The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Sherman's worst moment came during a presidential trip to Honolulu, where Kennedy attended a Pearl Harbor memorial ceremony. The president stayed in the residence of Admiral Harry Felt, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet; Sherman's job was to secure the premises, with the help of a marine colonel. Hot towels and the president's favorite foods and drinks were ordered and in place when Kennedy arrived, said his hellos, and disappeared into a bedroom. "Within ten minutes," Sherman said, "a [White House] staff member arrived in a car escorting two ladies who were not on the guest list. They were unknown to me but were in the company of a staff member---therefore they were allowed in the house. I knew what they were there for, I guess. This was sort of the usual routine in many stops. And the colonel turned to me and said, 'Uh, who are they?' And I turned to him and I said, 'Well, they're secretaries, and I assume there's some work the president wants done this evening.'

  "I got mad. This is not what the president of the United States should be doing. There was no regard for who was there. The marine colonel---he knew what was going on. Other people were there. Navy people were in the house. Cooks were in the house. There were police on the streets. What can you say? I got angry at any president who doesn't treat the White House like I think he should. You're dealing with people who are in intimate contact with the president and may have been sent there by other people, if you want to get really spooky about it. The possibility of blackmail and things like that are astounding. I never knew the name of the outsiders, where they came from, where they were, or anything. I opened the door and said good evening and they said good evening. And in they went and the door shut. And when I reported for my next shift the next day, the president was still alive."

  Joseph Paolella, of Los Angeles, remains proud of the fact that he was the first Secret Service agent of Italian descent to be assigned to the presidential detail. Paolella loved the assignment and adored Kennedy, but he shared the agents' constant concern that the president would end up being a blackmail victim. "The worry was that one of these women could be a spy ... might be working for the Russians or Communist Party," Paolella told me in a 1997 interview. Sometimes the agents were upset about the president's women for a different reason---they weren't very attractive. In one case, a prominent California Democrat came for a meeting with Kennedy and brought along "these real skinny-looking broads," Paolella told me. "You'd say, 'Geez, what's the president doing with something like that?' We might think he could do better than that. But not from a protective standpoint."

  Paolella left the Secret Service in 1964, after six years on the job, because of his dislike of President Johnson. Protecting Jack Kennedy had been far more exciting, and Paolella, a bachelor, had enjoyed being near a president who attracted women at every stop. Some of the agents and military aides who traveled with Kennedy, surfeited with available women, soon found themselves doing what the president was doing. Drinking and partying became a constant feature of presidential travel, especially on the weekend trips to Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. After leaving the Secret Service, Paolella told me, he talked to no one about what he witnessed in the Kennedy White House. "In those days," he explained, "no one would have believed it."

  Agents acknowledged that the Secret Service's socializing intensified each year of the Kennedy administration, to a point where, by late 1963, a few members of the presidential detail were regularly remaining in bars until the early morning hours. Larry Newman said in one of his interviews with me that an "honest snapshot" of the Secret Service's partying in the months before the president's death would have triggered much public anger. The irony, Newman added, was that the fault may have been Jack Kennedy's. "It's not like he ruined you [as an agent]," Newman said, "but you get the tone of the way the detail works from the top. It was loose."

  The looseness extended beyond the president. At least three female Kennedy family members propositioned various Secret Service agents, according to Newman, Paolella, and their colleagues. One Kennedy relative was particularly forward, and was eventually given a colorful sobriquet by the agents---"rancid ass." Peter Lawford, the president's brother-in-law, was seen by the agents as a contemptible buffoon who drank too much, was too aggressive with women, and, on presidential trips, was constantly trying to push himself into the Secret Service's backup car. There was one occasion, during a raucous party in December 1962, at Bing Crosby's huge estate in Palm Springs, California, when, Paolella told me, agents literally rescued a young airline stewardess from Lawford's drunken advances, and left him sprawled in the desert.

  The Crosby party was the high point---or low point---of presidential partying, Paolella said. Some of the women at the pool, the agents knew, were stewardesses from a European airline; their names, as usual, were not known to the Secret Service. The party was so noisy that a group of California state policemen on duty at the front of the estate, which bordered on a desert wilderness area, assumed that the shouts and shrieks of the partygoers were the nighttime calls of coyotes.

  Paolella was reluctant to provide further details, but Larry Newman, who also was on duty that night, was not. He and Paolella "thought we were going to have a quiet tour of duty around the house," Newman told me. "But as the evening got darker, the state police were calling us on the radio and asking us if there were coyotes up around the house bothering the president." The two agents were posted in front of the home, and they agreed, after some discussion, that they had to intrude on the president's privacy by going poolside for a look. What they saw, Newman told me, was Powers "banging a girl on the edge of the pool. The president is sitting across the pool, having a drink and talking to some broads. Everybody was buckass naked." At a later point in the party, Newman said, Powers moved to the edge of the pool, bent over, made an obscene gesture, and said, apparently to the president, "Hey, pal. Look at this." As always, Powers became increasingly frantic in his efforts to amuse the president. He began running in and out of the Crosby house with armfuls of Crosby's suits and diving with the clothes into the pool. "The president thought that was pretty funny---laughed and about fell out of the chair," Newman told me. "The only difficulty was Bing Crosby didn't think it was funny." The White House later had to pay for the ruined clothes, Newman said.

