Official and Confidential (56 page)

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

I
n 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.

Edgar's prejudice, however, had deep-seated personal origins. Through his youth and into middle age, a rumor circulated in Washington – a rumor of which he was certainly aware – that Edgar himself had black blood in his veins.

In 1958, while researching articles on Edgar for the
New York Post
, reporter William Dufty enlisted the help of a black agent in the Bureau of Narcotics to obtain a clandestine interview with Edgar's black manservant, Sam Noisette. As the three men talked, Dufty realized the two blacks were repeatedly referring to Edgar as ‘some kind of spook,' even ‘soul
brother.' Dufty had many black friends – he had co-authored Billie Holiday's biography
Lady Sings the Blues
– and remembered having heard offhand remarks along the same lines. He later realized that, in the black communities of the East, which also claimed Clark Gable and Rudolph Valentino as their own, it was generally believed that Edgar had black roots.

The writer Gore Vidal, who grew up in Washington in the thirties, had a similar memory. ‘Hoover was becoming famous, and it was always said of him – in my family and around the city – that he was mulatto. People said he came from a family that had “passed.” It was the word they used for people of black origin who, after generations of interbreeding, have enough white blood to pass themselves off as white. That's what was always said about Hoover.' ‘There was a sort of secret admiration among blacks for those who were able to pass,' said Dufty. ‘Fooling white people was easy, but fooling blacks was next to impossible.'

Early photographs of Edgar do have a negroid look. His hair was noticeably wiry, and a 1939 article refers to his ‘dark skin, almost brown from sunburn. His coloring … gives a striking contrast to the crisp, white linen suit.' Was there then some truth to the story?

As was often the case in those days, no birth certificate was registered when Edgar was born in 1895. The document that was eventually issued, in 1938, states simply that both his father and mother were ‘white.' The ancestry of his mother is well documented, a line of solid burghers easily traceable to their ancestral home in Switzerland. His father's family history, however, amounts to no more than a series of conflicting reports of descent from German, Swiss or British immigrants, settlers who arrived in America 200 years before Edgar's birth. There had been plenty of time for racial intermingling.

After Edgar's death, even Helen Gandy would speak of ‘an early story' that Edgar had black blood. She spoke of the rumor during an interview, then dropped the subject.

‘Hoover himself had to know what people said about him,' said Gore Vidal. ‘There were two things that were taken for granted in my youth – that he was a faggot and that he was black. Washington was and is a very racist town, and I can tell you that in those days the black blood part was very much the worst. People were known to commit suicide if it was discovered that they had passed. To be thought a black person was an unbelievable slur if you were in white society. That's what many people flatly believed about Hoover, and he must have been so upset by it …'

Whether or not the rumor was true, it must have caused endless distress to Edgar, whose public posture was that of the white nativist, suspicious of all that seemed alien. Just as he compensated for his secret homosexuality by lashing out at fellow homosexuals, so Edgar's worry about his racial identity may have shaped his behavior toward blacks. To those who knew their place – servants like Noisette, James Crawford and the rest – he played the decent, paternalistic boss. Those who sought to rise above their station, as perhaps he sensed he himself had done, he had at best no time for.

Born in an era when black men were regularly lynched for rape – if the victim was white – Edgar preferred to shrug off the miseries of black Americans. As with organized crime, he was content to ignore the law enforcement problems that arose, or to claim ‘lack of jurisdiction.'

The attorney Joseph Rauh never forgot the angry non sequitur of an answer Edgar gave when asked to probe the attempted murder of a white labor leader in the forties. ‘Edgar says no,' Attorney General Tom Clark told Rauh. ‘He's not going to send the FBI in every time some nigger woman says she's been raped.'
¹

Though Edgar mounted some effective operations against the Ku Klux Klan, his priorities became obvious once blacks began to demand their rights. ‘When I was working in the South in the fifties,' said Arthur Murtagh, ‘there was simply no comparison. The Bureau only investigated the Klan when
a murder had been committed and the press forced them into it. Far more time and effort went into investigating black militants …'