I know a lot of secrets about what has gone on in Washington. ... Dangerous ones.' "That the brothers should have wanted to cut off contact with Monroe is no surprise. Dallying with her had been foolhardy from the start. Both were married men in an age when adultery by public figures was even more perilous than it is today. Their folly was compounded by the fact that they apparently talked too much when with Monroe. The 1982 investigators gave some attention to a claim that Monroe kept a journal in which she scribbled notes about her conversations with Robert Kennedy on subjects such as his crusade against the Mafia, his efforts to put Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa behind bars, and the confrontation with Fidel Castro's Cuba. The D.A.'s report quoted associates saying they had seen no such diary and doubted whether -- in her final months especially -- Monroe was capable of keeping one.Yet no fewer than seven people, including Monroe's friends and two reporters, are on recordas saying the actress did habitually make notes in a diary. One was Jeanne Carmen, the girlfriend with whom Monroe discussed her scenario for suicide. In a memo summarizing aninterview with Carmen -- omitted entirely from the 1982 report -- an investigator wrote:"Monroe informed Carmen that Robert Kennedy made numerous business telephone callsfrom Monroe's residence. Monroe was aware of Kennedy's plans regarding Castro andapparently wrote them in a diary. ... One evening Kennedy, Carmen and Monroe were atMonroe's apartment when Kennedy discovered the diary. He examined it and became upset.He told Monroe she should never put anything in writing and to throw the diary away.Carmen doesn't know what Monroe did with the diary." Political Entanglements If the notebook posed a threat, Monroe's loose lips posed an even greater one. Evidence of that comes from the FBI file on Monroe's February 1962 visit to Mexico, the file that neitherthe D.A. nor I were allowed to see back in the '80s. What we now have of it shows why itwas considered sensitive.Monroe had spent 10 days in Mexico, shopping, socializing and drinking too much. Itappeared to be a harmless vacation trip, but on March 6, four days after Monroe got back toLos Angeles, the senior FBI official in Mexico sent Director J. Edgar Hoover a four-pagereport. Quoting two unnamed people close to her, it said that Monroe had "associated closelywith certain members of the American Communist Group in Mexico ... present and/or pastmembers of the Communist Party, U.S.A., and their friends and associates who share acommon sympathy for Communism and the Soviet Union … during the course of this visit amutual infatuation arose between subject [Monroe] and Frederick Vanderbilt Field ...[source's name deleted] said it was obvious that the subject was completely enamored withField. She said that subject thinks that Field is rich, stable, intellectual, and dependable."Field, who was married, made no mention of having had a fling with Monroe, either in hispublished memoir or in interviews with me. He did say his impression was that "sexually,Marilyn did a fair amount of one-night stands." Whether or not he and Monroe were"enamored," it is clear that they took to each other at once. Field had long espoused Communist doctrine and was by his own account "a good, unrebellious comrade."Monroe seemed to gravitate to left-wingers. Her doctors, psychiatrist Greenson and internistEngelberg, had both been involved with the Communist Party. Her housekeeper's brother-in-law Churchill Murray, who introduced Monroe to diplomats in Mexico, was a member of the group of Communists in exile there. Field deemed Monroe's politics "excellent." She wasof the left, odd though it may seem to a public that recalls only the blond bimbo of hermovies. Her psychiatrist's daughter, Joan Greenson, told me that Monroe was "passionateabout equal rights, rights for blacks, rights for the poor. She identified strongly with theworkers." The FBI, a document shows, deemed her to be "very positively and concisely leftist."While in Mexico, the FBI learned, Monroe chattered about the night she met Robert Kennedyand the long political conversation they had. She told José Bolaños and Field that they haddebated U.S. policy on Cuba.No foreign policy issue was more sensitive than Cuba in early 1962. The Cuban missile crisiswas only months away. Robert Kennedy was directing secret American attempts tooverthrow Castro, and anything he said on the subject would have been of interest to theCubans and the Soviets. Some of the American Communists in Mexico City, the newdocuments indicate, were in touch with Soviet-bloc embassies.Two weeks after the report on Monroe reached FBI headquarters, on March 22, Director J.Edgar Hoover went to the White House to talk to President Kennedy. At least in part,Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach remembered, Hoover's purpose was to warn Kennedyabout his womanizing. Kennedy was not readily deterred.According to credible witnesses, he slept with Monroe two days later, during a weekendbreak near Palm Springs.In the following weeks, Monroe continued to have contacts with the Kennedy brothers andalso -- by phone -- with Field. She stayed on the West Coast but invited Field to use herManhattan apartment for a visit that summer. All the while, the files show, FBI agents weretracking Field wherever he went. On July 13, J. Edgar Hoover received a bombshell report from Mexico. Two sources -- thenames are redacted -- reported on what Monroe told them: "She had luncheon at the PeterLawfords with President Kennedy just a few days previously. She was very pleased, as shehad asked the President a lot of socially significant questions concerning the morality of atomic testing."July had seen the first known detonation of an H-bomb on U.S. territory, and more testsfollowed; Robert Kennedy, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at his side, witnessed oneof them. Anything Monroe passed on about what the Kennedys said privately on the subjectwould have been of interest to the Communist side. Nothing in the available record showsthat Hoover warned the brothers of Monroe's indiscretions, but it would have beenextraordinary had he failed to do so. And it would also have been extraordinary if theKennedys did not, at that point -- just three weeks before her death -- move to sever theirconnection with Monroe once and for all.When she was found dead, according to her psychiatrist, Monroe had a phone "clutchedfiercely in her right hand." Whom had she been calling as she slipped into unconsciousness?Los Angeles chief of detectives Thad Brown told Virgil Crabtree, the U.S. Treasury's assistantchief of intelligence in Los Angeles, that a White House number, scrawled on a piece of crumpled paper, had been found in the dead woman's bedclothes. "It was determined,"Brown's aide, Inspector Kenneth McCauley, told me, "that she had called John Kennedy justbefore she died."That last evening, President Kennedy was in Cape Cod enjoying a break. The White Houseswitchboard, though, could patch calls through to him wherever he was. The Presidentialphone log shows that early the following morning, at 9:04 East Coast time -- 6:04 on theWest Coast -- Kennedy took a call from Peter Lawford in California. The two men talked for some time. Robert Kennedy, back at his friend's ranch, spent the day horse riding and playing football. News of Monroe's death came up, his host remembered, but was discussed "lightly, in a sort of amusing way."