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‘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 assumed 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