J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (81 page)

What happened between the three Kennedys during the next few days can only be surmised. Robert would obviously warn John that Hoover believed the story (that is, had yet another arrow in his quiver), whether it was true or not. Typically, the attorney general would have confronted Joe, certainly to ask about the tale and probably to rant and rave. He’d had occasion to snap feistily at his father more than once during the campaign, when clumsy missteps threatened to undercut the mint-new Kennedy image of uncorrupted, idealistic youthfulness. And Robert would surely be writhing furiously at this latest twist of Hoover’s thumbscrew.

On December 18 the head of the clan, who was vacationing in the sun and balmy beach air at the family estate in Palm Beach, suffered a massive stroke. He was never able to speak again, though he stayed alive for almost eight years—during which two sons were killed and the third disgraced.

Hoover found out about a third telephone call.

On February 27, as the Kennedys still reeled from the shock of losing, for all practical purposes, the advice and encouragement of their father, possibly as the result of a telephone call Robert Kennedy may have made, another old man eased into a fatherly role. In identical memos to Robert and to O’Donnell, the FBI director expressed his concern that Campbell, who had called the White House at least three times to his knowledge, was an associate of Roselli and of Sam Giancana, whom he described as “a prominent Chicago underworld figure.”
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JFK presumably saw this new indication of Hoover’s spidery watchfulness and knew that a copy was tucked into his files.

On March 22 the president and his FBI chief met privately for lunch in the White House living quarters. “What actually transpired at that luncheon may never be known,” said a Senate report thirteen years later, “as both participants are dead and the FBI files contain no records relating to it.”
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Perhaps for the first time Jack Kennedy had no doubts that Hoover now possessed information that, if leaked, could destroy his presidency. And Jack had to handle this problem on his own.

This could hurt you very badly, Mr. President, is the likely approach Hoover took, imputing a patriotic motive to his violation of White House privacy. It would have been his style to emphasize the connection to the boss of the Chicago Mafia and let the other matter of Mrs. Campbell materialize, unexpressed, on its own.

I’ll do everything
I
can to protect you, but if a reporter got hold of this story…, Hoover may have warned. Always eager to nail down the particulars, he must have astonished Kennedy with the amount of information he had in hand on Giancana, Roselli, Sinatra, and Mrs. Campbell. It would have been strange if the sanctimonious bachelor had not lectured the younger man a bit on the sacred responsibility of high office.

He did not have to mention Inga, who would have been on both their minds. Compared with this, Jack’s unknowing involvement with an older woman who may or may not have been a Nazi spy was a youthful escapade.

Many speculate that Hoover used this climactic luncheon to unveil another surprise—his discovery that the CIA was behind Giancana’s plot to assassinate Castro.
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But Kennedy was innocent of that foolishness. That was not true of the liaison with Mrs. Campbell, who had actually, according to White House logs, telephoned him seventy times since his inauguration.

Both men knew, though from very different perspectives, how much power J. Edgar Hoover now wielded over his commander in chief.

And perhaps John Kennedy matured somewhat that day. Now head of the family clan, now faced with the increasingly seamy realities of bureaucratic infighting and his own vulnerabilities, he apparently took steps to protect himself and his job. He made the last recorded call to Judith from the White House line.

The following day, as Hoover knew from the Los Angeles SAC, the president intended to spend the weekend with Sinatra. Hopeful of establishing a kind of West Coast White House, the singer had added two guest houses to his estate in Palm Springs, put in a helipad, and wired the place for serious communications: five private telephone lines, equipment for teletype facilities, and, according to the FBI report, “enough cable available to handle a switchboard
if necessary.”
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Arrangements also covered the special amenities for which the host was famous and which the president had greatly enjoyed on past occasions.

