Enemies

by Tim Weiner

  “Yes, sir,” Mitchell said. “We’ll try it that way and see how it flies. I would hope that he doesn’t blow his stack and leave the fold.”

  Nixon said: “Well, if he does now, I’ll be ready.”

  The Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that the newspapers had the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. That ruling came down as Nixon was praising Hoover before a hundred graduates of the FBI’s training academy.

  “As a young Congressman I worked with him and with others in the Federal Bureau of Investigation in major investigations of various subversive elements in this country,” he said. “Let me tell you something. Anybody who is strong, anybody who fights for what he believes in, anybody who stands up when it is tough is bound to be controversial. And I say that insofar as he is concerned, there may be controversy, but the great majority of the American people back Mr. Hoover.”

  The question was whether Nixon and Hoover still backed each other. They spoke by telephone the next day. Nixon asked Hoover what the Supreme Court decision meant for the prosecution of the Ellsberg case.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: What’s your public relations judgment on it, Edgar? I’d just like to know.

  HOOVER: My public relations judgment, Mr. President, is that you should remain absolutely silent about it.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: You would?

  HOOVER: I would … And I think we ought to be awful careful what we do in this case of this man Ellsberg. Because there again, they’re going to make a martyr out of him. All of the press in the country are going to, of course, come to the front that he’s a martyr. And in view of what the Supreme Court has now said, I doubt whether we’re going to be able to get a conviction of him.

  The president was furious. “I talked to Hoover last night and Hoover is not going after this case as strong as I would like,” Nixon complained to Haldeman. “There’s something dragging him.”

  “You don’t have the feeling the FBI is really pursuing this?” asked Haldeman.

  “Yeah, particularly the conspiracy side,” Nixon said. “I want to go after everyone. I’m not so interested in Ellsberg, but we have to go after everybody who’s a member of this conspiracy.”

  Nixon believed to the marrow of his bones that he was up against a vast left-wing cabal—an array of forces ranging from the intelligence services of Communist dictatorships to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party—and that Western civilization hung in the balance of this struggle. On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. “When I see those columns,” he said, “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome.”

  “They lost their will to live,” he said. “They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period.”

  “A HELL OF A CONFRONTATION”

  Bill Sullivan had an ultimatum: Hoover had to go. He went to see Robert Mardian at the internal security division of the Justice Department, carrying a threatening weapon: two suitcases filled with transcripts and summaries of the warrantless Kissinger wiretaps on Nixon aides and newsmen. The taps were arguably unlawful; without question, they were politically explosive.

  Sullivan said that Hoover could use the documents to blackmail the president of the United States—a startling if implausible idea. Deeply alarmed, Mardian called the White House. The president went on high alert.

  “The P agreed to meet with J. Edgar Hoover tomorrow to seek his resignation,” Haldeman wrote in his diary on Friday, September 17. But later that day, Nixon quailed at the thought. He put off the meeting, and he tried to convince the attorney general to tell the director to step down on his seventy-seventh birthday, New Year’s Day 1972. Mitchell said Hoover would not accept such an order from anybody but the president.

  Dreading the conversation, Nixon invited Hoover to breakfast at the White House at 8:30 on Monday, September 20. The director played it perfectly. “He was trying to demonstrate that despite his age he was still physically, mentally, and emotionally equipped to carry on,” Nixon recounted in his memoirs. “I tried to point out as gently and subtly as I could that as an astute politician he must recognize that the attacks were going to mount.” He was too subtle by half. Hoover replied: “More than anything else, I want to see you re-elected in 1972. If you feel that my staying on as head of the Bureau hurts your chances for re-election, just let me know.”

  The president lost his spine. “At the end of the day,” Haldeman recorded, “he got around to reporting to me on his very-much-off-the-record breakfast meeting with J. Edgar Hoover. Said that it’s ‘no go’ at this time. Hoover didn’t take the bait, apparently, and is going to stay on as a political matter. He feels it’s much better for the P for him to do so. He will then pull out at any point in the future when the P feels that it would be politically necessary.”

  Ten days later, Hoover fired Bill Sullivan and locked him out of his offices at the FBI—a decision based on his judgment that Sullivan had lost his mind. Even Sullivan’s loyal subordinates were inclined to agree with that assessment. “He may have suffered a mental collapse,” wrote Ray Wannall, a top FBI intelligence supervisor, who had known Sullivan since 1947, “perhaps brought on by his obsession to become FBI Director.”

  On the day he was forced out, Sullivan was struggling in vain to secure his files, including a copy of the poison-pen letter he had sent to Martin Luther King, among other potentially incriminating documents. In the corridor, he ran into the man Hoover had chosen to supplant him: a tall, suave thirty-year veteran of the FBI named Mark Felt, who was searching without success for the copies of the wiretap summaries that Sullivan had stolen. He was convinced that Sullivan had become a renegade, trying to claw his way to power by “playing on the paranoia and political obsessions of the Nixon administration.”

  Felt called Sullivan a Judas. They came close to a fistfight. In a rage, Sullivan left the Bureau for the last time.

