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Overview
As United States Attorney General, the young, legally inexperienced Robert F. Kennedy sat at the head of a vast department tasked with enforcing the law and defending the rights of an entire nation. Although his family connection to the White House raised eyebrows, Robert Kennedy’s tenure was marked by impassioned battles to root out corruption and protect individual civil liberties. From his fierce stand against organized crime to his tumultuous relationship with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, RFK proved time and again that he was a champion of fairness.
In this investigative account of the Kennedy years, acclaimed scholar Victor S. Navasky crafts an unmatched portrait of the complex interaction of power and principle in the halls of justice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480436220 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 547 |
| Sales rank: | 717,928 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Kennedy Justice
By Victor S. Navasky
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2000 Victor S. NavaskyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3622-0
CHAPTER 1
Secrecy: The Director and the General
Each had a law degree but neither had practiced law. J. Edgar Hoover, armed with a degree from George Washington University's night school (he worked days cataloguing new books at the Library of Congress), began his career by securing a clerkship in the Justice Department. Robert F. Kennedy, 56th in his class of 123 at the University of Virginia Law School, where his major academic achievement was a term paper attacking the "sell out" at Yalta, went to work in the Justice Department's Internal Security Section, then a part of the Criminal Division.
Each got his real start fighting subversion. In one hundred days in 1919 Hoover helped put together 60,000 political dossiers on radicals and anarchists—a prelude to the notorious "Red raids" of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Kennedy, restless at the Justice Department, where an office mate reports he would leave his pay checks uncashed in his desk drawer, thus forever fouling up the departmental budgetary system, soon moved over to the Communist-hunting (Joe) McCarthy Committee. While neither Hoover nor Kennedy either condoned or can be blamed for the excesses of their respective superiors, both found the super-patriotic environment of the work congenial.
Each had assumed a position of high responsibility at an early age. In 1924 Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, at the recommendation of Herbert Hoover, asked J. Edgar Hoover (no relation) to head the FBI—then called the Bureau of Investigation—at age twenty-nine. Don Whitehead, the FBI's official biographer, confirms the legend that he accepted on "certain conditions": The Bureau must be divorced from political hacks. Appointments must be based on merit. Second, promotions will be made on proved ability and the Bureau will be responsible only to the Attorney General." Attorney General Stone is reported to have replied, "I wouldn't give it to you under any other conditions. That's all. Good day."
Robert Kennedy was sworn in as Attorney General at age thirty-five. Before he agreed to take the job he conferred with his former Rackets Committee boss, Senator John McClellan (who pointed out that if he took the job it could hurt his brother), his friend Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, with whom he had journeyed through the Soviet Union (who said he might find more fulfillment doing something else and suggested a sabbatical), Attorney General William Rogers (who told him it was a lousy job—"You spend all your time arguing about who's going to be a judge and worrying about what anti-trust cases to bring") and J. Edgar Hoover, who encouraged him to take it (but Kennedy told his aide John Seigenthaler that he didn't really think Hoover meant it).
Each made his name chasing gangsters and hoodlums. In the Thirties, Hoover went after and bagged such public enemies as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly. Kennedy, aiming his sights at The Enemy Within, the title of his first book, used his position as Chief Counsel of Senator McClellan's Rackets Committee (on which Senator John F. Kennedy served) to expose such public enemies as Tony "Ducks" Corallo, Johnny Dio, Jimmy Hoffa, Dave Beck, the Gallo brothers, Tony Provenzano.
