Jack Shafer: J. Edgar Hoover, Bill Moyers and the investigation of homosexuals

When Bill Moyers left his show Now With Bill Moyers at the end of 2004, he told the Associated Press that his immediate project would be a book about the year he worked for Lyndon B. Johnson. Upon returning to PBS in the spring of 2007 to relaunch Bill Moyers Journal, he informed the AP that the book was progressing.

Progressing, yes, but not progressing sufficient that Moyers could say anything definitive about his White House years when the Washington Post asked him last week to comment on its discovery that he had directed the FBI to investigate Johnson administration figures who were"suspected as having homosexual tendencies." He confessed to the Post via e-mail of having scant memories of the incidents of four decades ago but volunteered that the inquiries could have been in response to allegations brought to Johnson by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

To assist Moyers in researching his Johnson book, I spent the better part of Saturday afternoon at the library exploring what Moyers knew about the gay-hunting in the Johnson administration and when he knew it. What I learned, plus what I already reported in a previous column ("The Intolerable Smugness of Bill Moyers"), should help reinvigorate his memory.

As the Post reported, the active search for Johnson administration homosexuals got going just a month before the 1964 presidential election after police arrested top Johnson aide Walter Jenkins as he was performing oral sex on a retired Army sergeant in a YMCA men's room near the White House.

Johnson tried to suppress the news of the arrest and asked his underlings to see if it couldn't be proved that Jenkins had been framed by Republicans. Both strategies failed, which we know in detail thanks to the 2001 book Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965, edited and annotated by historian Michael Beschloss. The secretly taped conversation can be keyword searched on Amazon.

Johnson and his people worried that Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., the Republican candidate for president, would capitalize on the Jenkins arrest to win the election. According to Robert Dallek's Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President, Goldwater declined to take political advantage of the arrest. Dallek writes,"When reporters on his campaign plane pressed him for a comment, he would only speak 'off the record.' 'What a way to win an election,' he said, 'Communists and cocksuckers.'"...

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