Harry Truman's Hell

"According to the pleasant mythology Truman later created about those years, he was the solitary rose in the manure pile, an honest public servant unaware of the crimes around him."

Thomas Joseph Pendergast was the political boss of the Democratic Party of Kansas City and effectively controlled the city from 1925 until about 1936.

Harry Truman served in the U.S. Army in World War I, and one of his associates then was a nephew of Pendergast. Truman was elected county judge in 1922 with the backing of the Pendergast machine (which had been started by Tom's older brother). Like many city machines of that era, corruption was rampant. With Prohibition in full swing, vast bootlegging profits slushed around Kansas City; plenty to buy any votes needed to control the political offices.

Harry was a funny guy, according to his own notes. He followed orders from Pendergast, helping the machine to rob the city, but (he claimed) doing his best to minimize that, and refusing to take any graft for his own use. "I could have had $1,500,000.00. I haven't $150.00. Am I a fool or an ethical giant?"

Pendergast liked Harry because he was a competent administrator, kept his own hand out of the till, and yet followed orders. When a U.S. Senate seat became available, it was Pendergast's machine that sent Harry Truman to Washington in 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression. Truman then and later claimed there were no strings attached. Biographer Richard L. Miller observed: "Clearly he protested too much, perhaps to ease his own guilty conscience about his role as an honest front protecting the power of thieves and murderers."

During the Pendergast era Kansas City was the nation's Las Vegas. Nothing illegal was not available and easy to find: alcohol, prostitutes, casinos and other forms of gambling. The city actually prospered, as organized criminals led by Johnny Lazia made sure visitors and citizens were safe from petty crime, and the take from the criminal enterprises was generally divvied up in a civil manner. They even used a lot of it to build up infrastructure. Even after Lazia was gunned down in July of 1934.

Senator Truman, of course, was an ardent supporter of the New Deal. Pendergast eventually fell victim to his own gambling addiction. He was indicted for tax evasion by the IRS and went to jail in 1939. In 1940 a reform slate came to power in Kansas City, just in time to the boom years of World War II.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1940, found he needed the corrupt urban political machines (he had not needed them, at least not much, in 1932 or 1936). American tradition, starting with George Washington, was that no President would serve more than 2 terms. Roosevelt imagined himself indispensable, but he did not openly run for the Democratic nomination. When the convention assembled in Chicago (where the Capone machine still ran things) the delegates thought they were nominating John Nance Garner, then FDR's Vice President. Ed Kelly, Chicago's Mayor and a Capone man, packed the convention hall with thugs who "spontaneously" staged an hour-long demonstration demanding that Roosevelt accept the nomination. Roosevelt did. Mussolini's March on Rome was not more perfectly staged.

By 1944 the bosses were back in charge of the Democratic Party. "The 1944 convention — dominated by Hannegan, Hillman, and the city bosses — added Truman to the ticket. Roosevelt died three months after his fourth inauguration, and Tom Pendergast's boy became President."

President Truman continued the New Deal and tried to extend it to creating a national health insurance program. He also committed heinous war crimes, continuing Roosevelt's policies of purposefully targeting civilians in German and Japanese cities with conventional weapons, then becoming the only human in history to actually use nuclear weapons, and against mainly civilian targets at that.

Go to hell, Harry.

[All quotes were found in Stephen R. Fox's Blood and Power, Organized Crime in Twentieth Century America, William Morrow & Company, 1989.]

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.

Uncle Raymond Clinton

By coincidence I have recently been reading two books simultaneously. I picked up Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton at the local used book sale (a fundraiser for local seniors). I figure if Hillary is going to be President, which is likely, then I should know more about her. She’s an okay writer, and presents herself well, but the book began to wear on me as I read past page 300.

