J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Little time was wasted on preliminaries. Clawson’s first question was “The reviews of the Ramsey Clark book came out yesterday and they were very detrimental to you. Is there anything you want to tell me about it?”

  Ramsey Clark was a “jellyfish,” Hoover sputtered, “a softie.” He was the worst attorney general he had encountered during his forty-five years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was even worse than Bobby Kennedy, Hoover said. With Clark “you never knew which way he was going to flop on an issue.”

  This was the same attorney general who had stood up against the FBI director and refused him permission to wiretap Martin Luther King, Jr., and innumerable others; the same AG whose devotion to civil liberties was so great that Hoover, fearful of what Clark would do if he found out about such illegal “intelligence collecting” techniques as tapping, bugging, mail opening, and bag jobs, had found it expedient to ban them.

  “At least Kennedy stuck to his guns,” the director continued, “even when he was wrong.”

  By contrast, John Mitchell was an “honest, sincere and very human man.” Hoover added, “There has never been an attorney general for whom I’ve had higher regard.”

  This was the same attorney general on whom he was collecting blackmail material.

  What about his troubles with Robert Kennedy? Clawson asked.

  The trouble with Kennedy, Hoover told Clawson, “was that Kennedy wanted to loosen up our standards and qualifications; to discard the requirement that agents hold degrees in law or accounting. He even wanted to discard the bachelor’s degree as a requirement.

  “In short, he wanted more Negro agents.”

  He’d told Robert Kennedy, Hoover said, that before he’d lower the standards of the FBI he’d resign. Immediately after their conversation, he’d gone to the White House and told President Johnson about the confrontation. The president had told him, “Stand by your guns.” He had, Hoover said. “I didn’t speak to Bobby Kennedy the last six months he was in office.”

  Clawson knew he had his exclusive in the first ten minutes, but the director was so obviously enjoying himself that he didn’t want to interrupt.

  Campus disruptions would stop, Hoover said, “if college presidents had the courage and guts to expel and make it stick.” He praised S. I. Hayakawa for his handling of disruptions at San Francisco State College. Most college administrators are soft, Hoover said. “They come up through the academic process, and there is nothing worse than an intolerant intellectual. They’re soft, and they never want to accept responsibility.”46

  An hour had passed. Clawson tried to extricate himself, but Hoover had trotted out the Karpis stories. Finally, after nearly two hours, the reporter pleaded writer’s cramp and the director told him that if he ever needed any assistance from the Bureau, he shouldn’t hesitate to ask.

  Ken Clawson had won his lunch. And J. Edgar Hoover had missed his. As Clawson left the director’s office, awed agents clustered around him. For the first time in living memory, they told him, the director had missed his noon appearance at the Mayflower.

  Hoover was delighted with the interview (he sent Clawson a warmly inscribed photograph of himself), even though it enraged some of his friends. Conservative publications such as the Star, the Chicago Tribune, and U.S. News & World Report, which had supported the FBI director for decades, were furious that Hoover had broken his long silence by giving an exclusive to Kay Graham’s Washington Post, of all papers.

  Although a surprisingly large number of newspapers and magazines defended Clark and criticized Hoover for his latest outburst—”J. Edgar Hoover: Honor Him, Reward Him, Revere Him and Replace Him,” read the editorial headline in the Los Angeles Times—the director was quite content with the result.47

  As he had undoubtedly anticipated, the White House was not displeased with his attacks on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, or with his fulsome praise for Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell. But, unknown to Hoover, the interview also made many, including the president and the attorney general, uneasy.

  Was Hoover getting senile? Worse, was he out of control? And, if he decided to pop off again, whom would he pick for his target this time?

  Hoover was so pleased with the Post interview that he decided to give another. This time, however, Crime Records persuaded him to favor a more conservative publication, and he chose Time, which gave the assignment to its Washington correspondent, Dean Fischer.

  Fischer had long hair and sideburns, but, forewarned, he’d trimmed them before his appointment with the legendary FBI director. Still, Hoover noticed and commented, “You won’t find long hair or sideburns a la Namath around here.”

  For his part, Fischer was surprised to discover that Hoover looked younger than his years. Although his movements were stiff, indicative of arteriosclerosis, Fischer noted in a memo he wrote after the meeting, he was impressed by his strength, “so evident in the steely gaze and the stout, oaken body, unbent after more than three quarters of a century.”48

  Hoover’s mind, however, was something else.

  Following his interview with the director, Ken Clawson had concluded, “I came out of there well convinced that the director was not only not senile but [that he had] one of the most vigorous and active minds I’ve ever dealt with.”49

  It was as if Dean Fischer had been interviewing a different person.

  Fischer had arrived with a list of twenty-five carefully prepared questions, which he’d hoped to squeeze into the hour allotted him. Although the interview lasted three hours, he succeeded in asking only four, since Hoover delivered “an almost unbroken monologue.” Although he spoke in a strong, firm voice, “his talk was rambling,” Fischer noted. “His mind flicked over the names and events of three or four decades more easily than it focused on the present. The ghosts of MacArthur, Baruch, Herbert Hoover, old John D. Rockefeller and Harlan Stone flitted in and out of his memory. He recalled in detail his first meeting with Walter Winchell…but he had difficulty responding to a question about repression without losing himself in a forest of recollections”—recollections that included an almost pathetic description of his devotion to his two pet terriers, G-Boy and Cindy.50

  This was not the stuff to make a memorable interview.

