J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  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.”62

  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.*

  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.”63

  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.”64 Possibly forged, the note nonetheless had its effect upon the Hollywood, Vegas, and Washington gossip circuits.†

  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.”65

  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.”66

  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.*

  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.”67 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.*

  “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.”68

  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.”69 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.†

  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.”71

  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 pai
r 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.”72

  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.”73

  The recording was indistinct, however. As Anthony Summers has noted, Lansky could have said “Lake Tahoe.” Monroe was visiting the California mountain resort the last weekend in July. The attorney general was in the Los Angeles area the Friday before, but his whereabouts on Saturday and Sunday are not known.

  Despite rumors that he was with her the following weekend in her Brentwood home, perhaps beside her when she died on Saturday, August 4—that Lawford helped him flee, and Hoover helped cover up his presence by having Monroe’s telephone records seized—the evidence would suggest that the FBI director, like everyone else, had no proof of Kennedy’s involvement and was not called in. Had he been, Hoover would almost certainly have used this information against Kennedy at a later date, when he ransacked his files for every bit of derogatory material he could find.*

  Monroe’s name did come up on August 20, sixteen days after her death, when Hoover sent Courtney Evans to inform the AG about the mention of the unidentified woman in the Lansky tap. Kennedy snorted, saying he had never been in El Paso. He thanked Evans for the tip, though, and was moved to discourse upon the subject of gossip mongers in general. According to Evans’s report, the attorney general, on his own, noted that “he was aware there had been several allegations concerning his possibly being involved with Marilyn Monroe. He said he had at least met Marilyn Monroe since she was a good friend of his sister, Pat Lawford, but these allegations just had a way of growing beyond any semblance of the truth.”74

  Obviously, the attorney general was speaking directly to his suspicious FBI director, responding to the unspoken accusation that hovered in the air.

  His oblique denial was not, however, believed. As late as 1964, some eight months after President Kennedy’s death, Hoover was reminding RFK of the Monroe rumors—and of the unexploited resources of the director’s personal files.

  In a memorandum, Hoover felt he should warn Kennedy that an author planned to reveal the affair with the late actress in a new book.

  For a man who enjoyed betting on the ponies, and had once been addicted to the glamour of the Stork Club, J. Edgar Hoover seemed strangely uninterested in the exotica of Las Vegas. On October 9, on his first and last visit to the gambling mecca, he spoke to the annual convention of the American Legion. Observers noted that he made a beeline through the lobby of his hotel, eyes glaring straight ahead, ignoring the noisy hullabaloo and blinking lights of the craps tables and slot machines as if they did not exist.

  But by this time he knew, from over a hundred wiretaps and bugs, some of them planted in plush bedrooms, more about the innards of this multimillion-dollar empire in the Nevada desert than did any of the blackjack dealers, pit bosses, or cocktail waitresses.

  He knew who was skimming from the casino profits—and how much they were taking in. He knew where the money went and how it made its way to the top bosses.*

  He also knew that some people, well connected with this place, were very unhappy with the Kennedys, John and Robert, unhappy to the point where they were talking about killing them.

  In July and August of 1962 the teamsters boss James Riddle Hoffa told a close associate, Edward Grady Partin, who headed Teamsters Local No. 5 in Baton Rouge, “I’ve got to do something about that son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy. He’s got to go.”75

  Hoffa then discussed the layout and exposed position of Robert Kennedy’s home at Hickory Hill; noted that the attorney general often rode in an open convertible and would be an easy target for a lone assassin positioned in a high building with a .270 rifle with a high-powered scope; and discussed the advisability of having the assassination committed somewhere in the South, where rabid segregationists would be blamed. It was important, Hoffa said, that the assassin be someone without any identifiable connection to the Teamsters or Hoffa himself.

  But Hoffa said he’d prefer to bomb Bobby and asked Partin if he could get some plastic explosives.

