J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  *At least one reason Dodd enjoyed such favor with both Hoover and LBJ was his expressed contempt for the Kennedys. On the day of the assassination, his startled aides picked up the drunken senator at the airport and were treated to a volley of slanderous remarks about the dead president and the pope, interrupted with their boss’s speculations that he would be named vice-president soon. When the late president’s funeral services were aired on national television on all channels, Dodd became incensed that nothing else could be viewed and resorted to directing the funeral march, interjecting obscene gestures.

  *In a think piece, the Washington Post’s Richard Harwood deftly summed up the conflict: “If, as Director Hoover has insisted, Attorney General Kennedy was not only cognizant of but encouraged the illegal eavesdropping in which the FBI has been engaged for years, his political position is hardly enhanced. His credibility would be damaged, for he has denied the Hoover claim without reservation. His position with the liberal intellectual establishment would likewise be impaired, for eavesdropping is inconsistent with prevailing concepts of civil liberty in the United States.”58

  *According to Mark Felt, once deputy associate director of the FBI, Hoover, “sensitive to the moods of Congress,” had already asked him for a “substantial” cutback in wiretapping during 1965. The director, without laying down specific guidelines, simply asked Felt to winnow out the least-productive taps, apparently relying upon the agent’s judgment and initiative. These qualities received national attention in 1980, when he and Edward Miller were convicted of conspiring to violate individual civil rights by authorizing break-ins and searches of the homes of five people suspected of having ties to fugitives who belonged to the Weather Underground, a radical leftist organization. The prosecutor noted that he had “tons of examples of entries that continued from 1966 to 1972.”63 Despite Hoover’s January 6 memo, FBI agents were repeatedly staging break-ins in New York City during the last six months of his life. Felt and Miller were the first top FBI officials ever convicted of this charge. Both were given “full and unconditional” pardons by President Ronald Reagan before they were sentenced.64 The following day former President Richard Nixon sent champagne to the two men. “I think he’s a fabulous guy,” said Miller.65

  *In November the director informed selected SACs about the Bureau’s inspiration for a Klanzi party COINTELPRO: “We created the impression that the Klan and the American Nazi Party might form the Klanzi Party…for the purpose of ridicule and to provoke certain Klan leaders to an attack on the ANP.”67 A month before, someone suggested a rather similar plan to disrupt the Communist party and La Cosa Nostra by “having them expend their energies attacking each other.”68 A supposedly Communist leaflet attacking the working conditions at a mob-owned business was to be the first fruit of Operation Hoodwink.

  *The New York Times columnist James Reston noted tongue-in-cheek, “Johnson is staying out of the Kennedy-Hoover controversy. He is managing to restrain his grief over seeing the Senator in an embarrassing situation with Kennedy’s new-found liberal supporters.”71

  *When he announced publicly that his written consent would be required for all wiretaps, Clark also asserted that tapping was justified only in cases of national security where there was a direct threat to the security of the nation. By his own account, the new attorney general knew of only thirty-eight wiretaps in existence at the time, all in the national-security area.

  †“I was no stranger to the Department,” Clark would tell the Church committee. “When I first officially entered here, I padded the halls as a 9-year-old kid beside my father. I love the place.”80 To avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, Justice Clark stepped down from the Supreme Court when his son was appointed attorney general. President Johnson thereupon appointed Thurgood Marshall, the first black to sit on the Court.

  ‡Of talks with Hoover, Clark would recall, “I don’t think that I ever really engaged in philosophical discussion or arguments with him. These would basically be soliloquies; these were things that he would get off on.” Tolson, on the other hand, struck the attorney general as “a gentle and thoughtful man.” He could “carry on a very engaging conversation on many subjects, but you never felt any fervor of opinion and you never thought that here was a man who made a decision. If it ever came to an issue that required a decision, he would always defer to Hoover or say, ‘I’ll have to see what the boss says.’ ”81

  *Early in 1968 Ramsey Clark drily answered a question about his dealings with his famous employee: “I describe our relationship as cordial and he describes it as correct.”90

  *The FBI’s inability to discover any Marxist-Leninist influence in this organization caused the probe to be closed down the following month. A similar program began in 1968; a full investigation was launched in August 1971 and continued up to 1974.

  *These annual exercises were not without surprises. In 1966, congressmen were unsettled when Hoover departed from his prepared text to rave about Rustin, charging that he had been “convicted of sodomy, a violation of the Selective Service Act and was an admitted member of the Young Communist League…He admitted sodomy. He was apprehended in Pasadena, CA.”105

  †“These top-level Communist officials were invited by the schools or by groups on the campuses,” the FBI director testified. “I do not feel this should be permitted as I do not think the students should be confronted by individuals who are liars.” He noted that the Bureau sent speakers to colleges and universities to present “the true facts about communism.”107

