by Larry Tye
That kind of loyalty—offering to sacrifice his position for the sake of his brother’s presidency—was visible every day to White House and Justice insiders. Outsiders got their look one hot summer day when family and friends were sailing side by side on Joe’s boat, the Marlin, and the Honey Fitz, the presidential yacht that Jack had renamed for his maternal grandfather. Charlie, the president’s dog, tried to jump from one to the other and ended up in the deep water. “Without any hesitation, Bobby jumped overboard and swam as hard as he could to the dog,” said Rita Dallas. “Bobby couldn’t possibly reach him in time—but he kept right on swimming, apparently oblivious to the fact that he also was heading straight into the propellers….The dog was within inches of his death, fighting now to keep himself from being drawn under. He and Bobby went down at the same time. Someone yelled, ‘Stop the engines! For God’s sake! Stop the engines,’ and for what seemed like an eternity we held our breaths. Finally, Bobby surfaced with the dog in his arms. He treaded water, showing Charlie first to the President, then to us! A wild cheer went up! The children screamed and yelled! The adults clapped and whistled! Some of us wept.”
Jack himself could never have performed that muscular feat, for reasons that Bobby understood but that he had ensured few others did. He was practiced by then at covering up his brother’s physical frailties. During the 1952 Senate race, he had hidden Jack’s crutches in the car during campaign appearances and used a sunlamp to give color to his pallid skin. In 1960, he had made light of the adrenal insufficiency. Now Bobby was suspicious of the injections the president was getting from Dr. Max Jacobson, known to his celebrity clients as “Dr. Feelgood.” He finally persuaded Jack to send the medications to the Food and Drug Administration for testing. When the agency confirmed the presence of amphetamines and steroids, Jack told his brother, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.”
The truest sign of Bobby’s confederacy with his brother was his willingness to camouflage and sometimes enable the president’s sexual deceptions. Joe had been Jack’s bulwark early on, prying the then bachelor away from, among others, Inga Arvad, a married Danish journalist and suspected Nazi spy. Bobby stepped in during the 1960 campaign, helping squash old gossip that Jack had been married before he met Jackie—and still was—to the socialite Durie Malcolm. False rumors like that made it easier to get outraged about others that hit the mark. JFK’s White House mistresses ranged from Judith Campbell Exner, who would become involved as well with the gangster Mooney Giancana, to Mimi Alford, a nineteen-year-old intern. He is said to have also slept with strippers and socialites, stewardesses and secretaries, before and throughout his marriage and presidency. Bobby’s most dramatic brotherly intervention involved Ellen Rometsch, a twenty-seven-year-old German who looked like Elizabeth Taylor and was married to a West German Air Force sergeant stationed at his embassy in Washington. The FBI was convinced she was a high-priced call girl, spy for the East Germans, and mistress to the president of the United States, and the bureau shared its suspicions with Bobby. He couldn’t take the chance, and he had her quietly deported to Germany in the summer of 1963, with his old Rackets Committee aide LaVern Duffy riding along. Bobby Baker, who says he had arranged the original liaison between President Kennedy and Rometsch, labeled what Bobby did kidnapping. “Had she been called before the Senate investigating committee,” Baker says, “her testimony would have wrecked President Kennedy.” RFK branded as “untrue” stories that his brother was involved with Rometsch, but he conceded that if all the rumors were aired about call girls and their relationships with a spectrum of senior elected officials, “it would be very unpleasant.”
Historians generally focus on the toll JFK’s adultery took on his credibility and his marriage, but they exacted at least as onerous a toll on his brother. Bobby came to see whitewashing for Jack as part of his job as family protector in chief, which meant dirtying himself and, worse for a truth-seeking prosecutor, becoming a practiced equivocator. He convinced himself Jack’s sex life was no more of the public’s business than the state of his adrenal glands or who said what in the calls to free Martin Luther King. Whether and to what extent his friend Jackie was aware of her husband’s betrayal is unclear, but J. Edgar Hoover knew, perhaps even more than Bobby. It became one more area of sparring between the FBI director and his nominal boss, and it gave Hoover the moral and practical upper hand. If Bobby was unwilling to be Jack’s sexual policeman, Hoover would be.
