J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  In fact, her husband had been watching many come and go right along with him.

  Take the rich, ambitious senator who didn’t especially admire LBJ but had expected to become his running mate…and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., certain that the president and he shared fundamental goals, but foolhardy enough to work for reform at the Democratic party convention…and Robert Kennedy, who despised Johnson, along with Walter Jenkins, who was devoted to him.

  One by one, together with countless others, they came under the scrutiny of the FBI, and Lyndon artfully pushed and pulled, letting Hoover see clearly how he could make himself indispensable to the political aims of the White House.

  The senator’s estimation of his worth in the national political arena was seriously inflated—even more so when he was arrested by New York City police on a raid of a bar where male homosexuals sought companionship. The senator would never rise higher than the Senate. Soon, although considered to be liberal on most social issues, he was regularly singing the praises of the FBI director for inclusion in the Congressional Record. The story was passed along to President Johnson, who knew that Hoover’s web extended somehow through the nation’s lowliest police precincts—but could always be reminded.

  If Hoover understood exactly how much his president enjoyed salacious gossip, he also felt that he could anticipate the forceful Texan’s political needs. Apparently without informing the White House, the FBI initiated electronic surveillance at the Democratic National Convention in August. CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were bugged. Dr. King was tapped.

  The White House had requested a special squad of thirty agents to help forestall any “civil disruption.”2 As reams of material were passed along to Jenkins, it must have been clear that some of these agents were engaged in transcribing information that could only come from wiretaps and bugs. In addition to these “confidential techniques,” as DeLoach termed them, the FBI team also gathered information by “informant coverage,…by infiltration of key groups through use of undercover agents, and through utilization of agents using appropriate cover as reporters.”3

  The King wiretap revealed the tactics—none of them “disruptive”—planned in a seating challenge of the all-white Mississippi delegation. Within hours, Jenkins knew each element of the changing strategies to be employed by the predominately black Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, including telephoned advice and counsel from several congressmen, senators, and governors.*

  Hoover had not asked Attorney General Kennedy for permission to tap the Reverend King. He was broadly interpreting the earlier authorization with its vague phrase about “residences.” So it was that RFK’s grudging approval led to his being tapped by his subordinate. Any contact Kennedy enjoyed with the civil rights leader, by telephone or in person, was closely observed and immediately reported to DeLoach, Johnson’s man in the FBI.

  The strange spectacle of White House aides giving medical and psychological diagnoses—without benefit of knowledge or examination—was occasioned by an arrest in a men’s room. Ordinarily the suspect might feel at least a little foolish, while the director of the FBI and the president of the United States would, with more important things to think about, comport themselves with appropriate dignity. In October the exact opposite was true.

  Walter Jenkins had been arrested in the same YMCA rest room, two blocks from the White House, back in January of 1959.† That incident had not been publicized, and for about a week neither was this occasion of “disorderly conduct (pervert).” When newsmen began to track down rumors about the incident, Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford persuaded their editors not to go with the story, explaining that exhaustion had occasioned the contact with another man and that Jenkins would be asked to resign.

  The Republican party’s national chairman, mired in Barry Goldwater’s moribund campaign for president, couldn’t resist, however. “The White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security.”6 At the FBI the “national security” angle was being taken very seriously by Hoover’s subordinates. If anything, the doggedly hardworking and infinitely loyal Jenkins might know even more than his boss about some matters, for avalanches of information funneled through him to the Oval Office. Including questionable FBI memos.

  The Johnson election bandwagon felt the ruts in the road, and the president, who yearned to swamp the Kennedy showing of 1960, was furious. He was also suspicious and in a mood for revenge. DeLoach was ordered to comb Goldwater’s staff for derogatory information, but a quick check of fifteen names taken out of the Senate telephone directory got nowhere.* Johnson had announced the resignation of Jenkins, who had followed Fortas’s advice and checked himself into a hospital. He also told the American people that he had asked J. Edgar Hoover for “an immediate and comprehensive inquiry,”7 especially in regard to the possibility that national security could have been compromised.

