Jack Kennedy’s luck began running out in the fall of 1963, well before November 22. He was confronted with a no-win situation in South Vietnam, where President Ngo Dinh Diem, the despot he had armed and supported, was increasingly taking the war to his political opponents instead of the communist-backed armed opposition. There was a crisis at home, too, as had been foreseen by Larry Newman and Tony Sherman of the Secret Service—one of the president’s pool-party women turned out to be an East German. That fact was uncovered not by Kennedy or an aide but by a group of Republican senators investigating a graft-and-sex scandal on Capitol Hill. The president’s womanizing was on the verge of being exposed as a national security issue.
The woman’s name was Ellen Rometsch. She was a Washington party girl with a quality that made her a natural for Jack Kennedy: she was stunningly attractive, an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike. That was all that mattered in late spring of 1963. The president did not know that Rometsch was born in 1936 in Kleinitz, Germany, a village that became part of East Germany after World War II. He did not know that, as a child growing up in Kleinitz, Rometsch was a member of a Communist Party youth group and that, as a young adult, she joined a second Communist Party group. He did not know that she fled with her family to West Germany in 1955 and, after a failed first marriage, moved in 1961 to the United States with her second husband, a sergeant in the West German air force who was assigned to the German Embassy in Washington. Kennedy also did not seem to realize—or care—that if his sexual relationship with Ellen Rometsch somehow became known, she would be thought by many to be a communist spy.
Rometsch, twenty-seven when they met, fulfilled another essential criterion for the president: she was a professional, a prostitute who would take her money, do what was wanted, and keep silent. Kennedy stumbled upon Rometsch in the usual way, through one of his many procurers in Washington, this time Bill Thompson, the railroad executive.
Rometsch had become one of Bobby Baker’s girls by early 1963, and she spent many evenings with Baker and his friends at the Quorum Club, a private hideaway for legislators and lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Baker, the secretary to the Senate Democrats, was known as the man who made the legislative process work. He was a parliamentary expert and brilliant vote counter. He was also the man who did what the Democratic senators needed done, and discreetly got them what they wanted, including women.
Baker arrived in Washington from Pickens, South Carolina, as a fourteen-year-old congressional page in 1943 and rose through the ranks with his mentor, Lyndon Johnson, of Texas. He became, as he put it in his memoir, Wheeling and Dealing, “a Capitol Hill operator” who in mid-1963 was accused of influence peddling—taking payoffs in return for steering federal contracts to his friends in business. Baker resigned from the Senate, under pressure, on October 7; he was being investigated by the Justice Department and also the Senate Rules Committee, whose Republican minority was eager to turn the case into an issue in the 1964 presidential campaign. Baker eventually served eighteen months in a federal penitentiary after being convicted on nine counts of fraud and tax evasion.
None of that had yet happened when Baker was approached one evening in the spring of 1963 by Bill Thompson in the Quorum Club, and asked, Baker recalled in an interview for this book, a typical question: “‘Baker,’ he said, ‘who is that good-looking girl? That woman looks like Elizabeth Taylor.’ And I said, ‘She’s a German, and her husband is a sergeant who works for the German Embassy. And she’s a real pro as far as I’m concerned. I mean, everybody who has had a date with her has really enjoyed her company.’
“So he said, ‘Bakes, do you think that if I invited her to the White House that she would go with me to meet President Kennedy?’ I said, ‘Gee, she’s a Nazi. She’ll do anything I tell her.’ And so I asked her, and she said she would be delighted.” It was arranged, Baker told me, for Thompson to pick Rometsch up at her apartment in northwest Washington and take her to the White House. Rometsch later told Baker, he told me, that “the president was really a fun guy and how delighted she was to be with him.” When he next went to the White House, Baker added, “the president told me that she was the most exciting woman that he had been with.”
Rometsch was very much in demand that spring. “She was a very lovely, beautiful party girl … who always wore beautiful clothes,” Baker told me. “She had good manners and she was very accommodating. I must have had fifty friends who went with her, and not one of them ever complained. She was a real joy to be with.”
