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
Hoover thought the telegram was full of lies. Within a day or two, the package of tapes was mailed to Mrs. King. On November 24 the director was fulminating again, departing from a prepared speech to denounce “moral degenerates” in “pressure groups”—a slap at the civil rights movement.
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According to some reports, the president was becoming concerned and was actively seeking a replacement for his unpredictable FBI chief. In a White House meeting with civil rights leaders, he listened to criticism of the FBI in silence. At a press conference late in November his praise for Hoover’s efforts to protect civil rights workers was lukewarm: “He has been diligent and rather effective.”
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Meanwhile, on November 27, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins met with DeLoach, apparently because of rumors about the King tapes. “I told him…that if King wanted war we certainly would give it to him,” DeLoach wrote in a memo to John Mohr. Wilkins remembered a different kind of meeting, in which he warned gravely that revelations about King would split black and white America. To his colleague, however, DeLoach boasted that Wilkins had promised to “tell King that he can’t win in a battle with the FBI and that the best thing for him to do is retire from public life.”
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There were other skirmishes. President Johnson was warned that his liaison, DeLoach, was offering the King tapes to journalists. His source was Ben Bradlee. Since LBJ had played the tapes himself, to selected White House guests, he could hardly criticize DeLoach. Instead, to show whose side he was on, he cautioned DeLoach, through Moyers, that Bradlee, who he said “lacked integrity,”
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was spreading tales.
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Still, he had to be worried about what Hoover might do or say next.
Sometime in late November, according to Sullivan, Johnson “ordered Hoover to meet with King and patch things up.”
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The FBI director had no choice but to obey, and on December 1 the pair held a “summit” meeting in the director’s office.
Although there have been many different versions of the encounter,
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most
agree that the director and the reverend were polite, even complimentary, to each other. (“This was not the same man that called Martin a notorious liar,” King’s aide Andrew Young would recall.)
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Most likely, the tapes and other derogatory materials were not discussed, not even by indirection. “Quite amicable,”
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King would say, for public consumption. It was a comment made on the fly, because the director’s long-windedness had almost caused the reverend to miss a plane.
Hoover was pleased with himself, according to Sullivan, thinking that “he had captivated King, really charmed him,” with his fifty-five-minute monologue about the accomplishments of the FBI.
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All was well, perhaps, until a wiretap picked up King’s review. “The old man talks too much.” According to Sullivan, “there was no hope for [King] after that.”
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In short order, three very significant dates occurred in the director’s life.
On December 10 Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. Exhausted, depressed by the rumors that the FBI still intended to publicize the information on the tapes, he said the following day, in his acceptance speech, “Those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to nagging feelings that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden.”
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Hoover was much more interested in an incident involving some of King’s supporters. One night, as the partying got wildly out of hand, two “stark naked” civil rights workers ran down the halls of their hotel after some prostitutes who had just rolled them. The incident was hushed up, thanks to the intervention of Bayard Rustin,
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but the FBI heard about it. And quickly spread the rumor that King himself was involved. He was not. But the director of the FBI, who held the laureate “in complete contempt,” could claim that here was yet more evidence that “he was the last one in the world who should ever have received [the Nobel Prize].”
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Then there was Christmas, thirty-four days after the tape and letter were mailed to the SCLC office, the date by which King was to have taken the “one way out.” He had not yet received the FBI’s message, however. It was early January before Mrs. King opened the thin box and called her husband, giving the Bureau a great deal of pleasure with the tone and tenor of her reactions.
King asked some of his closest advisers to read the letter and listen to the tape. As Hoover’s men had feared, they immediately assumed that it was all the work of the FBI. So depressed that he could not sleep, King was overhead on a tap saying, “They are out to break me.”
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But that, in a sense, only further vindicated the events of a third red-letter day—January 1, 1965. Vacationing in Miami, dining with Tolson as his enemy fell ever deeper into despair, Hoover became three score and ten. Lesser mortals would have celebrated the day with a retirement party, but not the director. He and his cronies now served at the pleasure of Lyndon Johnson, who had learned how much he needed them earlier in the year.
