Although the FBI was an empire of its own, Bobby was technically Hoover’s boss, and the two men had to work together on a multitude of serious matters ranging from civil rights to organized crime. For years Bobby had been writing political valentines to the imperious Hoover, congratulating him in language that even Caesar might have found exaggerated. It was impossible, however, to embarrass Hoover by celebrating his greatness too effusively, and by dint of Bobby’s correspondence and his father’s equally fulsome tributes to the director, it might appear that the new attorney general and the FBI chief would work well in tandem.
The two men were so different in their approaches to government, however, that from the day Bobby stepped into office, much of what he did rankled Hoover. Although the FBI perpetuated an image of their leader as an intrepid G-man, Hoover was in essence the most brilliant Washington bureaucrat of the twentieth century, a career civil servant who could have been overseeing widgets as easily as agents.
There was precision in everything Hoover did, from the way he managed his Caucasian, conservative, white-shirted, clean-shaven agents to the niceties of his communication with the White House. He held a treasure trove of information on policymakers and presidents that had kept all presidents wary, helping to ensure his continued tenure. Most of what the agency did was documented in precise memos that ended up on the chief’s desk, the final product of a machine whose ultimate output was not the capture of criminals but the endless perpetuation of Hoover’s power.
The FBI director was consumed with fighting the American Communist party. He could not see that the party had been reduced to a few bedraggled militants surrounded by the FBI agents who had thoroughly infiltrated the organization. He refused to understand that the most serious internal danger the nation faced was organized crime. That said, the director had created a disciplined, professional organization that, for the most part, stayed within the broad parameters of the law and often rendered signal service that its opponents rarely acknowledged.
Bobby was an antibureaucrat who proudly flouted all the elaborate strictures of government, considering a day not won unless he had broken out of one tedious regimen or another or surprised some slumbering official with his unannounced appearance. Night or day, few Washington officials would have dared to arrive at their office without wearing a coat and tie. On weekends and evenings, Bobby was damned if he was going to dress like an ambitious