  To Hoover’s great embarrassment, word got out that a bouquet of flowers had appeared at Jenkins’s bedside, accompanied by a warm personal message signed, “J. Edgar Hoover and Associates.” According to Sullivan, DeLoach had engineered this kindly gesture in order to humiliate the director.†

  While Hoover smarted from the jokes about his hospital gift, LBJ concentrated on the matter at hand. First, the president had FBI agents pressure the man arrested with Jenkins, ordering that “agents should bear down on [the suspect] with respect to his knowledge of…Republican National Committee members.”9 Next, Johnson and Fortas decided that Jenkins was afflicted with “a very serious disease which causes disintegration of the brain.”10 When the FBI sought confirmation from Jenkins’s physician, however, he stood firm. The White House diagnosis was never made public, “inasmuch as the medical authorities are not yet certain of their findings,” as DeLoach phrased it in a memo to Hoover.11 Spurred on by LBJ, the FBI tried to pressure Interior Secretary Stewart Udall to lean on a Park Service cop who had told a story about Jenkins trying to solicit his favors in LaFayette Park earlier in October. The Bureau had been inspired too late. The president had already tried that ploy. The policeman, too, stood firm.

  The hysteria at SOG and the White House subsided when a special poll, commissioned by LBJ, showed that the American public, by and large, couldn’t care less.

  The president praised his loyal old friend in public at last for “dedication, devotion and tireless labor.” Privately, he made sure the FBI report contained yet another medical diagnosis from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fatigued Jenkins was not a homosexual “biologically.”12 More than three hundred people were interviewed in the Bureau’s zeal to prove that Johnson’s aide had not compromised the nation’s security. And that the inquisitive president with a gossipy FBI chief knew nothing about his aide’s prior arrest on a morals charge.*

  The incident probably cost LBJ few votes in his landslide election victory in November. Some well-known voices of the anti-civil rights radical Right, however, turned viciously on their former hero at SOG, calling his Bureau report a “whitewash.” The former congressman Walter H. Judd, himself a virtual icon of outspoken anti-Communists, seethed with rage. He wondered aloud if Hoover or his agency might be “involved in such a way that it fears being hurt by some revelation Jenkins could make.” The famous bouquet, he charged, had “compromised” the Bureau.14

  Quietly and with dignity, Walter Jenkins, forty-six, returned to Texas with his wife and six children.

  In December, after turning down (he said) more than six hundred offers over the years, Hoover signed with ABC, now managed by his old friend, the former Eisenhower press secretary Jim Hagerty.† Produced by Jack Warner, who had produced The FBI Story, the new Bureau-approved TV series premiered the following fall. The top new series in the 1965 season in terms of ratings, “The FBI” endured for nine years.

  What forty million Americans viewed in their living room once a week was in every scene, word, and gesture vetted by Tolson and others in the FBI.* An agent was stationed in
Hollywood to oversee the writing and production.

  Hoover’s experience with filmmaking had been positive, though he grumbled that some unauthorized pictures had not been of top quality. Certainly, none contained a line like Jimmy Stewart’s character’s reaction to his first meeting with the FBI director in the authorized film: “He can make water run uphill.”16

  Casting, of course, was the first priority, and Hoover was pleased that the very clean-cut, unbesmirched Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., was chosen. For his part, the actor would several times characterize the FBI director as “very sweet” and the agents he met as “very kind.” Describing his first meeting with Hoover at SOG, Zimbalist recalled that “he had this marvelous old colored man who would take you in.” After one of Hoover’s monologues, a two-hour-long ramble punctuated with contrasting observations about Khrushchev and Shirley Temple, Zimbalist became convinced that the old man was not only “a breath of fresh air” but was indeed “the ideal, he was the benevolent ruler.”17 Hoover was pleased with his new star.

  Not only the actors playing FBI agents were given background checks but many others as well. Hoover let it be known that he did not want criminals, subversives, or Communists in any way connected with the production. The problems of a Hollywood casting director were not thereby eased. Presumably Warner or his associates knew the story about the scene in The FBI Story that had to be restaged and reshot. The Bureau found something derogatory about one of the extras glimpsed on-camera.

