Official and Confidential (50 page)

Kennedy went further. ‘I suppose you know,' he said, ‘you're under very close surveillance.' He warned King to be very careful about what he said on the phone, that if J. Edgar Hoover could prove he had links with Communists, he would use it to wreck pending civil rights legislation.

As the meeting with the President ended, King found himself wondering why Kennedy had taken the precaution of ushering him out into the garden to talk. ‘The President,' King told an associate later, ‘is afraid of Hoover himself, because he wouldn't even talk to me in his own office. I guess Hoover must be bugging him, too.'

On June 23, the President left Washington for Europe, on the tour remembered today for the ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner
' speech and the pilgrimage to Ireland. He also visited London to see Prime Minister Macmillan. The evening he arrived, as he dined with the British leader, Kennedy learned the Profumo case was about to touch his presidency. The noon edition of the New York
Journal American
that day carried the headline:
HIGH US AIDE IMPLICATED IN V-GIRL SCANDAL
. The opening line read: ‘One of the biggest names in American politics – a man who holds a “very high” elective office – has been injected into Britain's vice-security scandal …' The report stopped short of naming the President, but the implication was clear.

The report stayed in the paper for one edition and was then dropped without explanation. Robert Kennedy had moved swiftly. He telephoned his brother in the middle of the dinner with Macmillan, FBI files show, and the President expressed ‘concern.' The FBI representative in London, Charles Bates, was ordered to brief Kennedy the next
morning before he left for Italy. If anything develops,' the President told Bates, ‘anything at all, we'd like to be advised. Get it to us in Rome.'

In Washington, forty-eight hours after publication of the
Journal American
story, the authors of the article faced the Attorney General in his office. The paper's Managing Editor, Pulitzer Prize winner James Horan, and Dom Frasca, remembered by a colleague as ‘the best investigative reporter' on the paper, had been hauled from their homes in New York and flown to the capital in the Kennedys' private jet.

The two journalists have since died, but their ordeal at the hands of Robert Kennedy was recorded by the FBI. According to the file, the President's brother asked the newsmen to name the ‘high U.S. aide' who, according to the article, was being linked to the Profumo scandal. Horan replied that the reference was indeed to the President and that, according to the newspaper's sources, it involved a woman he had known shortly before he was elected President.

‘It is noted,' Edgar's liaison man Courtney Evans reported, ‘that the Attorney General treated the newspaper representatives at arm's length … There was an air of hostility …' When the reporters refused to reveal their sources, Kennedy followed up ruthlessly. According to Mark Monsky, godson of the
Journal American
's owner Randolph Hearst, the President's brother threatened to bring an antitrust suit against the paper. Hearst's editors then dropped the story.

After this confrontation with the reporters, Robert Kennedy betrayed how vulnerable he felt about Edgar. He tried to persuade Courtney Evans ‘not to write a memorandum' to Edgar about the meeting. According to Charles Bates, Edgar had been delving into the case for some time. ‘There was a big flap,' Bates recalled. ‘My HQ sent cables saying “Is this true? What can you find out?”'

On the evening of June 29, as the President dined with Macmillan, Bates had sent Edgar coded telegram 861, marked
VERY URGENT
. Of twenty lines, seventeen had been
excised by the censor as of the writing of this book. What remains reads: ‘…[Name censored] talked about President Kennedy and repeated a rumor that was going around New York …' A second document provides more background. A report addressed to William Sullivan, by then Assistant Director in charge of Counter-Intelligence, offers – between the censored chunks – information that:

One of [name blanked out] clients was John Kennedy, then presidential candidate. [Name] stated that Marie Novotny, British prostitute, went to New York to take [name's] place, since she was going on pre-election rounds with Kennedy.

Before it was silenced, the New York
Journal American
had referred to a second mystery woman, ‘a beautiful Chinese-American girl now in London.' The highest authorities, said the paper, ‘identified her as Suzy Chang …'

Suzy Chang was an aspiring actress and model. There is no evidence she was a prostitute, but she did move in the wealthy London circles associated with the Profumo case. Tracked down by this author, she admitted having known Kennedy. ‘We'd meet in the 21 Club,' she said nervously. ‘Everybody saw me eating with him. I think he was a nice guy, very charming.' Then she laughed. ‘What else am I going to say?'