Kennedy knew, Baker said, that Rometsch was there to service him and would have to be paid: “President Kennedy did not want a date with somebody for social purposes. It was clearly understood when [Thompson] took girls to the White House they were going to be party girls.” Baker said he had first supplied women to Kennedy “in my official position in the Senate. When a good-looking girl would send a card in to Senator Kennedy, the doorman would come to me and say, ‘Mr. Baker, what shall I do?’” It happened all the time, Baker said. Once, he recalled with a laugh, a woman sent a note to Kennedy saying, “Senator, you can put your shoes under my bed any time you want.”
“A lot of celebrities are chased by beautiful people,” Baker said, and Jack Kennedy “loved it.” Baker told of one meeting early in the presidency when he was invited to the Oval Office to meet with Kennedy. “He really didn’t want to talk about the Senate,” Baker told me. “He just said, ‘You know, I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day.’”
Over the next few months, Ellen Rometsch helped Kennedy ward off headaches. And she gossiped to Baker about it. She described pool parties in the White House, Baker told me, where “everybody’s running around there naked.” There was one occasion, Baker told me, without naming his source, “when Jackie came home and Bill Thompson had all these people” in the pool.* On May 18, 1963, Baker said, Rometsch joined a group of legislators and friends on a bus outing to the Preakness, the annual stakes race at the Pimlico Race Course, near Baltimore. “We were talking because we were seatmates,” Baker told me, “and she had gone to the White House two nights before for a naked party in the swimming pool. I think there was like five guys and twelve girls in the White House indoor pool.” In all, Baker estimated, Rometsch visited Kennedy at least ten times that spring and summer.
Those visits eventually triggered what became a nightmare for the hard-to-rattle president—the one scandal, had he lived, that he and Bobby Kennedy might not have been able to continue to cover up.
In June the Harold Macmillan government was rocked by a sex scandal that led to the resignation of John Profumo, the British minister of war, after he admitted that he had lied to the House of Commons. The Profumo scandal, as it was quickly dubbed by London’s tabloid press, revolved around a prostitute named Christine Keeler, who was having simultaneous affairs with Profumo and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attache. The story was made poignant by the fact that Profumo had an unblemished record: he had served valiantly as a brigadier general in World War II and was married to Valerie Hobson, a prominent English actress who had just played the lead role in The King and I. There were fears, the press breathlessly reported, that Profumo, while cavorting poolside with Keeler and at least four other prostitutes, including a Chinese beauty named Suzy Chang and a bleached-blond Czech named Maria Novotny, was spending his weekends answering the girls’ questions—planted by Ivanov—about British nuclear policy. The significance of Profumo’s national security transgressions, if there were any, paled beside the overwhelming appearance of his impropriety. The fact that a married senior defense official was frolicking with prostitutes proved lethal to Macmillan’s leadership. He resigned in October, and a badly tarnished Tory government was voted out of office in 1964.
The president, needless to say, was fascinated by the scandal. “Kennedy had devoured every word written about the Profumo case,” Ben Bradlee reported in Conversations with Kennedy. “It combined so many of the things that interested him: low doings in high places, the British nobility, sex, and spying. Someone in the State Department had apparently sent him an early cable on the Profumo case from David Bruce, the American ambassador to Great Britain. Kennedy … ordered all further cables from Bruce on that subject sent to him immediately.”
The president’s interest was far from academic. Maria Novotny and Suzy Chang worked as high-class prostitutes in New York as well as London, and, as Novotny would tell reporters later, she and Chang had serviced Jack Kennedy before and after the 1960 presidential election. As a senator, Kennedy had taken Suzy Chang to dinner at 21, the very public New York restaurant. He, too, with a wife as lovely as Profumo’s, could be drawn into the scandal.
Once again the president turned to his brother, who took action within days of the first published newspaper reports on Profumo’s pending resignation, in early June of 1963. On June 11, the day after Kennedy’s speech at American University calling for a “just and genuine peace” with the Soviet Union, Charles Bates, the FBI’s legal attaché in London, was cabled by J. Edgar Hoover and ordered to “stay on top of this case and … keep bureau fully and promptly informed of all developments with particular emphasis on any allegation that U.S. nationals are or have been involved in any way.” A heavily censored copy of Hoover’s cable was declassified in 1986.
