Mary had already come to hate her husband’s job, and the death of their son destroyed what was left of their marriage; Mary divorced him, and Cord subsequently became a covert-operations agent in London. Mary moved to Georgetown to live in an apartment and art studio in the converted garage of her sister, Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee, and her husband Ben Bradlee. In the fall of 1961, Mary began visiting the White House, at first to attend various social events and private parties. JFK had attempted to have an affair with her; however, she put him off until January 1962, when she changed her mind. Another CIA official, Bill Walton—a very good friend of both JFK and Mary Meyer—would often escort her to White House social events as a pretext to getting her inside while seeking to avoid creating suspicions as to her real purpose, especially when Jacqueline was there.
Before long, Mary and JFK had allegedly—there is no proof of it—begun to take marijuana together, and later other rumors suggested they had experimented with other more powerful drugs. Angleton, a friend of Cord Meyer who was also fond of Mary, was concerned that she had become too entangled with Kennedy to remain unaffected by it. It may just be a coincidence that, concurrently with his affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer and their rumored use of drugs together, Kennedy had become less tolerant of the CIA’s intelligence breakdowns and the Pentagon’s aggressive provocations for military actions, especially in Vietnam.
His Peace Speech in June 1963 represented a sea change in his attitudes: Previously, during the campaign, he had accused Eisenhower of not being tough enough on fighting Communism; now, in 1963, he began seeking more peaceful overtures to Russia, Cuba, and Vietnam, and less confrontational actions in the world’s trouble spots. This shift toward peaceful coexistence was not well received in all parts of Washington DC, especially on the other, Virginia, side of the Potomac River. The fact was that Mary Meyer was regarded as a serious threat to the national security by many very high level men in the CIA. In her case, that didn’t happen before the assassination; for her, the risk of her revealing her own secrets came ten months after the assassination, just as the whitewash represented by the Warren Commission Report was being released. But the fuse which ultimately led to the firing of point-blank gunshots to her head and upper body—hallmarks of a professional hit—was lit well before her death.
Early in 1963, as Phil Graham’s mental state continued deteriorating, he went (uninvited) to a newsmen’s convention in Phoenix, took over the dais, “grabbed the microphone and drunkenly announced to the crowd, many of whom knew him, that he was going to tell them exactly who in Washington was sleeping with whom, beginning with President Kennedy. His favorite, screamed Phil, was now Mary Meyer, who had been married to CIA official Cord Meyer and was the sister of Ben Bradlee’s wife, Tony.” One of the newsmen immediately called President Kennedy, who then called Katherine Graham to advise her of what happened and offered to help; however, she was too angry at Kennedy to accept. Phil’s assistant, James Truitt, took the phone and asked Kennedy to have a military jet take Leslie Farber, Phil’s doctor, to Phoenix immediately, which he did.61 This episode may have had something to do with Bradlee’s transfer of Truitt to Tokyo shortly thereafter.
In any event, this unfortunate incident came very close to being an explosive news story in every newspaper in the country, were it not for some very quick actions to shut Phil up and make sure none of the newsmen would report it. Katherine Graham flew to Phoenix in the chartered Gulfstream jet that had taken Phil there earlier to retrieve him and have him committed to a very expensive psychiatric hospital, Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. On August 3, 1963—the fifteenth anniversary of the Washington Post Company, the umbrella corporation for the newspaper and other properties—Phil Graham called Katherine and asked her to come pick him up so they could spend the weekend together at their farm. Once there, Phil shot himself in the head.62
Marilyn Monroe
As to the Monroe affair, JFK’s vulnerabilities stem from the even more troubling nature of the questions surrounding her death and Bobby’s alleged involvement, at least his presence in her apartment shortly before her death.63 There were a number of men in Washington DC who were watching Marilyn Monroe in more ways than simply having a prurient interest in her movies, her scantily dressed photographs on calendars, and the completely nude photos of her being passed discreetly among friends. These men regarded her as an extremely dangerous person, a threat to the national security of America. From another prism, Jack and Robert Kennedy also regarded her as dangerous. But the danger she presented to them involved their ability to continue to stay in office, given what would happen if their enemies caught wind of what was going on. In fact, their biggest enemy, J. Edgar Hoover, knew all about their secret lives, thanks to the wiretaps and bugging devices he had had installed in her house.