  But, when angered, the director gave Fischer even more than he’d hoped for. Questioned about Martin Luther King’s receiving the Nobel Prize, Hoover snapped, “He was the last one in the world who should have received it…I held him in complete contempt because of the things he said and because of his conduct.”

  After denouncing the “bleeding hearts on the parole boards,” and lazy judges who didn’t put in enough hours, he took off on “the jackals of the press.”

  And, questioned on the topic of presidential protection, he didn’t attack the Secret Service, as Fischer probably anticipated, but instead gave the Hispanic press something to editorialize about for days:

  “You never have to bother about a president being shot by Puerto Ricans and Mexicans,” the FBI director said. “They don’t shoot very straight. But if they come at you with a knife, beware.”51

  On November 27, the director, accompanied by Tolson and Mohr, testified behind the closed doors of the Senate Subcommittee on Supplemental Appropriations. He needed an additional $14.5 million, Hoover told the committee, so that he could hire one thousand new FBI agents. Deprived by Sullivan of his favorite menace, the American Communist party, Hoover had come up with a sensational new threat: militant Catholic priests and nuns, and in particular two brothers, Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, whom he identified as the leaders of “an incipient plot” to “blow up underground electrical conduits and steam pipes serving the Washington D.C. area in order to disrupt Federal Government operations.

  “The plotters are also concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed government official. The name of a White House staff member has been mentioned as a possible victim.”52

  The evidence of the “plot” consisted of se
veral highly imaginative, “what-if” letters that a Catholic nun, Sister Elizabeth McAlister, had smuggled into Danbury prison to Father Philip Berrigan, who was currently serving time for destroying draft board records. Sister McAlister was apparently in love with both Father Berrigan and revolutionary rhetoric; friends said she thought of herself as a modern Joan of Arc. Unfortunately for the lovers, the courier for their letters was one Boyd F. Douglas, Jr., a paid FBI informant and agent provocateur.

  The highly placed government official was none other than Henry Kissinger, whom McAlister had suggested placing under “citizen’s arrest” to stop the bombing in Southeast Asia.

  The FBI director had informed Kissinger, the president, and key GOP leaders of the discovery of the conspiracy in September. Although Nixon seemed to take it seriously, the potential kidnap victim apparently did not. Ever mindful of his carefully cultivated playboy image, Kissinger jokingly speculated that “sex starved nuns” were behind the plot.53

  Hoover’s testimony was given in closed session. But one of his assistants had brought along thirty-five printed copies of his remarks for the committee clerk to hand out, and favored reporters, such as Ken Clawson of the Washington Post, were able to pick up copies at the Justice Department.

  The FBI director’s remarks caused consternation at Justice. William Sullivan had sent Hoover a strongly worded memo, prior to his appearance before the committee, warning him that he could jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation if he mentioned the case. But Hoover had ignored the warning. He’d also neglected to inform Attorney General Mitchell, who was infuriated that Hoover had violated Justice Department guidelines on pretrial statements. Mitchell had already informed Hoover that Justice’s Internal Security Division had gone over the FBI’s case and found that there was insufficient evidence to warrant presentation to a grand jury. To save Hoover’s reputation, he’d now have to prosecute.

  The strongest reaction, however, occurred in a place where the name J. Edgar Hoover was usually mentioned in only the most reverential tones: the House of Representatives.

  The speaker was Representative William Anderson of Tennessee. A retired Navy captain, World War II hero, and former skipper of the nuclear submarine Nautilus, the four-term congressman was one of the most respected members of the House, which lent additional weight to his remarks.

  Anderson began with a quotation: “ ‘The truly revolutionary force of history is not material power but the spirit of religion. The world today needs a true revolution of the fruitful spirit, not the futile sword. Hypocrisy, dishonesty, hatred, all of these must be destroyed and men must rule by love, charity, and mercy.’ ”

  Anderson then asked, “Are these the deeply reflective words of a clergyman, a member of the anti-Vietnam war movement—perhaps Daniel or Philip Berrigan?

  “No, they are the inspiring words of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, in Masters of Deceit.”

  Identifying himself as a longtime admirer of Mr. Hoover and the FBI, Representative Anderson sadly noted, “We have suffered many casualties in the Vietnamese war. Most of our domestic and international problems are either caused by this unwanted, undeclared war or are intensified by it. It is now distressingly evident that one of the most ardent, devoted and, presumably, unassailable public servants in the lifetime of our Republic is, in a sense, a casualty of that same war.”

  He was speaking, he said, of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director had ignored the due process clauses of the Constitution; he had made his charges in public, through the Senate, rather than in the courts, where they belonged; and in doing so he had resorted to “tactics reminiscent of McCarthyism.”54

  Despite attempts to silence him, the congressman succeeded in completing his sixty-minute statement. Those who took the floor after him were about equally divided, pro and con, although Hoover’s supporters—including Rooney and Richard Ichord—were clearly the most vocal. A similar debate took place in the Senate.

