Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [163]
Thunderbolt would also dredge up the old story about Kennedy’s affair with his Senate secretary, Pamela Turnure. The headlines read: JFK ACCUSED OF ADULTERY, and the article appeared after Turnure’s former landlady, who had recorded the sounds of the couple’s love-making, wrote letters to several public officials. Edgar was one of the recipients, and according to Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s former aide, the Thunderbolt publication was no coincidence. ‘Johnson told me,’ he recalled, ‘that Hoover had given him the sound tapes on that woman during the 1960 campaign. Then, during the presidency, he made sure the information got to people they thought would use it. Not the regular press, but scurrilous publications …’
Like Thunderbolt.
It all suggests that Edgar secretly fanned the flames of both the Turnure gossip and the ‘other marriage’ to his own advantage. Then, when the marriage story had done its damage, he put Kennedy in his debt by supplying background for the Newsweek rebuttal.
As if this was not enough, there was the Hollywood connection – the President’s alleged involvement with the actress Angie Dickinson, and Marilyn Monroe’s affairs with both brothers.
Dickinson is said to have become one of John Kennedy’s lovers sometime before the inauguration. ‘Angie and JFK disappeared for two or three days in Palm Springs during the period before Kennedy assumed office,’ recalled photographer Slim Aarons, a Kennedy friend. ‘They stayed in a cottage and never emerged. Everyone knew about it.’
‘Everyone’ was meant to include only Kennedy insiders, but reporters who traveled with the Kennedys got wind of such things. Newsweek reporter Dick Schumacher recalled how he opened a door at Palm Springs, spotted Dickinson relaxing on a bed and promptly ‘forgot’ what he had seen. The predominantly male press corps of those days liked Kennedy and somewhat envied his success with women. They believed that a politician’s private life was his own business, not to be probed or written about. Secret Service agents took the same view and protected him as best they could. FBI agents did what they were trained to do, and reported to Edgar.
An account of how Edgar found out about Angie Dickinson comes from a former agent whose squad liaised with the Secret Service. ‘It happened,’ said the agent, who asked to remain anonymous, ‘when Kennedy was on the West Coast on political business. He flew from Burbank Airport to Palm Springs by chartered aircraft, with Angie Dickinson on board, and they took a detour – via Arizona. When they did get to Palm Springs, Kennedy got off alone, I guess to stop the press seeing Dickinson.
‘The problems came later. The plane on that trip had been an executive aircraft with a bedroom. The copilot, who was employed by Lockheed, had bugged the bedroom and taped the conversation. And afterwards he tried to use the tape, anonymously, to extort the President for a large sum of money. His letter was intercepted by the Secret Service, and they called the FBI. Our goal was to get that tape back. Find it, get it back. No publicity. We checked on the airplane’s crew, and the copilot was kind of shady. So, when he was abroad on a trip we bribed the manager of his apartment to let us in.
‘We found the tape recording hidden in the wall, near an electric socket. It was a large tape, the old-fashioned sort. We took it and we resealed the goddamn thing, so the guy wouldn’t even know at first it was gone. The Bureau gave us very exact orders after we found the tape. They didn’t want it mailed. They wanted it sent by personal messenger to the Director. We talked to Lockheed and they fired the guy. There was no prosecution, to keep it quiet. And that was that. But Hoover had the tape.’
Cartha DeLoach confirms that information came in on the Dickinson affair. Homer