J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Blind memorandums containing the fruits of these investigations (the photographs were among the eleven enclosures), were sent to President Johnson, via his aide Marvin Watson, on November 8, 1966,* and were shown to several of the Warren Commission members, as well as favored press contacts, who promptly nicknamed the photograph’s subject “Pinhead.”

  Among those shown the materials was the commission member Hale Boggs. A longtime Hoover supporter, the Louisiana congressman was shocked to discover the extremes to which both the president and the FBI director would go in order to destroy their critics.

  Boggs had no illusions about LBJ, but he was shaken by Hoover’s willing participation. As he remarked to his son, Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., “If they have all this on some little guy who wrote a book, what about me?”31 In time he’d find out.

  Boggs had glimpsed what others dealt with frequently.

  When the civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo was shot dead with an FBI informant on the scene—Gary Thomas Rowe was riding in the same vehicle as the killers—Hoover sought to discredit the victim by giving the story a salacious twist. He told LBJ, “She was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car…It had the appearance of a necking party.”

  In this phone call to Johnson, he added that “the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope.” When the president called back a few minutes later, his FBI director reported, “On the woman’s body we found numerous needle marks indicating she had been taking dope, although we can’t say definitely, because she is dead.” Hoover wanted to believe this lie. That is probably why his agents in Mississippi came up with it.

  Johnson wanted to telephone condolences to the widower. In the first call, referring to “the husband of the woman in Detroit who had died,” as his memo phrased it, Hoover suggested that LBJ have an aide call first, “and, if the man behaves himself, the President could consider talking to him later.”

  His agents were feverishly looking for derogatory information about the murder victim, her husband, and her coworkers in the movement. With equal address, the FBI was leaking slander to the press and to their KKK informants. A wiretap produced this urgent teletype: “Martin Luther King has telephonically advised the family he will arrive in Detroit on Sunday, March 28.” To express his sympathies, the civil rights leader had decided to attend Mrs. Liuzzo’s funeral services. Alerted, the FBI was there in force. Meanwhile, file checks were being set in motion for anyone who wrote Hoover about the case. Under that regimen junior high school students who had written to applaud the FBI’s handling of the investigation earned their first name check.

  Dr. King, apparently operating under the impression that Mrs. Liuzzo was the victim in the case, wired Hoover his congratulations when the FBI apprehended the murder suspects. The Bureau decided not even to acknowledge, much less publicize, this gesture, “because a reply would only help build up this character.”32

  In these years occasions were finally beginning to inform against J. Edgar Hoover.

  Senator Edward Long of Missouri had become exercised about the government’s “armory of electronic snooping devices.”33 His Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure began looking into the surveillance techniques of all government agencies in 1965, beginning with the IRS and its mail coverage. Swiftly the FBI director saw to his fortifications.

  He persuaded LBJ to order Katzenbach, who had no idea just how much Hoover was hiding, to coordinate the responses for all intelligence agencies. Long’s staff was sniffing too close to the FBI’s unauthorized mail intercept programs. The attorney general intended to tell the senator that “extreme national security matters” were jeopardized by his inquiry, a theme that Vice-President Hubert Humphrey would also employ with Long.

  Unknown to Katzenbach, DeLoach went to Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to encourage additional pressure on the blindly probing subcommittee chairman. Soon it was clear to the attorney general that Long was on board; someone had “waked him up.”34 But Hoover decided that Long “cannot be trusted,”35 for his staff had begun to ask questions about wiretaps and microphones, and the innocent Katzenbach was cheerfully agreeing to prepare a memorandum on the subject.

  Even so, the senator was trying to cooperate, but the press was getting into the act.* There were too many juicy rumors about the FBI’s electronic surveillance practices. Long asked DeLoach for advice in dealing with the mounting pressure on him and his subcommittee.

  What the press didn’t know was that Long himself had been picked up in the Bureau’s coverage of organized crime, not once but many times. He was on the payroll. A beneficiary of campaign support from the mob-dominated Teamsters Union, he had publicly, and warmly, praised its notorious president, Jimmy Hoffa, while privately, over a two-year period, receiving a total of $48,000 from the Teamsters official’s personal lawyer. Hoover knew all this, and he let Long know he knew it.36

  Long wanted the FBI director to give the committee transcripts of certain electronic surveillances that had come to light. To Long’s surprise, the FBI director was enthusiastically cooperative, but he had an even better idea: he would make available to the public transcripts of all the Bureau’s electronic coverage, including those on which Long himself appeared. The Missouri senator declined the offer.37

  When DeLoach helpfully suggested that the subcommittee chairman issue a statement that he was satisfied “that the FBI had never participated in uncontrolled usage of wiretaps or microphones and that FBI usage of such devices had been completely justified in all instances,” Long happily agreed. But he wanted to make certain that he was getting it right. Couldn’t the FBI compose the release for him, “on a strictly confidential basis”?38 DeLoach could and did.

