Bob Kennedy Barks --& Bites

ON a sweltering day in Washington last summer Reporter Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register strolled into the offices of the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to see the chief counsel, Robert Francis Kennedy. Things were kind of quiet around town, said Mollenhoff: there must be something worth investigating. Asked Kennedy: "Have you any ideas?" Mollenhoff, who had been writing stories about corruption and abuses in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters for six years, indeed had an idea: the Teamsters. He showed Kennedy some of his clippings, and emphasized the national significance of what newsmen had been digging up in Portland, Ore. Bob Kennedy promptly called together his staff, and an investigation was born.

From that day on Bob Kennedy, 31, a lawyer with the true prosecutor's instinct for the jugular, has been a formidable pursuer of the bosses of the powerful Teamsters Union. Son of Boston Millionaire Joseph P. Kennedy (who was F.D.R.'s ambassador to Great Britain), younger brother of Massachusetts' U.S. Senator John Kennedy, Investigator Bob is an average package (5 ft. 10 in., 150 Ibs.) full of far more than average energy. At Harvard he played end on the varsity team, though he then weighed only 160 Ibs. As a Navy seaman in 1945, he went directly to the Secretary of the Navy to be assigned to the destroyer named for his late brother Joe, a Navy flyer killed in operations in 1944. Out of the University of Virginia Law School (class of '51), Bob spent a year with the Justice Department, resigned to manage brother Jack's successful senatorial campaign, then landed a job with the Senate Subcommittee. He worked as calmly as he could under Joe McCarthy's Chief Counsel Roy Cohn, who taunted Kennedy as "a cute kid," complained that Kennedy did not like him. Bristling like a Boston terrier, Kennedy retorted: "If I have any dislike, it's well justified."

Under the Bed. Armed with supreme self-confidence and an initial $350,000 appropriation, Kennedy sent his staff legmen into a dozen cities, headed west himself to tackle Teamster chieftains on their home grounds. One day in the west, he knocked at the door of a labor racketeer, was stopped at the doorstep by a suspicious wife.

Kennedy sniffed a favorite aroma from her kitchen: chocolate sauce.

With a connoisseur's transfixed expression, he begged a sample, tasted a spoonful, pronounced it "the best chocolate I've ever tasted." The woman let him inside, gave a rundown on her absent husband's activities.

Kennedy's investigators were full of such tricks. Once they interviewed an Army corporal who passed on idle chitchat from a girl he met at a dance. She was maid for a woman employed by the Teamsters; under the woman's bed was a stack of their records. Anxious to inspect any Teamster file, Kennedy got the corporal to continue dating the maid (although the soldier complained that she was no bargain), arranged to have a staff member accompany them and the maid's girl friend on a double date. Capping the evening at the Teamster employee's home, the corporal kept the girls amused while Kennedy's investigator feigned illness, staggered to the bedroom for a quick look at the records under the bed.

"We'll Prove It." Working 17-hour days, Investigator Bob Kennedy hopped back and forth across the country drawing together the findings. When the pieces of the Teamster puzzle began to fall into place, Kennedy returned to Washington, resumed a routine that was as strenuous as his field work. Rising at 6:45 a.m. at his McLean, Va. home, he went horseback riding with his wife Ethel (they have five children ranging from six months to five years) before going to the office, divided his day between hearings and office work, e.g., checking the 500 tips (one-third worthwhile) pouring in each day. Since they have a staff of servants at home, Mrs. Kennedy has sat in at almost all of the Teamster hearings to watch her husband at work. In the hearing room, Kennedy took a terrier grip on recalcitrant witnesses, accusing, badgering and interrupting in his high-pitched, bean-and-cod-accented voice, drawing on a remarkable store of information.

Closing the first phase of hearings with Dave Beck last week, Kennedy was surprised not at all to see Beck duck behind the Fifth Amendment. From. Counsel Kennedy came a typical reaction: "With the records we have, we'll prove what he would have said if he had talked."

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