Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [146]
Lyndon Johnson, one of Washington’s craftiest manipulators of men, understood early on the importance of making Edgar his friend or – more important – ensuring he never gave him cause to become an enemy. Johnson’s political closet was bulging with skeletons. There were corrupt business deals, and women, and above all there were the allegations of ballot-rigging in 1948, when Johnson won election to the Senate by just eighty-seven votes.1
During the outcry following that election, Edgar had made a personal visit to Austin, the Texas state capital, and was seen closeted with Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, who had backed Johnson. The FBI’s probe of the vote fraud was conducted, observers recalled, with ‘a notable lack of investigative and prosecutorial vigor.’ According to the definitive study of the case, it soon ‘disappeared without trace.’
Johnson referred to Edgar privately as ‘that queer bastard.’ He fawned over him, however, in a steady stream of complimentary letters. ‘I think you and all your men are tops,’ he scrawled on one. ‘I see them under all circumstances and when I do I’m proud that I am a public servant.’ In the last weeks of the Eisenhower administration, Clyde Tolson lobbied frantically for a special law to ensure that, should Edgar retire he would continue to receive his full salary. This was achieved, not least thanks to pressure from Majority Leader Johnson.
Edgar reciprocated. He was observed visiting Room S-208, the hideaway Senate office known as the Johnson Ranch East, to proffer advice. He even flew to Texas in November 1959 to make speeches extolling Johnson’s virtues. During a whistle-stop tour, including a visit to the Johnson ranch, the Senator bear-hugged Edgar for the cameras. Edgar then returned to Washington after a meeting with oil millionaire Billy Byars, a regular vacation companion in California and – like Murchison – one of Johnson’s financial backers. Disregarding all the proprieties, the Director of the FBI had been making a campaign appearance on behalf of a presidential candidate.
Clint Murchison, the kingmaker who had played a key role in bringing Eisenhower to power, had something on all the political horses. The big money went to Nixon, as it had in the past and would in the future. He also sent an aide to deliver $25,000 in cash to the Kennedys. This, though, as Bobby Baker put it, was ‘just betcopping.’ Edgar’s friend Murchison was really rooting for Lyndon Johnson, a candidate sure to protect the interests of the big oil companies.
Murchison cared about power, not party labels, and one man – Edgar – remained a fixture on his political agenda. Two years before the election, when right-wing senator William Knowland had presidential hopes, the millionaire offered this advice in a letter to Johnson: ‘If you can work Knowland, Nixon and Hoover together,’ he told his fellow Texan, ‘you can control the United States.’
In 1960, with Johnson’s name replacing Knowland’s, the same formula applied. And as the campaign got under way, Edgar began considering the strengths – and weaknesses – of the young man who did not fit any agenda but his own, John Kennedy.
‘When John Kennedy was making a strong challenge for the presidency,’ recalled Cartha DeLoach, ‘Mr Hoover asked Clyde Tolson, and Tolson told me, to make a thorough review of the files. They knew all about Kennedy’s desires for sex, and the fact that he would sleep with almost anything that wore a skirt. “Joe Kennedy told me,” Mr Hoover said, “that he should have gelded Jack when he was a small boy.”’
The FBI file of dirt on John Kennedy had been opened at the start of World War II, based on British MI-5 reports on his social life while visiting his father, then Ambassador to Britain. He was just twenty years old,