  Unfortunately for the FBI, whatever stress Long suffered had not destroyed his common sense. He saw that a release claiming, per the Bureau draft, that “exhaustive research into the activities, procedures, and techniques of this agency” had found electronic surveillance to be “under strict Justice Department control at all times” would send his staff up the wall and then to the eagerly waiting press. Led by the counsel Bernard Fensterwald, a tireless and tenacious interrogator, the subcommittee aides would not have supported the FBI-dictated conclusion: “Investigation made by my staff reflected no independent or unauthorized installation of electronic devices by individual FBI Agents or by FBI offices in the field.”39

  This ploy having failed, DeLoach met with Long and Fensterwald to ask for a commitment that the subcommittee would do nothing to embarrass the Bureau. The counsel had a reasonable proposal. Couldn’t an FBI official, perhaps even DeLoach himself, appear at the hearing and simply state that the agency “used wiretaps only in cases involving national security and kidnapping and extortion, where human life is involved, and used microphones only in those cases involving heinous crimes and Cosa Nostra matters”?40

  That would not be possible. Fensterwald must have been dumbfounded, for his suggested statement was pretty much a paraphrase of the statement the FBI had prepared for Long to deliver. No, DeLoach explained, “to put an FBI witness on the stand would be an attempt to open a Pandora’s box, in so far as our enemies in the press [are] concerned.” When Fensterwald proposed calling a particular former FBI agent as a witness to the committee, DeLoach denounced his erstwhile colleague as “a first-class SOB, a liar, and a man who had volunteered as a witness only to get a public forum.”41

  DeLoach reported to Hoover that the Long subcommittee had been “neutralized”42 but would bear watching. Indeed, the FBI director ordered a file check on all members of the subcommittee and their counsel. He also composed a new statement to be used if he were compelled to testify. In it he claimed that “official records…make it indelibly clear that the FBI used microphones, as well as wiretaps, during Robert Kennedy’s administration of the Justice Department with Mr. Kennedy’s knowledge and approval.”43

  But the subcommittee backed off. There would be n
o need for putting the blame on the Kennedy brothers…not just yet.

  Still, it had been close, and the director had suffered because of Long’s timidity, or divided loyalties, when the chips were down. The FBI had protected the senator, but had the latter labored with appropriate diligence to protect the FBI?

  Hoover soon reached his answer. By the spring of 1967 Long’s subcommittee had drafted proposed legislation to ban wiretapping and bugging, except in national-security cases as determined under strict guidelines.

  In May a Life magazine article using material leaked by the FBI hit the stands. Not only revealing the $48,000 payment from Hoffa’s attorney, the writer expounded his thesis that all of Long’s committee activities aimed to protect criminals and weaken legitimate law enforcement operations. In particular, the senator was supposed to be most interested in helping Hoffa get a reversal of his conviction for jury tampering in Chattanooga, Tennessee. According to this theory, the subcommittee would obtain evidence of government wiretapping in the case, thereby giving the Teamster grounds for reversal of his conviction or a new trial.*44

  Behind closed doors a Senate committee later investigated and exonerated Senator Long. His subcommittee’s comprehensive bill to control bugging and wiretapping was set aside. He was defeated for reelection in the Democratic primary by Thomas Eagleton.

  “Mr. Speaker, this is corruption at its worst and its central figure is J. Edgar Hoover. It is he whose unchecked reign of absolute power has intimidated this Congress to the extent that a serious question has not been asked about his management of the FBI for 10 years—maybe longer. He has become the American Beria, destroying those who threaten his empire, frightening those who should question his authority, and terrorizing those who dissent from his ancient and anachronistic view of the world.”45

  Forcefully delivered in the U.S. House of Representatives, these words could have riveted the nation as the brave assault of a courageous congressman. But by April 19, 1972, Representative Cornelius E. Gallagher, Democrat from New Jersey, was a drowning man. Bright, handsome, liberal, he had been on LBJ’s short list for the vice-presidency in 1964, until Hoover spoke a word in the president’s ear. Soon Gallagher would plead guilty to one count of tax evasion and be sentenced to two years in jail. Hoover’s FBI had destroyed his credibility, and his bright political future, before he rose to speak.

  It could have been much worse. Some years earlier he had given the Hoover lackey Roy Cohn a preview of a very different kind of speech: “It has been called to my attention that the Director of the FBI and the Deputy Director of the FBI have been living as man and wife for some 28 years at the public’s expense; as a member of Congress we have an oversight duty and that oversight is to make sure that the funds which go to the FBI are properly spent…” Cohn was horrified, but Gallagher was determined. “I may go down,” he said, “but I’m taking that old fag with me.”47 The speech never made the Congressional Record. The following day, according to the congressman, Cohn called to make a deal for Hoover.

  It had all begun with Gallagher’s concern, echoing Long’s, about governmental abuse of surveillance capabilities. Later he recalled, “Senator Long was the pioneer in privacy in the Senate just as I was in the House of Representatives.” As a member of the House Committee on Government Operations, he had learned about polygraph tests, trash snooping, and mail covers. By June 1966 his privacy subcommittee was getting ready to hold hearings on the growing potential for new kinds of invasion of privacy by means of the rapid developments in computer technology.

