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Back in Washington, Edgar took a remarkable step. He asked Andrew Tully, a journalist he trusted, to join him for lunch in his private dining room. ‘I have some things to say,’ he told Tully, ‘but I don’t want you to publish it until after I’m dead.’ Tully agreed, asked one question, then sat back and listened. The question was: ‘Is the President pressuring you to retire?’

‘Not anymore he’s not,’ Edgar replied. ‘I put the kibosh on those jaspers who want to get rid of me … The President asked me what thoughts I had about retirement and I said none, then I told him why. I told him he needed me around to protect him from those people around him. Some of those guys don’t know a goddamned thing about due process of law. They think they can get away with murder. I told the President I hoped I’d live long enough to keep those people from getting him into bad trouble.’

Edgar was scathing about Nixon’s advisers. ‘John Mitchell,’ he said, ‘he’s never even been in a courtroom. He’s not equipped to be Attorney General. Ehrlichman, Haldeman and [Ron] Ziegler [Nixon’s press spokesman]… they don’t know anything except how to sell advertising. That counsel, Dean – he doesn’t know law. I ignore the son of a bitch.’

Edgar spoke of men in ‘the President’s kindergarten’ who kept ‘coming up with half-baked schemes.’ He told how he had squashed the 1970 White House plan for a coordinated campaign against internal unrest. Then, with chilling prescience, he effectively predicted the Watergate disaster. ‘The President,’ he said, ‘is a good man. He’s a patriot. But he listens to some wrong people. By God, he’s got some former CIA men working for him that I’d kick out of my office. Someday that bunch will serve him up a fine mess.’

Whether or not Edgar still had any protective feelings toward Nixon, they were not reciprocated. ‘The hatred of Hoover by Nixon and his staff,’ said James McCord, ‘appeared to be becoming intense … My own experience at CREEP verified this … It was an open secret there that Nixon was out to get Hoover … by any means he possibly could.’

Within days of giving his secret interview to Tully, Edgar provoked the administration even further. A year earlier, against Edgar’s wishes, Attorney General Mitchell had approved secret FBI surveillance of a foreign embassy that the CIA regarded as essential. On February 3, 1972, a report reveals:

Hoover had advised that he was to testify in Congress and would advise the Congress that the installation in the [Chilean mission] was initiated at CIA request.

Edgar was threatening to expose domestic snooping, snooping the administration wanted continued. It fit the scenario painted by McCord, then regularly in touch with his contacts at the CIA and the FBI. ‘Nixon,’ he said, ‘planned to fire Hoover. Hoover learned of it and resolved that he would have to go to Congress with the facts of Nixon’s wiretapping of the news media, the National Security Council staff and of Ellsberg. This Nixon feared.’

The coverage Edgar objected to was discontinued. Edgar made no reference to it in his routine appearance before Congress’ Appropriations Committee, on March 2, 1972. Already, though, he was about to cross Nixon again. In late February, the columnist Jack Anderson had shaken the government with a story claiming the Republicans had accepted a huge cash donation from International Telephone and Telegraph as a payoff for government intervention in an antitrust suit against the company. The story was based on a memo apparently written by Dita Beard, an ITT lobbyist, and authenticated by Anderson before publication. Now, knowing Edgar detested Anderson, Nixon’s counsel John Dean went to see the Director. His mission – to have the Bureau prove the Beard memorandum was a forgery.

‘Hoover,’ Dean recalled, ‘was poised at the end of a long, polished conference table, waiting for me as if I were there to photograph him.’ Dean noticed Edgar was wearing perfume, then launched into his request. Edgar, all sweetness and light, agreed that Anderson, the journalist who had