The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  "Last summer," Mollenhoff added, "the FBI started an investigation of the girl. With less than a week's notice, she and her husband were sent back to Germany ... at the request of the State Department."

  Mollenhoff had written widely on labor corruption in the 1950s and had been an enthusiastic supporter of Bobby Kennedy's work as general counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee. The two men had grown apart---the specifics of their dispute could not be learned for this book---and the increasingly conservative Mollenhoff wrote extensively, and critically, of the Kennedy administration's decision in late 1962 to bypass Boeing and award the TFX contract to General Dynamics. His reporting was taken most seriously by Bobby Kennedy.

  The reason for the attorney general's concern was obvious. The mere fact that a Senate committee and the FBI were investigating espionage charges against a foreign-born prostitute who undoubtedly would talk, if compelled to do so, about partying with the president in the White House pool could cripple Jack Kennedy as similar accusations had crippled Harold Macmillan's government. The Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee would soon begin demanding in public that they needed to interview Ellen Rometsch, and insisting that she be given a visa to return to Washington. The Democrats controlled the Senate, but any attempt to forestall the Republicans with parliamentary tactics would produce nothing but negative press.

  Bobby Kennedy needed help, and he needed it right away---from J. Edgar Hoover. Two days after the Mollenhoff story, the attorney general summoned Courtney Evans to his office at 9:30 A.M. to talk about the Rometsch case, and gave him a message for Hoover that played on the FBI director's strong feelings of patriotism and respect for the presidency. "He said that he was greatly concerned, as was the President, with the possible harm which will come to the United States if irresponsible action is taken on the Hill in connection with the Ellen Rometsch allegations," Evans noted in a memorandum made available under the Freedom of Information Act. Kennedy added, Evans wrote, that he had "talked with the President on the telephone" and Jack Kennedy was thinking of personally telephoning Senate leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen to ask them to meet with Hoover. "This would be for the purpose of insuring that the Senate leadership in both political parties was aware of the facts," recorded Evans, "and to place on them responsibility in an effort to prevent irresponsible action."

  At 9:45, having laid the groundwork with Evans, Kennedy telephoned Hoover, and made clear why he and his brother were running scared. "The Attorney General called," Hoover reported in a memorandum of their conversation, made available under the Freedom of Information Act, "and advised that he had talked with [Courtney] Evans and the President about the whole situation regarding the Rometsch girl; that he could visualize Senator Williams talking about this and [the] fact [that the] girl was from East Germany and the security angle." Hoover added to the attorney general's fears when he told him that, according to an FBI informant's report in July, "Rometsch said she was sent to this country to get information."

  Rometsch had been contacted the day before by FBI agents at her home in Germany, Hoover told Kennedy, but was refusing to be interviewed. The FBI director then gave Bobby Kennedy what he was looking for. "I advised the Attorney General we should see something is done that she does not get a visa to come back and the Attorney General agreed." Kennedy told Hoover that "he was going to talk to the President and give him a brief summary." He would tell the president that Hoover had come through. Ellen Rometsch would remain in Germany---and remain silent. Without Rometsch, the Republicans had no witnesses and no hearing.

  Hoover's promise to try to keep Rometsch out of the country was not enough. Within hours of their phone call, Bobby Kennedy was forced to walk over to the FBI director's office---a walk he rarely took. There, invoking his brother, the president of the United States, he asked for an extraordinary favor: Would Hoover do what the president wanted and meet with Mike Mansfield of Montana, the Senate majority leader, and Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the minority leader, to "brief them" about Rometsch before the Rules Committee began its hearings? In other words, the Kennedys wanted Hoover to kill the Rules Committee investigation.

  Hoover tried to fight off the request. "I told the Attorney General," he wrote in an account of the meeting, "that he already had a complete memorandum upon this matter which he, himself, could read to the Senators if he so desired, rather than have me personally meet with them." But Kennedy pushed ahead, telling him, the FBI director wrote, that "he felt I should see the Senators as they were primarily interested in any breach of security which might have occurred in the Rometsch case and they would give more credence to what I had to say than any statement he might make." The attorney general was laying it on a bit thick, but his appeal was effective.

