Kennedys and Hoover: How Their Battles Affected King

Shortly after Robert Kennedy took over the Justice Department, he found himself at loggerheads with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. An unwitting Martin Luther King Jr. would soon find himself a pawn in the attorney general’s continuing battle to protect his brother, John F . Kennedy, the President, from the FBI chief.

The running battle between Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover began in the early days of J. F. K. ‘s Administration.

Robert Kennedy wanted to shift the bureau’s priorities drastically from domestic intelligence to organized crime. Citing the FBI’s own private figures that the American Communist Party had shriveled further since its collapse in 1956--until about 1,500 FBI informants within the party supplied a hefty part of its budget and membership--he insisted that the bureau’s vast domestic security network was a wasteful bureaucratic appendix from the McCarthy era.

Kennedy was appalled to learn that there were only a dozen FBI agents targeted against organized crime, as opposed to more than a 1,000 in political security work. He would have preferred something close to a reversal, and it annoyed him almost beyond endurance that the FBI still denied the very existence of organized crime.

By the end of Robert Kennedy’s first year as Hoover’s nominal boss, worn edges were beginning to show.

In December, Kennedy told a British journalist that the U.S. Communist Party “couldn’t be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides, its membership consists largely of FBI agents.”

In sharp but indirect rebuttal, Hoover told a House committee the next month that the U.S. Communist Party was a “Trojan Horse of rigidly disciplined fanatics unalterably committed to bring this free nation under the yoke of international communism.” Hoover substantiated this ringing alarm by disclosing confidentially to the congressmen, and to selected senators as well, that a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison was both a secret member of the Communist Party, subject to orders from the Kremlin, and a guiding adviser to Martin Luther King.

The message was clear: that the troublesome Negro revolution was Moscow’s skirmish line, and that only the omniscient Hoover knew the full details.

More pointedly, in a Jan. 8 classified memo to Robert Kennedy, Hoover extended the reach of suspicion. Not only did the Communists have influence upon King through Levison, he warned, but through King, in turn, Levison and the Communists had “access” to the attorney general himself and to the White House.

Because King had met personally with both Kennedy brothers--even taken a meal recently with the President--there was a specter of Communist influence at the highest levels.

Kennedy made no recorded response, perhaps because he dismissed the notion that he was personally vulnerable to Communist manipulation. Shortly after receiving Hoover’s memo, Kennedy left, on Feb. 1, 1962, for a monthlong good-will trip around the world.

Hoover welcomed the attorney general home on Feb. 27 with a dose of scandal so fantastic in those days that even the most credulous readers of supermarket tabloids would have dismissed it as lurid fantasy.

Mobster Connection

Hoover’s memo was the result of an investigation that had begun sometime earlier, when FBI agents in Las Vegas arrested private parties for placing illegal wiretaps on the home of singer Phyllis McGuire.

Preliminary development of the wiretap prosecution had shown that the wiretappers were in the employ of Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent working for Howard Hughes, and Sam (Momo) Giancana, Al Capone’s mobster heir in Chicago. That much was good news to the entire Justice Department--Hoover loathed Maheu as a bureau renegade, and Kennedy had sought the conviction of Giancana almost as diligently as that of Jimmy Hoffa.

The first of the bad news was that Maheu and Giancana claimed immunity from prosecution on the grounds that their wiretap was sanctioned by the CIA. Officials from the CIA, in turn, had confirmed through gritted teeth that Maheu and Giancana indeed had been working for them in a series of top-secret attempts to assassinate Cuban Premier Fidel Castro by means of Giancana’s gangster connections.

Giancana, while plotting these missions, had asked Maheu and the CIA to make sure that his mistress, Phyllis McGuire, was not two-timing him while he was away, and the agency officials had decided that they were in no position to refuse.

Sinatra Made Introductions

All this was only the beginning. Further investigation, plus the wiretaps themselves, had revealed that Phyllis McGuire nursed her own complaints about the relationship, including the fact that Giancana maintained a second mistress, in California, named Judith Campbell.

Singer Frank Sinatra had introduced Campbell to Giancana and to other gangsters with whom he socialized. Sinatra also had introduced Judith Campbell to John Kennedy, it turned out, and both John and Robert Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe, among others, in a serial exchange of lovers.

Gangsters and Blackmail

The ramifications of this one Las Vegas arrest, Hoover wrote, could spell disaster for the Administration. It meant that the CIA and the Kennedy brothers had poisoned the U.S. government’s chances of prosecuting Giancana and associated gangsters for any of their crimes. They had exposed the U.S. government to disgrace as one that pursued murder in partnership with gangsters and exposed the President to blackmail as a consort of gangster women.

A week later, Hoover formally requested Attorney General Kennedy’s authorization to place wiretaps in the office of Stanley Levison. Kennedy approved.

Lunch at the White House

By an odd custom that Justice Department executives preferred not to discuss, Hoover himself assumed the authority to place room listening devices--bugs, as opposed to wiretaps--and he moved swiftly on bugs even before Kennedy authorized the wiretap.

