John Chancellor \nWASHINGTON - Longtime NBC News anchor and commentator John Chancellor was the target of a 1960s FBI probe into whether he was homosexual - until President Lyndon Johnson ordered the bureau to confirm him in a virtual exercise of executive privilege.
That's according to government documents declassified last spring and just released. Chancellor died in 1996.
The probe began when Chancellor underwent a routine background check after then-President Lyndon Johnson tapped him to run the Voice of America radio network. According to the New York Post, Chancellor's FBI files include two anonymous allegations which investigators never substantiated, citing APBnews.com, which first carried the story over the weekend.
The background checks, done in 1965, discovered Chancellor had a history of alcohol-related arrests in his early 20s but then hinted at "possible immorality," the Post says. The FBI interviewed several about Chancellor's alleged homosexuality and cited "reliable homosexual informants" as telling the agency Chancellor was "one of us" or "friendly to us."
Chancellor led the VOA for two years but returned to NBC, working there until 1993. A former FBI agent and USIA security officer learned of the probe from former co-workers and leaked it to his USIA bosses, the Post says. President Johnson killed the probe by demanding the FBI endorse Chancellor no matter what his past showed.
"FBI personnel had no right or authority to 'tip off' employees of other Federal agencies regarding matters affecting the President," said LBJ in a memo cited among the documents.
In that era, the FBI tended to believe someone in the federal government who was a secret homosexual was subject to foreign blackmail.
NBC would not comment on the Chancellor files, APB.com says.
