J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  William Sullivan wasn’t the only one who misread J. Edgar Hoover. What neither Sullivan nor Huston realized was that the FBI director had an ace in the hole.

  The signing ceremony took place as scheduled, on June 25, 1970, in J. Edgar Hoover’s office.

  The director of the FBI was nearly two decades older than the three other directors. And he was more than four and a half decades older than that “hippie intellectual.” But it wasn’t just age or seniority or the president’s appointment that made him chairman of the ad hoc committee. He was the head of American intelligence, and he didn’t intend to let any of them forget it.

  The others had come expecting a quick signing; with the exception of Huston, all were busy men, with pressing appointments. They weren’t prepared for a bravura performance.

  J. Edgar Hoover opened the signing ceremony by commending the members for their outstanding effort and cooperative spirit. Then, to their astonishment, he began reading the special report page by page by page, all forty-three pages. At the end of each page he would pause and ask, Any comments, Admiral Gayler? Any comments, General Bennett? Any comments, Mr. Helms?—saving Huston for last. Openly showing his contempt for the young White House liaison, Hoover repeatedly got his name wrong: Any comments, Mr. Hoffman? Any comments, Mr. Hutchison? After the sixth or seventh variation, the red-faced Huston stopped trying to correct him.

  In each category there were two suggested options: that the intelligence-collecting practice be continued as it was or slightly intensified; or that it should be expanded, broadened, or greatly intensified.

  For example, under the category Electronic Surveillances and Penetrations, the least-extreme option was that present procedures be changed to intensify coverage of foreign nationals; the most extreme would intensify the coverage of “individuals and groups in the United States who pose a major threat to the internal security.”

  Then came the newly added footnote: “The FBI does not wish to change its present procedure of selective coverage on major internal security threats as it believes this coverage is adequate at this time. The FBI would not oppose other agencies seeking authority of the Attorney General for coverage required by them and therefore instituting such coverage themselves.”31

  In essence, the FBI won’t commit the illegal act, but you can do it yourself, if the attorney general approves.

  Mail coverage: “The FBI is opposed to implementing any covert mail coverage because it is clearly illegal.” Surreptitious entry: “The FBI is opposed to surreptitious entry.”

  There was no admission that the FBI had ever committed these acts or, in the case of the mail opening, that it was still sharing the fruits of the CIA’s several programs.

  Development of campus sources: “The FBI is opposed to removing any present controls and restrictions.” Use of military undercover agents: “The FBI is opposed.” A permanent interagency committee: “The FBI is opposed.”32

  Finally Admiral Gayler couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He objected to one of the FBI’s footnotes, and General Bennett quickly backed him.

  J. Edgar Hoover was not accustomed to being interrupted or having his opinions challenged. Although CIA Director Helms tried to soothe the waters, Hoover was clearly upset, and, reading even faster, he hurried through the remaining pages.

  The signing itself took only a few minutes, after which Hoover dismissed the committee, and Huston delivered the special report to the president. He also wrote a long memorandum to Haldeman, recounting the turbulent history of the committee and at the same time puffing up his own role. Huston reported that he had gone into “this exercise” anticipating that the CIA would refuse to cooperate, but “the only stumbling block was Mr. Hoover.” From the very start, Hoover had tried to subvert the purpose of the committee, but Huston “declined to acquiesce in this approach, and succeeded in getting the committee back on target.” Except for Hoover, everyone else was dissatisfied with current collection procedures, including the FBI director’s own men. The director was “bull-headed as hell” and “getting old and worried about his legend,” but Huston was sure that after a face-to-face stroking session with the president, he’d come along. Hoover was enough of a trouper, Huston was still convinced, that he’d “accede to any decision which the President makes.”33

  Huston then recommended that all of the most extreme options be adopted.

  Nixon sat on the report for several weeks, then, via Haldeman, sent word that he had approved all of Huston’s recommendations except one. He didn’t want to meet with Hoover.

