Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Additionally, as alluded to earlier, when HSCA staff investigator Gaeton Fonzi interviewed Aleman on March 12, 1977, a year and a half before his HSCA testimony on September 27, 1978, he wrote, “[Aleman] also said that Trafficante brought up Jimmy Hoffa’s name and said that Hoffa would never forgive the Kennedys for what they did to him. Aleman said he got the impression that Trafficante was hinting that Hoffa was going to make the hit, not him, and that Kennedy would never make it to the election because of Hoffa. This, says Aleman, was the one aspect of the conversation with Trafficante that [Washington Post reporter George] Crile did not properly put into perspective in his piece; otherwise, the piece was very accurate.”67*

  Finally, as indicated earlier, the HSCA reviewed all the reports that Davis and Scranton prepared on their contacts with Aleman and found no mention of the Trafficante threat. Therefore, if Hoover had received information in a report from Davis and Scranton about the threat, this necessarily means he had to order the destruction of these reports and the preparation of new ones, thus automatically bringing into the cover-up not only the earlier mentioned chain of command, but Davis and Scranton as well. The extremely high improbability of all of this happening is one of the reasons why I believe that if Aleman told Davis and Scranton about the Trafficante threat, they did not put it in their report or reports.

  But if Aleman told FBI agents Davis and Scranton what Trafficante allegedly told him, and if they put this in their report, and if the report reached Hoover, and if Hoover, believing the mob would in fact kill Kennedy, did not furnish this information to the Secret Service or do anything else about it because he was hoping the mob would kill Kennedy, thereby avoiding his impending compulsory retirement, Hoover, even though the mob did not, in fact, end up killing Kennedy, would, as indicated, be an incredible villain. I am very, very confident that this scenario did not happen. However, based on the existing record, there is no way that one can dismiss the notion completely out of hand. I mean, to retain power, men have done much worse things than stand by and let someone else commit a murder that redounds to their benefit.

  One footnote to the Trafficante-Aleman issue: Contrary to Mark North’s conclusion that if the assumed facts set forth in his scenario were true, they would make Hoover guilty of treason,68 they would not. Treason is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”69 Neither clause would apply to Hoover’s alleged conduct, the courts defining “enemy” as a “foreign power,” and ruling that aid to the foreign country has to take place while the United States is “in a state of open hostility” with the other country (i.e., while we’re at war).70

  The main contention by the fringe element of the conspiracy community is that Hoover actually conspired to have Kennedy murdered (unlike Mark North’s allegation of passivity on Hoover’s part). But they present not the tiniest sliver of evidence to support their wild allegation. However, because Hoover is such a central figure in the assassination saga, a very brief profile of who J. Edgar Hoover was, and how he ran his empire, is called for.

  J. Edgar Hoover, since his appointment as FBI director in 1924, at once formed and effectively ran perhaps the finest, most incorruptible law enforcement agency in the world, while being personally beset by obsessions, paranoia, and insecurities that would run off the edge of the paper of any psychiatric report analyzing him. Just one illustrative example: In 1959 in California, Hoover’s chauffeur-driven car was struck from behind while in the process of making a left turn, and he was shaken up. Thereafter, on instructions from Hoover, his drivers had to take him to his destination without making a left turn.71

  Hoover, it seemed, believed he was incapable of error as the FBI’s director, something akin to the doctrine of papal infallibility in the Catholic Church. As former FBI agent Joseph L. Schlott wrote, “In the FBI under Mr. Hoover, you had to work on the premise that the Director was infallible.” Indeed, Hoover himself would only admit to having been conned twice in his life (not in FBI business, naturally), “once by a door to door salesman who sold him black sawdust for his flower bed as pure manure, and once by the Birdman of Alcatraz, who sold him a sparrow dyed yellow as a canary.”72*

