J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (104 page)

A
mong the first government officials President-elect Nixon summoned to his transition headquarters in New York’s Hotel Pierre was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

“Edgar,” Nixon told him, “you are one of the few people who is to have direct access to me at all times. I’ve talked to Mitchell about it and he understands.”
¹

For eight years J. Edgar Hoover had waited to hear those words.

Properly grateful, he’d come bearing his own peculiar gifts.

During the closing days of the campaign, Hoover informed Nixon, President Johnson had ordered the FBI, under the guise of national security, to investigate both his running mate, Spiro Agnew, and Madame Chennault.

Age hadn’t slowed Hoover’s speech. At times his staccato, machine-gun-like delivery seemed even speedier (the result, at least some of his assistants suspected, of his daily “vitamin shots”). This may explain what then happened. For as Hoover recited the details of the taps, bugs, and long-distance telephone calls made from the campaign plane, apparently both Nixon and H. R. Haldeman misunderstood him: they thought he said that LBJ had ordered the FBI to wiretap him, Nixon, and that his campaign plane had been bugged.

As Hoover had anticipated, Nixon blamed LBJ, not him. However, Haldeman, who was soon named White House chief of staff, realized that the FBI director was simply “covering his ass.” To which Haldeman later added, with uncharacteristic humor: “And no one was more adept at sheltering that broad expanse than he.”
²

But these weren’t Hoover’s only surprises. The best was yet to come. By
courtesy and tradition, the president-elect had been invited to visit the president at the White House. When he did, Hoover warned Nixon, he should be very careful what he said. Not only were the telephones monitored; Johnson had installed elaborate electronic equipment which enabled him secretly to record conversations in the Oval Office.

This so startled Nixon and Haldeman that neither paid much attention when Hoover explained the mechanics, that the taping system was manually operated, by a switch under LBJ’s desk, and that he could turn it on, or off, whenever he chose.

Thus was the seed planted.

On November 11 the Johnsons took the Nixons on a tour of the White House, showing them the changes that had been made since Eisenhower’s days. Over lunch, while their wives were carrying on their own conversation, the president-elect asked the president what he thought of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms. Although Johnson’s comments on Helms go unremembered (Nixon later reappointed him), it was obvious to Nixon that “Lyndon Johnson’s admiration for Hoover was almost unbounded.”
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Johnson urged Nixon to keep Hoover on, and Nixon assured him that he had already informed the FBI director that he would do so.

Johnson and Nixon again met on December 12, this time privately, in the Oval Office, and again the subject of Hoover came up, in a discussion of “leaks.”

It was of the utmost importance, Johnson told Nixon, that secrecy be maintained on all matters involving national security. If he met with his full Cabinet or the National Security Council in the morning, everything he said would make the afternoon papers, Johnson complained. He didn’t even ask Hubert to sit in on many of his meetings, for fear his staff might leak something.

“If it hadn’t been for Edgar Hoover,” Johnson added cryptically, “I couldn’t have carried out my responsibilities as Commander in Chief. Period. Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men. You will rely on him time and again to maintain security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”
⁴

During either this meeting or the earlier one on November 11, Johnson also told Nixon that “if it hadn’t been for Edgar Hoover, he could not have been president,”
⁵
and that “without Mr. Hoover…he simply couldn’t have run the foreign policy of this country during the last difficult months of his presidency.”

These cryptic remarks would puzzle Nixon throughout his White House years, and long thereafter. “What he was referring to, I do not know,” the former president stated in a little-known 1976 deposition.
⁶

Johnson and Nixon also discussed, in this, their last meeting before the inauguration, presidential libraries and the importance of maintaining the historical record.

Sitting in the Oval Office, which he would soon occupy, conversing with the outgoing president, whom he would soon replace, Richard Nixon surely realized that this was in itself indeed a historic moment, and that probably every word they said was being recorded.

Thus did the seed germinate.

Nixon had intended to announce Hoover’s reappointment on January 1, 1969, the FBI director’s seventy-fourth birthday, but on learning that
True
magazine planned to publish an “exposé” on the FBI director in its January issue, which would reach the stands on December 30, Hoover persuaded the president-elect to move up the announcement two weeks.

The article, “The Last Days of J. Edgar Hoover,” by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, was more laudatory than critical, more rehash than investigative journalism. It disclosed that Hoover’s “sainthood” had been fostered by “40 years of planted press notices” (neglecting to mention that their “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column had published more than its share of them) and that Hoover was a hard disciplinarian who was feared by his subordinates; but the only real revelation was that Hoover’s “closest confidant and constant companion,” Clyde Tolson, now sixty-eight, was “in failing health,” which was obvious to anyone who saw him.

If anything, the article should have reassured Hoover that his myths were intact. It didn’t, of course. Planted editorials praising Hoover, and lauding Nixon for reappointing him, appeared in newspapers all over the country.

Unaware that it was the last time he would do so, on January 20, 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover watched the inaugural parade from his balcony on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building.

As the caravan passed along Pennsylvania Avenue, the president-elect, looking up and spotting Hoover, stood and threw out his right arm, with his palm upward, as if in a Roman salute, while the FBI director responded with a beaming smile and what was perhaps a condescending nod.

It was as if the president-elect were passing in review for him.

Thereafter it became one of the FBI director’s favorite stories, of how the newly elected president had shown his obeisance. It
was
a great story. There was only one thing wrong with it. It never happened.

In planning the inaugural parade, Nixon, almost deathly afraid of assassination, had ruled out an open convertible and the Secret Service had gratefully concurred. Rufus Youngblood, the agent in charge of presidential protection, recalled, “We moved down Pennsylvania Avenue not in an open car, but in an enclosed limousine that was as bulletproof and bombproof as technology could devise.”
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Every newspaper and television photograph of the event showed an enclosed limousine.

