The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (125 page)

“
W
hat is the scandal?” Kennedy asked with delicious anticipation.

The president was on the telephone with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who on March 22, 1963, had just returned from England with a precious piece of political tittle-tattle. Kennedy treated gossip like chocolate bonbons, a pleasant little addiction that he enjoyed tasting several times a day. Schlesinger had a particularly sweet item about John Profumo, the British war minister, who had gotten himself into a wicked fix.

“Well, he has written a number of letters to a girl who turns out to have been the mistress of a Soviet military attaché,” Schlesinger said.

“Is that the girl that was written about in this morning’s paper?” the president asked, already up to the moment on the story.

Kennedy treated the scandal as if it were happening to some exotic species of political animal. He himself had indulged, however, in precisely the same behavior that doomed Profumo’s political career, carrying on with a woman who was also involved with one of his nation’s enemies. The president, moreover, had done so with reckless nonchalance, learning nothing from the debacle with Exner, continuing with liaisons that were even more dangerous.

Later that spring Kennedy sailed down the Potomac on the
Honey Fitz
with a group that included his carousing comrade, Senator Smathers. The sexual gossip of the moment dealt not with the capital but with London, where the Profumo affair risked bringing down the Conservative government.

“How serious do you think it would be?” Kennedy asked, as Smathers remembered. “Do you think there is any possibility of anybody in my administration getting in a similar situation?”

“I don’t believe so,” Smathers replied. Then Kennedy went through the cabinet members one by one, describing the sexual predilections of each man, or the lack of them. By any measure, it was unlikely that the president had a Profumo in his cabinet. What was left unsaid was that the threat of scandal lay not in the cabinet but in Kennedy himself.

“It’s different from the case you tried when you were assistant U.S. attorney in 1941,” Jack said, his knowledge startling the Florida senator. That case arose from the question of whether state officials had illegally encouraged young women to cross state lines for immoral purposes. Smathers had won the verdict, and the case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Kennedy said that he had read about the matter when he had studied Smathers’s 1950 senatorial campaign. What was startling was not that he remembered but that it was something that he was reflecting on at this moment.

Up until now, Kennedy fancied that he could laugh with impunity about poor Profumo. On June 29, however, the
New York Journal-American
reported that a “high elected American official” had been the paramour of Suzy Chang, another of the British call girls involved in the scandal. There apparently was no truth to the rumor that Chang and her colleague, Christine Keeler, had bestowed favors on Kennedy, but the president had for so long treated sex as an endless buffet that it sounded plausible. Bobby called in the offending reporters, and his stern lecture was enough to convince the paper to back away from the story. “Have we learned what Christine [Keeler] and her friend did here in the U.S. when they were here?” the attorney general asked the FBI. It was the kind of question that he would ask only because he was not sure of all the parchments on which the president had left his pen marks.

Kennedy was probably involved with another European woman, Ellen
Rometsch, a German whose husband was an air force sergeant assigned to the West German embassy in Washington. Rometsch was a beautiful, sensuous young woman who hung around men of power in the watering holes of political Washington. Some thought that she was a call girl, though she was probably on the borderline between amateur and professional: men gladly showed their largess for her favors, but she could claim she was only having a good time. She became known as one of Bobby Baker’s girls. The secretary to the Senate Democrats was a man of many favors, and Rometsch was one of his favorite gifts. Baker asserts that Kennedy’s friend Jim Thompson set Rometsch up with the president, a pleasure that he supposedly enjoyed several times in the spring of 1963.

Hoover was also interested in the twenty-seven-year-old woman, but his concern was of a different sort from the president’s. The FBI chief’s obsession with Communist spies played into the paranoia of American politics, but the reality was that the East German secret police, the Stasi, had sent East Germans west as moles. Hoover was not wrong in suspecting a woman who had been active in Communist youth groups before fleeing her native East Germany. It was curious too the way she had arrived in Washington with her husband, only to use her sexual charms to ingratiate herself with men of power, including probably the president himself.