So I started re-reading The Money and the Power, the Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, by Sally Denton and Roger Morris. I had already read it once, and I had forgotten that the Clintons play a small role in it. Basically, the book is about how the vast sums of money made by organized crime, especially from bootlegged alcohol during Prohibition, was eventually cycled into the Las Vegas we know today. It is a colorful story, filled with the names of famous gangsters like Benjamin Segal and Meyer Lansky, but also meticulous in connecting organized crime to politics, including most of the post-Prohibition Presidents of the United States. (It was published in 2001, so Barack Obama makes no appearance in it.)

Now Hillary (admittedly, by her own representation) was a good girl. Her father owned a small business, and she grew up church-going, Republican, and upper-middle class. She went to a swanky girls-school private college, Wellesley, then on to Yale Law School. I spotted no obvious discrepancies in her story. She was influenced by the turmoil of the 60s, in particular the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. By 1972 she had changed over to the Democratic Party.

The anomalies I spotted were in her descriptions of her eventual husband, Bill Clinton. Now I had thought Bill Clinton was supposed to be from a poor family. He was supposed to be a bright kid who won scholarships, including a Rhodes scholarship to study in England. Well, I would tend to admire that, since I was a bright scholarship kid. But I also know that scholarship kids typically are penniless until they get their first real job after they graduate from academia. Unlike the kinds of students who typically attend places like Wellesley and Yale, they don’t own cars and they work paid, usually menial jobs each summer as well as during the school year. They can’t accept glamorous unpaid internships that give the upper class kids inside tracks to the most desirable jobs.

What struck me first was the car. They have just started dating in the spring of 1971, at Yale Law School. “We spent long hours driving around in his 1970 burnt-orange Open station wagon.” What was an unpaid law student doing with a new station wagon? And where did the money come from that summer, when he and Hillary lived in Berkeley, California, and it is clear he did not have a job? There was more, but that was enough to remind me that Hot Springs, Arkansas was a notorious center of organized crime activity. I knew Bill was from Hope, which is not far from Hot Springs; I wondered if his easy money meant he had already been bought.

Of course it is not really a secret that William Jefferson Blythe III, aka Bill Clinton actually spent most of his childhood in Hot Springs, and graduated from Hot Springs High School. Although his step father, Roger Clinton had owned the Hope Buick Dealership, he was an alcoholic and gambler, and had sold his share of the dealership in 1955. His worked as a parts manager for his broth Raymond after that. He died in 1967, before Hillary even met Bill. Uncle Raymond Clinton owned the Hot Springs Buick dealership with his partner Earl T. Ricks, who eventually also became Brigadier General of the Arkansas National Guard. Ricks died in 1953.

So the Opal likely was a gift from a generous uncle who owned a car dealership. Nothing wrong with that. But according to Denton & Morris, Raymond Clinton had other sources of income besides the dealership. He “ran slot machines in the town for the Marcello family.” [D&M page 376]

When Bill Clinton showed up in Arkansas in 1974 to take an appointment as a law professor and run for Congress, Bill raised more money in the Democratic Party primary than his far-better-established opponents. It was Raymond who helped him raise the money, and if it is true that he was mob-connected, then the money was largely mob money from drugs, prostitution, and gambling. Clinton lost to the Republican. In 1976 Bill ran for state Attorney General and won. He did not become known for prosecuting or even noticing the organized crime still rampant in Hot Springs.

Later, as President of the United States, Clinton would quietly kill a proposal for a 4% federal gambling tax.

That helped President Clinton raise large sums of money in Las Vegas for his 1996 re-election campaign. Gambling interests, led by Brian Greenspun and Steve Wynn poured money into the Clinton campaign and the general Democratic Party war chest. One $25,000 per attendee party sponsored by Wynn raised $650,000 for the Democrats [D&M page 371]. Just in case, Wynn and friends also gave very large sums of money to Republican Party nominee Bob Dole.

Bill Clinton and then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich could sometimes put aside partisan discord to accomplish something together. Due to the movement to legalize gambling outside Nevada, by 1996 a backlash was growing. Pushed by non-profit groups, Congress decided to create a Gambling Impact Study Commission. Critics pointed out that gambling “took billions, addicted thousand at great physical and human cost, and siphoned spending from local businesses to the point of ruin, all while giving back nothing of social or economic value.” [D&M page 373].

