The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Other sections of the speech perhaps had a special meaning for the president, given what really took place during the missile crisis. "Above all," he said, "while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy---or of a collective death wish for the world.... We can seek a relaxation of tensions without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute."

  Nikita Khrushchev told Averell Harriman, the president's special emissary in Moscow for ongoing test ban talks, that it was "the best speech by any president since Roosevelt." Within two months the Soviet Union ended two years of haggling over on-site inspections and other issues of verification, by signing a treaty with the Kennedy administration that banned the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and underwater. The nuclear weapons of the future could now only be tested underground.

  Did the president's passionate speech indicate that he had learned from his manipulation and lies about the missile crisis? The evidence is that it did not. The nation was terrorized in the summer of 1963 by fear of strontium 90---radioactive fallout from American and Soviet nuclear tests, which was found at heightened levels in cow's milk and human bone structure. A partial test ban treaty was good politics. Michael Beschloss concluded in The Crisis Years that the speech "was as much the product of political calculation as any address Kennedy ever gave. It was designed to build public support for the test ban treaty he hoped to achieve, to mollify Khrushchev, ... and overcome any Soviet skepticism that he was willing to jeopardize his domestic position in order to push a controversial agreement through the Senate."

  Khrushchev had his political needs, too. The Soviet economy was stagnant, and Khrushchev believed some respite from the extravagant cost of the nuclear arms race was essential in order to meet the growing demand for consumer goods. The premier was also facing a series of difficult meetings in Moscow in June with the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, who were vitriolic in denouncing his retreat in the Cuban missile crisis.

  Pushing for the test ban was not all politics for Kennedy. He had a carefully conceived strategic agenda reaching back to his days in the Senate: he was convinced that a test ban treaty would freeze the huge American advantage over the Soviet Union in weapons research and deployment. A treaty would also prevent the spread of the bomb to nations that he viewed as especially dangerous---most notably Communist China. What Kennedy knew in 1963, and Nikita Khrushchev did not, was the extent to which the Pentagon's nuclear scientists were prepared to continue their work underground. The test ban treaty would not slow the arms race.

  It became clear during Senate ratification hearings on the treaty that Kennedy was willing to bargain to get what he wanted. He assured the skeptical members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that in return for their endorsement of the test ban they could significantly increase underground nuclear weapons testing and development. The funds budgeted for such weapons development increased steadily over the next few years, and so did the sophistication of the research. By 1968 the Pentagon's weapons manufacturers began to conduct underground tests of nuclear warheads in the megaton range---fifty times greater than the weapons detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A new generation of offensive weapon, the multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle, or MIRV, was successfully developed in underground testing by the late 1960s. A MIRV is a hydra-headed missile that can thrust as many as fourteen nuclear warheads into outer space, where, with the aid of complex electronics, each warhead can reenter the atmosphere and strike a target with precision. MIRV was not just an improved weapon but a qualitative leap forward in the ability to wage nuclear war. The antiballistic missile defense system (ABM) was also successfully tested and developed by the late 1960s in underground testing.

  Despite Kennedy's stirring words at American University, during Senate hearings on the test ban treaty in the summer of 1963 there was no talk of the recklessness and wastefulness of an uncontrolled arms race. The test ban treaty was described to senators hostile to arms control not as a victory against the arms race but as a victory in it. In his memoir Kennedy, Ted Sorensen, who wrote the first draft of the American University speech, recalled that Kennedy's essential skepticism was not about Senate ratification, but about obtaining Moscow's acceptance of the treaty. "Inasmuch as even a limited test-ban treaty required a Soviet acceptance of a permanent American superiority in nuclear weapons [emphasis added]," Sorensen wrote, "[Kennedy] refused to count too heavily on the success" of negotiations with Moscow.