  Hoover was driven that afternoon to meet with Mansfield and Dirksen at Mansfield's home in northwest Washington. There was no need to discuss any of the indelicate details. Mike Mansfield, interviewed by telephone in 1997 for this book---he was ninety-four years old and very acute---said he distinctly remembered meeting with Hoover, because it was the only time he and Dirksen, the two Senate leaders, were brought together by the FBI director. "I really don't recall" what the meeting was about, he added. "I'm afraid I can't be very helpful, except to say that Dirksen and I did meet with Hoover." Everett Dirksen died in 1969, and archivists at the Dirksen Congressional Center, in Pekin, Illinois, where Dirksen's papers are on file, told me that they were unable to find any mention of Ellen Rometsch or the October 28 meeting with Hoover and Mansfield.

  A few days later, Hoover was invited to lunch with the president at the White House, his first such meeting since March 1962, when the subject was Judith Exner and Sam Giancana. No memoranda of the lunch are known to exist.

  It seems clear that the president still felt that he was just a newspaper story or two away from the fate of Profumo and Macmillan. On November 5, less than three weeks before his assassination, Kennedy summoned the Ben Bradlees at the last minute for a private dinner. Bradlee, who had other plans, tried to beg off, he wrote in Conversations with Kennedy, but the president was persistent. At dinner, Bradlee wrote, JFK was full of talk about his lunch with Hoover a few days earlier.

  He told us how FDR used to have Hoover over regularly, and said he felt it was wise for him to start doing the same thing, with rumors flying and every indication of a dirty campaign coming. "Boy, the dirt he has on those senators," Kennedy said, shaking his head. "You wouldn't believe it." He described a picture of Elly Rometsch that Hoover had brought with him. Her name had popped up and in and out of print as one of the women who frequented the Quorum Club, Bobby Baker's relaxing emporium on Capitol Hill ... Kennedy said the picture showed her to be a "really beautiful woman." Hoover told Kennedy at lunch that his agents had obtained an affidavit from Elly Rometsch in West Germany stating that she wanted to return to the United States, not to go back in business, but to marry the chief investigator of a Senate committee, whom Kennedy knew. This man, Kennedy quoted Hoover as saying, "was getting for free what Elly was charging others a couple of hundred dollars a night."... There is something incredible about the picture of the president of the United States and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation looking at photographs of call girls over lunch in the White House living quarters.

  The president could have been living dangerously once again, and recklessly shooting the breeze about Ellen Rometsch with his pal Ben Bradlee. But it is far more likely that Kennedy was setting Bradlee up to write a story, if needed, knocking down any public hint of a presidential relationship with Rometsch. Bradlee had performed that service the year before, in the Newsweek story that curbed speculation in the establishment press about the president's marriage to Durie Malcolm.

  The final lie about Rometsch---and the Senate---fell to Bobby Kennedy, in his 1964 interview with the Kennedy Library. "Clark Mollenhoff wrote an article that she had been tied up with people at the White House, which was, in fact, incorrect," Kennedy said. "I loo
ked into the files," he added, with obvious indignation, "and she had been tied up with a lot of people at the Capitol! [Emphasis in original.] I got all the information she had ... and it got to large numbers on both ways"---Democrats and Republicans. His concern, Bobby Kennedy added, was for the reputation of the United States. "I thought it was very damaging and ... I spoke to the President about it. It didn't involve anybody at the White House, but I thought it would just destroy the confidence that people in the United States had in their government ... Some of the Senators had Negro girlfriends and all kinds of things which were not very helpful." Those concerns, Bobby Kennedy said, led him to urge a meeting between Hoover and the two Senate leaders, Mansfield and Dirksen, "to explain what was in the files and what information [the FBI] had. I guess it was a shock to both of them.

  "From then on," Kennedy added, "there was less attention [in the Senate] on that aspect of the situation."

  Robert Kennedy, in rewriting the Ellen Rometsch story for the Kennedy Library, was doing more than protecting his brother. He was also shielding his own role in the Bobby Baker scandal. The attorney general had his own business with the Senate Rules Committee in the fall of 1963, dealing not with Baker but with the despised Lyndon Johnson. The vice president stood between the attorney general and any realistic chance of his succeeding his brother as the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 1968. Johnson had to be knocked off the ticket in 1964 to make way for the president's younger brother.

