Official and Confidential

by Anthony Summers

  There was no grief in Edgar’s office, two months after King’s assassination, when Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. ‘Goddamn the Kennedys!’ William Sullivan had heard Clyde Tolson say in 1963, after President Kennedy’s death. ‘First there was Jack, now there’s Bobby, and then Teddy. We’ll have them on our backs until the year 2000.’ In the summer of 1968, when it began to look as though Robert might win the presidency, Clyde startled colleagues at an executive meeting. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.’

  Now someone had, and Edgar was roused from sleep by President Johnson to be told that, as in 1963, he would rely on the FBI for the best information. Yet, as in the case of the Dallas assassination, the murder of Robert Kennedy was to remain a historical muddle. The notion that only Sirhan Sirhan was responsible was doubted. The initial FBI report on the crime, released only after Edgar’s death, indicated that twelve or more bullets were fired. Sirhan’s gun was capable of firing only eight. Other evidence, meanwhile, suggested to some that two gunmen were involved.

  The first autopsy pictures of Kennedy were rushed to Edgar personally, to be joined in his Official and Confidential files by gruesome color pictures and medical reports. Of all the famous deaths in the Director’s long career, they are the only death pictures thus preserved.

  Edward Kennedy, too, was a victim of Edgar’s spite. In 1962, when he first ran for the Senate, the youngest of the brothers was embarrassed by the revelation that he had been suspended from Harvard for getting a friend to take an exam in his place. It was Edgar, according to FBI sources, who ensured the story got into the newspapers.

  By 1967 Edgar had written Edward Kennedy off as ‘irresponsible,’ a judgment vindicated two years later when the Senator abandoned a female companion in the wreckage of his sunken car at Chappaquiddick. The accident was a local police matter, but Edgar would readily oblige when the Nixon White House asked him to send agents looking for additional dirt. He loved to gossip about the tragedy, sometimes for hours on end.

  In the summer of 1968, with Robert Kennedy gone, Edgar’s horizon seemed free of serious opposition. It was an illusion.

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  ‘Mr Hoover served with distinction, but he served too long … Those who had recent contact with him knew that age increasingly impacted his judgment. We all – the Presidents, the Congress, the Attorneys General, the press – knew that, and yet he stayed on struggling against change and the future.’

  Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General, 1975

  ‘The greatest enemy,’ Edgar had said, ‘is time,’ but he acted as though he could hold the clock back. In 1968, when he turned seventy-three, the familiar bulldog profile seemed little changed. Edgar’s doctors pronounced him fit, and aides passed on the reassuring news to the press. They said as little as possible about Clyde Tolson.

  Though five years Edgar’s junior, Clyde had undergone open-heart surgery and suffered the first of several strokes. So feeble was his eyesight that he would soon need help to read his mail, and sometimes he did not make it into the office at all. Edgar could not stand to see his friend show his weaknesses in public. When Clyde stumbled and fell at the track in California, Edgar ordered an accompanying agent not to help him. ‘Leave him alone,’ he snapped. ‘Let the dumb asshole get up by himself.’

  Clyde ‘retired’ when he reached the automatic retirement age of seventy, but only for a day. By dint of some bureaucratic sleight of hand, Edgar promptly rehired him. Clyde continued to get ‘outstanding’ performance reports and, in spite of his failing eyesight, was issued a new service revolver. FBI propaganda insisted that the Director and his right-hand man were hale and hearty, as indomitable as ever.

  Increasingly, however, people who mattered were unconvinced. A group of Los Angeles agents wrote to the Attorney General complaining of the Director’s ‘rapidly advancing senility and increasing megalomania.’ Two former agents dared to write books criticizing him, and Edgar found that old suppression techniques no longer worked. Even the conservative press, he found, was now prepared to run articles mocking him and asking how much longer he could remain Director of the FBI.

  History was leaving Edgar behind. In the past he had always known how to maneuver, how to respond to change in ways that left the FBI looking good. Now he failed to see how Middle America, his traditional constituency, was changing. The tide of opinion was running in favor of civil rights, a factor the FBI could have exploited by being seen to enforce the law. Instead, Edgar ranted on about supposed Communist influence on the black movement and about Martin Luther King’s ‘lies.’ Millions of Americans were turning against the Vietnam War, but Edgar exacerbated the situation by having his agents infiltrate the protest groups and sending agents provocateurs to disrupt demonstrations. The manipulator of public opinion had lost his touch.

