In the first year of the Johnson presidency there was a possibility that Edgar himself might be exposed. Life magazine reporter William Lambert, probing the origins of Johnson’s wealth, conducted interviews with Allan Witwer, the former manager of the hotel owned by the millionaire Clint Murchison, friend to both Johnson and Edgar. Witwer told how Edgar had freeloaded at the hotel; he produced the bills to prove it and revealed that Edgar rubbed shoulders with organized crime figures there.
While Lambert found Witwer credible, Life’s top executives and its attorneys shied away. Already under pressure from the White House for doing the Johnson series, they thought it folly to take on J. Edgar Hoover as well. Lambert passed his information on to Robert Kennedy, who urged old friends at the Justice Department to investigate. It was hard, however, to prove Edgar had broken the law, and his corrupt involvement with Murchison remained a secret.
When Kennedy left the Justice Department and ran for the Senate, Edgar leaked smear material on him to the press. When wiretapping became a controversial issue, he blamed Kennedy for wiretaps conducted during his time as Attorney General. The viciousness and guile of it all is evident from a report filed by Cartha DeLoach. President Johnson, DeLoach reported, wanted:
to get word to the Director that the Director might desire to bring ‘the facts’ concerning Kennedy’s authorization of wiretapping before a Congressional Committee …[Johnson aide] Watson stated the President was most anxious to see that the Director would not get hurt in connection with this matter. He wants to put Kennedy in his place. The President obviously wants to get these facts out, inasmuch as Kennedy will be seriously injured, as far as the left wing is concerned, if such facts become known. At the same time, as the Director knows much better than I do, there are far better ways of getting these facts out than through the medium of a Congressional Committee.
Respectfully,
C. DeLoach
Years later, under questioning by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, DeLoach acted naive. ‘I was an investigator, not a politician … I didn’t know whether it was political or not. We didn’t know what was in the minds of the White House personnel or the President …’
He later became more forthright. ‘President Johnson,’ DeLoach said, ‘knew how to twist arms. He knew how to use people. And he recognized early in the game that to have the FBI on his side and to use the FBI as a tool would be of assistance to him.’
None of this had anything remotely to do with the legitimate business of the FBI – law enforcement and the protection of national security. Yet DeLoach acknowledged his role without a glimmer of an awareness of ethical wrongdoing. He was, he said, just taking orders. ‘I kept the Director constantly advised at all times. I did nothing, at any time, that Mr Hoover was not fully advised of.’
Those who served in the Johnson White House were to shudder at the memory of the effects of Edgar’s mischief. In 1965 the FBI man in London, Charles Bates, picked up allegations that the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was sexually involved with his aide Marcia Williams. He reported this to Edgar – along with a story that Wilson was a tool of the Soviets – just before Wilson visited Washington.
‘Next time I saw Hoover,’ said Bates, ‘he told me the Wilson information was “terrific.” He had sent it straight over to President Johnson. When he told me that I thought, “Oh Jesus!” It was just raw intelligence, and I kind of hoped they’d never use it.’
When they did, it caused great diplomatic embarrassment, ‘Johnson didn’t like Wilson,’ said Undersecretary of State George Ball, ‘because Wilson wasn’t supporting him over the Vietnam War. Hoover knew his subject. He knew what pleasure Johnson would get out of any pornographic or scatological information about anyone he didn’t like. The President showed me the gossip on Wilson with great glee. Then, when Wilson brought Marcia Williams along to the first meeting, Johnson got hold of me and said, “Keep that woman out.” I had to make some excuse, telling Wilson the meeting was confined to the government officials directly concerned. It was very awkward.’
Competent sources were later to agree that Edgar’s ‘terrific’ information on the British Prime Minister was part of a smear campaign cooked up by Wilson’s political enemies. ‘Hoover was a very malign influence,’ said Ball. ‘I hated those preposterous canards … They tended to influence the President’s attitudes to the point of distorting policy.’