John F. Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe was an open secret in Hollywood, having started as early as 1956, when they were both on European trips. They spent many evenings together during the 1960 convention and, after a dinner on one such evening, were seen “the next morning emerging from a shower at the (Peter) Lawford beach house.”64 The affair began before the election and continued well after he went to the White House. Hoover had warned Jack about exposing his affairs with Judith Campbell and Marilyn Monroe, so he had resigned himself to give up both, no doubt because there were many others to replace them.
Author Donald H. Wolfe, in The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, made a compelling case that Robert F. Kennedy was not only the last visitor of Marilyn Monroe before she died but was actually involved in it in some way. To be sure, other authors, including Donald Spoto in his book Marilyn Monroe, disagree vehemently with such a conclusion. A more likely scenario was presented by researcher Stephen Pegues in 1997, who wrote that it was a Giancana hit man, Gianola Tortorello, and two other men who broke into Monroe’s home and forced a Nembutal suppository into her rectum;65 this would explain the lack of the same chemical in her stomach, as reported in her autopsy. Giancana, like his mafioso brethren, were all outraged at what they considered as a double cross by Joseph Kennedy, who had promised them freedom from prosecution. His son Bobby apparently did not get that memo; the death of Marilyn Monroe, under this hypothesis, was a message for all three of the Kennedy men from the underworld about the dangers of reneging on promises.
It is not our purpose here to settle that case; however, it is clear that whatever involvement Bobby may have had would have been known to his nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover; he wouldn’t hesitate a moment to use the secret scandals known only to the handful of people who had access to the FBI reports to keep Bobby Kennedy rattled and under complete control. RFK had found out about Hoover’s channels when he ordered the FBI to confiscate the records of her telephone calls from General Telephone within hours of her death. He knew that Hoover knew all about the outgoing and incoming telephone calls, not just the precise times of each call but the taped conversations as well. Since August 4, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover possessed information on both Kennedy brothers that was so potentially damaging that it could end their political careers. From then on, they were held hostage by Hoover, who would continue to use this advantage in the days and weeks following November 22, 1963, to gain total control over the investigation of JFK’s assassination.66 When RFK tried to use his most trusted men in the Justice Department’s criminal division, Jack Miller and Robert Peloquin, to inject themselves into the investigation, they were shunned by the FBI on the orders of the director. He would also withhold reports from his field agents to the Justice Department, thus precluding Kennedy’s awareness of the information they had gathered about Oswald’s New Orleans connections to CIA and Mafia figures like David Ferrie and Carlos Marcello.67
For the last fifteen months of their administration, both John and Robert Kennedy were rendered impotent by their own FBI head. Robert Kennedy’s seeming reticence about vigorously pursuing the murderers of his brother was, ironically—at least in part—due to his own vulnerability within the feder
al law enforcement bureaucracy because his authority as attorney general had been trumped by J. Edgar Hoover.
