In Washington, forty-eight hours after publication of the Journal American story, the authors of the article faced the Attorney General in his office. The paper’s Managing Editor, Pulitzer Prize winner James Horan, and Dom Frasca, remembered by a colleague as ‘the best investigative reporter’ on the paper, had been hauled from their homes in New York and flown to the capital in the Kennedys’ private jet.
The two journalists have since died, but their ordeal at the hands of Robert Kennedy was recorded by the FBI. According to the file, the President’s brother asked the newsmen to name the ‘high U.S. aide’ who, according to the article, was being linked to the Profumo scandal. Horan replied that the reference was indeed to the President and that, according to the newspaper’s sources, it involved a woman he had known shortly before he was elected President.
‘It is noted,’ Edgar’s liaison man Courtney Evans reported, ‘that the Attorney General treated the newspaper representatives at arm’s length … There was an air of hostility …’ When the reporters refused to reveal their sources, Kennedy followed up ruthlessly. According to Mark Monsky, godson of the Journal American’s owner Randolph Hearst, the President’s brother threatened to bring an antitrust suit against the paper. Hearst’s editors then dropped the story.
After this confrontation with the reporters, Robert Kennedy betrayed how vulnerable he felt about Edgar. He tried to persuade Courtney Evans ‘not to write a memorandum’ to Edgar about the meeting. According to Charles Bates, Edgar had been delving into the case for some time. ‘There was a big flap,’ Bates recalled. ‘My HQ sent cables saying “Is this true? What can you find out?”’
On the evening of June 29, as the President dined with Macmillan, Bates had sent Edgar coded telegram 861, marked VERY URGENT. Of twenty lines, seventeen had been excised by the censor as of the writing of this book. What remains reads: ‘…[Name censored] talked about President Kennedy and repeated a rumor that was going around New York …’ A second document provides more background. A report addressed to William Sullivan, by then Assistant Director in charge of Counter-Intelligence, offers – between the censored chunks – information that:
One of [name blanked out] clients was John Kennedy, then presidential candidate. [Name] stated that Marie Novotny, British prostitute, went to New York to take [name’s] place, since she was going on pre-election rounds with Kennedy.
Before it was silenced, the New York Journal American had referred to a second mystery woman, ‘a beautiful Chinese-American girl now in London.’ The highest authorities, said the paper, ‘identified her as Suzy Chang …’
Suzy Chang was an aspiring actress and model. There is no evidence she was a prostitute, but she did move in the wealthy London circles associated with the Profumo case. Tracked down by this author, she admitted having known Kennedy. ‘We’d meet in the 21 Club,’ she said nervously. ‘Everybody saw me eating with him. I think he was a nice guy, very charming.’ Then she laughed. ‘What else am I going to say?’
A mass of FBI and Immigration Service documents show Chang did travel to New York in 1960, the year she was alleged to have gone with John Kennedy. She was also there in 1961, and over the Christmas period at the end of 1962. The most revealing document notes that late in 1963 ‘Chang arrived in US at New York, via Flight 701 … She was the [blanked out section in report]… She was questioned regarding the “Profumo Affair.”’
The Profumo case was treated with the utmost gravity in Washington. Defense Secretary McNamara, CIA Director John McCone, Defense Intelligence Agency boss General Joseph Carroll, and usually one of Edgar’s senior aides, attended a series of meetings. The case was handled at the FBI by two Assistant Directors. Progress reports, which remain almost entirely censored, went to the office of President Kennedy, to his brother – and to Edgar. ‘To find that the President was perhaps involved with somebody in the British security scandal!’ exclaimed Courtney Evans, recalling the gravity of those days. ‘Nobody was grinning …’
Except, perhaps, for Edgar. By the time the President returned from Europe he had a pile of information on Suzy Chang, and probably on Mariella Novotny, too. Heavily censored documents show Edgar was in contact with his New York office about Chang just twenty-four hours before the Journal American story broke in that city.
