The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  As the mob did its politicking, J. Edgar Hoover was sifting through his agents' reports and keeping up-to-date files. Joe and Jack Kennedy were careful with Hoover as they were with few other men; Hoover, they knew, did not approve of the candidate's personal life.

  By the late 1950s, according to Cartha DeLoach, one of Hoover's deputies, Joe Kennedy and the FBI director had become friends. "Two big men who felt it necessary to know each other," DeLoach told me in an interview. "They both had the same conservative politics. Hoover catered to him, to some extent, and Joe Kennedy catered to Mr. Hoover, knowing of the FBI's capabilities insofar as getting information. Not using it for blackmail purposes," DeLoach insisted, "but getting it and having it in files. Strange as it may seem to some people today, who constantly castigate Hoover as an individual who leaked information, who extorted in order to save his job and to protect the FBI, he had a deep sense of loyalty to the presidency."

  Hoover, for reasons not clear, chose to pretend early in 1960 that he knew little about Jack Kennedy when he ordered DeLoach to review the files. "He called in the following day," DeLoach told me, "and I told him Jack had quite a relationship with Inga Arvad and other sexual escapades. And that, frankly, while he was somewhat of a bright individual, he had a very immoral background. Hoover told me, 'That is not right. You have misinterpreted the files. You're talking about the older brother of John F. Kennedy. Go back and recheck those files.' When he called back, I was able to tell him, 'I am not wrong. This is the man who is a candidate for the presidency.' That was the first that Hoover knew about him. Hoover knew nothing about the sexual background until we checked the files." Hoover was troubled by the files, DeLoach said, because "he did feel that the presidency should be a very dignified office, representing the people of the United States, the strongest nation in the world. Jack Kennedy and his constant acts of immorality certainly offended Hoover."

  By 1960 the FBI director had become a genius at intimidating politicians. He was born in 1895 in segregated Washington, the youngest of four children, and grew up in a solidly middle-class Protestant environment. A stutterer in his youth, Hoover went into adulthood with a series of idiosyncrasies and obsessions that tormented those who worked under him. FBI agents had to meet Hoover's standards of dress and physical appearance; sweaty palms or a colored shirt could lead to a dismissal. The agents learned not to tell the director what he did not want to know. Hoover sought to control those above him---the presidents and members of Congress to whom he reported---through the secret dossiers he kept in his office. Many of those files were reportedly destroyed after his death, in 1972.

  After working his way through law school, Hoover found his first significant job in the Alien Enemy Bureau of the Justice Department, where he dealt with foreigners accused of disloyalty. By 1919 he was the Justice Department's expert on radicalism and aliens, and in 1920 he took part in the infamous Palmer Raids against suspected communists, which led to more than four thousand arrests. Throughout his career, Hoover remained obsessed with rooting out communists, socialists, and other suspected subversives from American society; his concern was not only for what the radicals did but for what they thought.

  In 1924 Hoover was appointed head of the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI, and he moved brilliantly to increase the size, skill, and morale of the agency. He was one of the first to push for the establishment of a national fingerprint center, which revolutionized crime fighting. He also understood the value of public relations. By the mid-1930s, Hoover was constantly striving to personify himself, and his FBI, as being in the forefront of the war against crime, stopping such killers---amid front-page fanfare---as Machine Gun Kelly and John Dillinger. He began in those years what would become three decades of close cooperation with Hollywood, leading to a series of wildly popular "G-man" movies: one, starring James Cagney, fixed Hoover's public image as the nation's foremost crime fighter. In 1936, with World War II looming, President Roosevelt authorized Hoover to investigate Nazi and communist subversion in the United States, giving the FBI the right to become entrenched in all areas of domestic surveillance. Hoover expanded the FBI's use of bugging devices and wiretaps---and also expanded his personal intelligence-gathering on politicians, public figures, and journalists.

