Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [160]
On January 11, before the assembled throng of senators and congressmen, John Kennedy spoke of Vietnam, of civil rights and of taxes. Few could have noticed or cared as he rattled off a line praising the FBI – for its ‘coordinated and hard-hitting effort.’ This was a sweetener for Edgar, but the time for meaningful sweeteners was past.
A month earlier, Edgar’s spies had warned him not only that the Kennedys were planning to fire him, but that a specific candidate, State Department Security Director William Boswell, was in line for his job. And soon, having not deigned to see Edgar for the past year, Kennedy sent word that he ‘desired to speak with Mr Hoover.’
Edgar stepped out of his limousine at the northwest gate of the White House at one o’clock on March 22. He was ushered into the Oval Office, and then he and the President took the elevator to the dining room in the Executive Mansion. The only other person present was Kenneth O’Donnell.
The meeting was a long one. Four hours later, as Edgar was leaving, Kennedy aides Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger were on the way in. Their names were anathema to Washington conservatives, and the President refrained from introducing them. As he explained to them a few moments later, he ‘did not want to upset Mr Hoover too much.’
It may never be known whether or not Kennedy tried to fire Edgar that day. The Kennedy Library says it has no record of what was said at the lunch. Nor does the FBI – even though Edgar normally wrote a memo following a visit to the White House. We do know the meeting went badly. Kenneth O’Donnell, interviewed years later, would say only that the President eventually lost patience. ‘Get rid of that bastard,’ he hissed to his aide. ‘He’s the biggest bore.’
Since the mid-seventies, when a Senate inquiry probed the nation’s darker intelligence secrets, the encounter has had a special significance. Edgar sat down with the President armed with dirt more explosive than even he was used to – much of it, ironically, obtained thanks to Robert Kennedy’s pursuit of Mafia boss Sam Giancana.
Edgar had learned, even before Eisenhower left office, that there was a plot to kill Fidel Castro and that Giancana was somehow involved. Early in the Kennedy presidency he discovered Giancana was working with the CIA; and by March 1962 he knew that Judith Campbell, who was in touch with Giancana and Johnny Roselli, was one of the President’s lovers. While his attention was drawn to this by his agents, Edgar may even have learned something of it directly from Roselli, who is said to have socialized with him at La Jolla.
Edgar knew, too, of Giancana’s threat to ‘tell all’ about the Kennedys and, from a recent wiretap, that Giancana and Roselli had discussed obtaining a ‘really small’ receiver for bugging conversations. In that same conversation they had spoken of ‘Bobby’ and when he would next be in Washington.
The Director of the FBI, then, had evidence that the President of the United States was intimate with a young woman who was close to a Mafia boss who was involved with the CIA in a plot to assassinate a foreign leader – a plot that Edgar had every reason to suspect the President had authorized. And that, all the while, the FBI was ruthlessly pursuing that same Mafia boss on the orders of the President’s younger brother.
Any Director of the FBI would have been justified in bringing such a scenario to the President’s attention. With his malice toward the brothers and with the threat of dismissal hanging over him, Edgar must have relished doing so.
Judith Campbell, now known by her married name, Exner, has revealed that Edgar indeed brought her name up that day. ‘Jack called me that afternoon,’ she said. ‘He told me to go to my mother’s house and call him from there. When I did, he said