Official and Confidential (47 page)

Nor would Joseph be there, henceforth, to intervene in his sons' tangled relations with the Mafia. From now on, the boys were on their own.

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‘Aside from the moral issues, the morass of potential blackmail in which the Attorney General found himself must have appalled him … How could the CIA and John Kennedy have been so stupid?… The potential for blackmail extended beyond Giancana. J. Edgar Hoover would also be able to hold these stories over John and Robert Kennedy as long as they lived.'

Harris Wofford, former Kennedy aide, 1980

O
n January 6, 1962, the columnist Drew Pearson made a daring prediction: ‘J. Edgar Hoover,' he said, ‘doesn't like taking a back seat, as he calls it, to a young kid like Bobby … and he'll be eased out if there is not too much of a furor.'

It was only a brief comment in a radio broadcast, but what Pearson said made ripples in Washington. Three days later, in a note to his brother, Robert Kennedy begged the President to keep a favorable reference to the FBI in his State of the Union address. ‘It is only one sentence,' he told the President, ‘and it would make a big difference for us. I hope you will leave it as it is.'

On January 11, before the assembled throng of senators and congressmen, John Kennedy spoke of Vietnam, of civil rights and of taxes. Few could have noticed or cared as he rattled off a line praising the FBI – for its ‘coordinated and hard-hitting effort.' This was a sweetener for Edgar, but the time for meaningful sweeteners was past.

A month earlier, Edgar's spies had warned him not only that the Kennedys were planning to fire him, but that a
specific candidate, State Department Security Director William Boswell, was in line for his job. And soon, having not deigned to see Edgar for the past year, Kennedy sent word that he ‘desired to speak with Mr Hoover.'

Edgar stepped out of his limousine at the northwest gate of the White House at one o'clock on March 22. He was ushered into the Oval Office, and then he and the President took the elevator to the dining room in the Executive Mansion. The only other person present was Kenneth O'Donnell.

The meeting was a long one. Four hours later, as Edgar was leaving, Kennedy aides Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger were on the way in. Their names were anathema to Washington conservatives, and the President refrained from introducing them. As he explained to them a few moments later, he ‘did not want to upset Mr Hoover too much.'

It may never be known whether or not Kennedy tried to fire Edgar that day. The Kennedy Library says it has no record of what was said at the lunch. Nor does the FBI – even though Edgar normally wrote a memo following a visit to the White House. We do know the meeting went badly. Kenneth O'Donnell, interviewed years later, would say only that the President eventually lost patience. ‘Get rid of that bastard,' he hissed to his aide. ‘He's the biggest bore.'

Since the mid-seventies, when a Senate inquiry probed the nation's darker intelligence secrets, the encounter has had a special significance. Edgar sat down with the President armed with dirt more explosive than even he was used to – much of it, ironically, obtained thanks to Robert Kennedy's pursuit of Mafia boss Sam Giancana.

Edgar had learned, even before Eisenhower left office, that there was a plot to kill Fidel Castro and that Giancana was somehow involved. Early in the Kennedy presidency he discovered Giancana was working with the CIA; and by March 1962 he knew that Judith Campbell, who was in touch with Giancana and Johnny Roselli, was one of the President's lovers. While his attention was drawn to this by
his agents, Edgar may even have learned something of it directly from Roselli, who is said to have socialized with him at La Jolla.

Edgar knew, too, of Giancana's threat to ‘tell all' about the Kennedys and, from a recent wiretap, that Giancana and Roselli had discussed obtaining a ‘really small' receiver for bugging conversations. In that same conversation they had spoken of ‘Bobby' and when he would next be in Washington.

The Director of the FBI, then, had evidence that the President of the United States was intimate with a young woman who was close to a Mafia boss who was involved with the CIA in a plot to assassinate a foreign leader – a plot that Edgar had every reason to suspect the President had authorized. And that, all the while, the FBI was ruthlessly pursuing that same Mafia boss on the orders of the President's younger brother.