The same demand was forwarded by Director John McCone to the CIA station in London. “When the business broke about Profumo,” Cleveland Cram, the deputy chief of station, said in a 1997 interview for this book, “we suddenly got an ‘Operation Immediate’ from John McCone” asking the station to determine whether any Americans were involved. Cram and Charles Bates, the senior FBI man in London, “gossiped together a lot, as you can imagine,” Cram told me, “and we immediately assumed it had something to do with the Kennedys.” The CIA officer was ordered to make contact with Sir Roger Hollis, the director general of Britain’s MI5, and explain that he needed full cooperation. To Cram’s surprise, he got it. Cram spent the next “three or four” weeks at MI5 headquarters, poring over the Profumo files. “It was like getting access to a spider’s web,” Cram told me. “It was a lot of fun.” He also got a glimpse into MI5’s ability to pry—learning, for example, that one of his neighbors was a secret informer for MI5.
He had “no question” at the time what the unusual assignment was all about, Cram told me: to learn whether “one of the Kennedys” was dealing with the Profumo girls. “They wanted to be forewarned if [the American names] became public, and forewarned is forearmed.” Charles Bates informed him, Cram said, that he had checked with FBI colleagues in Washington and learned that his order from Hoover originated at the White House. Cram said he snooped around, too, and learned that he was sent to MI5 to look for American involvement because of a “specific request from [President] Kennedy.
“That’s, you know, pretty electrical,” Cram added. When he did not immediately report to CIA headquarters on his findings from the MI5 files, he said, “we got a blast from McCone. ‘What are you guys doing? Get busy and find something. Aren’t the British cooperating?’ We had to write back and say, ‘Yes, they’re cooperating one hundred percent, but we just haven’t turned up anything.’ They kept niggling at us every other day. It was terrible. We had never received a request like this before and, to my knowledge, we never received a similar one afterward.”
Cram said that he found nothing in his research indicating that any high-level Americans were involved in the British scandal. Nor did he find any evidence that the Profumo-Keeler relationship posed a serious national security threat to Britain. Christine Keeler did ask Profumo questions, Cram said, “like, ‘Are you going to move nuclear warheads in Germany?’ and things like that. I doubt that he answered anything.” The scandal resulted from the mere fact that Ivanov was working for Soviet intelligence. “He was, through this source, Miss Keeler, in touch actually with John Profumo,” Cram said. “It was a very important case for MI5, I can tell you. They had this woman who was sleeping with John Profumo and was also sleeping with Ivanov.”
On June 23 Kennedy arrived in Bonn to begin his first trip to Europe since the Vienna summit, and on June 26 he got his first look at the Berlin Wall. His speech was a triumph; a million people jammed a plaza, now named after Kennedy, and broke into prolonged and emotional cheering when the president said in German, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” It was one of the memorable scenes of his presidency. “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world,” Kennedy said. He paused a beat, then said, “Lassen sie nach Berlin kommen!” (“Let them come to Berlin!”)*
The presidential entourage went on to Ireland, where Kennedy, greeted everywhere like a rock star, spent a few days paying homage to his family roots. On Saturday, June 29, Kennedy flew to England for a lonely dinner with the battered Harold Macmillan. England was the last place Kennedy wanted to be during the Profumo scandal, and his closest ally among the European leaders, whose government was on the run, was the last person he wanted to spend time with. The British Foreign Office had been told earlier that the president, after spending three days touring in Ireland, would visit England for only one. The British were further told that Kennedy wished to visit the prime minister at his country home in Surrey, and not in the more public London.*
While Kennedy faced a gloomy Saturday-night meal with Macmillan, Bobby Kennedy was facing his own gloom: the result of a copyrighted story in the New York Journal-American, part of the Hearst chain, linking “a man who holds a ‘very high’ elective office” in the Kennedy administration to “a Chinese girl” in the Profumo scandal. The article, published Saturday afternoon, was written by two solid investigative reporters, James D. Horan and Dom Frasca, and splashed on page one under a three-line headline that said: “High U.S. Aide Implicated in V-Girl Scandal.” It quoted Maria Novotny as saying that a Chinese-American woman—identified by Horan and Frasca as Suzy Chang—was the “former paramour of the American government official.”
