That first encounter sowed the seeds of future discord. Pique aside, Kennedy sensed danger long before Edgar became a threat to the Kennedy presidency. Exposure of the affair with Arvad – a suspected Nazi spy – could have been disastrous. In 1946, the moment he became a career politician, Kennedy began worrying about Edgar’s dossier.
‘When Jack came down to Congress,’ recalled his friend Langdon Marvin, ‘one of the things on his mind was the Inga-Binga tape in FBI files – the tape he was on. He wanted to get the tape from the FBI. I told him not to ask for it … Ten years later, after he beat Henry Cabot Lodge in the Massachusetts senatorial race, Jack became alarmed. “That bastard. I’m going to force Hoover to give me those files,” he said to me. I said, “Jack, you’re not going to do a thing. You can be sure there’ll be a dozen copies made before he returns them to you, so you will not have gained a yard. And if he knows you’re desperate for them, he’ll realize he has you in a stranglehold.”’
Perhaps Kennedy did betray his fear. Just after his election to the Senate, the record shows, he asked for ‘the opportunity of shaking hands’ with Edgar. From then until 1960, Kennedy went out of his way to flatter the man he privately called ‘bastard.’ Even at his wedding, he found time to tell the Hyannis FBI agent he was always available to ‘support Mr Hoover.’ Just weeks later he piled on the flattery, saying the FBI was the only agency ‘worthy of its salt.’ His brother, Robert, for his part, was said to be ‘more enthusiastic than ever about J. Edgar Hoover.’
Edgar wrote polite replies, filed the letters and continued to collect smear material. He was to learn that, one night in 1958, a couple named Leonard and Florence Kater had been disturbed by the sound of pebbles being thrown at an upstairs window. The window belonged to their twenty-year-old lodger, Pamela Turnure, a secretary in Kennedy’s Senate office. The man Turnure let in that night was Kennedy himself, and he became a regular nocturnal visitor.
The Katers, strict Catholics, became obsessed about the man they called the ‘philanderer.’ They rigged up a tape recorder to pick up the sounds of the couple’s lovemaking and snapped a picture of Kennedy sneaking out in the middle of the night. They spied on him for months on end, even after Turnure moved out of their house.
Something odd happened in the course of this persecution. Kennedy told an aide he thought his home telephone or his secretary’s was being tapped. The aide, acting on his own initiative, asked the FBI to check it out. Then, apparently after speaking further with Kennedy, he called back to ask the FBI to ‘just forget the whole matter.’ Kennedy, we can assume, was appalled at the notion of asking Edgar for any such favor – not least if, as he may have feared, the Bureau itself was involved in the bugging.
Edgar learned of Kennedy’s affair with Turnure soon enough anyway, thanks to the Katers. In the spring of 1959, with the election campaign approaching, they mailed details of the ‘adulterer’s’ conduct to the newspapers. The press shied away, but one company – Stearn Publications – sent the Katers’ letter on to Edgar. Soon, according to one source, he quietly obtained a copy of the compromising sex tapes and offered them to Lyndon Johnson as campaign ammunition.
‘Hoover and Johnson both had something the other wanted,’ said Robert Baker, the Texan’s longtime confidant. ‘Johnson needed to know Hoover was not after his ass. And Hoover certainly wanted Lyndon Johnson to be president rather than Jack Kennedy. Hoover was a leaker, and he was always telling Johnson about Kennedy’s sexual proclivities. Johnson told me Hoover played a tape for him, made by this woman who had rented an apartment to one of John Kennedy’s girlfriends. And she turned the tape over to the FBI …’
One senior official, William Sullivan, said flatly that Edgar tried ‘to sabotage Jack Kennedy’s campaign.’ Surviving records suggest Agents in Charge had standing orders to report everything they picked up on him. In March 1960 the New Orleans office quoted an informant who:
had occasion to overhear a conversation which indicated that Senator Kennedy had been compromised with a woman in Las Vegas, Nevada … He stated that when Senator Kennedy was in Miami, Fla., an airline hostess named [name deleted] was sent to visit Sen. Kennedy.