Hoover could recall how he had given his commander in chief unusual help during the summer and fall. He could smile as the wiretaps revealed King’s spiraling descent into deeper depression, exacerbated by his fear and feeling of guilt that somehow God was punishing him for not being worthy of his historic mission. He might laugh at the major news stories that had predicted the selection of a new FBI chief only weeks before. But it had been a close call.
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Hoover himself had lobbied through a law making the slaying of an FBI agent a federal offense, in 1934, but no one had thought to enact an applicable law for the president.
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Eastern Standard Time is used throughout this section. Dallas was on Central Standard Time, which was an hour earlier.
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Nixon recalled, “Months later Hoover told me that Oswald’s wife had disclosed that Oswald had been planning to kill me when I visited Dallas and that only with great difficulty had she managed to keep him in the house to prevent him from doing so.”
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Hosty’s recollection of the note’s contents was less explicit than Mrs. Fenner’s. He recalled, “The first part of it stated I had been interviewing his wife without his permission and I should not do this; he was upset about this. And the second part at the end he said that if I did not stop talking to his wife, he would take action against the FBI.”
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Knowledge of the Oswald note was closely held. Probably less than half a dozen people at FBIHQ knew about it, including Hoover, Tolson, and, possibly, John Mohr, although Mohr later denied such knowledge. Apparently Alan Belmont, who headed the FBI’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, was never told of it. At least he seemed genuinely shocked when the author questioned him about it. “I didn’t know anything about the letter,” Belmont said, “was never told of it.” Shanklin told William Sullivan—who was in charge of the Bureau’s probe of Oswald’s background and associations and who was on the phone with Shanklin several times a day—only that he had an “internal personnel problem,” that one of his agents had received “a threatening letter from Oswald.” Sullivan: “I raised a question as to details but Mr. Shanklin seemed disinclined to discuss it other than to say he was handling it as a personnel problem with J. P. Mohr.” Shanklin made no mention of the letter’s having been destroyed.
Shanklin was one of Mohr’s protégés; before being assigned to Dallas, he’d served four years in one of the Bureau’s cushiest postings, SAC of Honolulu. Those who knew Shanklin well—he died in 1988—state that he was a man who followed orders and that he would never have ordered the destruction of the note without prior instructions from FBIHQ. He was also loyal: in 1975 he denied, under oath, any knowledge of the Oswald note.
“Hoover ordered the destruction of the note,” William Sullivan told the author; “I can’t prove this, but I have no doubts about it.” Sullivan also stated, in a deposition concerning the Hosty note, “During the course of this long difficult investigation I did hear that some document had been destroyed relating to Oswald and that some others were missing, the nature of which, if told, I do not recall. I cannot remember who gave me this information or whether it was from one or more sources.”
It is possible that Sullivan might have refreshed his recollections of the missing documents when he testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977, but we’ll never know, since Sullivan was shot and killed a few days before his scheduled appearance.
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Hosty, however, didn’t destroy this letter, which he felt was material to the case (it concerned Oswald’s desire to return to Russia and his recent visits to the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City), but worked it into the body of one of his reports.
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Johnson named a bipartisan commission of seven members. There was one Democrat and one Republican from the Senate—Richard B. Russell, Democrat of Georgia, and John Sherman Cooper, Republican of Kentucky; one each from the House—Hale Boggs, Democrat of Louisiana, and Gerald Ford, Republican of Michigan; the former CIA director Allen W. Dulles; John J. McCloy, a New York investment banker with a long history of government service; and, as chairman, Earl S. Warren, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Warren first declined the appointment, but LBJ, using his legendary powers of persuasion, argued that if rumors of a foreign conspiracy were not quelled, they could conceivably lead the country into a nuclear war which could cost forty million lives, and Warren reluctantly accepted.
