Kennedy saw the Profumo scandal as a cautionary tale. In June, when he discussed civil rights with Martin Luther King at the White House, he took King for a walk in the Rose Garden, where he warned him to disassociate himself from Levison and O’Dell. “You’ve read about Profumo in the newspapers?” the president asked King. “That was an example of friendship and loyalty carried too far. Macmillan is likely to lose his government because he has been loyal to his friend. You must take care not to lose your cause for the same reason.” King replied that the accusations against Levison could not be true. (King remembered that Kennedy “turned red and shook.” But understanding that continuing ties to O’Dell would strain relations with Kennedy and might weaken administration support for reform legislation, King put O’Dell on notice that he would have to quit the SCLC. Because Kennedy wanted O’Dell fired immediately, the White House leaked a story to the Birmingham News about his communist ties that forced King to act at once. Similarly, the Kennedys brought additional pressure to bear on King to distance himself from Levison. When King tried to finesse the issue by proposing to communicate with Levison only through a mutual friend, Bobby ordered FBI wiretaps on the friend. Levison himself solved the problem by volunteering to break off all communications with King.)
Kennedy also worried that the Profumo scandal might directly embarrass him. On June 29, a week after he had spoken with King, the New York Journal-American published a front-page story about a “high elected American official” and Suzy Chang, a New York prostitute, who was living in England and was part of the Keeler vice or “V-girl” ring. Chang privately claimed that she had slept with Kennedy and eaten dinner with him at the “21” club in New York when he was a senator. To head off potential damage to his brother, on July 1 Bobby asked the two Journal-American reporters who had published the story to meet with him at the Justice Department. They claimed that the “high official” was the president of the United States. Bobby chided them for publishing a story “without any further check to get to the truth of the matter.” One of the reporters said “he had other sources of a confidential nature.” An FBI agent, who sat in on the meeting, reported to Hoover that Bobby “treated the newspaper representatives at arms’ length and the conference ended most coolly and, in fact, there was almost an air of hostility between the Attorney General and the reporters.” According to Seymour Hersh, Bobby used his considerable influence with the Hearst family, who owned the Journal-American, to squelch the story.
Yet Bobby and his brother understood, as their friend Charlie Bartlett pointed out in a 1963 syndicated column, that no president has an iron-clad hold on the press: “Gratitude stirred by favors has an immensely transient quality, particularly among newsmen whose attentions must shift rapidly, and the solid ingratiation of a vast press corps with an independent tradition would be an enterprise beyond the capacities of any set of officials.”
Two days after Bobby saw the Journal-American reporters, he confronted another potential scandal that seemed even more threatening to the president’s political future. On July 3, Hoover advised Bobby of accusations that Kennedy had been involved with a German-born twenty-seven-year-old call girl, Ellen Rometsch, who might be an East German spy. Rometsch had grown up in East Germany, where she had belonged to communist youth groups and allegedly worked as a secretary for Walter Ulbricht, the head of the DDR, before fleeing to the West. A dark-haired beauty described as an Elizabeth Taylor lookalike, Rometsch was introduced to Kennedy by Senate secretary Bobby Baker, who had long made call girls available to senators and other high-government officials. In the spring and summer of 1963, Rometsch apparently made repeated visits to the White House, where she attended naked pool parties and had sex with Kennedy.
The danger from any revelations about the president’s involvement with Rometsch was not lost on Bobby. Though he told Hoover’s assistant Courtney Evans, who briefed Bobby on the rumors, that unfounded allegations about prominent people were common, Evans recorded that the attorney general “made particular note of Rometsch’s name.” Bobby also expressed appreciation for Hoover’s discretion in privately informing him of the stories. While the FBI investigated the accusations, Bobby ensured that Rometsch herself would not embarrass the president with leaks to the press about their trysts. On August 21, he arranged to have her deported to West Germany. Her escort on the flight to Europe was LaVern Duffy, an old Bobby associate on the Senate Rackets Committee in the fifties, who had been seeing Rometsch romantically for months and now became the conduit for Kennedy money buying her silence.
