by Tim Weiner
With the 1964 election three weeks away, LBJ’s chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, had been caught by a Washington, D.C., vice detail having oral sex with a man in a YMCA bathroom a block from the White House. Sexual entrapment for the purpose of political blackmail was widely assumed to be a time-honored technique of Communist intelligence services. In a matter of days, Hoover was able to assure Johnson that the case had no national security implications.
“I’m very grateful to you for your thoroughness and your patriotism and the way you have handled it, as I am everything else you have done,” LBJ told him.
“Of course, I realize the spot that you have been in and the terrible other burdens you have had, and it’s awful bad this thing happened. But I think we handled it with compassion,” Hoover said.
“You just remember, my friend, you have done your duty as you have been doing all your life, and I’m proud of it. And I’m prouder of you now than I have ever been before,” LBJ told him. “And as long as your Commander-in-Chief feels that way about you—”
“That’s all I care about,” Hoover replied.
The homosexuality of his top aide mystified the president, though. “I guess you are going to have to teach me something about this stuff,” LBJ said to Hoover. “I swear I can’t recognize ’em. I don’t know anything about ’em.”
“It’s a thing that you just can’t tell sometimes—just like in the case of this poor fellow Jenkins,” Hoover replied. “There are some people who walk kinda funny and so forth, that you might kinda think might be a little bit off or maybe queer.”
A week later, a deeply uncomfortable Robert Kennedy sat next to President Johnson in a limousine winding through the streets of New York.
LBJ had joined RFK on the campaign trail five days before the election as Kennedy campaigned for the U.S. Senate. The president began a guarded conversation about the political bombshells that had been kept in Jenkins’s office safe. He told Kennedy that the safe held FBI reports detailing the sexual debauchery of members of the Senate and House who consorted with prostitutes. The president wondered aloud whether they should be leaked selectively, against Republicans, before election day.
“He told me he had spent all night sitting up and reading the files of the FBI on all these people,” Kennedy recounted. “And Lyndon talks about that information and material so freely. Lyndon talks about everybody, you see, with everybody. And of course that’s dangerous.” Kennedy had seen some of those files as attorney general. He felt their disclosure could “destroy the confidence that people in the United States had in their government and really make us a laughingstock around the world.”
Nor were these the only sex files the FBI shared with the president.
On November 18, 1964, Hoover, enraged that Martin Luther King was set to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, doubly incensed by King’s criticism of the FBI’s performance in the civil rights field, held a highly unusual press conference, calling a group of women reporters into his offices and proclaiming that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.” LBJ, conferring with Deke DeLoach two days later, expressed a degree of sympathy for Hoover’s position.
“He knows Martin Luther King,” LBJ said with a low chuckle. “I mean, he knows him better than anybody in the country.”
The FBI intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan, had run his own COINTELPRO against Martin Luther King. He had a package of the King sex tapes prepared by the FBI’s lab technicians, wrote an accompanying poison-pen letter, and sent both to King’s home. His wife opened the package.
“King, look into your heart,” the letter read. The American people soon would “know you for what you are—an evil, abnormal beast.… There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
The president knew Hoover had taped King’s sexual assignations. Hoover was using the information in an attempt to disgrace King at the White House, in Congress, and in his own home. DeLoach himself had offered newspaper reporters and editors a chance to hear the sex tapes. When Nicholas Katzenbach, now the acting attorney general of the United States, got wind of these offers to the press, he called DeLoach into his office and confronted him.
“He flatly denied any such activity and wanted to know who had been circulating such lies,” Katzenbach recalled. “I was totally convinced who in fact was lying, but I was without the means to prove it.” Convinced that the civil rights movement faced disaster, Katzenbach flew to see the president at the LBJ Ranch in Texas, where Johnson was enjoying a break after his landslide victory in the November 1964 presidential election. The president listened, asked a few questions, and moved on.
LBJ could not help but admire the Machiavellian force of Hoover’s attack. “I’ll tell you,” he told Katzenbach on March 4, 1965, “when Martin Luther King questioned his integrity, he goddamned sure responded pretty effectively!”
LBJ’s estimation of Hoover hit an all-time high on March 25, 1965, after the murder of Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights activist driving from Selma, Alabama, with a black passenger. A car pulled alongside her on a dark highway and a gunman shot her to death. The FBI broke the case immediately. An undercover informer named Gary Thomas Rowe was riding in the car with three fellow Klansmen.
On March 26, at 8:10 A.M., LBJ and Hoover talked about the arrests.
“We had one of our men in the car,” Hoover told an incredulous president. “Fortunately he had no gun and did no shooting. But he has identified the two men who had guns and fired guns.… We know who they are, and then we’ll bring ’em in and shake ’em down in interrogation.… We’ve got the informant in the office and we’re talking to him. He’s scared to death, naturally, because he fears for his life.”
“What is an infiltrator and an informant?” LBJ asked. “You hire someone and they join the Klan?”
Hoover’s pride practically pulsed through the telephone line. “They go to someone who is in the Klan and persuade him to work for the government,” he explained. “We pay ’em for it. Sometimes they demand a pretty high price, other times they don’t. For instance, those three bodies we found in Mississippi, we had to pay $30,000 for that … and after we found the bodies, we ascertained the identity of one man, and from him—we broke him down, and he gave us the identities of the other nineteen, two of whom confessed.”
