Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [148]
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