The House of Kennedy(41)
Like Sorensen, in 1952 Bobby is also a Senate staffer, working for first-term Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. While Sorensen’s position is merit-based, Bobby secures his through Kennedy connections—McCarthy’s a pal of Joe Sr. and has not only vacationed with the family, but dated two of Bobby’s sisters, Pat and Jean. Bobby, a 1951 graduate of University of Virginia Law School, works for just six months on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations, but the stint tarnishes his reputation for over a decade. “In those days,” Sorensen recalls, “[Bobby] was a conservative, very close to his father in both ideas and manners, sharing his father’s dislike of liberals.”
On January 31, 1957, Bobby becomes chief counsel for the newly formed Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, popularly known as the Rackets Committee. Though Bobby has inside knowledge of his brother Jack’s presidential ambitions—and according to his sister Jean, their father is “really mad” about a “politically dangerous” investigation into organized labor—Bobby sets his target on James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa, head of the 1.3 million-member transportation-based Teamster union.
On February 19, 1957, Eddie Cheyfitz, a lawyer for the Teamsters, invites the two men to dinner at his home. It’s their first meeting, and after sizing one another up—Hoffa finds Kennedy’s handshake weak; five-nine Kennedy looks down on Hoffa’s five-five stature—tension builds over dinner conversation that amounts to what Bobby calls “a complete fabrication” of information about the union. He demands a physical contest: “Hoffa, I’ll just bet I can beat you at Indian hand wrestling.”
In both of his two memoirs, Hoffa relates the encounter. The RFK biographer Larry Tye quotes from the second: “I leaned back in my chair and looked at him as if he was crazy. I couldn’t believe he was serious but he stood up, loosened his necktie, took off his jacket, and rolled up his sleeve…Like taking candy from a baby. I flipped his arm over and cracked his knuckles on to the top of the table. It was strictly no contest and he knew it. But he had to try again. Same results…I’m damn certain in my heart that Robert F. Kennedy became my mortal enemy that night.”
For three years, Bobby tries and fails to prove the improper financial dealings he’s alleged of Hoffa. “I used to love to bug the little bastard,” Hoffa says of a series of 1957 Rackets Committee hearings televised by NBC, which reveal an entrenched rivalry between the two men.
“During the worst of the hearings,” Ethel recalls, “the big semis would get off the main roads and come by Hickory Hill with the horns just blaring.” In 1959, the New York Times reports that Bobby “received anonymous threats from a telephone caller that someone would throw acid in the eyes of his six children,” who consequently, according to Bobby Jr., had “to wait after school in the principal’s office” for Ethel to pick them up.
Still, staffers admire his total dedication. The assistant attorney Nicholas Katzenbach recalls working lunches at Hickory Hill. “Bobby would call up at the last minute, and say uh, ‘Ethel, I’m bringing out uh, 10 of us, 12 of us, 20 of us, uh, can you fix us some lunch?’ And we’d spend the afternoon discussing problems.”
The feud with Hoffa escalates when Jack is elected president in 1960 and Bobby rises to the head of the Justice Department as attorney general for the Kennedy administration. Joe Scarborough writes that Bobby “ultimately succeeded in convicting Hoffa but along the way he did the unthinkable: He made him a sympathetic figure.”
Although a May 1963 Gallup poll shows Bobby’s favorability rating at 72 percent, he’s already worrying about the effects his controversial stint as attorney general may have on Jack’s chances for reelection in 1964.
Aides are surprised when on November 20, 1963, his thirty-eighth birthday, their hard-working leader (according to Joe Sr., “Jack works as hard as any mortal man can. Bobby goes a little further”) gives a dispirited toast at the office party. They whisper about an impending resignation, speculating, “I guess Bob won’t be here by Christmas.” That night at Hickory Hill, in the midst of another bustling party for friends and family, Ethel picks up on Bobby’s grave mood. In her own toast, she never mentions her husband, insisting only that guests “drink to the President of the United States.”
Two days later, on November 22, 1963, it is warm enough to eat lunch on the patio at Hickory Hill. Bobby’s guests are Robert Morgenthau, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the chief of his criminal division, Silvio Mollo. The menu of clam chowder and tuna fish sandwiches honors the Catholic tradition of forgoing meat on Fridays.
At 1:45, there is a commotion by the pool. A workman with a transistor radio begins shouting, and a phone extension rings. Ethel tells Bobby that J. Edgar Hoover’s on the line, which immediately alarms him, as he and Hoover are bitter rivals. (At a meeting of senior FBI agents in 1968, Hoover deputy Clyde Tolan remarks of Bobby, “I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.”) Bobby later tells Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “I thought something was wrong because he wouldn’t be…calling me here.”
Hoover delivers his dire news: “The President’s been shot.” When JFK biographer William Manchester asks Bobby whether Hoover “sounded excited,” Bobby replies, “No, not a bit. No, nor upset.” On reflection, Bobby later says, “It wasn’t the way that, under the circumstances, I would have thought an individual would talk.”