  Above all, Hoover was a megalomaniac—he had to be the only person in the FBI who received the acclamation of the public. When the most famous G-man ever (other than Hoover), Melvin Purvis, who most believed to be the key agent in the tracking down and killing of John Dillinger (the bureau’s “Public Enemy Number One”) in the alley behind the Biograph Theater in Chicago in 1934, received national attention and fame, Hoover could not tolerate it. Purvis, who at one time was a big favorite of Hoover’s, and was the recipient of several personal letters from him, suddenly became persona non grata at the bureau. Hoover had told Purvis in one letter, “Well, son, keep a stiff upper lip and get Dillinger for me and the world is yours.” But after Purvis became widely known as “the man who got Dillinger,” he was demoted to a desk job in the Chicago office and forced to resign the following year.† In Hoover’s 1938 book, Persons in Hiding, he devotes much space to Dillinger (more than the likes of notorious outlaws like Ma Barker, Baby Face Nelson, and Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, all FBI prey),‡ the most famous “person in hiding” the FBI has ever brought to ground, and the one about whose celebrated capture the bureau has always taken the greatest pride. Yet remarkably, in his telling of the Dillinger capture, Hoover does not even mention Melvin Purvis. In fact, the name Melvin Purvis doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, even though Purvis was also very instrumental in bringing to an end the career in crime of Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd.73

  It is common in nonfiction for authors to ignore the accomplishments of competitors or people they don’t like (for whatever reason). When they do this, their books, in which they have an obligation to rise above their pettiness for the historical record, lose credibility. Because of Hoover’s pettiness, I read his book, not just the part on Dillinger, with a jaundiced eye.

  Hoover not only easily controlled, in a dictatorial fashion, his entire agency, but also induced enormous fear in (and hence, largely controlled) every major public figure—including President John F. Kennedy—who ever strayed in his personal life. His gunpowder? The very well-known secret dossiers (“Hoover’s files” they were known as) he kept in two file cabinets behind the desk of his secretary, Helen Gandy, on wayward congressmen, diplomats, celebrities, and so on.74 William Sullivan, a former assistant director of the FBI under Hoover, said that the dossiers or files did not necessarily include references to “sex alone, but financial irregularities or political chicanery. He gathered all the dirt that was present on people in high-ranking positions…Knowledge is powerful, and he had knowledge of the most damaging kind, knowledge of people’s misbehavior.”75 Emanuel Celler, for years chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, liked and respected Hoover, but said Hoover “had a dossier on every member of Congress and every member of the Senate.” Though he could not speak for the Senate, he said, “The members of the House were aware of this” and many “had a lot of skeletons in their closet…That’s what made him so feared.” Celler said, “There’s no question in my mind” that Hoover tapped the telephones of congressmen.76 Author Victor S. Navasky wrote that “the Director, with the FBI files as his private library, [was the] de facto caretaker to the nation’s reputations.”77

  The brimming contents of these files were gathered by Hoover’s agents through the wiretapping of telephones (which was unlawful but routinely authorized for years by the U.S. attorney general in national security cases) or “bugging” (installing, usually by criminal trespass, hidden microphones in people’s homes, apartments, etc., to pick up nontelephonic verbal communications), called “black bag jobs” in the FBI. Even where national security wasn’t involved, as was frequently the case, it was widely reported that Hoover regularly ordered telephone taps (wiretaps) and buggin
g without the approval of the attorney general,78 who had no legal authority to allow them anyway.

  Hoover’s abuse of the national security exception was notorious, perhaps the most prominent example being his secret Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a program that took Hoover’s FBI far beyond its sole mandate to enforce federal law. Deciding he knew what was best for America, its values, and its culture, Hoover’s COINTELPRO was a series of covert missions starting in 1956 (to 1971) to identify, penetrate, and neutralize what Hoover decided were subversive elements in the United States, including, Hoover believed, civil rights groups, black liberation and antiwar groups, and the political Left, mostly American Communists. However, the first group COINTELPRO operated against, ironically, was a group on the Far Right, the Ku Klux Klan. A favorite tool of COINTELPRO was to fabricate and spread pernicious rumors and write anonymous letters with false accusations about individual members of these groups. A report from the House Select Committee on Intelligence (“Pike Committee Report”) in 1976 said that in the process, “careers were ruined, friendships severed, reputations sullied, businesses bankrupted and, in some cases, lives endangered.”79 A typical example of COINTELPRO: The bureau learned, through electronic surveillance, of a civil rights leader’s plan in 1964 to attend a reception at the Soviet mission to the United Nations honoring a Soviet author. The FBI arranged to have news photographers at the scene to photograph him entering the Soviet mission.80