The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, soon collided with Edgar – partly because he insisted on communicating with the FBI through the correct channel, the office of outgoing Attorney General Robert Kennedy. To change his mind, Edgar sent derogatory material on Kennedy to the President, who then read it aloud to McNamara. Edgar told Johnson the Defense Secretary was part of a Kennedy conspiracy to get him out of the FBI. McNamara, who suspected Edgar of bugging public officials, told the President Edgar was ‘a menace’ and should be fired.
Johnson, however, seemed more committed to Edgar than to his own cabinet members. Should they abandon him by resigning, he warned, two men were going to ‘follow their ass to the end of the earth’: J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the Internal Revenue Service.
Judge Laurence Silberman, the former Deputy Attorney General who examined Edgar’s Official and Confidential files in 1974, concluded that Johnson used the FBI as ‘his private political police force.’ Edgar supplied him, by one estimate, with 1,200 dossiers on individual U.S. citizens.
Members of the press were especially vulnerable. ‘I know the FBI picked up cocktail party chatter,’ said Richard Goodwin. ‘It all went into the files. I remember Johnson talking about certain columnists’ cars being parked in front of the Soviet ambassador’s house, and he must have got that from the FBI. As we got deeper into the Vietnam thing, Johnson became obsessed with the idea that the opposition was coming from some Communist subversive source.’
‘You know, Dick,’ the President told Goodwin one day in 1965, ‘the Communists are taking over the country. Look here …’ Then, showing Goodwin a manila folder, ‘It’s Teddy White’s FBI file. He’s a Communist sympathizer.’ This would have come as news to all who knew Theodore White, author of The Making of the President books.
Edgar sent Johnson material on numerous journalists, including NBC’s David Brinkley, columnist Joseph Kraft, and New York Times veteran Harrison Salisbury. He also sent a dossier on Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, most recently distinguished for his valorous coverage of the Gulf War for Cable News Network.
In 1965, furious over press leaks, the President demanded information on Peter Lisagor, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News. Edgar sent DeLoach scurrying to discover the source of a Lisagor story about the presence of Soviet bombers in Hanoi. The resulting report offered an answer to the question, with some malicious gossip thrown in. The source, DeLoach decided, had been:
Marguerite Higgins, who was formerly employed by the New York Herald Tribune. Miss Higgins is widely known around Washington. Her reputation is spotty. The newspapermen refer to her as ‘mattress-back Maggie.’ She is currently married to retired Lieutenant-General William E. Hall. Miss Higgins is very close to Peter Lisagor … My source feels that Miss Higgins obtained this information from her husband …
Citizens who sent telegrams to the President criticizing policy would have been appalled to know the FBI ran checks on them. So would members of the U.S. Senate, had they known how Johnson sat in the White House chuckling over FBI reports on their sex lives. He would slap his thigh in delight as he read about a senator’s visits to a brothel.
A 1968 memo, reporting presidential curiosity about Senators Stephen Young and William Fulbright, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, sums up the conspiratorial atmosphere:
Marvin Watson [presidential aide] called last night at 7 P.M. Watson stated that he and the President wanted to make certain that the FBI understood that when requests were made by the President, Watson, or Mrs Stegall [White House secretary], concerning matters
of extreme secrecy, the FBI should not respond in writing by formal memorandum. Watson stated that what the President actually wanted was a blind-type memorandum which bore no government watermarks or letterhead signifying the source of the memorandum …’
Edgar simply scrawled ‘OK.’ This was a technique he had been using for decades. The President was soon bragging that he knew within minutes what Senator Fulbright had said at lunch at the Soviet embassy.
Never was secrecy more necessary to Johnson, or FBI acquiescence more unethical, than in August 1964, during the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. When the delegates poured into town, FBI wiretaps and bugs were ready at key locations, with DeLoach heading a force of no fewer than twenty-seven agents, a radio technician and two stenographers. Secure phone lines linked a control center in the Old Post Office Building with the switchboards of the White House and FBI headquarters in Washington. After talks with the White House, Edgar was mounting a massive surveillance operation.
