Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [171]
‘It is noted,’ Edgar’s liaison man Courtney Evans reported, ‘that the Attorney General treated the newspaper representatives at arm’s length … There was an air of hostility …’ When the reporters refused to reveal their sources, Kennedy followed up ruthlessly. According to Mark Monsky, godson of the Journal American’s owner Randolph Hearst, the President’s brother threatened to bring an antitrust suit against the paper. Hearst’s editors then dropped the story.
After this confrontation with the reporters, Robert Kennedy betrayed how vulnerable he felt about Edgar. He tried to persuade Courtney Evans ‘not to write a memorandum’ to Edgar about the meeting. According to Charles Bates, Edgar had been delving into the case for some time. ‘There was a big flap,’ Bates recalled. ‘My HQ sent cables saying “Is this true? What can you find out?”’
On the evening of June 29, as the President dined with Macmillan, Bates had sent Edgar coded telegram 861, marked VERY URGENT. Of twenty lines, seventeen had been excised by the censor as of the writing of this book. What remains reads: ‘…[Name censored] talked about President Kennedy and repeated a rumor that was going around New York …’ A second document provides more background. A report addressed to William Sullivan, by then Assistant Director in charge of Counter-Intelligence, offers – between the censored chunks – information that:
One of [name blanked out] clients was John Kennedy, then presidential candidate. [Name] stated that Marie Novotny, British prostitute, went to New York to take [name’s] place, since she was going on pre-election rounds with Kennedy.
Before it was silenced, the New York Journal American had referred to a second mystery woman, ‘a beautiful Chinese-American girl now in London.’ The highest authorities, said the paper, ‘identified her as Suzy Chang …’
Suzy Chang was an aspiring actress and model. There is no evidence she was a prostitute, but she did move in the wealthy London circles associated with the Profumo case. Tracked down by this author, she admitted having known Kennedy. ‘We’d meet in the 21 Club,’ she said nervously. ‘Everybody saw me eating with him. I think he was a nice guy, very charming.’ Then she laughed. ‘What else am I going to say?’
A mass of FBI and Immigration Service documents show Chang did travel to New York in 1960, the year she was alleged to have gone with John Kennedy. She was also there in 1961, and over the Christmas period at the end of 1962. The most revealing document notes that late in 1963 ‘Chang arrived in US at New York, via Flight 701 … She was the [blanked out section in report]… She was questioned regarding the “Profumo Affair.”’
The Profumo case was treated with the utmost gravity in Washington. Defense Secretary McNamara, CIA Director John McCone, Defense Intelligence Agency boss General Joseph Carroll, and usually one of Edgar’s senior aides, attended a series of meetings. The case was handled at the FBI by two Assistant Directors. Progress reports, which remain almost entirely censored, went to the office of President Kennedy, to his brother – and to Edgar. ‘To find that the President was perhaps involved with somebody in the British security scandal!’ exclaimed Courtney Evans, recalling the gravity of those days. ‘Nobody was grinning …’
Except, perhaps, for Edgar. By the time the President returned from Europe he had a pile of information on Suzy Chang, and probably on Mariella Novotny, too. Heavily censored documents show Edgar was in contact with his New York office about Chang just twenty-four hours before the Journal American story broke in that city.
He had long used the Journal American, like other Hearst papers, to fuel fears about the Red Menace. There were even former FBI men on the paper’s staff. Edgar’s phone logs show that he talked regularly with Richard Berlin, head of the Hearst conglomerate.