J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  *Knowledge of the Oswald note was closely held. Probably less than half a dozen people at FBIHQ knew about it, including Hoover, Tolson, and, possibly, John Mohr, although Mohr later denied such knowledge. Apparently Alan Belmont, who headed the FBI’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, was never told of it. At least he seemed genuinely shocked when the author questioned him about it. “I didn’t know anything about the letter,” Belmont said, “was never told of it.” Shanklin told William Sullivan—who was in charge of the Bureau’s probe of Oswald’s background and associations and who was on the phone with Shanklin several times a day—only that he had an “internal personnel problem,” that one of his agents had received “a threatening letter from Oswald.” Sullivan: “I raised a question as to details but Mr. Shanklin seemed disinclined to discuss it other than to say he was handling it as a personnel problem with J. P. Mohr.” Shanklin made no mention of the letter’s having been destroyed.

  Shanklin was one of Mohr’s protégés; before being assigned to Dallas, he’d served four years in one of the Bureau’s cushiest postings, SAC of Honolulu. Those who knew Shanklin well—he died in 1988—state that he was a man who followed orders and that he would never have ordered the destruction of the note without prior instructions from FBIHQ. He was also loyal: in 1975 he denied, under oath, any knowledge of the Oswald note.

  “Hoover ordered the destruction of the note,” William Sullivan told the author; “I can’t prove this, but I have no doubts about it.” Sullivan also stated, in a deposition concerning the Hosty note, “During the course of this long difficult investigation I did hear that some document had been destroyed relating to Oswald and that some others were missing, the nature of which, if told, I do not recall. I cannot remember who gave me this information or whether it was from one or more sources.”

  It is possible that Sullivan might have refreshed his recollections of the missing documents when he testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977, but we’ll never know, since Sullivan was shot and killed a few days before his scheduled appearance.6

  †Hosty, however, didn’t destroy this letter, which he felt was material to the case (it concerned Oswald’s desire to return to Russia and his recent visits to the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City), but worked it into the body of one of his reports.

  *Johnson named a bipartisan commission of seven members. There was one Democrat and one Republican from the Senate—Richard B. Russell, Democrat of Georgia, and John Sherman Cooper, Republican of Kentucky; one each from the House—Hale Boggs, Democrat of Louisiana, and Gerald Ford, Republican of Michigan; the former CIA director Allen W. Dulles; John J. McCloy, a New York investment banker with a long history of government service; and, as chairman, Earl S. Warren, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Warren first declined the appointment, but LBJ, using his legendary powers of persuasion, argued that if rumors of a foreign conspiracy were not quelled, they could conceivably lead the country into a nuclear war which could cost forty million lives, and Warren reluctantly accepted.

  *Hosty’s remark to the Dallas police lieutenant Revill (“We knew he was capable of assassinating the president, but we didn’t dream he would do it”), which Revill reported to Chief Curry, eventually reached Hoover and the press. Enraged, the FBI director instructed his aides to “tell Dallas to tell Hosty to keep his big mouth shut. He has already done irreparable harm.”18

  In his Warren Commission testimony, Hosty denied having made the remark. Lieutenant Revill testified otherwise.

  *Obtaining his personnel file some years later, Hosty discovered that his answers to Inspector’s Gale’s questions had been falsified.

  Although three SACs were censured, Gordon Shanklin wasn’t one of them. The Inspection Division was under the overall supervision of John Mohr.

  †Both District Attorney Henry Wade and Assistant District Attorney William Alexander were ex-FBI agents. When someone leaked the contents of Oswald’s diary to the Dallas Morning News, two FBI agents asked Alexander if he was the source of the leak. Alexander heatedly responded that Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the Warren Commission could “Kiss my a..” In reporting this shocking comment to the director—complete with double dots—the special agents, Robert M. Barrett and Ivan D. Lee, at least got their priorities straight: “Alexander was strongly admonished by interviewing agents concerning his making such remarks about Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI and President Johnson.”20

  ‡Even the investigation of the Russian connection failed to satisfy Sullivan, who told the author in 1976 that there were three things, three gaps in the investigation, that still bothered him: “1. We don’t know what happened while Oswald was in Russia; 2. Why was Marina permitted to marry Oswald and why were they allowed to leave Russia when others were not permitted to do the same? And 3. We know next to nothing about Oswald and the Cubans.” Sullivan found “thoughtprovocative” the fact that Marina was obviously much more intelligent than her husband.

  *Seth Kantor’s book Who Was Jack Ruby? (1978) remains the best account of Ruby’s background and associations, although it needs to be updated with more recent findings, such as those of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and reissued. For two excellent books on the probable involvement of organized crime in the assassination, see David E. Scheim, Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy (1988), and John H. Davis, Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1989).

  *Perhaps out of habit, the FBI did investigate one aspect of Ruby’s activities: his sex life. Carefully choosing their language so as not to offend the prudish director—or Miss Gandy, who opened and read all such materials—the agents reported that Ruby’s sexual habits were “peculiar” and “other than normal.” Obviously repulsed by such a degenerate act, the agents noted that Ruby liked to engage in oral sex with women “with him being the active, rather than the passive, participant.”24

  *“No Oswald-Ruby Link, FBI Believes. Each Acted Strictly on His Own during Violent Dallas Days, Evidence Indicates,” ran the Chicago Tribune headline of December 4, 1963.

