J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (98 page)

(A year later Belmont was also gone, about a year short of his thirty-year retirement date. His offense was that he had told the director the truth more than once too often. DeLoach, fair-haired boy of the president of the United States, replaced him in the number three spot.)

Katzenbach was one of the few individuals who eventually made the transition from “Kennedy man” to trusted Johnson appointee. That achievement did not come soon enough to give him leverage over Hoover, however.

For some months the president let his “acting” AG dangle in limbo, the uncertain status of his appointment making it impossible to initiate major policy changes within Justice. When he was confirmed in February, LBJ hauled him and his deputy into the Oval Office and instructed them to “get along with” Hoover and his Bureau. So DeLoach informed the director in a memorandum, along with the president’s promise “that Attorney General Katzenbach would not be around very long and that he hoped we could put up with him for the time being.”
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This would not be easy. On March 30 Katzenbach directed that Hoover’s “bugs” be initiated only with the same authorization procedures as wiretaps. FBI claims based upon the Brownell memo were “extremely tenuous,”
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the attorney general felt. On the same date, he ordered that wiretaps be reevaluated every six months and continued only with a new authorization by the attorney general, not at the Bureau’s discretion. Hoover could look back over a wealth of material in his files that would never have come to light under such restrictions.

These moves threatened a delicate balance that Katzenbach understood very well: “In effect, [Hoover] was uniquely successful in having it both ways: he was protected from public criticism by having a theoretical superior who took responsibility for his work, and was protected from his superior by his public reputation.”
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Affable as he was bright, the attorney general tried to encourage personal meetings with Hoover, to whom he had never spoken by telephone until November 22, 1963. He met with an icy chill. Hoover increasingly avoided contact with Justice officials, and with his own personnel as well.

He was communicating with this pesky new boss in other ways. Katzenbach
knew that the FBI was leaking potentially embarrassing stories about him to the press. When he pursued those leaks, Hoover’s men “invariably” denied any involvement. During the 1975 Church committee hearings the astounded Katzenbach was shown three documents bearing his initials. Avoiding the term “forgery,” he testified that he did not remember reading the documents and certainly would have. Each reported on an unauthorized bug on Martin Luther King, Jr. The FBI Laboratory declared Katzenbach had indeed initialed the memorandums.

On one occasion the attorney general made specifically clear that a bug in the bedroom of a Mafia leader was not in line with department policy, and he took care to reaffirm this position later.

Eventually there was a blowup. For weeks Hoover and Katzenbach warred over the exact language to be used in a Justice Department admission in a Supreme Court case that a defendant had been bugged. Lying to the former attorney general Rogers, playing upon LBJ’s contempt for Robert Kennedy, pressuring Senator Russell Long, and attempting to intimidate Deputy AG Ramsey Clark, the Bureau wanted nothing written down that might suggest that Hoover had exceeded his authority. Hanging over Justice was the threat to reveal that Kennedy had known about the surveillances and others, a charge that could not (as Katzenbach suspected) be proved.

Over Hoover’s furious objections, the solicitor general’s response to the Supreme Court declared, “There is…no specific statute or executive order expressly authorizing the installation of a listening device such as that involved in this case.” That statement and others were unforgivable. “My correspondence with Mr. Hoover…unavoidably became a bitter one,” Katzenbach recalled, “and it persuaded me that I could no longer effectively serve as Attorney General because of Mr. Hoover’s obvious resentment toward me.”
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Katzenbach, having fallen afoul of what he called “the historical accident of J. Edgar Hoover,”
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resigned from the Cabinet. Taking a cut in pay, he moved in September to the State Department, where he would be under secretary to Dean Rusk. He had chosen to lend his talents to the growing crisis in Vietnam.

His deputy, Tom Clark’s son Ramsey, succeeded him. Clark became much stronger in the job than his predecessor, acting with such firmness that Hoover, characteristically, would call him a “jellyfish.”

