Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [162]
Increasingly harassed by the FBI, Campbell asked the President for help. ‘I was sort of begging him,’ she recalled, ‘saying, “Jack, do something. I can’t handle this” – because I was being followed. And he would always reply, “Don’t worry about it. You’re okay, you haven’t done anything wrong. You know Sam works for us.”’
Still, the President was infuriated. ‘Jack spoke of Hoover with great irritation,’ Campbell recalled. ‘It was in the sense of, “I wish he’d get out of my hair.” It was very obvious he wanted to be rid of Hoover.’
The President could not risk trying to dump his FBI Director. The Giancana mess aside, Edgar was now armed with knowledge of a battery of other Kennedy follies. Even before the March confrontation, Edgar had let the President know he knew about the use of prostitutes during the 1960 Convention. He knew, too, about an old relationship that could prove as politically damaging as the current ones.
In early March a small New York magazine, The Realist, ran a story headlined THE STORY BEHIND THE RUMOR ABOUT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S FIRST MARRIAGE. The rumor was that Kennedy had been briefly married, in 1947, to a Florida socialite named Durie Malcolm. Malcolm had merited an entry in a privately printed history of her family, and it stated flatly that among her several husbands was ‘John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England.’
If true, the ‘other marriage’ story was dynamite. It would mean that the first Catholic president had been divorced, which was against his professed religion, and – since he had concealed the fact – had deceived the nation. Research had established as of the writing of this book only that Kennedy and Malcolm did know each other in the forties, well enough to stir up speculation in a Florida gossip column.2
An entry in FBI files shows that in November 1961, when the rumor first reached the Bureau, an agent promptly perused Malcolm’s family history in the New York Public Library. His report, and similar ones from New Jersey and Massachusetts, went straight to Edgar. He then brought the matter to Robert Kennedy’s attention.
The file, however, does not tell the whole story. In a rare interview after Edgar’s death, his secretary, Helen Gandy, indicated that her boss had been onto the ‘other marriage’ as early as 1960, and that he and Richard Nixon discussed using it for election dirty tricks.
Soon after Edgar’s lunch with the President in 1962, the story began appearing in the press. First the Thunderbolt, the racist organ of the National States Rights Party, came out with a front-page story: KENNEDY’S DIVORCE EXPOSED! IS PRESENT MARRIAGE VALID? Right-wing organizations distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of Malcolm’s family history around the country. The syndicates and wire services started digging. A United Feature column, by Henry Taylor, was withdrawn at the last moment. Then Walter Winchell asked, ‘Why hasn’t the White House debunked it?’ By the time the debunking came, in Newsweek, it had become a serious embarrassment.
Ben Bradlee, the magazine’s Washington Bureau Chief, has told how that story came to be written. ‘I talked to the President about doing a story, based largely on Thunderbolt and the hate sheets. The FBI had made an investigation and some FBI documents were made available by Kennedy’s press secretary. The condition was that we could have them overnight, and never again. Salinger was the intermediary between us and the FBI. Chuck Roberts and I stayed up all night with the documents, writing the story in some motel … I don’t know what the terms were on which Kennedy got that stuff from the FBI …’
Edgar, then, had ridden to the rescue, a rescue that might never have been necessary had it not been for the stories written by Winchell, Henry Taylor and Thunderbolt. Winchell had long been manipulated by the FBI. Henry Taylor’s massive FBI file shows he and Edgar