But Rometsch’s distance from potentially inquisitive American reporters and an agreement not to discuss her relations with Kennedy did not eliminate the possibility of a public scandal. In September 1963, Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee began looking into allegations that Bobby Baker had engaged in influence peddling and other ethical violations. On October 7, Baker gave up his Senate position and devoted himself to combating the investigation. Understanding that the White House and Senate Democrats could squelch the probe, Baker tried to enlist Bobby’s support. The unspoken understanding between them was that Bobby—who disliked Baker and his strongest ally, Johnson—would not encourage the Senate inquiry, and in turn, Baker would sit on information about the president and Rometsch. But with evidence of Baker’s wrongdoing mounting, no one could hold back an investigation.
Moreover, a story on October 26 in the Des Moines Register by the well-regarded investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff brought the Rometsch scandal to public attention. Mollenhoff raised questions about Rometsch’s deportation and cited allegations of associations between the “party girl” and “several high executive branch officials” described as “prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of government.” The story more than caught Kennedy’s attention. “The President came in all excited about the news reports concerning the German woman & other prostitutes getting mixed up with government officials, Congressmen, etc.,” Evelyn Lincoln noted in her diary on Monday, October 28. “He called Mike Mansfield to come to the office to discuss the playing down of this news report.” Mollenhoff’s story said nothing about Rometsch’s possible East German ties, which would have made his revelations as sensational as those about Profumo and would have made Kennedy as vulnerable as Macmillan, who lost power in October 1963. The president instructed O’Donnell to get every White House aide on record as having had nothing to do with any Baker call girls.
Bobby became the point man in heading off possible damage to his brother and others at the White House. He sent word to Hoover asking him to discourage any Senate investigation of the Rometsch allegations. Bobby said he was “greatly concerned, as was the President, with the possible harm which will come to the United States if irresponsible action is taken on the Hill in connection with the Ellen Rometsch allegations.” Hoover suggested that they stop Rometsch from getting a visa to return to the United States, so that it would be difficult for the Senate to probe her White House involvements. Bobby, speaking for the president, asked Hoover to meet with Senate leaders, which he did. In a conversation with Mansfield and Everett Dirksen at Mansfield’s apartment in northwest Washington, Hoover assured them that an FBI investigation had turned up no evidence that Rometsch was a spy or a visitor to the White House. He did have, however, plenty of evidence that Baker’s call girls had serviced various senators. Not surprisingly, Hoover’s initiative convinced the Senate to stay away entirely from Baker’s call girls. To further discourage any investigation, JFK told Ben Bradlee that Hoover had lots of “dirt” on senators, which Kennedy implied Bradlee might want to uncover if they began looking into anyone else’s sexual misdeeds.
The Baker probe also raised concerns at the White House. Johnson had not only been Baker’s mentor in the fifties, when Lyndon had been majority leader, he had also publicly attended the opening of a luxury motel in Ocean City, Maryland, in 1962, where Baker, a part owner, entertained “the advise-and-consent set.” Allegations of corrupt dea
lings by Baker put Johnson under suspicion of unethical behavior. The president had a “keen interest” in the Baker case, and Bobby monitored the probe for evidence of any wrongdoing by the vice president. Johnson believed that Bobby, who obviously disliked him, saw him as of little help to the administration and had instigated the Baker investigation in order to throw him off the ticket in 1964.
In fact, Johnson’s suspicions were largely unfounded, but once the stories about Baker became public, the Kennedys shrewdly encouraged rumors that LBJ would be dropped in the following year. The simultaneous leaks and reassurances were smart politics. If Johnson were implicated in any of Baker’s misdeeds, the Kennedys could follow through on the rumors and rid themselves of a political liability. If the talk of Johnson’s wrongdoing proved false, which it did, the White House could simply echo earlier reassurances about keeping him as the ideal running mate.