  Then, when Edgar’s decline and fall seemed inevitable, along came Richard Nixon.

  It was as if some historical magnet had pulled the two together. Twenty-one years had passed since Edgar first cast an approving eye on Nixon. He and his wealthy friends, the Texas oilmen, had nursed Nixon on his way to becoming Vice President in 1952. Nixon had been seen repeatedly at Edgar’s side, on trips to the races and at baseball games, before the 1960 upset that swept Nixon into the political wilderness.

  Even in the wilderness Edgar had been there, a sympathetic houseguest at the Nixon home in California. ‘Hoover,’ Nixon would say ruefully when Edgar was gone and when Watergate dragged him down in disgrace, ‘was my crony.’

  In 1968, as Nixon reached for the presidency, he committed himself to keeping Edgar on as soon as his campaign went into high gear. Edgar leaked information designed to hurl the Democratic opposition. He laughed off a bid, meanwhile, to get him to run for Vice President alongside the southern conservative George Wallace. Dreams of a place for himself at the White House were long past – what Edgar wanted now was safe passage in a seaworthy Republican ship.

  All the gang were there, the millionaires and the middlemen. That summer, funds flowed into the Nixon coffers from Clint Murchison in Texas and Lewis Rosenstiel in New York. Louis Nichols, once Edgar’s political fixer and now Rosenstiel’s, became one of Nixon’s political advisers.

  Edgar covered his bets. He knew Vice President Hubert Humphrey, by then the leading Democratic contender, still had a good chance of winning. He raised no objection, therefore, when Humphrey’s people asked for the ‘same service’ at the Convention that the FBI had given Johnson four years earlier. This time, however, there would be no electronic surveillance; when Edgar asked Attorney General Ramsey Clark for approval, he was turned down flat.1

  Edgar worried about his fate should Humphrey become president. In the White House, a depressed Lyndon Johnson worried – again – about his personal safety. ‘Tell Edgar Hoover,’ he told an aide, ‘that I have taken care of him since the beginning of my administration, and now that I am leaving, I expect him to take care of me … There will be any number of crackpots trying to get at me after January 20, 1969.’

  In November, when Nixon scraped home to victory, Edgar wrote Johnson a last obsequious letter:

  My dear Mr President,

  You have afforded me many pleasant moments for many years. As a personal friend, neighbor and subordinate, I have enjoyed your company … Clyde Tolson and Deke DeLoach join me in expressing appreciation for your kindness. They, too, are very grateful for the time spent with you.

  Sincerely,

  Edgar

  Within two days of writing this farewell note, Edgar was closeted with Nixon at New York’s Pierre Hotel, telling him of Johnson’s illicit use of the FBI during the campaign. ‘Hoover told me the cabin on my plane was bugged for the last two weeks,’ Nixon would recall. ‘Hoover told [Attorney General-to-be] Mitchell and me separately … Johnson ordered it.’

  FBI files contain no evidence that Nixon was bugged, only that checks were made on the phone records of his running mate, Spiro Agnew,
because Johnson suspected Republican sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks. Yet as Nixon’s aide H. R. Haldeman confirms, Edgar not only claimed the bugging had occurred, he played on Nixon’s fears in other ways.

  ‘When you get into the White House,’ the Director warned, ‘don’t make any calls through the switchboard … Little men you don’t know will be listening.’ Edgar claimed that presidential communications, run by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, were insecure – that ‘the President should know that if he talked on those lines he would probably be monitored.’

  ‘We were to find that Hoover always came in with a little bag of goodies,’ Haldeman recalled, ‘tidbits of information that he doled out, alarums and excursions on which your imagination would feed. He would roll his eyes skywards, without offering a firm conclusion – all to create an impression of how useful the Bureau could be to the President.’

  Edgar must have hoped for a smooth run, a return to the power and privilege he had exercised during the last Republican administration, when Nixon had been Vice President. Haldeman, watching him with Nixon at the Pierre, thought they greeted each other ‘like old pals.’ ‘Edgar,’ Nixon said, ‘you are one of the few people who is to have direct access to me at all times.’

