Official and Confidential (55 page)

When Johnson had trouble getting through to DeLoach's home number – a teenage daughter was hogging the phone –
he sent technicians to install a hot line. ‘They had instructions to put it in the bedroom,' Edgar's aide recalled. ‘The President would call at all times, day and night.'

‘Dear Mr President,' DeLoach wrote in a gushing letter early in the administration:

Thank you for allowing Barbara and me to have a ‘moment of greatness' with the world's number one family yesterday afternoon. The informality, yet quiet dignity you possess, never ceases to inspire me … The telecast was excellent … I received a call at 9:00 P.M. last night from my elderly Mother [
sic
]… to report that ‘Mr Johnson is the best thing that has ever happened to this Nation …'

Sincerely,

Deke

The President liked to say he wanted men around him who were ‘loyal enough to kiss my ass in Macy's window and say it smelled like a rose.' DeLoach was the perfect candidate, an ambitious assistant dedicated to ensuring not only that Johnson's will was done, but that it coincided with Edgar's.

Edgar too played the sycophant. One of the President's public appearances, Edgar told Johnson, ‘brought out your humbleness …' ‘I only wish,' he gushed after a press conference, ‘our Washington Senators baseball team had an outfielder as capable of fielding some of the hot ones you handled. They were certainly loaded but you handled them like a Mickey Mantle.'

The two men were linked by fear. Edgar's was the chronic fear of a forced end to his rule. Johnson's hidden terrors are only now being unveiled. Two senior aides, Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, became so alarmed by the President's state of mind that, secretly and unbeknownst to each other, they turned to psychiatrists for advice. ‘The diagnosis was the same,' Goodwin was to reveal. ‘We were describing a textbook case of paranoid disintegration, the eruption of
long-suppressed irrationalities … The disintegration could continue, remain constant or recede, depending on the strength of Johnson's resistance.'

Others, like former press secretary George Reedy, believed the President was ‘a manic depressive.' Johnson worried constantly about the danger of assassination and was obsessed with the notion that survivors of the Kennedy administration were plotting his downfall. He came to believe the press wanted to destroy him, that the press corps and government were riddled with Communists.

Edgar had fulminated against enemies real or imagined all his life, and his policeman's function had long since taken a backseat to politics. In the Johnson presidency, the combination of psychoses made a dangerous mix. Vital checks and balances, designed to ensure the separation of the executive from law enforcement, simply lapsed.

For both men, the first obvious enemy was Robert Kennedy, who remained Attorney General until September 1964. Johnson thought him ‘that little runt,' and Kennedy considered Johnson ‘mean, vicious, an animal in many ways.' For all that, Kennedy felt Johnson needed him to win the coming election, and he saw himself as Johnson's vice presidential running mate. It was a delusion. Johnson spurned Kennedy and his people from the start.

Edgar and Kennedy acted out a similar charade. In January 1964, at a party in the Justice Department, Kennedy gave Edgar a delayed Christmas gift, a set of gold cuff links embossed with the Department seal, the Attorney General's initials and his own.

While others received the same gift, Kennedy had made a point of including the Director, perhaps as a last-ditch attempt to ease the tension. Edgar responded with a ‘Dear Bob' note, saying the cuff links would be ‘a constant reminder of a friendship I shall always treasure.'

Even as he wrote it, a stream of FBI information was going
to President Johnson on Kennedy people still working at the White House. Though much of it was requested by Johnson, the tone of the FBI correspondence leaves no doubt of Edgar's complicity.

Edgar stirred up trouble at every opportunity. In February, from Minneapolis, his Agent in Charge reported gossip about a dinner at which members of the ‘Kennedy crowd' had supposedly plotted to ‘create a situation whereby the President would be forced to pick the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, as his running mate.' Edgar sent DeLoach to pass on the story, unchecked and uncorroborated, to President Johnson.

Johnson loved sleaze, and Edgar indulged the appetite, especially when it concerned the Kennedys. One of Edgar's Assistant Directors, who asked not to be identified, told the following story: ‘We supplied Johnson with a full field investigation report on a young woman who had worked as a hostess on the Kennedy plane and supplied sex services to John Kennedy. Kennedy had brought her into the White House as an assistant press secretary – for obvious reasons. When Johnson came into office we turned up some nude pictures taken when she was still a senior in high school. They went to Johnson, and he took them out of the report folder and put them in his desk. This little girl would come in to clear the Teletypes, and the President would take out these pictures and then give her a good looking over. It became quite a joke around the White House …'

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.