Such committees in Congress always have the power to subpoena witnesses. But gangsters and casino corporate executives (if there is any difference) alike remembered the Kefauver hearings and Robert Kennedy hearings with great distaste. Clinton, Gingrich and politicians whose campaigns had been slushed up with gambling profits made sure the committee did not have the usual powers. In the end the Gambling committee accomplished nothing.

When did Hillary become aware of her husband’s organized crime connections? My best bet would be never. After all, Uncle Raymond ran a legitimate business, an automobile dealership. Hillary had her own law practice to worry about. Most people can look the other way when it is convenient to them, and Hillary seems to not be an exception.

Hillary and Bill are independently wealthy now, but not so wealthy that they can finance another Presidential campaign without a lot of donated money. Hopefully the women who love Hillary and the Democratic Party can make enough donations to her campaign that she will not be beholden to any particular person, or private interest group, when she is making decisions that affect us all.

I expect Bill Clinton to hang around the White House, and he does have some talents. But I expect Hillary to make her own decisions. As the first female President, I hope she turns out to be one of the rare peace Presidents. I hope the feminist core of her following holds her to that standard.

Other sources:

The next Stop after Hope (Progressive Review)

Frontline Interview with Roger Morris about Partners in Power, The Clintons and Their America.

The Double Coup of 1952

Coup. 2 a sudden, successful move or action 3 coup d'etat
— Webster's New World Dictionary, Third College Edition

1952 was a relatively calm year in the USA. The postwar prosperity was just 7 years old, as most other nations had not yet been able to rebuild their bombed-out factories enough to make a dent in U.S. global economic dominance. The Korean War had settled down, for the most part, even if an armistice had not been signed. China's communist party was well-entrenched, so that only right-wing crazies any longer believed Chiang Kai-shek could ever return to the mainland. Jazz was still hot, and so was Frank Sinatra; rock and roll had not quite been born yet.

It was an election year, and as usual a number of men (it was before women aspired to be nominees of the two main political parties) wanted to be President.

There were primaries held in many states in 1952, but many state parties still chose the party delegations to the national conventions by other methods. These typically amounted to appointments by party bosses.

The two main contenders in the Republican Party were Senator Robert Taft and General Dwight David Eisenhower, most recently the Commander of NATO. Eisenhower, at least at first, did not so much run for the office as allow others to create a campaign using his name. Outgoing President Truman had once asked him to run as a Democrat. But "Not only had Eisenhower no politics; he had no religion, no conspicuous guiding principles, and few known views on most of the great issues of his time." But, it turned out, he was a Republican. [Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, p. 745]

Senator Estes Kefauver

President Truman was eligible for another term (his first term as President came from the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt), and he was on the primary ballots, but he was low in the polls. Estes Kefauver, Senator from Tennessee, was the front runner. He had led an investigation into organized crime and its control of political machines, which turned out to be mostly Democratic Party political machines. He vowed to clean up America.

Truman could not let that happen. While most historians have been unable to prove that Truman was personally corrupt, it is hard to argue with his lifetime tendency to run with corrupt men, starting with the Pendergast Machine in his native Missouri, and ending with men he appointed to high office when the President's appointed cronies, among them Donald Dawson, Merle Young, and William Boyle Jr., were caught demanding bribes to facilitate government grants to businesses. Truman did not think Kefauver was cleaning up the Democratic Party, he thought Kefauver was destroying it.

Truman needed a white knight, someone with a good reputation, but who would let the Democrats continue corruption as usual. After considerable effort he convinced the Governor of Illinois, Adlai E. Stevenson, to run against Kefauver.

Stevenson's run may have been the model for Barack Obama's primary run in 2008. Adlai was articulate, a great speaker who could galvanize the Democrats' liberals and intellectuals. Meanwhile the party bosses, hand in hand with organized crime, were happy to get behind Stevenson, who was a true son of the Chicago political machine, no matter his surface gloss.