Johnson was agog. “That’s wonderful, Edgar,” he said.
The case was a mixed blessing for Neil Shanahan, the FBI agent who handled the covert Klansman in the car, Gary Rowe. “We had this case wrapped up two hours after it happened,” Shanahan remembered. But how was the FBI to handle the fact that Rowe was a party to a murder? “We didn’t have any witness protection at that time,” Shanahan said. “I was his witness protection plan.… It was a problem for which there was no solution.”
LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover stood side by side in the East Room of the White House at noon on March 26, in a live address to the nation. The president announced the arrests of the four Klansmen, including the undercover FBI informant. Praising Hoover and the FBI for the swift arrests, without mentioning the FBI’s man inside the car, Johnson denounced the Klan as “enemies of justice who for decades have used the rope and the gun and the tar and the feathers to terrorize their neighbors.”
“We will not be intimidated by the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan any more than we will be intimidated by the terrorists in North Vietnam,” Johnson said, surely the first time a president had denounced the cross burners and the Vietcong in the same breath. Hoover stood at LBJ’s right, silent and stony.
They spoke again by telephone, in a brief moment of mutual pleasure, on April 13, 1965. “I sure am proud of what you’ve done on this civil rights thing, and I think history will so show it,” the president said. “Anybody could have a man in that car, that’s the most unthinkable thing I ever heard of! And it makes me scared by God to even talk back to my wife! ’Fraid you’ll have somebody there arresting me!”
; Hoover and Johnson laughed heartily together, a rare sound in the annals of American history. That moment of mirth ended one of the last free-and-easy conversations the two men ever had. In eleven days Lyndon Johnson would face a crisis that he could not handle. He would have to turn to Hoover to save him.
31
“THE MAN I’M DEPENDING ON”
THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC blew up on Saturday, April 24, 1965. President Kennedy had dreamed of making the country a showcase for democracy. Now it was a cauldron of fear and hate.
A right-wing junta had overthrown President Juan Bosch, the nation’s first freely elected leader. Then Bosch’s loyalists counterattacked. Bosch, a dreamy liberal, had fled to San Juan. His predecessor, Joaquín Balaguer, the last puppet president of the past dictatorship, had fled to New York. Blood ran in the streets of the capital, Santo Domingo.
At 9:35 A.M. on April 24, LBJ called the American diplomat he trusted most, Thomas Mann, a tough Texas conservative who served as an undersecretary of state.
“We’re really going to have to set up that government down there and run it and stabilize it one way or another,” LBJ told Mann. “This Bosch is no good.”
The president had put himself in the position of picking the next leader of the Dominican Republic. The problem was that almost no one in the United States government knew what was happening in Santo Domingo. The CIA station chief was out of commission with a bad back. The American ambassador was visiting his mother in Georgia. The ranking American officers in the capital were dodging bullets.
But J. Edgar Hoover and his man in San Juan had a handle on the case.
The position of special agent in charge was the highest a man could hold in the FBI without working at headquarters—“the Seat of Government,” as Hoover called it. The special agent in charge was the prince of his city, whether it be New York, New York, or Butte, Montana. Within those ranks, Wallace F. Estill was unique. He was the special agent in charge of Puerto Rico.
Not many men in Hoover’s FBI were as worldly. Born in 1917, Estill had joined the Bureau in 1941. He had investigated Nazi platinum smugglers in Uruguay, gathered intelligence on Russia from Eskimos in Alaska, served as Hoover’s official liaison with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and somehow managed through it all to keep his cool, a rare quality after twenty-four years under Hoover.
Wally Estill had been keeping a very close eye on Juan Bosch. Estill and the Bureau were listening to his telephone calls from San Juan as he plotted his way back to power in the Dominican Republic. The legal basis for the technical surveillance was dubious at best. “We have no evidence that Bosch has violated or conspired to violate any U.S. laws,” Tom Mann had written two months earlier. “What he has done is exercise the right of free speech.”
But Hoover and the Bureau had fingered Bosch as a Communist as early as 1961, and the charge, once made, was indelible.
Hoover himself authorized the “tech”—an unlimited electronic surveillance—on Bosch in San Juan; Hoover’s writ extended to the island because Puerto Rico was a U.S. commonwealth, under U.S. law. “With Bureau approval a tech was placed on Bosch’s phone,” Estill remembered. “It was successful beyond our wildest expectations.”
The FBI listened as Bosch and his aides in San Juan talked to their allies in Santo Domingo. The wiretapping showed that “Bosch was not only the nominal head of the revolt, he was the de facto leader,” Estill said. “We relayed this to the Bureau which, in turn, furnished it to the White House.”
Bosch became suspicious that his phone might be tapped. “He resorted to the use of pay phones throughout the city, and even the phones of friends and supporters” in Puerto Rico, Estill said. “With oral authorization”—from Hoover—“we expanded our coverage until we had the capacity, limited by available manpower, to monitor virtually every call between Puerto Rico and elsewhere.”
