J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  For the aged FBI director, October 1971 must have been the cruelest month. He had to fire his rebellious number three man, William Sullivan; President Nixon tried to fire him; he attempted to destroy his most secret files, but found he couldn’t; and Frank Baughman, his oldest friend, died of cancer. Hoover is shown here being greeted by the sheriff and former FBI agent Ed Duff, on his arrival in Daytona Beach, Florida, for Baughman’s funeral. Looking old and tired, Hoover nearly fell coming down the ramp of the plane. Wide World Photos.

  Once in his inner sanctum, Hoover seemed to collapse. These photographs, including the one which appears on the cover, were taken a few months before the FBI director’s seventy-seventh, and last, birthday. Yoichi Okamoto.

  Following J. Edgar Hoover’s death, Congress voted permission for his body to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. It was a remarkable honor, accorded to only twenty-one other Americans—presidents, statesmen, and war heroes—and never before to a civil servant, or a cop.

  To protect Hoover’s body from vandals, Communists, or a possible nuclear blast, FBI officials selected a lead-lined coffin, weighing well over a thousand pounds. Two of the young servicemen who carried the coffin suffered ruptures, while one of the honor guard, shown above, collapsed. Wide World Photos.

  After President Nixon delivered the funeral eulogy, Hoover was buried in Congressional Cemetery, just thirteen blocks from the row house where he had been born seventy-seven years earlier. His longtime aide and companion Clyde Tolson, center left, appeared more bewildered than sad; he survived the director by three years. After the graveside services, FBI officials quietly discussed how to bring to a quick end the reign of the outsider chosen to be Hoover’s successor, and the disposition of his secret files. Wide World Photos.

  His legacy: the J. Edgar Hoover Building, Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Was Hoover going to be proved right again? Not on August 13. That day, RFK received a colorfully scandalous two-page summary based upon King’s conversations over the Jones tap. By incredible good luck, from the Bureau’s point of view, the minister had decided to stay at the Jones house for three weeks, thereby instituting the tap on himself that RFK had refused to authorize. As with Rustin, though in a somewhat different vein, Hoover could now see that sex, not politics, would be the way to bring his enemy down.

  The Reverend King talked rough and tough, often about sex with the ladies. He did not restrain himself to the language of the Song of Solomon.

  King’s criticism still rankled.

  In the Yale Political Magazine’s August issue, the director wrote, “Extremists [who] have gone so far as to accuse the FBI of racism…are no less bigoted in their thinking than those who parade around in white sheets demanding that the FBI ‘Stop prying into state and local affairs’ and counselling witnesses to civil rights violations, ‘Don’t tell FBI agents anything.’ ”39

  Meanwhile, though the despised Rustin had had only two months to make his complex preparations, the march had become inevitable. Thousands headed for Washington. Hoover had tried to deter a few of the most notable participants, including the movie actor Charlton Heston, by having his agents contact them personally to warn them to stay off the streets, that SOG expected violence.

  But Hoover had been ineffectual at every level, as the great outpouring toward the Washington Monument showed to the world on August 28. When the crowds moved down to the Lincoln Memorial in the afternoon for the rally, between 200,000 and 500,000 Americans were assembled.

  “He’s damn good,”40 said President Kennedy, who was watching television in the White House on that historic day.

  King, in one of history’s classic speeches, intoned his belief in the possibility of an integrated society. It was powerfully dramatic, and much of the most famous passage was delivered extemporaneously. “I have a dream…that we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”41

  Hoover would be more exhilarated by words King spoke later that day in his private suite at the Willard Hotel. The bug may have been planted by the local police, but the FBI soon had the tape, which documented the enthusiastic relaxations of a party involving “friends of both sexes.”42 After listening to the fruits of the Willard bug, the FBI director was determined to resurrect the wiretap authorization that RFK had not signed, with its freedom to pursue addresses of one night’s duration.

  On the day after the march Sullivan caved in. “The director is correct. We were completely wrong…Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful demogogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro and national security.”43 Sullivan further recommended, on September 16, “increased coverage of communist influence on the Negro,” citing the “documented information” about party influence on King.44

  Hoover was not so easily mollified, however. He wanted complete submission, laid out in detail. “No,” he wrote, “I don’t understand how you can so agilely switch your thinking and evaluation…I don’t intend to waste time and money until you can make up your mind what the situation really is.”

  On September 25, the disloyal underling hit upon the properly abashed tone and sycophantic language to earn back the director’s favor.

  To Belmont he wrote that his division was eager “to do everything possible to correct our shortcomings.” Looking over his previous memo, he had enjoyed a revelation. “It is obvious to us now that we did not put the proper interpretation upon the facts that we gave to the director.” And he was in perfect agreement with Hoover’s real aims. “We are in complete agreement with the Director that communist influence is being exerted on Martin Luther King Jr…”45

  Since the deficient August 22 memorandum, Sullivan had had ample opportunity to hone his bureaucratic writing skills. His boss had refused to speak to him. After his September 25 memo Hoover began speaking again.

