According to his half brother Chuck, the mobster felt that the President had reneged on a bargain. To a mafioso, to break a bargain is a sin commonly punished by death, and Giancana was a murderer by profession. Again according to his half brother, he was to play a key role in planning Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.
It is not clear how fully Edgar understood the Giancana scenario in March 1962, only that he knew plenty and told the President so. ‘My impression from Jack,’ Judith Campbell has said, ‘was that Hoover had intimated to him that he knew I had been passing material from Jack to Sam.’ According to Cartha DeLoach, Edgar returned from the meeting saying he had told the President he knew ‘a great deal’ of what was going on.
Even so, records suggest, the brothers soon made themselves even more dependent on Edgar. Unless his brother had been keeping the Castro plot a secret from him, which seems highly unlikely, Robert had long known about Giancana’s involvement. Yet it was vital for Robert, as it was for his brother as President, to protect himself from being linked to the plots. A paper record was therefore concocted, including a memo by Edgar claiming that he and Robert had learned of the CIA’s use of Giancana with ‘great astonishment.’ The writing of that memo alone left the Attorney General indebted to Edgar.
Contrary to previous assumptions, the President did not sever his connection with Judith Campbell after the March meeting with Edgar. White House phone logs show that contacts between him and Judith Campbell continued at least through the late summer of 1962. According to Campbell, she and the President simply used other telephones to evade FBI wiretaps. Kennedy, his secretary Mrs Lincoln recalled, suspected Edgar of bugging even the White House itself. Even so, says Campbell, she and the President went on seeing each other for months to come, and she continued to meet with Giancana.
Increasingly harassed by the FBI, Campbell asked the President for help. ‘I was sort of begging him,’ she recalled, ‘saying, “Jack, do something. I can’t handle this” – because I was being followed. And he would always reply, “Don’t worry about it. You’re okay, you haven’t done anything wrong. You know Sam works for us.”’
Still, the President was infuriated. ‘Jack spoke of Hoover with great irritation,’ Campbell recalled. ‘It was in the sense of, “I wish he’d get out of my hair.” It was very obvious he wanted to be rid of Hoover.’
The President could not risk trying to dump his FBI Director. The Giancana mess aside, Edgar was now armed with knowledge of a battery of other Kennedy follies. Even before the March confrontation, Edgar had let the President know he knew about the use of prostitutes during the 1960 Convention. He knew, too, about an old relationship that could prove as politically damaging as the current ones.
In early March a small New York magazine, The Realist, ran a story headlined THE STORY BEHIND THE RUMOR ABOUT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE. The rumor was that Kennedy had been briefly married, in 1947, to a Florida socialite named Durie Malcolm. Malcolm had merited an entry in a privately printed history of her family, and it stated flatly that among her several husbands was ‘John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England.’
If true, the ‘other marriage’ story was dynamite. It would mean that the first Catholic president had been divorced, which was against his professed religion, and – since he had concealed the fact – had deceived the nation. Research had established as of the writing of this book only that Kennedy and Malcolm did know each other in the forties, well enough to stir up speculation in a Florida gossip column.2
An entry in FBI files shows that in November 1961, when the rumor first reached the Bureau, an agent promptly perused Malcolm’s family history in the New York Public Library. His report, and similar ones from New Jersey and Massachusetts, went straight to Edgar. He then brought the matter to Robert Kennedy’s attention.
The file, however, does not tell the whole story. In a rare interview after Edgar’s death, his secretary, Helen Gandy, indicated that her boss had been onto the ‘other marriage’ as early as 1960, and that he and Richard Nixon discussed using it for election dirty tricks.
Soon after Edgar’s lunch with the President in 1962, the story began appearing in the press. First the Thunderbolt, the racist organ of the National States Rights Party, came out with a front-page story: KENNEDY’S DIVORCE EXPOSED! IS PRESENT MARRIAGE VALID? Right-wing organizations distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of Malcolm’s family history around the country. The syndicates and wire services started digging. A United Feature column, by Henry Taylor, was withdrawn at the last moment. Then Walter Winchell asked, ‘Why hasn’t the White House debunked it?’ By the time the debunking came, in Newsweek, it had become a serious embarrassment.