But Kennedy canceled. Not willing to make the break himself, he’d called Peter Lawford and told him, “I can’t stay there. You know as much as I like Frank, I can’t go there, not while Bobby is handling this [Giancana] investigation.”
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To compound the insult, the president chose instead to stay in Palm Desert, an adjacent community, with another crooner, and a Republican at that: Bing Crosby.
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Sinatra was bitter. He later complained to the actress Angie Dickinson, a sometime (and always discreet) intimate of the president, “If he would only pick up the telephone and call me and say that it was politically difficult to have me around, I would understand. I don’t want to hurt him. But he has never called.”
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The singer could hardly have guessed that any contact might be picked up by Hoover and, no matter how innocent the conversation, become another item for the files.

Wounded, Sinatra retaliated by dropping Lawford and the rest of the Kennedy relatives and hangers-on. Guests who dropped by his desert hideaway now saw a note prominently attached to the wall, visible from the threshold. Dated 1959, it read, “Frank—what can we count on the boys from Vegas for? Jack.”
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Possibly forged, the note nonetheless had its effect upon the Hollywood, Vegas, and Washington gossip circuits.
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Sam Giancana was even more bitter. The Chicago agents were even
lockstepping
him, for Christ’s sake, following him right onto the golf course and playing behind him, ridiculing his swing. He’d had to go to court to get a restraining order, calling them off. The federal judge ordered his harassers to play no less than two foursomes behind him. It was impossible for the Chicago syndicate to do business, he’d complained to his mob associates Gus Alex and Edward Vogel. From now on, Giancana was overheard saying, “Everyone is on his own.”
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He blamed Sinatra. The singer had made promises and never kept them. On one of the FBI’s MISURs, Giancana discussed Sinatra’s double-cross with his Las Vegas frontman, Johnny Formosa.

Formosa wanted to take out the whole Rat Pack. “Let’s show ‘em. Let’s show those fuckin’ Hollywood fruitcakes they can’t get away with it as if nothing happened…I could whack out a couple a those guys. Lawford, that Martin prick, and I could take the nigger and put his other eye out.” As for Sinatra, Formosa suggested, “Let’s hit him,” offering to do it himself.

“No,” Giancana responded, “I’ve got other plans for him.”
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Every wilful child and disgruntled employee knows the best way to drive an authority figure up the wall. In artfully selected cases, do exactly what he says, to the letter.

Hoover complied promptly with a request from the attorney general on April 11. As he could predict, this unusual alacrity tarnished RFK’s reputation with the liberal journalists he and his brother had so successfully charmed in recent years.

When the CEO of U.S. Steel announced a price rise, five other steel manufacturers fell in line behind him, including the president of Bethlehem Steel. Not long before, however, the Bethlehem executive had told stockholders that no increase was necessary and could in fact be dangerous to the market survival of the company.

On its face, his turnabout suggested the possibility that the manufacturers could be fixing prices. Routinely, such suspected violations of the antitrust laws are investigated by the FBI. Never before, however, had FBI agents been so imbued with zeal that they had knocked on reporters’ doors in the dead of night and roused them from sound sleep, official badges glinting.
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Reporters in Wilmington and Philadelphia—three in all—had covered the Bethlehem stockholders’ meeting and could not corroborate the alleged comment by the company president, which had been carried in the
New York Times.
But they could, and did, let their colleagues know about the “policestate tactics” now in practice under Robert Kennedy.

The attorney general, who had indeed asked that they be interviewed, had no choice but to take responsibility for the timing of the actions of his employees. Offstage, he told friends that Hoover had intended to embarrass him. And had succeeded.

Hoover believed the “liberal press” had defeated Nixon. He had now sown a seed of suspicion about the Kennedys.

“If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.”
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Thus, Lawrence Houston.

The CIA general counsel had finally gone directly to the attorney general to
explain an embarrassing situation. Kennedy, unimpressed by previous representations from the superspies, had urged Courtney Evans to follow up “vigorously” the case involving Giancana and the attempted wiretap on Dan Rowan. Now Houston had to lay his cards on the table.