  One morning he found a strange letter among the stack of typed correspondence his secretary had left for him to sign. In it he was asking Katzenbach to send over copies of the Justice Department’s authorization for the bugs on King and the Las Vegas casinos. This missive, composed by DeLoach, had been dictated over the telephone by Cohn. When the “very unhappy” congressman reached Cohn, the explanation was that Hoover was “sick and tired” of being criticized for illegal surveillance and “furious with Senator [Robert] Kennedy, who was blaming it on Mr. Hoover.”

  Gallagher, who had long known Cohn and had, along with his wife, dined several times in the home the lawyer shared with his mother, asserted sensibly that he did not want to get involved in bureaucratic infighting, though he had often expressed support of the FBI publicly.

  His feelings were about to change. “You’ll be sorry,” Cohn replied. “I know how they work.” Subsequently Hoover’s number one conduit to gossip columnists called the congressman several more times, stressing the Bureau’s displeasure. In Hoover’s view the Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy was the perfect vehicle through which he “could relieve himself of the public criticism.” Gallagher would have none of it.

  His hearings went forward, for the first time alerting the public to the specific abuses possible with computers. Unknown to him, the FBI was even then developing large data banks of information.48

  The Life story was dated August 9, 1968, and used the same kind of leaked raw material that had fueled the exposé of Senator Long. Once again an organized crime tap had produced unexpected information about a member of the Congress. In this case Gallagher was alleged to have suspiciously close ties with the Cosa Nostra’s Joe Zicarelli, whose various scams and rackets were based in the congressman’s hometown, Bayonne.* The Life writing team was not unaware of the irony, admitting that Gallagher was “a leading congressional spokesman against government invasions of privacy, including the very investigative technique that had first disclosed his own alliance with the Mob.”

  The most shocking paragraphs came from a convicted hit man turned Bureau informant, who was said to claim that he had, at Gallagher’s request, removed a corpse from the basement of the congressman’s home in Bayonne and buried it in the wooden mash pit of an abandoned whiskey still on a chicken farm.

  Tagged “the tool and collaborator” of Zicarelli, Gallagher was quickly dropped from consideration for being raised in the hierarchy of House leadership. But Hoover was not satisfied. “If you still know that guy,” DeLoach said to Cohn, “you had better get word to him to resign from Congress.”†

  If he did not, the FBI was prepared to leak the story, which it was already spreading casually around town, that the dead man of the Life exposé, a minor mob figure, had died of a seizure while making love to the congressman’s wife.‡ “I doubt if even Goebbels had the terrible capacity of a DeLoach to spread the big lie, nor could Goebbels exceed the filthy mind of a DeLoach,” Gallagher would rage in Congress in his 1972 speech.52

  In 1968, however, it was his plan to launch a highly personal attack on Hoover and Tolson in the same forum. Temporarily DeLoach was stymied. Not only did Cohn call back to convey the FBI director’s pledge of friendship; he asked what the Bureau could do.

  Gallagher demanded that the FBI announce that the supposed wiretap transcripts of his phone calls to Zicarelli were phony. The Bureau indeed did so, but would have anyway. It was not in Hoover’s interest to allow a story that clearly involved an illegal wiretap to go unchallenged.

  Nonetheless, the congressman never carried out his threat, and the rumors about his wife were never scotched. In 1986, some three months before Cohn died of complications resulting from AIDS, he agreed to sign a statement that affirmed Gallagher’s version of the entire episode. He did not sign cheerfully, according to observers. He was attesting that Mrs. Gallagher had been slandered as part of an FBI-engineered plot to blackmail her husband into leaving public life.53

  But by then Hoover was safely dead, and he signed.

  Long and Gallagher were not the only senators Hoover destroyed. Back in 1964 Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut had received some disappointing news: contrary to his firm expectations, LBJ was not going to ask him to be on the ticket as vice-president.

  He was not really hewn from presidential timber, Dodd told an aide who knew he believed otherwise. “There are only two jobs I would leave the Senate for,” he went on, “FBI Director and th
e head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and I may well end up in one or the other.”54

  The only reason the remark did not harm the senator’s charmed status with Hoover was that the director did not hear it at that time.

  An FBI agent himself for a year, Dodd was the Bureau’s champion in the Senate. The connection was not loose. In 1933 Attorney General Cummings had sent young Dodd to Hoover with the express intent of creating a springboard for the ambitious young man’s political career. As the senator’s top aide later explained, the short tenure was “long enough to put the FBI stamp permanently on his public image.”55

  Nor was the Connecticut senator a merely parochial figure. Number two Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, head of the Internal Security Subcommittee, and member of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, he was part of the so-called Club, the Senate within the Senate. With the input of Bureau staffers, he delivered dozens of speeches extolling the personal virtues of J. Edgar Hoover, often streaking first out of the starting gate when either the director or his Bureau was criticized.*

  Hoover was grateful. Dodd was handed politically beneficial information uncovered by the FBI. He was warned when rumors and evidence turned up concerning his financial irregularities and other dangerous matters. When the senator visited New York on personal business, an FBI agent was there to drive him around in an FBI vehicle. When Dodd became suspicious that a member of his staff was romancing during work hours, Hoover ordered his agents to tail the fellow and produce hour-by-hour reports of his activities and whereabouts.