The story was pulled after one edition. Horan and Frasca both died in the 1980s. Before his death, Horan told his sons, Brian and Gary, that Bobby Kennedy had done everything possible to yank the story. “Bobby was putting the arm on Dad and saying this isn’t going to happen,” Brian Horan told me in a 1997 interview for this book. “It went up to Bill Hearst and it was spiked.” Hearst, son of William Randolph Hearst, was chairman and director of the Hearst Corporation, publishers of the Journal-American.†
That afternoon, the attorney general telephoned Warren Rogers, a trusted reporter who was a Washington correspondent for Look magazine, and urged him to call anyone he knew at the Journal-American to get the name of the unidentified American official in the Horan-Frasca article. Kennedy’s plea for help was memorable, Rogers said in a 1997 interview for this book, because he and his wife were having a backyard party that afternoon. “My guests never saw me,” Rogers told me. “Bob [Kennedy] was persistent, and I kept getting called to the telephone.” As usual, “there was no chitchat,” Rogers said. “Bob was all business. He asked me if I’d seen the story. I had not. He wanted to know who it was.” Rogers had no luck; the one senior editor he knew at the Journal-American would not say.
Jack Kennedy carried on as usual, while his brother struggled to keep the lid on at home. The last stop was Italy, where the president was to meet with government leaders and the newly elected Pope, Paul VI. The president had worked hard to arrange a long-planned dalliance at Lake Como with Marella Agnelli, the wife of Gianni Agnelli, a prominent Italian businessman. He had been forced to ask Dean Rusk, not one of his usual go-betweens, to arrange the perfect hideaway. Years later, Rusk described the painful incident to Pat Holt, a senior staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While planning the trip, Holt told me in a 1994 interview for this book, “Jack said to Rusk, ‘Mr. Secretary’—he never called him anything else—‘can you find a place that’s sort of quiet and restful where we could stop on the way home?’” Rusk was conflicted about recommending a villa at Lake Como that was owned by the Rockefeller Foundation. As a former president of the foundation, Rusk knew that there were long-standing rules against the use of its facilities by public figures. “Nonetheless,” Holt recounted, “they made it available, and Rusk was looking forward to it. He hadn’t been in office very long and he hoped to spend a day or two with the president, letting his hair down. The plane stops in Milan and Rusk is thinking they’re going to Lake Como. Instead, the president says, ‘Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for arranging this. I’ll see you back in Washington.’ And he goes off.”*
On Monday, with his brother still in Italy, Bobby Kennedy summoned Horan and Frasca to the Justice Department. A summary of the meeting, written by Courtney Evans, the FBI liaison officer to the attorney general, emphasized the reluctance of the two reporters “to volunteer information.” Kennedy was forced to ask for the name of the American official. “It was the President of the United States,” Frasca told the attorney general, according to Evans’s memorandum, made public under the Freedom of Information Act. The two journalists added, under questioning, that the source of their information was a conversation on June 28 between Frasca and a London journalist named Peter Earle of News of the World, a popular tabloid. News of the World had earlier signed a contract with Novotny for her story of the Profumo affair, and Earle had been assigned by his newspaper to write it for her. Novotny listened in on an extension telephone as Frasca and Earle talked, the Evans memorandum said, and spoke “very briefly.” Most of the information came from Peter Earle, Evans wrote. Frasca and Horan had tape-recorded the conversation, Evans added. Kennedy asked the journalists, Evans wrote, if they had written a story involving the president of the United States “without any further check being made to get to the truth of the matter.” At that point, Evans reported, “Frasca contended that he had other sources of a confidential nature.”
The meeting must have been very difficult for Robert Kennedy. Initially he asked Evans not to put anything in writing, but he changed his mind after learning that Evans later discussed the meeting with J. Edgar Hoover. In a note to Hoover two days later, July 3, made public under the Freedom of Information Act, Evans tried to put the best light on Kennedy’s initial request for silence by reporting that the attorney general, upon learning that Hoover had been told of the meeting, “was glad that this had been done and … he hoped I had not misunderstood his earlier admonition not to write a memorandum. He just wanted to be assured that you had been informed.” Evans further noted that Kennedy “treated the newspaper representatives at arms’ length and the conference ended most coolly and, in fact, there was almost an air of hostility between the Attorney General and the reporters.”
Horan, discussing the meeting with his sons years later, recalled the attorney general’s intensity. “Bobby was just sitting there, looking at him,” Gary Horan said in a 1997 interview. “‘I’ll never forget those steel blue eyes,’ [Dad] said.”
The one-edition Horan and Frasca story slipped quickly into obscurity. Over the next few weeks, with prodding from Bobby Kennedy, the FBI was able to document, according to files made available under the Freedom of Information Act, that Suzy Chang had flown from London to New York many times, allegedly to visit her ailing mother in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Now married and living under a different name on Long Island, Suzy Chang politely told me in two 1997 telephone conversations that she had nothing to say. In 1987, however, she was quoted by the journalist Anthony Summers, in Official and Confidential, his biography of Hoover, as admitting that she knew Jack Kennedy. “We’d meet in the 21 Club,” she told Summers. “Everybody saw me eating with him. I think he was a nice guy, very charming. What else am I going to say?” Other FBI files provided to Bobby Kennedy showed that Maria Novotny, who died in the 1970s in London, had been arrested for prostitution in New York in 1961. Before her death, Novotny wrote an unpublished manuscript, made available for this book, in which she claimed to have been recruited by Peter Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, to engage in group sex with Jack Kennedy a few weeks before his inauguration. She and another prostitute, Novotny said, pretended to be nurse and doctor; the president-elect was their patient.
Bobby Kennedy soon had more on his mind than the Journal-American and its uncooperative reporters. On July 3 Hoover informed him of yet another allegation about his brother—one involving Ellen Rometsch. Hoover reported, according to a summary written by Courtney Evans to an assistant FBI director, that a sometime bureau informant had spent time with Rometsch and been told that she was having “illicit relations with highly placed governmental officials.” That phrase, Evans and Bobby Kennedy had to assume, included the president. There was an ominous new factor in Hoover’s revelation, however: “Rometsch is alleged,” Evans quoted Hoover as saying, “to be from East Germany and to have formerly worked for Walter Ulbricht,” the communist leader of East Germany. The Profumo affair had arrived in Washington.
Bobby Kennedy quickly sought to minimize the report, telling Evans that “he was appreciative of the Director’s sending this information to him on a confidential basis, and there always are allegations about prominent people that they are either homosexuals or promiscuous.” But the attorney general was anything but casual about Hoover’s allegation. “It was noted,” Evans said in a memorandum to Hoover, “that the AG made particular note of Rometsch’s name.” Bobby Kennedy also expressed “his appreciation,” Evans said, for the FBI’s discretion in handling the matter.*
That summer, the FBI’s counterintelligence division opened an investigation into Rometsch as a possible spy. “I knew the allegations,” Raymond Wannell, head of FBI counterintelligence, said in a 1997 interview for this book. “I knew it was a serious matter. I didn’t know if they were proved” or disproved.
The Kennedy brothers did not wait for the FBI’s report. On August 21, 1963, Rometsch was abruptly deported to Germany, at the official request of the State Department. She was escorted home by LaVern Duffy, one of Bobby Kennedy’s associates from his days on the Senate Rackets Committee; the two flew to Germany on a U.S. Air Force transport plane. There are no known records documenting her departure, according to the State Department. Rolf Rometsch left the country a few days later; he was granted a divorce in late September on grounds of his wife’s “relations with other men.”