  Despite all of the precautions, the premiere episode shocked Tolson, who immediately wrote a one-line memo recommending cancellation. “I concur,” wrote Hoover.18 The problem was that the criminal in that episode was incited to murder because of an unusual personality disorder. Whenever he touched a woman’s hair, the handsome villain felt an uncontrollable urge to strangle her. DeLoach, who had signed a five-year personal contract with Ford Mercury in connection with the series, went into action, schmoozing with the TV critics, who, like Tolson and Hoover, had disliked the opening episode. There were no more hair fetishists.

  The Bureau’s creative control led to the creation of a strange mix of reality and fantasy. All of the TV agents were middle class, white, and male, which was not far from the truth. But while Zimbalist went on assignment in a radio-equipped late-model car, real-life FBI agents in Washington were handed bus tokens for jobs outside the office. At first, Zimbalist was blasting away at various malefactors each week, though actual FBI agents rarely had occasion to draw a weapon. Then, as escalating TV violence came under heavy criticism, Tolson banished death. “We didn’t kill anybody, I think,” said the star of “The FBI,” “the last two or three years.”19

  And Hollywood’s FBI, at Tolson’s direction, did not investigate the activities of the Cosa Nostra or the Mafia. Indeed, they had never heard of them. The very words were banned from the screen.

  Banned, too, was behavior that was familiar to many people who had been interviewed by agents from the Bureau. On television, FBI personnel were always polite to citizens, solicitous of their feelings, and “very kind.” They never lied on the witness stand.

  Even so, Hoover would try to cancel the show at least seven more times. On each occasion the weary DeLoach composed yet another memo defending the series. To the younger man it seemed that Hoover had lost his nerve, easily frightened that an episode might somehow give his enemies some new ammunition. “He would only go for sure winners,” DeLoach said later. “No longer was he creating an image for the Bureau, but only maintaining it.”20

  In general, it was an image with which the director was well pleased. The doggedly traditionalist star had kept to the straight and narrow, on-screen and off, and Hoover favored him with notes of congratulations or sympathy, as with offers of FBI help in personal matters.

  Perhaps Hoover himself, like many viewers, had come to think that the well-tanned Zimbalist actually was an agent of the Bureau. At a graduation ceremony at the academy, he urged the fledgling agents to “emulate” the star in their new career.21 As had happened before, J. Edgar Hoover seemed to find fantasy more appealing than reality.

  Courtney Evans, onetime pretender to a throne that would not soon be vacated, asked Belmont a sensible bureaucratic question. As FBI liaison to an attorney general who was ignored by the director, what was his probable future with the Bureau?

  “You have no future, Court,” Belmont replied.22

  Robert Kennedy, depressed by his brother’s murder and hated by the president he served, resigned in September 1964. He had decided the previous summer to run for the Senate from New York.* Nicholas Katzenbach became acting attorney general.

  Courtney Evans, who had been whipsawed between Hoover and the Kennedys for almost four years, resigned on December 12—and went to work for Katzenbach. He was immediately placed on the list of persons not to be contacted. Hoover also launched some sort of smear campaign, aimed at having Evans fired from Justice, but it failed.

  (A year later Belmont was also gone, about a year short of his thirty-year retirement date. His offense was that he had told the director the truth more than once too often. DeLoach, fair-haired boy of the president of the United States, replaced him in the number three spot.)

  Katzenbach was one of the few individuals who eventually made the transition from “Kennedy man” to trusted Johnson appointee. That achievement did not come soon enough to give him leverage over Hoover, however.

