Authors: Ronald Kessler
While black and Hispanic agents filed complaints of discrimination under Webster’s tenure, Webster’s emphasis was always on hiring and promoting more minorities.
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Webster kept a card in his wallet with the latest minority statistics. From 1978 to 1987, while he was FBI director, the number of female special agents rose from 147 to 787. Black agents increased from 185 to 393. Hispanic agents rose from 173 to 400.
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Despite his impressive credentials in the law, Webster had no experience or special interest in foreign affairs. Born on March 6, 1924, in St. Louis, William Hedgcock Webster attended secondary school in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. He graduated from Amherst College in 1947 and from Washington University Law School in 1949. He served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II and in the Korean War, practiced law in St. Louis, and was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri in 1960.
In 1961, Webster returned to the practice of law. In 1970,
he was appointed a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. In 1973, he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Although Webster was a Republican, President Carter appointed him FBI director in 1978.
As the end of his ten-year term as FBI director approached, Webster was already evaluating offers from major law firms when then vice president Bush asked him if he would like to be DCI. After Webster’s first wife, Drusilla, died in 1984, Bush and his wife, Barbara, had invited Webster to stay with them at their home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Webster and Bush had spent the weekend playing tennis.
While President Reagan never said so, it was plain that Webster had been chosen because of his reputation for imposing order on troubled agencies. Under William J. Casey, the CIA had become involved in the Iran-contra scandal and had failed to adequately inform Congress of the mining of the harbors in Nicaragua. The CIA had begun to project an image of being out of control, the inevitable result of Casey’s oenchant for thumbing his nose at Congress.
Webster was a first-class lawyer and judge whose integrity was beyond question—exactly what was needed to impose order on the CIA. For example, when the Carter White House asked the FBI to help guard the shah of Iran when he came to the U.S. for treatment for cancer, Webster questioned whether the FBI had the legal authority to comply. That sent White House lawyers scurrying to the law books to find a legal justification. Only when they found a law permitting the FBI to assist other agencies in guarding foreign dignitaries did Webster accede to the White House request.
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To underscore the fact that he was an outsider who would not tolerate past abuses, Webster preferred that others refer to him as “judge.”
“When he went to the FBI, it was in a state of disarray,” said John P. Austin, a friend who nominated him to be chairman of the American Bar Association’s Banking and Business Law Section. “He decided that he didn’t want to be known as the director. He wanted to be known as Judge Webster. The reason he did was he wanted to make it perfectly clear
that his relationship to the FBI would be in a sense similar to his relationship as a judge to what came before him.”
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“If you went looking for the resume of the ideal DCI, it wouldn’t be Bill Webster,” one of his aides said. “And yet in January of 1987, I’m not sure there was a better choice in the whole country to be DCI than Bill Webster.”
With President Reagan looking on, Webster became the fourteenth DCI on May 26,1987. Then Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., swore him in. Pledging “fidelity to the Constitution and the laws of our country,” Webster observed, “Today I leave one proud institution in American life, the FBI, to join another one, the CIA.”
Noting that Webster had been an officer in the Navy, Reagan said that when the bosun’s whistle was blown, Webster had responded. To commemorate the event, William Baker, Webster’s public affairs director from the FBI, gave him a bosun’s whistle from the British battleship H.M.S.
Hood
engraved with the date he was sworn in.
Webster declined to take a polygraph examination as part of the hiring process. But he did take what is known as a repolygraph almost immediately after taking office. The repolygraph is administered after employees are hired and is the same as the initial exam, except it does not include a number of questions on lifestyle. To Webster, it was a matter of principle. The president had nominated him, and the Senate had confirmed him. He would not subject himself to a test on whether he should be hired. But Webster recognized that the agency lives and dies on the polygraph. While universally hated, it is an integral part of every employee’s existence. To demonstrate that he knew what it meant to take the test, he took a polygraph exam given to employees once they are already working for the agency.
Casey had often popped into people’s offices just to say hello. Webster was not that kind of guy. To be sure, he had a playful side. Besides playing tennis, he enjoyed the antics at the Alfalfa Club, which holds an annual stag dinner in Washington. A strictly “No Women/No Press Allowed” affair, it is “one of the last gasps of the cigar-chomping, back-slapping, boozy days of yore,” as the
Washington Post
called
it. “It’s a night when the president, most of the Cabinet, and congressional heavy-hitters don’t have to worry about public image.”
Webster also visited the Bohemian Club, an exclusive men’s club sixty-five miles north of San Francisco that lists Ronald Reagan and George Bush as members.
Webster liked American Indian art and other art of the American West. He liked country music, particularly the mother and daughter team known as the Judds, who became his friends. On his fifty-four-acre family farm near Fulton, Missouri, he rode horses. He read history and Civil War books and spent a great deal of time researching the life of his greatgrandfather, Col. George P. Webster, a lawyer who led the Union’s Twenty-fifth Ohio Volunteer infantry at the Civil War battle of Perryville, Kentucky, on October 8, 1862. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and Colonel Webster became one of the casualties when he fell from his horse, mortally wounded.
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One of Webster’s favorite possessions was a two-foot-high brown bear—Judge WeBear—given to him by Mary Spaeth, a former White House fellow who had worked for him at the FBI. The bear wears black-rimmed glasses, pin-striped pants, an FBI T-shirt, tennis shoes, and judicial robes, a tennis racket clutched in its hands.
Spaeth gave it to Webster after he gave her a locket when she left the FBI.
“There were thirty guys at the FBI looking on,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘What if he doesn’t think it’s funny? I’m going to die. They’ll shoot me right here.’ Webster opened the box, and he started to laugh. He began to laugh so hard he began to cry. He took out his handkerchief and took off his glasses to wipe the tears from his eyes. And everybody else began to howl with laughter.”
