Many of the same columnists targeted by Wisner and his men were already in the pocket of Lyndon B. Johnson—notably Joseph Alsop—and information in Hoover’s “official and confidential” files, which was readily shared with Johnson on request as will be seen shortly,14 gave him an additional special entrée to these journalists. It was no coincidence that the man who first advanced Johnson’s name as a vice presidential candidate in 1960—first to Sam Rayburn and then to the Kennedys—was none other than Johnson’s friend Philip Graham. Although we’ll never know one way or the other, it may be that the already-charismatic Phil Graham, in an unusually climactic moment with his charm at full splendor, helped to seduce John F. Kennedy to accept, against his better judgement, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas as his vice presidential choice. Perhaps Graham even convincingly argued that Johnson would add balance to the ticket precisely where Kennedy would need it most: in the South and West.
In August 1952, the CIA reorganized itself again, merging the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) into the new Directorate of Plans (DPP). Wisner was put in charge of the new, much-larger organization, and Richard Helms became its chief of operations. The DPP being run by Wisner represented 60 percent of the total personnel within the CIA. About this time Wisner and Dulles were plotting the overthrow of Iran’s government, led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had upset the U.S. government when Iran nationalized their oil industry and carried out radical changes in their agricultural sector, including collective farming and government land ownership. The agency’s Operation Ajax succeeded in bringing down Mossadegh’s government. The supreme ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah—the shah of Iran—remained until he was overthrown by the fundamentalist Shia clergy, who came to power as a result of widespread concerns about the rapid modernization occurring under the shah. Another reason for the backlash was a deep-seated resentment among the Iranian population about the CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadegh and the residual suspicions about U.S. meddling in their national affairs. The long tail of political backlash was not figured in the calculation of the immediate success in the CIA’s sponsorship of this particular coup d’état.
J. Edgar Hoover had continued deep suspicions about the CIA, especially the DPP section, which he referred to as “Wisner’s weirdoes” because he felt it had usurped powers that rightfully belonged to “his” bureau. The feud between the CIA and FBI came to a boil when the FBI started carrying out investigations into the past of some of Wisner’s top officials; it was soon discovered that a number of them had been active in left-wing politics during the 1930s. Hoover passed this information to his friend, Joseph McCarthy, who started making attacks on some of Wisner’s staff. Hoover had also collected details of an affair that Wisner had had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war; Hoover claimed that the princess was a Soviet agent and fed this information to McCarthy as well.15 To Joseph McCarthy, for whom the only good Communist was a dead Communist, the nuances of philosophical thought or the socioeconomic-geographic-political environment of respective countries did not evoke much interest; he simply wanted as much fodder as he could get, and his pal Hoover was glad to provide it.16
J. Edgar Hoover
The truth about J. Edgar Hoover had been well hidden throughout his forty-eight-year term as the head of the FBI. Although many people had long suspected that he was far more enigmatic than he appeared, most of the nation still held him in high esteem, as the ultimate protector of core American values, by the time of his death in 1973. Within two years of that, the truth about him began emerging; a Time magazine article in December 1975 would help start the cleansing process:17
He was a brilliant chameleon. But he was also a master con man. That takes intelligence of a certain kind, an astuteness, a shrewdness. He never read anything that would broaden his mind or give depth to his thinking. I never knew him to have an intellectual or educated friend. Neither did Tolson. They lived in their own strange little world.
Sullivan told Time that Hoover was so intrigued by stories about expanding life spans through medical rejuvenation that he “ordered FBI officials in Switzerland to send him reports about a Swiss physician’s formula for prolonging life.” Added Sullivan: “He was a man with the ability to carry on 33 fights at the same time without slackening his pace or confusing one fight with another. He was always fighting—with other Government officials, with the immigration people, with the customs agency, with anyone who criticized him. The fights seemed to stimulate him.” The result was an arcane world in which the Washington headquarters, where Hoover reigned so autocratically, was grandiosely referred to in internal FBI memos as the Seat of Government (SOG).
