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‘I knew DeLoach pretty well,’ said Robert Mardian, later an Assistant Attorney General under President Nixon, ‘and I had been western regional director for Goldwater. Long afterwards, DeLoach told me how they had been ordered by Hoover to bug the Goldwater plane …’

An FBI report to DeLoach, dated nine days into the Jenkins probe, shows that sixteen members of Goldwater’s staff were also investigated. One, it said, ‘frequently dated prostitutes … in his office.’ This report was generated ‘according to the instructions of the Director.’

President Johnson did receive an FBI dossier on his opponent. He even read extracts aloud over the telephone to Democratic Senator George Smathers. As for Edgar, he probably had his own motive to try to torpedo Goldwater. In private, but unbeknownst to him in the presence of a former FBI agent, the Senator had made the mistake of saying he would dump Edgar if elected President.

In the wake of the Jenkins sensation, Edgar also responded to a Johnson request to ‘bring him everything we have on Humphrey.’ The reference was to Senator Hubert Humphrey, the President’s own running mate in the election campaign. FBI reports on the Humphrey team, including a (still censored) ‘allegation’ about the Senator himself, went to the White House within days.

Triumph in 1964 did little to calm Lyndon Johnson. One day the next year, sitting beside his swimming pool in Texas, Johnson talked gloomily about the deepening crisis in Vietnam. ‘I’m going to be known as the president who lost Southeast Asia. I’m going to be the one who lost this form of government. The Communists already control the three major networks and forty major outlets of communication. Walter Lippmann is a Communist and so is Teddy White. And they’re not the only ones. You’d all be shocked at the kind of thing revealed by FBI reports.’

‘Lyndon,’ said his wife, Lady Bird, ‘you shouldn’t read them so much … They have a lot of unevaluated information in them, accusations and gossip which haven’t been proven.’ ‘Never mind that,’ the President growled, ‘you’d be surprised at how much they know about people … I don’t want to be like a McCarthyite. But this country is in a little more danger than we think. And someone has to uncover this information.’

Edgar fed Johnson’s neuroses until the end of his presidency. And all the while he had been orchestrating the most vicious character assassination of his career, aimed at a man today revered as a hero, Martin Luther King.

31

‘The way Martin Luther King was hounded and harassed is a disgrace to every American.’

Senator Walter Mondale, later Vice President, 1975

In late 1963, when Time magazine named Martin Luther King its Man of the Year, Edgar was furious. ‘They had to dig deep in the garbage,’ he scrawled on the wire copy of the announcement, ‘to come up with this one.’

Edgar’s attitude on race – his reluctance to hire black agents and his opposition to the civil rights movement – has been explained as a legacy of his origins. He had been born in a time of virtual apartheid in the South, when blacks were expected to be servants and grateful for it. A black maid had waited on Edgar’s family when he was a child, and he attended a whites-only high school. Years later, when the school admitted black students, outraged alumni returned to tear down the insignia of an institution they regarded as a bastion of white respectability.

Edgar’s prejudice, however, had deep-seated personal origins. Through his youth and into middle age, a rumor circulated in Washington – a rumor of which he was certainly aware – that Edgar himself had black blood in his veins.

In 1958, while researching articles on Edgar for the New York Post, reporter William Dufty enlisted the help of a black agent in the Bureau of Narcotics to obtain a clandestine interview with Edgar’s black manservant, Sam Noisette. As the three men talked, Dufty realized the two blacks were repeatedly referring to Edgar as ‘some kind of spook,