Each had what others might—and did—call an obsession about personal toughness and courage. In April 1936, when Senator Kenneth McKellar accused Hoover of taking the glory but not the risks, the FBI chief flew to New Orleans and personally supervised the capture of Alvin "Creepy" Karpis. (But when he gave the command "Put the cuffs on him, boys," it turned out, to the embarrassment of all, that the boys had forgotten the handcuffs, so they ended up using an agent's tie. Today that tie is available for viewing in the FBI museum.) Kennedy, who once offered to punch it out with one of the Gallo brothers and continuously engaged in a variety of physical endurance contests against the elements, characteristically ruminated on the way home from a specially arranged dinner meeting (his first) with Jimmy Hoffa at the home of a law associate of Edward Bennett Williams that Hoffa wasn't so tough after all:
I thought of how often Hoffa had said he was tough: that he destroyed employers, hated policemen and broke those who stood in his way. It had always been my feeling that if a person was truly tough, if he actually had strength and power; if he really had the ability to excel, he need not brag and boast of it to prove it.
Hoover was a super-administrator and Kennedy was fast becoming one. Hoover took the Bureau of Investigation, an agency shot through with corruption, apathy and demoralization after the Teapot Dome scandals of the Harding Administration, and built it into what is generally regarded as the least corruptible and most sophisticated investigative agency in the world, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the "Federal" was added to the title in 1935). His first year on the job he set up the Identification Division, including the Central Fingerprint Repository, which now contains over 81 million American fingerprints. In 1932 he established the FBI Crime Laboratory, in 1933 the FBI Academy at Quantico, and in 1939, at the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he inaugurated from scratch America's efficient and effective wartime internal-security and counterespionage program. He set up such effective information retrieval systems as the National Fraudulent Check File, the National Automobile Altered Numbers File, the National Paint Standards File and the National Typewriter File. Kennedy, after piloting JFK to a series of record-breaking Congressional and Senatorial victories, created, organized and managed the juggernaut political organization which won for his brother the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination on the first ballot in Los Angeles in August 1960 and elected the nation's first Catholic President in November.
Both were puritanical and moralistic in their pronouncements about vice, prostitution and obscenity. Hoover made speeches about "smut peddlers" and Kennedy gave the green light to the prosecution of Ralph Ginzburg, publisher of "The Housewife's Handbook of Selective Promiscuity" and Eros, "A magazine devoted to the joys of love and sex."
Hoover was a long-time friend of Robert Kennedy's father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Hoover had cooperated (with Special Agent Courtney Evans as liaison) with Robert Kennedy's Rackets investigations and in 1960 sent the young Chief Counsel an adulatory telegram on the occasion of his first "Meet the Press" appearance, advising him that he was destined for great things. After the election it was Ambassador Kennedy who advised the President-elect that if he were going to keep Hoover (and Allen Dulles, head of the CIA) he might as well make a virtue of it. Along with Kennedy family friend James M. Landis, commissioned to do a study of federal regulatory agencies (he was later criminally prosecuted by Robert Kennedy on tax-evasion charges), they were President Kennedy's first appointments.
Yet it was inevitable that thirty-five-year-old Robert Kennedy, the maximum Attorney General, should clash with sixty-six-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, the ultimate bureaucrat. For Kennedy, prevailing clichés to the contrary, was less result-oriented than action-oriented. And Hoover, as Joseph Kraft shrewdly observed in Profiles in Power, was less ideologically motivated than bureaucratically motivated—an insight subsequently documented by Tom Wicker of The New York Times and Richard Harwood of the Washington Post and a small but growing band of Hoover-watchers in the press. Inaction is, of course, the last refuge of the professional bureaucrat. "You can't get in trouble by doing nothing," says Jack Miller by way of partial explanation. Miller was the Republican, anti-Hoffa member of the Teamster's Board of Monitors whom Kennedy named Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division.
