Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [170]
In the third week of June 1963, John Kennedy brought up the Profumo affair in a conversation with Martin Luther King. After a tumultuous two years, the civil rights leader was facing a fresh crisis – thanks to the FBI. Edgar, who had long since written King off as ‘no good,’ had been telling Kennedy the black leader was under Communist influence.
Specifically, he had persuaded Robert Kennedy to authorize a wiretap of one of King’s advisers who, Edgar alleged, was an active Soviet agent. This was just another of Edgar’s irrational obsessions, but the Kennedys could not be sure of that. They were afraid exposure of such links could bring disaster, not only on King but on the administration for supporting him.
So it was that on June 22, before addressing a group of civil rights leaders at the White House, the President took King by himself into the Rose Garden. He begged him to get rid of two colleagues Edgar claimed were Communists, then asked if he had read about Profumo in the newspapers. ‘That,’ he told King, ‘was an example of friendship and loyalty carried too far. Macmillan is likely to lose his government because he has been loyal to a friend. You must take care not to lose your cause for the same reason.’
Kennedy went further. ‘I suppose you know,’ he said, ‘you’re under very close surveillance.’ He warned King to be very careful about what he said on the phone, that if J. Edgar Hoover could prove he had links with Communists, he would use it to wreck pending civil rights legislation.
As the meeting with the President ended, King found himself wondering why Kennedy had taken the precaution of ushering him out into the garden to talk. ‘The President,’ King told an associate later, ‘is afraid of Hoover himself, because he wouldn’t even talk to me in his own office. I guess Hoover must be bugging him, too.’
On June 23, the President left Washington for Europe, on the tour remembered today for the ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech and the pilgrimage to Ireland. He also visited London to see Prime Minister Macmillan. The evening he arrived, as he dined with the British leader, Kennedy learned the Profumo case was about to touch his presidency. The noon edition of the New York Journal American that day carried the headline: HIGH US AIDE IMPLICATED IN V-GIRL SCANDAL. The opening line read: ‘One of the biggest names in American politics – a man who holds a “very high” elective office – has been injected into Britain’s vice-security scandal …’ The report stopped short of naming the President, but the implication was clear.
The report stayed in the paper for one edition and was then dropped without explanation. Robert Kennedy had moved swiftly. He telephoned his brother in the middle of the dinner with Macmillan, FBI files show, and the President expressed ‘concern.’ The FBI representative in London, Charles Bates, was ordered to brief Kennedy the next morning before he left for Italy. If anything develops,’ the President told Bates, ‘anything at all, we’d like to be advised. Get it to us in Rome.’
In Washington, forty-eight hours after publication of the Journal American story, the authors of the article faced the Attorney General in his office. The paper’s Managing Editor, Pulitzer Prize winner James Horan, and Dom Frasca, remembered by a colleague as ‘the best investigative reporter’ on the paper, had been hauled from their homes in New York and flown to the capital in the Kennedys’ private jet.
The two journalists have since died, but their ordeal at the hands of Robert Kennedy was recorded by the FBI. According to the file, the President’s brother asked the newsmen to name the ‘high U.S. aide’ who, according to the article, was being linked