  Khrushchev would immediately have broken off the test ban talks had he been able to anticipate Robert McNamara's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of the treaty. On August 13, 1963---eight days after the Soviets signed the treaty---McNamara, wary of criticism from the right, outlined an exponential increase in the arms race. America would triple its fleet of ICBMs, from 500 to 1,700, by 1966. This new push would also triple the total of available submarine-launched missiles by the same year. As for America's missile defense system, McNamara told the Senate that the ABM warhead designs "we now have or can develop through underground testing will provide a high probability of killing Soviet warheads even if [the Soviet warheads] incorporate advanced technology far beyond what now exists." The journalist I. F. Stone, in a 1970 essay on the test ban treaty for the New York Review of Books, caustically wrote that when McNamara's testimony was read in Moscow, Khrushchev's opposition within the Kremlin---which had steadily grown since the missile crisis---"must have felt Khrushchev had lost his mind in believing that the treaty was a step toward lightening the burden and danger of the arms race."

  Khrushchev, perhaps as much dazzled by Jack Kennedy as the reporters who covered him and the aides who worked in the White House, was ousted as premier and stripped of all his government and party posts in October 1964.

  * * *

  * Bobby Kennedy made essentially the same claim in an interview with Elie Abel, a correspondent for NBC News, who in 1966 published The Missile Crisis, considered at the time to be a definitive study. Kennedy "told me himself," Abel said in a 1970 interview with the Kennedy Library, that he had warned Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, at the height of the crisis that if the missiles in Cuba were not withdrawn "we would have to take direct military action early in the week. I think that's the way he put it." In a widely quoted portion of his book, Abel authoritatively described President Kennedy as being enraged to learn, after Khrushchev proposed the Jupiter trade, that the missiles were still in Turkey. "He distinctly remembered having given instruction," Abel wrote, "long before the Cuban missile crisis, that the Jupiters must be removed." Following his conversation with the president, Abel wrote, he checked with an official of the National Security Council who "was able to confirm the President's recollection. Kennedy had, indeed, issued instructions for the removal of Jupiters from Turkey in the third week of August, 1962, two months before the crisis." No such orders were given; all that Kennedy did, according to The Other Missiles of October, published in 1997 by historian Philip Nash, was to request that the Defense Department on August 23, 1962, study the question of how to remove the Jupiters. No action was taken on the president's request before the missile crisis, Nash wrote. Elie Abel's mistake, one that any reporter would have made, was to believe what his sources in the White House were telling him.

  * Robert Kennedy's Justice Department office diaries for 1963 have not been located by the Kennedy Library. In its finding aid for researchers, the library reports: "The desk diaries for 1963 are not in the custody of the Kennedy Library. Their whereabouts are unknown to the library staff."

  22

  ELLEN

  Jack Kennedy's luck began running out in the fall of 1963, well before November 22. He was confronted with a no-win situation in South Vietnam, where President N
go Dinh Diem, the despot he had armed and supported, was increasingly taking the war to his political opponents instead of the communist-backed armed opposition. There was a crisis at home, too, as had been foreseen by Larry Newman and Tony Sherman of the Secret Service---one of the president's pool-party women turned out to be an East German. That fact was uncovered not by Kennedy or an aide but by a group of Republican senators investigating a graft-and-sex scandal on Capitol Hill. The president's womanizing was on the verge of being exposed as a national security issue.

  The woman's name was Ellen Rometsch. She was a Washington party girl with a quality that made her a natural for Jack Kennedy: she was stunningly attractive, an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike. That was all that mattered in late spring of 1963. The president did not know that Rometsch was born in 1936 in Kleinitz, Germany, a village that became part of East Germany after World War II. He did not know that, as a child growing up in Kleinitz, Rometsch was a member of a Communist Party youth group and that, as a young adult, she joined a second Communist Party group. He did not know that she fled with her family to West Germany in 1955 and, after a failed first marriage, moved in 1961 to the United States with her second husband, a sergeant in the West German air force who was assigned to the German Embassy in Washington. Kennedy also did not seem to realize---or care---that if his sexual relationship with Ellen Rometsch somehow became known, she would be thought by many to be a communist spy.

