Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [190]
‘Next time I saw Hoover,’ said Bates, ‘he told me the Wilson information was “terrific.” He had sent it straight over to President Johnson. When he told me that I thought, “Oh Jesus!” It was just raw intelligence, and I kind of hoped they’d never use it.’
When they did, it caused great diplomatic embarrassment, ‘Johnson didn’t like Wilson,’ said Undersecretary of State George Ball, ‘because Wilson wasn’t supporting him over the Vietnam War. Hoover knew his subject. He knew what pleasure Johnson would get out of any pornographic or scatological information about anyone he didn’t like. The President showed me the gossip on Wilson with great glee. Then, when Wilson brought Marcia Williams along to the first meeting, Johnson got hold of me and said, “Keep that woman out.” I had to make some excuse, telling Wilson the meeting was confined to the government officials directly concerned. It was very awkward.’
Competent sources were later to agree that Edgar’s ‘terrific’ information on the British Prime Minister was part of a smear campaign cooked up by Wilson’s political enemies. ‘Hoover was a very malign influence,’ said Ball. ‘I hated those preposterous canards … They tended to influence the President’s attitudes to the point of distorting policy.’
The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, soon collided with Edgar – partly because he insisted on communicating with the FBI through the correct channel, the office of outgoing Attorney General Robert Kennedy. To change his mind, Edgar sent derogatory material on Kennedy to the President, who then read it aloud to McNamara. Edgar told Johnson the Defense Secretary was part of a Kennedy conspiracy to get him out of the FBI. McNamara, who suspected Edgar of bugging public officials, told the President Edgar was ‘a menace’ and should be fired.
Johnson, however, seemed more committed to Edgar than to his own cabinet members. Should they abandon him by resigning, he warned, two men were going to ‘follow their ass to the end of the earth’: J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the Internal Revenue Service.
Judge Laurence Silberman, the former Deputy Attorney General who examined Edgar’s Official and Confidential files in 1974, concluded that Johnson used the FBI as ‘his private political police force.’ Edgar supplied him, by one estimate, with 1,200 dossiers on individual U.S. citizens.
Members of the press were especially vulnerable. ‘I know the FBI picked up cocktail party chatter,’ said Richard Goodwin. ‘It all went into the files. I remember Johnson talking about certain columnists’ cars being parked in front of the Soviet ambassador’s house, and he must have got that from the FBI. As we got deeper into the Vietnam thing, Johnson became obsessed with the idea that the opposition was coming from some Communist subversive source.’
‘You know, Dick,’ the President told Goodwin one day in 1965, ‘the Communists are taking over the country. Look here …’ Then, showing Goodwin a manila folder, ‘It’s Teddy White’s FBI file. He’s a Communist sympathizer.’ This would have come as news to all who knew Theodore White, author of The Making of the President books.
Edgar sent Johnson material on numerous journalists, including NBC’s David Brinkley, columnist Joseph Kraft, and New York Times veteran Harrison Salisbury. He also sent a dossier on Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, most recently distinguished for his valorous coverage of the Gulf War for Cable News Network.
In 1965, furious over press leaks, the President demanded information on Peter Lisagor, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News. Edgar sent DeLoach scurrying to discover the source of a Lisagor story about the presence of Soviet bombers in Hanoi. The resulting report offered an answer to the question, with some malicious gossip thrown in. The source, DeLoach decided, had been: