J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  The fitness buff Kennedy did not discover that the FBI had a gym in the basement of the Justice Building until two weeks after the inauguration. But Hoover had anticipated him. When the attorney general went down one day to work out, an agent guard posted at the door refused him entry, explaining that no one without FBI credentials could be admitted. Apparently deciding not to go to war over such a silly issue, Kennedy backed off.*

  Unwisely, he backed off at other times as well. Once, in the midst of a meeting about civil rights, he needed an answer immediately and, characteristically, picked up the phone and called the director. “How many FBI agents do we have in Birmingham?” he asked. Hoover: “Enough.”25 For the next twenty minutes, the two men talked, or rather Kennedy listened. When he hung up, he still had no idea how many FBI agents there were in Birmingham.

  Yet if Kennedy and his staff were annoyed, Hoover, Tolson, and others in the FBI hierarchy were horrified by the strange ways of the new intruders. The attorney general’s actions were considered so unlike anything the Bureau had ever seen before that they were almost immediately transmuted into legends.

  There was the time the director, adopting a grandfatherly stance, kindly invited the rambunctious Kennedy kids into his famous office. Uncowed, they swarmed around the room, and one of them playfully pushed Hoover’s “panic button,” which sent agents racing in to protect him from danger. His mortification was apparent.

  Worse still was the freedom afforded Brumus. His daily presence on the fifth floor, where both Kennedy and Hoover had their offices, was in direct violation of Section 201, Chapter 8, Title 2, of the Rules and Regulations for Public Buildings: “Dogs…shall not be brought upon property for other than official purposes.”

  Kennedy’s beloved pet, an overgrown beast, shared his owner’s distaste for ceremony. Finally, an indiscretion led to a crisis meeting of the FBI’s executive conference, the twelve top officials (excluding Hoover, who never attended), averaging more than thirty years’ experience apiece, who were responsible for overseeing the enforcement of something like 160 different kinds of crime.

  It seems that one day Kennedy brought his dog to work with him, and it peed all over the rug in the AG’s office. At the next executive conference the twelve grown men discussed bringing charges against him for the destruction of government property, an even more serious charge than violation of Section 201, but, after much heated debate, decided not to officially pursue the matter, this time.

  To the director, Kennedy was almost as unrestrained as his dog. In fact, he insouciantly destroyed government property even as Hoover watched. On one occasion, as the head of the FBI and his second-in-command, Tolson, tried to control their rising rage, the attorney general scarcely acknowledged their entrance into his office. He was engrossed in an English pub game, throwing darts. Although the conversation went forward, Kennedy obviously did not, as an aide wryly remarked, “give the Director undivided attention.” But Hoover felt that the insult was compounded by lawbreaking. “It was pure desecration,” he would charge. “Desecration of government property.”26 Kennedy had missed the target, and darts pockmarked the wood-paneled walls.

  During the workday the AG and his inner circle tended to throw off their jackets, unbutton collars, loosen ties, and roll up sleeves. “It is ridiculous to have the Attorney General walking around the building in his shirtsleeves,” Hoover groused to William Sullivan. “Suppose I had had a visitor waiting in my anteroom. How could I have introduced him?”27

  But Kennedy’s intrusiveness was not merely a matter of style. Although friends thought he was sincerely trying his best to show deference to the older man, Hoover could not help thinking otherwise when Kennedy, at least once, buzzed him to come over and explain some foot-dragging. “Nobody had ever buzzed for Hoover!” marveled a Justice Department official.28 And the director certainly resented Kennedy’s unprecedented requests, on occasion, that his speeches be revised. Or the rule that FBI press releases be sent through the department’s public relations hierarchy. Or Kennedy’s appearing in his office unannounced.*

  Most troubling of all, undoubtedly, was Kennedy’s penchant for contacting FBI agents directly rather than going through Hoover, as had all AGs before him. Frequently the young man called “deplorably undignified” by the director dropped in on field offices. What Kennedy perceived as good administrative practice, personally confirming that the agents were indeed “part of the Justice Department,” was seen by Hoover as intrusion, unwarranted and unforgivable. (Of course, the chain of command had never been sacred to the director, going in the other direction. He had always taken the liberty of going over the head of attorneys general to the White House, a course no longer open to him.)