On July 3, 1963, Hoover’s deputy, Courtney Evans, told Bobby about Rometsch. It does not matter whether one believes Baker’s assertion that the president told him that Rometsch gave him “the best oral sex I ever had.” There was such a climate of sexual license in the White House that the story was believable. A month later the attorney general directed that Rometsch be deported to Germany. LaVern Duffy, one of Bobby’s investigators on the rackets committee, accompanied her. He was a doubly good choice to shepherd Rometsch out of the country, for not only was he a good friend of Bobby’s but he was among those having an affair with the woman.

T
here was pleasure and pain in Kennedy’s affairs. The pleasure was the president’s, and the pain was Bobby’s, whose task was to straighten up matters after the women had left and to pretend that nothing had happened. It was a sordid duty, and the attorney general performed it impeccably. “The White House was a bawdy house, but the interesting thing about it is that, in his mind, I think Kennedy thought that he was keeping all of this stuff separate,” recalled Mark Raskin, who early on in the administration had watched from his perspective as McGeorge Bundy’s aide at the National Security Council. “But the reality was that one piece of this was collapsing in on the other, as it always happens in fact. The FBI is keeping tabs on him. They know what’s
going on. I assume that this is a problem for him personally. And so all this stuff now takes up time and energy and so forth and so on, all the pieces falling in on each other.”

Kennedy had created an atmosphere in which many of his aides felt that it was the highest part of devotion to emulate their beloved leader by displaying their own sexual swordsmanship. Even some members of the Secret Service picked up on the atmosphere, enjoying their own assignations. Other agents worried that they were losing control over the president’s activities. “I don’t know if I would use the word ‘disillusioned,’ but it was bothersome that sometimes we had not been able to do a background on people visiting the White House,” observed Joe Paolella, a Secret Service agent. “From the security standpoint, that made you feel that there could have been some security breaches, women, that kind of stuff. What if one was a Russian spy? Sometimes Mrs. Kennedy’s secretary, Pamela Turnure, came up. You could conjecture, but we really didn’t know why these women were up there.”

Kennedy did not seem to realize that circumspection is the key to an adulterer’s long-term success. Presumably he knew that Florence Kater was still obsessed with exposing an affair between him and Pamela Turnure. Even so, he brought Turnure into the White House as Jackie’s press secretary.

The matter was of serious enough consequence that in October 1961, Bobby’s press secretary, Edwin Guthman, sent to the FBI a copy of one of Kater’s letters to the attorney general calling the president a “debaucher of a girl young enough to be his daughter and his cynical knowledge that the press will cover up for him is such that he has brought her into the White House itself as his wife’s press secretary.” He included a cover letter that asked whether the agency “had anything in files on the writer, Florence Mary Kater.” Although the FBI had nothing on Kennedy’s tormenter, the agency had a copy of the letter Kater had sent out in 1959 and noted that it had been distributed widely, including to the NBC journalist David Brinkley.

Kater finally managed to find someone willing to publish her tale. In November 1963,
The Thunderbolt
became the first publication to print Kater’s charges in explicit detail. The racist newspaper that called itself “The White Man’s Viewpoint” included a photo of Kater picketing outside the White House in which she carries a large placard condemning the philandering president, a photo of what appeared to be the then-Senator Kennedy shielding his face as he hurried out of Turnure’s Georgetown apartment, and the transcript of a tape recording of Kennedy and Turnure made on July 1, 1958. The Katers, who had lived downstairs from Turnure, had secretly recorded Kennedy’s visit late one night. The tape included sounds of a couple making love and having a testy contretemps. “I think that all men are
cheaters,” the woman said, her guest presumably giving her ample evidence of that.

There was other innuendo already appearing in publications more legitimate than
The Thunderbolt.
In July, the FBI had taken note of a column in
Photoplay,
a popular fan magazine, by Walter Winchell, who included a blind item concerning Marilyn Monroe and an anonymous powerful man who could have been either the president or the attorney general.