In the first primary, New Hampshire, Kefauver crushed Truman; Stevenson was not on the ballot. Eisenhower beat Taft 44,497 to 35,820, which is also a large margin of victory.

But Taft was not so easily put off. His father, William Howard Taft, had served both as President and as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Robert had first been elected to office in 1920 and had served in the U.S. Senate since 1939. He had led the conservative opposition to Roosevelt and Truman for almost two decades. He had a strong campaign organization left over from two prior runs for the nomination.

Robert Taft beat Eisenhower in the next Republican primary, Nebraska; then in Wisconsin. In Illinois Eisenhower came in third. But "Ike" won the New Jersey and Pennsylvania primaries. Earl Warren won California and Taft won South Dakota, the last 2 primaries. With delegates from states not holding primaries Taft was way ahead. He had 588 committed delegates, with only 604 needed to get the nomination. He just needed 16 more uncommitted delegates to win.

Meanwhile Kefauver won every state Democratic primary except Minnesota (won by Hubert Humphrey), Florida (Richard Russell) and West Virginia (which elected an unpledged delegation).

So who was elected President in 1952? Did the people elect Estes Kefauver or Robert Taft?

Trick question. Don't feel bad, few Americans can name all the Presidents. There were a lot of them, and many are now quite obscure.

There were two political coups in 1952, one in the Democratic Party and one in the Republican Party.

Back in 1952 African-Americans could not vote in the former Confederate states, the South (and were discouraged from voting in many other states as well). The Democratic Party, in the South, was the party of segregation, a white-people's party. There were few Republicans in the southern states, but they sent delegates to the Republican National Convention, convened on July 7 in Chicago, anyway. Keynotes were given by Joe McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur. Then business was conducted.

Taft appeared to be able to win the nomination on the first ballot. He now had 607 committed delegates. But Thomas Dewey and other supporters of Eisenhower had other ideas. They challenged the credentials of the southern state delegates, most of whom supported Taft. Meanwhile polls showed Eisenhower would do better with the general public than Taft, the darling of conservatives. Back room deals were made in secret. Individual delegates began to desert Taft.

On the first ballot Eisenhower got 595 votes, Taft 500, Warren 81, Harold Stassen 20, and MacArthur 10. Before a second ballot could be held, the Minnesota delegation changed over to Ike, giving him the nomination. Taft, ever the team player, allowed a motion to make the nomination unanimous.

The Democrats also met in Chicago, about a week after the Republicans left. Adlai Stevenson had taken himself out of the race on April 16. Kefauver had the popularly elected delegates, but crooks ran the party in that era. The anybody-but-a-reformer crowd considered Vice President Alben Barkley, but labor union leaders refused to back him. Stevenson made a speech welcoming the convention, and by all accounts, it was a great speech, recapitulating the achievements of the New Deal. Soon after Stevenson allowed he would accept the nomination, if offered.

It took three ballots for organized crime to prevent Estes Kefauver from becoming President. Kefauver led Stevenson in the first ballot with 340 votes to Stevenson's 273, Richard Russell's 268, Averall Harriman's 123 and 1/2, and a scattering for others. In the second ballot Kefauver again led with 362.5 votes, Stevenson had 324.5, Russell 294, and Harriman 121. But on the third ballot some delegates (probably bribed) defected from Kefauver, and Harriman's switched to Stevenson in a block. So Stevenson was nominated on the third ballot with 617.5 votes, or 50.2% of the delegates.

The party bosses did let the American people (excepting southrern non-whites) vote in November of 1952. The American people went with the General, who was pretty close to the center of the political spectrum. To appease the right wing of the Republican Party, Richard Nixon was Ike's running mate and became the Vice President of the United States. Dwight David Eisenhower became the first Republican Party President of the United States since Herbert Hoover.

