J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  According to some accounts, Joseph Kennedy learned of the FBI surveillance shortly after this—possibly from his old friend J. Edgar Hoover—and persuaded a former Wall Street colleague, Assistant Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, to transfer his son overseas. According to William Sullivan, however, it was Hoover himself who recommended the transfer, “for security reasons.”9

  Although the end result was certainly not what the FBI director had intended, Kennedy was sent to the South Pacific, had his P-T boat rammed and sunk, returned home a hero, and—on the basis of his carefully edited war record, two ghostwritten books, and his father’s behind-the-scenes manipulation—was launched on his political career, serving first as a congressmen, then as a senator, and, in July of 1960, as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

  If Hoover felt in any way responsible for Kennedy’s rise, he never bragged about it.

  When the freshman representative from Massachusetts first arrived in Washington in 1947, he told Langdon Melvin, Jr., a close friend and legislative aide, that one of the things he wanted to do, now that he was a member of Congress, was get the Inga tape from the FBI. “I told him not to ask for it,” Melvin would recall, that “he’d never get it.”

  Later, after he’d been elected senator, Kennedy told Melvin that he was really going to get the tape this time, to which his friend bluntly responded, “I told him not to be stupid.” It apparently became an obsession with him. And, lest he forget, there were reminders.

  In 1963 President Kennedy was grand marshal at the Harvard commencement. Among those in attendance was a former classmate, and former FBI agent, Frederick Ayer, Jr. As Kennedy, resplendent in silk top hat and tails, walked down the aisle, Ayer whispered, quite audibly, “How’s Inga?” Flashing an enraged glare, the president hissed, “You son of a bitch!”10

  Hoover’s documentation on the Arvad affair, and the uses to which the FBI director might put it, concerned John F. Kennedy and his father throughout the 1960 campaign and long afterward.

  Damaging as the revelations of Kennedy’s sexual involvement with a suspected Nazi spy would have been to his political hopes, it could have been worse. For, voluminous as the FBI’s Kennedy-Arvad file was—it ran to 628 pages and included transcriptions of the two bugged weekends in the Charleston hotel room—it was incomplete.

  Finally having decided that Inga Arvad was probably not a spy, or that at least “no subversive activities were discovered,”11 the FBI in March 1945 closed its investigation.

  Fortunately for Kennedy, Hoover never learned of a last meeting of the pair, in New York City in November 1946. Three months later Arvad married the former cowboy actor Tim McCoy, who was thirty years her senior, and moved to Arizona. And six months after that she gave birth to a son, whom she named Ronald McCoy.

  Not until twenty years later, when Ronald was in college, did Inga break her long silence and tell her son that she had been pregnant when she married McCoy, adding, “I don’t know who your father was for sure…I really don’t know if it was Jack or Tim. I don’t know.”12

  Nor was this Hoover’s only file on the Kennedys. Joseph Kennedy himself rated several and was mentioned at length in numerous others.

  Certainly mindful of Hoover’s files, Kennedy Senior went out of his way to court the FBI director, making sure cards were sent on all the right anniversaries.* He did not forget Tolson either. Each Christmas, in addition to a case of Jack Daniel’s Black Label, the former bootlegger included a case of Haig & Haig scotch. He also invited both men to his son John’s wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier. Regretfully declining, Hoover sent the Cape Cod resident agent in their place, who reported back that even in the midst of the wedding reception the groom had found time to praise the FBI director. “Senator Kennedy complimented you and the Agents of the Bureau on the splendid job done and volunteered that he was anxious and willing at all times to ‘support Mr. Hoover and the FBI.’…The Honorable Joseph Kennedy [was] also present when the above statement was made and he, in turn, joined with his son in expressing his high regard for the Bureau.”13

  Bourbon, scotch, and flattery aside, there was only one way the Kennedys could assure Hoover’s continued silence about Inga Arvad and certain other extremely embarrassing items in his files. No one needed to spell it out. It was simply understood by everyone concerned. And since it was unstated, no one could call it blackmail.

  Less than three weeks after JFK’s nomination, on August 4, 1960, the New York Times reported, “During a series of news conferences on his lawn today, Senator Kennedy was asked whether, if elected, he would retain J. Edgar Hoover as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and continue the agency’s program as it is constituted. He replied that he would, of course, retain Mr. Hoover and planned no major changes within the agency.”14

  Although the statement was, in all likelihood, triggered in the usual way, by a planted question from a favored reporter, both the candidate and his father must have anticipated it well in advance, realizing there was only one possible response.

  Although Hoover favored Nixon and did what he could behind the scenes to aid the campaign, he did not overlook the possibility that Kennedy might be elected, and acted accordingly.

  For example, Hoover informed Kennedy that one of his staff members had formerly been a Communist, thus giving him time to dismiss the man and put himself in the FBI director’s debt, before leaking the same information to Nixon, who eagerly released it.

  On the one hand, the devout Presbyterian established a working relationship with Father Cronin, Nixon’s chief speech writer, and energetically furnished him with derogatory information about the Kennedys and their operatives. On the other, he was clearly unnerved by the growing number of Roman Catholics in the FBI, convinced that they were all supporters of JFK.

