Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [173]
Clark Mollenhoff, who wrote the Register story, was one of Edgar’s ‘friendly’ reporters.3 His article added that Senator John Williams, the Republican from Delaware, ‘had obtained an account’ of Rometsch’s activity. It would later emerge that the Senator had come into possession of documents from the FBI, a leak that only Edgar could have approved. His information, the Register reported, included a list of Rometsch’s ‘government friends,’ and he intended to present it to the Senate Rules Committee, the body investigating Bobby Baker, the following Tuesday.
Now the Kennedys performed urgent damage control. In a series of panicky calls to Edgar’s office, a White House aide begged the FBI to prevent the Register story from being published in other newspapers. The President himself, he said, was ‘personally interested in having this story killed.’ The Bureau refused to help.
Publication of the story on a weekend, and in an out-of-town newspaper, offered a small breathing space. The Attorney General called La Verne Duffy, a Kennedy friend, and dispatched him on the next plane to West Germany. His mission was to silence Rometsch before the press got to her. It was reported a few days later that ‘men flashing U.S. security badges saw Mrs Rometsch on Sunday and got her to sign a statement formally denying intimacies with important people.’ Letters Rometsch later sent to Duffy thanked him for sending money and assured him, ‘Of course I will keep quiet …’
At home, very early on Monday morning and just twenty-four hours before Senator Williams’ planned speech to the Senate Rules Committee, Robert Kennedy called Edgar at home. As the man with access to the facts, Edgar was the one person likely to be able to persuade the Senate leadership that the hearing would be contrary to the national interest and – because members of Congress were likely to be dragged in – contrary to the interests of Congress, too.
Edgar’s notes of the call from Kennedy, and of a later meeting at the Justice Department, leave no doubt of the Attorney General’s humiliation. The President’s brother was a supplicant, begging Edgar to bring the senators in line.
That afternoon, as the capital buzzed with impending scandal, Edgar briefed Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and Everett Dirksen, his Republican counterpart. To ensure total secrecy, they met at Mansfield’s home. What Edgar said at the meeting is censored in the FBI record, but it evidently did the trick. Before the afternoon was out, Senate plans to discuss Rometsch had been canceled.
The crisis was over, but it had been desperately serious. The Rometsch affair had threatened to become a Profumostyle sex and security disaster that could have forced the President into resignation. The cover-up had been achieved at great cost and left the Kennedys more indebted to Edgar than ever. The power struggle had lasted nearly three years, and they were losing.
Three months earlier, in the face of pressure from the FBI, Robert Kennedy had refused a Bureau request to wiretap Martin Luther King on the unfounded suspicion that he was under Communist control. Since then, in the week Ellen Rometsch had flown back to Germany, there had been the great civil rights march on Washington. A quarter of a million people had descended on the capital to hear King speak of his dream of freedom and to sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ For millions it was a moment of inspiration, of hope for progress. For Edgar, a southerner born in the nineteenth century, it merely inflamed his fear of King.
Edgar had again pressed the Attorney General to authorize a wiretap on King. Again Kennedy hesitated, knowing discovery of such surveillance would be politically disastrous. Then,