  In the rejected September 16 memo, Sullivan had recommended increased coverage of King. On October 7, after the FBI had scouted the possibilities of installing wiretaps at King’s Atlanta house and the SCLC’s New York office, Hoover requested the attorney general’s authorization for the two taps. It included the operative phrase “or at any future address to which he may move.”

  Kennedy told Evans he was afraid of the political damage that discovery of a wiretap at King’s home would cause but signed on October 10, approving “technical coverage on a trial basis.” When he hesitantly approved the SCLC surveillance on October 21, he asked that both taps be evaluated after a month.

  In the interim Kennedy had been dramatically reminded of the teeming abundance in Hoover’s bag of tricks. On October 18 the FBI had sent copies of a highly inflammatory monograph on King to a number of other government agencies.

  Belmont tried to warn Hoover, via Tolson, that he was making a dangerous move. But since he didn’t dare contradict the director, he had to use indirection to get the point across. “The attached analysis of Communism and the Negro Movement is highly explosive. It can be regarded as a personal attack on Martin Luther King…The memorandum makes good reading and is based on information from reliable sources. We may well be charged, however, with expressing opinions and conclusions…This memorandum may startle the attorney general, particularly in view of his past associations with King, and the fact that we are disseminating this outside the Department. He may resent this.”

  But Hoover chose not to read between the lines. “We must do our duty,” he piously declared.46

  Kennedy went through the roof when he found out about the distribution—an
d only by chance, learning that the Army had a copy.

  Under pressure, the Bureau had retrieved all of its own copies by October 28. Marshall has described it as “a personal diatribe…a personal attack without evidentiary support.”47

  Did Kennedy entertain the vain hope that Hoover would have to stop this kind of vague, if heated, smearing when wiretaps disproved it, or failed to yield substantive evidence? His friends believe that he agreed to the temporary tap so that Hoover would not scuttle the administration’s civil rights legislation. Once, he blurted out that he had to sign or there would have been “no living with the Bureau.”48

  And so the all-out war began.

  Which included an internal evaluation of the King and SCLC taps after thirty days, on November 21, 1963, then a decision to continue for at least three more months.

  Which included coverage of such “future addresses” of Dr. King as the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City, the Hyatt House Motel in Los Angeles, and “a friend’s home.”

  The director, if ever asked, was dutifully carrying out the wishes of his superior, the attorney general of the United States.

  Nor was this the only war. The FBI had at last officially declared war on organized crime. Urged by Robert Kennedy to “go into it like they went into the Communist Party,”49 Hoover gave it his all, announcing in his monthly editorial in the January 1962 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, “The battle is joined. We have taken up the gauntlet flung down by organized crime. Let us unite in a devastating assault to annihilate this mortal enemy.”

  Some were skeptical, none more so than veteran agents of the FBI. Yet on February 15, 1963, the director sent out a letter to the special agents in charge that had them shaking their heads in amazement. “Some cities have blind spots about La Cosa Nostra,” Hoover complained. “It is well to note that we have experienced situations in which certain offices took the position that La Cosa Nostra did not exist in their respective territories, only to learn at a later date that this organization, with its typical family structure is in fact in existence in the area and has been for many years.”50

  The turnabout was so astonishing to behold that some special agents treated it as a temporary aberration of the director’s and, fearing the day when he’d regain his senses, played it safe by doing nothing. For example, Regis Kennedy, of the New Orleans field office, maintained that there was little, if any, organized crime in Louisiana, and thus no need for wiretaps or microphone surveillances. He described Carlos Marcello, a commission member, the head of the oldest and one of the most powerful Mafia families in America, whose territory included not only Louisiana but also most of Texas, as a “tomato salesman.”*51 The Dallas and Miami field offices also had blind spots.† As a result, there were no taps or bugs on Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and, except for a brief period, Meyer Lansky.

  In April 1963 Robert Kennedy’s war against organized crime turned personal, involving the FBI in a way it had never been involved before. That same month the father of Carmine Lombardozzi, a capo in the family of Carlo Gambino, died, and one of the FBI agents, John P. Foley, who was circulating in the crowd outside the funeral home, was jumped by four of the mourners and badly beaten.

