The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Clark, who became a vice president of CBS News, said he helped persuade Jackie Kennedy to conduct the televised tour of the White House, and overrode her husband's worry that he would be criticized politically for exploiting his wife. It wasn't a hard sell. "He and she were so charming and young---the new generation," Clark told me. "And the kiddies. There was a young couple struggling with problems---not household problems, but the problems of state. That was appealing. Never mind the serious business of government."

  The White House, like its leader, seemed to be more open and more accessible. "What impressed people was how candid he was," recalled Fred Holborn, a Senate aide who moved with Kennedy to the White House. "He wouldn't be nervous if you were in the room while he was taking telephone calls." One surprise, Holborn added in a 1995 interview for this book, was the absence of Joseph Kennedy at the White House: "It was amazing how infrequently he called, and he'd only appear personally once a year." Holborn, for all of his years with JFK, didn't understand how it worked. Evelyn Lincoln explained in one of her interviews for this book that the Kennedy family had leased a private telephone line that ran from Joe Kennedy's office in New York directly to the Oval Office and to the president's living quarters. JFK also had a telephone installed in his private hideaway off the Oval Office. "It was a little office with a couch and telephone where [the president] could go and rest," Lincoln told me. "It was called the prayer room. When anyone he'd rather talk to in his private way called, he'd say [on the intercom] to me, 'Line five,' and he'd go take it." When his father called on his leased telephone line, Lincoln added, she would walk into the Oval Office and give him a card saying, "Your dad," and the president would move to his hideway---especially if there were others present---to take the call.

  The discrepancy between the public perception and the reality deepened after the president's murder. Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen followed the script in their Kennedy books, depicting the president's daily routine in the White House as one of constant work and constant action. "It was always an exhaustingly full and long day," Sorensen wrote, "as he remained in the office until 7:30, 8:00 or even 8:30 P.M., sometimes returning after his customarily late dinner, and usually reading reports and memoranda in the Mansion until midnight." Even when he and his wife were socializing with friends at dinner followed by a movie in the White House screening room, the president "would often slip away after fifteen minutes of the film to work, and then rejoin them when it was over." One of the president's few moments of relaxation, wrote Sorensen, came in the early afternoon, when he took fifteen-minute swims, accompanied by Dave Powers, his personal aide, in the White House heated pool.

  Schlesinger, in his version, wrote that the president worked through the morning and then took a relaxing swim in the White House pool before lunching in the Mansion alone or with his wife. "When his family was away," the historian added, "the President used to have his afternoon appointments on the second floor. But generally he returned to the West Wing [Oval Office] after his nap, where he worked until seven-thirty or eight at night." In the evenings, there were small dinner parties, depicted by Schlesinger as "the most agreeable occasions in the world." Weekends were preserved "as much as possible for themselves and the children."

  There is certainly a core of truth to the idyllic Sorensen and Schlesinger accounts. But they are far from the whole story, and far from the reality of life inside the Kennedy White House. The most dispassionate observers were the Secret Service agents assigned to the president's personal detail, the men whose responsibility was to be consistently at Kennedy's side ready to take a bullet meant for him. Their account of Kennedy's daily routine in the White House bears little resemblance to what is known. The accounts also share a crucial starting point: none of the agents, before they were assigned to the White House---the most prestigious job in the Secret Service---had any idea of what was going on. They have kept their silence, until now.

  Larry Newman, the first college graduate in his family, proudly joined the Secret Service in 1960, and in the fall of 1961 was quickly promoted to the presidential detail. His first major assignment was to provide security for a presidential speech in Seattle in November. Newman and Clint Hill, a senior agent, flew to Washington ten days before Kennedy's visit. "We had excellent cooperation with the Seattle police department," Newman recalled in a 1995 interview for this book, and the president made his speech and returned without incident to the safety of his suite in the Olympic Hotel. The floor of the hotel had been sealed; as Secret Service protocol dictated, access was limited to those with special clearance. That night Newman got what he called "my baptism by fire."

  Sometime after Kennedy was back, Newman heard "a commotion up at the elevator." A local Democratic sheriff "had come out of the elevator with two hookers and was bringing them down toward the president's suite. I stopped the man, and he was loudly proclaiming that the two girls were for the president's suite." The sheriff's party included a group of local policemen who had helped to provide security for Kennedy's speech. It was clear, Newman told me, that the sheriff and the policemen knew the women and knew they were "high-class call girls." Before long, Dave Powers came out of the suite. The sheriff tried to walk inside with the two women, but Powers "cut him off," Newman recalled, "thanked him for bringing the girls up, and took them into the suite."

  Newman was embarrassed, and at one point threatened to arrest the sheriff for interfering with the activities of federal officers. "He only wanted the thrill of letting the president know what a great favor he'd done for him, but what he wanted to do"---personally deliver the prostitutes---"was impossible." Before leaving the floor, the sheriff officiously warned the two women that "if any word of this night gets out, I'll see that you both go to Stillicoom [a state mental hospital] and never get out."