  Their loyalty was critical, for Hoover’s surveillance of the Democratic nominee was adding volumes to the Official/Confidential files. And the themes were not traditionally presidential.

  “Associate of Top Hoodlums Attends Religious Services with Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy” was the reporting agent’s superscription for an event back in February 1958. Phoenix agents had learned that the “closest friend” of the “top hoodlum”15 Joseph Bonanno had attended mass alongside Kennedy at Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Tucson.

  Early in 1960 an airtel memo to the director described orgiastic goings-on during the Las Vegas filming of the Rat Pack movie, Oceans 11. “Show girls from all over the town were running in and out of the Senator’s suite,” the report claimed. Kennedy was fraternizing at the Sands Hotel with the singer Frank Sinatra, described by an informant as “a pawn of the hoodlum element,” and his own brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford, who supposedly held “an interest of one half of one per cent” in the mob-controlled gambling palace. One unusually beautiful party girl, “a tall brunette UF [unidentified female],” was observed for the first time. Hoover learned much about her when she began visiting the White House for sexual matinees the following year.16

  From taps and bugs intended to reveal the workings of organized crime, the FBI learned that Sinatra had asked the notorious Chicago Mafia boss Sam “Mo Mo” Giancana for help with the controlled wards of Mayor Daley’s highly predictable electorate. In fact, Hoover learned that returns were creatively falsified to swing Illinois into the Kennedy column. He was certain of the information. His taps covered the phones of the sly counters in workingclass Chicago River precincts as they put together a counterfeit victory.

  Kennedy’s razor-thin win did not require the Illinois electoral votes. He would have prevailed with the results in Texas, home state of his running mate, Lyndon Johnson, whose vote-getting prowess included the ability to raise the dead. A last-minute freshet of ballots from the grave had elected him senator and earned him the sobriquet Landslide Lyndon.

  But to Hoover the Illinois vote itself was less important than his knowledge of how it had been obtained.

  Ben Bradlee,
then a Newsweek correspondent, and Bill Walton, an artist, were relaxing after dinner at Hyannis Port on the day after the election.

  Impishly, “Prez,” as JFK suggested they call him, said, “Okay, I’ll give each one of you guys one appointment, one job to fill.”17 Walton, a longtime family friend, immediately urged him to get rid of Hoover. The journalist thought the CIA’s Allen Dulles should go. The next day the president announced publicly that the first two appointments of his administration would be Hoover and Dulles.*

  The previous morning, as soon as the election results seemed certain, the FBI director had called to offer his support and Kennedy had assured him he would not be replaced. The son of Joe Kennedy, Sr., had not had any other choice.

  Moreover, as Jack Kennedy was fond of telling people when they asked him why he didn’t replace Hoover, “You don’t fire God.”18

  The first item appeared in the New York Times on November 9, one day before the election. Hoover recognized it for what it was, a trial balloon, and his apprehension was not eased when the paper’s editorial page shot it down.

  The call for an appointment came a few days later. Undoubtedly, the director suspected that the courtesy visit had been arranged by Joseph Kennedy, and he was right.

  According to Robert, his father, his brother, and a number of others had been urging him to accept the attorney generalship. But he was still undecided and very seriously wanted Mr. Hoover’s opinion.

  Kennedy approached his potential subordinate respectfully, treating him as both a senior statesman and a friend and contemporary of his father. This was not the brusquely contemptuous impertinent who had dared citicize him following the rackets probe, but the director had not forgotten.

  Still, he was in a very uncomfortable position. Like everyone else in Washington, he had to deal with the reality that this difficult young man was the brother of the president-elect.

  Blandly, he told Kennedy that it was a good job and that he should take it. “I didn’t like to tell him that, but what could I say?”19 Hoover later told William Sullivan, who had become head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, an appointment he knew was due to his being a Catholic and a Democrat. As far as he was concerned, the FBI director remarked with heavy irony, Robert Kennedy had all of the qualifications necessary for becoming the nation’s number one lawyer: he had managed the president’s campaign, had never practiced law, had never tried a case in court.

  Waiting outside the inner sanctum during this odd meeting was John Seigenthaler, a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, who had taken a leave of absence to work under Robert in the campaign. When Kennedy emerged, he told Seigenthaler that Hoover had not been straightforward. It was clear, at least to Robert, that the wary bureaucrat did not want him to accept the nomination.

  He was right. And Hoover was not alone. Robert’s consultations with several other wise old stalwarts of government had not won him any ringing endorsements. Hoover’s friend the former attorney general William Rogers warned him the job was lousy. Justice Douglas suggested he either accept a college presidency or take a sabbatical.

  On December 29 President-elect Kennedy made it official. For the first time in history, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States would be the brother of the commander in chief.

