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beach house, Kennedy and his brother-in-law returned to her home. They found the actress either dead or dying and phoned for an ambulance. One or both of them may have joined the ambulance on a last-hope drive to a hospital – only to turn it around when it became clear Monroe was dead. The body was then replaced in the bed, and the President’s brother left town rapidly the way he had arrived, by helicopter and aircraft. Dr Greenson confirmed privately, years later, that Robert Kennedy was present that night and that an ambulance was called.

For Robert Kennedy, back in northern California resuming his scheduled activities, the crisis was far from over. On the morning of Monroe’s death, Los Angeles Chief of Detectives Thad Brown was called to headquarters because of a ‘problem.’ A crumpled piece of paper, found in Monroe’s bedclothes, bore a White House telephone number.

A remarkable cover-up followed. The problem of that scrap of paper, and many other embarrassments, simply evaporated. Records of Monroe’s telephone calls were made to disappear, in part thanks to Captain James Hamilton of Police Intelligence, a longtime friend of the Attorney General. It was not the police, however, who retrieved the records of Monroe’s last phone calls. As a reporter discovered at the time, they were removed from the headquarters of General Telephone by mid-morning on the day after Monroe’s death. And, according to the company’s Division Manager, Robert Tiarks, they had been taken by the FBI.

A former senior FBI official, then serving in a West Coast city, confirms it. ‘I was on a visit to California when Monroe died, and there were some people there, Bureau personnel, who normally wouldn’t have been there – agents from out of town. They were on the scene immediately, as soon as she died, before anyone realized what had happened. I subsequently learned that agents had removed the records. It had to be on the instructions of someone high up, higher even than Hoover.’

The former official understood at the time that the orders came from ‘either the Attorney General or the President.’ ‘I remember the communications coming in from the Los Angeles Division,’ said Cartha DeLoach. ‘A Kennedy phone number was on the nightstand by Monroe’s bed.’ Monroe’s death, it seems, at last brought home to the President the scale of the risks he was running. The White House log shows that Peter Lawford called Kennedy at 9:04 A.M. Eastern time – 6:04 A.M. in California – on the morning following Monroe’s death, just an hour after Lawford had hired security men to bury evidence of the brothers’ relations with Monroe. Another of John Kennedy’s lovers, Judith Campbell, called the White House twice the next day – once in the afternoon and again in the evening. A note in the log indicates that Kennedy was in conference, with the scrawled addition ‘No.’ At about this time, it seems, the perilous Campbell liaison was ending at last.4

If mobsters had hoped to use the Monroe connection to destroy Robert Kennedy, they were thwarted by the successful cover-up. That cover-up, however, worked largely thanks to Edgar. By grabbing the telephone records on their behalf, he made the Kennedys more beholden to him than ever.

On August 7, just forty-eight hours after that favor, Robert Kennedy did something quite remarkable. A few hours earlier W. H. Ferry, Vice President of the Fund for the Republic, set up by the Ford Foundation to promote civil liberties, had lambasted Edgar’s scaremongering about Communism as ‘sententious poppycock.’ Robert Kennedy, we know, shared that view. Now, however, he leaped to Edgar’s defense, effusively praising his stance on Communism. ‘I hope,’ he said piously, ‘Hoover will continue to serve the country for many, many years to come.’

Photo agency files contain not a single picture of Monroe with either Kennedy brother, not even of her very public meeting with the President after singing ‘Happy Birthday’ from the stage of Madison Square Garden. Once, though, Globe Photos did have two such photographs. ‘In one of them,’ said a former senior executive,