Enemies

by Tim Weiner

  “I’ll give it my personal attention, Mr. President,” Hoover said.

  The FBI sent squads of agents to spy on the diplomatic compounds of allies and enemies alike. They gave special attention to the embassy of South Vietnam, America’s faltering partner in the war on communism, trying to see if Americans were working with foreign diplomats and spies to subvert the president.

  “A PILLAR OF STRENGTH IN A CITY OF WEAK MEN”

  Lyndon Johnson renounced his power on March 31, 1968. He said he would not seek reelection. He spoke to the nation on television, his face a crumpled mask of exhaustion, his voice tinged with bitterness and despair.

  To LBJ’s anguish, and to Hoover’s anger, Senator Robert F. Kennedy immediately became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Both men had good reason to believe that their most bitter political enemy would be the next president. Hoover feared a concomitant surge from the left wing of America, and most of all a rise among the radicals in the black power movement. RFK’s campaign was catalyzing black voters across America; the candidate had a newfound fervor for the politics of liberation.

  Four days after LBJ stood down from the presidential election, Hoover wrote to his field agents to be on guard against the forces he had labeled BLACK HATE: “The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

  The next evening, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

  The killing unleashed unfettered rage across the country; the flames burned close to the White House. Returning from King’s funeral in Memphis, Attorney General Ramsey Clark looked down upon Washington, D.C., from his airplane. The burning city, aglow as night fell, was in the grip of the most dangerous insurrection since the war of 1812. King’s killer, James Earl Ray, eluded the biggest manhunt in FBI history by taking a bus to Toronto and an airplane to London. A Scotland Yard detective arrested him sixty-six days later as he tried to board a flight for Brussels.

  On April 23, the Students for a Democratic Society seized Columbia University; six days later police stormed the campus and arrested seven hundred students. It took the FBI ten more days to respond. The response was COINTELPRO—NEW LEFT.

  The first wave of the FBI’s national attack on the antiwar movement included explicit instructions from Hoover and Sullivan to all field offices: Instigate conflicts among New Left leaders. Exploit the rifts between SDS and its rival factions. Create the false impression that an FBI agent stood behind every mailbox, that informants riddled their ranks. Use disinformation to disrupt them. Drive them mad. But COINTELPRO was behind the curve. More than one hundred campuses across the country had already been hit by student protests. The marches were breaking barricades, and at their fringes were militants willing to toss Molotov cocktails and more. Hoover sent out a fierce call to arms for his special agents in charge across America. “I have been appalled by the reaction of some of our field offices to some of the acts of violence and terrorism which have occurred … on college campuses,” he wrote. “I expect an immediate and aggressive response.”

  Hoover saw a gathering storm unlike anything since the great police, coal, and steel strikes that swept the nation as the American Left rose up after World War I. But the FBI had no answer to the violence and rage that shook America that spring.

  Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6. Millions of Americans had put their hopes in him. Hoover was more cold-eyed. “He became a kind of Messiah for the generation gap and individuals who were pro-King and still are,” Hoover wrote in a memo to his top aides after RFK’s death. Kennedy’s election would have been the end of Hoover’s power.

  The murder left the path to the White House open for a man who vowed to restore the rule of law and order. Hoover now had reason to hope for a restoration, a return to Republican verities, and a renaissance for the FBI. His old friend Richard Nixon might be elected president in November.

  It was a very close call. The contest between Nixon and LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, swung on public opinion about the war in Vietnam. Half a million American soldiers now fought; they died by the hundreds each week. Ten days before the election, after an all-night meeting with his closest military and intelligence aides, Johnson was set to announce a halt to the American bombing of Vietnam and a plan for a negotiated peace. But at the last minute, President Thieu of South Vietnam balked.

  “We’ve lost Thieu,” LBJ told an aide on the eve of the election. “He thinks that we will sell him out.”

  The FBI had detected evidence of a plot to sabotage LBJ’s plans for a cease-fire in Vietnam. The plot appeared to the president to be the work of the Nixon campaign.

  Three days before the election, LBJ said he was “personally watching the traffic”—telephone calls and telegrams being intercepted at the embassy of South Vietnam by the FBI and the National Security Agency—and that he had detected Nixon’s scheme to torpedo the peace talks. He ordered the FBI to place Anna Chennault, the most famous representative of Chinese anti-communism, under surveillance.

  LBJ suspected that she was Nixon’s go-between. FBI headquarters sent a top secret message to the president on Monday, November 4, the day before the election: “Anna Chennault traveled in her Lincoln Continental from her residence to the Vietnamese Embassy where she remained for approximately thirty minutes.” After that, the FBI reported, she went to 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue and entered room 205—an unmarked Nixon campaign office.

  LBJ summarized what he had learned about the Chennault affair on the eve of the election. “She says to the South Vietnamese Embassy—she was a carrier, that’s what she was—she said, ‘I have just heard from my boss … And you tell your boss to hold on a while longer.’ And that’s the nut of it.”

  Nixon won the presidency by a very narrow margin: fewer than half a million votes, roughly one-seventh of one percent of the electorate. A peace accord would surely have worked to Humphrey’s advantage.