Judith Campbell
At roughly the same time that JFK was sexually involved with Marilyn Monroe, he was carrying on another high-risk affair with Judith Campbell.68 She, in turn, was in a simultaneous, long-term intimate relationship with the boss of the Chicago Mob, Sam Giancana—the same Sam Giancana that JFK’s father had leaned on for financial and arm-twisting kinds of support in the election that got him elected president, and the same Sam Giancana who had become the target of his brother Robert for over five years, along with all the other mobsters who, coincidentally, were arm’s-length business associates of their father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Judith Campbell (later known as Judith Exner) was a gorgeous California socialite and twenty-five years old when she was introduced to JFK by Frank Sinatra in early 1960. One month later they became lovers. A month after that, JFK asked Campbell to carry a satchel containing at least $250,000 (“for the [presidential primary] campaign”) to Giancana, who was also recently introduced to Campbell by Sinatra. She became a conduit between Kennedy and Giancana during the primaries and remained so during the general election and the Kennedy administration. She carried money and documents on the elimination of Castro from JFK to Giancana and arranged meetings between the two. Throughout her years with JFK, Campbell was under intense FBI surveillance because of her association with Giancana. The surveillance revealed to the FBI her relationship with JFK. Hoover chose not to make this information public at least in part because revealing it would indicate the extent of his illegal bugging and would damage his and the FBI’s reputations.69
During the FBI’s surveillance of her Fontaine Avenue apartment, Agent William Carter observed two men as they broke into her place and then fleeing fifteen minutes later. They traced the getaway car to Mr. I. B. Hale, of Fort Worth, Texas, and identified the two men as his sons, Bobby and Billy. Mr. Hale was in charge of security for the General Dynamics Corporation. This break-in, apparently for the purpose of placing a wiretap on her telephone, was not reported to local police. The questions it raises suggest that someone in a position to know of her relationships with JFK and Sam Giancana was attempting to obtain information that would help in their efforts related to winning—or keeping—the TFX contract.70
By the fall of 1962, Campbell was out of JFK’s life. The FBI surveillance and JFK’s waning passion for her (he’d brought another woman to their bed much to Campbell’s dismay) left her heartbroken. Exner (Campbell) claimed to have gotten pregnant from JFK during their last sexual encounter. According to Exner, JFK told her not to keep the baby and to seek help from Giancana, who had also become her lover, in terminating the pregnancy.71 It was probably fortuitous that Kennedy’s affair with Campbell was over when it was, and that the affairs he and his brother Bobby had with Marilyn Monroe were also coming to an end at the same time, even though the reason was due to the death of the other party. Had they become tangled up with the numerous scandals which broke—or were on the precipice of imploding—the following year, it would have probably been impossible for the Kennedy administration to have survived. On the other hand, John might have personally survived, since there would have been fewer issues to have enraged his enemies.
The British Sex Scandal
In early 1963, the British government became embroiled in its own sex scandal that led to the resignation of John Profumo, the minister of war, after he admitted that he had lied to the House of Commons. This scandal went well beyond mere naughtiness with prostitutes, because one of the girls, Christine Keeler, was having a simultaneous affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché. Ivanov found this out first and had Keeler and four other prostitutes ask questions of Profumo about British nuclear policy. The British tabloids had picked up this story, and it was making front-page news for months until the entire Macmillan government was brought down by it.
John F. Kennedy was fascinated by the British scandal. Ben Bradlee reported in Conversations with Kennedy, “Kennedy had devoured every word written about the Profumo case … 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.”72
The real cause of his anxiety over the British scandal, however, had been related to his own intimate knowledge of his similar conduct with women from the same clique involved in the Profumo scandal. In fact, the story came within a hair’s breadth of morphing into an American scandal on June 23, 1963. The front-page headline that day in the New York Journal American was “High U.S. Aide Implicated in V-Girl Scandal,” and the story referred to a “man who holds a ‘very high’ elective office.” Though it did not name the president, it came close enough to propel Bobby into high gear, calling the reporters into his office. Threatening to bring an antitrust suit against the Hearst organization, he forced them to drop the story.73
It was later determined that the rumors inundating the news in mid-June 1963 were being fed by none other than J. Edgar Hoover, apparently prompted by his reaction to the president’s Peace Speech of June 10 at American University, followed a week later by the installation of a hotline between the White House and the Kremlin.74 Days after that, “there was a flurry of veiled hints linking the President to the Profumo story, such as the Drew Pearson-Jack Anderson column for June 29: ‘Britishers who read American criticisms of Profumo throw back the question ‘what high American official was involved with Marilyn Monroe?’”75
In addition to his affairs with women he shared with the Mafia, JFK had been serviced in New York by at least three call girls from Communist countries. Two of these women, Maria Novotny (Czech) and Suzy Chang (Chinese), were also involved with John Profumo, the British minister of war, getting answers to questions about British nuclear policy being fed to them by a Soviet naval attaché.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan eventually resigned, and his government was shortly voted out of office. Two reporters for the New York Journal American knew about the link between these call girls and JFK and wrote a story under the headline “High U.S. Aide Implicated in V-Girl Scandal,” but their story was suppressed after being published in one edition by the newspaper owner, Bill Hearst; under threats of being prosecuted under antitrust laws by Bobby Kennedy, the case was unceremoniously dropped.