Joseph P. Kennedy had known how to handle J. Edgar Hoover because they were of the same age and shared many friends and values; they were a lot alike. Many of their mutual friends were key Mafia leaders. Ironically, the thirty-five-year-old son of Joseph in 1961 became the attorney general and boss over the sixty-eight-year-old Hoover; Bobby Kennedy had already targeted some of these same friends of his father in his quest to clean up organized crime. The vitriol between Hoover and John and Robert Kennedy was wide, deep, and occasionally stunningly petty: In May 1962, JFK personally ordered that “Hoover’s dogs [be] retagged so that his own can be given the top three numbers in the district.”18 “All this meant that Vice President Johnson’s beagle, Little Beagle Johnson, slipped to four and J. Edgar Hoover’s cairn terriers to five and six.”19
Those were strange times, indeed: The chief of the FBI—a tyrannical demagogue and bully, unbeknownst to most people at the time (in fact, still a hero to most of the population)—was running an autonomous fiefdom within a federal government agency that he thought virtually belonged to him. Arguably, the worst mistake Joe Kennedy ever made, at least with regard to the long-term safety of his family, was his insistence that Jack, as the newly minted president, appoint his thirty-five-year-old brother, who had never practiced law, to the position of attorney general of the United States. As head of the Justice Department, he would command thirty thousand employees and control a $130 million budget in 1960. Just before he made the announcement, JFK was overheard telling Bobby, “Damn it, Bobby, comb your hair, and don’t smile too much or they’ll think we’re happy about this.”20
J. Edgar Hoover was not happy with this turn of events. He had been the director of FBI for longer than RFK had been alive, and now “that skinny squealing little liberal shit” was going to be his boss. One of Bobby’s first directives was to require the FBI to clear its press releases and speeches with him, and that all press releases would now be coming from the Department of Justice, rather than the FBI.21 By 1960, Hoover felt that he owned the bureau and could do whatever he wished. According to Anthony Summers, “Edgar ‘lived like an Oriental potentate.’ Edgar declared that he would eat ice cream only out of a round package—so it was flown in and kept in a freezer in the basement of the Justice Department. He wanted sides of beef from Colorado—they were flown in, too, all for free … Hoover had a heated toilet seat invented in the FBI laboratory. When he decided it was either a quarter of an inch too high or too low, it had to be redone.”22
Once Bobby Kennedy brought some of his children along with him to the office, and they all decided to “visit the Director’s office at a time when Hoover himself had stepped out briefly. The safe was open, Robert Kennedy Jr. recollects with no small glee, and he and his siblings jumped in and started pulling out documents by the handful. Just then Hoover himself appeared, and the younger Kennedy has still not quite gotten over the tantrum the enraged FBI Director mounted.”23
The November 1957 raid at the home of the mobster Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara, in Apalachin, New York, brought the reality of the Mafia’s existence directly to the front pages of every newspaper in the country. This meeting, which was portrayed in the movie The Godfather, was attended by roughly one hundred Mafia crime bosses from the United States, Canada, and Italy. Lo
cal police became concerned when they noticed numerous expensive cars with license plates from around the country; the local police alerted the state police, who together raided the meeting, causing mafiosi to flee into the woods and the surrounding area of the Apalachin estate. Over sixty underworld bosses were detained and indicted because of the disastrous meeting. The incident was most notable for the complete absence of any FBI agents, since their august leader had told them there was no such thing as organized crime syndicates.
Hoover’s many contradictions are much more widely known today than when the news media were still keeping them secret, which is to say, the period of his entire lifetime, ending May 2, 1972. But it is now widely known that, according to Anthony Summers’s account, “Mr. G-Man” J. Edgar Hoover was a closet homosexual and cross-dressing transvestite in his private life.24 He was also closely associated with a number of leading Mafia gangsters from time spent at the racetracks and the month-long free annual vacations at the La Jolla, California, resort owned by Texas oilman Clint Murchison. Hoover was indebted to Murchison and Sid Richardson for all their favors but was simultaneously being blackmailed by them and their guests from the Mafia, as a result of the well-known “secret” among many of them of the pictures their colleague Meyer Lansky had of Hoover “in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures, and he had made his deal with Hoover—to lay off. That was the reason, they said, that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI.”25 Other people, including Gordon Novel, a CIA electronics expert, stated that James Angleton had shown him similar pictures, specifically of Edgar “giving Clyde Tolson a blow job.”26 Lewis and Susan Rosenstiel—philanthropists and owners of Schenley Distillers, and among the wealthiest people alive in the late 1950s—said they witnessed Edgar in full drag at a party in 1958 at the Plaza Hotel. “He was wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig. He had makeup on, and false eyelashes. It was a very short skirt, and he was sitting there in the living room of the suite with his legs crossed. Roy introduced him to me as ‘Mary’ and he replied, ‘good evening,’ brusque, like the first time I’d met him. It was obvious he wasn’t a woman, you could see where he shaved. It was Hoover. You’ve never seen anything like it. I couldn’t believe it, that I should see the head of the FBI dressed as a woman.”27
Edgar the “blackmailee” meanwhile was, on a much grander scale, “a master blackmailer” himself according to one of his closest colleagues, William Sullivan.28 He used his huge cache of official and confidential files to blackmail anyone whom he deemed necessary, including congressmen, senators, high-level officials in every department or agency up to and including a succession of presidents, from Roosevelt to Nixon29 (but no doubt excluding his namesake, Herbert Hoover, who appointed him initially to his position). In most cases, his blackmailing of presidents was related to forcing them to allow him to continue in his position, and it was done through innuendo and hints that he would drop about having knowledge of certain indiscretions.