Jack’s infidelities were little surprise to anyone familiar with his family history. His father had had a longtime mistress, the silent film star Gloria Swanson, and scores of short-term dalliances. Grandfather Honey Fitz was an impenitent flirt, which helped explain why Rose seemed so unruffled when Joe compartmentalized his life into the time spent with his devoted household and the nearly equal time away with girlfriends. Joe passed down to his children his canons on the sanctity of friendships and family and the evils of cigarettes and whiskey. When it came to sexual mores, his message boiled down to this aphorism: Boys play while girls pray.
It was not just Jack who absorbed those lessons. Ted’s first marriage wouldn’t survive his playboy lifestyle. Joe Jr., too, had gotten around, although since he was never married, his fidelity gene was never put to the test. But Bobby was different. As an eighteen-year-old, he wrote a former schoolmate lamenting that he lacked his brothers’ way with women. Bobby wedded at a younger age than all but one of his siblings (Kathleen, who was nearly six years older, beat him by two months) and reveled in an unusually stable and robust marriage for a Kennedy. Few doubted that Bobby was the most puritanical and sanctimonious of Joe’s boys, but he was also most like his father in so many other ways. Did he take after the old man when it came to marital infidelity? And if so, was he hushing that up the way he did Jack’s indiscretions?
Scores of books have proposed answers to those questions, and a cottage industry has sprung up around those who claim to know. The list of Bobby’s alleged mistresses starts with the film stars Lee Remick, Kim Novak, and Candice Bergen, ends with the singer Claudine Longet, and includes other names familiar and unknown. No family in American history has been subject to more gossip, hearsay, and embellishment about their private affairs than the Kennedys. Prurient interest aside, they opened themselves to it by asking for the public’s trust and votes. JFK’s illicit sex and cover-ups confirmed our distrust. The question is fairly asked about Bobby, too, precisely because he publicly prized conjugal faithfulness and chided those who didn’t practice it. Many reporters at the time suspected hypocrisy, but journalists operated under different standards then, and they or their bosses declined to publish what they heard or saw.
“He definitely had an eye for pretty women, like every Kennedy man. Like the father. He was a flirt,” says Gwen Gibson, a reporter then in the Washington bureau of the New York Daily News who wrote about the Kennedys, including a feature on Bobby and Ethel. John Anderson, a California attorney who would help on Bobby’s presidential bid, recalls seeing him “smooching” and “nuzzling” with Candice Bergen in the first-class cabin on a campaign plane. Richard Goodwin, Bobby’s friend and aide who traveled with him overseas and in America, says there is no question that Bobby had extramarital affairs: “Of course he did. That’s a Kennedy family tradition….He wasn’t sort of randomly random like his brother [Jack] or Teddy, for that matter. Not at all. He was much more selective and limited….Everyone was doing it, including the press. That’s why they never reported it.”*20
No one knows for sure what happened when the doors were closed. The FBI tried to find out, but its reports on Bobby mainly repeated wild rumors, including those caught on wiretaps and bugs of Mob figures that Bobby easily refuted. What is beyond dispute is that, before his marriage but during his courtship of Ethel, Bobby was seeing a young British actress named Joan Winmill whom he got to know in 1948 while traveling after his Harvard graduation. Joan met Ethel later but didn’t know about her budding romance with Bobby. Ethel didn’t kno
w he was sending intimate letters to Joan back in London, along with perfume, Whitman’s Sampler chocolates, and his sister’s hand-me-down green velvet dress. While Joan and Bobby were not officially engaged—she was dating other men and presumed he was seeing other women—“for the first time in my life, I considered myself to be ‘in love,’ ” Joan said. She “couldn’t believe [her] eyes” when she got a letter from Bobby, postmarked Hyannis Port, announcing his engagement to Ethel. Looking back more than sixty years later, Joan blames her breakup with Bobby on his family, and particularly his father: “His family really didn’t care for English people, and they were very upset that I was seeing him.”