  "I couldn't believe he said this, but he did," Newman recalled. "One of the policemen, a lieutenant, asked me, 'Does this go on all the time?' I just didn't know what to say and said, 'Well, we travel during the day. This only happens at night.' The cops, the firemen, and everybody else" involved with presidential security had been "alerted that these girls were going in and meeting with the president," Newman said. "There was no question about that."

  Later that evening, Newman made what should have been a routine check of security along the corridors of the U-shaped hotel. The presidential party had booked all the rooms on the floor, and the suites for the president and his senior aides, Powers and Kenny O'Donnell, were located on one end of the corridor. At least six Seattle police officers had been assigned to guard the fire escape exits on the floor, but Newman found their posts unmanned. Instead the officers were all bunched together in a fire escape well directly across from the presidential suites. In a room next to the president's, two young women on the White House staff could be seen having a three-way sexual encounter with O'Donnell. The president's chief of staff had drawn the window's gauze curtains but not the heavier blinds. The policemen were passing a pair of binoculars back and forth---binoculars that were supposed to be used to survey the streets outside. "They were waiting in turn so they could watch," Newman told me. "The sergeant apologized to me and they reposted themselves, and that was it for me for the day. I didn't know what to do or say.

  "What I saw in Seattle became commonplace to me and the other agents when we were on the road. Dave Powers was the interface on these occasions, and he would find the women or bring the women along." The women would be brought out of the president's suite after three or four hours. "This became a matter of great concern," Newman told me, "because we didn't know who these people were and we didn't know what they had on their person. You would just look up and see Dave Powers mincing down the hall and saying 'Hi pal,' and we had no way to stop it. We were told to just not interfere with it. We didn't know if the president that next morning would be dead or alive."

  Newman, now living in Fort Collins, Colorado, is quick to say that he and his fellow agents loved Kennedy and loved the fact tha
t he made an effort to learn the names of the agents and some personal details about them. "It was highly frustrating, because we thought so much of the guy," Newman told me. "We really didn't like seeing him think so little of himself, if that's the right word." One solution was to blame Powers, O'Donnell, and other Kennedy hangers-on who supplied the women. "They could have been better friends, in my opinion," Newman said. "And also they could have had more respect for the security. They've written many books about how much they loved him. They were really running a hard risk on this."

  One of the risks involved the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the possibility, in case of success, of a retaliatory attack by Castro's agents on Kennedy. Even a botched murder attempt posed danger. Newman told of a dramatic off-the-record briefing for the Secret Service late in 1961, given by an army colonel who, so Newman and his fellow agents assumed, was on assignment with the Central Intelligence Agency. Newman could not recall the colonel's name. "He gave us a protective briefing at the EOB [Executive Office Building]," Newman told me. "The ties between the Pentagon and the CIA were stronger then than they are now. He told us that they had Castro's lunch at a shipyard in Cuba"; Castro had been fired on while attending a noisy party for the launching of a new ship, but the bullets instead struck the ship's propeller. "We just missed him," the colonel told the agents. The point was obvious, Newman said: "This was serious business and there was a possibility of retaliation against our leader. So he wanted to let us know how sharp we had to be and how tight we had to keep security at that particular time."

  Even under such circumstances, Newman told me, he and other agents did not have the authority to tighten presidential protection. "They [the president and his close aides] were the ones that were well aware of it"---the increased danger from assassination attempts---"and aware of more things than we were. And the tighter we made [the loop] ... we couldn't believe it ... it got more riddled. What we learned from the people we had talked to was enough to literally scare us into [believing] that this was serious business. And if the administration knew that, [we thought] they would want to assist us in making the security as tight as possible."

  The president's womanizing was his business, Newman said: "It didn't really bother us from a point of morality." But the Secret Service, he added, did not respect Powers, because he prevented the agents from conducting even a quick security check of the women's purses. "He knew we were trying to protect the president. We didn't know if these women were carrying listening devices, if they had syringes that carried some type of poison, or if they had Pentax cameras that would photograph the president for blackmail. Your security is only [as good] as its weakest link, and the weak link was Powers in bringing these girls in."

  In one typical case, he said, "I saw Dave Powers bring in two starlets who were easily recognizable. He had one [of the women] put a scarf over her head. They had a White House car go out and pick her up at the airport, and Powers met her at the car and walked her up to the second floor." It was Powers who arranged for the ambitious Hollywood starlets to fly into Washington to service the president. "It might be their career if they told their [theatrical] agent in Hollywood they didn't want to play," Newman said. "A lot of agents felt sorry for a lot of the girls ... that they were used this way. There wasn't a thank you---not like an affair. It was just being used. It was like a function." Afterward, while driving the women back to the airport, Powers would "counsel" the women, essentially warning them, Newman said, that "if this ever gets out in any way, your career is through." The Secret Service agents on duty at the time were often unsure of a visiting actress's identity, as they were about the identities of most of the women who came in and out. "If she wasn't a starlet, we didn't know who she was."

