J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  But Newsweek beat Time to the punch, with its own cover story, “Hoover’s FBI: Time for a Change?” It cited a new Gallup poll in which 51 percent of those queried thought Hoover should retire, and it named, among his possible successors, William Sullivan.†

  On May 5 the Los Angeles Times reported that the FBI had twenty-eight special agents on loan to the House Appropriations Subcommittee as investigators; thus, in effect, the FBI was investigating its own budget requests. There was even a bit of nepotism involved. One of the four agents assigned to the committee full-time was Paul J. Mohr, the brother of John Mohr, who prepared the FBI’s budget.

  May 10, 1971, the day the Newsweek story appeared, was also J. Edgar Hoover’s forty-seventh anniversary as director of the FBI, and Crime Records mobilized his congressional stable well in advance. Although many of his strongest supporters had died, retired, or been defeated for reelection (Hoover had the habit of outliving his friends as well as his enemies), seventy-one members of the House of Representatives and five senators put their tributes in the Congressional Record.

  Even the columnist Jack Anderson contributed to the director’s anniversary celebration, albeit indirectly.

  Four times a year (at Christmas, on Hoover’s birthday, on the anniversary of his joining the Justice Department, and on the anniversary of the day Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone named him acting director), the bite was put on headquarters personnel, SACs, and ASACs to contribute to “the director’s gift.”*

  This year they bought him a trash compactor.

  But the congressional accolades weren’t enough to hide the obvious fact that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was under the most sustained, devastating crossfire in his entire career.

  Like any experienced general, Hoover tried to reduce his areas of exposure.

  On April 28, 1971, less than two months after the Media break-in and less than a week after Boggs’ second attack, the FBI director sent an “all SACs” memo officially discontinuing all seven remaining COINTELPROs.

  This didn’t mean the end of COINTELPRO-type activities, however, for one paragraph read, “In exceptional instances where counterintelligence action is warranted, it will be considered on a highly selective individual basis with tight procedures to insure absolute security.”

  Moreover, many of the agents had relied on these harassment and disruption techniques for so long that they were loath to abandon them. Many of the acts continued, authorized or not.

  And, though the memo officially ended the COINTELPROs, one sentence, if read carefully, gave the strong impression that the hiatus might well be temporary: “Although successful over the years, it is felt that they should now be discontinued for security reasons because of their sensitivity” (emphasis added).29

  Nor was this the only way Hoover covered himself. Faced with the frightening prospect of having to personally justify his employment practices in a court of law, the FBI director reluctantly agreed to settle the suit the ACLU had brought on behalf of the former special agent Jack Shaw.

  Although Shaw was not reinstated, the “with prejudice” designation was dropped from his records, and on June 16, 1971, Shaw received a settlement check for $13,000. This just about covered the hospital and medical expenses of his wife, who had died of cancer three months earlier.

  Still another technique Hoover used to retain his job was to ingratiate himself publicly with the president and attorney general. In a special ceremony, Hoover presented Nixon, once an FBI reject, with a set of gold cufflinks bearing the FBI seal, while Mitchell was given a gold special agent’s badge, symbolizing the confidence he had brought to law enforcement, “which we didn’t have before your administration.”30

  He did further favors for his nominal superior. On the evening of May 24 the American Newspaper Women’s Club held its annual dinner at the Shoreham Hotel. The highlight of the black-tie gala was the presentation of the club’s Headliner of the Year Award. Although this year’s recipient was Martha Mitchell, the scene stealer of the evening was the man who had consented to make the presentation: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

  In recent years Hoover had rarely attended such public functions. To the surprise of many of the reporters, seeing him up close for the first time, the FBI director seemed far from aloof. Arriving in the middle of the cocktail party that preceded the dinner, he went directly to the bar, ordered a Jack Daniel’s, then mixed with the crowd. An even bigger surprise was that the director appeared to have a sense of humor. Asked if he had ever received any of Mrs. Mitchell’s middle-of-the-night telephone calls, Hoover responded, “I stay up waiting for that.”

