Fifteen weeks before Dallas, an FBI wiretap in Florida had picked up a conversation between two men who knew Edgar. One was Alvin Malnik, an attorney who would one day be identified as ‘one of Meyer Lansky’s trusted people’ and whom Edgar had befriended on a visit to Miami Beach. The other was local restaurateur Jesse Weiss, host to numerous mobsters and – every Christmas – to Edgar.
The log of the wiretap shows that the two men discussed the continuing crackdown on organized crime, and – with Robert Kennedy now in the ascendant – Edgar’s waning influence:
WEISS: They’re taking the play away from him.
MALNIK: Hoover is a lost …
WEISS: Cause.
MALNIK: A lost cause, that’s all …
WEISS: They take everybody’s picture – license numbers and everything …
MALNIK: Well, that’s not even bad, but when they go breaking into private property trying to get evidence, that’s the limit … the lowest.
WEISS: And then it’s laughable. Once upon a time, you know, you walked into the FBI … intimidate …
Poor reception apparently blurred the rest of Weiss’ comment, but the transcript resumes:
MALNIK: Sure! It doesn’t mean anything anymore … it doesn’t mean anything … Does Hoover realize this great transformation that’s happened within his own organization?
WEISS: I spoke to him. Two weeks ago I was in Washington before he went to California – he goes out to California every year … It’s like he … He told me the same thing: ‘Shucks, the Bureau is shot!’ ‘What the hell,’ he says. ‘But what can I do?… The Attorney General is the boss of the Bureau. He runs it … dare you to fight him.’
MALNIK: That’s right …
Just weeks after that conversation, Robert Kennedy complained to his brother about the FBI’s failure to bring pressure on Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. It was an issue that became moot when the President was assassinated.
‘The minute that bullet hit Jack Kennedy’s head,’ said Justice Department aide William Hundley, ‘it was all over. Right then. The organized crime program just stopped, and Hoover took control back.’ ‘Those people,’ Robert Kennedy said bitterly of the FBI a fortnight later, ‘don’t work for us anymore.’ In the months that followed, stunned by grief, he faltered in his drive against the mob. Edgar took full advantage.
‘Pursuit of organized crime did continue,’ recalled veteran Chicago agent Bill Roemer, ‘but not with the same intensity.’ Field agents soon found they had less money to spend and fewer clearances to install bugs against organized crime figures. ‘The whole Mafia effort,’ said William Sullivan, ‘slacked off again.’
The figures confirm it. At the end of the Kennedy administration, members of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section were working 6,699 man-days in the field each year. Three years later the figure had dropped by half. Days spent prosecuting mobsters before grand juries dropped 72 percent, days in court 56 percent, court briefs prepared 82 percent.
The President was dead, his brother a lame duck Attorney General. Edgar, by contrast, was back on top. On May 7, 1964, even while Edgar was secretly frustrating the work of the Warren Commission, Congress honored his fortieth year at the FBI with Resolution Number 706. It praised ‘one of the most remarkable records of service to God and country in our Nation’s history.’ It referred to Edgar’s ‘strong moral determination’ and his ‘unrelenting battle’ against America’s criminal underworld.
The next day, in a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House, President Johnson unveiled Executive Order 10682. With Edgar beside him, he announced he was waiving the compulsory retirement rule, due to take effect when Edgar turned seventy, seven months later. He praised Edgar as ‘quiet, humble … an anathema to evil men,’ and promised he could stay in office ‘for an indefinite period of time.’
‘The Roman Senate,’ commented Loudon Wainwright in Life, ‘conferred god status on a few emperors while they were still in office, and more or less the same thing has just happened to J. Edgar Hoover. Not that he hasn’t been at least a demi-god for a long time …’
* For the second official’s recollection see the Foreword to this edition.
30
‘You don’t fire God.’
Charles Brennan, former Assistant Director of the FBI
On June 4, 1964, the historian William Manchester was ushered into Edgar’s office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. In the anteroom, aides had pointed out a new life-size bust of the Director, in bronze. Now, seated like all guests on a chair that forced him to gaze upward, he stared in fascination.