He had long used the Journal American, like other Hearst papers, to fuel fears about the Red Menace. There were even former FBI men on the paper’s staff. Edgar’s phone logs show that he talked regularly with Richard Berlin, head of the Hearst conglomerate. Berlin oversaw an editorial policy of fierce opposition to the policies of the Kennedy administration.
He and Edgar, moreover, were both close to Roy Cohn, who was acting as attorney for an American involved in the Profumo case and said by a central figure in the scandal to have ‘arranged sex parties for JFK in London.’ A telltale handwritten note on one of the FBI’s Profumo documents reads: ‘Roy Cohn has this info.’
President Kennedy had been compromised by his relations with Judith Campbell, Marilyn Monroe – and now Novotny and Chang – all in circumstances that touched on national security, all discovered by Edgar. Yet all that summer the brothers and their FBI chief kept up a pretense of cordiality.
Edgar wrote to ‘Dear Bob’ to congratulate him on the birth of his eighth child, a son named Christopher. He commiserated with the President when his newborn son died less than two days after birth. The brothers wrote polite letters back.
All the while Edgar was up to his tricks, using the press to distort the facts on organized crime, bringing pressure to brand Martin Luther King a Communist, trying to get Robert Kennedy to authorize wiretaps – not just against close colleagues but against King himself. In August, even as he was offering sympathy over the loss of the President’s baby, Edgar had agents urgently investigating a lead about yet another woman, yet another potential security risk.
Ellen Rometsch, a lovely young refugee from East Germany, had come to the United States in 1961 with her husband, a West German army sergeant on assignment to his country’s military mission in Washington. She had looks like Elizabeth Taylor and soon became known as a ‘party girl.’ One of the men Rometsch met during the social whirl was Bobby Baker, secretary to the Senate Majority Leader and a close associate of Lyndon Johnson’s, and she was soon appearing in low-cut dress and fishnet tights at the exclusive Quorum Club, near the Capitol, which Baker had helped to found.
One of the club’s patrons in the late summer of 1961 was Bill Thompson, a railroad lobbyist and an intimate friend of the President’s. A wealthy bachelor, he was privy to many of the secrets of Kennedy’s love life and had been present at one of the earliest meetings with Judith Campbell.
‘We were having cocktails at the Quorum,’ Baker recalled, ‘and Bill Thompson came over to me. He pointed to Ellen and he said, “Boy, that son of a bitch is something. D’you think she’d come down and have dinner with me and the President?” So I had her meet Thompson, and she went down and saw the President. And he sent back word it was the best time he ever had in his life. That was not the only time. She saw him on other occasions. It went on for a while.’
Rometsch was loose-lipped, however, and began to talk about her relationships with men in Washington. Someone tipped off the FBI about her, and in July 1963 agents came to ask questions. As a recent refugee from the East, and one who had once been a member of Communist youth organizations, Rometsch might have been a Communist plant. Soon, with the cooperation of the German authorities, she and her husband were quietly shipped back to Germany.
The matter might have ended there were it not for the scandal that exploded, three weeks after Rometsch’s departure, around Bobby Baker, the man who had arranged many of her introductions to Washington politicians. The focus of the Baker case was on financial corruption, not sex, but – behind the scenes – the Quorum Club connection triggered an explosive allegation.
‘Information has been developed,’ read a top-level FBI memo written on October 26,
br /> that pertains to possible questionable activities on the part of high government officials. It was also alleged that the President and the Attorney General had availed themselves of services of playgirls.
The remainder of the text of the memo was censored as supplied for this book, and its source was not identified.
That same Saturday, in Iowa, The Des Moines Register ran a front-page story reporting the Rometsch expulsion for the first time. The FBI investigation, said the paper, ‘established that the beautiful brunette had been attending parties with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of Government … The possibility that her activity might be connected with espionage was of some concern, because of the high rank of her male companions.’
