J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  A month later the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” reported that the former FBI executive Lou Nichols had been telling his friends that he expected to succeed Hoover. “Nichols believes he has the inside track with President Nixon, who is expected to keep Hoover on one more year, then retire him at last at the age of 75.”32

  Nichols tried to call Hoover to deny the charge, but the director refused to take his calls. Louis Nichols, the first Judas, was once again persona non grata at FBIHQ.

  To end such talk—once and for all, he hoped—Hoover on May 8 told the Associated Press, “I have many plans and aspirations for the future. None includes retirement.”

  This was clearly a message to President Nixon and his advisers that he did not intend to go gentle into that good night. There would be no easy resignation, or symbolic move upward to the position of director emeritus, as had been suggested.

  Someone was behind all these rumors, Hoover was convinced, a cabal of enemies, and he suspected John Ehrlichman and his White House associates. It was more than idle speculation. The director had his own sources in the White House who supplied verbatim remarks Ehrlichman and the others had made.

  The time had come to strike back.

  Early in May 1969 Hoover called in Sullivan and told him, “There is a ring of homosexualists at the highest levels of the White House. I want a complete report.”33 Hoover then identified three of the suspected “deviates” as H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin (the latter, a Haldeman protégé from the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, was Nixon’s personal aide).

  Hoover’s source was a free-lance reporter, who was also a Bureau informant. He’d supplied a list of names, dates, and places—including a particular resort—where the alleged acts had taken place, and had told his FBI contact that he would sell the story unless the Bureau assured him they’d investigated and found it untrue. Realizing the difficulty of investigating such a charge without some word of it getting out, Sullivan did nothing, hoping that this was just another of the director’s temporary aberrations and that he would forget about it.

  But Hoover, who had been trying for months to get something on his White House “enemies,” had no intention of letting so damaging an accusation pass. To force the issue, he informed the president of the charges, making sure the information reached him by routing it via both John Mitchell and Rose Mary Woods.

  The accusation apparently both stunned and immobilized Nixon. This was exactly the sort of highly personal thing he didn’t want to know about the people he worked with. Making it even worse, his own close friendship with Bebe Rebozo had caused similar rumors in the past, which would undoubtedly resurface if any of this proved true. Such a scandal had greatly embarrassed Governor Ronald Reagan of California in 1967, when Drew Pearson revealed that some of his aides were spending weekends in a Lake Tahoe cabin with underage males.

  Despite the title of his best-selling book, Richard Nixon did not handle crises well. If he couldn’t assign a problem to someone else, he usually tried his best to ignore it, apparently hoping the problem would resolve itself. However, for obvious reasons, he couldn’t assign this particular problem to either Haldeman or Ehrlichman, as he had done recently in another potentially embarrassing, albeit nonsexual, case involving his brother Donald.

  Through various sources, the president had learned that his brother was meeting secretly with one of Howard Hughes’s representatives, John Meier. Richard Nixon had his own deals going with Hughes, as did Attorney General Mitchell, and he was not eager to have them exposed by his brother’s freewheeling. But then, neither was he willing to trust J. Edgar Hoover with the assignment of wiretapping his brother. “I don’t want to use Hoover,” he told Ehrlichman; “he can use it against me. See if the CIA will do it.”34 Ehrlichman then asked the CIA to put a full cover—wiretaps and twenty-four-hour surveillance—on Donald Nixon, but the agency, fearful the FBI director would learn they were poaching on his turf, had declined. Finally Nixon tried the Secret Service, which accepted the assignment without complaint. There was a precedent for this, Nixon learned: LBJ had used the SS, and not the FBI, to tail his brother, Sam Houston Johnson, who also had a propensity for getting into possibly embarrassing business dealings. But this time there was no point in using the Secret Service, since Hoover was already aware of the charges. So Nixon did nothing.

