Edgar knew early on. On June 27, according to Monroe’s housekeeper, Robert Kennedy arrived at the actress’ home alone, ‘driving a Cadillac convertible.’ A memorandum from the Los Angeles Agent in Charge, William Simon, landed on Edgar’s desk within days. ‘I remember it coming in. I was shocked,’ recalled Cartha DeLoach. ‘Simon reported that Bobby was borrowing his Cadillac convertible for the purpose of going to see Marilyn Monroe.’ From now on, agent sources say, the Attorney General’s California comings and goings were effectively under Bureau surveillance.
During the June visit, heavily censored FBI documents indicate, Monroe had lunch with the Attorney General at Peter Lawford’s house. Their conversation included a discussion about ‘the morality of atomic testing.’ At that critical time in the Cold War, anything Robert Kennedy said about such matters would have been of interest to Communist Intelligence. For Edgar, aware that Monroe had numerous left-wing friends, the development meant that his gratuitous snooping could now be justified as an authentic security concern.
On Saturday, August 4, Monroe was found dead. The autopsy report gave the cause of death as ‘acute barbiturate poisoning due to ingestion of overdose,’ and the Coroner decided it was ‘probably’ suicide. Others have theorized that the overdose was not taken by mouth but administered by someone else – perhaps by injection, perhaps rectally.
Sam Giancana’s half brother Chuck claimed in 1992 that the Chicago mobster had Monroe murdered in precisely that fashion. ‘By murdering her,’ he said, ‘Bobby Kennedy’s affair with the starlet would be exposed … It might be possible to depose the rulers of Camelot.’
Whether Giancana had a hand in the death or not, the evidence suggests the account given to the public was untrue. There are unresolved questions, above all, about Robert Kennedy’s behavior that weekend.
The Attorney General was in California at the time, to address the American Bar Association and to vacation with his family. A good deal of information suggests Kennedy flew to Los Angeles on August 4 for a showdown with Monroe. According to Lawford, who reportedly admitted accompanying his brother-in-law to Monroe’s house, there was an ugly quarrel. ‘Marilyn,’ he said, ‘allowed how first thing Monday morning she was going to call a press conference and tell the world about the treatment she had suffered at the hands of the Kennedy brothers. Bobby became livid. In no uncertain terms he told her she was going to have to leave both Jack and himself alone – no more telephone calls, no letters, nothing.’
The alleged row supposedly ended with hysteria from Monroe, a struggle in which she was subdued, then an urgent call for help to her psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson. Dr Greenson did come over, believed he had calmed Monroe down and went off to dinner.
It was he, according to the official account, who would be summoned by the housekeeper in the early hours of the following morning to find Monroe dead in bed. Yet statements by police officers, ambulance men, the housekeeper, doctors and others suggest the following scenario: After desperate calls by Monroe to the Lawford beach house, Kennedy and his brother-in-law returned to her home. They found the actress either dead or dying and phoned for an ambulance. One or both of them may have joined the ambulance on a last-hope drive to a hospital – only to turn it around when it became clear Monroe was dead. The body was then replaced in the bed, and the President’s brother left town rapidly the way he had arrived, by helicopter and aircraft. Dr Greenson confirmed privately, years later, that Robert Kennedy was present that night and that an ambulance was called.
For Robert Kennedy, back in northern California resuming his scheduled activities, the crisis was far from over. On the morning of Monroe’s death, Los Angeles Chief of Detectives Thad Brown was called to headquarters because of a ‘problem.’ A crumpled piece of paper, found in Monroe’s bedclothes, bore a White House telephone number.
A remarkable cover-up followed. The problem of that scrap of paper, and many other embarrassments, simply evaporated. Records of Monroe’s telephone calls were made to disappear, in part thanks to Captain James Hamilton of Police Intelligence, a longtime friend of the Attorney General. It was not the police, however, who retrieved the records of Monroe’s last phone calls. As a reporter discovered at the time, they were removed from the headquarters of General Telephone by mid-morning on the day after Monroe’s death. And, according to the company’s Division Manager, Robert Tiarks, they had been taken by the FBI.
