J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  In words very similar to those he used with Kleindienst following the Boggs speech, Hoover responded, “More than anything else, I want to see you re-elected in 1972. If you feel that my staying on as head of the Bureau hurts your chances for re-election, just let me know. As far as the present attacks are concerned, and the ones that are planned for the future, they don’t make any difference to me. I think you know that the tougher the attacks get, the tougher I get.”

  By now it was obvious to the president that the FBI director was not going to take the initiative and offer to resign: “He would submit his resignation only if I specifically requested it.” Realizing this, Nixon backed off: “I decided not to do so. My personal feelings played a part in my decision, but equally important was my conclusion that Hoover’s resignation before the election would raise more political problems than it would solve.”

  This is the “official” version of the Nixon-Hoover breakfast meeting, as recounted some years later in the former president’s memoirs. There is, however, another version, one which Sanford Ungar heard from various Bureau officials while researching his book FBI. According to this account, the president did broach the subject of the director’s resignation, “but Hoover immediately resisted, making threats and veiled references to material about Nixon in the Director’s private files.”33

  If true, “veiled references” were probably all that were needed, since it can be presumed that Nixon was not eager for Hoover to spell out what those matters were, knowing his words would be recorded on tape. Nor, it appears likely, would Hoover have been inclined to be too specific, for the same reason.

  To date, former President Richard Nixon has, through various legal stratagems and appeals, succeeded in keeping the transcripts of over four thousand hours of the White House tape recordings from being made public. Both the July and the October 1971 meetings at which he tried to fire J. Edgar Hoover are among the transcripts which have been suppressed.

  Again, the FBI director left the Oval Office with his status seemingly unchanged. Not only had he not been fired; he’d even managed to secure the president’s permission to expand the Bureau’s foreign liaison program.

  But there was no celebration. Hoover had been given a temporary reprieve. And that was all it was, he knew. He was now living on borrowed time.*

  It was after his meeting with Nixon that J. Edgar Hoover decided to destroy his most sensitive files.

  That decision was the culmination of a month heavy with betrayals and loss. October 1971 had begun with the firing of one of his most trusted aides and included the president’s attempt to fire him—two traumatic events which would have been severe emotional shocks for someone half his age.

  Not only had his oldest friend, Frank Baughman, died that month; another old, and even dearer, friend, Walter Winchell, was diagnosed as having cancer of the prostate with no hope of recovery (the king of the three-dot column succumbed the following February), while his constant companion, Clyde Tolson, was slowly but irretrievably deserting him.

  Two months earlier, while alone in his apartment, Tolson had become dizzy and fallen, apparently hitting his head on the bathtub. When his driver found him, he was bloody, confused, and disoriented. This was not his first dizzy spell or the first time he had fallen, but it was the first time he had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance: his illness was now public knowledge, although its exact nature, another cerebral vascular accident or stroke, was kept secret. When he was released, in September, Hoover had him taken to 4936 Thirtieth Place NW so that Annie Fields and James Crawford could look after him while he recuperated. He’d been too weak to make the trip to Frank Baughman’s funeral. He still had trouble concentrating for more than a few minutes at a time, forgot things, confused dates and identities. Now, when Hoover most needed his advice and support, he was unable to help.

  There was no one else Hoover could trust. One betrayal had followed another.

  Ironically, of all the presidents, it was not Roosevelt or Truman or Kennedy or even Johnson, but his own creation, Richard Milhous Nixon, who had turned on him. Moreover, Nixon had even betrayed their common cause, the very foundation of both their careers. For decades they had shared a bête noire—the Communist threat. That July, with a single announcement, that he had accepted an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China in 1972, the president had abandoned the fight. Compounding what Hoover felt to be a very dangerous mistake, the president was even planning to follow the China trip with a visit to the Soviet Union—to avoid offending the Russians! Sullivan’s declaration that the Communist party USA was moribund, together with the president’s attempt at détente, meant that he would have to find a new menace at budget time.

  But of all the betrayals, that of Bill Sullivan had been the most ominous. Although other top executives had defected over the years—the two Tamms, Nichols, Evans, DeLoach, Belmont—only Sullivan had broken the code of silence and talked about the internal policies of the FBI. Even Turrou and Purvis, who had published self-promoting books, hadn’t disclosed anything that would embarrass the Bureau or its director.

  On August 26, while Sullivan was still assistant to the director, the executive conference had issued an edict specifically advising members, and even those in the field, “that there would be absolutely no conversations with nor answers of any sort to representatives of the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Columbia Broadcasting System and National Broadcasting System.”35

  Thus far, in the first three weeks of October, unattributed but obviously Sullivan-sourced revelations about the FBI had appeared in every one of the publications mentioned above, as well as in Life, Time, and Newsweek. The only exceptions, to date, were the two networks.

  That the stories were more embarrassing than damaging was little consolation. Who knew what Sullivan would say next? His “honest memos” contained dozens of frightening clues—and they were not the worst things Sullivan knew.

