Read J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Online
Authors: Curt Gentry
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #United States, #Political Science, #Law Enforcement, #History, #Fiction, #Historical, #20th Century, #American Government
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (122 page)
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.
He hadn’t even gotten through the letter “C.”
*
As Sanford Ungar has noted, the FBI executive conference bore more than a passing resemblance to the Communist central committee: both had as their official function endorsing, unanimously, every decision and opinion of their director.
*
Sullivan recalled, “Of course, I used to feed her the same sort of disinformation the Bureau fed to double agents, which she faithfully carried back to Hoover and Tolson. Before I left the Bureau, I couldn’t resist telling her that I’d known about her activities all along. Flustered and embarrassed, she finally said, ‘I wish you men wouldn’t get us girls involved.’ ”
4
It is probable that still other techniques were used to spy on Sullivan. Among the still-classified folders in J. Edgar Hoover’s Official/Confidential file is OC no. 142. Headed “Specialized Mail Coverage” and categorized “Investigative,” it is five pages in length, covers the period July 2-7, 1971, and contains two memos “re highly sensitive information concerning two types of security coverage on -------.” Although the name has been excised in the OC summary, it is approximately fifteen to seventeen letters in length. “William Sullivan” would fit. As would the date, July 2 being the day after Mark Felt’s appointment.
*
Mardian and Sullivan’s recollections of this conversation differ. Mardian stated that Sullivan wanted him to give the materials to the president himself, and was upset when told he’d have to discuss the matter with his superior, Attorney General Mitchell. Sullivan, on the other hand, stated that he never intended for the materials to leave the Justice Department, that he wanted Mardian to take them for safekeeping. If he had wanted the materials to go to the White House, he observed logically, he would have contacted either Kissinger or Haig.
At issue, of course, is whether Sullivan wanted to curry favor with the president in hopes of being named Hoover’s successor.
Mardian also claimed that Sullivan had told him that “Mr. Hoover had used wiretap information to blackmail other presidents of the United States.”
7
Sullivan, however, claimed Mardian misquoted him: “I never used the word ‘presidents.’ ” What he’d said was that Hoover had used wiretap information to blackmail “others,” not “other presidents.” Sullivan added, “Hoover didn’t blackmail presidents, he manipulated them”—an interesting distinction.
8
†
Oddly enough, when Haldeman made his check—after Kissinger and Haig had done so—he found that two of the summaries were missing.
*
It’s possible that Nixon’s chosen stand-in for Hoover was none other than L. Patrick Gray III. Gray had been appointed an assistant attorney general in December 1970. Although assigned to the Civil Division, he’d shown an inordinate interest in the day-to-day operations of the FBI, and as early as the first week of January 1971 he and Hoover had already clashed.
This was a matter of some concern to the president, who asked John Ehrlichman to tell Gray to “butter up Hoover” and to tell him that “Pat Gray is the president’s friend.” Nixon also remarked, according to Ehrlichman’s notes on their conversation, “Hoover is a question. Have Haldeman include an approve/disapprove question on Hoover the next time he polls.”
10
Apparently the “approves” won, as Nixon waited until July before attempting to fire Hoover.
*
Many suspected, from his behavior patterns, that Hoover’s daily injections contained more than vitamins. Once he’d received his shot, promptly at 9:00
A.M.
, the FBI director’s mood would lift and he would show almost maniacal energy, until he crashed after lunch, often napping until it was time to go home. Aides learned the best time to approach him was between nine and twelve.
During the Kennedy years, both the president and his wife were patients of Dr. Max Jacobson, who not only visited the White House three or four times a week but often traveled with the Kennedys. Known as Dr. Feelgood to his celebrity patients—who included Winston Churchill, Cecil B. De Mille, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and dozens of other notables, as well as the then little-known Judith Campbell—Jacobson was just one of a number of doctors who, during this period, saw no danger in prescribing massive amounts of amphetamines, either in pill form or by injection.