‘In the foreground,’ Manchester recalled, ‘there was a miniature of the bust I had seen outside. It was looking at Hoover, and Hoover was looking at the bust. And between me and him there was an American flag, made of a sort of filmy gauze material. I was looking through the gauze at Hoover, and his complexion was red, white and blue.’
Manchester, who was researching his epic work Death of a President, was there to discuss the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. A few weeks earlier, at the White House, the professor had gone through another bizarre experience. Fearful of being interviewed, President Johnson had insisted on listening from another room as Manchester staged a ‘dress rehearsal’ question-and-answer session, with an aide standing in for the President. He never did sit for an interview. Now, closeted with Edgar, Manchester realized the Director of the FBI did not want to talk about the assassination. He wanted to talk about himself.
‘He would drift off into the early thirties,’ said Manchester, ‘and recall chasing Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and all that. I couldn’t keep him on the subject, and, in my opinion, he was really senile already.’
Johnson’s Undersecretary of State, George Ball, once met Edgar to discuss State Department security. ‘His counsel was totally fatuous,’ said Ball. ‘He indulged in such a rambling and seemingly endless monologue … I found it intolerable to sit and listen to such nonsense. So I finally excused myself to take a pretended telephone call in my conference room, then ducked out the back way. I questioned his competence.’
‘I used to go to his office rather than asking him to come to mine,’ said Nicholas Katzenbach, ‘partly as a courtesy, but also because I could leave his office. I could never get him out of mine. He would never listen at all, he’d just ramble on. He was closer to senility than anybody thought … Yet next to the President, this was the most powerful person in the country.’
Soon after the assassination, a new photograph of Lyndon Johnson appeared on Edgar’s office wall. ‘To J. Edgar Hoover,’ read the dedication. ‘Than whom there is no greater – from his friend of thirty years.’ The president’s widow, Lady Bird, who wrote gushingly of Edgar while he was alive, proved more reserved in 1988. ‘I wouldn’t,’ she said, ‘consider him a friend of ours.’ Others were more blunt. ‘Johnson didn’t like him,’ said Time’s White House correspondent Hugh Sidey. ‘He had a great regard for Hoover’s clout, but he was very suspicious of him. When Johnson talked with me about him, he seemed kind of contemptuous.’
‘Johnson would call me up on the phone,’ said Katzenbach, ‘and he’d say, “Goddamnit, can you do something about Hoover for me? The phone calls he makes! The bastard talks for hours …”’ Edgar, for his part, had no real fondness for the new president. ‘Johnson,’ he warned senior colleagues early in the new administration, ‘may become very dictatorial. We must keep our guard up.’
The fact of it was that Johnson would use Edgar, when Edgar was prepared to be used, but could not hope to dictate to him. ‘The President,’ his former press secretary George Reedy admitted, ‘recognized that Hoover was very powerful. He had so much information on everybody …’
Johnson betrayed his fear. ‘Every once in a while,’ said William Sullivan, ‘he’d call Hoover and say, “Now I’m going to ask you again. Tell me now, did you have a tap on me when I was a senator?” Johnson had a hell of a guilty conscience. I guess he assum
ed that if we had a tap on him when he was a senator, he’d be in real trouble.’
Edgar had known too much about Johnson, for too long, not to pose a threat. He knew about the ballot-rigging of 1948 that had brought him to the Senate, and he had an inside track on the corruption that made the President rich. Two years earlier – responding to an appeal for help from Johnson – Edgar had used FBI clout to squash press interest in the Billie Sol Estes fraud scandal.
The FBI records on Johnson’s relationship with Estes were withheld as this book was written, as were many of the papers on his corrupt aide Bobby Baker and on the Ellen Rometsch sex and security scare.
Though not in the same league as his predecessor, Johnson too had his share of extramarital adventures. As in the case of Kennedy, a mistress survived to claim Edgar had knowledge of one of them and used it to ensure his survival.