At the beginning of the Kennedy administration, knowing about his twelve-year-old son Steven born by Johnson’s mistress, Madeleine Brown, Hoover had used this information to seek Johnson’s help in getting a mandatory retirement waiver from Kennedy: “At one of their trysts at Austin’s Driskill Hotel, said Brown, he confided that he had ‘a big problem.’ ‘Hoover,’ he told her, ‘wants me to try to influence Kennedy to keep him on as FBI director. He knows about you and Steven, and he’s calling in his marker.” Johnson’s solution, Brown said, was to push her into a paper marriage hastily organized by Jesse Kellam, the confidante who had introduced them years earlier: “It was done to stop any gossip, and it worked, especially later, when he moved into the White House.”30
But their friendship superseded any real animus or actual blackmail threats, as evidenced by his continuing amicable relationship with Hoover and the complete access he had to any of Hoover’s files he requested. Evidently, Johnson and Hoover ultimately reached an understanding because the official and confidential files on LBJ, when finally opened after Hoover’s death, contained little information on Johnson’s secrets, corruption scandals, or his mistress. According to The Washington Post, “Tapes and memos once existed concerning Johnson’s backdoor activities. Some of this embarrassing material was removed from the files and sent to him at the White House.”31
The Kennedys, both John and Robert, felt that J. Edgar Hoover was dangerous. Unfortunately, they underestimated how dangerous he was generally, but more importantly, how dangerous he was to them. Bobby later told Anthony Lewis, “It was a danger that we could control, that we were on top of, that we could deal with at the appropriate times. That’s the way we looked at it. In the interests of the administration and in the interests of the country, it was well that we had control over it. There wasn’t anything that he could do. We were giving him direction. And there wasn’t anybody he could go to or anything he could do with the information or the material. So it was fine. He served our interests.”32 That view is debatable, given all of the blackmail material Hoover had already collected on both of them, including records Hoover kept on an incident in the Chicago FBI office, when the special agent in charge asked Kennedy if he would like to listen to some sensitive tapes. According to William Sullivan, “Kennedy should have refused, should have asked to have transcripts sent through the usual channels. Instead, he sat down and listened to the tapes, and by doing so compromised himself. After listening to the tapes for just a moment or two, Kennedy had to realize that they were the result of unauthorized taps. But he kept listening, which to Hoover implied tacit approval. Never a man to let an opportunity go by, Hoover insisted on and got sworn affidavits from every agent present stating that Kennedy had listened to the tapes and had not questioned their legality.”33
These stories depict a vicious and vulnerable man, who was contemptuous of both JFK and RFK and desperate to protect his own turf, fully aware that the Kennedys were intent on its destruction. Knowing Hoover as well as anyone outside the highest levels of the FBI possibly could, Lyndon Johnson no doubt knew that he would immediately have Hoover’s cooperation when the plan he was devising was ready for execution; he never doubted that Hoover would cooperate in the cover-up.
Rich Texas Oilmen, and Their Mobster Friends
In the early 1960s, Texas accounted for over half of the proven oil reserves in the United States, and six Texas companies controlled 80 percent of it. Oilmen had known since the 1960 election that Kennedy was threatening to eliminate their favorite law, called the “oil depletion allowance,” which allowed them to retain 27.5 percent of their oil revenue tax-free; its loss, according to World Petroleum magazine, stood to cost the industry as much as $280 million in annual profits.34 The original rationale for such an allowance was that the product that their investments yielded was a finite resource that would require continual investments in exploration and recovery in order to extend the flow of raw material; the more the companies produced, the less was available. Recognition of this depletion of the asset was intended as an incentive for finding and recovering more oil fields. (How this particular commodity was materially different from other forms of mining, or commercial ocean fishing, or even farming, was never fully explained, other than perhaps the oilmen having better lobbyists than the others.) Some of the oilmen had partly supported the Kennedy-Johnson ticket during the 1960 election (others had supported Nixon) because of Johnson’s promise that they would not push for elimination of the oil depletion allowance; nevertheless, John F. Kennedy had doubts about its fairness and efficacy, and in early 1963 attacked this tax loophole.
The oilmen were mostly former “wildcat” operators who had gained their fortune almost overnight, and they realized all too well that they could lose it just as quickly. One of the richest of the oilmen, Clint Murchison of Dallas, owned the Del Charro, the resort hotel located in southern California where he treated his f
riend J. Edgar Hoover and his partner Clyde Tolson to a month’s vacation every year, near the racetrack he also owned, the Del-Mar. Another of Murchison’s friends, Sid Richardson, went there at the same time, and other guests who would pop in during the month or so of Hoover’s stay included Richard Nixon, John Connally, Lyndon Johnson, and such mafiosi as Meyer Lanksky, Santos Trafficante, Johnny Rosselli of Los Angeles, Sam Giancana of Chicago, and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans.35 Murchison, like Estes and Johnson, was also involved with Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters and Mafia don Frank Costello, a good friend of Sam Giancana and former business associate of Joseph P. Kennedy.36 According to Anthony Summers, “The Del Charro was small, and in its comparative privacy Edgar rubbed shoulders with a bevy of white-collar crooks. Those welcomed at the hotel in the fifties included Ed Levinson, John Drew, and Ray Ryan, all notorious names to rackets investigators. Drew once departed leaving a valuable antique, a bottle of pre-Prohibition whiskey, as a present for Edgar.”37 During these weeks spent at the racetrack and the resort with some of the most notorious criminals in the country, it can be assumed that they commiserated endlessly about the sorry state of affairs with the Kennedys in charge. Furthermore, it isn’t a stretch to speculate in how many ways such a powerful group could envision ending the administration’s term of office.
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