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‘Clyde Tolson called me,’ recalled Cartha DeLoach, ‘and said, “We ought to have some feeling as to his intentions regarding the Director. Why don’t you get one of your friends in the press to plant a question at a press conference?” I called a vice president at UPI, a good friend, and asked him to ask Kennedy whether he would keep Hoover on. He did ask that question, and John Kennedy’s response was immediately, without hesitation, “That will be one of the first appointments I will make.”’

Indeed, less than three weeks after his nomination, Kennedy had committed himself to reappointing Edgar. Three months later, the night after his election, Edgar’s name came up after dinner with friends at Hyannis Port.

‘It was a joyous, silly, fun evening,’ recalled Ben Bradlee, then Washington Bureau Chief for Newsweek. ‘Jackie Kennedy and my wife, Tony, were both extremely pregnant, and I remember the President said, “OK, girls, the election’s over, you can take the pillows out now!” We talked about what we should call him now that he was elected, and he said, “Well, Prez sounds pretty good.” Then, as a sort of joke, he said to Bill Walton and me, “I’ll give each of you guys an appointment, one job to fill. What do you want?” And one of us said, “Well, one guy you can’t reappoint is Allen Dulles,” who was CIA Director. And the other said, “I don’t give a shit what you do, so long as you don’t reappoint J. Edgar Hoover.” And he just laughed …’

Bradlee was close by the next morning as the new president placed a call to Edgar. ‘He was telling him how much he wanted him, was counting on him, to stay on … Laid it on a bit thick, I thought.’

Kennedy’s decision to reappoint Edgar was front-page news within hours. ‘He never discussed it with any of us,’ said Kenneth O’Donnell. ‘I think he made up his mind – “We’re not going to rock the boat at this moment.” He would not discuss it with me.’

As President, Kennedy would make light of the Edgar problem. He dismissed Edgar as a ‘master of public relations.’ ‘The three most overrated things in the world,’ he liked to say, ‘are the state of Texas, the FBI’ and whatever was exasperating him most at the moment. In private, he fumed.

Kennedy told the columnist Igor Cassini, a family friend, that he ‘knew’ Edgar was a homosexual. ‘I talked to him about it,’ said the novelist Gore Vidal, ‘and he gave me one of those looks. He loathed Hoover. I didn’t know then that Hoover was blackmailing him. Nor did I realize how helpless the Kennedys were to do anything about him.’

The bottom line was fear. ‘All the Kennedys were afraid of Hoover,’ said Ben Bradlee. ‘John F. Kennedy was afraid not to reappoint him,’ said the columnist Jack Anderson. ‘I know that because I talked to the President about it. He admitted that he’d appointed Hoover because it would’ve been politically destructive not to.’4

On the day Kennedy was elected, Edgar wrote him an unctuous letter. ‘My dear Senator, Permit me to join the countless well wishers who are congratulating you on being elected President of the United States … America is most fortunate to have a man of your caliber at its helm in these perilous days … You know, of course, that this Bureau stands ready to be of all possible assistance to you …’

Hours after writing the letter, Edgar asked Philip Hochstein, editorial director of the Newhouse newspaper group, to fly down to Washington from New York. ‘When I got to his office,’ Hochstein recalled, ‘I offered my congratulations on the announcement of his reappointment by the President-elect. He replied in a surly manner and said, “Kennedy isn’t the President-elect.” He said the election had been stolen in a number of states, including New Jersey, where my office was, and Missouri, where Newhouse had recently bought a paper …

‘It was quite a harangue, and I think Hoover wanted me to be part of a crusade to undo the election. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t tell anyone at the time. But later I saw what Hoover had told me reported accurately