  Rometsch, twenty-seven when they met, fulfilled another essential criterion for the president: she was a professional, a prostitute who would take her money, do what was wanted, and keep silent. Kennedy stumbled upon Rometsch in the usual way, through one of his many procurers in Washington, this time Bill Thompson, the railroad executive.

  Rometsch had become one of Bobby Baker's girls by early 1963, and she spent many evenings with Baker and his friends at the Quorum Club, a private hideaway for legislators and lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Baker, the secretary to the Senate Democrats, was known as the man who made the legislative process work. He was a parliamentary expert and brilliant vote counter. He was also the man who did what the Democratic senators needed done, and discreetly got them what they wanted, including women.

  Baker arrived in Washington from Pickens, South Carolina, as a fourteen-year-old congressional page in 1943 and rose through the ranks with his mentor, Lyndon Johnson, of Texas. He became, as he put it in his memoir, Wheeling and Dealing, "a Capitol Hill operator" who in mid-1963 was accused of influence peddling---taking payoffs in return for steering federal contracts to his friends in business. Baker resigned from the Senate, under pressure, on October 7; he was being investigated by the Justice Department and also the Senate Rules Committee, whose Republican minority was eager to turn the case into an issue in the 1964 presidential campaign. Baker eventually served eighteen months in a federal penitentiary after being convicted on nine counts of fraud and tax evasion.

  None of that had yet happened when Baker was approached one evening in the spring of 1963 by Bill Thompson in the Quorum Club, and asked, Baker recalled in an interview for this book, a typical question: "'Baker,' he said, 'who is that good-looking girl? That woman looks like Elizabeth Taylor.' And I said, 'She's a German, and her husband is a sergeant who works for the German Embassy. And she's a real pro as far as I'm concerned. I mean, everybody who has had a date with her has really enjoyed her company.'

  "So he said, 'Bakes, do you think that if I invited her to the White House that she would go with me to meet President Kennedy?' I said, 'Gee, she's a Nazi. She'll do anything I tell her.' And so I asked her, and she said she would be delighted." It was arranged, Baker told me, for Thompson to pick Rometsch up at her apartment in northwest Washington and take her to the White House. Rometsch later told Baker, he told me, that "the president was really a fun guy and how delighted she was to be with him." When he next went to the White House, Baker added, "the president told me that she was the most exciting woman that he had been with."

  Rometsch was very much in demand that spring. "She was a very lovely, beautiful party girl ... who always wore beautiful clothes," Baker told me. "She had good manners and she was very accommodating. I must have had fifty friends who went with her, and not one of them ever complained. She was a real joy to be with."

  Kennedy knew, Baker said, that Rometsch was there to service him and would have to be paid: "President Kennedy did not want a date with somebody for social purposes. It was clearly understood when [Thompson] took girls to the White House they were going to be party girls." Baker said he had first supplied women to Kennedy "in my official position in the Senate. When a good-looking girl would send a card in to Senator Kennedy, the doorman would come to me and say, 'Mr. Baker, what shall I do?'" It happened all the time, Baker said. Once, he recalled with a laugh, a woman sent a note to Kennedy saying, "Senator, you can put your shoes under my bed any time you want."

  "A lot of celebrities are chased by beautiful people," Baker said, and Jack Kennedy "loved it." Baker told of one meeting early in the presidency when he was invited to the Oval Office to meet with Kennedy. "He really didn't want to talk about the Senate," Baker told me. "He just said, 'You know, I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every day.'"