  *Johnson groused to DeLoach that only six senators formed the nucleus of the antiwar opposition, including Morse, Fulbright, and Robert Kennedy. All, said the president, had either dined at the Soviet embassy in Washington or lunched or met privately with the Russian ambassador before becoming outspoken about the war. The president’s analysis of their personal motives was characteristically dismissive. Fulbright was “a narrow-minded egotist who is attempting to run the country.” Kennedy, Hoover would be told, was only trying to “bring embarrassment to the Administration and fame and publicity to himself.”113 In regard to the war, Johnson told the FBI he felt that Fulbright and Morse were “definitely under control of the Soviet Embassy.”114

  BOOK ELEVEN

  The Unforgotten Man

  “Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men. You will rely on him time and again to maintain security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”

  —President Lyndon Baines Johnson

  to President-elect Richard M. Nixon

  “I always felt that President [Herbert] Hoover was terribly wronged. Everyone blamed him for the Depression. He was a very shy man, you know, very human. We used to walk down the street in New York City after he had been president and no one recognized him. I thought, ‘How terrible, to be forgotten.’ ”

  —FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s

  last interview, Nation’s Business,

  January 1972

  32

  Hail, Caesar!

  Among the first government officials President-elect Nixon summoned to his transition headquarters in New York’s Hotel Pierre was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

  “Edgar,” Nixon told him, “you are one of the few people who is to have direct access to me at all times. I’ve talked to Mitchell about it and he understands.”1

  For eight years J. Edgar Hoover had waited to hear those words.

  Properly grateful, he’d come bearing his own peculiar gifts.

  During the closing days of the campaign, Hoover informed Nixon, President Johnson had ordered the FBI, under the guise of national security, to investigate both his running mate, Spiro Agnew, and Madame Chennault.

  Age hadn’t slowed Hoover’s speech. At times his staccato, machine-gun-like delivery seemed even speedier (the result, at least some of his assistants suspected, of his daily “vitamin shots”). This may explain what then happened. For as Hoover recited the details of the taps,
bugs, and long-distance telephone calls made from the campaign plane, apparently both Nixon and H. R. Haldeman misunderstood him: they thought he said that LBJ had ordered the FBI to wiretap him, Nixon, and that his campaign plane had been bugged.

  As Hoover had anticipated, Nixon blamed LBJ, not him. However, Haldeman, who was soon named White House chief of staff, realized that the FBI director was simply “covering his ass.” To which Haldeman later added, with uncharacteristic humor: “And no one was more adept at sheltering that broad expanse than he.”2

  But these weren’t Hoover’s only surprises. The best was yet to come. By courtesy and tradition, the president-elect had been invited to visit the president at the White House. When he did, Hoover warned Nixon, he should be very careful what he said. Not only were the telephones monitored; Johnson had installed elaborate electronic equipment which enabled him secretly to record conversations in the Oval Office.

  This so startled Nixon and Haldeman that neither paid much attention when Hoover explained the mechanics, that the taping system was manually operated, by a switch under LBJ’s desk, and that he could turn it on, or off, whenever he chose.

  Thus was the seed planted.

  On November 11 the Johnsons took the Nixons on a tour of the White House, showing them the changes that had been made since Eisenhower’s days. Over lunch, while their wives were carrying on their own conversation, the president-elect asked the president what he thought of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms. Although Johnson’s comments on Helms go unremembered (Nixon later reappointed him), it was obvious to Nixon that “Lyndon Johnson’s admiration for Hoover was almost unbounded.”3 Johnson urged Nixon to keep Hoover on, and Nixon assured him that he had already informed the FBI director that he would do so.

  Johnson and Nixon again met on December 12, this time privately, in the Oval Office, and again the subject of Hoover came up, in a discussion of “leaks.”

  It was of the utmost importance, Johnson told Nixon, that secrecy be maintained on all matters involving national security. If he met with his full Cabinet or the National Security Council in the morning, everything he said would make the afternoon papers, Johnson complained. He didn’t even ask Hubert to sit in on many of his meetings, for fear his staff might leak something.

  “If it hadn’t been for Edgar Hoover,” Johnson added cryptically, “I couldn’t have carried out my responsibilities as Commander in Chief. Period. Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men. You will rely on him time and again to maintain security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”4

  During either this meeting or the earlier one on November 11, Johnson also told Nixon that “if it hadn’t been for Edgar Hoover, he could not have been president,”5 and that “without Mr. Hoover…he simply couldn’t have run the foreign policy of this country during the last difficult months of his presidency.”

  These cryptic remarks would puzzle Nixon throughout his White House years, and long thereafter. “What he was referring to, I do not know,” the former president stated in a little-known 1976 deposition.6

  Johnson and Nixon also discussed, in this, their last meeting before the inauguration, presidential libraries and the importance of maintaining the historical record.

  Sitting in the Oval Office, which he would soon occupy, conversing with the outgoing president, whom he would soon replace, Richard Nixon surely realized that this was in itself indeed a historic moment, and that probably every word they said was being recorded.

  Thus did the seed germinate.

  Nixon had intended to announce Hoover’s reappointment on January 1, 1969, the FBI director’s seventy-fourth birthday, but on learning that True magazine planned to publish an “exposé” on the FBI director in its January issue, which would reach the stands on December 30, Hoover persuaded the president-elect to move up the announcement two weeks.