  For the first time in decades, J. Edgar Hoover had been attacked in Congress.

  Following Anderson’s speech, Hoover had the congressman investigated. Call girls in the capital were shown a photograph of Anderson and asked if he’d been one of their customers. Although this failed to elicit a positive identification, agents in Nashville found a madam who “thought” Anderson had visited her place of business several years earlier. Hoover then scribbled “whoremonger” on the memorandum, informed the White House that Anderson patronized prostitutes, and arranged to have the story leaked to the press in Anderson’s home state.

  There was no subtlety in Hoover’s treatment of Anderson, no real attempt to conceal the Bureau’s role. It was a direct, brutal response to the congressman’s criticism of the FBI director. As a former aide put it, “Anderson’s scalp was hung out to dry as a warning to others who might entertain the same notion.”55

  In 1972, William Anderson—World War II hero, former Nautilus skipper, and four-term congressman from Tennesee—was defeated for reelection.

  “Mr. President,” the CBS White House correspondent Dan Rather asked Richard Nixon, in a nationally televised news conference on the day after Representative Anderson’s speech, “as a lawyer and as his immediate superior, do you approve of the following actions of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover? One accusation which has been made public—accusing two men of conspiring to kidnap Government officials and/or blow up Government buildings as an antiwar action before any formal charges had been made and a trial could be arranged for these gentlemen. And continuing to call the late Martin Luther King a liar. Do you approve of those actions?”

  President Nixon responded somewhat evasively: “I have often been asked my opinion of Mr. Hoover. I believe that he has rendered a very great service to this country. I generally approve of the action that he has taken. I’m not going into any of the specific actions that you may be asking about tonight with regard to the testimony, for example, that you referred to. The Justice Department is looking into the testimony that Mr. Hoover has given and will take appropriate action if the facts justify it.”*56

  It was far less than the wholehearted endorsement the FBI director had anticipated.

  Hoover needed a scapegoat, and he chose William Sullivan.

  With Tolson sitting off to the side, nodding his encouragement, a red-faced Hoover turned on the assistant to the director. “You should have warned me,” Hoover said. “If you had warned me, I wouldn’t have mentioned this information.”

  Sullivan simply handed the director a copy of the memo he’d sent him prior to his Senate appearance.

  Hoover read it, then looked up and demanded, “Why didn’t you tear up that memo?”

  “I thought I might need it for protection,” Sullivan bluntly answered.

  There was a sudden hush.

  “You know you don’t need that kind of protection in the Bureau,” Hoover finally replied, smiling.

  Sullivan later noted, “It was like watching Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If I hadn’t saved a copy of that memo, he would have fired me then and there.”58

  However, it was the possible firing of J. Edgar Hoover, not that of William Sullivan, that was the talk of Washington.

  In less than a month, the director of the FBI had attacked two former attorneys general, one of whom was deceased; an also deceased civil rights leader; two yet-to-be-indicted Catholic priests; and a World War II naval hero. As if this weren’t enough, for good measure he’d also tossed in some amazingly insensitive remarks about blacks and Hispanics.

  The problem with firing Hoover, however, was that no one was brave, or foolish, enough to do it.

  “We’ve got to get rid of that guy,” Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus pleaded with Attorney General John Mitchell, following a bitter diatribe by the FBI director at a Justice Department meeting. “He is getting worse all the time.”

  “You’re right,” Mitchell responded. “Tell you what. I have to leave town later today, so I’m appointing you Acting Attorney General. You fire
him.”59

  * * *

  *A number, of course, had, but none were ever brought to trial. At least three SACs were suspected of accepting “major gratuities” from organized crime figures. A Miami SAC, for example, sent his son through college on a Teamsters Union pension fund loan. When a federal strike force began looking into this, the SAC was transferred but allowed to stay in the Bureau, until, facing new charges of “innumerable acts of misconduct,” he was permitted to retire quietly.

  *In 1978 FBI Director Clarence Kelley reopened the investigation, and Joseph Stabile was indicted on eight counts of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, thus becoming the first FBI agent ever indicted for a crime while on active duty. Stabile resigned the same day. On November 9, 1978, Stabile pleaded guilty to the obstructing-justice charge, and the other charges were dropped. On January 17, 1979, he was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

  *A little over a year later, Romain Gary also committed suicide.

  †Danner had a colorful background. A former special agent, from 1936 to 1946, he served the last several years as SAC of the Miami field office. In 1946 he managed the congressional campaign of George Smathers, and was later accused of having accepted a $10,000 campaign contribution from gambling interests. City manager of Miami from 1946 to 1948, he was fired for his connections with reputed organized crime figures in a police scandal. Close to both Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo since the 1940s—some claim he introduced them—he was by 1970 working for another former special agent, the legendary Robert Maheu, chief executive officer of Howard Hughes’s Nevada operations. One of his major duties was to serve as Hughes’s liaison, or “bagman,” to the Nixon administration.