J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  The big question was how much more Hoover knew—and whether he was aware that approval of the Dunes’s acquisition was linked to a $100,000 payoff to Richard Nixon from Howard Hughes. All of this may or may not have been discussed by Danner and Mitchell, and may or may not have been overheard by the FBI by electronic means.

  That July, Danner met Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo on the patio of the western White House, in San Clemente, California, and handed him a bulky envelope containing $50,000 in $100 bills. The following month, Danner made the second $50,000 payment, in bills of similar denomination, to Rebozo at his Key Biscayne, Florida, bank.

  It’s possible that J. Edgar Hoover learned of these payments. (At the very least, he must have strongly suspected that a deal had been struck in return for the Justice Department’s sudden about-face.) It’s also possible that he never learned of them. Ironically, whether he knew or didn’t know made little difference, for Nixon and Mitchell couldn’t be sure he didn’t know. To them it must have seemed that the FBI director, with his March 29, 1970, memo, possessed the key which could expose the $100,000 Hughes “contribution.”

  The fear of what J. Edgar Hoover knew was often as potent, and effective, as anything that was actually in his files.

  The “something bad” which Hoover had predicted happened, on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, when National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of protesting students, killing four and wounding nine.

  As with the John F. Kennedy assassination, J. Edgar Hoover was quick to make up his mind about who was responsible, telling the White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh, in a May 11 telephone call, that “the students invited and got what they deserved.”16

  Later that same month, after A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the former governor of Kentucky, punched a student in the nose during a demonstration on the University of Kentucky campus, Hoover wrote him a letter of commendation, stating that if such prompt action were taken by others the country wouldn’t be bothered by similar disorders.

  Appearing before a Senate subcommittee later that year, the FBI director complained that the investigation of the four Kent State deaths had cost the Bureau $274,100, with the 302 agents assigned to the case having to put in 6,316 hours of overtime. By contrast, although Hoover didn’t mention it, the deaths of the Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had cost the FBI only the usual informant’s fee, plus a $300 bonus.

  On May 22, 1970, Clyde Tolson reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy. To please Hoover, Attorney General Mitchell arranged to rehire him as an annuitant, meaning the FBI paid the difference between his annuity from the Civil Service Commission and his Bureau salary. However, to qualify, Tolson had to pass a physical examination.

  Between 1951 and 1970 Tolson had been hospitalized eleven times. In 1963 and 1965 it was for a duodenal ulcer. In 1964 he’d required heart surgery, repair of an abdominal aneurysm of the grand aorta. In 1966 it was for a hypertensive cerebral vascular accident, that is, a severe stroke, to his right side. In 1967 it was the same, only the stroke was to his left side, with complications of hypertensive arteriosclerotic heart disease and a flare-up of the duodenal ulcer. By 1967 he was down to 135 pounds. He never regained the lost weight.

  By 1970 he was gaunt, with a gray pallor, unable to shave himself or write with either hand. He was completely blind in the right eye, although the sight would mysteriously return from time to time. He walked very slowly, sort of dragging the right leg behind him.

  The director, by contrast, still walked as fast as ever.

  Periodically, the federal appellate court judge Edward Tamm lectured at the FBI Academy. Often, following his talk, the Bureau’s longtime number three man would drop in on the director for a brief chat. On one such occasion, Tamm, Hoover, and Tolson decided to leave the building together. When the elevator to the rear of the director’s office failed to respond, they went down the hall to another elevator. “I walked in long fast steps, as did the director,” Judge Tamm later recalled. “The two of us just flew down the hall, and poor old Clyde was tottering along behind, just having an awful time. When we got to the elevator, we had to wait for what seemed a long time, I suppose forty seconds or so, for Tolson.”17

  It was a common sight, and many who witnessed it thought Hoover cruel or insensitive. But those closest to him, his aides, knew he was trying to get Clyde to exert himself to greater effort. However, Emile Coué’s maxim “Every day in every way I am getting better and better” had little effect on a man with brain damage. Hoover was gradually losing Tolson, but he refused to accept that fact. “I can’t let him retire,” the director told Mark Felt. “If he does, he’ll die.”18

  Clyde Tolson passed the physical.

  With Tolson so often incapacitated, many of his duties and much of his authority fell on the shoulders of the Bureau’s number three man, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach. But on June 6, 1970, DeLoach unexpectedly announced his retirement, just two years short of reaching his thirty-year mark. Officially, DeLoach was leaving the bureau to accept an offer he couldn’t refuse: President Nixon’s friend Donald Kendall had offered to make him a vice-president at Pepsico. But Washington gossip credited the Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson, rather than Kendall, with DeLoach’s sudden departure.