A mass of FBI and Immigration Service documents show Chang did travel to New York in 1960, the year she was alleged to have gone with John Kennedy. She was also there in 1961, and over the Christmas period at the end of 1962. The most revealing document notes that late in 1963 ‘Chang arrived in US at New York, via Flight 701 … She was the [blanked out section in report]… She was questioned regarding the “Profumo Affair.”'

The Profumo case was treated with the utmost gravity in Washington. Defense Secretary McNamara, CIA Director John McCone, Defense Intelligence Agency boss General
Joseph Carroll, and usually one of Edgar's senior aides, attended a series of meetings. The case was handled at the FBI by two Assistant Directors. Progress reports, which remain almost entirely censored, went to the office of President Kennedy, to his brother – and to Edgar. ‘To find that the President was perhaps involved with somebody in the British security scandal!' exclaimed Courtney Evans, recalling the gravity of those days. ‘Nobody was grinning …'

Except, perhaps, for Edgar. By the time the President returned from Europe he had a pile of information on Suzy Chang, and probably on Mariella Novotny, too. Heavily censored documents show Edgar was in contact with his New York office about Chang just twenty-four hours before the
Journal American
story broke in that city.

He had long used the
Journal American
, like other Hearst papers, to fuel fears about the Red Menace. There were even former FBI men on the paper's staff. Edgar's phone logs show that he talked regularly with Richard Berlin, head of the Hearst conglomerate. Berlin oversaw an editorial policy of fierce opposition to the policies of the Kennedy administration.

He and Edgar, moreover, were both close to Roy Cohn, who was acting as attorney for an American involved in the Profumo case and said by a central figure in the scandal to have ‘arranged sex parties for JFK in London.' A telltale handwritten note on one of the FBI's Profumo documents reads: ‘Roy Cohn has this info.'

President Kennedy had been compromised by his relations with Judith Campbell, Marilyn Monroe – and now Novotny and Chang – all in circumstances that touched on national security, all discovered by Edgar. Yet all that summer the brothers and their FBI chief kept up a pretense of cordiality.

Edgar wrote to ‘Dear Bob' to congratulate him on the birth of his eighth child, a son named Christopher. He commiserated with the President when his newborn son died less than two days after birth. The brothers wrote polite letters back.

All the while Edgar was up to his tricks, using the press to distort the facts on organized crime, bringing pressure to brand Martin Luther King a Communist, trying to get Robert Kennedy to authorize wiretaps – not just against close colleagues but against King himself. In August, even as he was offering sympathy over the loss of the President's baby, Edgar had agents urgently investigating a lead about yet another woman, yet another potential security risk.

Ellen Rometsch, a lovely young refugee from East Germany, had come to the United States in 1961 with her husband, a West German army sergeant on assignment to his country's military mission in Washington. She had looks like Elizabeth Taylor and soon became known as a ‘party girl.' One of the men Rometsch met during the social whirl was Bobby Baker, secretary to the Senate Majority Leader and a close associate of Lyndon Johnson's, and she was soon appearing in low-cut dress and fishnet tights at the exclusive Quorum Club, near the Capitol, which Baker had helped to found.

One of the club's patrons in the late summer of 1961 was Bill Thompson, a railroad lobbyist and an intimate friend of the President's. A wealthy bachelor, he was privy to many of the secrets of Kennedy's love life and had been present at one of the earliest meetings with Judith Campbell.

‘We were having cocktails at the Quorum,' Baker recalled, ‘and Bill Thompson came over to me. He pointed to Ellen and he said, “Boy, that son of a bitch is something. D'you think she'd come down and have dinner with me and the President?” So I had her meet Thompson, and she went down and saw the President. And he sent back word it was the best time he ever had in his life. That was not the only time. She saw him on other occasions. It went on for a while.'

