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He and Edgar, moreover, were both close to Roy Cohn, who was acting as attorney for an American involved in the Profumo case and said by a central figure in the scandal to have ‘arranged sex parties for JFK in London.’ A telltale handwritten note on one of the FBI’s Profumo documents reads: ‘Roy Cohn has this info.’

President Kennedy had been compromised by his relations with Judith Campbell, Marilyn Monroe – and now Novotny and Chang – all in circumstances that touched on national security, all discovered by Edgar. Yet all that summer the brothers and their FBI chief kept up a pretense of cordiality.

Edgar wrote to ‘Dear Bob’ to congratulate him on the birth of his eighth child, a son named Christopher. He commiserated with the President when his newborn son died less than two days after birth. The brothers wrote polite letters back.

All the while Edgar was up to his tricks, using the press to distort the facts on organized crime, bringing pressure to brand Martin Luther King a Communist, trying to get Robert Kennedy to authorize wiretaps – not just against close colleagues but against King himself. In August, even as he was offering sympathy over the loss of the President’s baby, Edgar had agents urgently investigating a lead about yet another woman, yet another potential security risk.

Ellen Rometsch, a lovely young refugee from East Germany, had come to the United States in 1961 with her husband, a West German army sergeant on assignment to his country’s military mission in Washington. She had looks like Elizabeth Taylor and soon became known as a ‘party girl.’ One of the men Rometsch met during the social whirl was Bobby Baker, secretary to the Senate Majority Leader and a close associate of Lyndon Johnson’s, and she was soon appearing in low-cut dress and fishnet tights at the exclusive Quorum Club, near the Capitol, which Baker had helped to found.

One of the club’s patrons in the late summer of 1961 was Bill Thompson, a railroad lobbyist and an intimate friend of the President’s. A wealthy bachelor, he was privy to many of the secrets of Kennedy’s love life and had been present at one of the earliest meetings with Judith Campbell.

‘We were having cocktails at the Quorum,’ Baker recalled, ‘and Bill Thompson came over to me. He pointed to Ellen and he said, “Boy, that son of a bitch is something. D’you think she’d come down and have dinner with me and the President?” So I had her meet Thompson, and she went down and saw the President. And he sent back word it was the best time he ever had in his life. That was not the only time. She saw him on other occasions. It went on for a while.’

Rometsch was loose-lipped, however, and began to talk about her relationships with men in Washington. Someone tipped off the FBI about her, and in July 1963 agents came to ask questions. As a recent refugee from the East, and one who had once been a member of Communist youth organizations, Rometsch might have been a Communist plant. Soon, with the cooperation of the German authorities, she and her husband were quietly shipped back to Germany.

The matter might have ended there were it not for the scandal that exploded, three weeks after Rometsch’s departure, around Bobby Baker, the man who had arranged many of her introductions to Washington politicians. The focus of the Baker case was on financial corruption, not sex, but – behind the scenes – the Quorum Club connection triggered an explosive allegation.

‘Information has been developed,’ read a top-level FBI memo written on October 26,

that pertains to possible questionable activities on the part of high government officials. It was also alleged that the President and the Attorney General had availed themselves of services of playgirls.

The remainder of the text of the memo was censored as supplied for this book, and its source was not identified.

That same Saturday, in Iowa, The Des Moines Register ran a front-page story reporting the Rometsch expulsion for the first time.