  Meanwhile, the homosexual rumor spread. By May 27 Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s former campaign manager, had heard it. On June 24 Mitchell informed Nixon that he, too, had been asked about it. To protect himself, the attorney general advised the president, he had no choice but to ask the FBI to investigate the allegations. Reluctantly Nixon agreed and called Hoover, who promised that he would have one of his “most discreet executives,” Assistant Director Mark Felt, conduct the investigation.

  Felt, accompanied by an FBI stenotypist, questioned the individual suspects in their White House offices. (“I had a good alibi for the dates alleged,” Ehrlichman recalled; “I was elsewhere with other people, including a satisfactory number of women.”)35 Finding no evidence to support the allegations, Felt recommended that the case be closed, and Hoover concurred. But for months the rumors continued to circulate around Washington.

  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover might be old, Ehrlichman realized, but he could still play hardball.

  Though Ehrlichman and others in the White House were scheming to retire Hoover, its chief occupant was finding him much too useful to replace.

  When Nixon requested an FBI field check on Walter Annenberg, who wanted to be appointed ambassador to Britain, Hoover’s report was “four or five inches thick and included a history of Moe, his race-wire empire and his manifold underworld connections,” according to Ehrlichman. “But the file contained nothing derogatory about his son, Walter.”36 Yet the FBI director had such information, including court documents linking Walter Annenberg to at least some of his father’s activities. Hoover withheld it because he was aware how much Nixon wanted the TV Guide publisher cleared. Reportedly he had contributed $1 million to Nixon’s election campaign.

  In at least two instances, the director’s attempts to please the president by shortcutting established procedures backfired. The FBI’s background investigations of the Nixon Supreme Court nominees Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., and G. Harrold Carswell were so perfunctory that material which the FBI overlooked, including possible financial conflicts and prosegregationist statements, was used by the Senate to help defeat their nominations.

  The investigation and clearance of Haynsworth took all of one day and consisted of two telephone calls: on July 1, 1969, Hoover called the SAC in Columbia, South Carolina, who reported that the judge was “considered very conservative” and “definitely in favor of law and order”; and a followup call in which Hoover relayed this information to Attorney General Mitchell.37

  “Our investigation of Carswell had been so superficial,” William Sullivan recalled, “that we never found out that he was a homosexual.”38 Not until his 1976 arrest, for propositioning a vice-squad officer in the men’s room of a Tallahassee shopping mall, did the Bureau learn that Carswell had been a known homosexual for years.*

  When it suited his own purposes, however, Hoover could be very thorough. When asked for background checks on three possible nominees for chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (to replace Earl Warren, who had submitted his resignation while Johnson was still president), the FBI director found potentially derogatory material on all three—thus clearing the way for the man he personally favored, Warren Burger, a former assistant attorney general whom Eisenhower had appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1956, whose candidacy Hoover had been pushing since even before Nixon was sworn in.

  Hoover then worked closely with Attorney General Mitchell, compiling a list of federal appeals court judges who fit Nixon’s qualifications for the position: he wanted a conservative committed to his own philosophy, with judicial experience, fully predictable views, integrity, and administrative abil
ity, who was young enough to serve at least ten years.*

  When Nixon looked over the list—according to Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong—one name stood out, that of Warren G. Burger. Attorney General Mitchell gave the FBI director Burger’s name on May 19; not too surprisingly, since he was Hoover’s candidate, Burger was quickly cleared; and on May 21 the president announced the nomination.

  Not wishing to leave anything to chance, Hoover called his old friend James O. Eastland, who headed the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would hold hearings on the nomination, but Eastland, who had already been contacted by numerous others, assured Hoover that the nominee had his personal support.

  In photographs of the new chief justice’s swearing-in ceremony, on June 23, 1969, there is no mistaking the look of smug satisfaction on J. Edgar Hoover’s face.†

  “Hoover picked Warren Burger,” William Sullivan would bluntly state. “He made him chief justice.”39

  One of the three Hoover had eliminated to clear the way for Burger was his former boss and longtime “friend” William Rogers.