  Often, after such a visit, the special agent in charge was on the telex even before Kennedy was out of the building. According to one retired SAC, the questions and answers between SOG and the field were like “hostile interrogations.”29 Within forty-eight hours of the attorney general’s departure, an inspector from headquarters would arrive. When he was ready to head back home, he would be carrying signed statements from every agent who had been present.

  Helen Gandy made a special folder for them.

  Inevitably on these visits a number of younger agents were dazzled by Kennedy and came to identify with him. Those in Chicago had an occasion to feel tremendously sorry for him, for they witnessed his entrapment by one of Hoover’s beautifully devious setups.

  One of the director’s loyalists asked the attorney general if he would like to hear some organized crime tapes. Naively, Kennedy said yes. Possibly, if he thought about it at all, he presumed that the recordings had been made by the local police.

  In one, a Mafia killer gleefully described to his fellow “wise guys” the three-day torture murder of William “Action” Jackson, a loan shark suspected (erroneously) of being an FBI informant.

  His enthusiastic description is unprintable. But the coroner’s report says it all: “Impaled on meat hook. Doused with water. Cattle prod (electrical) used in rectum and pubic area. Shot. Limbs cut (apparently with an ice pick). Beaten about most of the body (apparently with baseball bats). Severe body burns, inflicted with a blowtorch. Incineration of the penis.”30

  Shocked beyond words, his face crimson with horror and rage, Kennedy hastily left the room.

  That night two inspectors arrived from SOG to collect the notarized statements for Gandy’s file. J. Edgar Hoover now had proof that the attorney general had listened to a tape made from a microphone surveillance and had said not a word in protest. “He [Kennedy] had no idea he was being set up,” recalled Sullivan.31

  The intergenerational tensions within the agency can only have been exacerbated by this kind of thing. To younger agents, the man who woke the director from his nap seemed capable of waking up the whole department. Many had never seen an attorney general in the flesh before, much less one so direct, approachable, and casual. Surely, RFK seemed like the imminent future as Hoover was fading into the past.

  One anecdote popular on the grapevine seemed to show how tenaciously (and foolishly) most of the veterans were resisting the fresh air of change. Kennedy was making one of his visits to the New York field office, which was headed by an assistant director of the FBI, John Francis Malone, known behind his back to his younger agents as Stonehead.

  The attorney general, pursuing his main interest, asked, “Mr. Malone, could you please bring me up to date on what’s been happening with organized crime?”

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Attorney General,” replied Hoover’s loyal colleague, “I’m sorry, but I can’t, because we’ve been having a newspaper strike here.”32

  Sniper fire came from both redoubts.

  From the beginning, Kennedy’s people spoke of the director’s “good days” of crisp, brilliant efficiency and his “bad days” of cartoonlike lunacy. During Seigenthaler’s first private visit with the director, he was treated to an energetically rambling spew of hate. Newspapers were all
untrustworthy or worse, known Communists worked on the copy desk of the New York Herald Tribune, Adlai Stevenson was a “notorious homosexual”—the Kennedy aide blinked in amazement. Not only did the tirade lurch from one unrelated topic to another, but some of the Stevenson “facts” were being used by other FBI officials to ridicule the former diplomat Sumner Welles.

  When Seigenthaler returned to the attorney general’s office, Kennedy took one look at him and said, “He was out of it today, wasn’t he?”33 Hoover’s quicksilver moods became a running joke.