IN PREPARATION FOR THE 1964 ELECTIONS, the Senate Democratic policy committee and the White House began discussions of how to deal with the country’s concerns and turn them into political advantages over the GOP. Specifically, the administration complained about the “stubborn and destructive obstructionism” of congressional Republicans to tax reforms that could expand the economy, inhibit inflation, and reduce unemployment. Opinion polls in the spring of 1963 had revealed that national defense, nuclear war, communist subversion, education, inflation, unemployment, and racial tensions were principal public worries.
Kennedy believed that the upcoming campaign would largely be about his record. He had every confidence that he would win, especially if the Republicans made conservative senator Barry Goldwater their nominee. But nothing could be taken for granted about the economy, civil rights, space exploration, Cuba, and Vietnam, which impressed him as the problems that needed the greatest attention in the next year and a half. He did not expect to resolve these difficulties in the near term. Instead, he would be content to keep them under control or frame them as challenges that might be effectively addressed in the future. His immediate goal, then, was to put conditions in place that would advance his administration toward a greater mastery of the country’s most compelling dilemmas in a second term.
By the fall of 1963, the president remained focused on the economy and how it would fare in the coming year without tax reform, which was on indefinite hold in Congress. Economic growth in the first quarter of the year had exceeded expectations, making a recession and a tax reduction unlikely. CEA predictions in the summer and fall that the first half of 1964 would see a significant slowdown unless there were a tax cut had no significant impact on Congress. Senators in particular were determined to resist reductions in tax revenues without assurances of a balanced budget. Ten of seventeen senators on the Finance Committee, for example, supported chairman Robert Byrd’s determination to hold up the bill until he had such a commitment from the White House. And even if the administration could promise this unlikely result, there seemed little chance of winning major tax revisions in an election year without a recession.
Since Kennedy believed that a slowdown would occur, if not in 1964 then certainly in his second term, he was confident that he could eventually win his tax cut. He intended to couple it with an attack on poverty. John Kenneth Galbraith’s assertion in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society, that the country had a permanent class of impoverished citizens had brought the issue to Kennedy’s attention. But it was Michael Harrington’s compelling book, The Other America, describing the suffering of forty to sixty million Americans, coupled with Dwight Macdonald’s fifty-page New Yorker essay-review on the invisible poor, that stirred Kennedy to plan a post-’64 election campaign to break the cycle of poverty in which so many elderly and minority Americans lived.
In October 1963, Kennedy discussed the issue with Walter Heller. A New York Times story on Kentucky underscored for Kennedy that “there was [a] tremendous problem to be met.” He wanted to make “a two- or three-day trip to some of the key poverty-stricken areas to focus the spotlight and arouse the American conscience on this problem from which we are so often shielded. It’s perfectly clear,” Heller said in a note to himself, “that he is aroused about this and if we could really produce a program to fill the bill, he would be inclined to run with it.” When they revisited the subject in November, Kennedy said he remained “very much in favor of doing something,” but he wanted Heller to “make clear that we’re doing something for the middle-income man in the suburbs as well.” Kennedy understood that the success of any big social program like Social Security partly depended on including the middle class as well as the poor.
CIVIL RIGHTS, which had become a more compelling issue in May and June, now stood at the center of domestic affairs. The chances of passing Kennedy’s civil rights bill, however, were poor. Getting a strong bill through the House seemed possible: Northern Democrats would likely join with moderate Republicans to outvote southern Democrats; they might even be able to end discrimination in places of public accommodation and re-create a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), the two most controversial civil rights reforms. But the twenty-two southern senators from the old Confederacy were confident of finding twelve conservative allies to defeat Kennedy’s bill. In addition, the Senate had never been able to muster the two-thirds-plus-one vote to stop a civil rights filibuster. If the White House agreed to quietly abandon the issue of segregation in public accommodations, Mansfield believed that they might bring enough Republicans along to win a limited civil rights law. “The assumption is that it is better to secure passage of as much of the Administration’s legislative proposals on civil rights as is possible,” Mansfield told the president, “rather than to run the very real risk of losing all in an effort to obtain all.”