  Felt went to Hoover’s inner sanctum to brief the director on the altercation. Hoover listened, shook his head sadly, and stared out the window. He had long feared a betrayal from within. “There were a few men who could tear down all that I have built up over the years,” he had written. Now, for the first time, Felt saw Hoover as he was—an isolated old man, alone at the top, no longer basking in adulation, fearing for the future.

  The battle over the FBI intensified. Hoover’s fate was the subject of a ferocious debate in the Oval Office throughout October.

  MITCHELL: We have those tapes, logs and so forth over in Mardian’s safe on that background investigation, wiretapping we did on Kissinger’s staff, the newspapermen and so forth …

  EHRLICHMAN: We have all the FBI’s copies.

  MITCHELL: Hoover is tearing the place up over there trying to get at them … Should we get them out of Mardian’s office before Hoover blows the safe? …

  EHRLICHMAN: Hoover feels very insecure without having his own copy of those things because of course that gives him leverage with Mitchell and with you—and because they’re illegal … He has agents all over this town interrogating people, trying to find out where they are …

  PRESIDENT NIXON: He doesn’t even have his own?

  EHRLICHMAN: No, see, we’ve got ’em. Sullivan sneaked ’em out to Mardian.

  MITCHELL: … Hoover won’t come and talk to me about it. He’s just got his Gestapo all over the place … I want to tell you that I’ve got to get him straightened out, which may lead to a hell of a confrontation … I don’t know how we go about it, whether we reconsider Mr. Hoover and his exit or whether I just have to bear down on him …

  PRESIDENT NIXON: My view is he ought to resign while he’s on top, before he becomes an issue … The least of it is he’s too old.

  MITCHELL: He’s getting senile, actually.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: He should get the hell out of there. Now it may be, which I kind of doubt, I don’t know, maybe, mayb
e I could just call him in and talk him into resigning.

  MITCHELL: Shall I go ahead with this confrontation, then?

  PRESIDENT NIXON: If he does go, he’s got to go of his own volition. That’s what we get down to. And that’s why we’re in a hell of a problem … I think he’ll stay until he’s 100 years old. I think he loves it … He loves it.

  MITCHELL: He’ll stay ’til he’s buried there.

  Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean all pushed the president to force the old man out.

  Nixon had come to the most perilous point of his presidency. He could ill afford to lose Hoover’s loyalty. What might the director do to hold on to his power? The hint of blackmail lingered.

  “We’ve got to avoid the situation where he could leave with a blast,” Nixon said. “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me.”

  The idea that Hoover could bring down the government of the United States was an extraordinary thought. It plagued the president. “I mean, he considers himself a patriot, but he now sees himself as McCarthy did,” Nixon said. Would he try to topple the pillars of national security, as Senator McCarthy had done?

  Then he had a brainstorm. Why not bring back Sullivan?

  Ehrlichman liked the idea. “Sullivan was the man who executed all of your instructions for the secret taps,” he reminded the president.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Will he rat on us?

  EHRLICHMAN: It depends on how he’s treated …

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Can we do anything for him? I think we better.

  EHRLICHMAN: What he wants, of course, is vindication. He’s been bounced, in effect, and what he wants is the right to honorably retire and so on. I think if you did anything for Sullivan, Hoover would be offended. Right now, it would have to be a part of the arrangement …

  PRESIDENT NIXON: He’d be a hell of an operator …

  EHRLICHMAN: We could use him … He’s got a fund of information and could do all kinds of intelligence and other work.

  Nixon would return time and again to the thought of making Sullivan the director of the FBI. “We got to get a professional in that goddamn place,” he once muttered. “Sullivan’s our guy.”

  “IT WOULD HAVE KILLED HIM”

  An impassioned diatribe from Sullivan arrived at Hoover’s home on the day that the debate over the director’s future started at the White House. It read like a cross between a Dear John letter and a suicide note. “This complete break with you has been a truly agonizing one for me,” he wrote. But he felt duty-bound to say that “the damage you are doing to the Bureau and its work has brought all this on.”

  He laid out his accusations in twenty-seven numbered paragraphs, like the counts of a criminal indictment. Some dealt with Hoover’s racial prejudices; the ranks of FBI agents remained 99.4 percent white (and 100 percent male). Some dealt with Hoover’s use of Bureau funds to dress up his home and decorate his life. Some dealt with the damage he had done to American intelligence by cutting off liaisons with the CIA. Some came close to a charge of treason.

  “You abolished our main programs designed to identify and neutralize the enemy,” he wrote, referring to COINTELPRO and the FBI’s black-bag jobs on foreign embassies. “You know the high number of illegal agents operating on the east coast alone. As of this week, the week I am leaving the FBI for good, we have not identified even one of them. These illegal agents, as you know, are engaged, among other things, in securing the secrets of our defense in the event of a military attack so that our defense will amount to nothing. Mr. Hoover, are you thinking? Are you really capable of thinking this through? Don’t you realize we are betraying our government and people?”