The complete Levison coverage was in place just before Hoover’s private luncheon at the White House on March 22, 1962, when he reported to President Kennedy on the FBI’s discovery of the Sinatra-Mafia-Castro-mistress tangle.

In confronting the President about his sexual escapades, Hoover was fortified by the experience of having done so 20 years earlier. During World War II, FBI agents watching a Danish reporter named Inga Arvad (who was suspected as a spy because she had known Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and other top Nazis) had discovered that she was having an affair with Kennedy, then a Navy lieutenant.

FBI agents had bugged their trysts to obtain tape recordings of Navy talk mixed with pillow talk. Hoover did not forget the episode. Upon Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960, he asked his assistant, Cartha (Deke) DeLoache, to retrieve the Kennedy-Arvad tape recordings from the FBI files for review.

Potential Scandal

In the summer of 1963, after King’s campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Ala., spawned a nationwide outbreak of demonstrations, Hoover asked for Robert Kennedy’s authorization to place wiretaps on King. Kennedy turned him down.

But in October, 1963, Hoover found that he held the balance in a potential scandal that might well ruin President Kennedy. FBI agents had discovered that among the President’s mistresses was a woman named Ellen Rometsch, who had fled her native East Germany in 1955 and made her way to Washington in 1961 as the wife of a soldier stationed in the West German Embassy.

To the bureau, this made Rometsch suspect as a possible East German spy. Even so, the scandalous implications might easily have been buried because of the President’s privacy in such matters, except that Rometsch was part of a collateral scandal that couldn’t be contained. She was one of many courtesans and party girls associated with Bobby Baker, an old Lyndon Johnson protege on the Senate staff.

Baker’s anonymity was about to be shattered by a disgruntled vending machine contractor angling to sue Baker for default on bought favors. That triggering event eventually sent Baker to prison.

Led to President

Long before then, it promised to open many lurid avenues of revelation about him as a one-man back-room market place who assiduously arranged contracts, cash, and back rubs. Robert Kennedy knew that one of those avenues led through Ellen Rometsch to President Kennedy. He had her quietly deported in August, but all through September, as lawyers and investigators circled Baker in private, the information left behind was a threat of the utmost sensitivity.

Essentially, it was a reprise of John Kennedy’s unknown Inga Arvad affair of the 1940s. Both these exotic romances with foreign women were within Hoover’s dreaded files, and Hoover, more than any other person, had the power to determine whether the Rometsch affair stayed as quiet as Arvad or became as noisy as the Profumo scandal in England, which was lurching toward a conclusion marked by suicide and political disgrace.

On Monday, Oct. 7, 1963, Hoover again sent Attorney General Kennedy a request for a direct wiretap on King. That afternoon Bobby Baker resigned his Senate position.

On Thursday, amid early ripples of publicity about Baker’s resignation, the Senate unanimously ordered a Rules Committee investigation of Baker’s conduct. That afternoon, having sent a terse note--”Courtney, speak to me”--Robert Kennedy met privately with Courtney Evans, his FBI liaison. He still had not signed the King wiretap authorization. To Evans, Kennedy stressed the political delicacy of the issue, saying that any public discovery of such a tap would be a disaster of the highest order.

Political Intelligence

Although neither Kennedy nor Courtney Evans spoke so plainly in their private memos, the best arguments for a wiretap on King had to do with obtaining political intelligence.

Ironically, much of that information had been shut off earlier in the year by Kennedy’s insistence that King stop talking to Levison, which had reduced the take from the Levison wiretaps. More than ever, Kennedy needed to know exactly what King intended. Congress was aflame over the civil rights bill. A surprise demonstration or a denunciation of the Administration could be calamitous from Kennedy’s point of view.

To deal with King--to court, control, or, in a dire emergency, renounce him entirely--he needed to know every possible detail. This was the unspoken bait from Hoover, who was not above larding his intelligence reports with political gossip.

On the other hand, it was a trap.

If Robert Kennedy handed Hoover a signed wiretap authorization on Martin Luther King, the precarious balance of their relationship would shift. Hoover would possess a club to offset Kennedy’s special relationship with the President.

A Faustian Undertow

Thereafter, it would become more difficult for Robert Kennedy to restrain Hoover from any action he proposed against King. For that matter, it would become more difficult to suggest practically anything to Hoover. How could Kennedy hope to control Hoover once he had agreed to wiretap King?

There was a Faustian undertow to Kennedy’s dilemma, and he did not feel strong enough to resist. He signed the first King wiretap authorization on Oct. 10. Some time later, after holding the matter entirely to himself, he told an aide tersely that there would have been “no living with the bureau” if he had not signed.

(Hoover leaked word of the taps when Robert Kennedy was running for President in 1968, after King’s death. Kennedy’s administrative assistant, John Seigenthaler, seeing the stricken look on Kennedy’s face when asked about the rumors during a practice debate, knew instantly that he did not need to ask whether it was true, nor could he bear to ask why.)

From “Parting of the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63,” by Taylor Branch. Copyright, 1988, by Taylor Branch. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Simon and Schuster Inc.