The most exotic speculation revolved around a relationship between Bobby and Marilyn Monroe, who was said to be having an affair with both brothers, consecutively or simultaneously, depending on who told the story. Again, the accounts were secondhand or based on tape recordings and other evidence that supposedly vanished years before. Marilyn herself seemed to have it every which way—whispering to some friends that there was no affair and to others that Bobby was leaving Ethel to marry her, berating him for dumping her or wondering how to tell him it was splitsville. The accusations don’t stop with infidelity. Bobby helped her commit suicide or outright murdered her—to cover up his affair, or JFK’s, or her ties and theirs to the Mafia—various authors and journalists have charged, starting in 1964 and continuing nearly unabated. Then he concealed his complicity in her death, so the story goes, with help from the FBI, the Los Angeles police, and his own investigators and aides. The rumors swirled so feverishly that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office reviewed all the claims and counterclaims in 1982, twenty years after the sex siren’s death. “Her murder would have required a massive, in-place conspiracy covering all the principals at the death scene on August 4 and 5, 1962; the actual killer or killers; the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner; the autopsy surgeon to whom the case was fortuitously assigned; and most all of the police officers assigned to the case,” the off-the-record report concluded. “Our inquiries and document examination uncovered no credible evidence supporting a murder theory.”
That doesn’t mean Bobby wasn’t entangled with Marilyn, if only to cover up any relationship JFK had with her. Eleanor McPeck, a Massachusetts landscape architect and historian, makes no claims to knowledge of any ties Bobby had to the movie star. She does assert that nearly a decade before he met Marilyn, he was fascinated with her. When McPeck was a teenager living a couple of blocks from them, Bobby and Ethel would have her over for dinner and to play a game of “Who would you rather be with?” You could name anyone you found interesting, she says, and it was all in fun. Ethel’s favorite was Andy Williams, who later became a close friend of hers and Bobby’s. Bobby’s, she adds, was “ ‘Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe,’ repeated over and over and over again.”
Ethel has lived with the rumors for fifty years, and she says she long ago stopped listening to or reading them. She tried to block them out then, too, although they must have hurt. She never disclosed any suspicions. She also understood Bobby’s family better than anyone else who wasn’t born into it, and she knew that whatever her church and theirs said about sex outside marriage, there was no tradition of monogamy in the Kennedy clan. She loved her husband more completely than she’d dreamed possible and still does. And she knew he always came home, not just to the kids but to her.
* * *
*1 Voice votes often leave it unclear who voted which way, giving senators political protection on matters such as confirming controversial nominees. Formal roll calls, by contrast, record each lawmaker’s ballot. In Kennedy’s case, he was approved by something in between called a standing vote, in which, to clarify the outcome of a voice tally, all those voting yes are asked to stand, then the noes—but the votes still aren’t recorded.
*2 Not everyone was a fan. The firebrand lawyer he took off the Keogh case says that while Bobby often was overzealous in pursuing his prey, on other occasions he was too obliging of criminals. The scuttlebutt, reports Jay Goldberg, was that Congressman Keogh was as dirty as his brother but too close to the Kennedys to be charged. There were three things Bobby cared about when he was attorney general, Goldberg adds: what was good for JFK, what was good for the Democratic Party, “and only then what was best for the citizenry.” Edwyn Silberling, a more seasoned attorney who headed the Organized Crime Section, was also critical of Bobby’s handling of some sensitive cases. With Judge Keogh, he said, “My own impression was that if it were at all possible to avoid going ahead with this case he would have avoided it.” Kennedy decided to prosecute, Silberling added, in part because local newspapers knew about the investigation and would have been suspicious if nothing was done. By the time he gave that interview to the Kennedy Library, however, Silberling, like Goldberg, had a personal reason to resent Bobby, who had fired him from his job overseeing the attack on organized crime. (Author interview with Goldberg; Silberling OH, March 24, 1971, 57–58, JFKL.)
*3 Many friends, relatives, and journalists concluded that the disgraced Landis had committed suicide when he was found drowned in his backyard swimming pool. The coroner said Landis died of a heart attack, and his biographer, Donald Ritchie, agrees (Ritchie, Landis, 201).
*4 The core members were Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., with Lawford and Joey Bishop also part of the pack that appeared together onstage, in films, and palling around at nightclubs.
*5 Hoffa had his own squad of high-priced legal talent that critics dubbed the Teamsters Bar Association.
