August 21, 1963—Justice Department officials quietly but hastily deported Ellen Rometsch, a 27-year-old brunette from East Germany, in an attempt to prevent disclosure of possibly the most explosive secret of President John F. Kennedy: his sexual involvement with an alleged Communist spy.
I learned about this scandal in two of the more substantial, less gossip-ridden histories of the Kennedy years: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, by Taylor Branch, and The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, by Michael Beschloss. Branch and Beschloss write vividly but carefully from oral history memoirs and primary sources, with a view of the President that is sober and balanced. In other words, they have produced neither hagiographies nor anti-Camelot screeds, earning credibility in their accounts of this episode.
Who was Ellen Rometsch? Start with the photo accompanying this blog. She looks like a somewhat more exotic version of Elizabeth Taylor, doesn’t she? Or, perhaps, one of the President’s other dangerous liaisons, Judith Campbell Exner.
Rometsch’s sexual loyalties were as shifting as her political ones. As a teenager she had joined the Communist Party Youth Group. In 1955, she flew to West Germany. With one bad marriage already behind her, she soon wed Rolf Rometsch, a sergeant in the West German air force. His assignment to his country’s military mission in Washington brought the couple to the U.S.—and, eventually, Ellen to the attention of the American President.
Even a five-year-old son did not slow her down, as she soon became involved in the swirling excitement of the Quorum Club, located in a three-room suite at the Carroll Arms Hotel, just across the street from the new Senate Office Building. This private social club was run by Bobby Baker, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson now coming under suspicion for influence peddling. The terms that were beginning to be applied to her included “party girl,” “courtesan,” “hostess,” and worse.
The Quorum Club’s central location made it convenient—in some cases, too readily so—for the Capitol Hill power players and fixers swirling about. "My wife is fond of the steak and sandwiches," claimed Congressman Bill Ayres.
The affair between Rometsch and JFK appears to have started in 1961 and continued for some time. Its days were numbered once FBI agents got wind of it and interrogated the young woman. Her prior East German background might have been enough to convince director J. Edgar Hoover that she was a spy for East Germany’s head, Walter Ulbricht. His leak to this effect, to journalist Courtney Evans, convinced Robert Robert that she had to be deported.
JFK’s affairs had the frequent thrill of danger, whether with a twenty-year-old intern in the White House press office (Marion Fahnestock), a Hollywood superstar (Marilyn Monroe), an artist who brought him LSD from Timothy Leary (Mary Pinchot Meyer), and a Mafia moll (Judith Campbell Exner). Yet, judging from his actions around this time--including unusually high interest in the Profumo sex scandal convulsing the United Kingdom at this time--none of them had the sheer political TNT potential of the Rometsch affair.
I learned about this scandal in two of the more substantial, less gossip-ridden histories of the Kennedy years: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, by Taylor Branch, and The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, by Michael Beschloss. Branch and Beschloss write vividly but carefully from oral history memoirs and primary sources, with a view of the President that is sober and balanced. In other words, they have produced neither hagiographies nor anti-Camelot screeds, earning credibility in their accounts of this episode.
Who was Ellen Rometsch? Start with the photo accompanying this blog. She looks like a somewhat more exotic version of Elizabeth Taylor, doesn’t she? Or, perhaps, one of the President’s other dangerous liaisons, Judith Campbell Exner.
Rometsch’s sexual loyalties were as shifting as her political ones. As a teenager she had joined the Communist Party Youth Group. In 1955, she flew to West Germany. With one bad marriage already behind her, she soon wed Rolf Rometsch, a sergeant in the West German air force. His assignment to his country’s military mission in Washington brought the couple to the U.S.—and, eventually, Ellen to the attention of the American President.
Even a five-year-old son did not slow her down, as she soon became involved in the swirling excitement of the Quorum Club, located in a three-room suite at the Carroll Arms Hotel, just across the street from the new Senate Office Building. This private social club was run by Bobby Baker, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson now coming under suspicion for influence peddling. The terms that were beginning to be applied to her included “party girl,” “courtesan,” “hostess,” and worse.
The Quorum Club’s central location made it convenient—in some cases, too readily so—for the Capitol Hill power players and fixers swirling about. "My wife is fond of the steak and sandwiches," claimed Congressman Bill Ayres.
The affair between Rometsch and JFK appears to have started in 1961 and continued for some time. Its days were numbered once FBI agents got wind of it and interrogated the young woman. Her prior East German background might have been enough to convince director J. Edgar Hoover that she was a spy for East Germany’s head, Walter Ulbricht. His leak to this effect, to journalist Courtney Evans, convinced Robert Robert that she had to be deported.
JFK’s affairs had the frequent thrill of danger, whether with a twenty-year-old intern in the White House press office (Marion Fahnestock), a Hollywood superstar (Marilyn Monroe), an artist who brought him LSD from Timothy Leary (Mary Pinchot Meyer), and a Mafia moll (Judith Campbell Exner). Yet, judging from his actions around this time--including unusually high interest in the Profumo sex scandal convulsing the United Kingdom at this time--none of them had the sheer political TNT potential of the Rometsch affair.
The problem was that it showed no signs of going away—particularly because of 1) ongoing investigations into the affairs of Bobby Baker, and 2) Hoover's in anything that might give him blackmail material over the President. (As if he didn't already have enough: not only knowledge of Rometsch and Exner, but, dating back to the early 1940s, of Inga Arvad, a Danish woman the FBI suspected of being a Nazi spy--and knew was the paramour of dashing young Lt. John F. Kennedy). In late October, reporter Clark Mollenhoff used a leak from Hoover to charge that “some prominent new frontiersmen from the executive level of government” were involved with the “party girl.”
Rushing once again to protect his brother’s interest, Bobby Kennedy pursued a two-track course: 1) dispatch an aide to Germany to convince the now-separated, now-annoyed Ellen from going public, and 2) persuade Hoover to steer Congress from investigating. In the second case, Hoover actually sat down privately with Senate leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen to convince them that any exposure of this affair would ruin the reputations of senators from both sides of the aisle.
You'd think he'd learn from his scrape, but JFK couldn't resist a gibe at the institution in which he sat before becoming President. "Boy, the dirt he (Hoover) has on those senators," he remarked. "You wouldn't believe it."
2 comments:
Start with the photo accompanying this blog.
no photo dude!
Consider it fixed.
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