When President Johnson's aide Walter Jenkins was arrested for homosexual conduct in a men's room during the 1964 campaign, Silberman said, LBJ aide Bill Moyers directed Hoover to find similar conduct on Barry Goldwater's staff. "Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files," he continued. An "outraged" Moyers telephoned Silberman, he said, to assert that the memo was "phony." "Taken aback," said Silberman, he offered an investigation to publicly exonerate Moyers. "There was a pause on the line, and then he [Moyers] said, 'I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?'" "Silberman's account of our conversation is at odds with mine," Moyers told me when I asked for comment.
During the 1968 campaign, Silberman said Johnson ordered FBI surveillance on Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew, not about the bribery that eventually drove him out of office but to check whether he was in contact with South Vietnam's government. He said LBJ also used the FBI to spy on Democrats, including his aide Richard Goodwin, whom he inherited from President John F. Kennedy but suspected was too close to Robert F. Kennedy.
"I think it would be appropriate to introduce all new [FBI] recruits to the nature of the secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover," Silberman concluded. "And in that connection this country -- and the Bureau -- would be well served if Hoover's name was removed from the Bureau's building."
After polite applause, a conservative gentleman sitting at my table said he thought Hoover on balance was a force for good in America. I disagreed, contending he was a rogue and a law-breaker (though I may be prejudiced by his plans to tap my telephone that were undone by my FBI sources). Nearly a month now has passed without any conservative publicly rising to agree with Larry Silberman that J. Edgar's memory should not be honored.