Ben Bradlee, the magazine’s Washington Bureau Chief, has told how that story came to be written. ‘I talked to the President about doing a story, based largely on Thunderbolt and the hate sheets. The FBI had made an investigation and some FBI documents were made available by Kennedy’s press secretary. The condition was that we could have them overnight, and never again. Salinger was the intermediary between us and the FBI. Chuck Roberts and I stayed up all night with the documents, writing the story in some motel … I don’t know what the terms were on which Kennedy got that stuff from the FBI …’
Edgar, then, had ridden to the rescue, a rescue that might never have been necessary had it not been for the stories written by Winchell, Henry Taylor and Thunderbolt. Winchell had long been manipulated by the FBI. Henry Taylor’s massive FBI file shows he and Edgar had been pals for years. Edgar had supplied him with information, and he had dutifully written stories attacking Edgar’s critics. Taylor’s column on the ‘second marriage’ was killed only at the eleventh hour, when Edgar intervened at the request of the White House.
Thunderbolt would also dredge up the old story about Kennedy’s affair with his Senate secretary, Pamela Turnure. The headlines read: JFK ACCUSED OF ADULTERY, and the article appeared after Turnure’s former landlady, who had recorded the sounds of the couple’s love-making, wrote letters to several public officials. Edgar was one of the recipients, and according to Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s former aide, the Thunderbolt publication was no coincidence. ‘Johnson told me,’ he recalled, ‘that Hoover had given him the sound tapes on that woman during the 1960 campaign. Then, during the presidency, he made sure the information got to people they thought would use it. Not the regular press, but scurrilous publications …’
Like Thunderbolt.
It all suggests that Edgar secretly fanned the flames of both the Turnure gossip and the ‘other marriage’ to his own advantage. Then, when the marriage story had done its damage, he put Kennedy in his debt by supplying background for the Newsweek rebuttal.
As if this was not enough, there was the Hollywood connection – the President’s alleged involvement with the actress Angie Dickinson, and Marilyn Monroe’s affairs with both brothers.
Dickinson is said to have become one of John Kennedy’s lovers sometime before the inauguration. ‘Angie and JFK disappeared for two or three days in Palm Springs during the period before Kennedy assumed office,’ recalled photographer Slim Aarons, a Kennedy friend. ‘They stayed in a cottage and never emerged. Everyone knew about it.’
‘Everyone’ was meant to include only Kennedy insiders, but reporters who traveled with the Kennedys got wind of such things. Newsweek reporter Dick Schumacher recalled how he opened a door at Palm Springs, spotted Dickinson relaxing on a bed and promptly ‘forgot’ what he had seen. The predominantly male press corps of those days liked Kennedy and somewhat envied his success with women. They believed that a politician’s private life was his own business, not to be probed or written about. Secret Service agents took the same view and protected him as best they could. FBI agents did what they were trained to do, and reported to Edgar.
An account of how Edgar found out about Angie Dickinson comes from a former agent whose squad liaised with the Secret Service. ‘It happened,’ said
the agent, who asked to remain anonymous, ‘when Kennedy was on the West Coast on political business. He flew from Burbank Airport to Palm Springs by chartered aircraft, with Angie Dickinson on board, and they took a detour – via Arizona. When they did get to Palm Springs, Kennedy got off alone, I guess to stop the press seeing Dickinson.
‘The problems came later. The plane on that trip had been an executive aircraft with a bedroom. The copilot, who was employed by Lockheed, had bugged the bedroom and taped the conversation. And afterwards he tried to use the tape, anonymously, to extort the President for a large sum of money. His letter was intercepted by the Secret Service, and they called the FBI. Our goal was to get that tape back. Find it, get it back. No publicity. We checked on the airplane’s crew, and the copilot was kind of shady. So, when he was abroad on a trip we bribed the manager of his apartment to let us in.
‘We found the tape recording hidden in the wall, near an electric socket. It was a large tape, the old-fashioned sort. We took it and we resealed the goddamn thing, so the guy wouldn’t even know at first it was gone. The Bureau gave us very exact orders after we found the tape. They didn’t want it mailed. They wanted it sent by personal messenger to the Director. We talked to Lockheed and they fired the guy. There was no prosecution, to keep it quiet. And that was that. But Hoover had the tape.’
Cartha DeLoach confirms that information came in on the Dickinson affair. Homer Young, another former agent, recalled how, when the President’s ardor cooled, the FBI was brought in to help out.
‘The Secret Service,’ said Young, ‘would call the FBI in Washington, who would call the Bureau in L.A. to get them to call the FBI Resident Agent in Palm Springs – because the Secret Service had no representative there. And our guy would have the job of telling Angie to knock it off, to stop trying to get through to the President, to stop calling the White House …’
Even as Edgar received his information on Dickinson, he was assiduously monitoring yet another dalliance – with the most famous Hollywood beauty of them all.
Oddly enough, Marilyn Monroe was a pinup in the lives of both Edgar and President Kennedy. Her nude calendar shot, along with other pictures of naked women, graced the walls of the basement bar at Edgar’s home in Washington. They were there, some assumed, to deflect speculation about the Director’s homosexuality.
In 1954, when he was undergoing back surgery, Kennedy had stuck a poster of Monroe on the wall of his hospital room. It showed her in shorts, standing with her legs apart, and the patient had it fixed upside down, so her feet stuck up in the air.
The evidence suggests Monroe and Kennedy had an affair of sorts in the early fifties. They were certainly in touch, and sleeping with each other occasionally, during the election campaign of 1960. The President’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, who talked about the relationship shortly before his death, recalled taking photographs of Monroe and Kennedy in the bathtub.
Such encounters continued into the first and second years of the presidency. The most famous blonde in the world was smuggled into Kennedy’s suite at New York’s Carlyle Hotel, even on board Air Force One, disguised in a black wig and sunglasses. Such escapades would have been dangerous at any time, and Monroe’s state of mind made them especially so.
Few except Monroe’s psychiatrists and closest friends knew how desperately Monroe was floundering. Her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller was in ruins and – as a longtime abuser of barbiturates – she was in a narcotic nosedive. There was a brief, anguished stay at a psychiatric clinic, then more doctors, more drugs and episodes of heavy drinking. Monroe suffered abrupt mood swings, from elated highs to black despair.
No public man with an image to protect should have gone anywhere near her. Yet John Kennedy continued to see Monroe, and Edgar was watching. Gordon Liddy, then an agent in Crime Records, was aware of the continuing coverage. ‘The stuff on the brothers and Monroe,’ he recalled, ‘was very, very closely held.’
It has been clear for some time now that Monroe came under electronic surveillance during the Kennedy presidency. Interviews with private detectives and technicians leave no doubt of it. Confusion remains, however, as to who commissioned the bugging and who received the ‘take.’3
Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, a prime target of the Kennedy Justice Department, almost certainly received some compromising material. He said as much to fellow prisoners when he later went to jail, and his attorney, William Buffalino, confirmed it in a 1990 interview. Some bugging, meanwhile, may have been commissioned by mobster Sam Giancana.
By 1962, according to his brother, Giancana had lost patience with the Kennedys. Still under constant pressure from the Justice Department, he hired surveillance experts to collect all possible dirt on the Kennedy brothers. If collaborating with them had failed to help, the mobster intended to try blackmail, a tactic at which the Mafia excelled.
Peter Lawford had long since been under surveillance on the orders of someone else – Edgar. The sound specialist who installed the bugs, who was still operating at the time, revealed his role only on the formal understanding that his name is not used.
‘The job at the Lawford house,’ the source said, ‘was done for the Bureau, through a middleman. I installed the devices on FBI orders. They were in the living room, the bedrooms and one of the bathrooms. An intermediary for Hoover came to me to arrange the installation, I guess at the end of the summer, in 1961. The formal reason given was that Hoover wanted information on the organized crime figures coming and going at the Lawford place. Sam Giancana was there sometimes. But of course the Kennedys, both John and Robert, went there, too.