  Hoover's hypocrisies and insecurities became more pronounced as his prestige and authority grew. For more than thirty years he took vacations with Clyde Tolson, the FBI's assistant director, who maintained an apartment close to Hoover's home. The two men went on at least two extensive vacations a year---never publicly depicted as such---to swanky resorts in Florida and California, where Hoover indulged his fondness for racetrack betting. Hoover's favorite key lime pie was regularly flown at government expense from Florida to Washington. Rumors about the two bachelors and their personal relationship have persisted until today. Visitors to the Hoover home were astonished to find that the prudish FBI director, who constantly inveighed against what he called the decline of public morality among America's youth, had installed a gallery of nude photographs in the basement rec room, including one of Marilyn Monroe. Over the years, FBI agents spent thousands of hours maintaining and improving his home. By 1960, as Kennedy campaigned for the presidency, Hoover was insisting that when outside Washington he be driven only in new black Cadillac sedans, which had to be immaculately clean. The drivers were instructed to plan their routes with no left turns---a Hoover edict issued after his car was struck while turning left. When on the road, agents were required to reserve suites only in Hoover-approved hotels, which provided the specified bed, mattress, and down pillows.

  Like Jack Kennedy, Hoover knew few limits.

  Joe Kennedy learned all about Hoover's power, and his obsessions, during his disastrous prewar opposition to FDR's determination to wage war against Nazi Germany. Kennedy had worked hard since then at buttering up the FBI director. His role as a special service contact for the FBI ended when the program was suspended after the war; he was reinstated in 1950 by Hoover as one of two such agents in Boston. At the time, an FBI letter described Kennedy as having "innumerable contacts in the international diplomatic set" and added that he "has expressed a willingness to use his entree into those circles for any advantage the Bureau might desire...."

  No amount of flattery was too much, as Joe Kennedy realized. Kennedy's FBI files, released under the Freedom of Information Act, are full of praise for Hoover in letters and statements from father, sons, and daughters. One postwar FBI report quoted Eunice Kennedy as telling colleagues at a Conference on Citizenship in Boston that her father had recently met with Hoover and "was very much impressed with the administrative organization and the operation of the bureau." Jack Kennedy, after his election to the Senate, was quoted in a confidential FBI report to Hoover that said he believed "the FBI to be the only real Government agency worthy of its salt and expressed his admiration for your accomplishments." In 1953 Joe Kennedy was appointed to serve as a member of a federal commission on government efficiency, which, while accomplishing little, did complete a study on defense spending. The elder Kennedy, according to FBI files, managed to relay word to Hoover expressing "shock" at the extent of Pentagon waste and mismanagement. "The deeper he delves into the matter, the more he appreciates your work," Hoover was told.

  Joe Kennedy's courting of Hoover paid off in 1956, when he was nominated by Eisenhower to serve on a high-powered new advisory group known as the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities.* An FBI security check ignored the extensive allegations about Kennedy's involvement in bootlegging during Prohibition and glossed over his dubious record as ambassador to England. A synopsis of the report ended with these words about Kennedy: "He has frequently expressed admiration for the Director and the work of the Bureau." Kennedy spent six months on the intelligence review panel, and made at least one secret trip overseas to review CIA operations. His mission created mayhem in the CIA station in Rome when Kennedy demanded---and got---access to the names of the
agency's undercover field agents inside the Italian government and the Vatican. Thomas F. McCoy, then a CIA operations officer in Rome, said in an interview for this book, "All he was doing was pushing the view of his right-wing friends in the Vatican---the aging monsignors who were out of things and wishing for the good old days." McCoy added, "Joe had his own point of view, which many people were supporting" in the aftermath of Senator Joseph McCarthy's loyalty investigations. "He didn't want us to support anybody who was mildly left: 'If they weren't communists, why were they acting like communists?'"*

  Joseph Kennedy was thus no outsider when it came to the good---and the bad---of the American intelligence community. He undoubtedly shared his understanding of the CIA's clandestine world with his sons Jack and Bobby, and perhaps with J. Edgar Hoover.

