-Caveat Lector-
http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2007/08/bobby-and-j-edgar-historic-
face-off.html
August 27, 2007
Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between The Kennedys And J.
Edgar Hoover That Transformed America
Book Review By Don Pesci
Source: http://donpesci.blogspot.com/2007/07/bobby-and-j-edgar.html
Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between The Kennedys And J.
Edgar Hoover That Transformed America
Burton Hersh, the author of two books on the Kennedys and an
authoritative book on the founders of the CIA, “The Old Boys”, was
ambivalent about writing Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off
between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformned America.
At first, Hersh wanted to keep the book narrowly focused, “though
honest.” Too wide an historical orbit, he thought, “was likely to
scorch out sources and friends whom I have cherished since the middle
sixties.” But he had become privy through his contacts to new
information, and the book flowered under his hand. Hersh’s scorched
friends and sources are not likely to be indifferent to the book. Nor
is anyone else who reads it.
The face page at the beginning of Bobby and J. Edgar carries a quote
from Ralph Martin’s Seeds of Destruction: “John F. Kennedy ‘told his
good friend John Sharon that if he had his life to live over again,
he would have a different father, a different wife, and a different
religion.” Sometimes in the face of brute reality, one prefers to
sink into the plush arms of one’s illusions. The mythology
surrounding the Kennedy family is more soothing, more edifying even,
that the naked truths explored in Bobby and J. Edgar.
J. Edgar of the title was, of course, Director of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover, and Bobby was former President John
F. Kennedy’s Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. As a senator, when Bobby
decided to rout the mob, little did he realize that the neighborhood
he intended to sanitize had connections with his sometime too
solicitous father, the resourceful Joe Kennedy, entrepreneur,
financier, former Court of Saint James Ambassador to Great Britain in
the Roosevelt administration, confident of Sam Giancana and his
opposite number J. Edgar.
Hersh is a masterful wordsmith. Consider the following caricature of
Bobby working the floor at the Democrat National Convention that was
instrumental in sending his brother to the White House:
“A scrawny, tousled bird, his rubbery lips writing with impatience
around the assertive front teeth, those pale assessing eyes beneath
their sweeping folds aglitter beside his harsh chopped beak of a
nose. Sleeves rolled up, by midmorning the shirttail would be
blousing out and the knot on his necktie worked halfway down the
front. Perspiration stood in dark blotches. All business every
minute, running down the delegate count.”
The trick in writing books of this kind lies in providing the reader
an aperture though which may be seen a historical period and its
principal characters, while at the same time being faithful to the
public and private record. The peg upon which Hersh hangs his
narrative is the clash -- not always public, for Hoover rarely showed
his hand; he was an equal opportunity manipulator -- between a
hopelessly idealist Bobby Kennedy and a worldly wise, sometime world
weary triumvirate that included his ambitious father, Hoover and his
brother the president, whose relationship with Sam Giancana, a
mobster and one of the principal actors in the Cuban Bay of Pigs
fiasco, is examined closely in “Bobby and J.Edgar.”
Bobby and the FBI chief were bound to bang heads after JFK appointed
his brother Attorney General and the energetic Bobby decided to go
after the Mob. Little did Bobby realize that his father’s own
personal orbit intersected with some shady characters that included
many politicians, organized crime figures and the white knight of
crime fighting, Hoover himself, keeper-in-chief of the secret files
he used to manipulate many of the characters occupying the political
stage in which Bobby and JFK and their father moved and operated.
Here is Bobby dilating on Hoover: When Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s close
associate, was in the hospital Bobby asked, “What was it? A
hysterectomy? … Any day now, I expect him to show up at work wearing
one of Jackie Dior’s creations.” Very likely these bon motes may have
been netted by Hoover in one of his frequent wiretaps. Secretly,
Hoover was providing to the ambitious Attorney General the
information on Giancana he needed to bust up the Mob. But that
information led, by a back door, to the front door of Bobby’s father
and brother – and Hoover knew it.
“After two harrowing years in office,” Hersh writes, “Robert Kennedy
had genuinely come to understand that Mob history intersected along
the fault lines of Joe Kennedy’s career.” Bobby, now compromised,
quietly retreated. “Bobby took me off the Chicago investigation,”
said Ed Silberling, appointed by the attorney general to head the
Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, “just when I began to come
up with information, the reason being that his father was often
mentioned in connection with the Mafia. He was interested in crime-
busting only to the extent that his family wasn’t involved.”
Once asked if he expected that presidential candidate John Kennedy
might have trouble with the Pope, Harry Truman quipped, “It’s not the
Pope, it’s the Pop.” There was little that Pop Kennedy was not
involved in. The force that held together Kennedy family was
considerably diminished after Joe Kennedy had his stroke. The Bay of
Pigs fiasco was a “smoking ruin” before Bobby understood that
Giancana, who had devised a way to poison Fidel Castro, had been
involved in the mess. By that time the sheen on Camelot was fading.
The president was a near invalid, Bobby had been surreptitiously
recruited by Hoover to place wire taps on Martin Luther King’s phones
at a time when the black leader was gaining in stature and
prominence. The center, it appeared, could no longer hold.