  One of the very worst examples of COINTELPRO abuse occurred in the late 1960s and involved prominent Hollywood actress Jean Seberg, a known supporter and financial contributor to the Black Panthers, a militant black nationalist group. When she became pregnant in 1970, the FBI became aware of it through the wiretap of a telephone conversation from Black Panther headquarters to Seberg, and the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office sent an Airtel to Hoover on April 27, 1970, stating that “permission is requested to publicize the pregnancy of Jean Seberg, well-known movie actress, by Ray Hewitt of the Black Panthers Party…by advising Hollywood gossip columnists in the Los Angeles area of the situation. It is felt that the possible publication of Seberg’s plight could cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public. It is proposed that the following letter from a fictitious person be sent to local columnists.” Permission was granted and on May 19, 1970, Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber published the story, which was syndicated to about a hundred papers around the country. On August 23, Seberg, who was married to French diplomat and novelist Romain Gary, prematurely delivered a baby daughter, who died two days later. At the infant’s funeral, Seberg opened the casket to prove the child was white and the story about her a lie. According to the Los Angeles Times, the story “triggered the actress’ downward spiral across a decade, her husband and others close to her said. For nine years, Seberg tried to take her life around the baby’s birthday. On September 8, 1979, her body was found naked in the back of a Renault parked on a Paris side street, the death credited to an overdose of barbiturates.”81*

  Hoover’s illegal wiretaps to gain compromising information on anyone he perceived to be a threat to his power, and oftentimes on political opponents of the president then in the White House (sometimes at the request of the president himself), started in the 1930s under FDR, reaching their zenith in the 1960s under the Machiavellian LBJ, Hoover’s personal friend. Only one president, Truman, had virtually no relationship with Hoover, to the extent of not even allowing Hoover to deal directly with him, forcing Hoover to deal with Truman’s chief military aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughn.82

  Hoover’s power was such that President Kennedy was fond of telling people when they asked why he never fired Hoover, “You don’t fire God.”83 LBJ had a more earthy way of putting it: “In the long run, I’d rather have Edgar on the inside pissing out, than on the outside hosing me down.”84

  After Hoover died, New York Times reporter Tom Wicker wrote that Hoover had “wielded more power, longer, than any man in American history.”85 And Hoover was never shy about letting everyone know just how powerful he was, referring to his FBI headquarters office as “SOG” or “Seat of Government.”86 In fact, the term “Seat of Government” was even used routinely in official FBI documents, for example, “All of the supervisors and officials who came into contact with this case at the seat of government, as well as agents in the field…”87 It seemed that Hoover didn’t know his place in the executive branch of government, and during his lifetime no one was about to remind him.

  Virtually every Hoover biography, from Curt Gentry’s best-selling J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets on down, has confirmed not only that Hoover had a bulging, six-hundred-page file on JFK’s dalliances,* but also that Kennedy was well aware of what Hoover had on him.88 And Hoover made sure his targets knew, directly or indirectly, that he had the goods on them.