  The incident, which was unprecedented, had major repercussions: Hoover passed down the word that the agents were free to reciprocate: “for every man we lose,” he is quoted as saying, “we make certain, through legal means of course, that the hoodlums lose the same number or more.”52 A mini-COINTELPRO was launched against the Gambino family, the New York squad leaning heavily on its boss (capo), his counselor (consigliere), his underboss (sottocapo), and his lieutenants (caporegimi). The agents even interrogated Albert Anastasia’s brother, who was a Catholic priest, and the daughter of another family member, who was in a convent. As for Gambino, the agents asked him, as Angelo Bruno later related it, unknowingly on tape, “Did you change the laws in your family, that you could hit FBI men, punch and kick them? Well, this is the test, that if you change the laws and now you are going to hit FBI men, every time we pick up one of your people we are going to break their heads for them.”53

  All over the United States crime families discussed this sudden, astonishing turn of events—they were especially stunned to find that the FBI even knew the family infrastructure—and agreed there should be no recurrence. But mob leaders in Youngstown, Ohio, didn’t get the message. The agents overheard them discussing which of their three available hit men to use to kill an FBI agent they particularly disliked. Some twenty of the area’s biggest and baddestlooking agents barged into the Mafia chieftain’s penthouse apartment, “accidentally” knocked over expensive vases, dropped cigarettes and still-lit matches on the Oriental carpets, urinated on a favorite potted palm. “You may have three hit men,” they told him, “but Mr. Hoover has thousands.”54

  After that, no one again referred to FBI agents on overhears as Boy Scouts.

  But the Mafiosi didn’t blame FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had left them alone for so many years. They were sure that he was only a reluctant warrior, acting on the orders of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

  Hoover, however, did not go undiscussed on the tapes. The Philadelphia agents probably thought long and hard before deciding whether to send the transcription of one ELSUR to SOG. It consisted of a conversation between Angelo Bruno, capo of the Philadelphia family and a commission member, and one of the Maggio brothers, who was an associate and in-law:

  Maggio: “Kennedy is going to leave, they are going to make him a special assistant…They want him out of the way, he is too much, he is starting to hurt too many people, like unions. He is not only hurting the racket guys, but others, anti-trust…But the only reason he won’t leave, which I heard before, you see he wants Edgar Hoover out of that.”

  Bruno: “Edgar Hoover.”

  Maggio: “He wants Edgar Hoover out of the FBI because he is a fairy. I heard this before…Listen to this. Edgar Hoover is not married and neither is his assistant, read back in his history.”55

  But they talked even more about the expletive-deleted Kennedys, and as time passed the remarks grew increasingly venomous.

  On May 10, 1963, J. Edgar Hoover celebrated his fortieth anniversary as director of the FBI.

  Later that same month, on a Friday afternoon, the FBI gave the Justice Department a single copy of its two-volume report on “skimming” in Las Vegas casinos, the result of an intensive, eighteen-month-long investigation, most of it conducted through electronic means, although Nevada law prohibited both wiretapping and bugging.

  Only three people in the Justice Department saw the report: William Hundley, who headed the Organized Crime Section; his assistant, Henry Peterson; and the investigator Jack Miller, who took the report home with him to read over the weekend. Robert Kennedy did not see it.

  By Tuesday, the mob had a verbatim copy of the report, as the FBI learned from its electronic surveillances.

  Hoover angrily charged the Justice Department with loose security and implied that one of the three men was responsible. However, there were other possibilities. Hundley suspected that the FBI had learned that some of their bugs had been discovered, only days earlier, and that “they turned the report over to us so we would be the fall guys.”56 But others had another theory, pointing out that FBI reports had fallen into the hands of organized crime figures long before Kennedy’s men arrived at Justice. There was a rumor, often heard in the underworld, that Meyer Lansky had his own man very high up in the FBI. William Sullivan had his own suspect, someone close to both the director and Tolson, who was reputedly living far above his means.

  This was one case the FBI never solved. When Sullivan left the Bureau, in 1971, the leaks were still going on.

  There was still another dimension to the Las Vegas skimming report: anyone reading it had to realize that microphones had been used. Quite possibly Hoover, in turning it over to the Justice Department in its raw form, intended to further entrap Robert Kennedy. Kennedy later claimed, �
��That was the first and only time I found out about FBI bugging when I was Attorney General, and I had the FBI stop right away.” To make sure they complied with his prohibition, the attorney general had Nicholas Katzenbach ask Courtney Evans, “Am I absolutely assured that this is stopped?” and Courtney responded, “Yes, it’s been stopped.”57

  The FBI did stop the bugging, Katzenbach much later learned, but only in Las Vegas, where the casino operators filed suits against the government.

  In September 1963 the Justice Department informant Joseph Valachi “surfaced” during the televised hearings of Senator McClellan’s permanent investigating committee. A soldato in the Vito Genovese crime family who was serving time in the Atlanta federal penitentiary for heroin trafficking, Valachi had turned informant in June 1962 and his turnabout been kept secret from all but a few persons in law enforcement, but the mob had known—from at least the spring of 1963—that he was “blabbing to the Feds.”*

  Valachi provided an astonishing amount of information for a lowly foot soldier, but almost all of it, and much more, was already known to the FBI from its electronic surveillances. Hoover’s chief concern with Valachi was publicity: the director wanted the FBI, rather than the Justice Department, to get the credit.

  To accomplish this he tried making an end run around the attorney general. As the Justice Department’s press secretary, Ed Guthman had to approve all articles and statements before their release, including those of J. Edgar Hoover’s ghostwriters. Well aware of the FBI director’s tricks, Guthman had learned to read, and consider, every word.