Rometsch was loose-lipped, however, and began to talk about her relationships with men in Washington. Someone tipped off the FBI about her, and in July 1963 agents came to ask questions. As a recent refugee from the East, and one who
had once been a member of Communist youth organizations, Rometsch might have been a Communist plant. Soon, with the cooperation of the German authorities, she and her husband were quietly shipped back to Germany.

The matter might have ended there were it not for the scandal that exploded, three weeks after Rometsch's departure, around Bobby Baker, the man who had arranged many of her introductions to Washington politicians. The focus of the Baker case was on financial corruption, not sex, but – behind the scenes – the Quorum Club connection triggered an explosive allegation.

‘Information has been developed,' read a top-level FBI memo written on October 26,

that pertains to possible questionable activities on the part of high government officials. It was also alleged that the President and the Attorney General had availed themselves of services of playgirls.

The remainder of the text of the memo was censored as supplied for this book, and its source was not identified.

That same Saturday, in Iowa,
The Des Moines Register
ran a front-page story reporting the Rometsch expulsion for the first time. The FBI investigation, said the paper, ‘established that the beautiful brunette had been attending parties with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of Government … The possibility that her activity might be connected with espionage was of some concern, because of the high rank of her male companions.'

Clark Mollenhoff, who wrote the
Register
story, was one of Edgar's ‘friendly' reporters.
³
His article added that Senator John Williams, the Republican from Delaware, ‘had obtained an account' of Rometsch's activity. It would later emerge that the Senator had come into possession of documents from the FBI, a leak that only Edgar could have approved.
His information, the
Register
reported, included a list of Rometsch's ‘government friends,' and he intended to present it to the Senate Rules Committee, the body investigating Bobby Baker, the following Tuesday.

Now the Kennedys performed urgent damage control. In a series of panicky calls to Edgar's office, a White House aide begged the FBI to prevent the
Register
story from being published in other newspapers. The President himself, he said, was ‘personally interested in having this story killed.' The Bureau refused to help.

Publication of the story on a weekend, and in an out-of-town newspaper, offered a small breathing space. The Attorney General called La Verne Duffy, a Kennedy friend, and dispatched him on the next plane to West Germany. His mission was to silence Rometsch before the press got to her. It was reported a few days later that ‘men flashing U.S. security badges saw Mrs Rometsch on Sunday and got her to sign a statement formally denying intimacies with important people.' Letters Rometsch later sent to Duffy thanked him for sending money and assured him, ‘Of course I will keep quiet …'

At home, very early on Monday morning and just twenty-four hours before Senator Williams' planned speech to the Senate Rules Committee, Robert Kennedy called Edgar at home. As the man with access to the facts, Edgar was the one person likely to be able to persuade the Senate leadership that the hearing would be contrary to the national interest and – because members of Congress were likely to be dragged in – contrary to the interests of Congress, too.

Edgar's notes of the call from Kennedy, and of a later meeting at the Justice Department, leave no doubt of the Attorney General's humiliation. The President's brother was a supplicant, begging Edgar to bring the senators in line.

That afternoon, as the capital buzzed with impending scandal, Edgar briefed Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and Everett Dirksen, his Republican
counterpart. To ensure total secrecy, they met at Mansfield's home. What Edgar said at the meeting is censored in the FBI record, but it evidently did the trick. Before the afternoon was out, Senate plans to discuss Rometsch had been canceled.

The crisis was over, but it had been desperately serious. The Rometsch affair had threatened to become a Profumostyle sex and security disaster that could have forced the President into resignation. The cover-up had been achieved at great cost and left the Kennedys more indebted to Edgar than ever. The power struggle had lasted nearly three years, and they were losing.

Three months earlier, in the face of pressure from the FBI, Robert Kennedy had refused a Bureau request to wiretap Martin Luther King on the unfounded suspicion that he was under Communist control. Since then, in the week Ellen Rometsch had flown back to Germany, there had been the great civil rights march on Washington. A quarter of a million people had descended on the capital to hear King speak of his dream of freedom and to sing ‘We Shall Overcome.' For millions it was a moment of inspiration, of hope for progress. For Edgar, a southerner born in the nineteenth century, it merely inflamed his fear of King.