Although the hypochondriacal Hoover secretly consulted “dozens” of doctors in New York and Washington, he apparently never contacted Jacobson (even though the FBI had a large file on the doctor). In researching his book
A Woman Named Jackie,
C. David Heymann examined the late Dr. Jacobson’s medical records, as well as an unpublished memoir he’d written, and Hoover’s name was not in either. But Hoover definitely knew about the president’s “treatments” and even had the exact formula, for in 1961 Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who distrusted Jacobson and was concerned about his brother’s health, gave five vials of Dr. Jacobson’s medication to the FBI Laboratory for analysis. The lab report revealed high concentrations of amphetamines and steroids, as well as multivitamins. So Hoover had the formula and would have had no trouble finding a doctor willing to prescribe it. Whether he did so will probably never be known, since both Hoover’s nurse, Valerie Stewart, the wife of a former agent, and his regular doctor, Robert Choisser, declined to be interviewed, citing medical confidentiality.
When Robert Kennedy confronted the president with the results of the FBI Lab analysis, JFK reportedly commented, “I don’t care if it’s horsepiss, it works.”
14
*
In searching Brennan’s office, Miller found six filing cabinets marked “Sullivan—Personal.” According to Mark Felt, they were “chock full of confidential FBI research material.”
23
In his book
The FBI Pyramid,
Felt gives the impression that had it not been for his quick action in changing the locks, Sullivan would probably have absconded with these materials also. Sullivan’s response to Felt’s charge was typical: “Mark Felt is a damn liar.”
24
*
Mardian had told Liddy about the conversation he’d overheard between FBI Director Hoover and Deputy Attorney General Kleindienst.
*
Although Nixon found Liddy’s memorandum “brilliantly argued,” Mitchell was less impressed. As he pointed out to the president, despite all the recent criticism of the FBI director, Hoover still had “very substantial support in the country and in Congress. To millions of Americans J. Edgar Hoover was still a folk hero.” An attempt to replace him—especially if it involved a public confrontation—could hurt him personally, Mitchell advised Nixon, “and could make the administration very unpopular.”
30
*
The president’s attempts to fire the FBI director became such common knowledge that the comedian David Frye satirized them on his album
Richard Nixon Superstar.
P
RESIDENT
N
IXON
: “I want to see you to discuss with you the matter of retirement.”J. E
DGAR
H
OOVER
: “Why, that’s ridiculous. Why, you’re still a young man.”P
RESIDENT
N
IXON
: “Not my retirement, Mr. Hoover, I’m talking frankly about your retirement.”J. E
DGAR
H
OOVER
: “Why, Mr. Roosevelt, I can’t believe you’re saying that.”
34
*
Following the seventy-two-year-old FBI director’s visit to the Scripps Institute in 1967, O’Leary was shown what was purportedly a copy of Hoover’s annual checkup report. He later reported, “It showed a blood-pressure reading a man of 50 would envy.”
39
*
Van Deman’s interests, like Hoover’s were eclectic. The general investigated, and traded information on, presidents (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman), senators (Paul Douglas, Wayne Morris), congressmen (Emanuel Celler, Adam Clayton Powell), movie stars (Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas, Helen Hayes), authors (John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck), labor unions, civil rights activists, even Nobel Prize winners (Linus Pauling). Like Hoover, Van Deman also supplied information to Congressman Richard Nixon, during his witch-hunting days; the House Un-American Activities Committee; the Tenney committee in California; and Senator Joseph McCarthy.
*
Indicative of Hoover’s close cooperation with Van Deman was the fact that the general was provided not only summary memorandums but also the raw investigative files on which they were based.
†
Asked to comment by Halloran, an FBI spokesman acknowledged that the Bureau had borrowed Van Deman’s reports, but said this was “proper” since “a civilian had an obligation to report information he thought might be useful to the Bureau.”
Explaining away the presence of those confidential FBI reports, however, required more evasive wordsmithing. The reports “could not have come directly from the Bureau,” the spokesman explained, since the FBI “does not give out information to unauthorized persons.”
41
The Last Days
J.
Edgar Hoover celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday, on January 1, 1972, aboard
Air Force One,
en route from Miami to Washington, D.C., as a special guest of the president, who also arranged to have a birthday cake aboard. Others on the flight, including Secretary of State (and former Attorney General) William Rogers, noted that the FBI director seemed to be in an especially good mood.
He had reason to be. Even Evans and Novak were reporting that “Hoover’s independent political power is so formidable” that the president wouldn’t consider “removing him in an election year.”
1
Of late, Richard Nixon had gone out of his way to make Hoover feel a part of the administration “team,” for example, inviting him to Key Biscayne for a small, intimate dinner during the director’s annual Florida sojourn.
On his return to the capital, Hoover reciprocated, by supplying the president with updates on the activities of his possible Democratic opponents, including their schedules of speeches and appearances, information that could have come only from inside their campaign organizations. And on January 13 Hoover memoed the field offices requesting, “Pertinent background information and data from your files on major nonincumbent candidates should be forwarded informally…as soon as they are nominated.”
2
(Hoover already maintained files on the incumbents.) Presumably some of this material—on mayoral, gubernatorial, senatorial, and congressional candidates—was also intended for the White House.
For his old friend the Brooklyn congressman John Rooney, head of the House Appropriations Subcommittee, who was facing a Democratic primary fight, Hoover went a step further. He ordered a special investigation into the
personal and political activities of his opponent, Allard Lowenstein, chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, finding, among other things, that Lowenstein was a closet homosexual.
There was more to the targeting of Lowenstein than helping a friend. If Rooney were to lose his seat, there would be a new appropriations chairman. Although committee assignments were decided by the Ways and Means Committee, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs would undoubtedly have a say in who was selected, and it was unlikely he’d approve anyone who’d automatically rubber-stamp the FBI’s budget as Rooney had. As an extra bonus, still another favor for the president, Lowenstein was on the White House enemies list, for his “dump Nixon” activities.
*
But for all of his efforts, the door to the Oval Office remained closed to the FBI director, per the president’s instructions to Haldeman and Ehrlichman.
To rally further support for his continued directorship, Hoover even forgave the first two Judases, Louis Nichols and Cartha “Deke” DeLoach. Both had close ties to the president, Nichols having managed Nixon’s campaign security in 1968, DeLoach being a vice-president of Pepsico, whose chairman, Donald Kendall, was a personal friend of the president, as well as a former law client of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. On January 7 Hoover wrote Nichols, “DeLoach was a capable and loyal administrator while in the Bureau and he has still maintained that loyalty since he left the Bureau. I know of several instances in which he upon his initiative came to the defense of the Bureau, one being in talking particularly with Congressman Boggs, the old drunk from Louisiana. As for Sullivan, your comments concerning him were certainly true. I only wish I had been able to spot his instability long before I did. When the crisis finally came, I moved swiftly and forced him into retirement…I personally think that I have been blessed with an exceptionally outstanding staff of executives through my administration of the Bureau with the exception of Sullivan. You certainly were tops when you were in the Bureau and I have never questioned your loyalty since you left it.”
3
Also forgiven was the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, before whose Washington, D.C., chapter Hoover made one of his last public addresses. Hoover’s animosity toward the society dated back to its founding, some thirty years earlier, when the former BI chief A. Bruce Bielaski was named its first president. (One of J. Edgar Hoover’s fabled ten commandments was “Thou shalt have no other Directors before me.”) Each year the society invited Hoover to address its annual convention,
and each year the FBI director politely, but firmly, declined. Hoover’s main complaint against the group, as voiced to his aides, was that its members were capitalizing on their onetime association with the Bureau. This was often true. The society, for example, maintained an “executive services” committee, which helped members find positions, mostly in security and related fields, by promoting them as the best-trained, most thoroughly investigated job applicants in the world.
