Newsweek, March 10, 1975

LBJ and the FBI

By Bill Moyers

The door to my office burst open and all 6 feet 4 inches of the President of the United States roared through it. "Good Lord," I thought, "he thinks I leaked that story to Joe Alsop this morning." That is exactly what I thought.

But no.

"Hoover was just here. And he says some of Goldwater's people may have trapped Walter—set him up."

Walter. Walter Jenkins—for 25 years the man closest to Lyndon Johnson. When they come to canonize political aides, he will be the first summoned, for no man ever negotiated the shark-infested waters of the Potomac with more decency and charity or came out on the other side with his integrity less shaken. If Lyndon Johnson owed everything to one human being other than Lady Bird, he owed it to Walter Jenkins. When others of us wandered back and forth, flirting with one career, then another, fickle Doubting Thomases of a sort, Jenkins stayed and kept it all together. And Johnson loved him.

Then, one evening during the campaign of 1964, exhausted from the unending rhythm of twenty-four hours days, overwork, overburdened and probably overwrought from all the demands LBJ and the rest of us kept making on him, Walter Jenkins left the party at Newsweek's news offices a few blocks from the White House and started walking back to his office. He was delayed getting there. Police arrested him at a nearby YMCA and charged him with "disorderly conduct." When the news broke, Jenkins resigned, left Washington and acted courageously as a man ever did. He went back to his hometown, in the face of all the publicity, and made a place for himself and his family. "When I leave here," Lyndon Johnson used to say at the White House, "the first man I'll run to is Walter Jenkins, and I'll tell him he's still the greatest."

ENTRAPMENT TIP

But today the President was thinking other thoughts. J. Edgar Hoover had come to see him and, according to the President's account, brought the news that one or more employees of the Republican National Committee, formerly associated with Senator Goldwater, might have engineered the entrapment of Walter Jenkins. The tip, Hoover suggested, had come from the district police.

The President said: "I told Hoover to find the [expletive deleted]. I told him I want to know every one of Goldwater's people who could have done this thing. And I told him that when I know, I intend…" (this portion also rated X).

He stalked to the door, turned abruptly, pointed his long finger back at me, and said: "You call DeLoach and tell him if he wants to keep that nice house in Virginia, and that soft job he's got here, his boys better find those bastards." And out he stormed.

I did call DeLoach—Deke DeLoach, the FBI liaison to the White House—and told him the President would very much like to have as soon as possible that report on the information the director had just brought to his attention. Then, in the whirlwind wind-up of the campaign, I forgot about the matter until one day DeLoach stopped by the office on other business and casually mentioned that Hoover had told the President that the suspicions could not be substantiated. I wasn't surprised; I had never thought that what happened to Walter Jenkins was a conspiracy of anything more than bone-crushing work and too little rest. Goldwater himself had refused to make a serious issue of it in the campaign. Shortly thereafter, I asked the President to relieve me of liaison with the FBI, which I had inherited upon Walter's departure, and he never again raised the affair with me.

FBI ABUSES

The incident came to mind again last week when Attorney General Edward H. Levi told Congress that abuses of the FBI had spanned three different Administrations, and listed some specific examples he said occurred in the Johnson years.

There have been rumors for a long time: of the bugging of Martin Luther King, of dossiers on congressmen, of prurient souls chuckling over juicy tidbits that had nothing to do with national security. The files on politicians I never knew about, although I did know that the former Majority Leader of the United States Senate hardly needed the FBI to tell him who on Capital Hill was sleeping with whom. The King stories were another thing. The President had been scared by reports that King was getting financial support from Communist sources of which even the civil-rights leader was unaware. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had brought the possibility to his attention, and I remember Johnson became quite agitated. "There's not a God-darn thing you and I can do to help this civil-rights thing," he told Kennedy. "If we put our arms around King and Jim Eastland (the chairman of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee) suddenly calls a press conference to announce that the good doctor-preacher is a Communist front. And don't think Hoover wouldn't tell him."

King was not a Communist front. The investigations not only established that fact but they turned up some totally irrelevant information which Hoover sent over to the White House. This always puzzled me—why that kind of refuse was ever typed up—until I realized, in the quickly fading days of my innocence, that this was the flypaper. J. Edgar Hoover had cornered the market on flypaper.

GOING PUBLIC

We may never know the whole truth about abuses of the FBI, although a few more independent and unintimidatable Attorneys General like Edward Levi may help us to know and prevent their recurrence by going public with the information. I still cannot sort out completely my own understanding of LBJ and the FBI. In my files is a copy of a covering memorandum from the Justice Department for a wiretapping program across which Lyndon Johnson sprawled, in large black letters with a felt pen, "NO!!!!" He could be enormously apprehensive about "turning the gumshoes loose," as he once said, and there were times when he personally feared J. Edgar Hoover.

But I also know that he learned to use Hoover even as Hoover was using him; that he was given to fits of uncontrollable suspicion, once lashing two of his aids for being as "naïve as newborn calves" about the Kennedys, Communists and The New York Times; that he sometimes found gossip about other men's weaknesses a delicious hiatus from work. And that from these grew some of our worst excesses. It is only a short step from outrageous indignation over a possible injustice to a close aide and friend to outrageous indignation over leaks of official secrets to the press, and each can lead to constitutional violations. The problem is in the legitimacy an exalted office with access to unaccountable power and secrecy can bestow upon the darker intimations of human character. It is a problem and a danger, and the best safeguards against it are strict laws rigidly observed and constant public scrutiny.

(© 1975 Newsweek magazine. Reprinted by permission.)