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Hosty’s remark to the Dallas police lieutenant Revill (“We knew he was capable of assassinating the president, but we didn’t dream he would do it”), which Revill reported to Chief Curry, eventually reached Hoover and the press. Enraged, the FBI director instructed his aides to “tell Dallas to tell Hosty to keep his big mouth shut. He has already done irreparable harm.”
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In his Warren Commission testimony, Hosty denied having made the remark. Lieutenant Revill testified otherwise.
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Obtaining his personnel file some years later, Hosty discovered that his answers to Inspector’s Gale’s questions had been falsified.
Although three SACs were censured, Gordon Shanklin wasn’t one of them. The Inspection Division was under the overall supervision of John Mohr.
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Both District Attorney Henry Wade and Assistant District Attorney William Alexander were ex-FBI agents. When someone leaked the contents of Oswald’s diary to the
Dallas Morning News,
two FBI agents asked Alexander if he was the source of the leak. Alexander heatedly responded that Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the Warren Commission could “Kiss my a..” In reporting this shocking comment to the director—complete with double dots—the special agents, Robert M. Barrett and Ivan D. Lee, at least got their priorities straight: “Alexander was strongly admonished by interviewing agents concerning his making such remarks about Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI and President Johnson.”
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Even the investigation of the Russian connection failed to satisfy Sullivan, who told the author in 1976 that there were three things, three gaps in the investigation, that still bothered him: “1. We don’t know what happened while Oswald was in Russia; 2. Why was Marina permitted to marry Oswald and why were they allowed to leave Russia when others were not permitted to do the same? And 3. We know next to nothing about Oswald and the Cubans.” Sullivan found “thoughtprovocative” the fact that Marina was obviously much more intelligent than her husband.
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Seth Kantor’s book
Who Was Jack Ruby?
(1978) remains the best account of Ruby’s background and associations, although it needs to be updated with more recent findings, such as those of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and reissued. For two excellent books on the probable involvement of organized crime in the assassination, see David E. Scheim,
Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy
(1988), and John H. Davis,
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(1989).
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Perhaps out of habit, the FBI did investigate one aspect of Ruby’s activities: his sex life. Carefully choosing their language so as not to offend the prudish director—or Miss Gandy, who opened and read all such materials—the agents reported that Ruby’s sexual habits were “peculiar” and “other than normal.” Obviously repulsed by such a degenerate act, the agents noted that Ruby liked to engage in oral sex with women “with him being the active, rather than the passive, participant.”
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“No Oswald-Ruby Link, FBI Believes. Each Acted Strictly on His Own during Violent Dallas Days, Evidence Indicates,” ran the
Chicago Tribune
headline of December 4, 1963.
Hoover followed a standard practice for leaks. He would first have the material disseminated to three or four other departments or agencies and then leak it, blaming one or more of its recipients. In this case, he decided in advance that the guilty party would be Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, who hadn’t pushed hard enough, he felt, to release the report.
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It wasn’t destroyed but it was suppressed, for eleven years. Even the fact that there was such a meeting on that date was excised from the Warren Commission indexes.
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Although Hoover never deviated publicly from his insistence that Oswald was the lone assassin, the FBI director privately suspected, at least for a time, that the CIA itself was implicated. So did Robert Kennedy. In what must have been an incredibly dramatic confrontation, within hours after the assassination Kennedy asked John McCone, director of the CIA, “Did you kill my brother?” Kennedy later related the incident to Walter Sheridan as follows: “You know at the time I asked McCone…if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.”
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“Gossip is certainly an instrument of power,” commented Lance Morrow in an October 26, 1981,
Time
essay. “Lyndon Johnson understood the magic leverage to be gained from intimate personal details, artfully dispensed. He made it a point to know the predilections of friends, the predicaments of enemies.”