  The Huston Plan was now official presidential policy. A single copy of the approved report was sent by courier to each of the four directors: Hoover, Helms, Gayler, and Bennett.

  Bennett had the least reaction: nothing in the plan much affected the DIA. But Gayler was “surprised” that the president had chosen the most extreme options, and Helms was “greatly concerned,” while Hoover, according to Sullivan, “went through the ceiling.”34

  Or, more accurately, he went across the hall. For Hoover’s hole card, which he had avoided playing until it became absolutely necessary, was Attorney General John Mitchell.

  The attorney general knew nothing of the plan. He hadn’t even been informed of the existence of the ad hoc committee. And he was angry at having been bypassed by Huston and the White House.

  Mitchell immediately agreed with Hoover: the illegalities spelled out in the plan could not be presidential policy. He told Hoover to sit tight until the president’s return from San Clemente in several days.

  Back in his office, the FBI director covered himself by dictating another memo, in which he recounted his conversation with Mitchell and renewed his “clear-cut and specific opposition to the lifting of the various investigative restraints.” However, good soldier that he was, he added that the FBI was prepared to implement the provisions of the plan—but only with the explicit authorization of the attorney general or the president.35

  When Nixon returned to the White House on July 27, one of his first conversations was with the attorney general. According to Mitchell, he informed the president that “the proposals contained in the plan, in toto, were inimical to the best interests of the country and certainly should not be something that the President of the United States should be approving.”36

  Nixon had not yet installed his taping system, so there is no way to verify Mitchell’s version of the conversation. Since he later approved other, similar illegalities, there is some reason to suspect that what he told the president was that Hoover was strongly opposed to the plan and would make trouble if ordered to put it into effect.

  Nixon probably came closer to the truth when, years later, he wrote in his memoirs, “I knew that if Hoover had decided not to cooperate, it would matter little what I had decided or approved. Even if I issued a direct order to him, while he would undoubtedly carry it out, he would soon see to it that I had cause to reverse myself.”37

  J. Edgar Hoover had won the battle. Nixon revoked his approval and ordered the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DIA to return their copies of the plan to the White House “for reconsideration.”

  When they were examined, it was apparent that all four of the copies had been restapled, indicating that each of the intelligence agencies had removed the original staple to make photocopies.

  Still unaware that he had lost the battle, Huston continued writing “Eyes Only for Haldeman” memos. “At some point Hoover has to be told who is President…It makes me fighting mad…what Hoover is doing here is putting himself above the President.”38

  Only much later could Huston admit, “I was, for all intents and purposes, writing memos to myself.”39 Shunted off to the side, Huston nevertheless stuck around until June 13, 1971, long after John Dean had taken over responsibility for domestic intelligence.

  J. Edgar Hoover had killed the Huston Plan. In its place, the president and his aides would create their own intelligence unit, the White House “Plumbers.”

  Hoover had
triumphed, taking on and beating the president, his representative, and all three of the other intelligence chiefs. But at a tremendous cost. Now even the president agreed that Hoover would probably have to be replaced.

  Following Hoover’s victory, he and Tolson flew to California for their annual three-week nonvacation at La Jolla. It was a familiar, comfortable routine: the visits to Scripps Clinic, which Hoover got out of the way during the first few days, before Del Mar opened; leisurely mornings around the pool, studying Annenberg’s Daily Racing Form; afternoons at the races, Jesse Strider driving them back and forth in the FBI limousine; followed by a nap, then bourbon and sizzling steaks (the latter flown in from Texas) by the cabanas in the evening, with all the “good old boys” in attendance. Those who were still living, that is. Joe McCarthy was gone, as were Clint Murchison, Sr., and Sid Richardson. Then a couple days, toward the end of the trip, at Dorothy Lamour and Bill Howard’s place in Beverly Hills, just the four of them sitting around the barbecue, with the director mixing his G-man cocktails.

