Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [174]
On October 26, the morning he and Edgar discussed Ellen Rometsch, the Attorney General had found himself in an impossible situation. On the one hand he was virtually begging for assistance with the Rometsch problem. On the other, he was angry at Edgar for disseminating an outrageously misleading report – that Martin Luther King was ‘knowingly, willingly, and regularly taking guidance from Communists.’ When he tried to remonstrate, Edgar just stonewalled. The Kennedys had lost control of J. Edgar Hoover.
There would have been ‘no living with the Bureau,’ Kennedy told an aide, if he had not approved the King wiretaps. Once he did, though, the Kennedys were mired even deeper. ‘It was a trap,’ wrote King’s biographer Taylor Branch. ‘Hoover would possess a club to offset Kennedy’s special relationship with the President … How could Kennedy hope to control Hoover once he had agreed to wiretap King? There was a Faustian undertow to Kennedy’s dilemma, and he did not feel strong enough to resist.’
Edgar picked October 29, the day after he had rescued the President from the Rometsch scandal, to discuss his future with Robert Kennedy. What of the rumors on Capitol Hill, he asked, that he was about to be fired? Kennedy assured him, Edgar noted with satisfaction, that the rumors were unfounded. Two days later he went to lunch with the President at the White House.
It must have been an extraordinary encounter, and deeply humiliating for the President. At the height of the Rometsch crisis, he had been forced to break his own rule and telephone Edgar directly. Now they were face-to-face. The Kennedy archives list the meeting as ‘off the record,’ but we know a little of what transpired from the President’s friend Ben Bradlee.
‘He told me Hoover had talked to him about that German woman,’ Bradlee recalled, ‘that they’d looked at pictures of her, and Hoover had discussed what she did with various politicians.’ Kennedy said nothing to Bradlee about the dirt Edgar had on him and his brother.
The President’s aide David Powers, meanwhile, was to hint that Edgar’s future was discussed at the meeting. And, according to Bradlee, Kennedy decided he would have to have Edgar over more often. ‘He felt it was wise – with rumors flying and every indication of a dirty campaign coming up.’
There had been only six meetings between Edgar and John Kennedy since 1961, and there would never be another. Twenty-two days after that last secret encounter at the White House, the President flew to Dallas.
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‘Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission, on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it …’
Congressman Hale Boggs, House Majority Leader and former member of the Warren Commission
Edgar learned of the assassination the way the world’s newsmen did, from the UPI teleprinter installed in his office. The first flash bulletin came in at 1:34 P.M., Washington time, four minutes after the shooting, as the President’s limousine sped toward a Dallas hospital.
Nine minutes later, with UPI saying Kennedy was ‘perhaps fatally wounded,’ Edgar picked up the direct line that neither he nor the Attorney General had used for months. Robert Kennedy was at home eating lunch, and the call was transferred to him there. ‘I thought something must be wrong,’ the President’s brother was to recall, ‘because Hoover wouldn’t be calling me here.’ Moments later he hung up, gagged and turned away.
Edgar merely noted, in a five-line memo, that he had passed on the news. Edgar’s voice, the Attorney General would recall, had been ‘not quite as excited as if he was reporting the fact that he found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University [Washington’s predominantly black college]. His conversations with me on November 22 were so unpleasant.’
Edgar would never offer a word of commiseration