*
A secondary complaint, that the society was indiscriminate in its admissions policy, accepting as members some who had left the FBI in less than the director’s good graces, was remedied when the society adopted a double blackball procedure. A list of the applicants for membership was sent to all those who were already members, as well as to contacts within the Bureau, to weed out any possible undesirables.
What Hoover failed to appreciate, until he came under fire during his later years, was that he had a devoted cheering squad of some ten thousand men who had a vested interest in perpetuating the FBI’s myths and defending the reputation of its director. Hoover responded to the standing ovation of the ex-agents with a spirited attack on “journalistic prostitutes,” targeting, in particular, Jack Anderson.
Among friends now, with no need to pull his punches, he was very much the old Hoover. The FBI had no intention of compromising its standards “to accommodate kooks, misfits, drunks and slobs,” he told them. “It is time we stopped coddling the hoodlums and the hippies who are causing so much serious trouble these days. Let us treat them like the vicious enemies of society that they really are, regardless of their age.”
He even managed, probably to the surprise of the former agents, to get in a touch of humor, observing, “As you’ll notice, I’m not standing on a box.”
4
To shore up public support, a new publicity campaign was launched, only this time restricted to “safe” publications, such as
Nation’s Business,
the official magazine of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which gave him its January 1972 cover and a fourteen-page pictorial interview headed, “J. Edgar Hoover Speaks Out About: Presidents he has known; Attorneys General he has known; Crooks he has known.”
Of the eight presidents he had served under while director, he named Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon as those he had been closest to.
Of the sixteen attorneys general, he cited as his favorites Harlan Fiske Stone, John Sargent, Herbert Brownell, William P. Rogers, and Frank Murphy. He added, “Of course, there’s John Mitchell, the present attorney general. He is a very able man, a very down-to-earth individual, very unlike those Herblock cartoons in the Washington
Post.
And I’m completely fascinated by his wife.
Martha is a wonderful person. She speaks her mind. She has integrity in thought. I like that.”
As for the crooks, he recalled Dillinger and Ma Barker and recounted, in some detail, his “capture” of Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, but when asked, “Mr. Hoover, is there one crook you remember most vividly?” he replied without hesitation, “Gaston B. Means. I think he was the worst crook I ever knew…He was a complete scoundrel. But he was the type some people liked—a sort of lovable scoundrel.”
Hoover then responded to those critics who suggested he should retire “and hand over the reigns of the FBI to a younger man” by saying, “I don’t consider my age a valid factor in assessing my ability to continue as director of the FBI—any more than it was when, at the youthful age of 29, I was appointed to this position. I was criticized then as ‘the Boy Scout.’ Now I’m called ‘that senile old man.’ ”
5
Among the illustrations were three current photos of the FBI director, taken by Yoichi Okamoto, LBJ’s favorite photographer. Although the photographs themselves were not retouched, it was obvious that their subject’s hair, still dark black with only flecks of gray, had been. In the cover photo, a striking doubleimage shot taken in his ceremonial office, Hoover looked old, but still as tough and determined as ever. An aged bulldog. Up closer, in the second photo, taken in his private office, his face looked puffy and blotched and there was no disguising the double chin. It was his eyes, and the circles around them, however, that were most telling. He looked weary to the point of exhaustion. In the last photo, also taken in his inner sanctum, Hoover, his back to the camera, was shown looking out over the city where he had been born and spent his entire life, nearly all of it in government service. Only in this photograph he appeared as a dark shadow, a haunting, almost spectral figure which seemed to dominate the landscape of the nation’s capital. The godfather of Pennsylvania Avenue.
It was to be Hoover’s last official portrait, as well as his last interview.
On January 10 William Sullivan went public for the first time, criticizing the “fossilized” bureaucracy of the FBI, in an interview with Hoover’s nemesis the
Los Angeles Times
reporter Jack Nelson.
