J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  He had an even bigger problem: laying the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover.

  Confirmed by a vote of 96 to 0 in the Senate, Kelley had a mandate for change, but showed no undue haste in exercising it. He did institute a policy of “participatory management,” which he’d used most successfully in Kansas City; as a result, according to the writer Sanford Ungar, whom he allowed unprecedented access to the inner workings of the FBI during the transition period, “Meetings of the executive conference have become more like those of a corporate board of directors than of the disciples of Christ.”42 But he surrounded himself with unreconstructed Hooverites and J. P. Mohr loyalists, who did their best to co-opt him and even managed to involve him in their petty pilferings.

  For every change Kelley made, however minor, he had to face the criticism “This isn’t the way the director did it.” A mini-rebellion almost broke out when the field offices were ordered to display the current director’s photograph alongside that of his predecessor. The question was one not of placement but of size. Kelley decreed the photographs be equal, and after much grumbling the SACs went along with it, taking some consolation from the fact that since Gray and Ruckelshaus had been only “acting” directors, they wouldn’t be sharing the field office walls.

  But Kelly didn’t need pictures to remind himself of Hoover. He was omnipresent, a lingering, brooding presence, affecting every decision Kelley did or didn’t make.

  Unlike Hoover, Kelley had great sympathy for and worked closely with the police, including the late director’s longtime nemesis Patrick Murphy, who now headed the Police Foundation.* He also established good working contacts with the other intelligence agencies, as well as with the Justice Department. He worked hard to improve the accuracy of the crime statistics, stressed quality and impact over quantity of cases, gave more authority to the field, and, after Nixon left office, resumed the war against organized crime, scoring several major victories. He deemphasized Domestic Intelligence—where most of the abuses had occurred—reducing its caseload to less than 10 percent of the Bureau’s total, but he also stressed taking “protective action…before very serious threats become clear violations of Federal law.”44 He apologized for the COINTELPROs, but in a way that indicated he did not take them all that seriously. He stated that he welcomed congressional oversight, but often was less than forthcoming in producing documents the committees requested. He authorized the release of large quantities of files under the Freedom of Information Act, but usually not the most incriminating, trying, not altogether successfully, to keep the lid on Pandora’s box. He said the days when the FBI smeared people were in the past, but one of his aides in External Affairs, as Crime Records had been rechristened, cautioned the author not to take anything William Sullivan said seriously, that he’d had a nervous breakdown. At times Kelley almost sounded like Hoover. Speaking on behalf of a bill to increase electronic surveillances, he said, “And I hope the Good Lord enables me to adequately convey to you the enormous value of this statutory weapon against the panderers of vice, corruption and violence.”45 But then, he had the same speechwriters, chief among them William George “Bill” Gunn.

  Looming over everything he did was the shadow of his predecessor. Kelley had to walk a fine line, distancing himself from Hoover but never denouncing him, not even after the Church committee hearings, which took place while Kelley was director. One of his most controversial speeches was at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, where, thirty years earlier, Sir Winston Churchill had delivered his famous “iron curtain” address.

  In a speech entitled “Perspectives of Power,” Kelley told his audience, “During most of my tenure as director of the FBI, I have been compelled to devote much of my time attempting to reconstruct and then explain activities that occurred years ago.

  “Some of these activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible. We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated. It is true that many of the activities being condemned were, considering the times in which they occurred—the violent Sixties—good faith efforts to prevent bloodshed and wanton destruction of property. Nevertheless, they were wrongful uses of power.”

  After stating that the abuses had occurred “chiefly during the twilight of Mr. Hoover’s administration” (Kelley, who had served in the Bureau from 1940 to 1961, knew better), and noting that no man should serve as director for more than ten years, Kelley added, “Yet I feel we should not utterly disregard Mr. Hoover’s unparalleled contributions to peace-keeping in the United States.”46

  Wrong? Indefensible? Abuses? The furor over Kelley’s almost apologetic remarks was so great that the FBI director had to send a “clarification” to the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Inc. The society had a vested interest in preserving, untarnished, the reputation of the late, great, incorruptible J. Edgar Hoover and his force of squeaky-clean Boy Scouts.*

  Kelley’s speech was delivered on May 8, 1976, three years after he’d become director and one year after the Church committee had exposed thousands of illegal, unethical, and immoral actions by Hoover’s FBI. To the day he retired, in 1978, Kelley was still treading that thin line. “I say it is time for the FBI’s critics to concentrate on the FBI present and the FBI future” (May 8, 1976). “My approach to my job since becoming FBI director has been to try to bring about change for the better, not to prove, or condemn, things that were wrong” (December 2, 1976). “It is my fervent desire to let the old wounds heal and to permit the FBI to move forward” (March 3, 1977).

  Kelley was never able to exorcise Hoover’s ghost. Even the move into the new FBI Building was not symbolic of a new start. For one thing, the building had been named for J. Edgar Hoover. For another, workers on the night shift claimed they could hear the late director hurrying down the halls of the floor above, the tip, tap of his little feet followed a minute or two later by the painful, shuffling steps of the late associate director, dragging his bad leg.