The White House had some small hope that it might convince “a leading southern Senator . . . to play the role that [Michigan senator] Arthur Vandenberg [had] played in the isolationist fight” at the start of the Cold War. Eventually, some southerner was going to say that “the world had changed, that the struggle for equal rights was irresistible and that the South, instead of wasting its energies in vain recrimination and resistance,” needed to accept “a constructive resolution” to a problem that undermined the country’s domestic and international well-being. Lister Hill of Alabama, a New Dealer, who did not have to run again until 1968, when he would be seventy-four and might not stand for reelection anyway, seemed a good choice. But Hill, like his fellow southerners in both Houses, would not break a commitment to the region’s mores.
It was clear to Kennedy that getting any kind of civil rights law would require an all-out lobbying effort. He needed to enlist as many groups as possible in bringing pressure to bear on uncommitted congressmen and senators. As Johnson had pointed out to civil rights leaders in June, the administration began with about two-to-one support in the Senate for a bill, but what he meant was that there were only fifty votes for and twenty-two against. The remaining twenty-eight uncommitted senators would decide the issue, which meant selling civil rights to them and their constituents during the few months left in the congressional session. Educators, women, and labor and religious leaders who were already sympathetic to legislative action were asked at White House meetings to educate others about the destructive effects of discrimination and personally do all they could to advance social justice. Businessmen, especially those most affected by the law’s provision that would end segregation in places of public accommodation, were urged to understand the national need for such a reform.
Yet Kennedy remained uncertain that he could sway Congress, and he worried that failure might be disastrous for his administration. In a White House meeting with civil rights leaders on June 22, he predicted a hard struggle that might cost him dearly. “The Vice President and I know what it will mean if we fail,” Kennedy said. “I have just seen a new poll—national approval of the administration has fallen from 60 to 47 percent.” (No one ever located the poll Kennedy cited; his Gallup approval rating at the time was,
in fact, 61 percent.) “A good many programs I care about may go down the drain as a result of this,” he said, “so we are putting a lot on the line.” He added, “I may lose the next election because of this.” On August 1, a reporter at a news conference asked Kennedy to comment on “indications lately that your policies on civil rights are costing you heavily in political prestige and popularity.” The reporter asked Kennedy to say “whether civil rights are worth an election.” Kennedy replied “[I] assume what you say is probably right.” But because civil rights currently represented “a national crisis of great proportions,” he believed that “whoever was President would meet his responsibilities” by advancing the rights of all citizens to equal opportunity.
Kennedy’s dire predictions were partly aimed at convincing civil rights advocates to accept a compromise bill, which was the only sort of measure he believed could pass. “The worst trouble of all would be to lose the fight in the Congress,” he asserted. He wanted to discourage the gathering on the twenty-second of rights activists King, James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Joe Rauh, Walter Reuther, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young from doing anything that jeopardized passage of even a watered-down law.
Kennedy was especially negative about a march on the Capitol. White House press leaks were already discouraging the idea when the Urban League’s Whitney Young asked him at the meeting whether newspaper reports about the president’s opposition were accurate. Kennedy responded, “We want success in the Congress, not a big show on the Capitol.” He acknowledged that civil rights demonstrations had pushed the administration and Congress into consideration of a major reform bill, “but now we are in a new phase,” he said, “the legislative phase, and results are essential. The wrong kind of demonstration at the wrong time will give those fellows [on the Hill] a chance to say that they have to prove their courage by voting against us. To get the votes we need we have, first, to oppose demonstrations which lead to violence, and, second, give Congress a fair chance to work its will.”