Any Director of the FBI would have been justified in bringing such a scenario to the President's attention. With his malice toward the brothers and with the threat of dismissal hanging over him, Edgar must have relished doing so.

Judith Campbell, now known by her married name, Exner, has revealed that Edgar indeed brought her name up that day. ‘Jack called me that afternoon,' she said. ‘He told me to go to my mother's house and call him from there. When I did, he said the phone in my apartment wasn't safe. He was furious. You could feel his anger. He said that, at their meeting, Hoover had more or less tried to intimidate him with the information he had. He'd made it clear that he knew about my relationship with Jack, even that I'd been to the White House, that I was a friend of Sam and Johnny Roselli, and that Jack knew Sam, too. Jack knew exactly what Hoover was doing. Knowing that Jack wanted him out of office, he was in a way ensuring his job – by letting Jack know he had this leverage over him.'

According to Campbell, there was something even more damaging to hide. Early in the presidency, Kennedy had
repeated his folly of the election period – by meeting again with Giancana. The new contacts, Campbell said the President told her, ‘had to do with the elimination of Fidel Castro.' Kennedy also used Campbell as a courier, on some twenty occasions, to carry sealed envelopes to Giancana.

Campbell's account cannot be dismissed. It is specific in dates and details and is supported by travel documents, her annotated appointment book and official logs recording three of her visits to the White House. Giancana's brother Chuck has also spoken of contacts between the Mafia boss and Kennedy during the presidency and of Campbell's delivering envelopes.

Most historians now accept that the Kennedy brothers were involved in the Castro plots. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, we know, they no longer trusted the CIA. It is therefore conceivable that, given his existing relationship with Giancana, the President may have chosen to deal directly with the mobster about Castro murder plans. To have done so would have been foolhardy, but it would fit with Kennedy's love of intrigue.

According to Campbell, the President said the envelopes he sent to Giancana contained ‘intelligence material' to do with the plots. The envelopes were sealed, however, and she never saw the contents for herself.
¹
Whatever they contained, John Kennedy was playing a horrendously dangerous game. Giancana had hoped that his help – first in getting the President elected and then with the Castro operation – would be rewarded with federal leniency. Yet Robert Kennedy's onslaught on organized crime not only included Giancana among its targets; he was singled out for especially intensive harassment.

According to his half brother Chuck, the mobster felt that the President had reneged on a bargain. To a mafioso, to break a bargain is a sin commonly punished by death, and Giancana was a murderer by profession. Again according to his half brother, he was to play a key role in planning Kennedy's assassination in Dallas.

It is not clear how fully Edgar understood the Giancana scenario in March 1962, only that he knew plenty and told the President so. ‘My impression from Jack,' Judith Campbell has said, ‘was that Hoover had intimated to him that he knew I had been passing material from Jack to Sam.' According to Cartha DeLoach, Edgar returned from the meeting saying he had told the President he knew ‘a great deal' of what was going on.

Even so, records suggest, the brothers soon made themselves even more dependent on Edgar. Unless his brother had been keeping the Castro plot a secret from him, which seems highly unlikely, Robert had long known about Giancana's involvement. Yet it was vital for Robert, as it was for his brother as President, to protect himself from being linked to the plots. A paper record was therefore concocted, including a memo by Edgar claiming that he and Robert had learned of the CIA's use of Giancana with ‘great astonishment.' The writing of that memo alone left the Attorney General indebted to Edgar.

Contrary to previous assumptions, the President did not sever his connection with Judith Campbell after the March meeting with Edgar. White House phone logs show that contacts between him and Judith Campbell continued at least through the late summer of 1962. According to Campbell, she and the President simply used other telephones to evade FBI wiretaps. Kennedy, his secretary Mrs Lincoln recalled, suspected Edgar of bugging even the White House itself. Even so, says Campbell, she and the President went on seeing each other for months to come, and she continued to meet with Giancana.

Increasingly harassed by the FBI, Campbell asked the President for help. ‘I was sort of begging him,' she recalled, ‘saying, “Jack, do something. I can't handle this” – because I was being followed. And he would always reply, “Don't worry about it. You're okay, you haven't done anything wrong. You know Sam works for us.”'

