The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [391]
Early on in his term, the new attorney general asked that fifty Treasury officials each year take a course in wiretapping and bugging, rather than the fifteen who were taking it in the Eisenhower years. The officer in charge said that it would be impossible to more than triple the number. “You look old to me,” Kennedy replied, dismissing the man. “You should think of retiring.” The man soon left Treasury, and a new, younger official took over to oversee the vastly increased load.
The FBI chief provided raw files to Bobby that were compilations of wiretaps, bugs, and overheard conversations, as well as informants’ tales of every stripe and degree of reliability. Hoover also sent his surrogates over to the Justice Department to inform the attorney general of the latest allegations and rumors involving the Kennedys, including a tale that the president had had a group of women with him on the twelfth floor of the LaSalle Hotel while the Secret Service surrounded the building. It was, as Bobby knew, “ridiculous on the face of it,” but it was a cunning move on Hoover’s part to pass on even the most questionable of tales, proving his loyalty and indispensability, while reminding the Kennedys that if he were a teller of tales, what tales he could tell.
Bobby might shrug off silly stories about the president that Hoover passed on, but he was judicious enough not to attack Hoover’s tales that had the hard ring of truth. At the end of January 1961, when Hoover received a cable from Rome, he made a note to send a memo to the attorney general. The cable dealt with a story in the weekly magazine Le Ore in which Alicia Darr Purdom talked about her supposed affair with Kennedy in 1951. Darr Purdom said that she would have been first lady except that she was “a Polish-Jewish refugee.” FBI records stated that in the early 1950s Darr Purdom had been a prostitute, “a notorious, albeit high-class, ‘hustler.’ “This was hardly the type of woman Kennedy would have contemplated marrying, but it was not the kind of story the administration wanted made public either.
Hoover understood the bureaucratic imperative of having his superiors sign on to any measure likely to prove controversial. He was not about to wiretap someone without getting Bobby’s approval, and during his term in office the attorney general reportedly approved more than six hundred wiretaps. The FBI also placed nearly eight hundred bugs that picked up the words of the innocent as well as the suspected.
To place a bug, an agent usually had to break into the premises to plant a secret microphone. The transcripts could not be used in court, and the fruits of most of this surveillance not only rotted on the ground but also kept the FBI and other agencies from doing more legitimate police work. Hoover, however, could produce a piece of paper that Bobby signed on August 17, 1961, authorizing microphone surveillance, or “bugging.”
Bobby’s defenders claim that he may not have understood the distinction between the two forms of electronic surveillance, and that “perhaps … he did not want to know.” Willful ignorance is the most pathetic of excuses, especially in a man of Bobby’s abilities, and it is unlikely that it was true. Again and again he read transcripts or listened to conversations that could only have come from hidden microphones. He even proposed a wiretapping bill that would have stripped Americans of part of their civil liberties. In the White House, Mike Feldman oversaw proposed legislation usually by passing it on, but when he saw this bill, he was so upset that he went to the president, and the legislation never got out of the White House.
Bobby was so militant in his war against organized crime in part because the world that he was seeing was one in which the underground and the highest reaches of society at times appeared seamlessly integrated. John Mataasa, a former Chicago cop, often drove Giancana around and served as his bodyguard. He also boasted that he chauffeured Sinatra when he was in the