Hoover. Sullivan called
Bobby a near-Puritan and then added:
The stories about Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were just
stories. The original story was invented by a so-called
journalist, a right-wing zealot who had a history of
spinning wild yarns. It spread like wildfire, of course, and
J. Edgar Hoover was right there, gleefully fanning the
flames. (The Bureau p. 56)
The Capell/Winchell/Hoover triangle sowed the seeds of this
slander. But the exposure of this triangle does more. In the
Vanity Fair article in which Judith Exner dumped out the latest
installment of her continuing saga, Liz Smith revealed that she
apprenticed at the feet of Walter Winchell in New York (January
1997 p. 32). This may explain why she took up her mentor's
cudgel.
Capell's work is, as Spoto notes in his Afterword, a frightful
piece of reactionary paranoia. But there are two details in his
pat anti-Kennedy tract that merit mention. First, Capell is
probably the first to propagate the idea that RFK was indirectly
responsible for his brother's murder. He does this by saying (p.
52), that commie sympathizer Bobby called off the investigation
of the shooting of General Edwin Walker in April of 1963, thus
allowing that crazed Communist Oswald to escape and later kill
JFK. This piece of rant has been modified later to fit into the
stilted mosaics of people like Davis and Waldron. What makes it
so fascinating is that, through the FBI's own files, we now have
evidence that Capell was deliberately creating a fiction: he had
information that Oswald was not a communist, but a CIA agent.
The second point worth examining about Capell's sc