On Tuesday morning, April 27, Undersecretary Mann advised President Johnson “to try to get a junta set up” in the Dominican Republic. In the afternoon, as the confrontation between Bosch’s supporters and the regime’s soldiers deepened, President Johnson sent the United States Navy to evacuate roughly one thousand Americans from the island. That night, a sleepless president, talking to the duty officer in the White House Situation Room at 3:30 A.M., monitored United States Air Force bombing runs over Vietnam.
The following day, April 28, the president swore in a new CIA director, Admiral William F. “Red” Raborn, another fellow Texan, in the Cabinet Room at the White House. Every ranking member of the CIA was present. But when the six-minute ceremony was over, the first thing LBJ did was to retreat to the Oval Office for an eight-minute one-on-one conversation with Hoover. “Mr. Hoover expressed his deep concern for the communistic activities in this hemisphere as well as affecting the Vietnamese war,” according to the president’s daily diary records.
As night fell, Johnson ordered four hundred United States Marines to the Dominican Republic, the first landing of American troops in the Western Hemisphere since 1928.
At dawn on April 29, the marine guards at the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo came under fire from snipers. LBJ ordered one thousand more marines to hit the shores. That afternoon, Hoover came to the White House for a twenty-minute briefing, alone with the president. Hoover saw a global threat: as the Communists were moving in the Caribbean, and the Kremlin was driving the Vietcong, American Marxists and their masters in Moscow were mobilizing the antiwar movement in the United States. What was happening in the Dominican Republic was part of a worldwide pattern, he said.
“THE ENEMY HAS THE ROADS”
LBJ received a good deal of unreliable intelligence on the Dominican Republic from the CIA and Red Raborn. “In my opinion this is a real struggle mounted by Mr. Castro,” the admiral told the president, with little evidence.
LBJ wanted to believe in him. On April 30, the president told his lawyer, Abe Fortas, that the CIA had “men right in these operations—just like Hoover had one in that car in Alabama—that know what’s happening.”
“And there ain’t no doubt about this being Castro now,” the president told Fortas. “They are moving other places in the hemisphere. It may be part of a whole Communistic pattern tied to Vietnam.… Our choice is whether we’re going to have Castro or intervention.… I think the worst domestic political disaster we could suffer would be for Castro to take over.”
That same day, the president decided to intervene with the full force of the American military. He sent a three-star army general, Bruce Palmer, Jr., and the 18th Airborne Corps, including the 82nd Airborne Division, into the Dominican Republic. More than twenty thousand American soldiers and special operations forces and psychological warfare officers joined the marines. The week before, LBJ had sent forty-nine thousand more American troops to Vietnam.
On May 1, General Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave General Palmer his marching orders: “Your announced mission is to save U.S. lives. Your unannounced mission is to prevent the Dominican Republic from going Communist. The President has stated that he will not allow another Cuba. You are to take all necessary measures to accomplish this mission.”
American forces interposed themselves between the soldiers of the junta and the soldiers loyal to President Bosch (the “rebels,” to the Americans). A tense standoff set in, marked by skirmishing, sniper fire, shelling, and savage nighttime raids against civilians.
Intelligence was the most precious commodity—but only the FBI’s Wally Estill had it, by virtue of his electronic surveillance of Bosch in San Juan and his allies in the Dominican Republic.
“A rebel artillery battalion lobbed a number of rounds into the U.S. lines” in Santo Domingo, Estill recounted. “My phone rang and our receptionist announced that the Bureau was on the line.” It was Al Belmont, Hoover’s ranking assistant director. “Immediately I heard Mr. Belmont demanding to know whether those shots were fired with the approval of the rebel leadership. I responded that I would have to
run upstairs and poll those on the tech to see what might have been intercepted and I would call him back. He responded with an emphatic NO! and said that President Johnson was holding on Belmont’s other line and prepared to order our troops to respond with a devastating barrage that would demolish the rebels unless assured that the rebel barrage was an unauthorized event.
“I ran upstairs and loudly queried those on duty. We had just intercepted a call from the rebel headquarters to Bosch explaining that a young artillery officer had ordered the shots fired—for whatever reason. It had been without approval and contrary to orders. The officer had been relieved of his assignment and would be disciplined. As I relayed the information to Belmont, and he to Johnson I could feel, even over the phone, the tension ease. Our retaliatory barrage did not occur.”
On May 5, LBJ talked to George Mahon, a thirty-year Democratic congressman from Texas. “With all these terroristic techniques that are developing in the world, I’m afraid that the time is coming, just like this thing in Santo Domingo, that they are refining the instruments of terror,” the congressman said. “They could even blow up the Capitol someday.”
“No question about it,” LBJ replied. “And we’ve got to meet it head on.”
The president met the threat by ordering Hoover to set up an FBI intelligence network at the American Embassy in Santo Domingo. The order was arguably illegal; the FBI had no jurisdiction. Hoover titled the operation DOMSIT, for Dominican Situation. He started rounding up two dozen agents who spoke Spanish, named each one a LEGAT, or legal attaché, wrangled diplomatic passports for them, and began dispatching them to the Caribbean that night.