  In September, Partin became an FBI informant. Learning of Hoffa’s plan, Hoover informed both the president and the intended victim. Under orders from Robert Kennedy, the FBI director had Partin polygraphed. “The FBI does not often give definite conclusions in a polygraph test,” the RFK aide and former FBI agent Walter Sheridan observed. “This time they did…The memorandum from the Bureau concluded that from all indications, Partin was telling the truth.”76

  That same month, the Florida Mafia boss Santos Trafficante, Jr., one of the principals in the CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro, was meeting with Jose Aleman, Jr., a wealthy Cuban exile and a friend from Trafficante’s Havana days, when the subject turned to the Kennedys. “Have you seen how his brother is hitting Hoffa,” Trafficante bitterly complained, “a man who is a worker, who is not a millionaire, a friend of the blue collars? He doesn’t know that kind of encounter is very delicate. Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.” When Aleman suggested Kennedy probably wouldn’t get reelected, Trafficante replied, “No, Jose, he is going to be hit.”77

  It was his impression, Aleman later stated, that Hoffa was involved in the plan and that Trafficante, although he knew of it, wasn’t its principal architect.

  Aleman later claimed, in a 1976 interview with the Washington Post reporter George Crile III, that he passed on this information to the FBI on at least two occasions, in 1962 and 1963. Crile tracked down the two agents Aleman claimed had interviewed him, George Davis and Paul Scranton, but they declined to confirm or deny Aleman’s account without headquarters approval, Scranton adding, “I wouldn’t want to do anything to embarrass the FBI.”78 If Hoover was aware of Aleman’s allegations, he did not report them to the president or the attorney general.*

  Also that month, Carlos Marcello met with two associates, Edward Becker and Carl Roppolo, at Churchill Farms, the Louisiana Mafia boss’s 3,000-acre plantation outside New Orleans.

  It is likely that no one hated the Kennedys more than Marcello. Robert Kennedy had gone to extreme lengths to nail Marcello, even arranging for him to be kidnapped and deported to Guatemala. When he’d slipped back into the country, the attorney general had hit him with indictments for fraud, perjury, and illegal reentry.

  All three men had been drinking heavily when Becker sympathetically remarked, “Bobby Kennedy is really giving you a rough time.”

  “Livarsi na petra di la scarpa!” Marcello exploded. “Take the stone out of my shoe!” Marcello followed this old Sicilian curse with “Don’t worry about that little Bobby son of a bitch. He’s going to be taken care of.”

  Becker realized that Marcello was quite seriou
s, that to him this was an affair of honor. He also realized that the assassination was already in the planning stage when Marcello said he was thinking of using “a nut,” an outsider who could be used or manipulated to carry out the hit, rather than one of his own lieutenants.

  But Marcello wasn’t talking about assassinating Robert Kennedy: the target was to be his brother, the president. “The dog will keep biting if you only cut off its tail,” Marcello explained. If they hit Bobby, Jack would retaliate with the Army and the Marines. But if the dog’s head were cut off, he added, the whole dog would die.80

  Carlos Marcello had on the inside of his office door a framed motto that visitors saw just before departing. It read, “Three can keep a secret if two are dead.”*81

  It’s possible the FBI director discussed the Hoffa plot with the president when he met with him on October 3—Jack worried about his younger brother—but if so, it goes unmentioned in the memorandum of their conversation which Hoover sent to Tolson the following day.

  The president had asked a favor, Hoover related. He was going to speak at the graduating exercises of the FBI National Academy later that month, and he wanted “a page and a half of ideas.” He specifically wanted the director to set down “concrete accomplishments,” and Hoover replied that the Bureau’s accomplishments “in the civil rights field, and in the campaign against the underworld” seemed just the right ticket.83

  In his October 31 NA speech, the president spoke effusively about both Hoover and the Bureau, noting that he had the “greatest respect” for the director and his “extraordinary men.” Although pleased with the president’s comments, Hoover could hardly have been surprised, since most of them had been written by Crime Records. But Kennedy added his own touches. One comment sticks out. To the future law enforcement officers seated before him, Kennedy said, “We have the greatest debt to all of you. You make it possible for all of us to carry out our private lives.”