Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [155]
When it suited him, on the other hand, he lied. ‘Attorney General Kennedy and I,’ Edgar wrote to Cardinal Cushing, a friend of the Kennedy family, ‘have worked most cordially together … We have not had a single difference.’
Kennedy’s people, meanwhile, found Edgar very strange indeed. Joe Dolan, a slim young lawyer, found himself lectured about weight problems for forty-five minutes – then briskly dismissed. John Seigenthaler, Kennedy’s administrative assistant, was harangued first about the way key newspapers were supposedly infiltrated by Communists, then about Adlai Stevenson’s alleged homosexuality. Edgar subjected first Robert, then the President himself, to a long briefing on the alleged homosexuality of Joseph Alsop, the distinguished journalist.
It was all bizarre to the Kennedys. For the first time, perhaps, men in power dared voice the notion that Edgar was not entirely sane. ‘He was out of it today, wasn’t he?’ Robert murmured to Seigenthaler when he emerged from Edgar’s lecture about Communists and pederasts. Kennedy staffers began to talk about Edgar’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days.
‘He acts in such a strange, peculiar way,’ Robert Kennedy was to say in 1964, on an embargoed basis, in an interview intended for use by future historians. ‘He’s rather a psycho. I think it’s a very dangerous organization. I think he’s become senile and rather … frightening.’
Sometimes through Robert, and sometimes in memos to the White House, Edgar quickly began playing on the President’s weakest characteristic: his womanizing. Ten days after the inauguration, an Italian magazine had published comments by Alicia Purdom, wife of the British actor Edmund Purdom. She claimed that in 1951, before either of them was married, she and Kennedy had had an affair. Had Joseph Kennedy not stepped in to end it, they would have married.
This was not picked up in the American press. Edgar, however, alerted by his man in Rome, promptly informed the President’s brother. Available information, and a heavily censored file, suggests the matter had been a worry even before the election, and that the family had paid a vast sum of money to hush the matter up. Allegations would reach Edgar that the reported affair with Purdom had involved a pregnancy. Stage by stage, as more of this came to his attention, he made sure the Kennedys knew he knew.
By now Pamela Turnure, who had been involved with the President in his Senate days, had – ironically – become press secretary to the President’s wife. Her former landlady, Florence Kater, still obsessed with the affair, once again tried to stir up trouble. Robert Kennedy’s office asked the FBI whether it knew anything about the matter and was told untruthfully that it did not. Edgar was playing games, and the brothers – mindful of how Edgar had used his Kennedy sex file to propel Lyndon Johnson toward the vice presidency – had to live with it.
They also had to live with efforts by Edgar, from the very beginning, to torpedo White House nominees he did not like. Pierre Salinger, who had been named as Press Secretary, was astonished to get a call from Time inquiring about an allegation that he had received Communist training as a child. Salinger cleared the matter up – his ‘Communist training’ had consisted of a vacation spent at a summer camp run by the Longshoremen’s Union – and Time explained that the tip-off had come from Edgar’s office. Then Edgar personally warned John Kennedy that Salinger had once been in jail. This was true. As a young reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, he had posed as a prisoner to write a series of articles on jail conditions. Salinger’s appointment went ahead.
As John Kennedy examined FBI reports on potential appointees, he was astounded by their keyhole