What the public now saw was a cantankerous old man, issuing blasts of bigotry at his enemies – not least those unable to answer back, like Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. When former Attorney General Ramsey Clark criticized him in a book for his ‘self-centered concern for his own reputation,’ Edgar promptly proved him right. In a three-and-a-half-hour harangue to a reporter, he labeled Clark ‘a jellyfish and a softy.’
At the Nixon White House, the unease grew. One reason for keeping Edgar on had been the fear of jettisoning a national institution, a man assumed to have overwhelming public support. That assumption was no longer valid. Fifty-one percent of those questioned in a Gallup poll thought Edgar should retire. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ said one Washington columnist, ‘has spent too much time being a demi-god.’ Lawrence Brooks, a ninety-year-old former judge who had observed Edgar in action since 1919, was moved to quote Abraham Lincoln. ‘We must,’ he said, ‘disenthrall ourselves.’
In February 1971 Nixon’s speech writer, future presidential contender Patrick Buchanan, advised him that Edgar was now a political liability and should be replaced as soon as possible.
He has nowhere to go but down; and he is going down steadily … With each of these new picayune battles in which he involves himself, his place is being sullied … My strong recommendation would be to retire Hoover now in all the glory and esteem he has merited and deserved; and not let him – for his own sake and ours – wind up his career a dead lion being chewed over by the jackals of the Left.
The memo went to a president preoccupied. At home, Nixon was beset by the highest unemployment figures in a decade. Abroad, he was embroiled in the U.S.-supported Vietnamese invasion of Laos, a public relations disaster, soon to be followed by ugly revelations about the My Lai massacre. Vietnam had become an albatross for Nixon, as it had been for Johnson. While he applied himself to such problems, Edgar piled embarrassment on embarrassment.
In a time of fervent feminism, Edgar was still dithering over whether or not secretaries should be allowed to wear pants. ‘It is absolutely essential,’ he had written a year earlier, ‘that we conduct sufficient investigation to clearly establish the subversive ramifications of the Women’s Liberation Movement.’ Now, in a blaze of publicity, he turned down two female applicants for the job of agent. They sued. Then he fired two female clerks for working with the peace movement in their spare time.
In March 1971, burglars broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, escaping with nearly a thousand documents – including some that exposed Bureau surveillance of students, radicals and blacks for the first time. One, at least, bore the telltale letters COINTELPRO, code word for the Bureau’s most secret dirty-tricks operations. Styling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, the thieves sent copies of the documents to newsmen and politicians. They were never caught – and Edgar had to close down COINTELPRO.
Angry voices were raised in Congress. Senator George McGovern, gearing up to fight Nixon for the presidency in 1972, publicly protested Edgar’s savage treatment of Agent Jack Shaw, forced to resign for venturing criticism of the FBI in a private letter.2 ‘I cannot believe,’ McGovern said, ‘that we want our great nation to become a land where our personal privacy and our personal freedom are jeopardized by the abuse of power by a police official who seems to believe he is a law unto himself.’
Behind the scenes, Edgar rehearsed the old routine. Agents trawled fruitlessly through McGovern’s record seeking something, anything, to discredit the senator. Edgar scribbled a furious note about ‘psychopathic liar McGovern.’ Clyde got twenty-one Bureau officials to fire off letters supporting Edgar, and sent one himself. The file copy bore a spiteful note: ‘The address of this letter has deliberately been phrased to avoid referring to McGovern as “Honorable.”’
Senator Edmund Muskie, meanwhile, discovered the FBI had recently surveilled a series of countrywide rallies by environmentalists – including himself. Congressman Henry Reuss learned – from one of the documents stolen in Pennsylvania – that agents had investigated his daughter, a student at Swarthmore College. ‘The FBI,’ said Reuss, ‘has an important responsibility to investigate crime … not to compile dossiers on millions of Americans, congressmen’s daughters or not, who are accused of no wrongdoing.’
Such protests paled beside the outburst of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, in April, when he made speeches accusing the FBI of wiretapping members of Congress and infiltrating the universities.3 ‘When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo, then it is time – it is way past time, Mr Speaker – that the present Director thereof no longer be the Director … The time has come for the Attorney General of the United States to ask for the resignation of Mr Hoover.’
Edgar learned of Boggs’ attack within minutes, from the congressional ticker. He had already seen an early copy of the latest Life magazine, its cover adorned with his own cartoon image, a disgruntled old man’s face done up to look like a statue from the days of imperial Rome. The headline read: THE 47-YEAR REIGN OF J. EDGAR HOOVER, EMPEROR OF THE FBI, and the story suggested that reign should end. Edgar knew that Newsweek, too, was preparing a cover story. Its headline would be: HOOVER’S FBI: TIME FOR A CHANGE?