Ellen Rometsch
The third Communist call girl, beautiful German-born Ellen Rometsch, became one of the White House pool party girls. As a youth and young adult, she was a member of the Communist Party. Bobby Baker had made sure that LBJ knew all about JFK’s affair with her, and he, of course, tipped off his friend, Hoover. In fact, as demonstrated below, it appears that Lyndon Johnson was the instigator of Baker’s involvement in helping to procure women for Kennedy. From the time of their first association, in 1948, Baker would do anything and everything that Johnson told him to do and, Johnson—whose primary skill was in using men’s weaknesses to gain an advantage over them—would not have hesitated to exploit any such opportunity.
When the FBI learned of the Rometsch-Kennedy connection, they began to investigate her as a possible spy, and JFK—aware of the potentially disastrous results if it were to become public—had Bobby Kennedy arrange to immediately deport her to Germany and paid her to keep her mouth shut. He enlisted the help of several friends to pay her the hush money, raising the funds in his behalf despite the fact that donors could not deduct the contributions or expect any acknowledgment from him. Hoover cooperated with RFK in this instance—not to help protect the president—to protect the vice president, who he feared could be connected to a Baker prostitute if the ongoing investigations led to a public disclosure.76
Rometsch was stunningly attractive, an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike. One of Jack Kennedy’s friends, Bill Thompson,
had discovered her at the Quorum Club and asked Baker about her. Baker told him, “She was a very lovely, beautiful party girl … who always wore beautiful clothes. 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.”77 The Life magazine article of November 22, 1963, edition, noted earlier, described what went on frequently within the Q, as it was called by some of the regular girls: “Sometimes she … [did] other dances which required no costume whatsoever. Once, perhaps because it was a hot summer night, the idea caught on and the other girl guests either decided independently or were persuaded to peel as well. That time the girls grew playful and finished the party pouring champagne over one another.”78
In helping Baker to set up the Q, Lyndon Johnson knew that he would have to keep the operation at arm’s-length distance from himself because the primary unstated purpose of the club was to provide a source of dirt on others, which he could use for multiple other future purposes. It would have originally been intended by him, in the 1950s, to target other congressmen. But by 1961, the focus of these nighttime enterprises would be moved to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, to the White House, to gather dirt on the president; if through Hoover’s resources he could get enough dirt on JFK without exposing himself, he might have been able to assume the presidency through the impeachment process. Beginning in that year, immediately after the election, Bobby Baker and Fred Black acquired another business associate, a New York lawyer and newly minted lobbyist named Myron “Mickey” Weiner, who would eventually work so closely with Baker that the office secretary Margaret M. Broome stated that it was not inaccurate to say Weiner “made Baker’s office his ‘second office.’”79 By then, his non-Capitol regular office/apartment at 1028 Connecticut Avenue was apparently used mostly for parties, according to his own testimony later given to a Senate investigatory hearing: “Weiner said that Carole Tyler … came to Weiner’s apartment on some occasions along with [Bobby] Baker and the female secretary of a U.S. Senator.”80 Another source referred to as Ms. E admitted prostitution services, on one occasion accompanied by Ellen Rometsch; she also “went to parties in Myron Weiner’s suite.” In an attempt at face-saving for himself, he admitted keeping “the names and addresses of ‘a few girls’ in the event one of his customer’s desired female company while in town.” Apparently contradicting himself, he went on to state that he used the services of party girls, including Rometsch, but denied he ever secured their services for anyone else.81
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