  The FBI director did less well, however, when he tried to help Nixon change the direction of the Court.

  One of Nixon’s campaign promises had been that if elected he would “turn around” the Supreme Court. Merely substituting Burger for Warren, however, didn’t accomplish this, since the chief justice, like each of the associate justices, had only a single vote. To assure a conservative majority, one or more of the liberal justices had to be replaced.

  With Hoover’s help, a hit list was drawn up. It was a short list, with only three names. In the order of their supposed vulnerability they were Associate Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Jr., and Abe Fortas.

  Douglas was considered the most vulnerable because of his voting record, particularly on obscenity issues (he’d also given a stay of execution to the Rosenbergs); his often controversial views (no one agreed with Douglas all the time, it was said, not even Douglas); his personal life (he’d been married, for the fourth time, at age sixty-seven, to a twenty-three-year-old attorney); and his directorship of the Albert Parvin Foundation, for which he received an annual fee of $12,000. Established by a California businessman as a way to fight communism (the idea had come from one of Douglas’s books), the fund brought foreign students to the United States to study the American form of government. However, its stock portfolio, Hoover discovered, included part interest in the mortgage of a Las Vegas casino.* Although there was no evidence that Douglas himself had Mafia connections, it could be made to seem that way, and Hoover passed on this information, first to Attorney General Mitchell and later to Congressman Gerald Ford, who would lead the Douglas impeachment fight.

  Brennan’s only sensitive point seemed to be a $15,000 real-estate investment he’d made with Fortas and some lower-court judges. And this was promptly leaked to sympathetic press contacts, who implied that Brennan might be influenced if he had to review the decisions of his fellow investors. It was a cheap shot, but it was all Hoover could come up with, even though he hated Brennan for his decisions restricting police powers.

  Fortas seemed the least vulnerable of the three, since he’d been worked over fairly thoroughly only months earlier, by the Senate, when Lyndon Johnson had nominated him to fill retiring Chief Justice Warren’s seat. But the disclosure that Fortas had continued advising LBJ on legal matters even after he was sitting on the Court had doomed his nomination, and given Nixon the chance to name Warren’s replacement.

  But it was Fortas, not Douglas, who proved most vulnerable, and it was Attorney General John Mitchell, not FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who brought him down.

  Earlier, during the confirmation fight, there had been testimony linking Fortas to the multimillionaire industrialist Louis Wolfson, a client of Fortas’s law firm, who had been indicted and convicted of Securities and Exchange Commission violations. Digging deeper into the files, William Wilson, who headed the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, discovered that in 1966, a year after he joined the Court, Fortas had accepted a $20,000 fee from a foundation funded by Wolfson, and that he had not returned the money until eleven months later, long after Wolfson had been indicted.

  Mitchell, or someone working for him, now leaked this information to Life magazine, which ran a six-page exposé of the Fortas-Wolfson connection, including the fact that the justice had met secretly with the financier following his indictment.

  Fortas now claimed that the $20,000 was for research and writing services and that he had finally returned it when he found he didn’t have time to undertake the assignment. But Wolfson himself, apparently hoping to make a deal, demolished this explanation by producing documents which showed that he had agreed to pay Fortas $20,000 a year for life or, in the event of his death, to pay Fortas’s widow a like amount every year during her lifetime.

  Confronted with the documents, Fortas resigned from the Court.

  Hoover could claim no credit for this victory. In fact, realizing that he would probably be the chief suspect, he carefully dissociated himself from it, with a remarkable memorandum. On June 2, 1969, he sent the attorney general a “Personal and Confidential” memo in which he stated that he had learned from “a reliable source” that “in connection with the investigation involving former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, the Department [of Justice] furnished considerable information to William Lambert, writer for Life magazine, which not only enabled Lambert to expose the Fortas tie-in with the Wolfson Foundation but additionally kept Lambert advised regarding” the ongoing FBI investigation.