Estes Kefauver, Organized Crime, and Politics

There's a dirty little secret of the 1950's that neither the Democratic Party propagandists nor the Republican Party propagandists want you to remember. For both parties the 1950s were a shining era. A Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was President for most of the decade, but the New Deal was still largely intact and the Democrats often controlled Congress. Both parties consider the 1950's a time of greatness, when the economy prospered, America ruled most of the world, and people were modest and hard-working.

Estes Kefauver was a Senator from Tennessee and he wanted to be President. He knew a little bit about vice, particularly the games of poker and flirting. Within the Democratic Party he was seen as too conservative by northern liberals and too liberal by southern conservatives.

In 1950 Senator Kevauver decided to have a committee investigate organized crime on a national scale. As far as the mainstream media was concerned, organized crime had been busted up after Prohibition. Sure, illegal gambling and prostitution still existed, and there were some junkies in most major cities who had to get their junk from somewhere, but crime just was not on the agenda.

Despite having a committee loaded with at least two Senators with mob connections and a marginally competent staff, Estes not only found organized criminal organizations in each of 14 cities he looked at, but in each city the political machine, and the police, were closely tied in with the mob.

Television was still fairly new in 1950s, but millions of sets existed and the Senate hearings were televised. It is estimated that 30 million Americans watched New York City crime boss Frank Costello testify, or rather dodge questions. Willie Moretti of New Jersey answered too many questions, and was gunned down in October 1951.

Kefauver exposed but he also protected. He was surprised at the wrath of top elected Democrats from Harry Truman on down. He carefully underplayed the political corruption angle. During the hearings he inexplicably deposited $25,000 in his bank (about $250,000 in today's money) and found another $10,500 to pay off a mortgage. One of his own chief campaign contributors was exponsed as a numbers boss in Knoxville. When hearings in Chicago ignored Democratic Party leaders having become millionaires in public offices having only small salaries, it was rumorred that they had a picture of him doing a Chicago prostitute.

All lines of inquiry seemed to lead in one direction: Las Vegas. In November 1950 the Kefauver Committee arrived in Los Vegas. The nation was newly at war in Korea and the Repubicans had just picked up five seats in the U.S. Senate (one was Richard Nixon) and twenty-eight in the House of Representatives. Kefauver was blamed by Democratic Party leaders for the defeat. Then the hand-selected mob frontmen, casino owners and public officials alike, denied knowing anything about organized crime or even the amount of money skimmed out of the casinos' takes before accounting was done and taxes paid.

Kefauver drew no conclusions from the testimony in Las Vegas. He had been defeated.

Today only students of organized crime read the old Kefauver report. That generation of top mobsters is dead. The political machines are less corrupt in some places, more corrupt in others, and the widespread legalization of gambling has. It is no accident that Barack Obama has happily focused on radical Islam rather than on organized crime, since he is the packaged product of the Chicago political machine. He has continued to support the anti-marijuana laws despite overwhelming grassroots support for legalization because he is protecting the black market profits of his allies.

You can read the Committe report at: American MAFIA, Kefauver Committee Final Report.

While unpopular with elected Democrats, Estes Kefauver was popular with voters. In the 1952 New Hamphire Primary he defeated President Truman, who then dropped out of the race. Kefauver won 12 of 15 primaries, but back then delegates to national conventions were mainly chosen by party machines. The same mob-ridden machines that Kefauver exposed. Adlai Stevenson, another mob-friendly but liberal Illinois politician, got the nomination. In the end the Republican Dwight ("Ike") Eisenhower won the Presidency. In 1956 Kefauver stomped Stevenson in the primaries at first, but later Stevenson, awash in campaign donations, won Oregon, Florida and California. Stevenson was nominated, and Ike was re-elected.

Kefauver died in 1963. No major, nationwide, public investigation into the links between organized criminal activity and politics has taken place since 1950.

This essay is largely based on Chapters 6 and 7 of The Money and the Power by Sally Denton and Roger Morris. Also David Halberstam's The Fifties.