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Quite apart from what Nixon volunteered, Edgar may have known presidential secrets thanks to electronic surveillance. In August 1970, according to reporter Tad Szulc, a specialist on intelligence matters, the Secret Service had discovered a minute bugging device concealed in the wall of the Oval Office. It had been planted there during routine repainting by an interior decorator employed by the General Services Administration. ‘My sources believed it was Hoover’s operation,’ Szulc said recently. ‘And if you are getting that kind of seed information you have a total mastery of what’s going on in the mind of the President.’

Edgar may not have needed a bug to learn about some of the President’s most secret conversations, including those about himself. He reportedly had access to the tapes Nixon himself made for posterity, the recordings we now know as the Watergate Tapes. For although the taping system had been installed by the Secret Service, it was reportedly insecure from the moment of its inception in early 1971.

In 1977, shortly before his death, William Sullivan talked with the film producer Larry Cohen, then embarking on a movie about Edgar’s life. ‘He told me,’ said Cohen, ‘that Hoover was aware Nixon was taping his own conversations. He knew about it because several of the Secret Service agents involved were former FBI agents. He said FBI officials knew where the tapes were kept – room 175½ of the Executive Office Building, a place other people had access to. Hoover aides had been able to go in there on more than one occasion and borrow tapes, and even played them at parties – particularly tapes where Nixon made embarrassing faux pas. They would play them and people would laugh, and then they’d put the tapes back again. It was a slipshod affair; it wasn’t like they were locked up in a safe or anything. How Nixon could’ve allowed this to happen is beyond our ken. I guess he thought he was immune.’

In fact, Nixon became more vulnerable with every passing month. If, as Ehrlichman testified, he confided in Edgar about the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, he presumably did so on the assumption Edgar would never tell. Yet in October 1971 the President did something guaranteed to infuriate Edgar, should he find out.

It was then that, as reported earlier, Nixon approved the internal White House report on Edgar’s incompetence, urging that Edgar be eased out as soon as possible. Its author was Gordon Liddy, who was still in regular contact with former FBI colleagues. Within weeks, moreover, Liddy became general counsel for CREEP (the Committee to Re-elect the President) and there worked alongside another former FBI – and CIA – agent, James McCord. McCord, unlike most of Nixon’s henchmen, thought Edgar ‘the finest law enforcement officer the world has ever seen.’

Then there was Fred LaRue, a White House political operative also about to join CREEP. He was the son of Ike LaRue, an oilman friend of Clint Murchison’s who had been friendly with Edgar at the Del Charro. John Caulfield, up to his neck in White House dirty tricks, was close to Joseph Woods, former FBI agent and brother of the President’s secretary, Rose Mary. Woods was intensely loyal to Edgar.

With potential sources like that, and with his other intelligence pipelines out of the White House, it is likely that Edgar knew a great deal about the plotting against him. By New Year’s 1972, in spite of the public show of trust, the trip with the President on Air Force One, the birthday cake and the smiles, Edgar’s relations with Nixon were threadbare.

During a delay before the flight that day, Edgar spent forty-five minutes in the back of a limousine talking gloomily with his Special Agent in Charge in Miami, Kenneth Whittaker. ‘He was upset,’ Whittaker recalled. ‘He told me about his problems with Sullivan, and he talked about Nixon. He wasn’t high on Nixon. “Let me tell you, Whittaker,” he said, “Pat Nixon would make a better president than him.” It was the