‘Hoover’s intermediary told me that, as Attorney General, Robert Kennedy had given strict orders that the house was not to be bugged. But it was covered, on Hoover’s personal instructions. Jimmy Hoffa did get one of the Kennedy-Monroe tapes, but only because it was leaked to him by one of the operatives. He wanted to make a buck and Hoffa’s people paid $100,000 – a lot of money back then. But that surveillance was commissioned by the FBI, and almost all the tapes went to the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover had access to every goddamned thing that happened at the beach house, including what happened when the Kennedys were there, for nearly a year. Draw your own conclusion.’
One of the men who monitored the bugs at the Lawford house was private investigator John Danoff. He told how, during a presidential visit in November 1961, he listened in on a tryst between Kennedy and Monroe. ‘To my amazement,’ Danoff recalled, ‘I started to recognize the voices – because of the President’s distinct Bostonian accent and Marilyn Monroe’s voice … Then you heard them talking and they were going about disrobing and going into the sex act on the bed …’
For Edgar, tapes of scenes like this were just the beginning of the harvest. On February 1, 1962, Monroe met Robert Kennedy for the first time, at a dinner party in the Lawford house. Later that night, the actress was to tell a friend, the two of them talked alone in the den. In characteristic fashion, she had prepared questions of topical interest and asked whether it was true that J. Edgar Hoover might soon be fired. Robert replied that ‘he and the President didn’t feel strong enough to do so, though they wanted to.’
According to the man who installed the bugs, that conversation would have been picked up by the hidden microphones. For Edgar, reading the transcript in Washington, Kennedy’s words must have held some comfort. He now knew, for sure, from the mouth of one of the brothers, that the Kennedys were afraid to dismiss him – for the time being. That gave him all the more reason to go on watching, to keep on piling up compromising information.
Edgar would have known about Robert’s comments on his future, and about the sex session with Monroe at the Lawford house, well in time for the lunch at the White House in March 1962. Yet whether or not he mentioned Monroe that day – along with Judith Campbell – John Kennedy blithely saw the actress again within forty-eight hours, on a trip to California. ‘It was obvious,’ said Philip Watson, a Los Angeles County official who saw
them together, ‘that they were intimate, that they were staying together for the night.’
In Washington in the weeks that followed, the tension between Edgar and the Kennedys continued. Robert Kennedy and Edgar now rarely cooperated with each other about anything. Formal courtesies continued, with the President telephoning Edgar to congratulate him on his thirty-eighth anniversary as Director. Edgar sent a pleasant acknowledgment. Then, the same day, he refused to show up at a cake-cutting ceremony organized by Robert.
The Monroe saga, meanwhile, took a strange turn. John Kennedy saw the actress once more, on May 19 in New York, but apparently never again. According to Peter Lawford, Edgar had warned him off, saying the Lawford beach house ‘had very likely been bugged by the Mafia.’ He did not, one may be sure, say it had been bugged on his own orders.
Unfortunately for the Kennedys, Monroe would not accept that the affair was over. Back on the Coast, she plunged into black despair, losing herself in drugs and barbiturates. ‘Marilyn,’ Lawford reportedly recalled, ‘began writing these rather pathetic letters to Jack and continued calling. She threatened to go to the press. He finally sent Bobby Kennedy out to California to cool her off.’
In the course of calming Monroe, however, Robert followed his brother into her embrace. ‘It wasn’t Bobby’s intention,’ Lawford is quoted as having said, ‘but they became lovers and spent the night in our guest bedroom. Almost immediately the affair got very heavy …’ Soon, Lawford said, Monroe was saying ‘she was in love with Bobby and that he had promised to marry her. It was as if she could no longer tell the difference between Bobby and Jack.’
A number of witnesses, and the surviving phone records, support the gist of Lawford’s account. They also support his statement that Robert in turn soon tried to distance himself. He did so too late, however, to avoid being drawn into Monroe’s psychiatric collapse. And too late to avoid falling into a double trap – the surveillance ordered by the criminals, Giancana and Hoffa, and the web spun by Edgar.