A former senior FBI official, then serving in a West Coast city, confirms it. ‘I was on a visit to California when Monroe died, and there were some people there, Bureau personnel, who normally wouldn’t have been there – agents from out of town. They were on the scene immediately, as soon as she died, before anyone realized what had happened. I subsequently learned that agents had removed the records. It had to be on the instructions of someone high up, higher even than Hoover.’
The former official understood at the time that the orders came from ‘either the Attorney General or the President.’ ‘I remember the communications coming in from the Los Angeles Division,’ said Cartha DeLoach. ‘A Kennedy phone number was on the nightstand by Monroe’s bed.’ Monroe’s death, it seems, at last brought home to the President the scale of the risks he was running. The White House log shows that Peter Lawford called Kennedy at 9:04 A.M. Eastern time – 6:04 A.M. in California – on the morning following Monroe’s death, just an hour after Lawford had hired security men to bury evidence of the brothers’ relations with Monroe. Another of John Kennedy’s lovers, Judith Campbell, called the White House twice the next day – once in the afternoon and again in the evening. A note in the log indicates that Kennedy was in conference, with the scrawled addition ‘No.’ At about this time, it seems, the perilous Campbell liaison was ending at last.4
If mobsters had hoped to use the Monroe connection to destroy Robert Kennedy, they were thwarted by the successful cover-up. That cover-up, however, worked largely thanks to Edgar. By grabbing the telephone records on their behalf, he made the Kennedys more beholden to him than ever.
On August 7, just forty-eight hours after that favor, Robert Kennedy did something quite remarkable. A few hours earlier W. H. Ferry, Vice President of the Fund for the Republic, set up by the Ford Foundation to promote civil liberties, had lambasted Edgar’s scaremongering about Communism as ‘sententious poppycock.’ Robert Kennedy, we know, shared that view. Now, however, he leaped to Edgar’s defense, effusively praising his stance on Communism. ‘I hope,’ he said piously, ‘Hoover will continue to serve the country for many, many years to come.’
Photo agency files contain not a single picture of Monroe with either Kennedy brother, not even of her very public meeting with the President after singing ‘Happy Birthday’ from the stage of Madison Square Garden. Once, though, Globe Photos did have two such photographs. ‘In one of them,’ said a former senior executive, ‘he was looking up at her. You could see the admiration in his eyes. It was a great picture.’5
A fortnight after Monroe’s death, two men visited Globe’s offices. ‘They said they were collecting material for the presidential library,’ said the former executive. ‘They asked to see everything we had on Monroe. I had a stock girl look after them, and then – afterward – we found that everything was gone, even the negatives.’
The staff at Globe remember only one thing about the men who took the photographs. They introduced themselves as FBI agents and had badges to prove it.
Months after Monroe’s death, even though the case was purely a police matter, agents were still interviewing potential informants on the subject. Edgar’s old journalistic mouthpiece Walter Winchell would later write an article virtually accusing Robert Kennedy of the star’s murder. In 1964, with help from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing activist called Frank Capell published a booklet linking Robert Kennedy to the events surrounding Monroe’s death. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the founders of the Motion Picture Alliance was Edgar’s old friend Lela Rogers
who – according to her daughter Ginger – was still in contact with the Director. Later, in the sixties, ranting on about the Kennedys during his California vacations, Edgar would rarely fail to bring up Monroe’s name. Years later, at home in Washington, he would respond to a question about the case from a young neighbor, Anthony Calomaris. ‘He said she was murdered,’ Calomaris recalled, ‘that it wasn’t a suicide, that the Kennedys were involved.’
In the fall of 1962, the chill between Edgar and Robert Kennedy had become a freeze. ‘It became a total rift,’ said former FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans. ‘The phone contact between them ended. The special phone just sat on the desk unused.’
The President, for his part, would see Edgar only twice more in the year that remained to him. The brothers were staying as far away from Edgar as possible, biding their time. For at last, on the horizon, they could see a chance to get rid of him.
28
‘Mr Hoover’s capitulation to his personal pique was irresponsible and clearly contrary to the personal interests of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, constitutional government and the nation.’
Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General, 1976
Instead of sunning himself in Miami Beach, his usual retreat over the holiday, Edgar spent New Year’s 1963 by himself, holed up in a New York hotel, recovering from prostate surgery. He was lonely and feeling his age, and suddenly his age mattered.
In two years’ time he would be seventy, the mandatory retirement age for federal officials. Only an Executive Order, signed by the President, could prolong his reign at the FBI. And in two years’ time, it seemed likely, John Kennedy would be secure in his second term. Unless something unexpected happened, Edgar’s insurance policies were about to run out.
In February, Edgar gave a charade of an interview. ‘My relations with Robert Kennedy,’ he said solemnly, ‘have always been pleasant and cordial, as well as my meetings with the President.’ Was there any truth to rumors that he might retire? ‘No truth whatever,’ said Edgar. ‘I expect to be here a long time … The President has power to extend my term of office.’
President Kennedy intended to do no such thing. The brothers had had enough, and the retirement-at-seventy rule promised to be a way to dump their persecutor without being seen to be firing him. It was now a question of hanging on, of fending Edgar off until after the 1964 election. Then, with Edgar’s seventieth birthday just weeks away, he would be replaced.
The dismissal was to come gift-wrapped. ‘Robert Kennedy told me,’ said Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, ‘they intended to give Hoover a glorious ceremony.’ ‘I remember speculating how they were going to go about it,’ said Courtney Evans, Edgar’s liaison with the Kennedys. ‘Perhaps they could make him Ambassador to Switzerland – the country his family came from.’
The names of possible replacements were now going the rounds – Courtney Evans among them. Robert Kennedy had long since sounded out John Connally, then Governor of Texas. Connally recalled: ‘I said, “Bobby, you’re not going to be able to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover.” But he assured me the time would come, and he would.’
Speculation about Edgar’s successor became a kind of sport. ‘Some friends of mine with mischief in them,’ remembered Joe Dolan, ‘were sitting around trying to think of the most unlikely successor to J. Edgar Hoover. And one of them said, “Adam Yarmolinsky!” He was a very bright lawyer, the assistant to McNamara, over at the Department of Defense. But he looked kind of evil, a bit like a gnome, a schemer, and apart from that he was absolutely not the guy you appoint to head the FBI. It was just a joke, but it got back to Hoover within hours. I guess he didn’t understand that his leg was being pulled.’1
Word of the Kennedys’ intentions spread through the Bureau, from the highest aide to the lowliest rookie agent. ‘It was common knowledge, according to Justice Department gossips,’ recalled Norman Ollestad, ‘that in 1964 the Director would definitely be out.’
‘The way it came to me,’ said Justice Department aide William Hundley, ‘was that the President had said to Bobby, “I can’t do it now. But when I’m reelected I’m going to get rid of him, make him Boxing Commissioner or something.” And when I’d bitch to Bobby about Hoover, he’d say, “Wait, just wait.” That kind of comment kept getting back to Hoover, and that was it …’
‘From then on,’ recalled Courtney Evans, ‘the Director wouldn’t have anything to do with the Kennedys – beyond the formalities. He was so incensed and mad.’
Through the spring and summer of 1963, Edgar went on scratching at the old sore – Kennedy womanizing. On May 29, he wrote to Kenneth O’Donnell raking up the old affair with Jacqueline Kennedy’s press secretary, Pamela Turnure. A week later it was another salvo about the President’s 1951 involvement with Alicia Purdom, letting the Kennedys know he knew about the alleged half-million-dollar payoff to keep Purdom quiet. Edgar kept up a steady stream of information on this, spicing a later memo with a reference to the alleged pregnancy.
At about this time, in 1963, the Kennedys began trying to play Edgar’s game in reverse. When Abba Schwartz of the State Department Bureau of Security reported some new example of Hoover meddling, the President responded with, ‘Tell it to Kenny [O’Donnell]. He’s keeping a record on all this.’ The Kennedys were doing what Edgar did to others, keeping a dossier on him.
