Rich Lives Matter More: How Robert Kennedy Got to be U.S. Attorney General

A 19 year old black man hits another man over the head with a bear bottle. He is arrested by cops, charged with assault or even attempted murder. He is convicted and serves 2 years in jail. After that he is a felon, and so can't get a job, and ends up in a life of crime.

That is a believable story in the United States of America. Some variation of it has happened millions of times in our history. It could have been a true story in the 1920s, or 1950s, or in 2015.

Now consider this quote from The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson:

At a bar "Magnuson, happened to be already celebrating his birthday there, and his friends began singing Happy Birthday to him. Infuriated over what he apparently regarded as an intrusion into his celebration, Bob walked up behind Magnuson and hit him over the head with a beer bottle, sending him to the hospital for stitches." This was just an example of a pattern of illegal, criminal, violent behavior. In another fight friends said "Bobby would have killed him if we didn't pull him off."

Now there are many reasons an act of violence does not result in jail time. Much violence is simply hidden, as when the victim can't ID the assailant, or has his or her own reasons to avoid the police.

Anyone who thinks all white men and women carry get out of jail free cards with them, should take a look at prison statistics (there are about 120,000 white males in federal prison on any given day in the USA with about 77,000 black men).

Some times violent men avoid jail because they have good lawyers. Some times that may be a public defender, but more generally for serious violence only a private lawyer will do. As a result, black or white, having money for lawyers is the main prerequisite

Some violent men get off scott free because they are part of a system of corruption. That would include cops, friends of cops and judges and politicians, and other connected people.

The Bob above is better known as Bobby or Robert Kennedy. He is better known for being the brother and United States Attorney General of President John F. Kennedy. Bobby was assassinated and died on June 6, 1968. President Kennedy was assassinated and died on November 22, 1963.

Are you surprised? I am. I thought I knew quite a bit about the Kennedy family. Only recently I read Robert Kennedy's The Enemy Within, which is mostly about his (later successful) attempt to jail Jimmy Hoffa. Robert did not mention that he acted like a psychopath at least as late has his college years.

In this particular case the violent criminal was the son of one of the most powerful men in the world, Joseph Kennedy, a billionaire (when there were only a few in the world) who maximized profits by dancing back and forth over the imaginary line separating business from organized crime. Apparently no charges were every brought against Bobby for anything he did. The American Bar Association found nothing objectionable about his ethics. He joined the Justice Department, then became Joe McCarthy's henchman in his anti-communist crusade. And at last, through nepotism, the highest figure in American law enforcement.

My own, anecdotal experience in life confirms the picture. Mainly I stay away from criminals and crime. I figure being a political dissident in America is dangerous enough. But three friends of mine have been involved in crimes that were slightly more than petty. Two, probably binging on drugs, copied a scene out of Cool Hand Luke and one of them was caught. One friend, a cook, punched the restaurant owner in the face during an argument.

All three were white. The cook was charged with assault, convicted, and spent over a year in jail. One thief, as I said, got away. I later learned he followed Bobby's path, getting a law degree and a job at the Justice Department. The one who was caught was quickly released and only orally reprimanded by a judge. I don't know what he did for a career.

The difference? The cook was poor and had poor parents and a public defender. The thief had rich parents, with connections to the intelligence community, and an expensive lawyer.

I know black and hispanic and Native American Indians all get treated worse by law enforcement and the courts. But being white and poor or working class is no picnic.

One more anecdote comes to mind. If you are going to be a terrorist, it pays to be from a rich, powerful family. Ask Patty Hearst.

Black lives matter. We need to do more to end all forms of racism. But we also need to give the same justice to people who commit crimes regardless of their economic status and ability to hire lawyers of various levels of competency.

Robert Kennedy, The Enemy Within, and Labor Unions

Robert Kennedy is rapidly fading from the national consciousness. Only those of us who lived through the period of his activity remember him. At best younger people know him as the assassinated brother of President John Kennedy.

Robert Kennedy wrote a number of books. Lately I have been reading what is perhaps his best known book, The Enemy Within [Harper & Brothers, New York, 1960]. I am reading it as part of my study of the influence of organized crime on business, society and politics (and vice-versa). See, for instance, Uncle Raymond Clinton, Or Is Hillary Still Mobbed Up? [May 25, 2015]

It is possible that Robert titled The Enemy Within more aptly than he knew. Enemy mainly chronicles Kennedy's investigations of Hoffa and the Teamsters Union and associates. It paints a pretty grim picture of how bad things can get when a union is corrupted or mobbed up. But it also shows how glaringly narrow-visioned Robert Kennedy was, and raises the question of whether, at the time it was written, Robert Kennedy knew where the Kennedy family wealth came from.

Today it is well known that Joseph Kennedy, Robert's father, was an important organized criminal, in addition to being an important legitimate business and political figure. In popular culture you can see that illustrated in the later seasons of the TV series Boardwalk Empire, for instance.

But in the 1950's Robert (born in 1925) certainly acted as if he was ignorant of where the money came from that made for a luxurious childhood, a Harvard education, law school, a career in the Justice Department, and working at a high level for Congress at an early age.

As I waded through this often tedious book about dead crooks and the men who investigated them, I came upon this delightful passage:

Fortunately, our work was not without its lighter moments. There is an office building on Fourteenth Street in New York City whose tenants include a number of labor unions. Knowing that some of these unions were under investigation, and suspecting that perhaps the building was owned by a racketeer or perhaps even by "The Mob," Walter May, Paul Tierney, and Bellino checked the records. They were shocked to learn who owned the building.

It was my family.

Of course the investigation stopped there. Had some other reputed mob family owned the building, Robert would have kept digging like a terrier.

Many researchers have alleged that Robert did indeed know his dad had been a mobster, at least in the distant past, based on what Robert (and his brother John, then a Senator and also on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations) avoided investigating.

But something else is obvious in the book. Kennedy crucified the Teamsters and James Hoffa. It helped turn the nation against unions in general. Republican politicians, Hollywood and the business propaganda machine went on a decades-long spree telling Americans that all unions are corrupt, that every member is a Union Thug.

But on page after page, where does most of the corruption come from? From the businesses that employ teamsters. Hoffa & crew misuse union dues, to be sure. But the extra money is coming from business owners who find it is good business to pay Hoffa, say, $100,000 in cash to get results that save $1 million on the payroll end.

Democratic unions, run honestly by elected officials responsible to their members, has always been a goal to almost all union members. Corrupting those unions has been a goal of employers and organized crime, which are often the same thing.

There are some reasonably honest businesses too, perhaps a majority. But a careful examination of the record shows that the interface between organized crime and profit-taking is a loose one. In addition to the Joe Kennedy types who move money back and forth gracefully between criminal enterprises (like importing whiskey during Prohibition), stock market scams, and legitimate businesses, there are the many CEOs and stockholders who don't mind making a little extra money by dumping toxic wastes, failing to invest in worker safety, or selling dangerous and shoddy products to consumers.

Most people are complex, and the more successful they are, the more complex they have to be. Joe Kennedy amassed a vast fortune at other people's expense, but it is hard to criticize the job he did helping to set up the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). If it weren't so tedious, that story would make a good "It takes a Thief" type TV series.

Maybe, if elected President, Robert Kennedy would have ended the Vietnam War his brother started. Maybe he would have led America to Camelot. Maybe he would have expiated the sins of his father. On the other hand, his regime might have been the most corrupt and hypocritical in U.S. history. We'll never know.