  Hoover followed a standard practice for leaks. He would first have the material disseminated to three or four other departments or agencies and then leak it, blaming one or more of its recipients. In this case, he decided in advance that the guilty party would be Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, who hadn’t pushed hard enough, he felt, to release the report.

  *It wasn’t destroyed but it was suppressed, for eleven years. Even the fact that there was such a meeting on that date was excised from the Warren Commission indexes.

  *Although Hoover never deviated publicly from his insistence that Oswald was the lone assassin, the FBI director privately suspected, at least for a time, that the CIA itself was implicated. So did Robert Kennedy. In what must have been an incredibly dramatic confrontation, within hours after the assassination Kennedy asked John McCone, director of the CIA, “Did you kill my brother?” Kennedy later related the incident to Walter Sheridan as follows: “You know at the time I asked McCone…if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.”39

  *“Gossip is certainly an instrument of power,” commented Lance Morrow in an October 26, 1981, Time essay. “Lyndon Johnson understood the magic leverage to be gained from intimate personal details, artfully dispensed. He made it a point to know the predilections of friends, the predicaments of enemies.”

  *The report, Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox have inferred, concerned Johnson’s visits to the Carousel Motel, in North Ocean City, Maryland. One of LBJ’s more notorious associates, Bobby Baker, was known to provide call girls to important politicians and businessmen at this address. After Johnson became president, the FBI stopped sending the Justice Department reports on the Bobby Baker case.

  †John Henry Faulk was one of the more fortunate blacklistees. Not because he won a $3.5 mil
lion judgment against Aware, Inc. (later reduced to $725,000), but because he managed to survive the blacklisting era. Many others didn’t. A humorist whom some compared to Will Rogers, he told his story in Fear on Trial (1964).

  *FBI scribes were less restrained than the president in praise of their boss. One biographical booklet handed out to the taxpayers called him “fearless fighter and implacable foe of the godless tyranny of cancerous communism…inspirational leader, champion of the people, outstanding American.” From another work, J. Edgar Hoover’s 40 Years as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau’s perspective on national history can be inferred: “On April 12, 1945, J. Edgar Hoover lost a great supporter and admirer when Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Georgia.”55

  *The booklet did not make the splash the FBI director might have anticipated. The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, by the right-wing author Frank Capell, was an attack upon Robert Kennedy as an agent of international communism. In Capell’s interpretation, the attorney general’s Communist friends agreed to kill the actress in order to protect him from revelations about the alleged love affair. Presumably, the scandal would have retarded the progress of the overthrow of the U.S. government.

  *Johnson went so far as to order up a presidential plane to convey Hoover to the much publicized opening ceremony. Pressured to get things photo ready within five days, the new SAC dummied up a fake office with flimsy walls and borrowed furniture on the top floor of a vacant, unfinished new bank building. Hoover made no comment about the makeshift surroundings, which were unaccountably described by some reporters as “plush.” Jeremiah O’Leary of the Washington Star knew better. He’d leaned on one of the temporary walls and almost brought the whole stage set crashing down.

  *During the same period, by contrast, the average number of “actions” initiated against the moribund Communist party each year was one hundred.

  †Such letters generally reveal the influence of Sullivan’s notions of human frailty, if not the work of his own hand. The director might think sex was always the lever, but a married man knew that lies about money could be more “disruptive.” In this note, the “God-fearing Klanswoman” took care to report, “They [her “menfolk.”] never believed the “stories that he stole money from the klans in [deleted] or that he is now making over $25,000 a year. They never believed the stories that your house in [deleted] has a new refrigerator, washer, dryer and yet one year ago, was threadbare. They refuse to believe that your husband now owns three cars and a truck, including the new white car. But I believe all these things and I can forgive them for a man wants to do for his family in the best way he can.” This invidious touch suggests that the recipient had never seen the house, appliances, or fleet of vehicles and might well expect to find the “new white car” somewhere in the vicinity of “Ruby.”64

  *His “neutralization” was complete. He committed suicide.

  *More than once, FBI agents found King MISURs unsatisfactory because his TV would usually be “blasting away.” Perhaps this was the least precaution a man could take after a personal warning from the president of the United States that he was being watched all the time.

  †“Pure unadulterated arrogance,” Representative Louis Stokes would call Sullivan’s plan to remove “a leader for a whole race of people, destroying that man,”80 and try to choose a replacement. Yet Sullivan wrote that he “had an opportunity to explore this from a philosophical and sociological standpoint” with a former Oxford professor, who had named Pierce. The candidate, Sullivan agreed, “does have all the qualifications of the kind of a Negro I have in mind to advance to positions of national leadership.”81 Sullivan’s hopes for Pierce, who apparently knew nothing about them, would be dashed by political realities. Appointed secretary of housing and urban development in Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, Pierce earned for himself with his elusiveness the nickname Silent Sam. He even eluded the direct notice of his president. At a reception for the nation’s mayors, Reagan smiled warmly at his Cabinet officer, shook his hand firmly, and said, “Welcome, Mr. Mayor.” His stewardship was seriously questioned when investigators discovered that political influence had often determined how housing grants and subsidies were awarded during the two Reagan administrations.