Unfortunately for the President, Edgar was way ahead. June 1963 brought brand-new woman trouble, the sort that could not be shrugged off. As the Kennedys wrestled with the mounting civil rights crisis, Edgar quietly opened a new file code-named ‘Bowtie.’ It was to grow to more than a thousand pages, and its subject was a scandal that on the surface appeared to be another nation’s problem.
Britain’s Minister for War, John Profumo, had confessed to having slept with a woman simultaneously involved with the Soviet Naval attaché in London, Yevgeny Ivanov. He resigned, but the crisis continued. The government of Prime Minister Macmillan, who had backed Profumo to the end, was shaken to its foundations. The press, meanwhile, fueled the controversy with daily revelations about the orgies and adulteries of the British establishment.
In Washington, President Kennedy was paying more than ordinary attention. ‘He had devoured every word written about the Profumo case,’ noted Ben Bradlee. ‘He ordered all further cables on that subject sent to him immediately.’ Bradlee assumed the President was merely fascinated by the sexually exotic aspects of the story. But it was more than that. According to persistent reports, he himself had dallied with two of the young women linked to the scandal.
As he combed the reports from London, Kennedy must have been especially concerned about references to a twenty-two-year-old prostitute of Anglo-Czech parentage named Mariella Novotny. In early 1961, she had been in New York and, she said later, was procured for the President-elect by Peter Lawford. They had sex several times in Manhattan, once in a group involving other prostitutes. As in the Profumo case, there was a potential security angle. Novotny’s name was being linked to an alleged Soviet vice ring at the United Nations.2
In the third week of June 1963, John Kennedy brought up the Profumo affair in a conversation with Martin Luther King. After a tumultuous two years, the civil rights leader was facing a fresh crisis – thanks to the FBI. Edgar, who had long since written King off as ‘no good,’ had been telling Kennedy the black leader was under Communist influence.
Specifically, he had persuaded Robert Kennedy to authorize a wiretap of one of King’s advisers who, Edgar alleged, was an active Soviet agent. This was just another of Edgar’s irrational obsessions, but the Kennedys could not be sure of that. They were afraid exposure of such links could bring disaster, not only on King but on the administration for supporting him.
So it was that on June 22, before addressing a group of civil rights leaders at the White House, the President took King by himself into the Rose Garden. He begged him to get rid of two colleagues Edgar claimed were Communists, then asked if he had read about Profumo i
n the newspapers. ‘That,’ he told King, ‘was an example of friendship and loyalty carried too far. Macmillan is likely to lose his government because he has been loyal to a friend. You must take care not to lose your cause for the same reason.’
Kennedy went further. ‘I suppose you know,’ he said, ‘you’re under very close surveillance.’ He warned King to be very careful about what he said on the phone, that if J. Edgar Hoover could prove he had links with Communists, he would use it to wreck pending civil rights legislation.
As the meeting with the President ended, King found himself wondering why Kennedy had taken the precaution of ushering him out into the garden to talk. ‘The President,’ King told an associate later, ‘is afraid of Hoover himself, because he wouldn’t even talk to me in his own office. I guess Hoover must be bugging him, too.’
On June 23, the President left Washington for Europe, on the tour remembered today for the ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech and the pilgrimage to Ireland. He also visited London to see Prime Minister Macmillan. The evening he arrived, as he dined with the British leader, Kennedy learned the Profumo case was about to touch his presidency. The noon edition of the New York Journal American that day carried the headline: HIGH US AIDE IMPLICATED IN V-GIRL SCANDAL. The opening line read: ‘One of the biggest names in American politics – a man who holds a “very high” elective office – has been injected into Britain’s vice-security scandal …’ The report stopped short of naming the President, but the implication was clear.
The report stayed in the paper for one edition and was then dropped without explanation. Robert Kennedy had moved swiftly. He telephoned his brother in the middle of the dinner with Macmillan, FBI files show, and the President expressed ‘concern.’ The FBI representative in London, Charles Bates, was ordered to brief Kennedy the next morning before he left for Italy. If anything develops,’ the President told Bates, ‘anything at all, we’d like to be advised. Get it to us in Rome.’