  Yet Nixon’s counsel John Ehrlichman, also present, thought his boss said this ‘ostentatiously, for effect.’ Haldeman thought Nixon doubted Edgar’s competence and was secretly considering firing him. Even as he was making promises to Edgar, Nixon was approaching others to fill the post.

  At a meeting in Palm Springs, Nixon dangled the job in front of Pete Pitchess, Sheriff of Los Angeles County, a Goldwater conservative and a former FBI agent. Pitchess responded with care. ‘Hoover,’ he noted, ‘hasn’t yet said he’s retiring.’ ‘No,’ said Nixon, ‘but he’s told me he’s preparing to, on his birthday.’ ‘Ah,’ Pitchess responded, ‘but which birthday?’ Nixon changed the subject.

  Why did Nixon fail to follow through? ‘He was afraid,’ said Pitchess. ‘Every goddamn president was afraid of Hoover – Johnson, even Kennedy. All of them, afraid. I was close to Nixon, but he wouldn’t be specific. He just said, “I have to handle Hoover with kid gloves.”’

  John Connally, who served Nixon as Secretary of the Treasury, saw it, too. ‘Nixon would like to have forced Hoover to retire, but he was not prepared to force it. He didn’t trust him. He was fearful …’

  Even after Edgar was dead, Nixon would be speaking of his power, in awe, almost as if Edgar were still alive to wield it. ‘He’s got files on everybody, goddamnit!’ Nixon was to say in 1973, wishing Edgar were there to rescue him from Watergate.

  President Johnson had told a friend there was a fat FBI dossier on Nixon. One might have expected it to be bulging with reports of connections to white-collar crime or of dubious business deals. The one item we know about, however, comes as a surprise. It links Richard Nixon with a woman, and an exotic one at that.

  *

  The story began in 1958, when Nixon, then forty-five, married and serving as Vice President, met Marianna Liu, a Hong Kong tour guide in her twenties. This was a chance encounter, but the two met again in Nixon’s wilderness years, when he traveled to Hong Kong on business. Liu believes they saw each other each year between 1964 and 1966, when she was working as a hostess at the Den, the cocktail lounge of the local Hilton. The two were photographed together.

  By her own account, Liu and a waitress friend visited Nixon and his traveling companion, the controversial businessman Bebe Rebozo, in a suite at the Mandarin Hotel. She – and Nixon – denied any sexual activity. Liu said that when Nixon next came to Hong Kong, she was in the hospital and he sent her flowers and a bottle of her favorite perfume.

  The former FBI representative in Hong Kong, however, remembered that the Nixon friendship with Liu caused a security flap. ‘One of my contacts in another U.S. agency,’ said Dan Grove, now a security consultant, ‘came to see me one morning and said one of his sources, Marianna Liu, was seeing Nixon. He thought I should be aware of this, because there was a suspicion she was a Chinese agent, that she was seeing U.S. Navy officers. He said he knew Nixon had had a top-secret briefing on the People’s Republic of China, and that made his contact with Liu a risk.’

  Grove went to the Hilton that lunchtime to talk to Liu. ‘My colleague,’ he recalled, just said to her, “You were with a big man last night, weren’t you?” And she said, “Yes, how did you know?” He said, “Who was with you?” And she replied, “His friend, Bebe Rebozo.” Marianna and a girlfriend had spent the day and evening with them.

  ‘It was not FBI jurisdiction, but I decided that I’d report it if I found she had any record of visas for the U.S. It turned out she did have a couple, and her background didn’t quite check in the different applications – a classic indicator of a possible intelligence background. I checked with the British Special Branch, and they came back and said, “She’s on record with us.” She’d come to their attention as a possible Chinese Intelligence Service agent. They’d never followed up because all her activities seemed to involve the Americans, rather than British subjects … I reported this to the Bureau, to Assistant Director Sullivan, and I got a reply saying something like, “Mr Nixon’s personal life is of no interest to this Bureau … Make your checks and close the file.”’

  According to Liu’s attorney, FBI records confirmed that her contact with Nixon set alarm bells ringing, that Nixon himself came under surveillance in Hong Kong – to the extent of his being photographed through his bedroom window with infrared cameras. The surveillance, Grove suspected, was carried out by the British, at the request of the CIA.

