Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The entrée of Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s J. Edgar Hoover, into the Countrywide scandal has caused several conspiracy theories to arise. Conspiracy theory 1: Blumenthal really, really, really wants to be senator. But there is a problem. One of Connecticut’s senatorial chairs is occupied by Sen. Joe Lieberman, formerly a Democrat, now a Democrat leaning Independent. Lieberman, unhorsed by Ned Lamont in a Democrat primary, ran in the general election as an Independent and cleaned the clock of former Governor and Senator Lowell Weicker ’s favorite politician, fellow Greenwich millionaire Lamont. The other chair is held by Sen. Chris Dodd. As a general rule in Connecticut politics, opportunities for senatorial slots do not become available until the grim reaper hauls off the reigning incumbent across the Styx. Weicker, torpedoed by Lieberman, was the exception that proves the rule. The Countrywide scandal presents a rare opportunity for Blumenthal. Hoover, the ambit...

Senator Lou DeLuca has painted himself into a corner from which he cannot escape. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been tapping the phone lines of “trash magnate,” so one newspaper put it, James Galante, who supposedly had ties to the Mob, when they stumbled upon DeLuca. DeLuca was having family problems. He had contacted Galante, who signaled DeLuca that he would dispatch, with DeLuca’s approval, a couple of tough guys to intimidate Mark Collela. DeLuca was fretting that Collela had abused his grand daughter, whom Collela later married. The FBI arranged a decoy to talk to DeLuca. The conversation between DeLuca and the FBI agent, posing as a confederate of Galante’s, has not been disclosed in full, but in the course of their tete a tete, DeLuca was offered a bribe, which he refused but did not report. DeLuca, in an expansive mood, promised he would do anything possible to help Galante. DeLuca may have been signaling Galante, through a third party he thought was a business assoc...

Burton Hersh, the author of two books on the Kennedys and an authoritative book on the founders of the CIA, “The Old Boys”, was ambivalent about writing Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America. At first, Hersh wanted to keep the book narrowly focused, “though honest.” Too wide an historical orbit, he thought, “was likely to scorch out sources and friends whom I have cherished since the middle sixties.” But he had become privy through his contacts to new information, and the book flowered under his hand. Hersh’s scorched friends and sources are not likely to be indifferent to the book. Nor is anyone else who reads it. The face page at the beginning of Bobby and J. Edgar carries a quote from Ralph Martin’s Seeds of Destruction: “John F. Kennedy ‘told his good friend John Sharon that if he had his life to live over again, he would have a different father, a different wife, and a different religion.” Sometimes in the f...