  LBJ was convinced that Nixon had cut a secret bargain with the government of South Vietnam to win his victory. The essence was this: Don’t make a peace agreement with Johnson and Humphrey. Wait until I’m elected. I will get you a better deal.

  “Now, that is the story, Dick,” LBJ said in a heated telephone call to Nixon after the election, all but accusing him of an act tantamount to treason. “And it is a sordid story.”

  Nixon denied it to his dying day. But the conversation left him with the indelible impression that the president of the United States had used the FBI to spy on him.

  The president did not dream of going public with the accusation. The mere fact that he had ordered the FBI to put the Nixon campaign under surveillance would have been explosive enough. But a public accusation that Nixon had torpedoed the peace talks would have been the political equivalent of nuclear warfare.

  LBJ had to make peace with him. On December 12, he invited Nixon to the White House for a two-hour meeting. They found common ground in their admiration for the work of J. Edgar Hoover.

  In the Oval Office, Johnson picked up the telephone, and he had a three-way chat with Hoover and Nixon. The call went unrecorded. But Nixon remembered the president saying: “If it hadn’t been for Edgar Hoover, I couldn’t carry out my responsibilities as Commander in Chief—period. Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men.”

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  THE ULTIMATE WEAPON

  RICHARD NIXON CAME to power with a soaring vision of world peace. If he succeeded, he thought he could reunite a nation at war with itself. If he failed, he feared the United States itself might fall.

  He wanted to find a way out of Vietnam. He thought he could end the Cold War with Russia and China. His political calculus of the price of compromise with the leaders of world communism was brutal: “The risk of war goes down, but the risk of conquest without a war through subversion and covert means goes up geometrically.”

  His hopes for the
world hinged on secret government in America. His policies and plans, from carpet bombings to the diplomacy of détente, were clandestine, hidden from all but a few trusted aides. But he knew the chances for the absolute secrecy he sought were slim.

  “I will warn you now,” LBJ had told him at the White House in December 1968, “the leaks can kill you.” He advised Nixon to depend on Hoover, and Hoover alone, to keep his secrets and protect his power: “You will rely on him time and time again to maintain security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”

  But Nixon put his complete trust in no one—not even Hoover, a man whom he called “my closest personal friend of all in public life.”

  They had been cronies, as Nixon put it, for more than twenty years. Hoover had schooled the callow newcomer to Congress in 1947. His tutelage in the political tactics of the war on communism had been Nixon’s primal experience of power. They had shared their thoughts in confidence a hundred times throughout the 1950s. Hoover had never lost touch; he had been a source of political counsel throughout Nixon’s long exile from Washington. Hoover had been more than a source of secret information; he was a trusted political adviser. He had never ceased to feed Nixon’s fears of political subversion.

  The two men spoke at least thirty-eight times, face-to-face or on the phone, over the first two years of the new administration—before Nixon plugged in his hidden microphones at the White House. Every few weeks, as Nixon remembered, “he’d come in alone” and talk at length about the threats that faced America. “Much of it was extremely valuable,” Nixon said. “And it never leaked.”

  They talked for hours over dinners at the White House, at Hoover’s home, on Nixon’s presidential yacht. The supper for four on the Sequoia included Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. “Almost unbelievable conversation,” Haldeman wrote in his private diary. “J. Edgar went on and on,” recounting “detailed reports of great FBI operations.” Hoover was “a real character out of days of yore”—and Nixon was “fascinated by him.”

  Hoover came to see Nixon at the headquarters of the presidential transition team at the elegant Pierre Hotel in New York at the end of 1968. He was “florid and fat-faced,” and “he looked unwell,” recalled John Ehrlichman, who would serve as Nixon’s White House counsel and Hoover’s White House liaison. But his powers of speech were undiminished.

  Hoover told Nixon that he should be cautious about what he said on the telephone to LBJ during the days of the transition, and careful what he said on the telephone once he took office. He could be taped. Hoover explained that the Army Signal Corps controlled the presidential communications system and monitored all calls patched through the White House switchboard; the way Nixon understood it, a corporal could listen in on the president.

  The director then pointedly reminded Nixon about the powers of surveillance that were at a president’s command. Years later, Nixon was compelled by an order from Congress to give a formal statement about what Hoover had told him that day.

  Hoover emphasized that the FBI had “conducted, without a search warrant,” black-bag jobs, break-ins, and bugging for every president since FDR, Nixon said. Its skills included “surreptitious entries and intercepts of voice and non-voice communications.” The Bureau was especially adept at hunting down leakers, Hoover confided. Wiretapping was “the most effective means” it had.

  Nixon also learned from Hoover how to lie to Congress about wiretapping without being caught.

  “That was Mr. Hoover’s common practice,” Nixon said in a secret sworn deposition to Watergate prosecutors, unsealed in November 2011. “He told me about it. He said, ‘You know, about a month or so before I ever go up to testify before the Appropriations Committee I discontinue all taps … so that when they ask me the question as to whether we are tapping anybody, I can say no.’ ” Once Hoover was done with his annual appearances in Congress, the FBI would turn the taps back on.