Duffy, a lifelong bachelor who died in 1992, had been dating Rometsch for months before she was deported; he was seen having drinks with her in the summer of 1963 at the Quorum Club. It was that connection, apparently, that prompted Bobby Kennedy to ask for Duffy’s help in getting Rometsch out of Washington and in keeping her quiet. There is much evidence that Rometsch and Duffy were in love. Over the next few months, Rometsch sent Duffy a series of passionate letters, expressing her deep feelings about him—and also thanking him for sending her money. One of Rometsch’s letters, dated April 8, 1964, and made available for this book, urged Duffy to send her money by personal check rather than by money order. “Which way you send it is up to you,” Rometsch wrote in her fractured English. “The bank is telling me that it would be more easy for them and the money would be fester in my hands if you should make up a check payable to me. you ask your Bank about it.” It was not clear whether Rometsch was referring to a token gift from Duffy or a substantial transfer of funds.
In interviews for this book, Duffy’s brother and one of his close friends both said that Duffy gave money—lots of it—to Rometsch on behalf of the Kennedys.
Wayne A. Duffy, a retired California banker, told me that he had been close to his brother LaVern and, after his death, found Rometsch’s letters to him while sorting through his personal papers. “The letters show she was getting paid,” Wayne told me. “You don’t send a gal out of the country and tell her to keep quiet and not pay her.” Asked if the money given to Rometsch had been his brother’s, Wayne Duffy said, “Absolutely not.” The money that was sent, in deutsche marks, came from the Kennedys, he said. The amount, he added, in response to questioning, “could have been five thousand dollars or fifty thousand.”
Wayne Duffy told me that he had always assumed that Ellen Rometsch was a spy for East Germany. “Most people thought she was for a long time,” he said, adding that he had no direct knowledge of such matters. The fact is, Duffy said, “she could have” been a spy. “It would have been very easy for her to be one.” He and LaVern had often discussed the Rometsch matter, Wayne Duffy said, and his brother told him of Rometsch’s relationship with the president. “Obviously, [the White House] was scared because they didn’t want it to become public,” Duffy told me. “But everybody on the inside knew it.” Duffy added that his brother had been offered a White House job by Jack Kennedy early in the administration, but turned it down to continue his investigative work in the rackets for the Senate.
Georgia Liakakis, who worked as a secretary and girl Friday for a number of Washington lobbyists and power brokers in the 1960s, including Bobby Baker, was one of LaVern Duffy’s close friends in 1963. Liakakis told me in a 1997 interview for this book that “the Kennedys gave [Rometsch] a lot of money.” Her source for that information, Liakakis told me, was LaVern Duffy: “He told me the Kennedys put him up to it … Bobby Kennedy was pushing him to keep her away and to keep her mouth shut,” Liakakis added. “They [the Kennedys] were afraid. There was a lot of money changing hands.”
LaVern Duffy and Kennedy money may have combined to get Ellen Rometsch out of Washington and keep her quiet, but there was one event even a Kennedy could not control in 1963: the political demise of Bobby Baker, secretary to the Senate Democrats. In September newspapers and magazines began unraveling a seamy story of Baker’s financial ties to a fast-growing vending machine company. Baker and a group of investors, it turned out, had been awarded many contracts while the new company was still being organized, and had also received instant credit from a bank controlled by Democratic senator Robert Kerr, of Oklahoma, and his family. By October the Baker scandal had turned into a newspaper tempest, and reporters were beginning to dig up dirt on a number of present and past senators—including Baker’s mentor, Vice President Johnson. A Maryland insurance broker named Donald Reynolds met privately with Senator John Williams of Delaware, a Republican, and complained to him about advertising he had been forced to buy on the vice president’s radio and television stations in Austin, Texas, as a condition of writing Johnson’s life insurance policy. Johnson also demanded, and got, a television set and a new stereo from Reynolds as a cost of doing business. John Williams’s best friend in the Senate was Carl Curtis of Nebraska, the senior Republican on the Rules Committee. As the scandal spread in the newspapers, alarming other Democrats—including senators who had received many thousands of dollars in campaign contributions through Baker—the Rules Committee announced an all-out investigation. Baker’s personal life was soon thrust into the limelight, along with the mysterious goings-on at the Quorum Club. It took only days for the Republicans on the committee to find out all they needed to know about Ellen Rometsch.
