Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [189]
Johnson loved sleaze, and Edgar indulged the appetite, especially when it concerned the Kennedys. One of Edgar’s Assistant Directors, who asked not to be identified, told the following story: ‘We supplied Johnson with a full field investigation report on a young woman who had worked as a hostess on the Kennedy plane and supplied sex services to John Kennedy. Kennedy had brought her into the White House as an assistant press secretary – for obvious reasons. When Johnson came into office we turned up some nude pictures taken when she was still a senior in high school. They went to Johnson, and he took them out of the report folder and put them in his desk. This little girl would come in to clear the Teletypes, and the President would take out these pictures and then give her a good looking over. It became quite a joke around the White House …’
In the first year of the Johnson presidency there was a possibility that Edgar himself might be exposed. Life magazine reporter William Lambert, probing the origins of Johnson’s wealth, conducted interviews with Allan Witwer, the former manager of the hotel owned by the millionaire Clint Murchison, friend to both Johnson and Edgar. Witwer told how Edgar had freeloaded at the hotel; he produced the bills to prove it and revealed that Edgar rubbed shoulders with organized crime figures there.
While Lambert found Witwer credible, Life’s top executives and its attorneys shied away. Already under pressure from the White House for doing the Johnson series, they thought it folly to take on J. Edgar Hoover as well. Lambert passed his information on to Robert Kennedy, who urged old friends at the Justice Department to investigate. It was hard, however, to prove Edgar had broken the law, and his corrupt involvement with Murchison remained a secret.
When Kennedy left the Justice Department and ran for the Senate, Edgar leaked smear material on him to the press. When wiretapping became a controversial issue, he blamed Kennedy for wiretaps conducted during his time as Attorney General. The viciousness and guile of it all is evident from a report filed by Cartha DeLoach. President Johnson, DeLoach reported, wanted:
to get word to the Director that the Director might desire to bring ‘the facts’ concerning Kennedy’s authorization of wiretapping before a Congressional Committee …[Johnson aide] Watson stated the President was most anxious to see that the Director would not get hurt in connection with this matter. He wants to put Kennedy in his place. The President obviously wants to get these facts out, inasmuch as Kennedy will be seriously injured, as far as the left wing is concerned, if such facts become known. At the same time, as the Director knows much better than I do, there are far better ways of getting these facts out than through the medium of a Congressional Committee.
Respectfully,
C. DeLoach
Years later, under questioning by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, DeLoach acted naive. ‘I was an investigator, not a politician … I didn’t know whether it was political or not. We didn’t know what was in the minds of the White House personnel or the President …’
He later became more forthright. ‘President Johnson,’ DeLoach said, ‘knew how to twist arms. He knew how to use people. And he recognized early in the game that to have the FBI on his side and to use the FBI as a tool would be of assistance to him.’
None of this had anything remotely to do with the legitimate business of the FBI – law enforcement and the protection of national security. Yet DeLoach acknowledged his role without a glimmer of an awareness of ethical wrongdoing. He was, he said, just taking orders. ‘I kept the Director constantly advised at all times. I did nothing, at any time, that Mr Hoover was not fully advised of.’
Those who served in the Johnson White House were to shudder at the memory of the effects of Edgar’s mischief. In 1965 the FBI man in London, Charles Bates, picked