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After Webster’s wife died, he led an active social life, dating a number of attractive women. He had a number of male friends, usually fellow lawyers or judges. While at the CIA, he jocularly signed letters to some of them 00-14, doubling James Bond’s code number because he was the fourteenth director of Central Intelligence. But Webster was not someone
to go drinking with. In fact, as a Christian Scientist, he generally eschewed alcohol, although he occasionally had a glass of white wine at a party. Webster had never gone to a doctor—he never seemed to need one. His first wife, Drusilla, was also a Christian Scientist and died of breast cancer without receiving any medical attention.
When CIA officials recommended a smoking ban in the building, Webster hesitated. He did not want to seem to be imposing his personal views on the agency. Perhaps he should propose the rule and get comments, he told John B. Bellinger, his assistant. But he overcame his reservations and imposed the prohibition that had been recommended to him.
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The result was a collection of cigarette butts outside the building from smokers who took drags on the front steps.
On the job, Webster was not someone who took off his jacket when others did. Rather, he inspired fear and respect. That was the way he wanted it, to be the judge who keeps his distance from the litigants, who reads all the pleadings and listens to all the arguments, but whose decision in the end is final. It was a style that was not calculated to win friends or loyalty. Rather, it won often grudging admiration.
Like a judge, Webster relied on clerks—called special assistants—to filter material that came in and offer their opinions. While every DCI had special assistants, none relied on them so heavily or used such a systematic process for screening issues before decisions were made. Nor did other special assistants have the impressive credentials Webster’s had. They were all lawyers, and all came with résumés that looked as if they had been made up. Almost every one had graduated either magna cum laude or cum laude from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Columbia. They had clerked for Supreme Court justices or edited law reviews or had been Woodrow Wilson Foreign Affairs fellows.
Webster chose the special assistants the same way he chose tennis partners.
“You can count on William to get the best player there is as his partner,” said Walter M. Clark, a friend from childhood who practiced law with him in St. Louis. “It’s done very subtly but very precisely. He likes to win. . . . He is awfully good
at maneuvering things to end up with the best player as his partner.”
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Like the clerks that served him when he was on the bench, Webster wanted his special assistants to read through the material he received, investigate and do research, and make recommendations.
“The job was structured very much like what he had experienced on the bench,” said Russell J. Bruemmer, one of his assistants who later became general counsel of the CIA. “It was clear early on he was not setting up a classic chief of staff role or line responsibility but rather a staff responsibility for information gathering, analyzing the way the decisions ought to be approached, and once made, assisting in getting decisions through the agency.”
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In reviewing the assistants’ recommendations, Webster wanted to know, “How have we done it in the past?” Then he asked, “Why do we do it that way?”
“You better have the answers to both, and you better have it right,” Bruemmer said. “If you are changing precedent, the question is, ‘Why are we changing it?’”
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Beyond that, the assistants were to eye proposals with the perspective of outsiders to see if the idea would make sense to the American people. For that reason, Webster as a rule wanted his assistants at the FBI and the CIA to stay with him only two years. That way, he said, they would not begin to reflect the views of the bureaucracy.
“I want you to ask every time something comes up, why is it being done this way?” Webster told John B. Bellinger, who was his special assistant at the CIA until 1991. “When you know why, it’s time to go.”
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There were two exceptions—Bruemmer, who was Webster’s clerk at the federal appeals court when Webster got the job at the FBI in 1978, and John B. Hotis, an FBI agent who had a law degree. Bruemmer became Webster’s first special assistant at the FBI in 1978 and stayed with him until he left to join Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington in 1981. In 1987, Webster appointed Bruemmer special counsel to investigate the Iran-contra affair at the CIA. A year later, he made him general counsel of the CIA.
Unlike Bruemmer and the other assistants, Hotis did not come from the outside. He was more senior than the others and stayed throughout most of Webster’s tenure at the FBI and CIA. Hotis acted as a sort of superclerk, with status slightly above the other special assistants. At the CIA, Webster gave him the title of counselor to the DCI. Generally, Hotis worked on special projects rather than the day-to-day issues that Webster’s other assistants addressed.
When he first came to the CIA, Webster brought with him William M. Baker, who had directed public and congressional affairs at the FBI. Baker became CIA director of public affairs, but he also functioned as another personal assistant to Webster. Finally, Webster brought Peggy Devine, his executive secretary at the FBI. She was known as the Dragon Lady because of the way she fiercely guarded access to her boss.
After weeks of briefings by each of the directorates, Webster took command. The first thing he encountered was outright hostility toward Congress, which was hardly surprising.
“Don’t brief; limit disclosure,” Casey once told a CIA associate, then uttered an expletive to describe all members of Congress, according to
Veil
by Bob Woodward.
According to one of Webster’s assistants at the time, CIA officials urged him not to be open with Congress.
“Well, Judge, you don’t want to say that; you can’t say that,” he was told. “Only say that if they ask that question.”
Often, holdovers from the Casey era compiled briefing books with sample questions and answers. The suggested answers gave a narrow response to the questions, avoiding possibly negative information. That never failed to infuriate Webster.
Webster occasionally raised his voice with subordinates when he was mad. But to those who knew him, the most ominous sign was when his eyes became more steely blue than usual, and his lips became thinner, so that his mouth seemed to disappear. It meant Webster was even more enraged than when he raised his voice. It happened a number of times as he made it clear he would not tolerate anything except complete and honest disclosure.
“He just couldn’t stand the CIA’s disdain for Congress,” a former assistant said. “He thought it was ridiculous, dated, not in the best interests of the agency, not smart, and not good government. He really believed that Congress was the elected representative of the people. He couldn’t stand the grumbling about sharing information with Congress.”