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Aware of Edgar’s scorn for his peers at other agencies, Nixon played to his vanity by making him Chairman of the Review Committee. Less adroitly, he appointed a presidential assistant, Tom Huston, to coordinate it. Though very right-wing, Huston riled Edgar from the start. He was young – twenty-nine – highly intelligent and well read, and he sported sideburns and longish hair. Edgar wrote him off as a ‘hippie intellectual.’

For a long time now, albeit reluctantly, Edgar had been sending an aide to meetings of the nation’s most prestigious intelligence group, the U.S. Intelligence Board. His attitude to that body is well summed up by an incident during the Nixon era – when each agency was asked to provide a small plaque, bearing its seal, for display on the conference room wall. Edgar had sent one three feet in diameter, three times larger than anyone else’s. Now, as Chairman of Nixon’s Review Committee, he behaved accordingly.

At the first meeting Edgar astonished everyone with introductory remarks saying the President merely wanted a history of the current unrest. When colleagues had to put him right, explaining that Nixon wanted to know what was wrong with intelligence on the radical movements, Edgar turned crimson. Then he abruptly ended the meeting.

Two weeks later Edgar angered the rest of the committee by adding his own footnotes to a text all the agencies had already approved. Then, at the signing session, he amazed everyone by reading the entire forty-three-page document out loud. After each page, as Edgar went around the table asking for comments, he would get Huston’s name wrong. It was ‘Mr Hoffman’ or ‘Mr Hutchinson,’ anything that began with H, but never the correct name. This meeting also ended in discord.

Huston’s recommendations, approved by the President, called for more surveillance of ‘domestic security threats,’ the monitoring of internal communications used by American citizens, fewer restrictions on opening mail, more informants on college campuses, a full-scale resumption of black-bag jobs and the establishment of an umbrella group, linking all the agencies, to manage internal security.

That any president could have approved such a package, the Senate Intelligence Committee would one day declare, was ‘deeply troubling.’ Edgar also objected vociferously, but not on reasons of principle. ‘Hoover was for the Huston plan,’ Nixon said in 1988, ‘but only if he did it. He did not trust the CIA, he didn’t trust anybody else. He was paranoiac, almost, about doing anything that would make him get in bad with the media …’

Tom Huston fought a fierce rear-guard action. He sent a ‘Top Secret – Eyes Only’ message to Haldeman, pointing out that Edgar was the only official raising objections:

At some point, Hoover has to be told who is President. He has become totally unreasonable … The Director of the FBI is paid to take risks where the security of the country is at stake … If he gets his way it is going to look like he is more powerful than the President …

Nothing happened. Richard Nixon never was one for confrontations. Edgar went off on vacation to La Jolla. Tom Huston was moved sideways and eventually resigned. Yet, in a way no one could have understood fully at the time, the ground had shifted. Edgar had alienated men whose actions were to determine his own last days, the future of the FBI and the history of the nation.

William Sullivan, long one of Edgar’s most trusted aides, emerged embittered from the Huston confrontation. Like several of his colleagues in the Domestic Intelligence Division and like Sam Papich, of CIA Liaison, Sullivan had long been grumbling about restrictions in the fight against domestic terrorism. He had also started playing a double game, simultaneously urging Huston on while letting Edgar think he was defending Bureau policy.

There was more than self-preservation at stake, for the men around Edgar had been eyeing the succession. If Edgar was to be replaced from within, Sullivan and DeLoach were the two main contenders.