The next step was inevitable. On October 26, 1963, the investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff published a dispatch in the Des Moines Register revealing that the Rules Committee was planning to hear testimony about Ellen Rometsch and her abrupt August expulsion from the United States. Mollenhoff’s story, like the one on the Profumo scandal published four months earlier by Horan and Frasca, did not name names, but it noted that the committee was “in the process of examining allegations regarding the conduct of Senate employees as well as members of the Senate” with Rometsch. The committee’s interest went beyond the Senate: “The evidence also is likely to include identification of several high executive branch officials as friends and associates of the part-time model and party girl,” Mollenhoff wrote.
Mollenhoff, who died in 1991, obviously had good sources, one of them being John Williams of the Senate. His story noted that Senator Williams “has obtained an account of the woman’s life in Washington over a period of more than two years.” Rometsch was born and raised in East Germany, Mollenhoff wrote, and “still has relatives on the other side of the iron curtain. The possibility that her activity might be connected with espionage was of some concern to security investigators because of the high rank of her male companions.”
“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 looked 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 Stockdale 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.
“So,” Grant continued, “my father went around and collected money. I think he did it not believing that Kennedy wouldn’t acknowledge it [as a loan or contribution] in some way. He couldn’t believe it was so underhanded.” There was no secret in Miami about Stockdale’s money needs. “All of his buddies knew he was broke,” Grant said, “because he was open about it: ‘Hey guys, I’m broke.’” He had trouble raising the $50,000 in cash, Grant told me. “Some of the people he approached were as incredulous as my mother was. They were simply disbelieving, and turned down the request.” Word began spreading in Miami, Grant added, that Stockdale was really raising the money for himself—that there was no Kennedy connection. “My father was devastated when he heard that story,” Grant told me. “It got to his core. My father was still trying to figure out how he could get Kennedy to acknowledge the contributors when November twenty-second came.”
A family friend had gone with his father, Grant said, to the Kennedy compound to deliver the money. “Kennedy said, ‘Thank you,’ opened a nearby closet door, and threw the briefcase in there,” Grant was told. “The closet was full of briefcases.”
Kennedy’s assassination devastated the Stockdale family, and left Stockdale with a serious problem, his son recalled. “He told everyone that the money he had collected was for Kennedy, but now he had no proof.” Grant said that his father “was very worried about Bobby Baker. Why would my father be worried about Bobby Baker?”
Edward Grant Stockdale committed suicide by jumping from his office window in downtown Miami ten days after the president’s murder. He was forty-eight years old. His son still wants to know why Kennedy needed the money.
* The first lady did her best, apparently, to avoid such surprises. Gerry McCabe was assigned as a presidential navy aide in 1963 to the communications room in the basement of the White House, where the government’s most sensitive dispatches arrived. Jacqueline Kennedy, when on vacations in Europe or elsewhere, always wired the president in advance of her return, McCabe told me in a 1995 interview for this book, pointedly saying on one occasion that she was “coming back a day earlier than planned.” The young navy officer said he and everyone else in the communications room understood the first lady’s real message: “You’d better get your friends out of the White House.”
* Kennedy’s ringingly defiant Cold War speech in West Berlin, which came less than three weeks after the American University speech, did not faze Khrushchev. In The Crisis Years, Beschloss quoted the Soviet premier as responding, “If one reads what he said in West Germany, and especially in West Berlin, and compares this with the speech at the American University, one would think the speeches were made by two different presidents.” Khrushchev added that the American president was wasting his time “courting the old West German widow.”
* Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers were scheduled to stay with the president at Macmillan’s country home, but slipped away to join a press party at Brighton with the crew of Air Force One. Kennedy telephoned O’Donnell just as he checked into his hotel, O’Donnell wrote in “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” and complained: “Thanks for leaving me stranded. I suppose you’ve been cooking up this little party for a week or more. Who’s there? What’s going on? I suppose you’ve got a big drink in your hand.”
