Official and Confidential (43 page)

Nixon was the clear Republican favorite, but the Party's popularity was at its lowest ebb in twenty years. Edgar, like many others, covered his bets. He ordered agents to supply Nixon with research material for his speeches and kept a weather eye on the Democrats.

The Democrats were juggling Joseph Kennedy's son John, now forty-two, the senator from Massachusetts; veteran contender Adlai Stevenson; Senator Hubert Humphrey; and Lyndon Johnson. For all his father's blandishments, John Kennedy was not the candidate Edgar preferred. If there was to be a Democrat in office, he favored Johnson.

Edgar had known Johnson since the thirties, when he had first come to Washington, and they had been close neighbors since the forties. Edgar sometimes visited the Johnsons for dinner or Sunday brunch and – he told colleagues – filled in as babysitter for their daughters. They came to think of him as an uncle and helped look for his dogs when they strayed. The Johnson home, Edgar said, ‘was a place where you could get the best chili con carne and the best mint julep in Washington.'

Lyndon Johnson, one of Washington's craftiest manipulators of men, understood early on the importance of making Edgar his friend or – more important – ensuring he never gave him cause to become an enemy. Johnson's political closet was bulging with skeletons. There were corrupt business deals, and women, and above all there were the allegations of ballot-rigging in 1948, when Johnson won election to the Senate by just eighty-seven votes.
¹

During the outcry following that election, Edgar had made a personal visit to Austin, the Texas state capital, and was seen closeted with Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, who had backed Johnson. The FBI's probe of the vote fraud was conducted, observers recalled, with ‘a notable lack of
investigative and prosecutorial vigor.' According to the definitive study of the case, it soon ‘disappeared without trace.'

Johnson referred to Edgar privately as ‘that queer bastard.' He fawned over him, however, in a steady stream of complimentary letters. ‘I think you and all your men are tops,' he scrawled on one. ‘I see them under all circumstances and when I do I'm proud that I am a public servant.' In the last weeks of the Eisenhower administration, Clyde Tolson lobbied frantically for a special law to ensure that, should Edgar retire he would continue to receive his full salary. This was achieved, not least thanks to pressure from Majority Leader Johnson.

Edgar reciprocated. He was observed visiting Room S-208, the hideaway Senate office known as the Johnson Ranch East, to proffer advice. He even flew to Texas in November 1959 to make speeches extolling Johnson's virtues. During a whistle-stop tour, including a visit to the Johnson ranch, the Senator bear-hugged Edgar for the cameras. Edgar then returned to Washington after a meeting with oil millionaire Billy Byars, a regular vacation companion in California and – like Murchison – one of Johnson's financial backers. Disregarding all the proprieties, the Director of the FBI had been making a campaign appearance on behalf of a presidential candidate.

Clint Murchison, the kingmaker who had played a key role in bringing Eisenhower to power, had something on all the political horses. The big money went to Nixon, as it had in the past and would in the future. He also sent an aide to deliver $25,000 in cash to the Kennedys. This, though, as Bobby Baker put it, was ‘just betcopping.' Edgar's friend Murchison was really rooting for Lyndon Johnson, a candidate sure to protect the interests of the big oil companies.

Murchison cared about power, not party labels, and one man – Edgar – remained a fixture on his political agenda. Two years before the election, when right-wing senator William Knowland had presidential hopes, the millionaire
offered this advice in a letter to Johnson: ‘If you can work Knowland, Nixon and Hoover together,' he told his fellow Texan, ‘you can control the United States.'

In 1960, with Johnson's name replacing Knowland's, the same formula applied. And as the campaign got under way, Edgar began considering the strengths – and weaknesses – of the young man who did not fit any agenda but his own, John Kennedy.

‘When John Kennedy was making a strong challenge for the presidency,' recalled Cartha DeLoach, ‘Mr Hoover asked Clyde Tolson, and Tolson told me, to make a thorough review of the files. They knew all about Kennedy's desires for sex, and the fact that he would sleep with almost anything that wore a skirt. “Joe Kennedy told me,” Mr Hoover said, “that he should have gelded Jack when he was a small boy.”'