Edgar had the woman’s name and address within hours. Another report, filed a few days later from Los Angeles, remained totally censored as this book was being written. It was marked merely ‘Memo, John F. Kennedy, U.S. Senator, Information Concerning, Central Research Matter.’
In April, as Kennedy’s primary victories began to panic the Johnson camp, DeLoach reported a source who:
noted on the top of Kennedy’s desk a photograph openly displayed. This photo included Senator Kennedy and other men, as well as several girls in the nude. It was taken aboard a yacht or some type of pleasure cruiser … The thing that disturbed him most was that the Senator would show such poor judgment in leaving this photo openly displayed … Members of the guard and cleaning services were aware of the photograph and Kennedy’s ‘extracurricular activities’ were a standard joke around the Senate Office Building.
On the very day of the nomination, July 13, DeLoach received a summary of ‘highlights’ of the Bureau’s Kennedy file It included a reference to the Inga Arvad affair in World War II and to ‘affidavits from two mulatto prostitutes in New York.’ It also raised a factor far more ominous than the sexual allegations, yet inextricably linked to them – ‘the hoodlum connections of Senator Kennedy.’
John Kennedy, like his father before him, had apparently slipped into his own shabby relationship with organized crime. He was compromised by it, and not only because of sex – caught, even before the presidency began, in the tangle of intrigue that may eventually have led to his assassination.
Edgar, himself long since neutralized by the mob because of his homosexuality, would gradually discover the extent of the younger man’s folly.
The Kennedy connection with the Mafia had not ended with Prohibition. Joseph Kennedy had maintained personal and business ties to the mob. His Chicago agent in the forties was a Miami gangster – eventually shot dead following a deal with the syndicate. He had played golf from time to time since the thirties with Johnny Roselli, the Chicago mob’s man on West Coast.
John Kennedy followed the same perilous road. According to Meyer Lansky’s widow, Kennedy met Lansky when he visited Cuba in 1957 – even took his advice on where to find women. Not long afterward, in Arizona, he went to mass with ‘Smiling Gus’ Battaglia, a close friend of Mafia chieftain Joe Bonanno. Later, he met Bonanno himself.
In 1960, when the Kennedys were pursuing the presidency, Joe Kennedy had meetings in California with numerous gangsters. He mended fences with Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, whom his son Robert – in sharp contrast to the father and the elder brother – had long been pursuing.
At the height of the campaign, Joseph Kennedy reportedly met with an assortment of organized crime bosses at Felix Young’s restaurant in New York. ‘I took the reservations,’ said Edna Daulyton, then working as a hostess at Young’s, ‘and it was as though every gangster chief in the United States was there. I don’t remember all the names now, but there was John Roselli, Carlos Marcello from New Orleans, the two brothers from Dallas, the top men from Buffalo, California and Colorado. They were all top people, not soldiers. I was amazed Joe Kennedy would take the risk.’
Thanks to a variety of sources, including FBI wiretaps and mob associates, it is now clear the Kennedys used the mob connection as a stepping-stone to power. They asked Carlos Marcello to use his influence to win Louisiana’s support for Kennedy at the Convention. He refused – he was already committed to Lyndon Johnson – but Chicago Mafia boss Giancana proved helpful.
Giancana and Roselli, Joe Kennedy’s golfing friend, would later be overheard on an FBI wiretap discussing the ‘donations’ they had made during the vital primary campaign in West Virginia. According to Judith Campbell, who became the candidate’s lover in the spring of 1960, John Kennedy himself took outrageous risks to enlist Giancana’s help. He met se
cretly with the Mafia boss at least twice and even sent Campbell to him as a courier, carrying vast sums of money in cash.
‘I felt Jack was entrusting me with something that was very important to him,’ Campbell recalled. ‘I didn’t know where the money was going to go when it left Sam, but I knew it had to do with the campaign … Someone was being paid off, something was being bought with this money.’
A mass of information suggests that is exactly what was going on. The Kennedy millions, along with contributions from the mobsters themselves, were used to buy votes both during the primaries and – in Chicago – in the close-run election that sent Kennedy to the White House.