† The Kennedys had enormous, and hard-earned, clout with the Hearst family by 1963. In January 1962 a few of the young attorneys in the Justice Department antitrust division began agitating for a possible investigation into the simultaneous suspension of publication earlier in the month of the unprofitable Los Angeles Mirror, an afternoon newspaper owned by the Otis Chandler family, publishers of the flagship Los Angeles Times, and what was said to be the equally unprofitable Los Angeles Examiner, a morning newspaper owned by the Hearst empire. The chains would each retain a monopoly in, respectively, the morning and afternoon daily newspaper market in the Los Angeles area. The Justice Department lawyers quickly scheduled a meeting with their boss, Lee Loevinger, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. “We took it to Loevinger,” George Miron, one of the attorneys, recalled in a 1996 interview for this book, “and he said, ‘Oh yeah, I know about it.’ It stunned us. He said, ‘There was a guy who came to see me and told me about it.”’
The “guy” turned out to be James McInerney, who since the early 1950s had handled personal and legal problems for Joe Kennedy and his sons—Florence Kater among them (see Chapter Eight). McInerney, a former assistant attorney general who had no experience in newspaper issues, had nonetheless been retained by the Hearst Corporation as its Washington adviser for the closure. Otis Chandler also relied on McInerney. Miron and his colleagues quickly summoned McInerney to a meeting; he told them that he had discussed the closing of the two newspapers with Bobby Kennedy, who gave his oral blessing. Kennedy’s action precluded any significant criminal investigation into possible collusion. If the attorney general had investigated, a subsequent congressional hearing showed, he would have discovered that the Examiner was in the black in the early 1960s; the Hearst Corporation was shutting down a profitable newspaper to get an afternoon monopoly in Los Angeles. “We were a bunch of punks who didn’t like to be pushed around,” Miron told me, “so we pressured Loevinger to try and open an investigation—not a criminal investigation,” but a civil inquiry into what clearly seemed to be a prearranged decision to shut down the two newspapers at the same time. The civil investigation did not happen, Miron said, and he and his colleagues “were not considered team players,” because of their persistence. Mclnerney’s brilliant lobbying became a focal point of a 1963 hearing by the House Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly; the hearing record, not printed until 1968, for reasons that are still not clear, included evidence of the profitability of the Examiner in the years before it was closed.
* In their memoir, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers described the president’s retreat in bucolic terms: “We arranged for him to land at Milan and to spend the rest of the day at Lake Como, killing some time and getting a bit of relaxation before going on to Rome on Monday.”
* Evans, now retired as a practicing attorney in Washington, remains a model of discretion. He was interviewed three times during the preparation of this book, and managed to be voluble while saying very little. Always amiable, Evans usually said he did not remember a specific incident, or did not remember handling a specific document. Asked about Jack Kennedy’s dealings with Sam Giancana and Judith Exner, he said, “The rich are different.” Was Jack Kennedy vulnerable to blackmail? “I don’t doubt it,” Evans said. Did Jack Kennedy know about the Castro assassination plotting? “Of course.” Evans also claimed not to have much recall of the Ellen Rometsch matter. “You know more about it than I do,” he told me with a smile.
* Years later, when he was in the Senate, Robert Kennedy described Lyndon Johnson to Adam Walinsky, one of his aides, as someone who “panicked and couldn’t function” in crises. “Kennedy told me,” Walinsky, a New York attorney, said in a 1993 interview for this book, “that Johnson had been a physical coward during the Cuban missile crisis.”
* Harrington, a professional archivist, said it was clear that “there was sensitive stuff” on the presidential tape recordings, “because of how carefully they [family members and friends] worked with them. The thing that was disillusioning for me was the fact that no transcripts were made” in real time, that is, within a few weeks or months of the initial tape recordings. “The thing that could justify the tapings was to use them to refresh [Kennedy’s] memory” before various meetings. “I had a hunch it was bad,” Harrington added. “They were so secretive about it. Why were they so secretive? The machine was set up, after all, in the Oval Office. There shouldn’t be any hanky-panky there.”