The periodic revelations from the Media burglars finally stopped, however, in February, when
Win,
a magazine published by the War Resisters League, devoted a single issue to a nearly complete collection of the purloined files. With their publication, Hoover could breathe a sigh of relief, presuming that the revelations would no longer be considered newsworthy.
However, on March 20, the NBC correspondent Carl Stern wrote the attorney general requesting “any documents which (i) authorized the establishment and maintenance of Cointelpro-New Left, (ii) terminated such program, and (iii) ordered or authorized any change in the purpose, scope or nature of such program.”
6
When the attorney general denied the request, nine months later, Stern filed suit under the provisions of the 1966 Freedom of Information Act.
There remained two final battles—one against the CIA, the other in opposition to the White House—as well as a last appearance before the House Appropriation Subcommittee.
The previous April, CIA Director Richard Helms had asked Hoover to bug the Chilean embassy. When Hoover refused (as he had all such CIA and NSA requests since the scuttling of the Huston Plan), Helms took his request to Attorney General Mitchell, who overruled the FBI director and ordered him to install the bugs. Compounding Hoover’s displeasure, Helms insisted on using the CIA’s own miniaturized, state-of-the-art bugging equipment. After covering himself on paper—obtaining Mitchell’s signed authorization of a microphone surveillance “with trespass”—Hoover had the microphones installed, then bided his time until February 1972, a month before his annual appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, when he notified Helms that if the microphone surveillance was still in place, he would find it necessary to inform Congress that it was a CIA operation. Helms immediately backed down, and the bugs were deactivated.
*
J. Edgar Hoover had won his last battle against the CIA.
Congressman John Rooney of Brooklyn had chaired the House Subcommittee on Appropriations since 1949. Not once, in all the years since, had the committee refused the Federal Bureau of Investigation a single cent of its requested appropriation, although other agencies, including the Justice Department itself, found the committee chairman “extremely parsimonious.”
7
Hoover’s final appearance before the committee, on March 2, 1972, was no exception. Nor had the ritual changed. If anything, Rooney was even more fulsome in his praise of the FBI director—with good reason. Because of the FBI’s secret investigation of Lowenstein, Rooney seemed almost assured another term in office.
†
In addition to such standbys as the Communist party and the Socialist Workers party, Hoover had brought along a new list of menaces, including gay lib, women’s lib, the Black Liberation Army, and the Weathermen.
Mr. Rooney: “You don’t allow gay activists in the FBI, do you?”
Mr. Hoover: “We don’t allow any type of activists in the FBI, gay or otherwise.”
8
Hoover’s last battle was with the White House and involved an alleged forgery, attempted blackmail by the president, Jack Anderson, and dog shit.
On February 15 the White House had announced that John Mitchell was resigning to head the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) and that his successor would be Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Although the nominee passed the confirmation hearings, they were reopened after Anderson broke the story of the Dita Beard memorandum. Allegedly written by ITT’s chief Washington lobbyist, the memo recounted a 1971 conversation with John Mitchell in which the attorney general supposedly agreed to drop three antitrust suits against ITT, in return for a pledge of up to $400,000 in cash and services to the 1972 Republican National Convention. The memo also implicated both Kleindienst and the president in the deal.
A White House task force, headed by Charles Colson, was given the job of discrediting the memorandum. The best way to do this, Colson decided, would be to have the FBI Laboratory declare it a forgery.
Colson, however, was not known for his subtlety. His way of handling the matter would be to tell Hoover: the president wants this done;
do it!
So the presidential counsel John Dean was given the sensitive assignment of approaching the FBI director.
Dean was meeting Hoover for the first time. Although he later described him as “the immaculately dressed, perfumed director,” he was obviously caught off guard by Hoover’s formidable presence, his bruising handshake, and his abrupt, no-nonsense “Mr. Dean, what can I do for you?”