Johnson’s nomination was a foregone conclusion, but he was haunted by the memory of his defeat by the Kennedy brothers in 1960. ‘He was afraid,’ said Clark Clifford, ‘that because they had planned a tribute to John F. Kennedy and Bobby was to deliver it, he might very well stampede the Convention and end up being the vice presidential nominee.’ Waiting and watching in Washington, Johnson juggled the timetable to ensure nominations were completed before Robert Kennedy appeared to eulogize his dead brother. Only then did the President descend on Atlantic City to be acclaimed the victor.
Some wondered how Johnson had managed to manipulate the Convention so brilliantly. ‘The interesting question,’ wrote Walter Lippmann, ‘is why he had such complete control …’ The FBI files supply the answer.
‘We were able to keep the White House fully apprised,’ read a DeLoach report, ‘by means of informant coverage … by infiltration of key groups through use of undercover agents, and through utilization of agents using appropriate cover as reporters.’ ‘Through cooperation with the management of NBC News,’ read another memo, ‘our agents were furnished press credentials.’
NBC executives have denied all knowledge of this, suggesting that the phony passes were supplied by officials of the Democratic National Committee. DeLoach, for his part, has said the ruse proved very successful. We can only guess how often the FBI used this trick. Later, during the Nixon administration, an agent would be caught asking questions at a press conference.
While DeLoach has suggested the Bureau’s primary task at the Convention was to preempt violence, former Agent in Charge Leo Clark told a different story. He was warned in advance, he told a Senate committee, that the mission was to be concealed from the Secret Service. Prevention of violence was just the cover story.
The FBI’s primary job, Clark revealed, was to snoop on senators and congressmen, key convention delegates, civil rights activists – and Robert Kennedy. He was present when DeLoach reported by telephone direct to the President and to Edgar. Therein lay an irony, for in principle only Kennedy – as Attorney General – had the authority to approve electronic surveillance.
The President later told Edgar the ‘job’ in Atlantic City was one of the finest he had ever seen. ‘DeLoach,’ Edgar scrawled on a report, ‘should receive a meritorious reward.’
Everything appeared to go swimmingly after the Convention – for Johnson and for Edgar. Robert Kennedy departed for the Senate. The Warren Report came out, seemingly closing the door on the Kennedy era itself. Then, on October 14, 1964, with the election just weeks away, a sex and security scandal burst upon the Johnson presidency.
News broke that Walter Jenkins, Johnson’s closest aide, had been arrested in a YMCA toilet, two blocks from the White House, having sex with a retired Army soldier. Jenkins admitted the offense, resigned and took refuge in a hospital room, suffering from ‘exhaustion.’ A rapid FBI inquiry concluded that he had never compromised national security.
Nagging questions remained, however, as to how and why the arrest had been kept secret for a week after it occurred. Nor was it clear why the FBI, supposedly so effective in its security checks, had failed to tell the White House of Jenkins’ arrest for a similar lapse, in the very same toilet, nearly six years earlier. Edgar’s public statement, moreover, failed to mention that Jenkins, a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, had tried to use his influence to reinstate a fellow officer dismissed for sex offenses.
Edgar’s public attitude on homosexuality was normally at least condemnatory, often cruel. On this occasion, however, he visited Jenkins in the hospital and sent him flowers. Jenkins’ brother William was a veteran FBI agent, and his secretary, Mildred Stegall, was at one stage being paid out of the FBI budget. Jenkins and his family were socially close to DeLoach and his wife.
It was Edgar, according to William Sullivan, who came up with the idea of trying to get a doctor to say Jenkins ‘has a brain injury and he’s definitely not a homosexual. It’s because of his brain injury that he acted in such a peculiar, unusual manner on this particular evening.’ The President’s friend Abe Fortas did try to cajole a psychiatrist, Dr Leon Yochelson, to spin such a yarn, but he refused.1
With Edgar’s certain connivance, and probably at his suggestion, Johnson tried to turn the Jenkins case around to damage the Republican candidate for the presidency, Senator Barry Goldwater.