The FBI file of dirt on John Kennedy had been opened at the start of World War II, based on British MI-5 reports on his social life while visiting his father, then Ambassador to Britain. He was just twenty years old, and the reports were merely random intelligence filed by a foreign ally. Then, in 1940, Edgar began receiving reports about a twenty-eight-year-old beauty named Inga Arvad, currently living in Washington.

Arvad was a journalist and socialite, Danish-born but with associations in Nazi Germany. She had interviewed Hermann Goring and Adolf Hitler, and by one report went to bed with the latter. She described Hitler in print as ‘very kind, very charming … not evil as he is depicted … an idealist.'

At first Arvad rang no alarm bells at the FBI. Ironically, as a reporter for the
Washington Times Herald
, she charmed her way to meetings with the Bureau's top brass. She wrote flatteringly of Edgar's secretary, Helen Gandy, with her ‘masculine intelligence and womanly intuition,' and of Clyde, with his ‘intelligent eyes' and a smile ‘like a good boy expecting the promised candy bar.' Clyde even introduced Arvad to Edgar at a party.

In late 1941, however, officials scurried for cover. Arvad's interviews were suddenly declared to have been ‘unsatisfactory.' Edgar himself had ordered a probe that revealed that ‘a young Ensign of the U.S. Navy known as Jack … has apparently been spending the night with Miss Arvad in her apartment.'

Kennedy, then serving with Naval Intelligence, had been introduced to Arvad by his sister Kathleen. By January 1942, FBI surveillance records confirm, they were having a passionate affair. Kennedy called her ‘Inga-Binga.' She called him ‘Honeysuckle' and ‘Honey Child Wilder.' They talked of marriage, a match – friends recalled – that his father violently opposed.

To separate the lovers, the Navy transferred Kennedy out of Washington, a move that only increased their ardor. Edgar's agents listened to hidden microphones as the couple made love, ‘on numerous occasions,' in Room 132 of the Fort Sumter Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. The surveillance was dropped for a while when Arvad began to suspect she was being bugged, then resumed in the summer of 1942. By that time Kennedy's meddlesome father had arranged for his son's transfer to the Pacific, where his heroism after the sinking of PT-109 would bring lasting fame.

Like a million wartime romances, the affair with Arvad lasted only months. The FBI's surveillance had been a legitimate way of handling a potential security risk, and the lovers had done nothing disloyal. It was, however, the start of lasting bitterness between Kennedy and Edgar.

In March 1942, when Arvad realized she was being surveilled, she was overheard telling Kennedy she intended protesting directly to Edgar. She was going to say, ‘Now, look here, Edgar J., I don't like everybody listening in on my phone …' In fact, Arvad told Ronald McCoy, her son by a subsequent marriage, Kennedy went with her to confront Edgar. As McCoy recalled it, ‘Jack was furious. Through his father or through Arthur Krock, he knew everybody, so he
and Mother went to see J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover told them his investigation showed she was
not
a Nazi spy or did anything for them. So Jack asked Hoover if he would give them a letter saying she wasn't a Nazi spy. Hoover said he couldn't, because if he gave her a letter and then she went out and started working for them tomorrow, his ass was on the line.'

That first encounter sowed the seeds of future discord. Pique aside, Kennedy sensed danger long before Edgar became a threat to the Kennedy presidency. Exposure of the affair with Arvad – a suspected Nazi spy – could have been disastrous. In 1946, the moment he became a career politician, Kennedy began worrying about Edgar's dossier.

‘When Jack came down to Congress,' recalled his friend Langdon Marvin, ‘one of the things on his mind was the Inga-Binga tape in FBI files – the tape
he
was on. He wanted to get the tape from the FBI. I told him not to ask for it … Ten years later, after he beat Henry Cabot Lodge in the Massachusetts senatorial race, Jack became alarmed. “That bastard. I'm going to force Hoover to give me those files,” he said to me. I said, “Jack, you're not going to do a thing. You can be sure there'll be a dozen copies made before he returns them to you, so you will not have gained a yard. And if he knows you're desperate for them, he'll realize he has you in a stranglehold.”'

Perhaps Kennedy did betray his fear. Just after his election to the Senate, the record shows, he asked for ‘the opportunity of shaking hands' with Edgar. From then until 1960, Kennedy went out of his way to flatter the man he privately called ‘bastard.' Even at his wedding, he found time to tell the Hyannis FBI agent he was always available to ‘support Mr Hoover.' Just weeks later he piled on the flattery, saying the FBI was the only agency ‘worthy of its salt.' His brother, Robert, for his part, was said to be ‘more enthusiastic than ever about J. Edgar Hoover.'