  And Kennedy’s people delighted in retelling their boss’s flippant cracks. When Tolson was hospitalized for an operation, the attorney general quipped, “What was it, a hysterectomy?”34 Passing the Dillinger exhibit case in Hoover’s outer office, he smirked, “What have they done lately?”

  Even Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, who was seen to argue with the FBI director on at least one occasion, got into the act. As friends knew, she slipped a note into the FBI suggestion box: “Chief Parker in Los Angeles for Director.”35 She was well aware that Hoover despised the California police chief.

  How much of this snide banter got back to its subject? According to more than one FBI agent, it was common knowledge within the Bureau that Hoover had bugged the entire Justice Department. Kennedy feared as much and, when he thought of it, tended to restrict certain topics to conversations with aides in his private elevator.

  Presumably, he never noticed how leisurely these conversations could be. Hoover had seen to it that the elevator had been slowed down considerably. For one thing, this would provide more information through the bug his agents had installed.

  Once, the decelerated elevator provided an unexpected benefit. After a rare shouting match between the two men, Kennedy decided to go over to the White House and put his side of the story directly to the president. He slowly descended to the basement parking garage of the Justice Building and raced up Pennsylvania Avenue, reaching the door to the Oval Office just as his antagonist strode out.

  Inside, his brother, red-faced, snapped out, “You have got to get along with that old man!”36

  No record of what was said between president and FBI director has ever been found or released. Not a hint made its way into the Washington scuttlebutt of the day.

  Of course, Hoover was continually reminding JFK, albeit indirectly, of his comprehensive and assiduously updated files.

  “Every month or so,” Robert Kennedy recalled, the director “would send somebody around to give information on somebody I knew or members of my family or allegations in connection with myself. So that it would be clear—whether it was right or wrong—that he was on top of all these things.”37

  Hoover had quickly learned that JFK relished gossip (Sinatra and Lawford kept him an courant on the Hollywood bedroom scene), and sensing his opportunity, he plied the newly elected president with tales about senators who opposed him, or such amorous adventurers as Bobby Baker. He told him, for example, that one southern senator, who was particularly close to JFK, was little better than a “pimp,” that he provided private congressional junkets to his home state, complete with feminine companionship, for a fee. This came as no surprise to JFK, who had utilized the service. Hoover also passed on the scandalous story of an ambassador who had been caught trying to flee the bedroom of a much married Washington hostess. When the FBI director through Courtney Evans, persistently asked the appointments secretary O’Donnell, “What is the President going to do about it?” O’Donnell, tossing caution to the winds, repeated, verbatim, the president’s response: “He said that from now on he’s going to hire faster ambassadors.”38 O’Donnell, the die-hard follower dubbed “court jester” by more than one reporter, has written that Kennedy asked him to have Evans put an end to this information service, but his version had not gained wide acceptance.

  Yet every such tale was a subtle reminder of what the FBI director had in his own files on the president. And, lest he miss the point, as in the fabled “Chinese water torture,” Hoover released his information drop by drop.

  On January 30, a mere ten days after the exuberance of the inauguration, Hoover informed the attorney general that an Italian magazine had published an interview with a woman who claimed that she had been engaged to Jack. The family, however, had allegedly paid her half a million dollars to back off.

  The January information was followed up later with a memo advising the attorney general that “it was further alleged that the woman became pregnant.”39

  On February 10 Robert received an unsolicited file summary on a friend of his brother’s. Hoover noted helpfully that he thought the information “may be of interest,” for the material stressed Sinatra’s alleged ties with gangsters and his and Jack’s assignations with call girls, including “affidavits of two mulatto prostitutes in New York”.40

  Meanwhile, Evans’s role was becoming increasingly important to Hoover, and in February he was made assistant director. This was dangerously exposed prominence, however, because the respect of both Kennedys for the agent made him, in the eyes of many, a contender to replace Hoover someday. And he was probably suspect when it became clear that Robert knew that the FBI director had informants planted in the White House. On February 13 the attorney general laid down the law with unmistakable firmness: any contact at all between any member of the Justice Department and any White House aide “will go through the Attorney General first.”41