  Sullivan struck hardest at Hoover’s cult of personality: “As you know you have become a legend in your lifetime with a surrounding mythology linked to incredible power,” he wrote. “We did all possible to build up your legend. We kept away from anything which would disturb you and kept flowing into your office what you wanted to hear … This was all part of the game but it got to be a deadly game that has accomplished no good. All we did was to help put you out of touch with the real world and this could not help but have a bearing on your decisions as the years went by.” He concluded with a plea: “I gently suggest you retire for your own good, that of the Bureau, the intelligence community, and law enforcement.” Sullivan leaked the gist of his letter to his friends at the White House and a handful of reporters and syndicated columnists. The rumors went out across the salons and newsrooms of Washington: the palace revolt was rising at the FBI. The scepter was slipping from Hoover’s grasp.

  “As political attacks on him multiplied and became increasingly shrill and unfair,” Mark Felt wrote, “Hoover experienced loneliness and a fear that his life’s work was being destroyed.”

  The president slowly pushed Hoover away from the White House. One last hurrah came at the end of 1971: an invitation to Nixon’s compound at Key Biscayne, Florida, over Christmas week, and a cake to celebrate Hoover’s seventy-seventh birthday aboard Air Force One during the return to Washington on New Year’s Eve. But after that, over the next four months the White House logs record only three telephone calls, lasting a total of eight minutes, between Nixon and Hoover. Silence descended.

  The last conversation with Hoover that anyone at the FBI recorded for posterity took place on April 6, 1972. Ray Wannall, who had spent thirty years hunting Communists for Hoover, went to the director’s office to receive a promotion. Hoover began a jeremiad, a wail of pain. “That son of a bitch Sullivan pulled the wool over my eyes,” he said. “He completely fooled me. I treated him like a son and he betrayed me.” His lamentation went on for half an hour. Then he said good-bye.

  PART IV

  WAR ON TERROR

  “Round up the evildoers”: President Bush at FBI headquarters after the 9/11 attacks.

  35

  CONSPIRATORS

  ON MAY 2, 1972, in the darkness before dawn, J. Edgar Hoover died in his sleep. It rained all day as his closed casket lay on a black catafalque in the rotunda of the United States Capitol. He was buried half a mile from where he was born, alongside his parents. Forty years later, the myths and the legends are still alive.

  “Oh, he died at the right time, didn’t he?” Nixon said. “Goddamn, it’d have killed him to lose that office. It would have killed him.”

  A few minutes after Hoover’s casket left the Capitol, the acting attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, telephoned his most loyal assistant at the Justice Department, L. Patrick Gray.

  “Pat, I am going to appoint you acting director of the FBI,” he said.

  “You have to be joking,” Gray replied.

  Gray was fifty-five years old, and he had never held an authority greater than the command of a submarine. He still had his navy crew cut. He was a bull-headed man with a jutting jaw, a straight-arrow Nixon acolyte. He had known the president for a quarter of a century, and he revered him. He had one qualification: he would do anything Nixon asked. Now the president was entrusting Hoover’s legacy to him.

  In a state of awe, Gray came to the White House after Hoover’s burial on May 4. Nixon gave him some sound advice. “Never, never figure that anyone’s your friend,” the president said. “Never, never, never … You’ve got to be a conspirator. You’ve got to be totally ruthless. You’ve got to appear to be a nice guy. But underneath you need to be steely tough. That, believe me, is the way to run the Bureau.”

  Gray lacked steel. He was a malleable man. He was deeply unsure of how to take control of the FBI. He dreaded being seen as “an interloper bent on pushing Hoover into the pages of history and remolding the FBI in my own likeness,” he wrote in a posthumously published memoir. He knew little about the Bureau. He understood nothing of its customs and traditions. He did not comprehend the conduct of the Bureau’s top commanders. He came to learn, as he wrote, that “they lied to each other and conned each other as much as they could.”

  Thus began the da
rk ages of the FBI. In a matter of months, the joint conduct of Pat Gray; his new number-two man at the Bureau, Mark Felt; and his intelligence chief, Ed Miller, would come close to destroying the house that Hoover built.

  “Once Hoover died,” Miller remembered mournfully, “we were absolutely deluged.”

  “THE DELICATE QUESTION OF THE PRESIDENT’S POWER”

  Nixon called the Bureau on May 15, 1972, after George Wallace, the racist Alabama governor who had received nearly ten million votes running for president in 1968, was gravely wounded by a deluded gunman on the campaign trail.

  Mark Felt answered the president’s call.

  “Bremer, the assailant, is in good physical shape,” Felt reported. “He’s got some cuts and bruises, and—”

  “Good!” said Nixon. “I hope they worked him over a little more than that.”

  Felt laughed. “Anyway, the psychiatrist has examined him,” he said, adding: “We’ve got a mental problem here with this guy.”

  Nixon wanted one thing understood. “Be sure we don’t go through the thing we went through—the Kennedy assassination, where we didn’t really follow up adequately. You know?” He hammered home the point. “Remember, the FBI is in charge now, and they’re responsible, and I don’t want any slip-ups. Okay?”