The running battle between Kennedy and Hoover took place on different ground. Kennedy wanted to shift the Bureau’s priorities drastically from domestic intelligence to organized crime. Citing the FBI’s own private figures that the American Communist Party had shriveled further since its collapse in 1956—until some fifteen hundred FBI informants within the party supplied a hefty part of its budget and membership—he insisted that the Bureau’s vast domestic security network was a wasteful bureaucratic appendix from the McCarthy era.