  He and Paolella were just doing their job, Newman said, by checking out the private party. "It may sound a bit perverted," he said, "but some of the girls had foreign accents ... and you have to keep an eye on him to see he doesn't get lost or somebody doesn't come out of the desert. We also had to keep the California state patrol on the checkpoint at the main highway and not [have them] come up and check the coyotes and see if we were all right. We didn't want them to see that the president was swimming with all these ladies and they were all nude. So we had to lie to them, and we just agreed with them that there are coyotes running like hell all over the place and we couldn't stop them. We'd let them know if it got too thick."

  Newman said he and Paolella subsequently discussed what they had seen with their supervisors, and were told to ignore the events---"just act like nothing was happening." A fellow agent later remarked, to the displeasure of his supervisors, that "nothing's happening out there, but one coyote is sitting on top of another one."

  "You had to have some kind of a police squadroom humor about the thing," Newman said, "because here you are. You've got the Cold War going on. You're protecting the leader of the free world. And the highway patrol is going to come up and you're protecting him from getting caught naked. And you're carrying guns and you have all kinds of automatic weapons and you can't see in the desert, and the only thing you find is Peter Lawford out there, moaning in his beer because he can't get with a girl that he's just met that night."

  * * *

  * Years later, in his oral history for the Kennedy Library, Sidey told of telephoning a reading institute in Baltimore where, he had been told, Senator Kennedy had taken a speed-reading course. No one there could confirm such a high rate of speed. "They suggested that he probably read about seven o
r eight hundred words a minute, which was twice normal," Sidey recalled. "The president didn't like that one bit." After some back-and-forth, Sidey recalled, he and the president agreed on a reading speed of 1,200 words per minute, and that was the statistic published in Life magazine. "I noted for months and years after," Sidey told the library, that "this became the real gospel on his reading speed."

  * The cortisone injections that Kennedy needed to control his Addison's disease may have heightened his sex drive. The side effects of the steroid include, for many users, an enhanced sense of confidence and personal power, and a marked increase in libido.

  * Travell said nothing about Kennedy's venereal disease in an oral history for the Kennedy Library recorded in 1966. In describing her treatment for a high fever Kennedy suffered in June 1961---his sickest day in the White House, she said---Travell explained that she had to treat the infection with "large doses of penicillin on the basis of the history that we had that he was extremely tolerant of penicillin." Kennedy's fever spiked at 105 degrees that night, Travell said, adding that it went down to 101 degrees after treatment. She chose to tell the press corps that Kennedy's fever had reached only 101 degrees, explaining that "I skipped the whole intermediate period of the night" when his temperature soared. Travell played a similar role during the 1960 campaign in denying, as Kennedy's physician, that he was suffering from Addison's disease. She was interviewed for the library by a not-very-probing Ted Sorensen, who had drafted many of the misleading 1960 campaign press releases describing the candidate's state of health.

  * Jack Kennedy liked Radziwill and especially liked his hard work on his behalf in 1960 as an effective vote-getter for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in Polish communities in the Midwest. Gore Vidal, who had the same stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss, as Jacqueline Kennedy (his half-sister and half-brother were her stepsister and stepbrother), recalled in a 1995 interview for this book that Kennedy wanted to give Radziwill a job in his upcoming administration. But Radziwill had been accused of fiscal improprieties while working with the Red Cross in London, Vidal said, and his FBI file, Jack Kennedy later told him, "weighs ten pounds." Kennedy then repeated to Vidal his dialogue with the FBI about the Radziwill report: "Do I have to read all this?" "Oh no, just don't appoint him."

  16

  CRISIS IN BERLIN

  Henry A. Kissinger was left behind in Cambridge on January 20, 1961, when McGeorge Bundy and other colleagues on the Harvard faculty moved to top jobs in the Kennedy administration. Kissinger, a German-born professor of government, was named a consultant on European affairs to the National Security Council, and in the early summer of 1961 he was invited to a Cabinet Room meeting on the Berlin crisis. It was his first inside look at the Kennedy administration, and the A team, including Robert Kennedy, was there, seated around a conference table. The president's men all stood, as is the custom, when he arrived to open the meeting. Within a few moments, a White House steward entered the room with a tureen of clam chowder. He served soup and crackers to the president and then moved around the room to Bobby Kennedy, who also got a bowl of soup. No one else was served.

  When Kissinger returned to Harvard, he described the scene to Morton Halperin, one of his teaching fellows, speaking, Halperin recalled in an interview for this book, of the king and his duke and their misguided "sense of entitlement."