Clark Mollenhoff, who wrote the Register story, was one of Edgar’s ‘friendly’ reporters.3 His article added that Senator John Williams, the Republican from Delaware, ‘had obtained an account’ of Rometsch’s activity. It would later emerge that the Senator had come into possession of documents from the FBI, a leak that only Edgar could have approved. His information, the Register reported, included a list of Rometsch’s ‘government friends,’ and he intended to present it to the Senate Rules Committee, the body investigating Bobby Baker, the following Tuesday.
Now the Kennedys performed urgent damage control. In a series of panicky calls to Edgar’s office, a White House aide begged the FBI to prevent the Register story from being published in other newspapers. The President himself, he said, was ‘personally interested in having this story killed.’ The Bureau refused to help.
Publication of the story on a weekend, and in an out-of-town newspaper, offered a small breathing space. The Attorney General called La Verne Duffy, a Kennedy friend, and dispatched him on the next plane to West Germany. His mission was to silence Rometsch before the press got to her. It was reported a few days later that ‘men flashing U.S. security badges saw Mrs Rometsch on Sunday and got her to sign a statement formally denying intimacies with important people.’ Letters Rometsch later sent to Duffy thanked him for sending money and assured him, ‘Of course I will keep quiet …’
At home, very early on Monday morning and just twenty-four hours before Senator Williams’ planned speech to the Senate Rules Committee, Robert Kennedy called Edgar at home. As the man with access to the facts, Edgar was the one person likely to be able to persuade the Senate leadership that the hearing would be contrary to the national interest and – because members of Congress were likely to be dragged in – contrary to the interests of Congress, too.
Edgar’s notes of the call from Kennedy, and of a later meeting at the Justice Department, leave no doubt of the Attorney General’s humiliation. The President’s brother was a supplicant, begging Edgar to bring the senators in line.
That afternoon, as the capital buzzed with impending scandal, Edgar briefed Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and Everett Dirksen, his Republican counterpart. To ensure total secrecy, they met at Mansfield’s home. What Edgar said at the meeting is censored in the FBI record, but it evidently did the trick. Before the afternoon was out, Senate plans to discuss Rometsch had been canceled.
The crisis was over, but it had been desperately serious. The Rometsch affair had threatened to become a Profumostyle sex and security disaster that could have forced the President into resignation. The cover-up had been achieved at great cost and left the Kennedys more indebted to Edgar than ever. The power struggle had lasted nearly three years, and they were losing.
Three months earlier, in the face of pressure from the FBI, Robert Kennedy had refused a Bureau request to wiretap Martin Luther King on the unfounded suspicion that he was under Communist control. Since then, in the week Ellen Rometsch had flown back to Germany, there had been the great civil rights march on Washington. A quarter of a million people had descended on the capital to hear King speak of his dream of freedom and to sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ For millions it was a moment of inspiration, of hope for progress. For Edgar, a southerner born in the nineteenth century, it merely inflamed his fear of King.
Edgar had again pressed the Attorney General to authorize a wiretap on King. Again Kennedy hesitated, knowing discovery of such surveillance would be politically disastrous. Then, bowing to the pressure, he authorized just one tap. In October, when Edgar demanded taps on four more King telephones at the height of the Rometsch affair, Kennedy caved in. The telephone taps, along with microphone surveillance, would continue until 1966.
On October 26, the morning he and Edgar discussed Ellen Rometsch, the Attorney General had found himself in an impossible situation. On the one hand he was virtually begging for assistance with the Rometsch problem. On the other, he was angry at Edgar for disseminating an outrageously misleading report – that Martin Luther King was ‘knowingly, willingly, and regularly taking guidance from Communists.’ When he tried to remonstrate, Edgar just stonewalled. The Kennedys had lost control of J. Edgar Hoover.
There would have been ‘no living with the Bureau,’ Kennedy told an aide, if he had not approved the King wiretaps. Once he did, though, the Kennedys were mired even deeper. ‘It was a trap,’ wrote King’s biographer Taylor Branch. ‘Hoover would possess a club to offset Kennedy’s special relationship with the President … How could Kennedy hope to control Hoover once he had agreed to wiretap King? There was a Faustian undertow to Kennedy’s dilemma, and he did not feel strong enough to resist.’