Edgar wrote polite replies, filed the letters and continued to collect smear material. He was to learn that, one night in
1958, a couple named Leonard and Florence Kater had been disturbed by the sound of pebbles being thrown at an upstairs window. The window belonged to their twenty-year-old lodger, Pamela Turnure, a secretary in Kennedy's Senate office. The man Turnure let in that night was Kennedy himself, and he became a regular nocturnal visitor.

The Katers, strict Catholics, became obsessed about the man they called the ‘philanderer.' They rigged up a tape recorder to pick up the sounds of the couple's lovemaking and snapped a picture of Kennedy sneaking out in the middle of the night. They spied on him for months on end, even after Turnure moved out of their house.

Something odd happened in the course of this persecution. Kennedy told an aide he thought his home telephone or his secretary's was being tapped. The aide, acting on his own initiative, asked the FBI to check it out. Then, apparently after speaking further with Kennedy, he called back to ask the FBI to ‘just forget the whole matter.' Kennedy, we can assume, was appalled at the notion of asking Edgar for any such favor – not least if, as he may have feared, the Bureau itself was involved in the bugging.

Edgar learned of Kennedy's affair with Turnure soon enough anyway, thanks to the Katers. In the spring of 1959, with the election campaign approaching, they mailed details of the ‘adulterer's' conduct to the newspapers. The press shied away, but one company – Stearn Publications – sent the Katers' letter on to Edgar. Soon, according to one source, he quietly obtained a copy of the compromising sex tapes and offered them to Lyndon Johnson as campaign ammunition.

‘Hoover and Johnson both had something the other wanted,' said Robert Baker, the Texan's longtime confidant. ‘Johnson needed to know Hoover was not after
his
ass. And Hoover certainly wanted Lyndon Johnson to be president rather than Jack Kennedy. Hoover was a leaker, and he was always telling Johnson about Kennedy's sexual proclivities. Johnson told me Hoover played a tape for him, made by this woman who had
rented an apartment to one of John Kennedy's girlfriends. And she turned the tape over to the FBI …'

One senior official, William Sullivan, said flatly that Edgar tried ‘to sabotage Jack Kennedy's campaign.' Surviving records suggest Agents in Charge had standing orders to report everything they picked up on him. In March 1960 the New Orleans office quoted an informant who:

had occasion to overhear a conversation which indicated that Senator Kennedy had been compromised with a woman in Las Vegas, Nevada … He stated that when Senator Kennedy was in Miami, Fla., an airline hostess named [name deleted] was sent to visit Sen. Kennedy.

Edgar had the woman's name and address within hours. Another report, filed a few days later from Los Angeles, remained totally censored as this book was being written. It was marked merely ‘Memo, John F. Kennedy, U.S. Senator, Information Concerning, Central Research Matter.'

In April, as Kennedy's primary victories began to panic the Johnson camp, DeLoach reported a source who:

noted on the top of Kennedy's desk a photograph openly displayed. This photo included Senator Kennedy and other men, as well as several girls in the nude. It was taken aboard a yacht or some type of pleasure cruiser … The thing that disturbed him most was that the Senator would show such poor judgment in leaving this photo openly displayed … Members of the guard and cleaning services were aware of the photograph and Kennedy's ‘extracurricular activities' were a standard joke around the Senate Office Building.

On the very day of the nomination, July 13, DeLoach received a summary of ‘highlights' of the Bureau's Kennedy
file It included a reference to the Inga Arvad affair in World War II and to ‘affidavits from two mulatto prostitutes in New York.' It also raised a factor far more ominous than the sexual allegations, yet inextricably linked to them – ‘the hoodlum connections of Senator Kennedy.'

John Kennedy, like his father before him, had apparently slipped into his own shabby relationship with organized crime. He was compromised by it, and not only because of sex – caught, even before the presidency began, in the tangle of intrigue that may eventually have led to his assassination.

Edgar, himself long since neutralized by the mob because of his homosexuality, would gradually discover the extent of the younger man's folly.