Burton Hersh's new book opens fresh debate on the Kennedys, the Mob and J. Edgar Hoover
History turns on passion: Shakespeare’s history plays
are rife with the notion. The drama of colliding
ambitions and outsize egos isn’t limited to Hampton
Court; someone clever once described LBJ’s presidency
as “a Tudor monarchy—with telephones.” The expert
Kennedy biographer Burton Hersh, the best-selling
author of The Mellons and The Old Boys, his masterful
dissection of the birth of the CIA [it’s on the
Agency’s reading list] has anatomized the brutal,
relentless struggle between RFK and FBI prince J.
Edgar Hoover—a web of blackmail, intrigue and
counterpunch unrivalled until Henry Kissinger came to
run Nixon’s State Department—in his latest, Bobby and
J.Edgar: The Historic Struggle that Transformed
America.
First off, as a breathtakingly shrewd take on the
Boston family’s internecine love-hate relationship
with the Chicago Mob—a take informed by some of the
best political writing about the Kennedys ever—the
thing is unputdownable; never before has the scheming,
utterly self-interested Kennedy patriarch, Joe
Kennedy, been brought to life so unsparingly and, at
times for a man who loved a good balance sheet more
than his many mistresses, even touchingly so, in the
old bastard’s moments of generosity. Make no mistake:
Hersh knows stuff about the Kennedys. He knew RFK
personally, skied with the family during Bobby’s years
in the wilderness after his brother’s assassination,
worked on Teddy’s aborted presidential campaign and is
generally accepted as the authoritative biographer of
on Teddy Kennedy’s life and times. There is deep
context here.
Teddy Kennedy won’t like much of what he reads in
Bobby and J. Edgar, but that’s to Hersh’s credit—Bobby
and J. Edgar is far more than a concatenation of
insider storylines, some of which are admittedly
deeply disturbing, such as allegations of RFK’s
romance with Marilyn Monroe [echoes of his father’s
liaison with Gloria Swanson] and JFK’s parlous state
of health [he was daily drugged to the eyeballs]. The
crises of Cuba and Vietnam loom large, but it’s where
RFK and Hoover collide that the book comes to full
boil.
That RFK went flat out after his father's Mob pals is
an Oedipal struggle Hersh explores, clear-eyed and
cogent: RFK’s obsession, Hersh maintains, brewed the
tragedy of November 22, 1963. Hersh is categorical
here; the Mob killed JFK in a triangulated,
professional hit in Dallas and his brother Robert
never forgave himself for lighting the fires which
consumed Camelot. That Robert himself may have been
the victim of a latterday Mob hit in 1968, as Hersh
posits, is a disturbing notion indeed.
Hersh’s is a deep intellectual honesty: while
clinically compiling Hoover’s misdeeds as head of the
FBI—and they were manifold, including his role in the
Palmer Raids of 1919 [a case worth revisiting in these
days of the PATRIOT ACT], his vicious persecution of
Martin Luther King and his consorting with known Mafia
gamblers while missing entirely the Soviet penetration
of much of the US government’s policymaking apparatus
in the 1930s—Hersh makes a vital point. When push came
to shove and LBJ needed the FBI to take down the Ku
Klux Klan, Hoover, protesting every step of the way,
sent in the FBI. But later, when Richard Nixon, the
man who made Reagan’s Iran-Contra cabal of Rumsfeld,
Cheney and Elliot Abrams possible, was poised to shut
the US Constitution down in the name of Nixon’s
‘enemies list’ and the Plumbers…Hoover wouldn’t play
ball.
Hoover—of all people—refused to cave to Nixon’s power
grab. Hersh’s narrative could have tailed off
precariously after RFK’s assassination but it doesn’t:
the saga sails on, detailing Hoover’s slow subsidence,
all the while reflecting on the FBI’s more extroverted
domestic counterintelligence tactics amidst Nixon’s
control freaks, harbingers of the present mess in US
civil liberties. Alberto Gonzales has been a long time
coming.
Joe Kennedy was a very hard man—arguably only Hoover
himself was tougher—and, as Hersh recounts, always
looked after his boys, until a stroke left him hors de
combat in December, 1961. A lion in winter, Joe
lingered on until the fall of 1970; thereafter his
surviving sons were on their own, enmeshed in the web
Joe had spun to bring them to power. Sheer willpower
wasn’t enough; the Kennedy addiction to personal
risk-taking, Hersh argues, would eventually break
their hold on history. The family’s famous Boston
Irish Catholicism, welded to Joe’s breathtaking
hypocrisies, only upped the temperature in the
pressure-cooker. JFK’s and RFK’s alleged marital
infidelities seem almost logical in the retelling. The
brothers were always fighting for air.
The battlefield Hersh surveys comprises two warring
political sensibilities: Hoover hunted the American
Left with a vengeance equal to RFK’s personal crusade
against La Cosa Nostra. That the two would
collaborate, as Hersh makes clear, almost against
their personae, in America’s redemptive struggle for
civil rights in the 1960s, is no less one of history’s
paradoxes. This is a remarkable piece of history,
fretted with Hersh’s acerbic wit and gimlet eye for
human psychology in the crucible of power. It’s not
going to win him friends amongst sentimental Kennedy
fans, nor amongst those who hold Oswald and Sirhan
Sirhan acted alone.
Joe Kennedy’s thoughts on the book would likely be
flintily harsh; Irish fireworks would no doubt ensue.
No matter: Hersh has the father, his sons and their
saturnine enemy Hoover in the round. That RFK was the
better man, whose assessment that organized crime
threatened the very bedrock of American free
enterprise—never mind the crippling of the unions and
the vast political corruption in Chicago alone that
Joe harnessed to bring Jack to power—is Hersh’s clear
verdict. He's right.