The dimensions of the encounter should not be underestimated. Robert Kennedy had behind him much of the power of the Presidency. But to take on Hoover meant to take on the whole Federal Bureau of Investigation, since Hoover, more than any other man in Washington, is identified with—indeed, is indistinguishable from—his agency. "Let me reiterate my oft-stated position," Hoover wrote in response to a remark of Governor Grant Sawyer of Nevada that he had not attacked Hoover but just the local FBI, "that as long as I am Director of this Bureau, any attack upon an FBI employee who is conscientiously carrying out his official duties will be considered an attack on me personally." It is not a unique strategy, but it is an effective one. As Robert Michels observed in his classic study Political Parties:
The Bureaucrat identifies himself completely with the organization, confounding his own interests with its interests. All objective criticism of the organization is taken by him as a personal affront ... the leader declares himself personally offended, doing this partly in good faith, but in part deliberately, in order to shift the battleground, so that he can present himself as the harmless object of an unwarrantable attack.... If on the other hand the leader is attacked personally, his first care is to make it appear that the attack is directed against the party as a whole. He does this not only on diplomatic grounds, in order to secure for himself the support of the party and to overwhelm the aggressor with the weight of numbers, but also because he quite ingenuously takes the part for the whole.
Not many people realize, moreover, that the FBI accounts for 41 percent of the Justice Department's budget and 42 percent of its manpower. Since it can plausibly be argued that the Bureau's influence exceeds its numbers by at least 10 percent, as much as one half of the Attorney General's job has to do with making the traditionally autonomous Bureau responsive to the will of the Administration. By the same token, it is the Director's job to resist political pressures and to maintain the professionalization of his agency. When James V. Bennett, retired Director of the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons, was asked to pinpoint the greatest single problem confronting an Attorney General, he stated, "They all have the same problem—the control and management of J. Edgar Hoover." By 1961, when Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, the FBI was charged with investigating more than 160 federal matters ranging from anti-trust and auto theft to espionage. So how it sees itself, what it chooses to emphasize, what cases it puts its best agents on, become critical. The psychological aspect of the relationship Kennedy and Hoover shared is perhaps best left to those who knew both men, but two observations are nevertheless worth offering at the outset. First, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Hoover had different styles, different values, different power bases and different commitments, which likely predetermined the tension that characterized their relationship. Second, while Mr. Kennedy, as a vast literature on the subject indicates, was in transit, Mr. Hoover and his Bureau were implanted. This was true institutionally, but it was also true personally. Robert Kennedy was evolving. Hoover was encrusted. Besides, the Director and his organization were there first. As the FBI Tour Guide used to say (until Kennedy found out about it), "Mr. Hoover became the Director of the Bureau in 1924, the year before the Attorney General was born." So the burden was always on Kennedy. Did he wish to intrude on existing Bureau practices? How much innovation would he strive for, how much accommodation would he accept? In other words, differences of personality as well as differences of policy, from the Kennedy perspective, surfaced as questions of tactics. To understand what Kennedy was up against, it is less important to psychoanalyze Hoover than to analyze his organization, the FBI.
When he resigned as Attorney General to run for Senator from New York in September 1964, the informed consensus of the working press was that one of the more singular aspects of Robert Kennedy's reign had been his success in harnessing J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. James F. Clayton wrote in the Washington Post: "No other Attorney General in 30 years has been able to impose his will on Hoover. Kennedy was able to do so largely because of his relationship to the President...." Anthony Lewis reported in The New York Times that "He made the first real effort in years to bring the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its powerful Director, J. Edgar Hoover, under effective direction and to turn the FBI's attention to such law enforcement problems as civil rights and organized crime." Lewis added, "Whatever ability Mr. Kennedy had to move Mr. Hoover stemmed obviously from the fact that his brother was President...." James Wechsler said in the New York Post that "During the regimes of several distinguished Attorneys General, the Justice Department's subservience to J. Edgar Hoover was a local joke. Robert Kennedy changed all that...."
The truth of the proposition is beyond doubt. Kennedy pushed the Bureau past the point of no return in civil rights and organized crime. Burke Marshall, Kennedy's introspective Assistant Attorney General in charge of civil rights, stresses that by 1963 the whole federal government had changed its attitude toward civil rights, but recalls, "When I got there the FBI had three agents in Mississippi. When I left there were 153." When Kennedy arrived, Hoover did not believe there was such a thing as a national crime syndicate. In 1962 he stated that "no single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the nation." When Kennedy left, Hoover was taking credit for the discovery of the Cosa Nostra. In September of 1963, he wrote in the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin that the sensational Valachi disclosures merely "corroborated and embellished the facts developed by the FBI as early as 1961 which disclosed the makeup of the gangland hordes." "At first it was like pulling teeth to get the Bureau to enter these areas," recalls a Kennedy assistant, "but by 1963 all that had changed."