  It was exactly the same, and yet it wasn’t. There was an air of finality to many things these days. Hoover disliked change, yet, despite his displeasure, and all of his power, he couldn’t prevent or postpone it. Even Harvey’s had changed, Julius Lully having sold it to Jesse Brinkman, who had the effrontery to bill them for their meals and drinks. They never went back.

  Had Hoover been told that this would be his and Tolson’s last trip to La Jolla, he probably wouldn’t have been surprised. It was not that Hoover sensed his own mortality, but rather that Clyde’s health was failing at an alarming rate. Many days he simply stayed in bed. As for the director’s own health, he later claimed, “I was in better shape at my August 1970 physical than I was in 1938.”40

  Still, Hoover returned to SOG tired and in a bad mood. In the absence of the director and associate director, William Sullivan had been in charge. Upon their return, Sullivan’s enemies had mounted a full-scale attack on the new assistant to the director. Although DeLoach was gone, most of his people remained, albeit with their power greatly reduced, and, in collusion with John Mohr, who bitterly resented Sullivan’s promotion to the number three spot, they fed Hoover and Tolson a steady stream of gossip and criticism.

  Although rarely witnessed outside the FBI hierarchy, the director’s temper tantrums were legendary. According to his aides, they increased dramatically in the fall of 1970. It wasn’t that the boss was senile—no one thought that—but rather that in his old age he’d grown querulous, petulant, easily riled. Counting the days until his December trip to Miami, everyone at FBIHQ trod carefully.

  Except William Sullivan.

  On October 12 the assistant to the director, a popular speaker on the FBI lecture circuit, gave a speech to a group of UPI editors at Williamsburg, Virginia. All went well until the question period, when someone asked, “Isn’t it true that the American Communist party is responsible for the racial riots and all the academic violence and upheaval?”41

  Sullivan knew the answer by rote. But he was tired of lying, tired of wasting badly needed manpower and funds on a long-extinct menace, while real Soviet spies were roaming all over the country undetected. For example, the Washington field office had a whole squad assigned to nothing else but CPUSA members, although there were only four in the Washington, D.C., area.

  Sullivan decided to answer honestly. “No, it’s absolutely untrue,” he responded. There is no evidence that any one group of people or any single nationwide conspiracy is behind the disorders on the campus or in the ghettos, he said. As for the CPUSA, it is not nearly as extensive or effective as it used to be, and it is “not in any way causing or directing or controlling the unrest we suffer today.” There would still be problems with student dissent and racial tension even if the Communist party no longer existed, Sullivan declared.42

  This was major heresy, and Sullivan knew he was in trouble even before he returned to SOG. The director was furious: “How do you expect me to get my appropriations if you keep downgrading the Party?” he screamed.43

  William Sullivan had made his last speech for the FBI.

  Sullivan was not the only target of Hoover’s rage.

  While doing graduate work at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City, Special Agent John Shaw disagreed with some critical remarks that one of his professors, Dr. Abraham S. Blumberg, had made about the FBI and its director. In rebuttal, Shaw wrote Blumberg a fifteen-page letter, admitting that the FBI had some faults but for the most part defending the organization. Shaw’s effort was sincere, albeit naive. Especially the latter. Shaw had the FBI secretarial pool type the letter. Rough drafts of eight of the fifteen pages were found during a routine wastepaper basket inspection.

  Ordered by his superiors to provide the complete text, Shaw refused. Within hours, he received a telegram from the director accusing him of “atrocious judgment” in not immediately reporting the professor’s adverse criticism to his superiors, and placing him on probation. His gun, badge, and credentials were confiscated.

  Hoover then ordered him transferred to Butte, Montana. Shaw requested a postponement of the transfer, explaining that his wife was dying of cancer and that he had to care for their four children. With a total lack of sympathy for his situation, Hoover ordered Shaw dismissed, “with prejudice.”