Despite the Warren Commission’s criticism of the FBI, the director had a vested interest in defending its conclusion that Oswald had acted alone. By the fall of 1966 dozens of books and articles had challenged the commission’s findings. Hoping to find derogatory information that could be used to discredit these efforts, Hoover, at the president’s request, investigated the authors of seven books critical of the Warren Report, turning up the information that one writer had been discharged from the military for mental problems while several others had belonged to leftist organizations. No proof of foreign involvement was found, but the file on one critic contained information of a highly personal nature. It consisted of a Queens County, New York, police record of
the subject’s arrest for committing an unnatural act (the charge was later dropped); the depositions of two prostitutes, attesting to the nature of said act; and photographs of the subject, shown nude, his arms seemingly bound behind his back, his face contorted in a painful grimace, while one of the prostitutes was sticking what appeared to be a pin or needle into his erect penis.

Blind memorandums containing the fruits of these investigations (the photographs were among the eleven enclosures), were sent to President Johnson, via his aide Marvin Watson, on November 8, 1966,
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and were shown to several of the Warren Commission members, as well as favored press contacts, who promptly nicknamed the photograph’s subject “Pinhead.”

Among those shown the materials was the commission member Hale Boggs. A longtime Hoover supporter, the Louisiana congressman was shocked to discover the extremes to which both the president and the FBI director would go in order to destroy their critics.

Boggs had no illusions about LBJ, but he was shaken by Hoover’s willing participation. As he remarked to his son, Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., “If they have all this on some little guy who wrote a book, what about me?”
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In time he’d find out.

Boggs had glimpsed what others dealt with frequently.

When the civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo was shot dead with an FBI informant on the scene—Gary Thomas Rowe was riding in the same vehicle as the killers—Hoover sought to discredit the victim by giving the story a salacious twist. He told LBJ, “She was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car…It had the appearance of a necking party.”

In this phone call to Johnson, he added that “the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope.” When the president called back a few minutes later, his FBI director reported, “On the woman’s body we found numerous needle marks indicating she had been taking dope, although we can’t say definitely, because she is dead.” Hoover wanted to believe this lie. That is probably why his agents in Mississippi came up with it.

Johnson wanted to telephone condolences to the widower. In the first call, referring to “the husband of the woman in Detroit who had died,” as his memo phrased it, Hoover suggested that LBJ have an aide call first, “and, if the man behaves himself, the President could consider talking to him later.”

His agents were feverishly looking for derogatory information about the murder victim, her husband, and her coworkers in the movement. With equal address, the FBI was leaking slander to the press and to their KKK informants. A wiretap produced this urgent teletype: “Martin Luther King has
telephonically advised the family he will arrive in Detroit on Sunday, March 28.” To express his sympathies, the civil rights leader had decided to attend Mrs. Liuzzo’s funeral services. Alerted, the FBI was there in force. Meanwhile, file checks were being set in motion for anyone who wrote Hoover about the case. Under that regimen junior high school students who had written to applaud the FBI’s handling of the investigation earned their first name check.

Dr. King, apparently operating under the impression that Mrs. Liuzzo was the victim in the case, wired Hoover his congratulations when the FBI apprehended the murder suspects. The Bureau decided not even to acknowledge, much less publicize, this gesture, “because a reply would only help build up this character.”
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In these years occasions were finally beginning to inform against J. Edgar Hoover.

Senator Edward Long of Missouri had become exercised about the government’s “armory of electronic snooping devices.”
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His Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure began looking into the surveillance techniques of all government agencies in 1965, beginning with the IRS and its mail coverage. Swiftly the FBI director saw to his fortifications.

He persuaded LBJ to order Katzenbach, who had no idea just how much Hoover was hiding, to coordinate the responses for all intelligence agencies. Long’s staff was sniffing too close to the FBI’s unauthorized mail intercept programs. The attorney general intended to tell the senator that “extreme national security matters” were jeopardized by his inquiry, a theme that Vice-President Hubert Humphrey would also employ with Long.