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The report, Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox have inferred, concerned Johnson’s visits to the Carousel Motel, in North Ocean City, Maryland. One of LBJ’s more notorious associates, Bobby Baker, was known to provide call girls to important politicians and businessmen at this address. After Johnson became president, the FBI stopped sending the Justice Department reports on the Bobby Baker case.
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John Henry Faulk was one of the more fortunate blacklistees. Not because he won a $3.5 million judgment against Aware, Inc. (later reduced to $725,000), but because he managed to survive the blacklisting era. Many others didn’t. A humorist whom some compared to Will Rogers, he told his story in
Fear on Trial
(1964).
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FBI scribes were less restrained than the president in praise of their boss. One biographical booklet handed out to the taxpayers called him “fearless fighter and implacable foe of the godless tyranny of cancerous communism…inspirational leader, champion of the people, outstanding American.” From another work,
J. Edgar Hoover’s 40 Years as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
the Bureau’s perspective on national history can be inferred: “On April 12, 1945, J. Edgar Hoover lost a great supporter and admirer when Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Georgia.”
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The booklet did not make the splash the FBI director might have anticipated.
The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe,
by the right-wing author Frank Capell, was an attack upon Robert Kennedy as an agent of international communism. In Capell’s interpretation, the attorney general’s Communist friends agreed to kill the actress in order to protect him from revelations about the alleged love affair. Presumably, the scandal would have retarded the progress of the overthrow of the U.S. government.
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Johnson went so far as to order up a presidential plane to convey Hoover to the much publicized opening ceremony. Pressured to get things photo ready within five days, the new SAC dummied up a fake office with flimsy walls and borrowed furniture on the top floor of a vacant, unfinished new bank building. Hoover made no comment about the makeshift surroundings, which were unaccountably described by some reporters as “plush.” Jeremiah O’Leary of the
Washington Star
knew better. He’d leaned on one of the temporary walls and almost brought the whole stage set crashing down.
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During the same period, by contrast, the average number of “actions” initiated against the moribund Communist party each year was one hundred.
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Such letters generally reveal the influence of Sullivan’s notions of human frailty, if not the work of his own hand. The director might think sex was always the lever, but a married man knew that lies about money could be more “disruptive.” In this note, the “God-fearing Klanswoman” took care to report, “They [her “menfolk.”] never believed the “stories that he stole money from the klans in [deleted] or that he is now making over $25,000 a year. They never believed the stories that your house in [deleted] has a new refrigerator, washer, dryer and yet one year ago, was threadbare. They refuse to believe that your husband now owns three cars and a truck, including the new white car. But I believe all these things and I can forgive them for a man wants to do for his family in the best way he can.” This invidious touch suggests that the recipient had never seen the house, appliances, or fleet of vehicles and might well expect to find the “new white car” somewhere in the vicinity of “Ruby.”
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His “neutralization” was complete. He committed suicide.
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More than once, FBI agents found King MISURs unsatisfactory because his TV would usually be “blasting away.” Perhaps this was the least precaution a man could take after a personal warning from the president of the United States that he was being watched all the time.
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“Pure unadulterated arrogance,” Representative Louis Stokes would call Sullivan’s plan to remove “a leader for a whole race of people, destroying that man,”
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and try to choose a replacement. Yet Sullivan wrote that he “had an opportunity to explore this from a philosophical and sociological standpoint” with a former Oxford professor, who had named Pierce. The candidate, Sullivan agreed, “does have all the qualifications of the kind of a Negro I have in mind to advance to positions of national leadership.”
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Sullivan’s hopes for Pierce, who apparently knew nothing about them, would be dashed by political realities. Appointed secretary of housing and urban development in Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, Pierce earned for himself with his elusiveness the nickname Silent Sam. He even eluded the direct notice of his president. At a reception for the nation’s mayors, Reagan smiled warmly at his Cabinet officer, shook his hand firmly, and said, “Welcome, Mr. Mayor.” His stewardship was seriously questioned when investigators discovered that political influence had often determined how housing grants and subsidies were awarded during the two Reagan administrations.