  *In The FBI Pyramid, Mark Felt, formerly deputy associate director of the Bureau, observed, “When the puritanical Director read the transcripts of the tapes disclosing what went on behind Dr. King’s closed hotel doors, he was outraged by the drunken sexual orgies, including acts of perversion often involving several persons. Hoover referred to these episodes with repugnance as ‘those sexual things.’ ”84 According to other FBI officials, the director was even more exercised by the minister’s penchant for consorting with white women.

  *This degree would have been an especially unkind cut, in the view of the FBI official whose memo noted, “It is shocking indeed that the possibility exists that King may receive an Honorary Degree from the same institution which honored the Director with such a degree in 1950.”88 The upper levels concurred. The agent who apparently persuaded the university official to reconsider was rewarded with a letter of commendation from Hoover as well as a monetary award.

  *According to the Church committee report, the recipients included the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA director, Acting Attorney General Katzenbach, and the heads of all military intelligence agencies and the USIA.

  *Some accounts of this incident have missed the point, taking the apologists’ line that the FBI intended that only King see the contents of the package. On the contrary, it knew that he would be out of the office and that Coretta would be at her post. It doesn’t take a Jesuit to see that, in such circumstances, a package addressed to Martin Luther King, Jr., is in effect and intent a package intended for Coretta Scott King.

  *FBI insiders felt that Nichols would never have allowed Hoover to expose his true feelings to this extent, and they even suspected that DeLoach was setting the old man up. Perhaps, but DeLoach did pass three notes in succession to the director after the “liar” remark, urging him to take it off the record. But Hoover had taken his stand: “DeLoach tells me that I should keep these statements concerning King off the record but that’s none of his business. I made it for the record and you can use it for the record.”95 Nonetheless, when he later saw that the whole episode had tarnished his image in the press, he was not above attaching blame to his subordinate.

  †“Everyone knows he can’t stand spontaneous exposure,” said one anonymous FBI source years later. “He either has to have a text in his hand or he’s going to say what he thinks and then there’s hell to pay.”99 Or was there? “Hoover Steals the Show” was the headline when Hoover made a rare appearance at a society cocktail party in Washington two days after his meeting with the lady journalists. He reported then that he had already received four hundred telegrams in response to his remarks, “all favorable except for two or three who were critical or hostile,” and these, he said, “were probably from racist groups associated with Martin Luther King.” He did say he had held his last press conference, however. “I’m going to get writer’s cramp from answering all those messages.”100

  *Bradlee had been much too personally close to John Kennedy for Johnson’s comfort. The newsman, according to Moyers, had made a comment that could certainly have a bipartisan moral, however: “If the FBI will do this to Martin Luther King, they will undoubtedly do it to anyone for personal reasons.”104 It was in Johnson’s interest to let Hoover know that the tactics of his Bureau were becoming all too obvious, at least in some capital circles.

  †DeLoach called it a “love feast.”106 Newsweek reported on December 14, 1964, that King was “awed” by the director’s information about corrupt law officers throughout the old South. By 1970 Hoover had created a wholly fictional account: “He sat right there where you’re sitting,” he told a Time reporter, “and said, he never criticized the FBI. I said, Mr. King—I never called him reverend—s
top right there, you’re lying. He then pulled out a press release that he said he intended to give to the press. I said, don’t show it to me or read it to me. I couldn’t understand how he could have prepared a press release even before we met. Then he asked if I would go out and have a photograph taken with him, and I said I certainly would mind. And I said, if you ever say anything that is a lie again, I will brand you a liar again. Strange to say, he never attacked the Bureau again for as long as he lived.” Unless the other participants all lied—King, DeLoach, Young, Ralph Abernathy, and Walter Fauntroy—Hoover’s version was only wishful thinking.107

  *Immediately afterward, DeLoach was attempting to work his own brand of charm on CORE’s James Farmer, who had come over at King’s behest because of a rumor that the FBI was planning to “expose” the civil rights leader the following day. “I told him that our files were sacred to us and that it would be unheard of for the FBI to leak such information to newsmen,” DeLoach reported in his official memo. “I told him I was completely appalled at the very thought of the FBI engaging in such endeavors.”110

  †The Bureau learned of these pleasingly salacious events, and many others, from its wiretap on Rustin. The highlights were passed along to President Johnson.

  31

  The Fall of LBJ

  Alone on his balcony at the Justice Department, high above the 1.2 million cheering citizens, Hoover watched Lyndon Baines Johnson’s inaugural parade. Lady Bird noticed the “lone spectator.” In her diary entry for January 20, 1965, she commented, “He has seen a lot of us come and go.”1