  Over the next few months, Ellen Rometsch helped Kennedy ward off headaches. And she gossiped to Baker about it. She described pool parties in the White House, Baker told me, where "everybody's running around there naked." There was one occasion, Baker told me, without naming his source, "when Jackie came home and Bill Thompson had all these people" in the pool.* On May 18, 1963, Baker said, Rometsch joined a group of legislators and friends on a bus outing to the Preakness, the annual stakes race at the Pimlico Race Course, near Baltimore. "We were talking because we were seatmates," Baker told me, "and she had gone to the White House two nights before for a naked party in the swimming pool. I think there was like five guys and twelve girls in the White House indoor pool." In all, Baker estimated, Rometsch visited Kennedy at least ten times that spring and summer.

  Those visits eventually triggered what became a nightmare for the hard-to-rattle president---the one scandal, had he lived, that he and Bobby Kennedy might not have been able to continue to cover up.

  In June the Harold Macmillan government was rocked by a sex scandal that led to the resignation of John Profumo, the British minister of war, after he admitted that he had lied to the House of Commons. The Profumo scandal, as it was quickly dubbed by London's tabloid press, revolved around a prostitute named Christine Keeler, who was having simultaneous affairs with Profumo and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attache. The story was made poignant by the fact that Profumo had an unblemished record: he had served valiantly as a brigadier general in World War II and was married to Valerie Hobson, a prominent English actress who had just played the lead role in The King and I. There were fears, the press breathlessly reported, that Profumo, while cavorting poolside with Keeler and at least four other prostitutes, including a Chinese beauty named Suzy Chang and a bleached-blond Czech named Maria Novotny, was spending his weekends answering the girls' questions---planted by Ivanov---about British nuclear policy. The significance of Profumo's national security transgressions, if there were any, paled beside the overwhelming appearance of his impropriety. The fact that a married senior defense official was frolicking with prostitutes proved lethal to Macmillan's leadership. He resigned in October, and a badly tarnished Tory government was voted out of office in 1964.

  The president, needless to say, was fascinated by the scandal. "Kennedy had devoured every word written about the Profumo case," Ben Bradlee reported in Conversations with Kennedy. "It combined so many of the things that interested him: low doings in high places, the British nobility, sex, and spying. Someone in the State Department had apparently sent him an early cable on the Profumo case from David Bruce, the American ambassador to Great Britain. Kennedy ... ordered all further cables from Bruce on that subject sent to him immediately."

  The
president's interest was far from academic. Maria Novotny and Suzy Chang worked as high-class prostitutes in New York as well as London, and, as Novotny would tell reporters later, she and Chang had serviced Jack Kennedy before and after the 1960 presidential election. As a senator, Kennedy had taken Suzy Chang to dinner at 21, the very public New York restaurant. He, too, with a wife as lovely as Profumo's, could be drawn into the scandal.

  Once again the president turned to his brother, who took action within days of the first published newspaper reports on Profumo's pending resignation, in early June of 1963. On June 11, the day after Kennedy's speech at American University calling for a "just and genuine peace" with the Soviet Union, Charles Bates, the FBI's legal attaché in London, was cabled by J. Edgar Hoover and ordered to "stay on top of this case and ... keep bureau fully and promptly informed of all developments with particular emphasis on any allegation that U.S. nationals are or have been involved in any way." A heavily censored copy of Hoover's cable was declassified in 1986.

  The same demand was forwarded by Director John McCone to the CIA station in London. "When the business broke about Profumo," Cleveland Cram, the deputy chief of station, said in a 1997 interview for this book, "we suddenly got an 'Operation Immediate' from John McCone" asking the station to determine whether any Americans were involved. Cram and Charles Bates, the senior FBI man in London, "gossiped together a lot, as you can imagine," Cram told me, "and we immediately assumed it had something to do with the Kennedys." The CIA officer was ordered to make contact with Sir Roger Hollis, the director general of Britain's MI5, and explain that he needed full cooperation. To Cram's surprise, he got it. Cram spent the next "three or four" weeks at MI5 headquarters, poring over the Profumo files. "It was like getting access to a spider's web," Cram told me. "It was a lot of fun." He also got a glimpse into MI5's ability to pry---learning, for example, that one of his neighbors was a secret informer for MI5.