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The new information came from Evelyn Lincoln, John Kennedy’s personal secretary for twelve years, before and throughout his presidency, and herself a part of the Kennedy legend. She lived and breathed the Kennedy saga, took her boss’ intimate telephone calls, saw his most secret correspondence, watched him agonize over crucial decisions. She was also at his side in Los Angeles.

Intensely loyal to the President’s memory, Mrs Lincoln would say no more about his sex life than was necessary to make her point about the episode in Los Angeles. She did, however, admit that her boss was a ‘ladies’ man.’ Then, with a chuckle, she blamed it on the ladies. ‘Kennedy didn’t chase women,’ she laughed. ‘The women chased Kennedy. I’ve never seen anything like it …’3

During the 1960 campaign, according to Mrs Lincoln, Kennedy discovered how vulnerable his womanizing had made him. Sexual blackmail, she said, had long been part of Lyndon Johnson’s modus operandi – abetted by Edgar. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ Lincoln said, ‘gave Johnson the information about various congressmen and senators so that Johnson could go to X senator and say, “How about this little deal you have with this woman?” and so forth. That’s how he kept them in line. He used his IOUs with them as what he hoped was his road to the presidency. He had this trivia to use, because he had Hoover in his corner. And he thought that the members of Congress would go out there and put him over at the Convention. But then Kennedy beat him at the Convention. And well, after that Hoover and Johnson and their group were able to push Johnson on Kennedy.

‘LBJ,’ said Lincoln, ‘had been using all the information Hoover could find on Kennedy – during the campaign, even before the Convention. And Hoover was in on the pressure on Kennedy at the Convention.’

Whatever Edgar had on Kennedy at this stage, it was apparently enough. His agents’ reports had filled him in on some of the recent womanizing, and there was also the ugly information about the Mafia connection. There was, too, the dossier Kennedy himself had long been worried about: the voluminous file, complete with tape recordings, on the candidate’s wartime affair with Inga Arvad.

In 1960 only fifteen years had passed since the war. Had voters learned that Kennedy had had a serious affair with a woman he knew to be close to Hitler and Göring, many – not least the vital Jewish constituency – might well have turned against him. Some believed that his father’s supposed Nazi sympathies would count against him anyway.

During their day of decision over the vice presidency, the brothers did their worrying alone in a bedroom, away from their aides. As John paced up and down and Robert slumped on a bed, Lincoln moved in and out of the room with messages. She heard enough, she says, to understand that Edgar’s smear information on Kennedy was at the heart of their dilemma. ‘It was the information J. Edgar Hoover passed to Johnson – about womanizing, and things in Joe Kennedy’s background, and anything he could dig up. Johnson was using that as clout. Kennedy was angry, because they had boxed him into a corner. He was absolutely boxed in. He and Bobby tried everything they could think of, anything to get Johnson out of the way. But in that situation, they couldn’t do it.’

Once he had decided on Johnson, John Kennedy tried to make little of it. ‘I’m forty-three years old,’ he told his aide Kenneth O’Donnell. ‘I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything …’

Lyndon Johnson saw it differently. ‘I looked it up,’ he would tell Clare Boothe Luce later. ‘One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.’

Evelyn Lincoln’s account, if accurate, is evidence that Edgar’s interference in the American political process was even more insidious than previously feared. It suggests, in effect, that he subverted the democratic system as ruthlessly as any secret police chief in a totalitarian state.

*

Edgar soon had an opportunity to test his power. The very day after