  On moving to Washington from Kansas City, the new FBI director had gratefully accepted the help of the Bureau in settling into his apartment. New valances had been installed, by the Exhibits Section, and two television sets purchased and installed, on the directions of Associate Director Callahan. The Exhibits Section also built a walnut table, a set of stack tables, and a jewelry box, which were given to Director Kelley as gifts from the executive conference. Kelley was not told the Exhibits Section made the gifts. Exhibits Section employees also repaired a broken cabinet for the FBI director and mounted the FBI seal on a gold disk as a charm for the director’s wife, who was dying of cancer. In addition, Director Kelley’s automobile received occasional servicing by FBI employees and his FBI-provided chauffeur performed personal errands for him. One weekend, while his wife was still able to travel, Director and Mrs. Kelley joined a number of former and current FBI executives and their wives on a trip to New York, where they met with officials of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which underwrote the Special Agents Mutual Benefit Association (SAMBA) policy. The others attending included former Assistant to the Director John Mohr and Mrs. Mohr and current Assistant to the Director Tom Jenkins and his wife.* The group stayed at the Waldorf Astoria. Director Kelley’s travel from Kansas City, Missouri, to New York and return to Washington, D.C., was by Government Travel Request (GTR). Travel for Mrs. Kelley and the others was paid by SAMBA. Prudential paid all other expenses.

  Once he realized how he’d been set up, and how crudely, from the valances to the complimentary weekend in New York, Kelley got mad. “I’ve never seen him so mad,” an aide recalled. “He burned and burned and burned and then he exploded.”†48

  When the Justice Department took over the corruption investigation—his own Inspection Division having found nothing amiss—Kelley cooperated fully with the JD team. As the latter stated in its final report, “Director Kelley should be given credit for putting an end to the improper practices described in the report. His cooperation greatly assisted Departmental invest
igators in uncovering the facts. His cooperation made this report possible.”49 It was because Kelley had ordered them to do so that “hundreds” of current and former FBI employees cooperated with the investigators.

  If the chief casualty of the probe was the reputation of J. Edgar Hoover, the chief beneficiary was the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although it had taken him five years to get around to it, Kelley cleaned house. He fired Associate Director Nicholas P. Callahan, citing not the charges in the report but other, unspecified “abuses of power.”* He completely reorganized the Inspection Division, restructured the FBI inventory system to provide built-in controls and audit trails, instituted new auditing and accounting practices, separated budget from property procurement, ended the exclusive relationship with U.S. Recording, replaced the Confidential Fund, reorganized the FBI Recreational Association, and, perhaps most important, as AG Bell carefully phrased it, “developed and improved the FBI career development program for special agents to ensure that the best qualified individuals are selected for administrative advancement, subsequently reducing the possibility that one person or group can control the selection of such candidates.”50

  Bell didn’t name names. He didn’t need to.

  Kelley’s shake-up, completed before the release of the Justice Department report on January 10, 1978, was his last hurrah. Nine days later President Jimmy Carter named a new FBI director.

  William Sullivan wasn’t around to see either the Justice Department report or the change in directors, although he would have greatly welcomed both.

  After leaving the FBI in 1971, Sullivan had tried to ingratiate himself with the Nixon administration, by writing two memos to John Dean citing instances in which the Democrats, and particularly the Johnson administration, had made political use of the FBI.† Nixon was frantically collecting any and all such material for use in defending his actions in Watergate. Despite his help, Sullivan was only briefly considered as a possible replacement for Gray—Felt having told Dean there would be open rebellion in the Bureau if Sullivan was appointed and Haldeman rejecting him as being “too independent”—although he did serve for a short time as director of the Justice Department’s Office of National Narcotics Intelligence. Upon his retirement, Sullivan divided his time between his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, and a crude, isolated cabin he’d built in the woods near Bolton, Massachussets, not far from where his sister lived.

  Although Hoover had locked Sullivan out of his office, it was widely rumored in the Bureau that the former assistant to the director had prepared for his probable departure well in advance, these preparations including the Xeroxing of a large number of key documents. Sullivan denied this. However, when his sister’s barn burned, several years before his death, Sullivan told numerous people that all of his records had been destroyed with it.

  There are some who suspect that Sullivan told this tale simply as a ruse to discourage FBI bag jobs. He didn’t have a telephone in his cabin, he told the author when he visited him there, because he wanted to save the taxpayers the cost of tapping it. He knew his Sugar Hill telephone was tapped, and that his mail was being opened, because he knew the men who were doing it: they’d all carried on similar operations for him, when he headed Domestic Intelligence, and had made sure he was alerted.

  Most of Sullivan’s last years were spent testifying before congressional committees and giving depositions in various court cases, such as the Morton Halperin wiretapping suit.

