Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [187]
Johnson’s solution, Brown said, was to push her into a ‘paper marriage’ hastily organized by Jesse Kellam, the confidant who had introduced them years earlier. ‘It was done to stop any gossip, and it worked, especially later, when he moved into the White House.’
‘What Lyndon told me,’ Brown said, ‘was that he was afraid of Hoover, that Hoover wanted him to intervene with the Kennedys not to fire him. “I want you to go through with the marriage,” he told me, “to help me get my balls out of Hoover’s vise grip.”’
Bearing in mind the various ways in which he was compromised, one is left to ponder the fact that, as President, Johnson moved quickly to prolong Edgar’s tenure. ‘The nation cannot afford to lose you,’ he told Edgar when he made the announcement. Perhaps, rather, it was Johnson who could not afford to risk Edgar’s wrath.
Perhaps, too, Johnson and Edgar reached some sort of accommodation. Edgar’s Official and Confidential files, and the main Bureau folders on the President, contain little compromising material: nothing on Madeleine Brown and only limited coverage of the corruption scandals in Johnson’s life.
According to The Washington Post, ‘tapes and memos once existed concerning Johnson’s backdoor activities. Some of this embarrassing material was removed from the files and sent to him at the White House.’ Clyde Tolson reportedly removed other sensitive documents immediately after Edgar’s death.
Washington insiders have a fund of coarse Johnsonian sayings, and one of the most famous refers to Edgar. Pressed by a young aide to replace him, the President is said to have replied, ‘No, son, if you’ve got a skunk around, it’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.’
Edgar now had better access to the White House than at any time in his four decades as Director. There followed a four-year period of manipulation that Richard Goodwin, an aide under both Kennedy and Johnson, has likened to the access Soviet Secret Police Chief Beria had to Stalin.
Word went out from Edgar to build special facilities for Johnson at Austin, Texas, the nearest FBI office to the LBJ ranch. A brand-new office was opened at Fredericksburg, even closer to Johnson’s home. Soon an FBI agent was traveling regularly aboard Air Force One, although presidential security was a Secret Service responsibility. Happily for interagency relations, the head of the Secret Service was himself a former FBI agent.
Cartha DeLoach now became Edgar’s link to the President. He had been a favorite for more than a decade, an enforcer of Bureau discipline (including Edgar’s hypocritical code of sexual behavior), a manipulator of the press, and congressional ringmaster. It had been DeLoach, on the eve of the Kennedy presidency, who prevailed on Johnson and Congressman John Rooney to ram through a law ensuring Edgar a bountiful retirement deal should the Kennedys force him out.
DeLoach was appointed liaison to the White House within hours of Kennedy’s assassination – replacing Courtney Evans, who had seemed to get on with the Kennedys rather too well. It was DeLoach who drafted the formula that kept Edgar on as Director after his seventieth birthday. He, rather than a White House aide, even wrote the proclamation.
DeLoach shuttled between the FBI and the White House for five years and became intimate with the First Family in a way unprecedented for a mere agency official. There were lunches at the White House, domino sessions with the President, an Easter weekend with the Johnsons at Camp David. ‘Quite soon,’ he recalled, ‘the President was consulting me frequently, particularly about government appointments.’
When Johnson had trouble getting through to DeLoach’s home number – a teenage daughter was hogging the phone – he sent technicians to install a hot line. ‘They had instructions to