Giancana’s peccadillo had to be forgiven in the interest of national security, Houston explained. Then, perhaps for the only time, a Kennedy was told by a CIA official that the mobster and the agency had planned to kill the inconvenient leader of Cuba. He was also told that the peculiar initiative had been ended for good.
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“I trust,” said Kennedy with obvious sarcasm, “that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the Attorney General know.”
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The crime-busting crusader had been forced, by Hoover’s hated rivals, to ease off on Giancana, though the mobster remained high on Kennedy’s hit list.

And he was forced to go to Hoover. On May 9 he visited his FBI director to confirm Hoover’s earlier suspicions about CIA shenanigans. In a memo written the next day, Hoover expressed “great astonishment” that the plotters had hired Maheu “in view of [his] bad reputation.”
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To the continuing surprise of FBI agents, the director’s former fair-haired boy still refused to spill the beans to anyone in the Bureau.
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Kennedy told Hoover in no uncertain terms, as the director’s memo records, that the CIA officials admitted that the plot had never been cleared with the Department of Justice. The two men shared a sense of outrage and astonishment at the CIA’s impudence.

Of course, Hoover had reason to be amused, seeing how ineptly the spy agency had earned the distrust and contempt of the attorney general, while thwarting his cherished campaign against the Mafia. By contrast, the FBI had followed the young man’s orders and had been especially inventive in protecting his brother’s reputation from harmful gossip.

He was surprised and galled—all things considered—when JFK’s note in honor of his thirty-eighth anniversary as director was coolly formal boilerplate: “Yours is one of the most unusual and distinguished records in the history of government service.”
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The occasion was May 10, and the attorney general announced a cakecutting ceremony. But the miffed Hoover could not accept. He intended to be at his post all day, he explained. Among his tasks was crafting the memorandum that explained for the files what RFK had learned from the CIA.

She dumbfounded the professional photographers who worked with her. Surprisingly plain in the flesh, much too substantial in the derriere, she nevertheless glowed in photographs and in the movies.

Hoover had been deeply involved, as she well knew, in the blacklisting of her second husband, the left-leaning playwright Arthur Miller. And the FBI, as well as associates of the Teamsters president, Jimmy Hoffa, were keeping tabs on her in the early 1960s.

Marilyn Monroe indiscreetly told numerous friends that she had fallen deeply in love with John Kennedy while he was still a senator—the pair supposedly meeting in the secret “love nest” he maintained at the very tony Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, as well as in Palm Springs and in Los Angeles during the 1960 Democratic convention—but that he had ended the affair sometime after becoming president. Some of the same friends were also convinced that, by mid-1962, the attorney general had taken his place in the arms of the legendary sex goddess.

If Frederick Vanderbilt Fields, a longtime friend of the actress, is to be believed, it began with a stimulating discussion of J. Edgar Hoover.

Both Robert Kennedy and Monroe were guests at a dinner party at Peter Lawford’s house. According to Fields, who heard the story from Marilyn, the pair went off by themselves to the den, where “they had a very long talk, a very political talk.” Marilyn told Fields that “she had asked Kennedy whether they were going to fire J. Edgar Hoover—she was very outspoken against him—and Kennedy replied that he and the President didn’t feel strong enough to do so, though they wanted to.”
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This encounter had occurred on February 1, 1962, and the dinner, if not the content of their talk, was reported in the press. Apparently the pair exchanged their private telephone numbers because before long Marilyn was calling him so frequently that the Justice Department operators, obviously acting on the attorney general’s instructions, refused to put her through.

How much did the FBI know about her affairs, first with Jack, and then with Bobby? William Sullivan would maintain that the Bureau knew about the former but missed the latter, if it ever really got off the ground. (He had his doubts.) It is possible, however, that the FBI stumbled upon the RFK affair but didn’t realize just what it had discovered.

On August 1, 1962, the mobster Meyer Lansky was overheard on a MISUR telling his wife, Teddy, that Bobby was carrying on an affair with a girl in El Paso. Mrs. Lansky griped that it was all Sinatra’s fault, since he was “nothing but a procurer of women for those guys. Sinatra is the guy that gets them all together.” Meyer stood up for his friend, saying it was not Frank’s fault, that “it starts with the President and goes right down the line.”
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