Vito had good reasons to groom Tom Hagen as his consigliere. He raised Tom like a son, and his loyalty was assured. As a college-educated, law-degreed, non-Italian not in the muscle end of the family, Tom could interact smoothly with the mostly Irish and Jewish judges and politicians Vito needed, far more effectively than an Italian consigliere who’d come up through the ranks and had acquired a police record. Tom was a perfect front man for the Corleones’ move toward legitimacy, and Michael sent him to Nevada to lay the groundwork months before he brought the family out. And, Tom was a calm, reasoned counterpoint to Sonny’s bad temper and violent streak—a restraint on his bad-boy brother.

But all those qualities may have hurt Vito with the other families—and may even have encouraged the attack on Vito, and the all-out war that followed. Puzo many times refers to “personal force” as a defining quality of credible Mob hierarchy, and Tom had none. The other families contemptuously referred to the Corleones as “the Irish mob” because of Hagen. Sollozzo put it bluntly to Tom after he kidnapped him: “The Don was slipping. In the old days I could never have gotten to him. The other families distrust him because he made you consigliere, and you’re not even Italian, much less Sicilian. Tom himself concludes, after he learns of Sonny’s murder that he “was no fit consigliere…old Genco would have smelled a rat.”

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