James Carroll, the son of an FBI man promoted by JFK to be the first head the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides detail:
Another reason we felt like princes as we entered that auditorium was the FBI's role as the front line of Bobby Kennedy's own twin preoccupations: the fight against the Reds, for which he'd first become famous as an aide to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and his newly launched campaign against Jimmy Hoffa. Bobby Kennedy, we felt, would look on us as special allies in the struggles he took most seriously. So imagine my surprise when what Bobby -- the hair, the teetch, the rolled-up sleeves -- chose to speak about that day was neither Reds nor the mob but the rights of colored people. In my mind, the NAACP might as well have been on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations, thought I knew as little about it as I did about the Lincoln Brigade.
I remember the shrill pitch of his voice and the open palm of his hand slapping the podium. I remember his direct invitation to come back to Washington after graduation to join a new American crusade. "My fundamental belief," he said once, and I recall his saying something like it that day, "is that all people are created equally. Logically, it follows that integration should take place everywhere."
Fundamental belief? Powerfully faced with his, I had to admit that it was mine too. I remember, as it were, a light going on in my dull head: the flip side of "created equal" is "integraton." It was an era when such lights went on all over the place. Arthur Schlesigner Jr. reports that after Bobby Kennedy and an aide took an early tour of the Justice Department, Kennedy asked, "Did anything occur to you as strange in our visit around the offices?" The aide referred only to how hward everyone seemed to be working. Kennedy repolied, "But did you see any Negroes?"
SOURCE: "An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us," pp. 129-130.
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Hoover was conflicted. How can one control one's equals?
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