  In fact, Robert Kennedy became, after the Bay of Pigs, not a duke but his brother's prime minister---the second most powerful man in the United States. The attorney general, through a Soviet intelligence officer in Washington, and with the president's approval, began back-channel communications with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. The two Kennedys spent the next eighteen months negotiating foreign policy with Khrushchev through a secret intermediary. They did so despite opposition from their Soviet experts, who were aware of the back channel but rarely knew what was being discussed or agreed to. Bobby Kennedy's portfolio by the middle of 1961 was staggering: he was the president's legal adviser, his political adviser, his protector, his best friend, and his most influential foreign affairs adviser.

  The history of the Kennedy administration and its dealings in the Cold War is incomplete without a full understanding of the president-to-premier agreements reached in Washington and Moscow. And yet not one official document dealing with the Kennedy-Khrushchev relationship through the back channel has been made public by the John F. Kennedy Library; the most detailed information has come from Soviet archives opened after the fall of communism. Robert Kennedy, in a 1964 interview with the Kennedy Library---published in part by family biographer and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in 1978---revealed that the Soviet he met with in Washington was Georgi N. Bolshakov, an intelligence officer posing as a journalist. Kennedy added, almost casually, "Most of the major matters dealing with the Soviet Union and the United States were discussed and arrangements were made between Georgi Bolshakov and myself.... We used to meet maybe once every two weeks."

  Georgi Bolshakov was a professional intelligence agent whose résumé dated back to World War II service with GRU, the intelligence branch of the Soviet army. His fluent command of English led him to an assignment in Washington in 1951, ostensibly serving as an editor for TASS, the Soviet news agency. In 1955 he was transferred to the staff of General Georgi Zhukov, the war hero who was the Soviet minister of defense. In 1959 he was sent again to Washington, where he maintained a long-standing Soviet relationship with Frank Holeman, a reporter for the New York Daily News, who was one of the few journalists unafraid to have occasional lunches with Soviet diplomats. Holeman was friendly with Edwin O. Guthman, a former reporter who was Bobby Kennedy's press secretary at the Justice Department. It was on Holeman's recommendation that Kennedy and the seemingly moderate and understanding Bolshakov first met, three weeks after the Bay of Pigs.*

  Over the next eighteen months, Bolshakov became a central figure for the president and his brother, as the middleman in the most intense confrontations of the Kennedy administration: the Vienna summit, the Berlin crisis, and the Cuban missile crisis. The full story of Georgi Bolshakov's contacts with Bobby Kennedy during those crucial days may never be known. "I don't know why they [the Soviets] wanted to proceed in that fashion," Kennedy told the library, "but they didn't want to go through their ambassador" in Washington. The Soviet ambassador, Mikhail Menshikov, "handled the regular routine matters, and he---Bolshakov---handled other things.... I met with him about all kinds of things."

  The American bureaucracy was also cut out, Kennedy acknowledged, and knew little of what was being said by the president and his brother to the Soviet leadership. "Unfortunately, stupidly," Robert Kennedy told the library, "I didn't write many of the things down. I just delivered the messages verbally to my brother, and he'd act on them. I think sometimes he'd tell the State Department---and sometimes he didn't." Kennedy was, once again, being less than candid about a vital matter: in fact, he did document some of the meetings with Bolshakov, but those papers, if they still exist, remain locked away in his personal files in the Kennedy Library.

  Bolshakov was well known to the Washington press corps in the early 1960s and known to be friendly with the Kennedys. But no reporter realized his importance. In his 1975 memoir Conversations with Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, then with Newsweek magazine, wrote about an evening he and his wife spent with the president and the first lady in her bedroom at the White House, watching a television special on the Kremlin. "While the President walked around in his underdrawers and wondered what life must be like in that mausoleum," Bradlee wrote,

  Jackie told us about the day that Bobby Kennedy had called the Kremlin in a rage about something, a story that had been kicking around town for some time and had been denied often. He was apparently calling Georgi N. Bolshakov, the Washington press corps' and the New Frontier's favorite Soviet diplomat [presumably then in Moscow], who was carried on the Soviet embassy's rolls as a journalist but who was felt by all of us to be a spy, like all Soviet diplomats. If so, he was a gregarious
spy, could drink up a storm, and liked to arm wrestle. Anyway, Jackie was now confirming that story that had been so often denied. But, she reported, there had been no answer at the Kremlin when the United States attorney general had called late at night.

  Schlesinger was given unprecedented access to Bobby Kennedy's oral history, and to a few of his personal notes, while researching his authorized biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, published in 1978. But he was unable to deal substantively with the possibility that Jack and Robert Kennedy, two men Schlesinger dearly admired, had been talking with the Kremlin behind the backs of all who were serving in the government. He trivialized Bolshakov as being "full of chaff and badinage," and said that one of Bobby Kennedy's aides, who could not have known of Bolshakov's secret role, depicted Bolshakov as full of "self-deprecating nods, smiles, and circus English" and benefiting from "Bobby's predilection for harmless buffoons."