From the start, Edgar knew something of all this. As early as March 1960 – the very month Kennedy began discussing Giancana with Judith Campbell – word reached FBI headquarters that:
members of the underworld element … Joe Fischetti [a Giancana associate] and other unidentified hoodlums are financially supporting and actively endeavoring to secure the nomination for the presidency as Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy … to assist Senator Kennedy’s campaign whereby … hoodlums will have an entre [sic] to Senator Kennedy …
In July, on the eve of the Convention in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy was told that Edgar’s agents had been trying to dig up information about the conduct of the West Virginia primary. A long FBI report containing ‘an extensive amount of derogatory information’ on his brother was supposedly on its way to the Justice Department.
If John Kennedy was worried by such reports, he did not show it. His antics with women during the Convention caused near panic among Democratic officials. We now know he was juggling Judith Campbell, Marilyn Monroe, whom he had known on and off for years, and sundry call girls. Los Angeles law enforcement noted his use of whores from a mob-controlled vice ring. This, too, would eventually be reported to Edgar.
Kennedy often shrugged off warnings that his womanizing might one day ruin him. ‘They can’t touch me while I’m alive,’ he said to one intimate, ‘and after I’m dead, who cares?’ ‘Jack,’ said Senator George Smathers, ‘felt he could walk on water so far as women were concerned.’ Reckless womanizing was a flaw in Kennedy’s character that imperiled everything he strove for, and Edgar was one of the first to spot that flaw.
According to one compelling account, Edgar used his knowledge to influence the selection of the vice presidential candidate at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 1960.
The Democrat Edgar favored, Lyndon Johnson, had gone to the Los Angeles Convention not just to win the nomination for himself, but to see Kennedy beaten. ‘LBJ,’ said the political wags, stood for ‘Let’s Block Jack.’ It was a dirty fight. Johnson’s men spread the word that Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease – which was true – and that his father had been pro-Nazi, which was not unfair. Both sides accused the other of buying delegates’ votes. When Kennedy money and superb organization defeated Johnson on the first ballot, he was furious.
‘He barked at aides, cursed, slammed down telephones,’ recalled Johnson’s aide Bobby Baker. ‘He refused to go and thank his exhausted campaign workers. I did not know it at the time, but LBJ had learned that the Knight newspapers on the West Coast would be out with a midnight edition saying John F. Kennedy was considering three men for the vicepresidential spot – and that LBJ was not among them.’
Less than twenty-four hours later, all that had changed. After a day of hectic speculation, Johnson stepped before the cameras to announce he was to run alongside Kennedy as the candidate for the vice presidency. ‘Jack Kennedy has asked me to serve,’ he said smoothly. ‘I accept.’
Hardly anyone had expected this development. And over the years historians have tried repeatedly to analyze the tense negotiations between the Kennedy and Johnson camps that led to Johnson accepting the vice-presidential slot.2 Kennedy himself told his aide Pierre Salinger cryptically that ‘the whole story will never be known. And it’s just as well it won’t be.’ ‘The only people who were involved in the discussions were Jack and myself,’ said Robert Kennedy. ‘We both promised each other that we’d never tell what happened.’
What happened, apparently, was blackmail. For John Kennedy, a key factor in giving Johnson the vice presidential slot was the threat of ruinous sex revelations, revelations that would have destroyed the ‘American family man’ image so carefully seeded in the national mind, and snatched the presidency from his grasp. The blackmailers, by this account, were Johnson himself – and Edgar.
The new information came from Evelyn Lincoln, John Kennedy’s personal secretary for twelve years, before and throughout his presidency, and herself a part of the Kennedy legend. She lived and breathed the Kennedy saga, took her boss’ intimate telephone calls, saw his most secret correspondence, watched him agonize over crucial decisions. She was also at his side in Los Angeles.
