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.
