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The FBI’s primary job, Clark revealed, was to snoop on senators and congressmen, key convention delegates, civil rights activists – and Robert Kennedy. He was present when DeLoach reported by telephone direct to the President and to Edgar. Therein lay an irony, for in principle only Kennedy – as Attorney General – had the authority to approve electronic surveillance.

The President later told Edgar the ‘job’ in Atlantic City was one of the finest he had ever seen. ‘DeLoach,’ Edgar scrawled on a report, ‘should receive a meritorious reward.’

Everything appeared to go swimmingly after the Convention – for Johnson and for Edgar. Robert Kennedy departed for the Senate. The Warren Report came out, seemingly closing the door on the Kennedy era itself. Then, on October 14, 1964, with the election just weeks away, a sex and security scandal burst upon the Johnson presidency.

News broke that Walter Jenkins, Johnson’s closest aide, had been arrested in a YMCA toilet, two blocks from the White House, having sex with a retired Army soldier. Jenkins admitted the offense, resigned and took refuge in a hospital room, suffering from ‘exhaustion.’ A rapid FBI inquiry concluded that he had never compromised national security.

Nagging questions remained, however, as to how and why the arrest had been kept secret for a week after it occurred. Nor was it clear why the FBI, supposedly so effective in its security checks, had failed to tell the White House of Jenkins’ arrest for a similar lapse, in the very same toilet, nearly six years earlier. Edgar’s public statement, moreover, failed to mention that Jenkins, a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, had tried to use his influence to reinstate a fellow officer dismissed for sex offenses.

Edgar’s public attitude on homosexuality was normally at least condemnatory, often cruel. On this occasion, however, he visited Jenkins in the hospital and sent him flowers. Jenkins’ brother William was a veteran FBI agent, and his secretary, Mildred Stegall, was at one stage being paid out of the FBI budget. Jenkins and his family were socially close to DeLoach and his wife.

It was Edgar, according to William Sullivan, who came up with the idea of trying to get a doctor to say Jenkins ‘has a brain injury and he’s definitely not a homosexual. It’s because of his brain injury that he acted in such a peculiar, unusual manner on this particular evening.’ The President’s friend Abe Fortas did try to cajole a psychiatrist, Dr Leon Yochelson, to spin such a yarn, but he refused.1

With Edgar’s certain connivance, and probably at his suggestion, Johnson tried to turn the Jenkins case around to damage the Republican candidate for the presidency, Senator Barry Goldwater.

Years later, asked whether there had been FBI surveillance of Goldwater in 1964, DeLoach said he ‘would doubt seriously whether such a thing ever happened … The request was made of me to make so-called name checks of Senator Goldwater’s staff. I came back and told Mr Hoover about it and Mr Hoover said, “What do you recommend?” And I told him I recommended we do nothing, and he said, “I agree with you.” And that’s exactly what we did, nothing.’

Other information has since become available. As the Jenkins case developed, Johnson burst into the office of his aide Bill Moyers. ‘Hoover was just here,’ he snapped, ‘and he says some of Goldwater’s people may have trapped Walter – set him up. I told Hoover to find the – [expletive deleted in Moyers’ account]… I told him I want to know every one of Goldwater’s people who could have done this thing … You call DeLoach and tell him if he wants to keep that nice house in Virginia, and that soft job he has here, his boys had better find those bastards.’

Senator Goldwater, as it happened, was the commander of the 999th Air Force Reserve Squadron, the unit in which Jenkins had served. The two men had traveled together on Air Force planes. On the strength of that, three days alter Jenkins’ resignation, two FBI agents arrived to question the Senator. He was busy campaigning, and the interrogation