  In a series of interviews for this book, Burkett Van Kirk, who was chief counsel in 1963 for the Republican minority on the Rules Committee, told me of his personal knowledge of Bobby Kennedy's direct intervention. "Bobby was feeding information to 'whispering Willie'"---the nickname for Senator John Williams. "They"---the Kennedy brothers, Van Kirk said---"were dumping Johnson." Williams, as he did earlier with Donald Reynolds's information about Lyndon Johnson, relayed the Kennedy materials to the senior Republican on the Rules Committee, Carl Curtis. The attorney general thus was dealing secretly with Williams, and Williams was dealing secretly with Curtis and Van Kirk. The scheming was necessary, Van Kirk told me, because he and his fellow Republicans understood that a full-fledged investigation into Bobby Baker could lead to the vice president. They also understood, he said, that the chances of getting such an investigation were slim at best. The Democrats had an overwhelming advantage in the Senate---sixty-seven to thirty-three---and in every committee. The three Republicans on the ten-member Rules Committee, Van Kirk said, had little power. "We never won one vote to even call a witness," he told me. The investigation into Bobby Baker and Lyndon Johnson would have to be done in a traditional manner---by newspaper leak.

  Van Kirk, who was named after his grandfather Senator E. J. Burkett of Nebraska, said that Bobby Kennedy eventually designated a Justice Department lawyer that fall to serve as an intermediary to the minority staff; he began supplying the Republicans with documents about Johnson and his financial dealings. The lawyer, Van Kirk told me, "used to come up to the Senate and hang around me like a dark cloud. It took him about a week or ten days to, one, find out what I didn't know, and two, give it to me." Some of the Kennedy-supplied documents were kept in Williams's office safe, Van Kirk said, and never shown to him. There was no doubt of Bobby Kennedy's purpose in dealing with the Republicans, Van Kirk said: "To get rid of Johnson. To dump him. I am as sure of that as I am that the sun comes up in the east."

  The Kennedy brothers repeatedly denied that they had any intention of dropping Johnson from the 1964 ticket. On October 31, 1963, at his next-to-last news conference, the president reaffirmed that he wanted and expected Johnson to be on the ticket. A year later, Bobby Kennedy told the Kennedy Library that "there was no plan to dump Lyndon Johnson" in 1964. "There was a lot of stories that my brother and I ... [had] started the Bobby Baker case in order to give us a handle to dump Lyndon Johnson ... There was never any intention of dropping him. There was never even any discussion about dropping him."

  Charles Spalding, Kennedy's old friend, may not have known the president's plans for 1964, but he did know Jack Kennedy. "Jack didn't like Lyndon," Spalding told me in a 1997 interview. "I know. He was just awful---so jealous, so disagreeable and ugly." What's worse, Spalding said, he and the president knew that Johnson wasn't loyal---"he really was anti-him [Kennedy]."*

  The most specific contradiction of the Kennedy brothers' denial came from Evelyn Lincoln, the president's loyal secretary, in her 1968 memoir, Kennedy and Johnson. She described a conversation on November 19, 1963, two days before the president left for Texas, in which Kennedy expressed his dissatisfaction with Johnson and said, "I will need as a running mate a man who believes as I do." Asked by Lincoln whom he was considering, he told her, Lincoln wrote, "At this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina, but it will not be Lyndon."

  Lincoln's papers were donated to the Kennedy Library after her death. Those documents were opened, in part, to researchers in mid-1997; among the documents, library officials say, are contemporaneous stenography notes corroborating her 1968 claim that Kennedy had told her he was planning to pick a new running mate in 1964.

  Evelyn Lincoln may also have had irrefutable evidence of the president's thinking about the vice presidency. Until this book it has not been known that for at least five years, Lincoln had access to all of the office and telephone tape recordings that were removed from the White House after Kennedy's death and retained by the Kennedy family, and she took some of those recordings to her home---to Bobby's consternation.

  Sometime after Kennedy's death, Lincoln, as the keeper of the president's office records, was put on the payroll of the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal office responsible for presidential records. She worked there with Frank Harrington, who, he explained in a series of interviews for this book, was the first archivist to be hired by the Kennedy Library. Harrington recalled that he was quickly reassigned by the library to Washington to help Evelyn Lincoln process the millions of pages of Kennedy administration papers. There were deep conflicts over the tapes between Lincoln and then-Senator Robert Kennedy, Harrington told me. "It drove Bobby batshit," he said, "because she took some of them home. She was working on them for her own book"---Kennedy and Johnson. Bobby Kennedy was then doing research for Thirteen Days, his study of the Cuban missile crisis. "I remember Bobby coming to the archives looking for a certain tape," Harrington said. "Evelyn couldn't produce it. She said, 'I'll get it for you tomorrow.' She produced it on the next day and said she'd found it in the archives. But she hadn't. I knew she'd taken it home. She lied. Bobby was a little bit afraid of her, because he didn't do anything to her." Instead, Harrington said, "he'd storm up to me to complain, but not to her."*

  With Lyndon Johnson on his way out, Jack Kennedy had every reason to look forward to the 1964 campaign and his reelection. There was some talk from inside the family of having a Kennedy-Kennedy ticket in 1964, most of it, Gore Vidal told me in an interview, coming from Ethel Kennedy, Bobby's wife. The only trouble spot, besides the growing difficulties in South Vietnam, was Ellen Rometsch and her desire---as Hoover told Kennedy over lunch, and Kennedy later confided to Ben Bradlee---of returning to the United States to marry a Senate investigator (LaVern Duffy). The initial Kennedy payments to Rometsch hadn't done the trick, and now a way had to be found to keep her in West Germany---and happy to keep quiet.

  Sometime early in November, Kennedy summoned Grant Stockdale, a friend from his early days in the House of Representatives, to the Oval Office. Stockdale, a real estate broker in Miami, had stayed friendly with Kennedy through the 1950s, and helped him in his political campaigns. There were many visits to the Kennedy compound at Palm Beach. By 1960 Stockdale was serving as the Democratic National Committee's fund-raising chairman for the southern states, and he raised a great deal of money for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. His reward was to be appointed in 1961 as ambassador to Ireland. The post had obvious sentimental value for Kennedy, and Sto
ckdale was flattered. Once in Ireland, he went all out to represent the new administration and lavishly spent his personal money on embassy entertaining. Eighteen months later, he told Kennedy he was broke and had to go back to his real estate business in Miami.

  The president understood. Stockdale appealed to Kennedy, perhaps, because he was all the things Kennedy was not: a self-made man who was precisely what he seemed to be. He had been a football star in college before serving in the war as a marine intelligence officer in the Pacific. "His life was an open book," Stockdale's son, also named Grant, told me in a 1996 interview. "When he got back to Miami, he told his friends he was broke. He was happy to have served, but happy to get back to his business."

  Stockdale also knew how to keep his mouth shut. He had joined Kennedy in 1962 at one of his private parties in the Carlyle Hotel in New York, and later told his son that "there were women, beautiful women there." It was a world, Grant said of his father, "that was too fast for him. He was completely out of his league." He did not go back.

  But now it was November 1963 and Stockdale was in the Oval Office. Grant told me the story his mother, Adie, had told him. "Kennedy said, 'I need you to raise some dough---fifty thousand dollars.' 'Why me?' 'Because I need it and I can count on you to keep it quiet.' 'What's it for?' 'It's for personal use.'"

  The president's request made his father very uneasy, Grant said. "He raised money," Grant told me. "That's what he did for the Democratic National Committee. But not for personal use." Stockdale asked the president, his son said, "'How are you going to acknowledge this money [to donors]?' Kennedy said, 'It's never going to be acknowledged.'" His father returned to Miami and did what Kennedy asked---he raised $50,000 in cash, telling contributors that the money was for Jack Kennedy. "He hated it," Grant told me, "but he felt, 'Shit, it's the president.' He was very distressed about being asked to raise cash for the president's personal use when he's got his own money problems. The clincher was the part about no acknowledgment. There was something wrong with the whole thing. He knew he was being used, and my mother knew he was being used. She really resented it. 'It's the craziest thing I've ever heard,' she said. 'Don't do it. Turn it down.' But he felt he couldn't.