  The article, “The Last Days of J. Edgar Hoover,” by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, was more laudatory than critical, more rehash than investigative journalism. It disclosed that Hoover’s “sainthood” had been fostered by “40 years of planted press notices” (neglecting to mention that their “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column had published more than its share of them) and that Hoover was a hard disciplinarian who was feared by his subordinates; but the only real revelation was that Hoover’s “closest confidant and constant companion,” Clyde Tolson, now sixty-eight, was “in failing health,” which was obvious to anyone who saw him.

  If anything, the article should have reassured Hoover that his myths were intact. It didn’t, of course. Planted editorials praising Hoover, and lauding Nixon for reappointing him, appeared in newspapers all over the country.

  Unaware that it was the last time he would do so, on January 20, 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover watched the inaugural parade from his balcony on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building.

  As the caravan passed along Pennsylvania Avenue, the president-elect, looking up and spotting Hoover, stood and threw out his right arm, with his palm upward, as if in a Roman salute, while the FBI director responded with a beaming smile and what was perhaps a condescending nod.

  It was as if the president-elect were passing in review for him.

  Thereafter it became one of the FBI director’s favorite stories, of how the newly elected president had shown his obeisance. It was a great story. There was only one thing wrong with it. It never happened.

  In planning the inaugural parade, Nixon, almost deathly afraid of assassination, had ruled out an open convertible and the Secret Service had gratefully concurred. Rufus Youngblood, the agent in charge of presidential protection, recalled, “We moved down Pennsylvania Avenue not in an open car, but in an enclosed limousine that was as bulletproof and bombproof as technology could devise.”7 Every newspaper and television photograph of the event showed an enclosed limousine.

  Perhaps the president-elect did wave. And Hoover, from his fifth floor aerie, may have spotted the motion. But Hail, Caesar?

  It was enough to make one suspect that the aged FBI director was getting senile, except for one fact: Hoover’s aides, who were standing alongside him, also claimed to have seen Nixon stand and raise his arm in salute.

  They would never have reached that balcony had they not first learned to see the world through J. Edgar Hoover’s eyes.

  Hoover didn’t need to exaggerate his relationship with the new president. That Richard Nixon had finally risen to the presidency was due, in large part, to him. Nixon had more than ample reason to be grateful. Of all the eight presidents he had served under while FBI director, Hoover knew this one best. His files on Nixon dated back to 1939—when the young Duke graduate had applied for an appointment as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had been rejected for “lacking aggressiveness”—and covered all the years since. He knew his strengths and his weaknesses. He knew of more crises than Nixon himself cared to remember. He was aware of financial and personal relationships that had never surfaced during any of Nixon’s campaigns.

  Hoover had still another reason to feel content. As his attorney general, Nixon had picked his former law partner and campaign manager, John Mitchell, a tough, law-and-order advocate whose views on most issues were in complete accord with Hoover’s own (the system of justice in the United States suffered, Mitchell complained, from “a preoccupation with fairness for the accused”).8

  But when Nixon told Hoover who the new AG would be, he did something unprecedented: he asked that the FBI not conduct a background investigation on Mitchell.

  This was, as Nixon should have known, like waving a red flag in front of a bull. “By merely making the request,” William Sullivan realized, “Nixon put himself right in the director’s pocket.”9

  Hoover went along with the request, but Sullivan made some discreet inquiries. All he discovered was that Mitchell’s wife Martha was under treatment for alcoholism, which was fairl
y common knowledge; and that she had been pregnant with their first child before Mitchell’s divorce from his previous wife had come through. Neither of which, of course, was grounds for denying him his new post.

  “I never found out what Mitchell was hiding,” Sullivan recalled.10 Perhaps there was nothing to find. It was possible that Nixon simply wanted to spare his friend the embarrassment of questions regarding his wife’s illness.

  There was still another possibility, which was the outgrowth of a certain peculiarity in the personality of Richard Nixon, one which J. Edgar Hoover recognized and would use to his own advantage in the months to come.

  The FBI had taken over the job of investigating presidential appointees—including Supreme Court nominees, Cabinet officers, ambassadors, White House staff and employees—during the Truman era. It was a job which Hoover had very much wanted and one which every president since had found helpful. But when the FBI forwarded its reports to the White House, Nixon, unlike his predecessors, didn’t want to see them, “because,” he would state, “if somebody was going to be on a staff, I didn’t want to know what his problems were or had been in early life…I only wanted to know whether presently he was competent, whether he could do the job. As far as his present life was concerned, unless it involved something that might impinge upon his service, I felt that it was best not to know, because it would create an unpleasant relationship between me and whoever I had to work with.”11

  Ill at ease with all but a few close friends, Nixon did not want to get emotionally involved with the people he worked with. He didn’t want to know what their problems were. (But his aides were very interested in such information, and Hoover continued to supply it.) He even found it difficult to hire people. And almost impossible to fire them.