  Nor could Hoover trust any of the others. Immediately after learning that Sullivan had given the Kissinger-wiretap materials to Mardian, he had Felt collect the sensitive files in all the assistant directors’ offices (“I had a few goodies of my own,”36 John Mohr later admitted) and secure them in the director’s suite. Over the years Hoover had played his sublieutenants off against one other in a way that kept each unsure of his staus and that gave no one too much power for too long. Clyde Tolson, the master gamesman, had orchestrated it all, while at the same time protecting, and isolating, the director. Hoover remained isolated—he was totally alone now—but without protection. Each of the assistant directors had his own private agenda, and most, if not all, no matter how hotly they might deny it, were secretly coveting the director’s seat. After nearly half a century, there was finally the prospect of room at the top. Even James Crawford noticed the change. As he later put it, simply but eloquently, during the director’s last years there were “a lot of people in there that didn’t have the fear of him like alot of them used to have.”37

  Nor was this true only of the Bureau. That fear—the fear of J. Edgar Hoover and his long-rumored secret files—no longer had the inhibiting effect on Congress that it had once had, though the recent heavy-handed destruction of Representative William Anderson of Tennessee would change a few minds. As for the press, there had been a time when he could, and did, dictate what appeared in almost every newspaper in the United States. That time had passed. No one feared being put on the no-contact list anymore. Not when everyone else seemed to be on it also.

  But the greatest betrayal of all was the one he never admitted, even took extreme measures to disguise. His health was failing. Following his return from lunch, the director would often be “in conference” until it came time for him to leave for home. Only his immediate staff knew—though others suspected—that he frequently napped for up to four hours at a time, or that it was now necessary for a nurse to visit him at home, on weekends, to give him his “vitamin shots.” (The sight of a white f
emale entering or leaving the Hoover residence was so startling that, even though she did not wear a uniform, the neighbors guessed her role almost immediately, although for a time they thought that she was attending to Tolson.) As often happened, those closest to him saw little change, but others, who hadn’t seen him for a while, noticed. Jeremiah O’Leary of the Washington Star, once a favored recipient of Bureau leaks but of late on the once-dreaded no-contact list, observed Hoover trying to get out of his limousine. It was painful even to watch. “That’s how I got a handle on the fact that he was really slowing down,” O’Leary later remarked38—with genuine sadness, because he’d first met the already legendary FBI director when he was a copyboy on the Star in 1939.

  Although he continued to brag about his excellent fitness reports, and apparently wasn’t above falsifying the same,* Hoover, like the Bureau itself, seemed to be suffering from a hardening of the arteries. He was old and tired. None of the longevity nostrums had worked. Nor had the “bug lights.” When he caught a cold, it lingered for weeks.

  “Something chilling happened to the Director in the course of the last decade of his life,” Frank Donner has written. “The patriarch was overtaken by an autumn crowded with reckless, cruel, and arbitrary actions, caricatures of his ‘normal’ authoritarian behavior and typically motivated by threats to his authority and power found lurking in criticism and even disagreement…It was not merely the aging process but the terror of death itself that explained the Director’s autumnal madness.”40

  Donner saw evidence of Hoover’s obsessive fear of death in his failure to groom a successor, his search for cure-alls, the bulletproof limousines, a reputed phobia about agents’ stepping on his shadow.

  But this wasn’t Hoover’s only fear. He also feared, as he had since the 1920s, when he’d substituted “J.” for “John,” the besmirching of his name; having his carefully constructed reputation destroyed; being held up to ridicule and embarrassment (a fear that seems to have plagued him since his youthful, stuttering days); the loss of his position and, with it, his potency and power—all of which could, and probably would, occur if his files fell into unsympathetic hands.

  Sullivan headed the list of his immediate fears, but the Media disclosures ran a close second. Only those who worked for him knew how shaken Hoover had been by the burglary of the small Pennsylvania resident agency. For the first time since the Coplon case, the FBI director’s own memorandums had been used against him. As if these weren’t enough, he was even fearful of a ghost from the past, that of his early mentor, Major General Ralph H. Van Deman, the father of American intelligence.

  Following Van Deman’s death in 1952, his widow had given the bulk of his vast subversive files to the Army, which eventually shipped them to Fort Holabird, Maryland. While they were stored there, various federal agencies, including the FBI, had access to them, using them primarily to run name checks on suspected subversives.

  When the Army inventoried the files in the fall of 1970, it was discovered that their indices, a complete list of General Van Deman’s informants, and a number of the still-sensitive files had disappeared, leaving the suspicion that at some point the FBI may have “Morgenthaued” these files also. If so, the agents botched the job, leaving behind hundreds of extremely incriminating documents which proved that despite Attorney General Harlan Stone’s 1925 edict, J. Edgar Hoover had never stopped investigating the private lives and beliefs of American citizens.*

  In early 1971 Senator Sam Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights held hearings on the subject of Army surveillance of civilians. As the Pentagon brass well knew, the Van Deman files were political dynamite: not only had the Army partially funded the former general’s private intelligence network; it had drawn freely on the information it had collected. In order to keep the files out of the hands of Ervin, a Pentagon committee developed a neat stratagem. It gave the files to another Senate subcommittee, that of internal security, headed by James O. Eastland, with the understanding that they would be kept secret. The transfer was made the same day Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert F. Frohike was due to testify before the Ervin committee, so that, if asked, Frohike could say the Army no longer possessed the Van Deman files. For some reason—possibly the same reason Ervin chose not to investigate the FBI—Frohike wasn’t asked, and it appeared that J. Edgar Hoover’s longtime collaboration with Van Deman would remain secret.