Unknown to Katzenbach, DeLoach went to Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to encourage additional pressure on the blindly probing subcommittee chairman. Soon it was clear to the attorney general that Long was on board; someone had “waked him up.”
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But Hoover decided that Long “cannot be trusted,”
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for his staff had begun to ask questions about wiretaps and microphones, and the innocent Katzenbach was cheerfully agreeing to prepare a memorandum on the subject.

Even so, the senator was trying to cooperate, but the press was getting into the act.
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There were too many juicy rumors about the FBI’s electronic surveillance practices. Long asked DeLoach for advice in dealing with the mounting pressure on him and his subcommittee.

What the press didn’t know was that Long himself had been picked up in the Bureau’s coverage of organized crime, not once but many times. He was on the payroll. A beneficiary of campaign support from the mob-dominated Teamsters Union, he had publicly, and warmly, praised its notorious president, Jimmy Hoffa, while privately, over a two-year period, receiving a total of
$48,000 from the Teamsters official’s personal lawyer. Hoover knew all this, and he let Long know he knew it.
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Long wanted the FBI director to give the committee transcripts of certain electronic surveillances that had come to light. To Long’s surprise, the FBI director was enthusiastically cooperative, but he had an even better idea: he would make available to the public transcripts of
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the Bureau’s electronic coverage, including those on which Long himself appeared. The Missouri senator declined the offer.
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When DeLoach helpfully suggested that the subcommittee chairman issue a statement that he was satisfied “that the FBI had never participated in uncontrolled usage of wiretaps or microphones and that FBI usage of such devices had been completely justified in all instances,” Long happily agreed. But he wanted to make certain that he was getting it right. Couldn’t the FBI compose the release for him, “on a strictly confidential basis”?
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DeLoach could and did.

Unfortunately for the FBI, whatever stress Long suffered had not destroyed his common sense. He saw that a release claiming, per the Bureau draft, that “exhaustive research into the activities, procedures, and techniques of this agency” had found electronic surveillance to be “under strict Justice Department control at all times” would send his staff up the wall and then to the eagerly waiting press. Led by the counsel Bernard Fensterwald, a tireless and tenacious interrogator, the subcommittee aides would not have supported the FBI-dictated conclusion: “Investigation made by my staff reflected no independent or unauthorized installation of electronic devices by individual FBI Agents or by FBI offices in the field.”
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This ploy having failed, DeLoach met with Long and Fensterwald to ask for a commitment that the subcommittee would do nothing to embarrass the Bureau. The counsel had a reasonable proposal. Couldn’t an FBI official, perhaps even DeLoach himself, appear at the hearing and simply state that the agency “used wiretaps only in cases involving national security and kidnapping and extortion, where human life is involved, and used microphones only in those cases involving heinous crimes and Cosa Nostra matters”?
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That would not be possible. Fensterwald must have been dumbfounded, for his suggested statement was pretty much a paraphrase of the statement the FBI had prepared for Long to deliver. No, DeLoach explained, “to put an FBI witness on the stand would be an attempt to open a Pandora’s box, in so far as our enemies in the press [are] concerned.” When Fensterwald proposed calling a particular former FBI agent as a witness to the committee, DeLoach denounced his erstwhile colleague as “a first-class SOB, a liar, and a man who had volunteered as a witness only to get a public forum.”
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DeLoach reported to Hoover that the Long subcommittee had been “neutralized”
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but would bear watching. Indeed, the FBI director ordered a file check on all members of the subcommittee and their counsel. He also composed a new statement to be used if he were compelled to testify. In it he claimed that “official records…make it indelibly clear that the FBI used microphones, as well as wiretaps, during Robert Kennedy’s administration of
the Justice Department with Mr. Kennedy’s knowledge and approval.”
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