  The FBI director did not stop with Shaw. When John Jay College officials refused to fire Professor Blumberg, Hoover ordered the fifteen remaining FBI agents enrolled there to resign. When a teacher at American University, in Washington, D.C., criticized the director’s actions at John Jay, eleven FBI clerical employees were yanked from AU.

  Since his outburst before the women’s press club in 1964, when he’d angrily denounced the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover had not held an open press conference or given a personal interview.*

  On November 16, 1970, the FBI director did something totally unexpected: he granted an exclusive interview to a reporter from a newspaper that was at the very top of the FBI’s no-contact list: the Washington Post.

  It began with a bet: lunch at the Sans Souci. During the summer of 1970 the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, decided to try something new. Traditionally, the major newspapers assigned the same reporter to both the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice, someone who was either a lawyer or well versed in the law—in short, a legal reporter. But Richard Nixon’s Justice Department was different. Because he was the president’s closest adviser, John Mitchell was first and foremost a politician, and only secondarily the attorney general of the United States. So Bradlee reassigned the political reporter Ken Clawson, who had been on the White House detail, to Justice.

  Clawson had been on his new assignment only about a month when Bradlee asked him to try to get some major stories out of the FBI, which had not only blacklisted the Post (although Bradlee did not know of the Bureau’s no-contact list, he felt its effect) but greatly favored its local competitor, the Washington Star.

  Possessed of more than a little gall, Clawson thought he might start with an interview with the director, and he wrote Hoover a letter, on Washington Post stationery, asking for an appointment. The director’s reply was succinct: “I received your letter. I can see no opportunity in the foreseeable future for you and me to get together.”

  “And this pissed me off,” Clawson recalled. But Bradlee only laughed at the letter; it was exactly what he’d expected. Doubly irritated, Clawson bet Bradlee that he would interview Hoover within thirty days. The bet was lunch at the Sans Souci, one of Washington’s more expensive “in” spots.

  Having just come off the White House beat, Clawson had very good connections there.* He asked the president’s two top aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, if they’d ask the president to write a personal letter to the FBI director, requesting that he see him. But neither wanted to get involved. Clawson also had good contacts on the Hill, among them the director’s close friend Senator James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, cha
irman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. How about intimating that you’ll cut his appropriations if he doesn’t see me? Clawson suggested. “Ken, I love you like a son,” Eastland responded, “but I wouldn’t any more write a letter like that than I would jump off the balcony.” His thirty days nearly up, Clawson finally tried Hoover’s “boss,” John Mitchell. “You’re my last hope,” he told the attorney general. “I want you to order J. Edgar Hoover to see me.” Mitchell thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard, although, once he’d stopped laughing, he turned serious and said, as if to himself, “God knows what the ramifications would be.”

  He’d help this much, Mitchell ventured. The FBI director was due to attend a meeting in his office in exactly fifteen minutes. And he’d have to cross the hall to get there.

  When Hoover emerged from his office, Clawson was waiting. Standing directly in his path, the reporter introduced himself, said he’d written to request an interview and had instead received “the most negative, ill-mannered” response that he’d ever had from any public official.

  Startled that anyone would dare approach or speak to him in this manner, the director looked around for his aides, but he was alone. He then gave Clawson a withering gaze that seemed to say, “You’ve done a very nasty thing,” hastily promised to look into the matter, and hurried across the hall to the safety of Mitchell’s office.44

  This encounter occurred on Thursday, November 12.

  On Monday, November 16, Clawson arrived at the Post to find there had been eight urgent calls from the FBI. Returning them, he was told that if he would come over immediately, “the boss” would allow him twenty-five minutes.

  What had happened in the interim was that on Sunday, November 15, the press had reviewed Ramsey Clark’s new book, Crime in America. Although he’d credited the FBI with a number of accomplishments, the former attorney general had also said that the Bureau suffered from “the excessive domination of a single person, J. Edgar Hoover, and his self-centered concern for his reputation and that of the FBI.”45