It is arguable, however, that the influence of Hoover and the Bureau on the Department and Kennedy was at least as great as, if less visible than, the influence of Kennedy and the Department on Hoover and the Bureau. And although Kennedy and his "riot squad," as his energetic staff were once termed, were resourceful in making the Bureau more responsive to Justice Department policy, ultimately the FBI was equally successful in limiting and perhaps even diminishing Robert Kennedy's vision of the possible. When militant critics of Kennedy's civil rights policy like Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn write in Climbing Jacob's Ladder, their moving and passionate study of the anti-segregation movement, that Kennedy "made a decision ... to keep the FBI away from the kind of apprehension and arrest actions [in civil rights cases] that it constantly engaged in when bank robberies or auto thefts were involved ..." they are telling only a three-quarter truth. The FBI always had that policy. What Kennedy & Co. really decided, consciously or otherwise, was not to attempt to change the Bureau's pre-existing policy. This is a distinction that is not without a difference.
Organizations—public and private—tend to develop purposes and "bureaucratic truths" of their own. John Kenneth Galbraith has eloquently reminded us, "What is done and what is believed are, first and naturally, what serve the goals of the bureaucracy itself." The FBI is no exception to Galbraith's rule. Robert Kennedy's strategy in attempting to cope with those situations where the Bureau's interests conflicted with the Kennedy interests was a policy of unconfrontation. Collision-avoidance was in the Administration's interest. "Bob never sat down with the Director and read him the riot act—that's not the way it worked," says a colleague.
The General didn't fear to challenge the Director to specific skirmishes, but none of them was of a magnitude to change the essential balance of power within the Department. Mr. Hoover was the hedgehog (to borrow Isaiah Berlin's useful terminology) with one big idea, the preservation of business as usual. Mr. Kennedy was the fox, with lots of little ideas, like halfway houses for juvenile delinquents (Hoover called them "young punks"), sentencing and bail reform (Hoover thought they were the "maudlin proposals" of "misguided sentimentalists"), closing Alcatraz because it was outmoded, expensive and a penological anachronism (Hoover believed we needed a maximum-security hellhole as a deterrent to crime), commuting the sentence of convicted ex-Communist Junius Scales (Hoover believed that the litmus test of repentance was to "name names," a confidence Scales wouldn't violate), surfacing Cosa Nostra informer Joseph Valachi (Hoover believed that the identity of an informant should never be revealed) or setting up an independent national crime commission (Hoover thought it would lead to a national police force). Sometimes Kennedy prevailed and sometimes he didn't, but always his policy decision was made in the environment of the Bureau's organizational preferences.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kennedy Justice by Victor S. Navasky. Copyright © 2000 Victor S. Navasky. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Table of Contents
- Cover
- Dedication
- Author’s Note
- PROLOGUE The Attorney General
- PART I THE CODE OF THE FBI
- ONE Secrecy: The Director and the General
- TWO Organized Crime: The Bureaucracy and the General
- THREE Civil Rights: The Movement and the General
- PART II THE CODE OF THE IVY LEAGUE GENTLEMAN
- FOUR Federalism: The Governor and the General
- FIVE Southern Justice: The Judges and the General
- SIX Lawyering: The Solicitor and the General
- PART III THE CODE OF THE KENNEDYS
- SEVEN Charisma: The Family and the General
- EIGHT Ethics: The Politicians and the General
- NINE Civil Liberties: Hoffa and the General
- EPILOGUE Kennedy Justice
- Appendix to Chapter Two
- Appendix to Chapter Seven
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliographic Notes
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Y
- Z
- Copyright