Years later, asked whether there had been FBI surveillance of Goldwater in 1964, DeLoach said he ‘would doubt seriously whether such a thing ever happened … The request was made of me to make so-called name checks of Senator Goldwater’s staff. I came back and told Mr Hoover about it and Mr Hoover said, “What do you recommend?” And I told him I recommended we do nothing, and he said, “I agree with you.” And that’s exactly what we did, nothing.’
Other information has since become available. As the Jenkins case developed, Johnson burst into the office of his aide Bill Moyers. ‘Hoover was just here,’ he snapped, ‘and he says some of Goldwater’s people may have trapped Walter – set him up. I told Hoover to find the – [expletive deleted in Moyers’ account]… I told him I want to know every one of Goldwater’s people who could have done this thing … You call DeLoach and tell him if he wants to keep that nice house in Virginia, and that soft job he has here, his boys had better find those bastards.’
Senator Goldwater, as it happened, was the commander of the 999th Air Force Reserve Squadron, the unit in which Jenkins had served. The two men had traveled together on Air Force planes. On the strength of that, three days alter Jenkins’ resignation, two FBI agents arrived to question the Senator. He was busy campaigning, and the interrogation irritated him. Had Goldwater known what was really going on, he would have been even angrier.
‘I knew DeLoach pretty well,’ said Robert Mardian, later an Assistant Attorney General under President Nixon, ‘and I had been western regional director for Goldwater. Long afterwards, DeLoach told me how they had been ordered by Hoover to bug the Goldwater plane …’
An FBI report to DeLoach, dated nine days into the Jenkins probe, shows that sixteen members of Goldwater’s staff were also investigated. One, it said, ‘frequently dated prostitutes … in his office.’ This report was generated ‘according to the instructions of the Director.’
President Johnson did receive an FBI dossier on his opponent. He even read extracts aloud over the telephone to Democratic Senator George Smathers. As for Edgar, he probably had his own motive to try to torpedo Goldwater. In private, but unbeknownst to him in the presence of a former FBI agent, the Senator had made the mistake of saying he would dump Edgar if elected President.
In the wake of the Jenkins sensation, Edgar also responded to a Johnson request to ‘bring him everything we have on Humphrey.’ The reference was to Senator Hubert Humphrey, the President’s own running mate in the election campaign. FBI reports on the Humphrey team, including a (still censored) ‘allegation’ about the Senator himself, went to the White House within days.
Triumph in 1964 did little to
calm Lyndon Johnson. One day the next year, sitting beside his swimming pool in Texas, Johnson talked gloomily about the deepening crisis in Vietnam. ‘I’m going to be known as the president who lost Southeast Asia. I’m going to be the one who lost this form of government. The Communists already control the three major networks and forty major outlets of communication. Walter Lippmann is a Communist and so is Teddy White. And they’re not the only ones. You’d all be shocked at the kind of thing revealed by FBI reports.’
‘Lyndon,’ said his wife, Lady Bird, ‘you shouldn’t read them so much … They have a lot of unevaluated information in them, accusations and gossip which haven’t been proven.’ ‘Never mind that,’ the President growled, ‘you’d be surprised at how much they know about people … I don’t want to be like a McCarthyite. But this country is in a little more danger than we think. And someone has to uncover this information.’
Edgar fed Johnson’s neuroses until the end of his presidency. And all the while he had been orchestrating the most vicious character assassination of his career, aimed at a man today revered as a hero, Martin Luther King.
31
‘The way Martin Luther King was hounded and harassed is a disgrace to every American.’
Senator Walter Mondale, later Vice President, 1975
In late 1963, when Time magazine named Martin Luther King its Man of the Year, Edgar was furious. ‘They had to dig deep in the garbage,’ he scrawled on the wire copy of the announcement, ‘to come up with this one.’
Edgar’s attitude on race – his reluctance to hire black agents and his opposition to the civil rights movement – has been explained as a legacy of his origins. He had been born in a time of virtual apartheid in the South, when blacks were expected to be servants and grateful for it. A black maid had waited on Edgar’s family when he was a child, and he attended a whites-only high school. Years later, when the school admitted black students, outraged alumni returned to tear down the insignia of an institution they regarded as a bastion of white respectability.
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