The Appellate Division found in favor of Darr’s new lawyers: Metrik and Friedman, it ruled, had breached the attorney-client privilege in their bill of particulars against Darr. On June 4, 1963, the two attorneys were publicly censured, and the file in the case was sealed. Metrik and Friedman were subsequently disciplined by the New York Bar Association. The two attorneys are deceased, and their firm disbanded; their file remains sealed today.* In its ruling, the Appellate Division noted that Metrik and Friedman’s “disclosure here on the intended crime was not made to prevent the act or to protect those against whom it was threatened. It was made long after the alleged occurrence” and was “not connected, even remotely,” with issues arising out of the Clark inheritance. Alicia Darr Clark kept her inheritance, and Metrik did not receive his $1.2 million fee.
What was the “contemplated crime” cited by Metrik and Friedman? Hoover’s memorandum to Bobby Kennedy—in the version released in 1977—provided some clues; Kennedy received it on June 4, 1963, the same day the New York court announced its censure of Metrik and Friedman for their bill of particulars. Hoover reported that his sources had been told that Alicia Darr had in her possession letters signed by John F. Kennedy and photographs proving that the two had had a relationship. Hoover, as the press reported in 1977, wrote that Darr had initiated a lawsuit against Kennedy before the inauguration and that Bobby Kennedy had allegedly gone to New York and settled the matter for $500,000.
Hoover’s information was apparently wrong. No record of a Darr lawsuit against Kennedy has been found, nor is there any evidence that the Kennedys paid anything to quash such a suit. A number of Jack and Robert Kennedy’s former associates, contacted by reporters in 1977, denied any knowledge of a $500,000 payoff and expressed doubt about the accuracy of the FBI report. Hoover may have been wrong about the lawsuit, but there is much evidence that Darr tried for years to extort money from the Kennedy family.
Alicia Darr did have money problems in early 1960, at exactly the time the presidential campaign was in full bloom, and she did worry the candidate. On April 8, 1960, three days after the disappointing Wisconsin primary, Kennedy drafted in pencil a two-page memorandum for the record—made public for the first time in this book—summarizing a conversation with Bobby Baker, the secretary of the Democratic membership of the Senate and a proétgé of Lyndon Johnson. Baker met secretly with Kennedy and warned him that he had been approached by a New Jersey lawyer named Mickey Weiner and had been told that the wife of “a well-known movie actor”—Darr had not yet obtained her Mexican divorce—was willing to give Johnson an affidavit acknowledging an affair with Kennedy in return for $150,000. “Baker,” Kennedy wrote, “said he thought it was blackmail, and did not inform Johnson of the matter.” Baker may have been a Johnson protégé, but he was also a sometime playmate of Jack Kennedy; his loyalty to that part of Senate life and not to his mentor Johnson carried the day. Kennedy, obviously aware of the political danger posed by Alicia Darr, treated his memorandum as if it were a legal document; it was countersigned on the same day by Pierre Salinger, his press secretary, placed in an envelope, and sealed three days later by Salinger, as Salinger noted on the front of the envelope. The handwritten memorandum, still sealed, was found among the papers of Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s personal secretary, after her death in 1995.
In a 1995 interview for this book, Bobby Baker said he did not recall the blackmail threat or the conversation with Kennedy about it, but he did have a sharp memory of Mickey Weiner: “He was a whorehound, a percentager. He was trying to get defense contracts.” Salinger said in an interview that he did not recall the document, or signing and sealing it.
Although there is no evidence of any blackmail payments to Alicia Darr, the Kennedy family did turn to Clark M. Clifford, the high-powered Washington lawyer, for help in a matter that may have been the same one Bobby Baker reported to Kennedy.* Clifford recalled in an interview for this book being asked by Kennedy to handle what he depicted as an “extraordinarily dangerous” situation in the spring of 1960, a few months before the Democratic convention. It involved a woman “who could destroy him,” Clifford told me. “I had a conversation with Jack Kennedy that was so dramatic that if I could live to be a million years old, I could never forget it.” The senator had gotten involved in a “very sensitive matter,” Clifford said. “Public knowledge [of it] could have blown the Kennedy nomination out of the water.”
At the time of Kennedy’s request, Clifford was working for the presidential campaign of Stuart Symington, a fact he immediately mentioned to Kennedy. “I thought he’d say that I can’t place you in the position of having this explosive information. He didn’t say that. He said, ‘I want you to go on representing me on this matter. Go ahead and work for Symington, but please continue on. If it becomes known, I’ve had it.’” Clifford added that he handled the incident until it got “to the point where I could turn it over to the Old Man [Joe Kennedy].” Clifford refused to say more about the matter, but did note that he made it a practice to have nothing to do with cash payoffs to women. “When it got into this area, I was never involved.” The issue did arise in one case, the lawyer added: “I told Jack that I was not the right fellow to handle it. And they turned to [James] McInerney.” Nothing more could be learned about the possible role of McInerney, who died in an automobile collision in 1963.
Further evidence of the threat posed by Alicia Darr emerged in yet another document in the FBI files, this one dated August 9, 1963, but not released in any form in 1977. Hoover warned Bobby Kennedy that some of the sealed documents in the Metrik disciplinary case were beginning to make the rounds of Kennedy enemies, who were depicting the documents as “dynamite” and an “H-bomb.” In July, Hoover wrote, the documents were offered by a “private detective” going by the name “Robert Garden” to Senator John G. Tower of Texas, a Republican who was on the Armed Services Committee and a strong supporter of Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964; Tower was told that the materials dealt with a vital national security matter. Tower sent his administrative assistant, H. Edward Munden, to New York to visit Garden and take a look. Munden told the FBI in an interview soon afterward that the papers dealt with an affair in the 1950s between Kennedy and a woman named Clark who had become pregnant sometime before Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. There was also a letter from Clark to her attorney, the FBI summary said, that stated that “now that Mr. Kennedy had been elected President, ‘their’ position”—that is, Clark and Metrik’s position—“was much better.” Munden was told further during his New York visit to the private detective that there were additional documents and compromising pictures.
Munden, interviewed for this book in 1995, recalled that the subject of the meeting with Garden, which was obviously not his real name, was the 1964 election; the alleged detective, who made it clear that he wanted a large sum of money for the documents, was eager for Senator Tower’s help in getting information to the Republican Party for use in the presidential campaign. The documents, Munden told me, included “legal papers concerning an illegitimate child of President Kennedy. The mother was one of the Singers.” Munden, who had anticipated that the materials would deal with national defense or military issues, said he handed the materials back to Garden and told him that “it had nothing to do with the security of the United States.” Munden returned to Washington and described the bizarre meeting to Tower, who immediately telephoned the attorney general. “He told him that we had nothing to do with the information,” Munden told me. “Bobby thanked him and said he knew the rumor was out there.” He heard nothing further, Munden recalled in our interview, but there was no question in his mind that somebody wanted Barry Goldwater “to