Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [169]
The names of possible replacements were now going the rounds – Courtney Evans among them. Robert Kennedy had long since sounded out John Connally, then Governor of Texas. Connally recalled: ‘I said, “Bobby, you’re not going to be able to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover.” But he assured me the time would come, and he would.’
Speculation about Edgar’s successor became a kind of sport. ‘Some friends of mine with mischief in them,’ remembered Joe Dolan, ‘were sitting around trying to think of the most unlikely successor to J. Edgar Hoover. And one of them said, “Adam Yarmolinsky!” He was a very bright lawyer, the assistant to McNamara, over at the Department of Defense. But he looked kind of evil, a bit like a gnome, a schemer, and apart from that he was absolutely not the guy you appoint to head the FBI. It was just a joke, but it got back to Hoover within hours. I guess he didn’t understand that his leg was being pulled.’1
Word of the Kennedys’ intentions spread through the Bureau, from the highest aide to the lowliest rookie agent. ‘It was common knowledge, according to Justice Department gossips,’ recalled Norman Ollestad, ‘that in 1964 the Director would definitely be out.’
‘The way it came to me,’ said Justice Department aide William Hundley, ‘was that the President had said to Bobby, “I can’t do it now. But when I’m reelected I’m going to get rid of him, make him Boxing Commissioner or something.” And when I’d bitch to Bobby about Hoover, he’d say, “Wait, just wait.” That kind of comment kept getting back to Hoover, and that was it …’
‘From then on,’ recalled Courtney Evans, ‘the Director wouldn’t have anything to do with the Kennedys – beyond the formalities. He was so incensed and mad.’
Through the spring and summer of 1963, Edgar went on scratching at the old sore – Kennedy womanizing. On May 29, he wrote to Kenneth O’Donnell raking up the old affair with Jacqueline Kennedy’s press secretary, Pamela Turnure. A week later it was another salvo about the President’s 1951 involvement with Alicia Purdom, letting the Kennedys know he knew about the alleged half-million-dollar payoff to keep Purdom quiet. Edgar kept up a steady stream of information on this, spicing a later memo with a reference to the alleged pregnancy.
At about this time, in 1963, the Kennedys began trying to play Edgar’s game in reverse. When Abba Schwartz of the State Department Bureau of Security reported some new example of Hoover meddling, the President responded with, ‘Tell it to Kenny [O’Donnell]. He’s keeping a record on all this.’ The Kennedys were doing what Edgar did to others, keeping a dossier on him.
Unfortunately for the President, Edgar was way ahead. June 1963 brought brand-new woman trouble, the sort that could not be shrugged off. As the Kennedys wrestled with the mounting civil rights crisis, Edgar quietly opened a new file code-named ‘Bowtie.’ It was to grow to more than a thousand pages, and its subject was a scandal that on the surface appeared to be another nation’s problem.
Britain’s Minister for War, John Profumo, had confessed to having slept with a woman simultaneously involved with the Soviet Naval attaché in London, Yevgeny Ivanov. He resigned, but the crisis continued. The government of Prime Minister Macmillan, who had backed Profumo to the end, was shaken to its foundations. The press, meanwhile, fueled the controversy with daily revelations about the orgies and adulteries of the British establishment.
In Washington, President Kennedy was paying more than ordinary attention. ‘He had devoured every word written about the Profumo case,’ noted Ben Bradlee. ‘He ordered all further cables on that subject sent to him immediately.’ Bradlee assumed the President was merely fascinated by the sexually exotic aspects of the story. But it was more than that. According to persistent reports, he himself had dallied with two of the young women linked to the scandal.
As he combed the reports from London, Kennedy must have been especially concerned about references to a twenty-two-year-old prostitute of Anglo-Czech