  Nelson had once been one of the Bureau’s favored reporters, the recipient of numerous “leaks.” However, while heading the Times Atlanta bureau, Nelson had infuriated Hoover by interviewing witnesses to the slaying of Martin Luther King, Jr., before the FBI could locate them. (Even worse, Life had pointed this out in its assassination coverage.) Also, that same year, two Ku Klux Klan terrorists had been shot down while attempting to bomb the home of a Jewish businessman in Meridian, Mississippi. One, the schoolteacher Kathy Ainsworth, had been killed, while her companion, Thomas Tarrants III, had been seriously wounded. At first Nelson, relying on his FBI and police sources, had played the story the way the Bureau told it: “Teacher by Day—Terrorist by Night.” Only later, in digging deeper, did he learn that the FBI and local police had paid two Ku Klux Klan informants $36,500 to set up Ainsworth and Tarrants. Further irritating Hoover, Nelson also proved, in his book The Orangeburg Massacre, written with Jack Bass and published in 1970, that three FBI agents had been present and witnessed the shootings on the campus of South Carolina State College at Orangeburg, and had perjured themselves by denying this under oath.

  Shortly after his transfer to the Washington bureau of the Times in January 1970, Nelson had begun investigating rumors of corruption among the top executives of the FBI. And a number of these rumors concerned DeLoach.

  But Nelson didn’t stop at that. He began asking very knowledgeable questions about the director himself: Was it true that the FBI Laboratory had designed and constructed a porch for J. Edgar Hoover’s home at 4936 Thirtieth Place NW, even building a scale model in the lab? How often did the FBI director replace his bulletproof limousines and how did the cost compare to that paid by the president, who rented his? What had happened to the income from Hoover’s books, in particular the best-selling Masters of Deceit, and had they actually been ghostwritten by FBI employees on public time? How much was the Bureau paid per installment for the TV series “The FBI,” and exactly what was the mysterious “FBI Recreational Fund,” which supposedly shared in the revenues from the books and TV series? Who controlled the no-contact list? When the fugitive Angela Davis was captured, all the major newspapers were alerted in advance that the arrest was about to be made except the Los Angeles Times.

  Although Nelson continued to ask questions about the FBI, his DeLoach story never appeared. Although no one concerned is inclined to talk about it, apparently a deal was struck between the Los Angeles Times management and the FBI: an end to the Times’s investigation of DeLoach, in return for DeLoach’s leaving the government.

  According to Cartha DeLoach, when he told Hoover that he was resigning to take the Pepsico job, the director plaintively responded, “I thought you were the one who would never lea
ve me.”19

  However, according to William Sullivan, the director was “very anxious” that DeLoach resign. “DeLoach left under a big cloud.” The best evidence of Hoover’s anger at DeLoach was the choice of his replacement: William Sullivan. “DeLoach and I were bitter enemies,” Sullivan recalled, “and frankly, [Hoover] appointed me in order to humiliate DeLoach, because the worst thing he could do to DeLoach was to appoint his number one enemy in that spot. By doing that, he degraded DeLoach…”20

  Cartha “Deke” DeLoach was the second Judas. Hoover’s new assistant to the director would become the third.

  The Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson moved to the top of Hoover’s current enemies list, the FBI director ordering him smeared as an irresponsible drunk. As Nelson observed years later, after reading his own FBI file, “What they didn’t realize is that you can’t ruin a newspaper man by branding him a drunk.”21

  On June 5, 1970, President Nixon met in the Oval Office with his four intelligence chiefs: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Vice-Admiral Noel Gayler, director of the National Security Agency; and Lieutenant General Donald V. Bennett, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  He was disappointed in the quality of intelligence he had been receiving on dissidents, Nixon told them. The nation was undergoing an “epidemic of unprecedented domestic terrorism,” yet too little was known about it. “Certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans—mostly under 30—are determined to destroy our society,” the president claimed. To meet this threat, the government needed “hard intelligence” and “a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.”22

  To this end, he’d decided to appoint an ad hoc committee consisting of the four intelligence chiefs, naming J. Edgar Hoover its chairman. His own liaison would be Tom Charles Huston.

  A former national chairman of the arch-conservative Young Americans for Freedom and a recently appointed White House aide, the twenty-nine-year-old Huston was a novice in the domestic-security field—his only experience being a brief hitch with Army intelligence—but he tried to make up for it with determination and an arrogance befitting the personal representative of the president. Hoover’s dislike for him was instantaneous. “That snot-nosed kid,” is what Hoover referred to him as in conversations with William Sullivan; “that hippie intellectual.”23

  Before the meeting broke up, the president asked Hoover and Helms if there were any problems in coordination between their two agencies. Both assured him there were not.

  The ad hoc committee met three days later, in the FBI director’s conference room, and immediately ran into problems. The president, chairman Hoover said, wanted them to prepare a historical summary of unrest in the country up to the present.

  This wasn’t at all what the president wanted, Huston interjected. Hoover had misunderstood the president’s intent. “We’re not talking about the dead past,” the young presidential assistant told the aging FBI director; “we’re talking about the living present.”24 The report was not to be a historical summary but a current and future threat assessment, a review of intelligence gaps, and a summary of options for operational changes.

  Hoover was livid. Not only was this snot-nosed kid contradicting him; he was asking the FBI to prepare a report on its own alleged failures! Intelligence gaps indeed!