  The most blatant, outrageous, and vile example of this was the fifteen FBI bugging tapes of Martin Luther King, containing words and physical sounds of King with other women in hotel rooms around the country. These tapes were sent to King (whom Hoover despised and viewed as a Communist pawn dangerous to America, which resulted in King’s telephone also being tapped under authorization from RFK on national security grounds) at King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference office in Atlanta in mid-November of 1964. FBI coverage of King had revealed that King’s wife, Coretta, “opened his mail for him when he was on the road.” A letter accompanying the tapes was from an anonymous writer, who told King that he was “a complete fraud…and an evil, vicious one at that…You are done.” One note is believed to have actually encouraged King to commit suicide, reading, “King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.”89 DeLoach confirmed that the FBI’s wiretaps of King’s phone, which RFK approved, were at the request of the FBI, not RFK. However, in May of 1968, columnist Drew Pearson said that RFK ordered the wiretaps on King’s phone, and that he would soon release the documentation he had to support this, which he never did.90 Hoover showed his personal distaste for King and his firsthand involvement in the effort to destroy him in a handwritten note at the bottom of an internal FBI memo discussing the “microphone surveillance” of King in his room at the Shroeder Hotel in Milwaukee. “King is a tomcat,” Hoover scribbled, “with obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”91 Hoover even went so far as to try to peddle a dossier on King, which included a taped composite of King’s sexual activities in various hotel rooms, to key members of the Washington, D.C., press corps, but they declined to accept his offer.92

  By all accounts, though there is no record of what was said, Hoover’s lunch with Kennedy at the White House on March 22, 1962 (at which he brought along an FBI memo on Judith Campbell Exner, prepared for him two days earlier, that set forth the dates of her calls to the White House and the fact that she had “associated with prominent underworld figures Sam Giancana of Chicago and John Roselli of Los Angeles”), was to inform the president that he must cease seeing Exner. It is no coincidence that White House records show the last of seventy telephone calls put through the White House switchboard to Exner’s number occurred that afternoon after the luncheon.93

  Just as those who wear their patriotism on their sleeves usually have very little left inside—in a similar vein one is reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark that “the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons”—many law-and-order extremists like Hoover very often have no compunction about violating the law themselves. In addition to the well-chronicled fact that Hoover often used FBI personnel to make repairs to his home, there is at least one clear case of a prosecutable felony (grand theft) committed by Hoover; many people have gone to jail for less. “As you know,” former assistant FBI director William Sullivan wrote to Hoover in 1971, a few days after he left the FBI, “I had a number of men working for many months writing your book, Masters of Deceit, for you. Contrary to what you have said it was not done on private time. It was done on
public time, during the day at taxpayers’ expense [we’re obviously talking here about well over $100,000]…Do you realize the amount of agent time that was spent not only in writing the book but on advertising and publicizing it all around the country? All our field offices were told to push it…We even wrote reviews here at the Headquarters which were sent to the field to have printed by different papers.”94 Louis Nichols, the FBI’s first publicist and lobbyist, and a Hoover partisan who was more responsible for the lionization of Hoover in the public’s eye than anyone else, confirmed Sullivan’s story about Masters of Deceit, which sold 250,000 copies in hardcover and 2 million in paperback.95

  Returning to the central issue, as previously stated, no one, ever, has produced one piece of evidence connecting J. Edgar Hoover with Kennedy’s death, and your more responsible conspiracy theorists don’t devote any space to the charge. Indeed, the very thought that J. Edgar Hoover decided to murder President John F. Kennedy is too far-fetched for any but the most suspicious and irrational minds. Hoover had already proved (the March 22, 1962, luncheon with JFK over Judith Campbell Exner) the power he had to blackmail the president, and it is therefore ridiculous to say that he would try to kill Kennedy—and thus expose himself to a sentence of death—in order to keep his job. When we couple all of this with the fact that, as author Curt Gentry writes, “Hoover’s concern with preserving his good name became an obsession” and “the fear that his carefully constructed image would come tumbling down obsessed him most of his life” (the “hundreds of hours” he spent “fussing over the blueprints” to the building in Washington, D.C., that currently bears his name is a metaphor for his all-consuming concern over his image and reputation),96 the thought becomes too crazed to put to paper, and I apologize to his surviving relatives, if he has any, for even discussing this issue.