  Entertainment for the event was provided by the Grand Ole Opry star Minnie Pearl, who wore hot pants and a hat with a price tag dangling from it. This was the first time he had met Miss Pearl, Hoover said, and he was delighted, because he’d always been a fan of country music. “I guess I’m square,” the FBI director observed. “I’m fond of country music, Western music and girls, too.”

  What about hot pants? someone asked.

  “They’re okay on the proper person,” Hoover replied, “just like the mini skirt.”

  (But the next day at FBIHQ none of the female employees dared put the director’s remarks to the test.)

  However, it soon became apparent that Hoover’s sense of humor was short-lived. Speaking of his hosts, Hoover commented, “The ladies of the press are less cattier than the men. There are very few jackals among the ladies of the press. I have a scavenger, you know. Jack Anderson’s aide goes through my garbage. I view Jack Anderson as the top scavenger of all columnists. Jack Nelson is next to a skunk.”

  The AP reporter Janet Staihar chose this moment to ask the director if he had any retirement plans. “None whatsoever,” Hoover forcefully replied, “not so long as I’m healthy.”

  Attorney General John Mitchell, who was standing nearby, took umbrage at the question. “You’re so far off base I’m going to belt you one,” he said menacingly, “or pour a drink—.” When someone grabbed his arm in what appeared to be midpour, Mitchell said, “Oh, I’m just kidding. She’s a friend of mine.” Staihar later said she’d never met Mitchell before.

  Martha Mitchell didn’t share her husband’s mood. After his introduction she hugged Hoover and remarked, “Edgar, I know you don’t come to many dinners, so I want the audience to take a good look at you, because if you’ve seen one FBI director, you’ve seen them all.”

  Then she added, tweaking the cheek of her husband, who seemed to be perpetually embarrassed by the antics of his wife and former mistress, “John tells me he’s never worked for a nicer fellow.”31

  But when it came to shoring up his relationship with the White House, Hoover ran into problems.

  On June 13, 1971, the New York Times published the first installment of the “Pentagon Papers.”* Two days later Attorney General Mitchell, acting on the instructions of the president, ordered the FBI to investigate the leak of the top-secret report.

  Ordinarily Hoover tried to avoid such assignments, since determining the source of a leak after it had occurred was, as the Kissinger taps had proven, usually impossible, but in this case the source was quickly identified as Daniel Ellsberg, a former researcher for the Defense Department and the Rand Corporation, who had turned from a “hawk” into a “militant dove.” All the FBI really had to do was identify Ellsberg’s accomplices, if any, to determine whether this was a solitary action or part of a larger conspiracy. Moreover, as J. Anthony Lukas has suggested, it is probable that Hoover saw this as a no-win situation, a battle between the administration and the press, “in which he could only get hurt,” and therefore decided against getting too deeply involved.32 Whatever his reasons, Hoover gave the investigation a low priority.

  What he failed to realize was the extent of Nixon’s anger, and his paranoia.† Although the Pentagon Papers dealt with the actions of only the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the president was convinced that their publication was part of a widespread pl
ot to undermine his administration.

  Further compounding the problem was a bizarre little misunderstanding, which was the result of the increasing illegibility of J. Edgar Hoover’s handwriting.

  Louis Marx, Daniel Ellsberg’s father-in-law, was a wealthy, ultraconservative toy manufacturer. He was also a casual acquaintance of J. Edgar Hoover. In addition to occasional meetings at the racetrack, each Christmas Marx would send the FBI director a large shipment of toys, which Hoover would distribute to the children of friends and a few favored charities. Although far from a close friend, Marx was on the director’s Special Correspondents’ list, which meant that in letters he was addressed by and replied to on a first-name basis. Realizing this, Charles “Chick” Brennan, who headed the Ellsberg investigation, thought it politic to query the director before interviewing Marx.* Hoover denied the request, scribbling a blue-ink NO on the bottom of the memo, but he did so in such a way that Brennan mistook it for OK, and authorized the interview.

