The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [450]
Kennedy was probably involved with another European woman, Ellen Rometsch, a German whose husband was an air force sergeant assigned to the West German embassy in Washington. Rometsch was a beautiful, sensuous young woman who hung around men of power in the watering holes of political Washington. Some thought that she was a call girl, though she was probably on the borderline between amateur and professional: men gladly showed their largess for her favors, but she could claim she was only having a good time. She became known as one of Bobby Baker’s girls. The secretary to the Senate Democrats was a man of many favors, and Rometsch was one of his favorite gifts. Baker asserts that Kennedy’s friend Jim Thompson set Rometsch up with the president, a pleasure that he supposedly enjoyed several times in the spring of 1963.
Hoover was also interested in the twenty-seven-year-old woman, but his concern was of a different sort from the president’s. The FBI chief’s obsession with Communist spies played into the paranoia of American politics, but the reality was that the East German secret police, the Stasi, had sent East Germans west as moles. Hoover was not wrong in suspecting a woman who had been active in Communist youth groups before fleeing her native East Germany. It was curious too the way she had arrived in Washington with her husband, only to use her sexual charms to ingratiate herself with men of power, including probably the president himself.
On July 3, 1963, Hoover’s deputy, Courtney Evans, told Bobby about Rometsch. It does not matter whether one believes Baker’s assertion that the president told him that Rometsch gave him “the best oral sex I ever had.” There was such a climate of sexual license in the White House that the story was believable. A month later the attorney general directed that Rometsch be deported to Germany. LaVern Duffy, one of Bobby’s investigators on the rackets committee, accompanied her. He was a doubly good choice to shepherd Rometsch out of the country, for not only was he a good friend of Bobby’s but he was among those having an affair with the woman.
There was pleasure and pain in Kennedy’s affairs. The pleasure was the president’s, and the pain was Bobby’s, whose task was to straighten up matters after the women had left and to pretend that nothing had happened. It was a sordid duty, and the attorney general performed it impeccably. “The White House was a bawdy house, but the interesting thing about it is that, in his mind, I think Kennedy thought that he was keeping all of this stuff separate,” recalled Mark Raskin, who early on in the administration had watched from his perspective as McGeorge Bundy’s aide at the National Security Council. “But the reality was that one piece of this was collapsing in on the other, as it always happens in fact. The FBI is keeping tabs on him. They know what’s going on. I assume that this is a problem for him personally. And so all this stuff now takes up time and energy and so forth and so on, all the pieces falling in on each other.”
Kennedy had created an atmosphere in which many of his aides felt that it was the highest part of devotion to emulate their beloved leader by displaying their own sexual swordsmanship. Even some members of the Secret Service picked up on the atmosphere, enjoying their own assignations. Other agents worried that they were losing control over the president’s activities. “I don’t know if I would use the word ‘disillusioned,’ but it was bothersome that sometimes we had not been able to do a background on people visiting the White House,” observed Joe Paolella, a Secret Service agent. “From the security standpoint, that made you feel that there could have been some security breaches, women, that kind of stuff. What if one was a