  On inauguration day J. Edgar Hoover rejoiced. Favored friends, agency cronies, and their families crowded together festively in his office to watch the changing of the guard on television. Certain that the Kennedys were committed to waging a major new war on crime (when meant more agents), convinced as always that the presidency was a sacred institution and that it was his job to protect the reputation of the president himself, the director was pleased at the prospects of the Republic. That, at least, was how Quinn Tamm recalled the day in a letter to the New York Times some twenty-two years later.

  Indeed, the FBI head did have good reason to feel pleased, for he had already proved that he could use his old bureaucratic ploys to good effect with the bright young men of the New Frontier. At the height of the pre-inaugural celebrations, when top Kennedy people were inundated with organizational work and social obligations, Hoover had sent a densely worded five-page letter to the designated attorney general, his deputy Byron R. White, and Dean Rusk, the incoming secretary of state.

  In one paragraph was buried a terse but vague admission of enormous importance, referring to the Bureau’s “carefully planned program of counterattack against the CPUSA which keeps it off balance” and was “carried on from both inside and outside the Party organization.” This scheme, Hoover wrote, had been “successful in preventing communists from seizing control of legitimate mass organizations.”20

  None of the three recipients had called to complain. Probably, in the flurry of the moment, none had read it.

  But long in the future, when a Senate committee was investigating the agency’s abuses of power, the letter could be, and was, adduced as proof that the FBI had alerted the top officials of the Kennedy administration to the existence of COINTELPRO.

  In his congratulatory telephone call to the president on the morning after the election, the FBI director had informed him that Special Agent Courtney Evans would be his personal liaison to the administration.

  Both Jack and Bobby liked Evans, an unusually dedicated young agent they’d come to know well during Senator Kennedy’s investigation of improper activities in labor management. During the campaign Robert had called Evans whenever he felt the need to deal with the FBI in any way.

  Evans’s problem was that he liked the Kennedys, and was also loyal to the FBI. Although placed in an extremely difficult position, Evans had a remarkable talent for coolly assessing both sides, even when friction heated up between Hoover and the young man who was his boss and took the designation seriously.

  Many reasons would be given for the conflicts between Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, but Courtney Evans, who saw the situation up close, too close sometimes, reached a startling conclusion. One reason they clashed, thought Evans, was that “they were too much alike. When I looked at Bob Kennedy operating in 1961, I figured that’s the way Hoover had operated in 1924…same kind of temperament, impatient with inefficiency, demanding as to detail, a system of logical reasoning for a position, and pretty much of a hard taskmaster.”21

  According to Evans, all myths to the contrary, there was never a direct confrontation between the two. With him as liaison, there wasn’t much opportunity. Although Evans was officially the FBI’s liaison with the Justice Department, he also was Hoover’s contact with the Kennedy White House, where he worked mostly through Kenny O’Donnell, JFK’s appointments secretary and devoted factotum. That Hoover was denied his familiar perk of ready access to the Oval Office made him “very unhappy,” according to O’Donnell. During the nearly three years of the Kennedy administration, the proud director was invited to the White House fewer than a dozen times.

  Yet JFK seemed to get along with the man whose files could destroy his presidency and embarrass his family. Even though his decision to retain Hoover had been coerced by circumstances—not only his father’s wishes but the risk of alienating voters after a close election—Kennedy apparently understood the director and his obsessions. In their unspoken gentleman’s agreement, neither was going to rock the boat.

  Robert Kennedy’s people were determined to “hit the ground running.” Efficiency, hard work, and dedication were prized, and so it was not strange that one enthusiastic assistant attorney general, whose office was in Hoover’s corridor, was first to arrive each morning. In the dark depths of a Washington winter, he would automatically switch on the corridor lights on the way to his office door. Soon, an FBI agent appeared and asked him to discontinue this habit. “The director likes to turn them on,” he explained impassively.22

  Mild eccentricity was hardly the worst, however, in the wide gulf between the styles and beliefs of Kennedy loyalists and old-time Hoover janissaries. But the pettiness of some conflicts seemed to be the tip of
a very ugly iceberg.

  On the one hand, it was clear that the director could not resist the opportunity for reminding his young boss who was the veteran. Ignoring Washington’s Birthday, as he did most federal holidays, Kennedy worked in his office.

  “After observing your car in the Department garage,” began the next day’s letter from Hoover, “I would like to thank you for coming to work on February 22nd, a national holiday…The spirit you demonstrated—the spirit of Valley Forge and Monte Cassino—will, we hope, spread through the entire Department of Justice. Keep up the good work.”23

  If the letter can be excused as subtle in its condescension, other Hoover actions cannot be.

  When tourists lined up for the official FBI tour in order to see how national law enforcement worked, they got a telling hint. Guides were instructed to use this line: “Mr. Hoover became the Director of the Bureau in 1924, the year before the Attorney General was born.”24 When Kennedy found out, he had the offending comment taken out of the printed tour guide.

  But he apparently did not know about the standard line used by an assistant director who welcomed the new-agent classes. The administrator praised the young initiates because 36 million men had applied for their jobs and failed, including Richard Nixon and Robert Kennedy. The reasons given: Nixon was “not aggressive enough”; the current AG had been rejected for being “too cocky.”