  Learning his order had been ignored, Hoover had Brennan transferred to Alexandria, Virginia. Fiercely loyal to his men, William Sullivan protested Brennan’s transfer, first to the director and then, when that failed, to Robert Mardian, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division. Mardian took the complaint to Attorney General Mitchell, who asked Hoover to rescind the order, saying he needed Brennan in Washington on the Ellsberg case. Hoover acquiesced, but only after demoting Brennan to inspector, censuring him, and putting him on probation. He was also accorded the silent treatment: when passing Brennan in the hall, other FBI executives wouldn’t acknowledge his presence, for fear they’d be reported to the director.

  Word of Hoover’s refusal to question Marx soon reached Nixon, who was infuriated. “Even as our concern about Ellsberg and his possible collaborators was growing,” Nixon later wrote, “we learned that J. Edgar Hoover was dragging his feet and treating the case on merely a medium-priority basis; he had assigned no special task forces and no extra manpower to it. He evidently felt that the media would make Ellsberg look like a martyr, and the FBI like the ‘heavy,’ if he pursued the case vigorously…

  “I did not care about any reasons or excuses. I wanted someone to light a fire under the FBI in the investigation of Ellsberg, and to keep the departments and agencies active in the pursuit of leakers. If a conspiracy existed, I wanted to know, and I wanted the full resources of the government brought to bear to find out. If the FBI was not going to pursue the case, then we would have to do it ourselves.”34

  On July 17 John Ehrlichman assigned Egil “Bud” Krogh to head the leak project. He was soon joined by the former Kissinger aide David Young, the former CIA agent Howard Hunt, and the former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, forming what would become known as the White House Plumbers.

  Thus, as Richard Nixon explained it in his memoirs, seven years after the fact, it was J. Edgar Hoover who forced his administration to embark on the road to Watergate.

  Denied access to the president by his aides, Hoover remained unaware of how seriously Nixon took the Ellsberg case. Not until the second week in August did the FBI director upgrade it to a Bureau special.

  And by this time he was preoccupied with fighting a rebellion within the Bureau itself—the first ever—led by the man he’d once treated like a son, the third Judas, William Cornelius Sullivan.

  * * *

  *During this period, Anderson was also being investigated by the CIA, IRS, Pentagon, and White House, all of which were trying to determine the sources of “leaks” appearing in his columns.

  *Each year the GSA purchased a new Cadillac chassis, which was shipped to Hee and Eisenhardt in Cincinnati, where armor plates, bulletproof windows, and specially built tires were installed. The preceding year’s model was then sent to New York City, Miami, or Los Angeles, to update the models the director kept there.

  *The fact that the repairman found physical evidence of a tap would indicate that this was probably not an FBI-authorized wiretap, since the actual tapping of such lines usually occurred in the Old Post Office Building.

  Then too, Hale Boggs’s disenchantment with the FBI dated back at least a year, when he, his friends, and various associates had been questioned by the Bureau in connection with the Justice Department investigation of Victor J. Frankil, the Baltimore contractor who had filed a multimillion-dollar claim against the government for cost overruns on the construction of the Rayburn Office Building garage. A friend of Boggs (as well as Cartha DeLoach), Frankil had remodeled the House majority leader’s own garage, at substantially below cost. Although a Baltimore grand jury had voted to indict Frankil, and had named Boggs and others as unindicted coconspirators, Attorney General Mitchell had declined to prosecute.

  *Both the origin of the tape and Biaggi’s sudden decision to withdraw it remain a mystery. What role, if any, the FBI may have played in suppressing the tape is purely a matter of conjecture. Interviewed by the author in 1976, Representative Biaggi refused to discuss the tape and immediately terminated the interview as soon as it was mentioned. The former congressman Gallagher declined to be interviewed. Representative Hale Boggs disappeared while on an airplane flight over Alaska in 1972 and is presumed dead.