  Some months later, however, the New York Times writer Richard Halloran learned of the existence of the Van Deman files. From military sources who had helped inventory the files, Halloran also learned that they contained hundreds of confidential FBI investigative reports, indicating that the retired major general could, upon request, freely obtain any information he wanted from the Bureau.* Moreover, Van Deman, like his pupil J. Edgar Hoover, had a mania for collecting and filing things. He even kept his own library cards, which indicated when the FBI borrowed and when it returned a file.†

  The New York Times had broken Halloran’s story the previous month, in September 1971. To Hoover the Van Deman files, even in the safekeeping of his ally Senator Eastland, must have seemed a potential time bomb, as well as still another reminder of what could happen should his own files fall into other hands.

  Each morning, shortly after the director’s arrival, Helen Gandy brought in a stack of file folders and placed them on Hoover’s desk. As time permitted, he went through them one by one. Some he marked for destruction, probably with the letter “D,” since that was the Bureau symbol for paperwork that was to be shredded and burned. Others he marked “OC,” for transfer to the Official/Confidential file.

  These particular folders, each of which bore the letters “PF,” were from the director’s Personal File. Helen Gandy later testified that this file, which took up some thirty-five file drawers in her office, consisted in its entirety of J. Edgar Hoover’s personal correspondence over the nearly half century he had been director of the FBI, and that it contained nothing that pertained to Bureau matters—“I was very careful to be sure that nothing of that had gotten into the Personal File.”42

  But the type of material Hoover transferred from the Personal file to the Official/Confidential file gives the lie to this claim. The first eight folders bore the headings “Agreement between the FBI and Secret Service concerning Presidential Protection”; “Bentley, Elizabeth—Testimony”; “Black Bag Jobs”; “Black, Fred B. Jr.”; “Black, Fred (#2)”; “Bombing at the U.S. Capitol”; “Bureau Recording Instruments”; and “Butts, E. R.”

  Initially, the Personal File and the Official/Confidential file were probably as separate and distinct as their names indicate. Over the years, however, the line between them had blurred, Hoover himself making little distinction between that which was FBI business and that which was his own.

  Even the folders of strictly personal correspondence undoubtedly contained a great deal more than the innocuous exchange of pleasantries, since the FBI director investigated his friends, associates, and supporters just as thoroughly, and ruthlessly, as he did his enemies. (There were fat folders, “loaded with derogatory material,” on such friends as Clint Murchison, Roy Cohn, and Mervyn LeRoy, according to a former aide, who added, “Hoover didn’t trust anyone he didn’t have something on.”) Included, too, were the special considerations Hoover granted those whose goodwill he wanted to curry.

  According to Mark Felt, keeper of the Hoover flame, in addition to “a tremendous personal correspondence with the high and mighty in government…Hoover’s personal files also contained letters, some rather obsequious, from various Bureau officials who were trying to extricate themselves from the Hoover doghouse or otherwise ingratiate themselves with him. No doubt, some of them contained bits and pieces of gossip involving the world’s great which the official thought might interest or amuse Hoover.”45 Although Felt doesn’t use the verboten term, included in the above were probably hundreds of reports from Hoover’s “subs,” the vast network of informants inside the Bureau and other
branches of government.

  Other former aides believe the Personal File also contained far more sinister material, such as evidence of crimes Hoover let go unreported and unprosecuted, some committed by special agents, others by friends and associates, including the solution to a sensational “unsolved” murder involving one of the FBI director’s congressional supporters.

  It was these folders, the contents of his Personal File, that J. Edgar Hoover now chose to examine, and destroy.

  It must have been an extremely difficult, even painful, task. Alone in his inner sanctum, turning page after page, the FBI director, who was often accused of obsessively dwelling in the past, was forced to relive his career. But in a bizarre way. Not chronologically, as it had occurred, but alphabetically—an irony that the former librarian, given his present circumstances, undoubtedly failed to appreciate.

  Each folder must have posed a double-edged question: Might this still be useful? Or, in the wrong hands, would it be dangerously incriminating?

  With each choice, Hoover had to face the likelihood of his removal as director of the FBI—and possibly even, on a deeper level, his own mortality.

  Like the embezzling bank president who discovers he can’t even take a vacation for fear his records will betray him, Hoover now found himself the prisoner, and the ultimate victim, of his own files. They, not William “Wild Bill” Donovan, or the three Judases, or any of his other enemies, were his real nemesis. Trapped by the myth he had so carefully created and nurtured, that the files alone were the real source of his power, Hoover couldn’t bring himself to destroy them. Less than two weeks after he started, he abandoned the task.