Intensely loyal to the President’s memory, Mrs Lincoln would say no more about his sex life than was necessary to make her point about the episode in Los Angeles. She did, however, admit that her boss was a ‘ladies’ man.’ Then, with a chuckle, she blamed it on the ladies. ‘Kennedy didn’t chase women,’ she laughed. ‘The women chased Kennedy. I’ve never seen anything like it …’3
During the 1960 campaign, according to Mrs Lincoln, Kennedy discovered how vulnerable his womanizing had made him. Sexual blackmail, she said, had long been part of Lyndon Johnson’s modus operandi – abetted by Edgar. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ Lincoln said, ‘gave Johnson the information about various congressmen and senators so that Johnson could go to X senator and say, “How about this little deal you have with this woman?” and so forth. That’s how he kept them in line. He used his IOUs with them as what he hoped was his road to the presidency. He had this trivia to use, because he had Hoover in his corner. And he thought that the members of Congress would go out there and put him over at the Convention. But then Kennedy beat him at the Convention. And well, after that Hoover and Johnson and their group were able to push Johnson on Kennedy.
‘LBJ,’ said Lincoln, ‘had been using all the information Hoover could find on Kennedy – during the campaign, even before the Convention. And Hoover was in on the pressure on Kennedy at the Convention.’
Whatever Edgar had on Kennedy at this stage, it was apparently enough. His agents’ reports had filled him in on some of the recent womanizing, and there was also the ugly information about the Mafia connection. There was, too, the dossier Kennedy himself had long been worried about: the voluminous file, complete with tape recordings, on the candidate’s wartime affair with Inga Arvad.
In 1960 only fifteen years had passed since the war. Had voters learned that Kennedy had had a serious affair with a woman he knew to be close to Hitler and Göring, many – not least the vital Jewish constituency – might well have turned against him. Some believed that his father’s supposed Nazi sympathies would count against him anyway.
During their day of decision over the vice presidency, the brothers did their worrying alone in a bedroom, away from their aides. As John paced up and down and Robert slumped on a bed, Lincoln moved in and out of the room with messages. She heard enough, she says, to understand that Edgar’s smear information on Kennedy was at the heart of their dilemma. ‘It was the information J. Edgar Hoover passed to Johnson – about womanizing, and things in Joe Kennedy’s background, and anything he could dig up. Johnson was using that as clout. Kennedy was angry, because they had boxed him into a corner. He was absolutely boxed in. He and Bobby tried everything they could think of, anything to get Johnson out of the way. But in that situation, they couldn’t do it.’
Once he had decided on Johnson, John Kennedy tried to make little of it. ‘I’m forty-three years old,’ he told his aide Kenneth O’Donnell. ‘I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything …’
Lyndon Johnson saw it differently. ‘I looked it up,’ he would tell Clare Boothe Luce later. ‘One out of every four presidents has died in offic
e. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.’
Evelyn Lincoln’s account, if accurate, is evidence that Edgar’s interference in the American political process was even more insidious than previously feared. It suggests, in effect, that he subverted the democratic system as ruthlessly as any secret police chief in a totalitarian state.
*
Edgar soon had an opportunity to test his power. The very day after the Convention, a press report forecast that – if elected – Kennedy would fire Edgar.
‘Clyde Tolson called me,’ recalled Cartha DeLoach, ‘and said, “We ought to have some feeling as to his intentions regarding the Director. Why don’t you get one of your friends in the press to plant a question at a press conference?” I called a vice president at UPI, a good friend, and asked him to ask Kennedy whether he would keep Hoover on. He did ask that question, and John Kennedy’s response was immediately, without hesitation, “That will be one of the first appointments I will make.”’
Indeed, less than three weeks after his nomination, Kennedy had committed himself to reappointing Edgar. Three months later, the night after his election, Edgar’s name came up after dinner with friends at Hyannis Port.
‘It was a joyous, silly, fun evening,’ recalled Ben Bradlee, then Washington Bureau Chief for Newsweek. ‘Jackie Kennedy and my wife, Tony, were both extremely pregnant, and I remember the President said, “OK, girls, the election’s over, you can take the pillows out now!” We talked about what we should call him now that he was elected, and he said, “Well, Prez sounds pretty good.” Then, as a sort of joke, he said to Bill Walton and me, “I’ll give each of you guys an appointment, one job to fill. What do you want?” And one of us said, “Well, one guy you can’t reappoint is Allen Dulles,” who was CIA Director. And the other said, “I don’t give a shit what you do, so long as you don’t reappoint J. Edgar Hoover.” And he just laughed …’
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