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From the start, Edgar knew something of all this. As early as March 1960 – the very month Kennedy began discussing Giancana with Judith Campbell – word reached FBI headquarters that:

members of the underworld element … Joe Fischetti [a Giancana associate] and other unidentified hoodlums are financially supporting and actively endeavoring to secure the nomination for the presidency as Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy … to assist Senator Kennedy’s campaign whereby … hoodlums will have an entre [sic] to Senator Kennedy …

In July, on the eve of the Convention in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy was told that Edgar’s agents had been trying to dig up information about the conduct of the West Virginia primary. A long FBI report containing ‘an extensive amount of derogatory information’ on his brother was supposedly on its way to the Justice Department.

If John Kennedy was worried by such reports, he did not show it. His antics with women during the Convention caused near panic among Democratic officials. We now know he was juggling Judith Campbell, Marilyn Monroe, whom he had known on and off for years, and sundry call girls. Los Angeles law enforcement noted his use of whores from a mob-controlled vice ring. This, too, would eventually be reported to Edgar.

Kennedy often shrugged off warnings that his womanizing might one day ruin him. ‘They can’t touch me while I’m alive,’ he said to one intimate, ‘and after I’m dead, who cares?’ ‘Jack,’ said Senator George Smathers, ‘felt he could walk on water so far as women were concerned.’ Reckless womanizing was a flaw in Kennedy’s character that imperiled everything he strove for, and Edgar was one of the first to spot that flaw.

According to one compelling account, Edgar used his knowledge to influence the selection of the vice presidential candidate at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 1960.

The Democrat Edgar favored, Lyndon Johnson, had gone to the Los Angeles Convention not just to win the nomination for himself, but to see Kennedy beaten. ‘LBJ,’ said the political wags, stood for ‘Let’s Block Jack.’ It was a dirty fight. Johnson’s men spread the word that Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease – which was true – and that his father had been pro-Nazi, which was not unfair. Both sides accused the other of buying delegates’ votes. When Kennedy money and superb organization defeated Johnson on the first ballot, he was furious.

‘He barked at aides, cursed, slammed down telephones,’ recalled Johnson’s aide Bobby Baker. ‘He refused to go and thank his exhausted campaign workers. I did not know it at the time, but LBJ had learned that the Knight newspapers on the West Coast would be out with a midnight edition saying John F. Kennedy was considering three men for the vicepresidential spot – and that LBJ was not among them.’

Less than twenty-four hours later, all that had changed. After a day of hectic speculation, Johnson stepped before the cameras to announce he was to run alongside Kennedy as the candidate for the vice presidency. ‘Jack Kennedy has asked me to serve,’ he said smoothly. ‘I accept.’

Hardly anyone had expected this development. And over the years historians have tried repeatedly to analyze the tense negotiations between the Kennedy and Johnson camps that led to Johnson accepting the vice-presidential slot.2 Kennedy himself told his aide Pierre Salinger cryptically that ‘the whole story will never be known. And it’s just as well it won’t be.’ ‘The only people who were involved in the discussions were Jack and myself,’ said Robert Kennedy. ‘We both promised each other that we’d never tell what happened.’

What happened, apparently, was blackmail. For John Kennedy, a key factor in giving Johnson the vice presidential slot was the threat of ruinous sex revelations, revelations that would have destroyed the ‘American family man’ image so carefully seeded in the national mind, and snatched the presidency from his grasp. The blackmailers, by this account, were Johnson himself – and Edgar.