  *The sculptor, Neil Estern, saw the FBI director as “a man both unloved and unloving. But because Hoover has never had to hide his thoughts or feelings there is a truth in his face you don’t find in the average public figure.”26

  †Some 41 percent wanted Hoover to stay in office, and 8 percent “didn’t know.” However, 70 percent of those polled thought Hoover had done an excellent or good job as head of the FBI, with only 17 percent rating his performance fair, poor, or bad, while a Harris poll, released a few days later, had an even split, 43 percent to 43 percent, on the question of whether Hoover should retire.

  *All others, down to the lowly “brick agents,” were encouraged to send the director letters or cards. Although some of the SACs kept tabs on who complied, most of the agents didn’t bother, unless they were hoping for a transfer or promotion.

  *The official title of the study, which had been prepared under the direction of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967-68, was “History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy.”

  †Nixon wanted everyone who had a top-secret clearance, whether the number was “one million” or “three or four or five hundred thousand,” polygraphed. “Listen,” he told Ehrlichman and Krogh, “I don’t know anything about polygraphs and I don’t know how accurate they are but I know they scare the hell out of people.”33

  *A longtime assistant to William Sullivan, Charles Brennan had become head of the Domestic Intelligence Division when Sullivan was named to the number three spot.

  35

  The Third Judas

  Even William Sullivan was unable to say exactly when he decided to do battle with J. Edgar Hoover.

  It may have been as early as 1957, when he tried to persuade the director that there was indeed a Mafia. Or a decade later, in 1967, when he suggested that the Ku Klux Klan was a far greater threat than the CPUSA. It was certainly in the wind by June 1970, when he played a double role in drawing up the Huston Plan, and it was definitely well under way that October, when he made his Williamsburg speech. And there had been signs of it in a dozen large and small disagreements since.

  But he must have known, in June 1971, when he wrote the first of his “honest memos,” that there was no turning back.

  It was a sign of Hoover’s slippage that just when the president was most critical of the FBI for failing to wage an all-out war on his domestic enemies, J. Edgar Hoover decided the time was ripe to compete with the CIA overseas.

  Goaded by Kissinger, Nixon made no secret of the fact that he was unhappy with the agency’s intelligence product. Picking up on this cue, and hoping to further ingratiate himself with the White House, Hoover decided to increase the number of the FBI’s foreign attaché offices. A memo to this effect was circulated am
ong the members of the FBI executive conference, requesting comment. Although the executive conference invariably rubber-stamped the director’s “suggestions,” this time there was a dissent.*

  “Because of racial conflict, student and academic revolution, and possible increase in unemployment,” William Sullivan memoed the director, “this country is heading into ever more troubled waters, and the Bureau had better be fully prepared to cope with the difficulties that lie ahead. This cannot be done if we spread ourselves too thin and finance operations which do not give us proper return for the dollars spent…”

  Sullivan not only opposed the increase in legats; he favored a reduction. But he did so in words that he must have known would greatly disturb Hoover, by reminding him of his 1970 decision to break off liaison with the other intelligence agencies: “I am not unmindful of the fact that the Director pointed out that we could get along quite well without an expensive domestic liaison section and, therefore, he dissolved it. Applying the Director’s reasoning to foreign liaison, I think certainly the conclusion is valid that we can at least reduce it, with benefits to the Bureau.”

  This was major heresy, but Sullivan didn’t leave it at that. He took on the entire executive conference: “I have read the comments of the above-named men. It was somewhat more than mildly distressing and saddening to me to observe the lack of objectivity, originality, and independent thinking in their remarks. The uniformity and monolithic character of their thinking constitutes its own rebuttal. While I am certain it was not the intention of these important Bureau officials, who occupy unique roles, to create the impression in the reader’s mind that they said what they did because they thought this was what the Director wanted them to say, nevertheless it seems to me that this is the impression conveyed.”1