  About a quarter hour before sunrise on November 9, 1977, William Sullivan was walking in the woods near his Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, home when a twenty-one-year-old hunter equipped with a Remington 30-06 automatic rifle shot him in the back, the bullet slamming into Sullivan’s right shoulder and exiting through the left side of his neck. Sullivan was carried to the nearby home of the Sugar Hill police chief, Gary Young, a close friend with whom he had been planning to go hunting later that day. By the time an ambulance arrived, accompanied by officials of the state police, the fish and game department, and the FBI, Sullivan was dead. The hunter, the son of a state police official, said he had mistaken Sullivan for a deer.* Both the fish and game department and the state Police of New Hampshire investigated the shooting and on November 19 the young hunter pleaded nolo contendere to fish and game violation no. 207:37, the misdemeanor charge of carelessly shooting a human being. He was later fined $500 and had his hunting license suspended for ten years. Through a spokesman, the Sullivan family said it accepted the shooting as an accident and forgave the hunter.

  Because he had been the number three man at the FBI, and his battles with the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had been much publicized, Sullivan’s death would have rated more than a brief mention on the obituary pages, but his scheduled appearance the following week before the House Select Committee on the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.—Sullivan’s division had been involved in the FBI investigations of both killings—assured front-page coverage. Attorney William Kunstler called a press conference to announce that there wasn’t “the slightest doubt” that William Sullivan was murdered, because he was about to “blow the whistle”53 on FBI operations that would have provided direct links to the slayings of Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X. Kunstler also announced that he would ask Attorney General Griffin Bell to have the Justice Department investigate. The Justice Department later stated there was no reason to open an investigation, since, as the JD spokesman Terence Adamson noted, “the person responsible for the shooting has acknowledged it and the physical evidence substantiates his account.”54

  Clarence Kelley had announced his intention to retire shortly after Carter took office, in early 1977, and the president had appointed a blue-ribbon panel to pick his successor. The panel, whose dozen members included F. A. O. Schwarz, Jr., Charles Morgan, former southern field director of the ACLU, Attorney General Bell, and Kelley himself, screened 235 résumés. Aware of how they could be slanted, FBI name checks were not used, the panel instead relying on frank, tough questioning. Anyone who had any connection with the COINTELPROs, for example, was eliminated. Although the list was reduced to five finalists, the unanimous choice of the panel was the forthright Neil J. Welch, Buffalo SAC, who told its members, “To improve federal law enforcement, the best thing you could do would be sandbag Bureau headquarters and rip out the phones.”55 Carter, who interviewed each of the finalists, instead chose William Hedgcock Webster, a former prosecutor and trial and appellate court judge from St. Louis, and the Senate confirmed him, by a vote of 90 to 0, on February 23, 1978.

  Judge Webster, as he liked to be called, brought to his job “a reputation for absolute integrity,” according to the New York Times.56 Newsweek characterized him as a “straight arrow, sternly rectitudinous” and a man of “probity and discretion.”57 The Washington Post, in reviewing his first three years, would call him “the man who brought pride back to the FBI.” “If he did nothing else,” the paper noted, “Webster managed to get the FBI off the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.”58

  “I had a learning process when I got there,” Webster later admitted. “It was a rough time. People were talking about ripping J. Edgar Hoover’s name right off the building.”59 Although he appointed James B. Adams deputy associate director, Webster wasn’t much concerned about the old Hooverites: most of those remaining were soon due to reach the mandatory retirement age of seventy, and for them there would be no exemptions. Unlike Kelley, Webster could refer to “the new FBI” and get away with it. In a highly symbolic act, Webster had a bust and a portrait of Hoover removed from the director’s suite, but he waited seventeen months to do it, and it wasn’t until after Adams and John J. McDermott, the last two holdovers from the Hoover era, had retired. On replacing them, Webster restructed the high command, appointing not one associate director but three executive associate directors—Homer A. Boynton, Jr., Donald W. Moore, Jr., and Lee Colwell—none of whom was closely identified with Hoover. They were also better educat
ed and, at fifty-two, forty-nine, and forty-five, decidedly younger than their predecessors.* His first priorities, Webster said, were reestablishing morale and momentum. Once these had been accomplished to his satisfaction, he shifted the Bureau’s direction from the realms of car thefts and bank robberies—Hoover’s easy statistics—to the new, to the FBI, areas of white-collar crime, corruption by public officials, and, still later, drugs. The Abscam investigations—which led to the convictions of one senator and six representatives—occurred under Webster. Although some denounced the techniques that were employed as entrapment, Webster had learned at least one lesson from Hoover: frightening Congress wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Webster appeared fairly candid, although properly reserved, with the congressional oversight committees, which for the most part praised him, and the appropriations committees, which gave him what he wanted. Espionage received special emphasis, as did counterintelligence. Judge Webster took great pride in the Bureau’s high-technology crime solving, which consisted of greater use of computers and more court-ordered electronic surveillances than ever before. There was no more lily-white male FBI: by 1987 the Bureau’s 9,100 special agents included 350 Hispanics, 350 blacks, and 650 women. The SACs in Indianapolis and Atlanta were black. Certain rules were eased. Agents no longer faced automatic firing for engaging in extramarital affairs or living with someone outside the bonds of matrimony, although “practicing homosexuals” were still banned from Bureau jobs.†