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‘Dear Mr President,’ DeLoach wrote in a gushing letter early in the administration:

Thank you for allowing Barbara and me to have a ‘moment of greatness’ with the world’s number one family yesterday afternoon. The informality, yet quiet dignity you possess, never ceases to inspire me … The telecast was excellent … I received a call at 9:00 P.M. last night from my elderly Mother [sic]… to report that ‘Mr Johnson is the best thing that has ever happened to this Nation …’

Sincerely,

Deke

The President liked to say he wanted men around him who were ‘loyal enough to kiss my ass in Macy’s window and say it smelled like a rose.’ DeLoach was the perfect candidate, an ambitious assistant dedicated to ensuring not only that Johnson’s will was done, but that it coincided with Edgar’s.

Edgar too played the sycophant. One of the President’s public appearances, Edgar told Johnson, ‘brought out your humbleness …’ ‘I only wish,’ he gushed after a press conference, ‘our Washington Senators baseball team had an outfielder as capable of fielding some of the hot ones you handled. They were certainly loaded but you handled them like a Mickey Mantle.’

The two men were linked by fear. Edgar’s was the chronic fear of a forced end to his rule. Johnson’s hidden terrors are only now being unveiled. Two senior aides, Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, became so alarmed by the President’s state of mind that, secretly and unbeknownst to each other, they turned to psychiatrists for advice. ‘The diagnosis was the same,’ Goodwin was to reveal. ‘We were describing a textbook case of paranoid disintegration, the eruption of long-suppressed irrationalities … The disintegration could continue, remain constant or recede, depending on the strength of Johnson’s resistance.’

Others, like former press secretary George Reedy, believed the President was ‘a manic depressive.’ Johnson worried constantly about the danger of assassination and was obsessed with the notion that survivors of the Kennedy administration were plotting his downfall. He came to believe the press wanted to destroy him, that the press corps and government were riddled with Communists.

Edgar had fulminated against enemies real or imagined all his life, and his policeman’s function had long since taken a backseat to politics. In the Johnson presidency, the combination of psychoses made a dangerous mix. Vital checks and balances, designed to ensure the separation of the executive from law enforcement, simply lapsed.

For both men, the first obvious enemy was Robert Kennedy, who remained Attorney General until September 1964. Johnson thought him ‘that little runt,’ and Kennedy considered Johnson ‘mean, vicious, an animal in many ways.’ For all that, Kennedy felt Johnson needed him to win the coming election, and he saw himself as Johnson’s vice presidential running mate. It was a delusion. Johnson spurned Kennedy and his people from the start.

Edgar and Kennedy acted out a similar charade. In January 1964, at a party in the Justice Department, Kennedy gave Edgar a delayed Christmas gift, a set of gold cuff links embossed with the Department seal, the Attorney General’s initials and his own.

While others received the same gift, Kennedy had made a point of including the Director, perhaps as a last-ditch attempt to ease the tension. Edgar responded with a ‘Dear Bob’ note, saying the cuff links would be ‘a constant reminder of a friendship I shall always treasure.’

Even as he wrote it, a stream of FBI information was going to President Johnson on Kennedy people still working at the White House. Though much of it was requested by Johnson, the tone of the FBI correspondence leaves no doubt of Edgar’s complicity.

Edgar stirred up trouble at every opportunity. In February, from Minneapolis, his Agent in Charge reported gossip about a dinner at which members of the ‘Kennedy crowd’ had supposedly plotted to ‘create a situation whereby the President would be forced to pick the Attorney General,