  Of course, Newman added, the agents understood that Powers "was doing the president's bidding. You'd have to say it starts at the top and works its way down. It caused a lot of morale problems with the Secret Service. You were on the most elite assignment in the Secret Service, and you were there watching an elevator or a door because the president was inside with two hookers. It just didn't compute. Your neighbors and everybody thought you were risking your life, and you were actually out there to see that he's not disturbed while he's having an interlude in the shower with two gals from Twelfth Avenue.... Other times when we were in hotels around the country and Powers would bring these girls that we didn't know, we often said we would draw the black bean to see who got to testify before the House subcommittee [on the annual Secret Service budget] if the president received harm or was killed in the room by these two women. This was the president of the United States, and you felt impotent and you couldn't do your job. It was frustrating."

  "We often joked," Newman told me, that "we couldn't even protect the president from getting a venereal disease."

  Newman and his fellow agents did not know that it was far too late to protect the president from venereal disease. Kennedy suffered much of his adult life from nongonorrheal urethritis, a painful venereal infection; despite repeated treatment, he went to his death with it. The navy pathologists who conducted the Kennedy autopsy on the night of November 22 found evidence of chlamydia, a high-ranking military officer told me in an interview for this book. Those autopsy notes were not published, the officer added, at the request of the Kennedy family.

  The long-suppressed medical records describing Kennedy's condition were uncovered in the Kennedy Library by the journalist Nigel Hamilton, and mentioned briefly in JFK: Reckless Youth, initially projected to be the first of a two-volume biography. (Hamilton chose not to continue the project.) The medical file, made available for this book, reveals that Kennedy had been treated since 1940 for a series of venereal diseases, and often experienced acute pain while urinating. In 1953 he was referred to the late Dr. William P. Herbst, Jr., a prominent Washington urologist, who treated Kennedy until the end of his life. Herbst's incomplete handwritten notes, as released by the Kennedy Library, show that Kennedy was being repeatedly reinfected---and, presumably, infecting his partners. Kennedy's most often repeated complaint, as noted by Herbst, was "burning" and "prostate tenderness." Treatment included a massive dose of antibiotics and gentle massaging of the prostate gland. The documents indicate that his condition continued after Kennedy was placed under the primary care of Dr. Janet Travell, his hand-picked White House physician. Travell and Herbst apparently worked together closely in the treatment of the president.

  Kennedy was aware of at least some of the implications of his disease. In a source note for the 1993 biography President Kennedy: Profile of Power, the writer Richard Reeves anonymously quoted a family doctor saying that Kennedy, anxious about the effect of his disease on his ability to father children, had his sperm count tested after his marriage.

  The Herbst documents raise questions about Kennedy's health and well-being at moments of international crisis. On April 14, 1961, for example, as Kennedy neared a final decision to authorize the Bay of Pigs, Herbst was summoned to the White House by Travell, and he treated Kennedy for "burning" and "occasional mucus" while urinating. The president had suffered a similar flare-up three weeks earlier, according to Herbst's notes, and "responded rapidly" to penicillin. After an examination, Herbst ordered that Kennedy, if he did not improve within a few days, be treated with 600,000 units of penicillin. He received a shot with that dosage on April 17, as the Cuban invasion was getting under way.

  Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of health research for Public Citizen, a public interest medical group in Washington, D.C., reviewed Herbst's notes for this book in 1995 and described the April 17 dosage as "high then"---although, he added, such large dosages are more common today. "If he was having sex all the time," Wolfe told me, "he'd get reinfected all the time." Kennedy's infection presented symptoms similar to gonorrhea, Wolfe added, but it was not that disease, because Herbst's notes show that there were no gonorrheal bacteria in Kennedy's urine. The president was successfully treated with a variety of antibiotics that include erythr
omycin, nitrofuran, and tetracycline.*

  In his opinion, Wolfe added, the Herbst files show that Kennedy "clearly was suffering from a sexually transmitted bacterial disease called nongonorrheal urethritis." Kennedy's venereal disease was not formally diagnosed by the medical community until the late 1960s, Wolfe said, and is known today as a chlamydial infection. "Initially it was considered more of a nuisance than a serious disease," Wolfe added, "especially by doctors who did not have it." The disease is easily transmitted to women, and creates special risks for them; chlamydia can damage a woman's reproductive tract and make her unable to bear children, while producing only mild physical symptoms. By 1997, untreated chlamydia was believed to be the cause of 35 percent of infertility among American women.

  Six days after Kennedy's death, according to notes Herbst made, Janet Travell telephoned and asked him to turn over his Kennedy file to her for safekeeping. In his notes, Herbst quoted her as saying that the file "'does not belong to me but to the country.' This I do not agree with," Herbst wrote, "but [I] am sending it to her for what is considered appropriate disposition." Kennedy, Herbst wrote on the last page of his file, one week after the assassination, was "reading constantly" and was "always considerate, courteous, friendly."

  The doctor obviously did not feel the same about Janet Travell. The Kennedy Library files show that Herbst apparently changed his mind and instead forwarded his notes to Bobby Kennedy. On December 6, 1963, Herbst wrote the attorney general and said he was including "a copy of the records" of Jack Kennedy's clinical treatment. On that date, too, according to the library's files, Travell, in a memorandum for the record, reported Bobby Kennedy's "ruling" that the president's medical records would be regarded as "privileged communication" and not be kept in a federal archive.*