It was almost inevitable that either before or during the 1964 election, speculation about Kennedy’s sexual activities would move from occasional innuendo in the gamier gossip columns and tabloids to full-scale articles in major newspapers and magazines. Guthman is convinced that Kennedy’s sexual conduct, particularly with Exner, “would have been an issue in the campaign.” Kennedy’s aide Mike Feldman and Hoover’s deputy Cartha DeLoach both believe that though the matter probably would have surfaced, the president would have successfully dismissed it as nothing but baseless campaign innuendo.

T
he public knew nothing about the president’s sexual appetites and thought him an exemplary husband. Kennedy was an immensely popular president, not only admired but revered. Yet he was increasingly dogged by a multitude of problems. These were not grand crises in which he could stand stalwartly on the deck of the ship of state, most Americans hewing to his judgment no matter where he led them. These were pesky, petty squalls that risked slowly sapping away the energy and strength of his administration.

In the middle of July, Kennedy’s secretary brought him a cover letter and a series of memos from his friend Charles Bartlett. “I know how you dislike bearers of bad news but I am passing these memos along under a deep conviction that they deal with an area which urgently requires your personal scrutiny,” the columnist wrote. “An aura of scandal is building up…. At best O’Donnell, O’Brien … are performing legitimate political functions in a way that is breeding resentment and suspicion. At worst they are the heart of an extensive corruption which is reaching into many of the government agencies.”

T
he memos dealt for the most part with matters taking place at the Democratic National Committee. Contributors seek to be reimbursed for their largess with positions, contracts, and influence, and it is only when the spoils system transcends the limits of law and appearances that it becomes a political problem. The greedy are never satiated, and there is a natural progression in this process toward corruption. That had happened to some
degree toward the end of both previous administrations, and the question was whether it was happening again. In one of his memos, Bartlett recalled that in February he had told Kenny O’Donnell that “the committee would have been more balanced if someone like Siegenthaler
[sic]
had gone there.” O’Donnell, who fancied himself a tough man in a tough world, reportedly replied that he [O’Donnell] “was responsible for the dealings with contractors and that he was determined they would ante up to the party.”

O’Donnell may have been the chief political operative in the White House, but he had already violated one of the fundamental rules by breaking down the firewall between the president and his top people and the often nasty business of patronage. John Seigenthaler had in fact been scheduled to move over from the Justice Department to the DNC precisely because of the reasons that so upset Bartlett. Seigenthaler was to have been what he called “the buffer and the string cutter,” saving Bobby from having to deal with big contributors and other favor-seeking supplicants. “Bobby had dealt with every major politician in America during the campaign, and every one of them thought that Bobby was obligated to them,” Seigenthaler reflected. When Bobby’s aide moved back to his home state to become the editor of the
Nashville Tennessean,
the administration lost a man who had both the moral fiber and the toughness to handle the largely thankless job of patronage.

Bartlett’s charges were for the most part in the gray area where most patronage takes place. Everything the journalist had said could be rationalized with a shrug and a wink. What was most devastating, however, was an account of a conversation that Bartlett’s source had purportedly had with Larry Newman, a Secret Service agent. Newman supposedly recounted an evening he had spent with O’Donnell at Lake Como in Italy at the end of the president’s recent European trip. “O’Donnell’s remark was that the president was in fact rather stupid and that if it were not for his assistance, he would fall flat on his face,” Bartlett wrote in his memo. “Newman said that O’Donnell’s power seemed to him to be total and that he was clearly a negative and evil force.”

Bartlett admitted years later that Paul Corbin had been the source of the story about the Secret Service agent hearing O’Donnell blowing hard and strong at Lake Como. Newman had not even gone on the European trip. He did not know O’Donnell, and even if he had, he was hardly so stupid as to spout such blustering nonsense. He was bewildered when he started hearing rumors that O’Donnell did not like him and that for some reason he was on the outs with the Kennedys.