The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [389]
Bobby had scarcely been in office for a week when he showed up one evening around eight o’clock to visit the FBI’s printing unit, shaking hands with night-shift employees. That same evening he wanted to enter the FBI’s gym but was told the door was locked. So began a flurry of memos back and forth within the FBI about the unpredictable attorney general and his mysterious visits. In subsequent visits to the gym, the FBI monitored Bobby’s every move, even noting in a memo the number of push-ups he performed—ten to fifteen—during one half-hour session in the facility.
Hoover had created an agency in which no life or event went unmonitored. It was a trivialization of government, but the system he had created allowed Hoover to chronicle Bobby’s actions and record his utterances. The attorney general would never be able to escape from any questionable actions he took, or from any of the accolades he gave the director.
As he entered office, Bobby shared Hoover’s fixation with American communism, giving speeches and interviews that could as easily have been spoken by Hoover or Joe McCarthy. In March, Bobby went on the radio program of Senator Kenneth Keating, the moderate New York Republican, and said that the Communist Party remained as great a threat as during the Red Scare of the past decade because it “is controlled and to a large degree financially supported by a foreign government.” As much as many American liberals ignored the painful truth, evidence in recent years from Soviet archives shows that Bobby was correct in his second assertion: the parry had been largely controlled and financed by Moscow. However, by 1961 the Communist Party was decimated and probably controlled and financed more by the FBI, whose agents and informers may have made up about half of the minuscule party.
By the fall of his first year as attorney general, Bobby had come to the realization that the Communist Party was not a nefarious secret army of potential traitors with the power and will to subvert America. “They are not important numerically and present no grave menace to our security,” Bobby said in November in Los Angeles. Even as he said so, he made sure that he kept stroking Hoover. After his return from his West Coast trip, he called Hoover. The FBI director noted “that in regard to the trip which he recently made, he was impressed with my people in all of the cities where he traveled.”
Bobby believed that there was a vast underground army of betrayers within America more threatening than Communists. As attorney general, he set out to attack organized crime with a resolve and weaponry far beyond what had been brought to previous attempts. He had been obsessed with the mob since the days of his work on the McClellan Committee, and now he believed he had the power to end what he had begun. He quadrupled the number of attorneys in the organized crime division and sent them across the country attacking the gangsters where they nested, protected by corrupt local officials or a see-no-evil police atmosphere. The IRS targeted Mafia figures for audits, going after them with a merciless concern for detail that at times assaulted their civil liberties.
Many superbly dedicated FBI agents pursued this new enemy just as relentlessly, shadowing targeted individuals, wiretapping them, monitoring their businesses and homes, and tailing them wherever they went. Hoover, however, had been slow in turning them toward this implacable foe.
“Hoover was a miserable son of a bitch, but he was tough,” said William Hundley, chief of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section. “He was tough and shrewd and powerful. And you know, we got some movement from the FBI, but not what we would have liked. They hated us. And it wasn’t right. At that