The whole thing, eventually, became bullet ridden. Giancana was
assassinated, likely by an even then diminishing Mob. JFK was
assassinated, and Hersh here explores possible Mob involvement in the
president’s death. The president’s assassin was assassinated, and
later Bobby, perhaps the most honorable of the Kennedys, went down in
a hail of bullets.
“Tragedy,” Bobby had said following his brother’s death, “is a tool
for living.” The overarching thesis of Hersh's book is that the
bullets, as well as the tragedy are connected.
Bobby and J. Edgar
The Historic Face-off Between The Kennedys
And J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America
By Burton Hersh
Publisher: Carol & Graf/Perseus
Price: $28.95/hardcover5
Trento's Column: Bobby and J. Edgar - A New Secret History
Written by Joe Trento
http://www.storiesthatmatter.org/
Tuesday, 12 June 2007
My colleague Burton Hersh has a new book out that is well worth
reading to understand the context of contemporary history. I
recommend Bobby and J. Edgar: The Bitter Face-Off Between The
Kennedys and Hoover (Carrol & Graf, $27.95). Hersh understands the
Kennedys better then any other living historian. He also has
something rare for a historian – Hersh understands the intelligence
community and how its leadership targets and manipulates Presidents
through the men around them. The lessons in this book about the 1950s
and 60s apply very well to how easy it is to manipulate the
politically ambitious.
There is truly astonishing information in this book. You will learn
that Hoover was frantic to bury the John Kennedy and Oswald cases
because he was trying to cover up the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald has
been a paid FBI informant. Hersh has no document to support the
Oswald informant story, but he skillfully interviewed a top FBI
counterintelligence official who read files confirming that Oswald
was on the Bureau payroll when he was in New Orleans. This is a vital
lead that reporters should follow-up.
I can independently confirm that Hoover had tried to spy on the
activities of the Warren Commission investigating JFK’s death. My
late friend and co-author, Lt. Col. William R. Corson, who worked for
the commission used to complain about how Hoover had tried to spy on
the commission. Thanks to Hersh we now know why. This means that
rather than look into the possibility that the Soviets may have been
behind Kennedy’s murder, the Director of the FBI had to cover up the
Bureau’s relationship with Oswald.
Hoover destroyed the career of a wonderful FBI official named Elbert
“Bert” Turner who was removed from FBI headquarters and blamed for
the missing Oswald files. Turner was sent down to the Washington
Field Office (WFO) as part of the cover-up effort. What is not in
Hersh’s book is that Turner’s demotion and Hoover’s cover allowed the
KGB to send a series of false defectors all with one mission –
convince the American government the Russians had nothing to do with
recruiting Oswald to kill Kennedy. Because the FBI’s WFO worked
Soviet operations, Turner should have been privy to operations
involving these defectors. But Hoover kept him out of it, and for
political reasons any possible role the KGB played in Kennedy’s death
remained unexplored.
This book focuses in on how J. Edgar Hoover had a long and largely
unreported relationship with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. that had a
profound effect on American politics, policy and the Kennedy sons.
Hersh has demonstrated terrific reporting and historical skills with
his 1993 groundbreaking group biography The Old Boys about the early
days of the CIA. But in this book about the Kennedys and Hoover,
Hersh gets to the heart of a secret history that has been wildly
misinterpreted and misreported by others. Patriarch Joe Kennedy and
J. Edgar Hoover got along as they both used mob contacts to trade
information. The conflict between Hoover and Bobby Kennedy, Hersh
details, is out of Shakespeare. Kennedy, a young man who saw
everything in black and white gets a top Senate investigating job
under a politically ambitious southern senator who was going to hunt
down the mafia. The problem was that it was the same mafia his father
had been in business with for decades. Hoover had relationships with
those same mobsters. Hoover had used mob informants since the days he
orchestrated the Palmer raids in the early 1920s. The book paints a
vivid Joe Kennedy who was not the crude black and white anti-Semite
other biographers have portrayed. Kennedy’s control and use of Hoover
to protect his spoiled sons and manipulate Lyndon Johnson onto the
ticket with JFK is engrossing reading.
Where Hersh overreaches is in some of his implications. It is true
Hoover never willingly investigated the mob, and the Kennedy’s
interest in exposing it after their father’s stroke was something
that angered Hoover. But that does not mean Hoover was involved with
the mob in killing Kennedy. It does mean Hoover prevented a proper
investigation of who assassinated the President.
You will also learn from this book why sex and politics is vitally
important. The culmination of this story is a series of sad events
that really begin after a stroke had made Joe Kennedy ineffective in
protecting the Kennedy sons from Hoover. Careless love affairs and
political help from the mob would be used to pressure the president
and attorney general by Hoover. But instead of caving into Hoover,
and now without the protection from their father, they fought back on
civil rights, going after the mob and all the other issues JFK
believed in. Hersh insists that the forces the Kennedy brothers took
on ultimately caused Bobby Kennedy to conclude that his actions
resulted in the death of the president.=
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