Still, the President was infuriated. ‘Jack spoke of Hoover with great irritation,' Campbell recalled. ‘It was in the sense of, “I wish he'd get out of my hair.” It was very obvious he wanted to be rid of Hoover.'

The President could not risk trying to dump his FBI Director. The Giancana mess aside, Edgar was now armed with knowledge of a battery of other Kennedy follies. Even before the March confrontation, Edgar had let the President know he knew about the use of prostitutes during the 1960 Convention. He knew, too, about an old relationship that could prove as politically damaging as the current ones.

In early March a small New York magazine,
The Realist
, ran a story headlined THE STORY BEHIND THE RUMOR ABOUT PRESIDENT KENNEDY'S FIRST MARRIAGE. The rumor was that Kennedy had been briefly married, in 1947, to a Florida socialite named Durie Malcolm. Malcolm had merited an entry in a privately printed history of her family, and it stated flatly that among her several husbands was ‘John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England.'

If true, the ‘other marriage' story was dynamite. It would mean that the first Catholic president had been divorced, which was against his professed religion, and – since he had concealed the fact – had deceived the nation. Research had established as of the writing of this book only that Kennedy and Malcolm did know each other in the forties, well enough to stir up speculation in a Florida gossip column.
²

An entry in FBI files shows that in November 1961, when the rumor first reached the Bureau, an agent promptly perused Malcolm's family history in the New York Public Library. His report, and similar ones from New Jersey and Massachusetts, went straight to Edgar. He then brought the matter to Robert Kennedy's attention.

The file, however, does not tell the whole story. In a rare interview after Edgar's death, his secretary, Helen Gandy, indicated that her boss had been onto the ‘other marriage' as
early as 1960, and that he and Richard Nixon discussed using it for election dirty tricks.

Soon after Edgar's lunch with the President in 1962, the story began appearing in the press. First the
Thunderbolt
, the racist organ of the National States Rights Party, came out with a front-page story:
KENNEDY'S DIVORCE EXPOSED! IS PRESENT MARRIAGE VALID
? Right-wing organizations distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of Malcolm's family history around the country. The syndicates and wire services started digging. A United Feature column, by Henry Taylor, was withdrawn at the last moment. Then Walter Winchell asked, ‘Why hasn't the White House debunked it?' By the time the debunking came, in
Newsweek
, it had become a serious embarrassment.

Ben Bradlee, the magazine's Washington Bureau Chief, has told how that story came to be written. ‘I talked to the President about doing a story, based largely on
Thunderbolt
and the hate sheets. The FBI had made an investigation and some FBI documents were made available by Kennedy's press secretary. The condition was that we could have them overnight, and never again. Salinger was the intermediary between us and the FBI. Chuck Roberts and I stayed up all night with the documents, writing the story in some motel … I don't know what the terms were on which Kennedy got that stuff from the FBI …'

Edgar, then, had ridden to the rescue, a rescue that might never have been necessary had it not been for the stories written by Winchell, Henry Taylor and
Thunderbolt
. Winchell had long been manipulated by the FBI. Henry Taylor's massive FBI file shows he and Edgar had been pals for years. Edgar had supplied him with information, and he had dutifully written stories attacking Edgar's critics. Taylor's column on the ‘second marriage' was killed only at the eleventh hour, when Edgar intervened at the request of the White House.

Thunderbolt
would also dredge up the old story about Kennedy's affair with his Senate secretary, Pamela Turnure.
The headlines read:
JFK ACCUSED OF ADULTERY
, and the article appeared after Turnure's former landlady, who had recorded the sounds of the couple's love-making, wrote letters to several public officials. Edgar was one of the recipients, and according to Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's former aide, the
Thunderbolt
publication was no coincidence. ‘Johnson told me,' he recalled, ‘that Hoover had given him the sound tapes on that woman during the 1960 campaign. Then, during the presidency, he made sure the information got to people they thought would use it. Not the regular press, but scurrilous publications …'