*6 During a 1963 meeting at the Justice Department, Hoffa became so enraged that he “started choking Bobby with two hands and hollering, ‘I’ll break your fucking neck! I’ll kill you!’ ” said Frank Ragano, Hoffa’s attorney, who was there. “The combined efforts of Bobby, Danny, Jack, and myself finally broke his chokehold. I am positive Robert Kennedy would have died before our eyes if we had not intervened.” Selwyn Raab, an ex–New York Times reporter and coauthor of Ragano’s memoir, says he checked the story and is convinced Ragano’s account is credible. (Ragano and Raab, Mob Lawyer, 142–43, and email from Raab, April 15, 2014.)
*7 Jimmy was more straightforward in 1962 when, at a rally of his supporters in Detroit, he took a swipe at Bobby’s manliness. Asked by a wisecracking Teamster whether Bobby was a “doxy,” or immoral woman, Hoffa answered, “He’s worse than that—he’s a touch football player” (Russell, Out of the Jungle, 216).
*8 Years later, when he was running for president, Bobby offered conflicting evidence on whether he had mellowed on Jimmy. Teamsters officials approached Ted Kennedy to see whether, in return for their campaign help, Bobby would push for Jimmy to be “transferred from the [prison] mattress factory to the farm, so he could get outdoors,” recalled Dave Burke, an aide to Ted. Bobby’s response: “As far as I’m concerned, Jimmy Hoffa can stay in the mattress factory forever. And if I’m ever elected president of the United States, he has a darn slim chance of ever getting out of jail.” But William Hundley, who ran Justice’s Organized Crime Section under Bobby, recalled that during that 1968 campaign, Bobby told him: “If I become president I’m going to let [Hoffa] out.” Hoffa’s biographer Lester Velie offered one more unlikely twist on the Hoffa-Kennedy relationship, writing that in the spring of 1964, Bobby offered Jimmy a quick parole if the Teamsters boss agreed to cut his ties with the union. Jimmy flew into a rage: “That son of a bitch [Kennedy] is trying to take my union away from me.” (Burke OH, December 8, 1971, 55, JFKL; “Legend in the Law,” Washington Lawyer: Why Jimmy Hoffa Had to Die, 95–96.)
*9 In Kennedy-speak, “vigor” was a favorite word, pronounced “vigahhh.”
*10 Georgia used a County Unit System that made the number of counties a candidate won matter more than the number of votes. While the system gave more weight to urban than rural counties, it wasn’t nearly enough more to account for the population differences.
*11 Cox would be back in the spotlight a decade la
ter when he was named special prosecutor in the Watergate case. But five months into the job the Nixon White House fired Cox as part of a cover-up of the cover-up that became legendary as the Saturday Night Massacre. What set Nixon off was Cox’s insistence that the president turn over tapes of Oval Office conversations that ultimately proved a conspiracy to hide the administration’s ties to the Watergate burglary.
*12 In accepting his party’s nomination for president, JFK had promised to chart a “new frontier” that pushed scientific limits, attacked poverty, and promoted peace. The phrase resonated enough that it became the slogan for the Kennedy administration.
*13 Jack joked that Bobby “still wears those button-down shirts. They went out five years ago. The only people I know who still wear them are Chester [Bowles] and Adlai [Stevenson]” (Sidey, John F. Kennedy, President).
*14 He never liked watching sports as much as playing them. That was consistent with his preference for doing rather than observing, no matter the activity, but ironic given how many famous athletes he counted as friends.
*15 It wasn’t just the Justice Department that was his playroom. After his swearing-in as attorney general, Bobby took his children for a tour of the White House, where he led them in sliding down the long curving balustrade.
*16 The FBI chief was notorious for his likes and dislikes. The former included dark suits with a folded handkerchief in the breast pocket, shirts with French cuffs, and underlings who bought his book, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in American and How to Fight It. The list of things he didn’t like ran from sweaty palms and the smell of tobacco to both Kennedy brothers (Report on the FBI from Jack Levine to Herbert J. Miller, Jr., January 23, 1962, President’s Office Files: Justice Department, JFKL, 34–36).