Madeleine Brown, a Texan in her mid-sixties, said she and Johnson enjoyed an on-off liaison for two decades. She said they met at a Dallas reception in 1948, when he was a congressman and she a twenty-four-year-old assistant in an advertising firm, and that Johnson fathered her son Steven, born three years later. The son bore a resemblance to the former president.
It was during the Kennedy era, when he was Vice President and her son Steven was ten, that Johnson first told his mistress Edgar had become a threat. At one of their trysts at Austin’s Driskill Hotel, said Brown, he confided that he had ‘a big problem.’ ‘Hoover,’ he told her, ‘wants me to try to influence Kennedy to keep him on as FBI Director. He knows about you and Steven, and he’s calling in his marker.’
Johnson’s solution, Brown said, was to push her into a ‘paper marriage’ hastily organized by Jesse Kellam, the confidant who had introduced them years earlier. ‘It was done to stop any gossip, and it worked, especially later, when he moved into the White House.’
‘What Lyndon told me,’ Brown said, ‘was that he was afraid of Hoover, that Hoover wanted him to intervene with the Kennedys not to fire him. “I want you to go through with the marriage,” he told me, “to help me get my balls out of Hoover’s vise grip.”’
Bearing in mind the various ways in which he was compromised, one is left to ponder the fact that, as President, Johnson moved quickly to prolong Edgar’s tenure. ‘The nation cannot afford to lose you,’ he told Edgar when he made the announcement. Perhaps, rather, it was Johnson who could not afford to risk Edgar’s wrath.
Perhaps, too, Johnson and Edgar reached some sort of accommodation. Edgar’s Official and Confidential files, and the main Bureau folders on the President, contain little compromising material: nothing on Madeleine Brown and only limited coverage of the corruption scandals in Johnson’s life.
According to The Washington Post, ‘tapes and memos once existed concerning Johnson’s backdoor activities. Some of this embarrassing material was removed from the files and sent to him at the White House.’ Clyde Tolson reportedly removed other sensitive documents immediately after Edgar’s death.
Washington insiders have a fund of coarse Johnsonian sayings, and one of the most famous refers to Edgar. Pressed by a young aide to replace him, the President is said to have replied, ‘No, son, if you’ve got a skunk around, it’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.’
Edgar now had better access to the White House than at any time in his four decades as Director. There followed a four-year period of manipulation that Richard Goodwin, an aide under both Kennedy and Johnson, has likened to the access Soviet Secret Police Chief Beria had to Stalin.
Word went out from Edgar to build special facilities for Johnson at Austin, Texas, the nearest FBI office to the LBJ ranch. A brand-new office was opened at Fredericksburg, even closer to Johnson’s home. Soon an FBI agent was traveling regularly aboard Air Force One, although presidential security was a Secret Service responsibility. Happily for interagency relations, the head of the Secret Service was himself a former FBI agent.
Cartha DeLoach now became Edgar’s link to the President. He had been a favorite for more than a decade, an enforcer of Bureau discipline (including Edgar’s hypocritical code of sexual behavior), a manipulator of the press, and congressional ringmaster. It had been DeLoach, on the eve of the Kennedy presidency, who prevailed on Johnson and Congressman John Rooney to ram through a law ensuring Edgar a bountiful retirement deal should the Kennedys force him out.
DeLoach was appointed liaison to the White House within hours of Kennedy’s assassination – replacing Courtney Evans, who had seemed to get on with the Kennedys rather too well. It was DeLoach who drafted the formula that kept Edgar on as Director after his seventieth birthday. He, rather than a White House aide, even wrote the proclamation.
DeLoach shuttled between the FBI and the White House for five years and became intimate with the First Family in a way unprecedented for a mere agency official. There were lunches at the White House, domino sessions with the President, an Easter weekend with the Johnsons at Camp David. ‘Quite soon,’ he recalled, ‘the President was consulting me frequently, particularly about government appointments.’
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 ‘me
an, 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 …’