  For some months the president let his “acting” AG dangle in limbo, the uncertain status of his appointment making it impossible to initiate major policy changes within Justice. When he was confirmed in February, LBJ hauled him and his deputy into the Oval Office and instructed them to “get along with” Hoover and his Bureau. So DeLoach informed the director in a memorandum, along with the president’s promise “that Attorney General Katzenbach would not be around very long and that he hoped we could put up with him for the time being.”24

  This would not be easy. On March 30 Katzenbach directed that Hoover’s “bugs” be initiated only with the same authorization procedures as wiretaps. FBI claims based upon the Brownell memo were “extremely tenuous,”25 the attorney general felt. On the same date, he ordered that wiretaps be reevaluated every six months and continued only with a new authorization by the attorney general, not at the Bureau’s discretion. Hoover could look back over a wealth of material in his files that would never have come to light under such restrictions.

  These moves threatened a delicate balance that Katzenbach understood very well: “In effect, [Hoover] was uniquely successful in having it both ways: he was protected from public criticism by having a theoretical superior who took responsibility for his work, and was protected from his superior by his public reputation.”*26

  Affable as he was bright, the attorney general tried to encourage personal meetings with Hoover, to whom he had never spoken by telephone until November 22, 1963. He met with an icy chill. Hoover increasingly avoided contact with Justice officials, and with his own personnel as well.

  He was communicating with this pesky new boss in other ways. Katzenbach knew that the FBI was leaking potentially embarrassing stories about him to the press. When he pursued those leaks, Hoover’s men “invariably” denied any involvement. During the 1975 Church committee hearings the astounded Katzenbach was shown three documents bearing his initials. Avoiding the term “forgery,” he testified that he did not remember reading the documents and certainly would have. Each reported on an unauthorized bug on Martin Luther King, Jr. The FBI Laboratory declared Katzenbach had indeed initialed the memorandums.

  On one occasion the attorney general made specifically clear that a bug in the bedroom of a Mafia leader was not in line with department policy, and he took care to reaffirm this position later.

  Eventually there was a blowup. For weeks Hoover and Katzenbach warred over the exact language to be used in a Justice Department admission in a Supreme Court case that a defendant had been bugged. Lying to the former attorney general Roge
rs, playing upon LBJ’s contempt for Robert Kennedy, pressuring Senator Russell Long, and attempting to intimidate Deputy AG Ramsey Clark, the Bureau wanted nothing written down that might suggest that Hoover had exceeded his authority. Hanging over Justice was the threat to reveal that Kennedy had known about the surveillances and others, a charge that could not (as Katzenbach suspected) be proved.

  Over Hoover’s furious objections, the solicitor general’s response to the Supreme Court declared, “There is…no specific statute or executive order expressly authorizing the installation of a listening device such as that involved in this case.” That statement and others were unforgivable. “My correspondence with Mr. Hoover…unavoidably became a bitter one,” Katzenbach recalled, “and it persuaded me that I could no longer effectively serve as Attorney General because of Mr. Hoover’s obvious resentment toward me.”28

  Katzenbach, having fallen afoul of what he called “the historical accident of J. Edgar Hoover,”29 resigned from the Cabinet. Taking a cut in pay, he moved in September to the State Department, where he would be under secretary to Dean Rusk. He had chosen to lend his talents to the growing crisis in Vietnam.

  His deputy, Tom Clark’s son Ramsey, succeeded him. Clark became much stronger in the job than his predecessor, acting with such firmness that Hoover, characteristically, would call him a “jellyfish.”

  Despite the Warren Commission’s criticism of the FBI, the director had a vested interest in defending its conclusion that Oswald had acted alone. By the fall of 1966 dozens of books and articles had challenged the commission’s findings. Hoping to find derogatory information that could be used to discredit these efforts, Hoover, at the president’s request, investigated the authors of seven books critical of the Warren Report, turning up the information that one writer had been discharged from the military for mental problems while several others had belonged to leftist organizations. No proof of foreign involvement was found, but the file on one critic contained information of a highly personal nature. It consisted of a Queens County, New York, police record of the subject’s arrest for committing an unnatural act (the charge was later dropped); the depositions of two prostitutes, attesting to the nature of said act; and photographs of the subject, shown nude, his arms seemingly bound behind his back, his face contorted in a painful grimace, while one of the prostitutes was sticking what appeared to be a pin or needle into his erect penis.