  Inevitably, the three men with very differently constituted strong personalities who were president, attorney general, and FBI director would have to meet to conduct some aspects of the nation’s business. Their first off-the-record conference, about an hour and a half long, occurred on February 23. As would be true of all such meetings—and any rendezvous JFK wanted kept secret—the president’s guest eluded the press by entering by the gate used for the White House public tour. In this case, Dave Powers met Hoover, who “awed” him but was “charming,” and escorted the director over to the “mansion,” or first-family living quarters.

  O’Donnell has speculated that the president took this opportunity to alert Hoover to the upcoming military adventure at the Bay of Pigs. True or not, the meeting described by Powers as “real, real long”42 was not an accurate foreshadowing of Hoover’s future in the Kennedy administration.

  If O’Donnell recalled correctly, the door to the Oval Office would swing open for the director only five to seven times during JFK’s stewardship, almost always with Robert, too, waiting on the other side. Powers has said that Hoover had perhaps three off-the-record dinners with the president. In addition, the FBI head eagerly attended the annual White House ceremony awarding Young American Medals for Bravery to youths who had demonstrated unusual courage.

  Not at all satisfied, Hoover continued to remind both brothers how frequently and warmly he was welcomed to the White House during the Roosevelt and Eisenhower administrations. And JFK sympathized with his difficulties in being the subordinate of a man half his age. Robert would claim that he, too, was not insensitive to the director’s feelings. “I made arrangements with my brother that he would call him every two or three months and then have him arrange to have J. Edgar Hoover, just by himself, for lunch…It’s what kept Hoover happy for three years because he had the idea that he had direct contact with the President.”43

  If happy, Hoover was vigorously engaged in increasing his level of contentment, and he was not relying upon young Robert in the slightest. Quite the contrary.

  A May 4 memo addressed to Byron White, deputy attorney general, skillfully rewrote history and perverted language in order to stake out broad new powers for the FBI. At the time, Kennedy and his aides were engaged in preparing legislative strategy for getting laws through Congress that would authorize the AG to use wiretaps for investigations concerned with “national security” and “criminal” activity. They were too busy to read between the lines and were not, in any event, accustomed to looking out for Hoover’s artfully concealed pongi sticks, as he well knew.


  Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, he claimed, had in 1954 approved the use of microphone surveillance (read “bugging”) “with or without trespass.” True, a Brownell memo that year had indeed noted, “For the FBI to fulfill its important intelligence function, considerations of internal security and the national safety are paramount and, therefore, may compel the unrestricted use of this technique in the national interest.” True, so far as this excerpted paragraph goes, but the former AG had made clear in the entire memo that his observation applied only to national-security cases.

  Hoover inaccurately, but brilliantly, implied that Brownell had suggested much wider leeway. He reported to White, as if it were an approved activity since the 1950s, “In the interests of national safety, microphone surveillances are also utilized on a restricted basis even though trespass is necessary to assist in uncovering major criminal activities.” Thus was the fait accompli portrayed as an order obeyed.

  In addition, he stretched the truth by describing the bugs used “in the internal security field” as focused solely on the “activities of Soviet intelligence agents and Communist Party leaders.”44 Actually, the targets had included people thought sympathetic to the party, the House Agriculture Committee chairman Harold D. Cooley, and a black separatist group.

  Every one of them had been installed without prior approval from Robert Kennedy, but the Byron White memo, if its implications were fully understood, did not bring down swift retribution. Moreover, the attorney general had known as early as February 17, the day Congressman Cooley was going to meet privately in Manhattan with members of a well-heeled sugar lobby, that Hoover could “cover” the event. Later, Kennedy perused a summary of that “coverage,” but no one has ever come up with evidence that he knew or suspected—or even asked—what technique had been used.*