  In declassified files there is a strong suggestion that Kennedy may have privately briefed Hoover on what he was learning about the CIA, a conversation, if it took place, that would surely have delighted the bureaucratic-minded FBI director, who was often at war with the CIA and other government intelligence agencies. FBI files show that on February 16, 1956, Hoover told his key deputies about a visit the day before with Kennedy, who informed him that he planned to analyze the issue of "duplication of coverage abroad by the military, CIA and the State Department.... I discussed with Mr. Kennedy generally some of the weaknesses which we have observed in the operations of CIA, particularly as to the organizational set-up and the compartmentation that exists within that Agency." There is no evidence in the publicly released files of any further contact between Kennedy and Hoover about the CIA, but the files do show that Kennedy continued to send flattering personal letters to Hoover as his son began his presidential campaign.

  Joe Kennedy's fawning relationship with Hoover was not the only thing the Kennedys had going for them. The FBI director was then just five years away from reaching the federal government's compulsory retirement age of seventy, and his overriding interest was to remain in power. Hoover, and Jack Kennedy, understood that only the president of the United States, whatever his private morality, had the authority to keep Hoover on the job. Hoover's reappointment was assured---but Kennedy first had to win the election.

  There was at least one known backup plan in case the Kennedy campaign's mixture of hard work, charm, money, and gangster connections failed and left Jack Kennedy on election night with only a small plurality of electoral college votes. The campaign feared that the twenty-six unpledged electors in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia---fourteen of whom would shortly announce they would vote for Senator Harry Byrd, amid reports that the others might join their revolt---could take away the presidency. The plan was centered, not surprisingly, on money.

  Oscar Wyatt, a wealthy oilman, banker, and Democratic Party fund-raiser in Corpus Christi, Texas, spent election night anxiously watching returns at home, as did the rest of the nation. "We didn't know whether Jack won," Wyatt recalled in an interview for this book. "If Illinois went against Jack, we'd have to get the Mississippi vote"---the eight unpledged electors in that state. Wyatt was telephoned at home late in the evening by Clifton Carter, one of Lyndon Johnson's most trusted political lieutenants, and told: "You've got to get one hundred thousand dollars to Mississippi tonight." Wyatt was further told that each of the delegates would cost $10,000. "I owned a substantial interest in a bank in Corpus Christi and got the bank opened up and got the money," Wyatt told me, adding that getting a bank president to open up in the middle of the night was no easy chore. Wyatt arranged for his private plane to be fueled and readied for an immediate flight to Jackson, Mississippi. It was now eleven P.M., and Wyatt decided to stay at the airport.

  At two A.M. Carter telephoned again and told him to hold the plane. "Don't leave." A third call came at four A.M. "Don't leave." Finally, at six-thirty A.M., Wyatt, asleep on a couch in his hangar, was called a last time by Carter and told, "Daley brought it in. Go to sleep." The plane returned to its hangar. When interviewed in 1995, Wyatt was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Coastal Corporation, in Houston.

  The Mississippi electors, without any $10,000 inducements, duly cast their ballots for Senator Byrd on December 19, 1960. Their vote was little more than a gesture; Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by a total of 300 to 219 in the electoral college (Hawaii's 3 votes were added later) and was ratified as the thirty-fifth president of the United States.

  Hoover, with his access to the secrets of electronic surveillance, knew that the election corruption went far beyond Illinois. But he did not act on what he knew. The day after the election---the day Jack Kennedy announced he would reappoint Hoover as FBI director---Hoover summoned Philip Hochstein, editorial director of the Newhouse newspaper group. "When I got to his office," Hochstein later told the British journalist Anthony Summers, "I offered my congratulations on the announcement of his appointment by the President-elect. He replied in a surly manner, 'Kennedy isn't the President-elect.' He said the election had been stolen in a number of states, including New Jersey, where my office was, and Missouri, where Newhouse had recently bought a paper.... It was quite a harangue, and I think Hoover wanted me to be part of a crusade to undo the election.... I didn't tell anyone at the time."

  Sometime shortly after Jack Kennedy took office, the FBI in Chicago forwarded a report on the Illinois election to the Justice Department. "I can tell you," Robert Blakey, then in Justice, said in an interview for this book, "that the fact that it was stolen was brought to Robert Kennedy's attention." Nothing happened.