  Hoover contained his anger long enough to poll the other directors on what they thought the president had meant. After some discussion, all three backed Huston. Irritated by this turn of events, Hoover finally agreed that they should prepare an options paper and abruptly dismissed the meeting.

  Later Tom Charles Huston looked back at these meetings with a sense of astonishment at his own—and the president’s—naïveté. From the start, there was an “atmosphere of duplicity.”25 Here was the president of the United States, asking for a comprehensive report on intelligence-collecting methods that could be used against domestic radicals, and sitting across the table from him were the nation’s four intelligence chiefs, not one of whom saw fit to inform him that most of these techniques were already being used against these same groups. They just silently sat there—Hoover, Helms, Gayler, and Bennett—each with his own secrets. Nixon didn’t know about the CIA’s mailopening program, or the FBI’s COINTELPROs, or the NSA’s monitoring of domestic telephone calls, or the DIA’s planting informants among campus groups.

  Not only were they deceiving the president and his representative; they were playing games with each other. “The Bureau had its own game going,” Huston later realized, while, across the Potomac, “the CIA had its own game going…They did not want to have revealed the fact that they were working on each other’s turf.”26

  The task of drawing up the report was left to a working staff made up of representatives of the four agencies and Huston. The guiding force was the FBI representative, William Sullivan, who saw this as a golden opportunity to reinstate, with presidential approval, the intelligence practices Hoover had forbidden since 1966. Although the final report would become known as the Huston Plan, its real architect was Sullivan, who took the impressionable Huston in hand and led him every step of the way. Selling the program to the other intelligence agencies was no problem; for years they’d been begging Hoover to remove his restraints. Sullivan’s real problem was selling the plan to his own boss.

  As early as June 6, the day after the meeting with the president, Sullivan enthusiastically memoed the director, “Individually, those of us in the intelligence community are relatively small and limited. Unified, our combined potential is magnified and limitless. It is through unity of action that we can tremendously increase our intelligence-gathering potential, and, I am certain, obtain the answers the President wants.”27

  After several rocky starts, the working staff finally produced a first draft, and the members showed it to their superiors. While the other directors had no objections to it, when Sullivan presented the report to Hoover he immediately balked, refusing to sign it unless it was completely rewritten to eliminate the extreme options. He wouldn’t put his signature on a report that called for wiretapping, bugging, mail opening, burglaries. Nor would he approve making the ad hoc committee a permanent committee, which would in effect give it authority over the FBI.

  “For years and years and years I have approved opening mail and other similar operations, but no,” Hoover told Sullivan. “It is becoming more and more dangerous and we are apt to get caught. I am not opposed to doing this. I am not opposed to continuing the burglaries and the opening of mail and other similar activities, providing someone higher than myself approves of it…I no longer want to accept the sole responsibility. [If] the attorney general or some other high ranking person in the White House [approves] then I will carry out their decision. But I am not going to accept the responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years.

  “Number two, I cannot look to the attorney general to approve these because the attorney general was not asked to be a member of the ad hoc committee. I cannot turn to the ad hoc committee to approve of these burglaries and opening mail as recommended here. The ad hoc committee by its very nature will go out of business when this report has been approved.

  “That leaves me alone as the man who made the decision. I am not going to do that anymore.”28

  It would be unfair to the others involved to rewrite the whole report, Sullivan argued. What about adding his objections in the form of footnotes? Hoover agreed, and Sullivan set to work amending the report. He showed the amended draft to the director on the morning of June 23, and Hoover approved it.

  Finding the director willing to go this far, Sullivan decided to press his luck. The CIA was unhappy with the break in liaison with the FBI; the agency felt it was being discriminated against. Wouldn’t this be a good time to reestablish liaison? Surely the CIA had learned its lesson.

  Bu
t Sullivan had misread Hoover’s mood. He immediately jumped at the opportunity this presented. To prove there was no discrimination involved, he told Mark Felt to also cut off liaison with the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, and Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence. The only liaison offices left in operation were those with Congress and the White House.

  “It was one of those unbelievable damn things,” William Sullivan recalled. “It was a nightmare.”29 It was not, he had begun to suspect, the act of a rational mind.

  Yet to Hoover the act was not only rational but necessary. If the extreme options in the final report were adopted, and implemented, and the wholesale bugging, tapping, mail opening, and break-ins became known—as almost invariably they would be, when attempted by amateurs—the Nixon administration itself could easily self-destruct.

  By cutting off liaison, Hoover hoped to distance the FBI, and his own reputation, from the inevitable holocaust.

  The other directors were shown the footnoted report that same day. Nothing J. Edgar Hoover did much surprised Richard Helms, but Admiral Gayler and General Bennett, both newcomers to the intelligence scene, were furious. Hoover’s objections, they complained to Huston, made it look as if they had made recommendations rather than simply suggesting possible options. Huston tried to placate them, saying he’d personally relay their complaints to the president. There wasn’t much else he could do: the signing ceremony was only two days away. Huston himself wasn’t particularly bothered by Hoover’s opposition. His attitude seemed to be “What the White House wanted, the White House would get.”30