Perhaps the president-elect did wave. And Hoover, from his fifth floor aerie, may have spotted the motion. But Hail, Caesar?

It was enough to make one suspect that the aged FBI director was getting senile, except for one fact: Hoover’s aides, who were standing alongside him, also claimed to have seen Nixon stand and raise his arm in salute.

They would never have reached that balcony had they not first learned to see the world through J. Edgar Hoover’s eyes.

Hoover didn’t need to exaggerate his relationship with the new president. That Richard Nixon had finally risen to the presidency was due, in large part, to him. Nixon had more than ample reason to be grateful. Of all the eight presidents he had served under while FBI director, Hoover knew this one best. His files on Nixon dated back to 1939—when the young Duke graduate had applied for an appointment as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had been rejected for “lacking aggressiveness”—and covered all the years since. He knew his strengths and his weaknesses. He knew of more crises than Nixon himself cared to remember. He was aware of financial and personal relationships that had never surfaced during any of Nixon’s campaigns.

Hoover had still another reason to feel content. As his attorney general, Nixon had picked his former law partner and campaign manager, John Mitchell, a tough, law-and-order advocate whose views on most issues were in complete accord with Hoover’s own (the system of justice in the United States suffered, Mitchell complained, from “a preoccupation with fairness for the accused”).
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But when Nixon told Hoover who the new AG would be, he did something unprecedented: he asked that the FBI
not
conduct a background investigation on Mitchell.

This was, as Nixon should have known, like waving a red flag in front of a bull. “By merely making the request,” William Sullivan realized, “Nixon put himself right in the director’s pocket.”
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Hoover went along with the request, but Sullivan made some discreet inquiries. All he discovered was that Mitchell’s wife Martha was under treatment for alcoholism, which was fairly common knowledge; and that she had been pregnant with their first child before Mitchell’s divorce from his previous wife had come through. Neither of which, of course, was grounds for denying him his new post.

“I never found out what Mitchell was hiding,” Sullivan recalled.
¹⁰
Perhaps there was nothing to find. It was possible that Nixon simply wanted to spare his friend the embarrassment of questions regarding his wife’s illness.

There was still another possibility, which was the outgrowth of a certain peculiarity in the personality of Richard Nixon, one which J. Edgar Hoover recognized and would use to his own advantage in the months to come.

The FBI had taken over the job of investigating presidential appointees—including Supreme Court nominees, Cabinet officers, ambassadors, White House staff and employees—during the Truman era. It was a job which Hoover had very much wanted and one which every president since had found
helpful. But when the FBI forwarded its reports to the White House, Nixon, unlike his predecessors, didn’t want to see them, “because,” he would state, “if somebody was going to be on a staff, I didn’t want to know what his problems were or had been in early life…I only wanted to know whether presently he was competent, whether he could do the job. As far as his present life was concerned, unless it involved something that might impinge upon his service, I felt that it was best not to know, because it would create an unpleasant relationship between me and whoever I had to work with.”
¹¹

Ill at ease with all but a few close friends, Nixon did not want to get emotionally involved with the people he worked with. He didn’t want to know what their problems were. (But his aides were
very
interested in such information, and Hoover continued to supply it.) He even found it difficult to hire people. And almost impossible to fire them.

Nixon had deceived Hoover, although several weeks passed before the FBI director realized it. He had no intention of allowing Hoover direct access. As John Ehrlichman put it, “The last thing Nixon wanted was Hoover walking in on him whenever he felt like it.”
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To forestall this, Haldeman had given Ehrlichman, recently appointed White House counsel, the job of acting as both buffer and conduit, choosing him, Ehrlichman suspected, because Rose Mary Woods had become too close to Hoover and, particularly, to Helen Gandy.

Not totally inconsiderate of the director’s feelings, Nixon still called him periodically to ask his advice. And when he sent Ehrlichman to see him, he arranged for him to bring some good news.

For the first time in decades, the FBI director was having budget problems, the Bureau of the Budget having refused to allocate additional funds for construction of the new FBI Building, which—in part because of the director’s repeated changes in specifications—was already more than $40 million over budget, while construction hadn’t yet reached the ground level.
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Using his influence as president, Nixon got Hoover the money he wanted, and Ehrlichman was delegated to tell him, hoping this would help smooth the way for a good working relationship.

Visiting the famed director of the FBI was, Ehrlichman discovered, akin to going to see the Wizard of Oz. After being escorted through Hoover’s “trophy rooms”—a series of anterooms and offices, their walls adorned with hundreds of photographs, awards, scrolls, and plaques—he was finally ushered into a handsomely paneled room familiar to anyone who watched TV. Everything was here: the impressively large desk, the flags, the FBI seal, both on the wall and embroidered in the deep-pile carpet. The only thing missing was the director.

Not until then did Ehrlichman learn that this was just a conference room, which was also used for ceremonial occasions and Bureau-authorized television shows. Hoover’s inner sanctum was beyond the desk, behind yet another door.

It was small, not more than twelve feet square, and the director, seated behind a simple wooden desk in a large leather chair, dominated it.

“When he stood, it became obvious that he and his desk were on a dais about six inches high,” the White House counsel observed, while sinking into the soft leather couch the director had indicated. Then Hoover “looked down at me and began to talk. An hour later he was still talking.”

Forewarned that all meetings with the FBI director were secretly filmed or videotaped, Ehrlichman tried to spot the camera lens but was unsuccessful.
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He did notice, near the ceiling, “a wavering purplish light” whose purpose he couldn’t fathom. (This was Hoover’s “bug light,” which he believed killed germs. There was a similar device in his private bathroom.)

On Ehrlichman’s return to the White House the president asked him how he’d gotten along with Hoover. “Great,” he replied; “he did all the talking.”