Edgar picked October 29, the day after he had rescued the President from the Rometsch scandal, to discuss his future with Robert Kennedy. What of the rumors on Capitol Hill, he asked, that he was about to be fired? Kennedy assured him, Edgar noted with satisfaction, that the rumors were unfounded. Two days later he went to lunch with the President at the White House.
It must have been an extraordinary encounter, and deeply humiliating for the President. At the height of the Rometsch crisis, he had been forced to break his own rule and telephone Edgar directly. Now they were face-to-face. The Kennedy archives list the meeting as ‘off the record,’ but we know a little of what transpired from the President’s friend Ben Bradlee.
‘He told me Hoover had talked to him about that German woman,’ Bradlee recalled, ‘that they’d looked at pictures of her, and Hoover had discussed what she did with various politicians.’ Kennedy said nothing to Bradlee about the dirt Edgar had on him and his brother.
The President’s aide David Powers, meanwhile, was to hint that Edgar’s future was discussed at the meeting. And, according to Bradlee, Kennedy decided he would have to have Edgar over more often. ‘He felt it was wise – with rumors flying and every indication of a dirty campaign coming up.’
There had been only six meetings between Edgar and John Kennedy since 1961, and there would never be another. Twenty-two days after that last secret encounter at the White House, the President flew to Dallas.
29
‘Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission, on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it …’
Congressman Hale Boggs, House Majority Leader and former member of the Warren Commission
Edgar learned of the assassination the way the world’s newsmen did, from the UPI teleprinter installed in his office. The first flash bulletin came in at 1:34 P.M., Washington time, four minutes after the shooting, as the President’s limousine sped toward a Dallas hospital.
Nine minutes later, with UPI saying Kennedy was ‘perhaps fatally wounded,’ Edgar picked up the direct line that neither he nor the Attorney General had used for months. Robert Kennedy was at home eating lunch, and the call was transferred to him there. ‘I thought something must be wrong,’ the President’s brother was to recall, ‘because Hoover wouldn’t be calling me here.’ Moments later he hung up, gagged and turned away.
Edgar merely noted, in a five-line memo, that he had passed on the news. Edgar’s voice, the Attorney General would recall, had been ‘not quite as excited as if he was reporting the f
act that he found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University [Washington’s predominantly black college]. His conversations with me on November 22 were so unpleasant.’
Edgar would never offer a word of commiseration – he just sent one of those terse formal notes of his. In the nine months Robert Kennedy was to remain in office, the two men would rarely speak. When the direct-line phone next rang, Edgar merely waited until it stopped. Then he ordered, ‘Put that damn thing back on Miss Gandy’s desk, where it belongs.’
When Edgar called Kennedy a second time, forty minutes after the shooting, he was still talking only of ‘critical’ wounds. The Attorney General, who had better sources, set him straight. ‘You may be interested to know,’ he snapped, ‘that my brother is dead.’
That evening, Edgar went home to watch television. The next day he went to the races.
‘The track raced on the Saturday, the day after Kennedy died,’ said Bill Koras, an official at Pimlico, ‘and Mr Hoover was there. He used our little private office and was there most of the day conducting business about the assassination. Mr Tolson was with him, and he went down to place the bets.’
Within hours of the murder, before leaving his office, Edgar had written an ingratiating letter to Lyndon Johnson, the man who had gambled – correctly – that fate might bring him the presidency.
My dear Mr President,
I was indeed shocked by the brutal assassination today of President Kennedy and I want to offer my deepest sympathy on the Nation’s tragic loss of your personal friend.
My staff and I want to reaffirm our earnest desire to be of assistance to you in every possible way.
This was pure hypocrisy. Edgar well knew that Johnson and the Kennedys had at best tolerated one another. By contrast, he and Johnson had long been exchanging letters of mutual admiration. In one, just months earlier, the Vice President had expressed his ‘complete and utter devotion’ to Edgar.