  There is no better proof of Hoover’s mastery of the bureaucratic process. With this single memorandum, he accomplished three things: (1) he cleared the FBI of complicity in leaking the information to Life; (2) he put Mitchell on notice that nothing he did escaped him; and (3) he created a document which could be most embarrassing to the administration if the attorney general, or the president, ever turned on him.

  Mitchell did the only smart thing: he played dumb, responding, “We have started an investigation within the Department, with the hope of ascertaining the source of such leaks.”40

  Removing Fortas didn’t solve Nixon’s problems with the Court, since, with the Senate’s rejection of both his nominees, Haynsworth and Carswell, he still had to find an acceptable conservative to fill the vacant seat. But if he could eliminate one more liberal…

  Again Justice Douglas, who had already survived a Nixon-ordered IRS audit, was targeted, and Congressman Gerald Ford was given the assignment of mounting an impeachment drive. As before, Hoover supplied much of the ammunition, although this time the CIA also contributed.

  However, Ford’s effort went badly, and on June 5, 1970, Nixon called Hoover to check out a possible new charge. Was he aware, the president asked, that Douglas had an article in “one of those magazines”? Hoover was and declared the publication—the literary magazine Evergreen Review, which had published an excerpt from Justice Douglas’s latest book, Points of Rebellion—“pornographic.” Hoover’s memorandum concerning the conversation noted, “The President asked if he had Jerry Ford call me, would I fill him in on this; that he is a good man. I told him I would.”41

  Gerald Ford hardly needed Nixon’s endorsement. Hoover had spotted him as a comer when he first became a candidate for Congress, a judgment that had been confirmed in Ford’s maiden speech, when he’d asked for a pay raise for the FBI director. And Ford, of course, had been Hoover’s informant on the Warren Commission.

  Hoover gave Ford the information, which he used, but it didn’t help; after weeks of hearings, the House committee issued a 924-page report, which concluded, “There is no credible evidence that would warrant preparation of impeachment charges.”42

  Associate Justice William O. Douglas suspected, rightly, that Hoover had supplied much of the “evidence” used against him. They were old enemies and had been since 1939, when Douglas had first joined the Court.

  The justice suspected the FBI dire
ctor of other things. In 1966, in a case of great sensitivity, Black v. U.S., which dealt with FBI wiretapping, Douglas’s swing vote became known before the decision was announced. Greatly disturbed, Douglas went to Chief Justice Warren and asked him how often he had the conference room “swept.” Surprised by Douglas’s interest in such mundane matters, Warren responded that he believed the janitor cleaned it daily.

  After Douglas clarified his usage, Warren did some checking and found that the cost of “de-bugging” the room would be about $5,000. There was no provision in the Court’s budget for such an expense. However, the chief justice discovered, the FBI was willing to “sweep” the room without charge. And, presuming this would please Douglas, Warren took the FBI up on its offer.43

  Although he couldn’t prove it, Douglas remained convinced the conference room was bugged—there were other leaks—and he was “morally certain” that at various times “all Supreme Court wires were tapped.” He identified those most likely to be doing the tapping as “the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Council.” Douglas saw taps and bugs everywhere.* “In the sixties, no important conversation or conference in Washington was immune from wiretapping or electronic surveillance,” he believed, while “the clandestine electronic ears in Nixon’s days were everywhere in Washington.”44

  There were those who thought Justice Douglas paranoid. But Douglas had been wiretapped, and by the FBI, in every administration from that of Harry Truman, when he was picked up on the Corcoran taps, to that of Richard Nixon, when, on June 25, 1970, Hoover sent H. R. Haldeman a report on a wiretapped conversation in which Douglas’s tactics in the impeachment battle were discussed.†

  But Justice Douglas’s suspicions went beyond electronic surveillances. He was also convinced that his office in the Supreme Court had been burglarized. This had occurred during the Johnson administration, and again the chief suspect was the FBI.