WASHINGTON — FBI files released Monday on the late Sen. Ted Kennedy show that Joseph P. Kennedy, the senator’s father, felt close enough to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to check on a rumor regarding his son.
An FBI file dated May 11, 1954, said Kennedy called the bureau and spoke to an assistant director. Kennedy said he had learned that muckraking journalist Drew Pearson was going to write a story about his son “Teddy” that said he had not been admitted to school at Fort Holabird, Md., while in the Army because of an “adverse FBI report which linked him to a group of ‘pinkos.'”
The FBI assured him that Ted Kennedy had not been investigated for any links to communism.
In another document, an informant told the FBI the mob was plotting a character assassination of Robert and Ted Kennedy and brother-in-law Peter Lawford.
The document noted that the tipster said “the Italian Outfit” planned to work with associates of Frank Sinatra to arrange for women to “be placed in compromising situations in the presence of any or all of the two Kennedys and Peter Lawford.” The FBI said the party was to take place in New York.
“In the convoluted rumor, both Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe were to be involved,” the FBI summary on its web page said. “The FBI did not consider the rumor solid, and no other mention of it appears in the file, suggesting that the informant did not supply any corroboration to the story.”
FBI records released Monday also indicate there were death threats against the Senator five years after he ran unsuccessfully for President, the AP reported.
AP reported that an FBI file showed that on May 23, 1985, the U.S. Capitol Police passed onto the FBI a copy of a letter that had been mailed to Secret Service from a Warren, Mich., resident saying: “Brass tacks, I’m gonna kill Kennedy and (President Ronald) Reagan, and I really mean it.”
The wire service reported that the FBI considered the person dangerous, “but an accompanying psychological analysis said she was ‘merely ventilating her frustrations and projecting her inadequacies’,” the AP wrote.
Kennedy died last August.
To read files click here.