  The lack of action was precisely why Joe Kennedy had insisted after the election that Bobby be nominated as attorney general. Jack, always reluctant to take on his father, at first waffled. "I don't know what to do with Bobby," he told George Smathers. "He busted his tail for me." The two men were talking, Smathers recalled in an interview for this book, while dangling their feet in the water at the shallow end of the pool at Palm Beach. Joe Kennedy was reading the morning papers at the other end. "The Old Man," Kennedy said, "wants him to be attorney general." Smathers, a former U.S. attorney who was not an admirer of Bobby's, was stunned. "He never had a case in his life," he recalled telling Kennedy. "He never argued in a courtroom. If you make him an assistant secretary of defense, he'll have a lot of power. It's an appropriate job for a guy who has never done a damn thing." Jack Kennedy's response was intimidating, Smathers recalled: "Why don't you tell the Old Man?"

  Smathers accepted the challenge and walked to the other end of the pool. "'Excuse me, Mr. Ambassador. Jack and I have just been talking about Bobby. He wants to do something with Bobby. I thought he could be assistant secretary of defense, and then in a year or two he could move up.' Joe said, 'Jack! Come here.' Jack walked over. [Joe] said, 'I want to tell you, your brother Bobby gave you his life blood. You know it and I know it. By God, he deserves to be attorney general and by God, that's what he's going to be. Do you understand that?' Jack said, 'Yes sir.' And so Bobby became attorney general."

  The Republicans quickly learned all they needed to know about Kennedy loyalty. Everett Dirksen, the ranking Republican senator from Illinois, later telephoned Cartha DeLoach and requested a full-scale FBI investigation of the election; he had evidence, he said, that the election had been stolen. "I told him the FBI had received considerable information and we sent that information to the Department [of Justice]," DeLoach recalled. "We'd be glad to receive his information, or any other information, and refer [it] to the attorney general. But Senator Dirksen said, 'You say turn it over to the attorney general?' I said, 'That's the only recourse we have.' And he said, 'Thanks a hell of a lot,' and slammed the phone down. He knew that Bobby Kennedy was the attorney general.

  "And," DeLoach added, Dirksen "probably knew that the Department of Justice had already advised the FBI not to conduct any further investigation."

  * * *

  * Woodfield came to understand, he said, that Sinatra considered himself "to be the ambassador between the U.S. government and the mob." The p
hotographer told of once being on assignment with Sinatra in Miami and accompanying him and some of his gangster friends to a dog track, where several scenes were to be shot. During a break for lunch, Sinatra called out, "Billy, put in a roll and take some pictures for me ... just me." Woodfield then heard one of the gangsters tell another, "Come on. We're going to get our picture with Frank." The other responded: "Take a picture? I'm not supposed to be in the country." The exchange left Woodfield a little unnerved. Pete Hamill told me of once being asked by Sinatra to ghostwrite his autobiography. Hamill, aware that the book would be a bestseller, told the singer that he would consider doing so---but Sinatra would have to tell the truth about the women, the politicians, and the mob guys. Sinatra told Hamill he could live with the first two requirements, but not the third: "I don't want someone knocking on the fucking door."

  * The committee, which exists today as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), was headed by Dr. James R. Killian, Jr., president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who played a major role in developing America's satellite intelligence capability. Others on the board included retired general James H. Doolittle; Edward L. Ryerson, retired chairman of Inland Steel; and the Wall Street lawyer Robert A. Lovett. Kennedy resigned from the committee on July 25, 1956, explaining in a letter to President Eisenhower that he was becoming "deeply involved" in political activities on behalf of his son, then seeking the vice presidential nomination.

  * Somebody in Washington obviously had qualms about Kennedy's visit. William L. Colby, who would become director of the CIA, was a senior officer in the Rome station in 1956. Prior to Kennedy's arrival there, Colby recalled in an interview for this book, he had been given secret instructions from CIA headquarters that he and others in the station were to cooperate with Kennedy about covert operations but were not to provide him with the names of any agents. Kennedy got his way, nonetheless, Colby said, by telling the station: "Either you're going to give me the names or I'm going to go to the president and quit this job."