  A 1976 FBI memorandum shows that Grove’s memory is accurate:

  From: DIRECTOR FBI August 18, 1976

  Subject: MARIANNA LIU – ISCH [Internal Security Desk China]

  Bureau file concerning caption matter brought to the attention of this Bureau by Legal Attaché Hong Kong letter dated 10.12.67 wherein suspicions of possible Chicom intelligence involvement of subject were inferred but not substantiated by Special Branch, HK Police … and a U.S. [name of agency deleted] representative indicated he had heard … subject [regularly saw] VP Nixon when he visited HK …

  ‘When Nixon got elected President,’ Grove recalled, ‘I was in the office one Sunday morning, and I saw a picture of Liu with Nixon in a newspaper – if my memory serves me right it was at the inaugural ball. I thought, “How did she get in there?” I’d asked for visa applications to be monitored and was supposed to be notified if she tried to enter the U.S … Since I hadn’t been, I sent in an official letter marked “Personal attention of Mr Hoover.” Our instructions were that any possible hostile activities against senior U.S. government officials were to go to the Director personally … But he did not respond to my letter.’

  The FBI in Hong Kong never investigated the allegation and – whatever other agencies may have done – never tried to obtain evidence that Nixon and Liu slept together. Unchecked sexual innuendo had always been grist for Edgar’s mill. According to William Sullivan, Edgar read the information on Liu ‘gleefully’ and personally showed the report to Nixon before he became President.

  Nixon’s companion in Hong Kong, Florida real estate millionaire Bebe Rebozo, was his closest confidant. He has since been linked to a string of suspect business deals, including the suspected funneling of campaign funds to Nixon’s personal coffers. Edgar told Kenneth Whittaker, his Agent in Charge in Miami, to be especially ‘attentive’ to Rebozo – and to watch him carefully.

  We cannot know what passed between Edgar and Nixon concerning the trips to Hong Kong or about Marianna Liu. For Nixon, however, there was one certainty. Exposure of the security flap caused by his friendship with Liu – during the election campaign or during his presidency – could have wounded him gravely, even fatally. And Edgar had the file.

  Just before Christmas 1968, weeks after their meeting at the Pierre, Nixon announced Edgar’s reappointment as Director. He also gave him a raise to $42,500 a yea
r, a fortune at the time.

  Nixon’s inaugural parade took place under conditions of unprecedented security. Edgar’s agents used dirty tricks to thwart anti-Vietnam War protesters – false housing forms to disrupt accommodation arrangements for out-of-town demonstrators and phony CB radio broadcasts to confuse the organizers.

  The office windows on Pennsylvania Avenue were all closed by order of the Secret Service, with one exception. As they had so many times before, Edgar and Clyde stood peering down from their balcony at FBI headquarters, watching the birth of another regime.

  Nixon told neither of his key aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, about the Marianna Liu problem. Nor did he mention any other reason he might have to fear Edgar. He simply ordered Ehrlichman to establish himself with Edgar as ‘his friend and White House confidant.’

  Ehrlichman’s first mission was to reassure Edgar about a project he held dear, the building of a grand new headquarters for the FBI. It had been eight years since Congress had agreed that the FBI should have a new building. It was to be a concrete edifice, eleven stories high at its tallest point, facing onto Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets. And Edgar was already fighting with the planners.

  He was worried that open arcades on the new building would give ‘free access to alcoholics, homos and whores.’ Columns, he thought, would provide cover for lurking assassins. For public consumption, he let it be known that he did not want the building named after him. In private, he admitted that was exactly what he wanted. ‘It was,’ said his friend Walter Trohan, ‘the dearest thing to his heart.’

  Ehrlichman assured Edgar that building operations would be expedited, then sat back and listened to one of the Director’s monologues. ‘He was doing a selling job on me,’ Ehrlichman recalled, ‘telling me what we should look out for. Communism, the Kennedys, the Black Panthers … He spoke of all the black movements with passion and hatred.’

  ‘I hardly had a chance to say anything,’ the aide complained afterward to Nixon. ‘I know,’ the President replied, ‘but it’s necessary, John. It’s necessary.’ Nixon went out of his way to humor Edgar. He went along to the FBI Academy to be made an honorary FBI agent – three decades after trying to become a real one. He brought Edgar to Camp David for the weekend, with the ailing Clyde in tow.