  “Hoover, over a period of fifty years, always stonewalled the question,” Nixon said, “and he was always technically truthful.”

  Nixon revived the FBI’s traditions of wiretaps, bugs, and black-bag jobs. They quickly became a part of the political culture of the Nixon White House. He ordered Hoover back into the field of political warfare.

  “THERE WAS ONLY ONE WAY TO DEAL WITH THIS”

  Nixon had apocalyptic visions of a revolution in America, his dark thoughts driven deeper by the political assassinations, ghetto riots, and antiwar marches of the sixties. His inaugural parade on January 20, 1969, ran into a brief but furious hail of rocks, bottles, and beer cans tossed by hundreds of antiwar protesters. On the campaign trail, Nixon’s mantra had been “Bring Us Together.” The people he thought were ripping America apart were screaming curses at his black limousine as it rolled to the White House.

  The early days of his presidency were marked by alarming bombings and shoot-outs: radicals attacked army recruiting offices and Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) centers on campus; Puerto Rican nationalists blew up the draft board in San Juan; black militants aimed sniper attacks at police. Hoover had proclaimed the Black Panther Party and its photogenic leaders the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. His intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan, had succeeded through COINTELPRO at placing informers at high levels inside the party, which by 1969 was already starting to fragment. But the FBI did not have a clue about the student movement, and the students were the ones who worried Nixon the most.

  Nixon feared that they were a subversive threat as powerful as the Soviets, the Chinese, and the Vietcong. He spoke of the campus uprisings at American universities in one of his first major addresses.

  “This is the way civilizations begin to die,” he said. He quoted Yeats: “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.”

  The correlation of forces was changing in America. Nixon would remake the Supreme Court by appointing right-wing justices. He vowed repeatedly to reestablish respect for the law and the power of the presidency. He had named the deeply conservative John N. Mitchell as attorney general to restore order to the United States, continuing the political tradition of hiring his campaign manager to run the Justice Department. Mitchell had a placid, pipe-puffing demeanor and a passionate devotion to the president. He would do anything Nixon asked of him, and he treated Hoover with the deference the director demanded. “Attorneys General seldom directed Mr. Hoover,” Nixon said. “It was difficult even for Presidents.”

  From his first week in office, Nixon demanded secret intelligence on the radicals. “He wanted to know who was doing it, and what was being done to catch the saboteurs,” Ehrlichman wrote. The president told his White House counsel to go see Hoover, to establish himself as “his friend and White House confidant,” and to set up a direct channel for secret communications between the FBI and the White House.

  Ehrlichman approached the director with caution. His staff had warned him “that every meeting in Hoover’s office was secretly filmed or videotaped. But they did not prepare me for the Wizard of Oz approach that his visitors were required to make.” From the corridors of Justice, Ehrlichman was ushered through double doors guarded by Hoover’s personal attendants. He walked into a room crammed with tributes to Hoover—plaques and citations emblazoned with emblems of American eagles and eternally flaming torches. The anteroom led to a second, more formal room, with hundreds more awards. That led to a third trophy room with a highly polished desk. The desk was empty.

  “J. Edgar Hoover was nowhere to be seen,” he wrote. “My guide opened a door behind the desk, at the back of the room, and I was ushered into an office about twelve or thirteen feet square, dominated by Hoover himself; he was seated in a large leather desk chair behind a wooden desk in the center of the room. When he stood, it became obvious that he and his desk were on a dais about six inches high. I was invited to sit on a low, purplish leather couch to his right. J. Edgar Hoover looked down on me and began to
talk.” He talked nonstop, for an hour, touching on the Black Panthers, the Communist Party of the United States, Soviet espionage, Congress, the Kennedys, and much more. But he had little to say about what the president wanted: intelligence on the radical factions of the New Left.

  Ehrlichman would learn—as would Nixon—that “the Bureau dealt excessively in rumor, gossip, and conjecture” when it came to sensitive political intelligence. Even when a report was based on wiretapping or bugging, “the information was often hearsay, two or three times removed.”

  Such was the case with the first hot tip Hoover delivered at the end of January 1969. Nixon had invited Hoover to a dinner for twelve at the White House. The invitation crossed with a startling memo to the president. Hoover asserted that a long-standing member of the White House press corps, Henry Brandon, who covered Washington for the Sunday Times of London, was a threat to national security.

  “I called Mr. Hoover and said, ‘What is this all about?’ ” Nixon remembered. He knew Brandon as the most prominent foreign correspondent in Washington, an accomplished social climber, and a friend to the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who liked to spend Sundays in Brandon’s swimming pool.

  Hoover said that the reporter was suspected of spying for the British and Czech intelligence services—and that the FBI had been wiretapping Brandon for years in search of the proof. This planted the seed of an idea in Nixon’s mind: wiretapping reporters was the way to find the leakers and their sources within the White House.

  A few days later, on February 1, 1969, Henry Kissinger convened the National Security Council staff for a top secret meeting on the Middle East with Nixon. “Within days,” Nixon remembered, “details of the discussion that had taken place were leaked to the press. Eisenhower, whom I had personally briefed on this meeting, considered any leak of classified foreign policy information, whether in war or peace, treasonable.”