According to his memo of record, Edgar offered to resign that afternoon. He called Attorney General Mitchell, who was sunning himself at Key Biscayne, to break the news of the Boggs speech. ‘I wanted him to know and the President to know,’ Edgar wrote afterward, ‘if at any time my presence embarrasses the Administration – if it is felt I may be a burden or handicap to the re-election – I would be glad to step aside.’
If Edgar did offer to resign, neither Mitchell nor anyone else in the Nixon administration remembered the momentous event.4 For men who hoped to be rid of Edgar, moreover, he and the President responded oddly to the Boggs episode. Nixon said he thought Edgar was ‘taking a bad rap,’ and Mitchell demanded that Boggs ‘recant at once and apologize to a great and dedicated American.’ A few weeks later he defended Edgar aggressively when a reporter asked the Director if he planned to retire. ‘You’re so far off base,’ Mitchell snapped, ‘that I’m going to belt you one … Why, he’s the most outstanding individual who has ever had anything to do with law enforcement.’
Nixon and his officials had no choice but to grovel to Edgar. For he now possessed information that strengthened his hold over the President – a hold that, even in the clamor for his resignation, made dismissing him unacceptably risky.
Two years earlier, in the spring of 1969, Nixon and Henry Kissinger had been enraged by a series of news stories that in their view compromised national security, especially on Vietnam. They thought the stories had been leaked by trusted officials, and asked Edgar and the Attorney General how best to track down the culprits. As a result, the FBI began a wiretapping operation that targeted six of Kissinger’s aides, eight other officials and four prominent journalists. The bugging continued until 1971.
It was Edgar, according to Kissinger, who proposed that course. In his memos for the record, however, he made it appear otherwise. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, ‘invariably listed some official outside the FBI hierarchy as requesting each wiretap, even in cases where I had heard Hoover himself specifically recommend them to Nixon.’
What Edgar had done was to lure the administration into danger, while – as Kissinger put it – ‘protecting his flanks.’ He saw to it that the taps were authorized by Attorney General Mitchell, in writing.
The fact that the targets included eminent correspondents – William Beecher and Hedrick Smith of The New York Times, Marvin Kalb of CBS and columnist Joseph Kraft – made the surveillance especially sensitive. The effort produced not an iota of evidence to identify the leaks, but a time bomb of potential trouble for the President.
The fact that Nixon had approved the bugging meant that the buck would stop with him if it were exposed. Such a revelation might wreck his chances of reelection in 1972.
Edgar knew the President feared exposure, for Nixon ordered that summaries of the tapped conversations be delivered only to H. R. Haldeman in person, in sealed envelopes.
The man in charge of the wiretap operation was William Sullivan, the highest-ranking official in the Bureau below Edgar and Clyde. He, too, knew that secrecy was essential. On Edgar’s orders, copies were kept to a minimum, one for the White House and one for Edgar. ‘This is a White House operation,’ Edgar told Sullivan. ‘It’s not an FBI operation and we’re not going to put them in the FBI files …’ The transcripts were closely held, first in Edgar’s office, then in Sullivan’s.
Transcripts under Edgar’s control were a potential weapon for use against Nixon. In April 1971, according to three sources, he used it – just days after Congressman Boggs’ claim that the FBI had been tapping politicians. He did so, specifically, after Richard Kleindienst, the Deputy Attorney General, declared himself in favor of a congressional inquiry into Boggs’ allegations.
If he was to be pilloried for illegal bugging, Edgar had no intention of suffering alone. He angrily called Kleindienst and rambled on at length. The Deputy Attorney General, weary of such calls, held the phone at arm’s length – allowing a colleague, Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, to listen in. ‘You understand,’ Mardian heard Edgar say, ‘that if I am called upon to testify before the Congress, I will have to tell all that I know about this matter.’
The threat was lost on Kleindienst, who knew nothing of the buggings Nixon had ordered. Mardian, who did, thought Edgar had ‘threatened the President of the United States.’ He reported the conversation to the White House – and, two years later, to Watergate investigators.
Edgar went further, according to a note by William Sullivan found among Mardian’s private papers. On April 10, still furious that Kleindienst had welcomed an inquiry, the Director called the President himself at Camp David. Should he be called before Congress to discuss bugging, Edgar said, he ‘would have to lay bare the FBI’s sensitive operations, and this would be very undesirable and damaging.’
There was no inquiry into Boggs’ allegations. In May, celebrating his forty-seventh year in office, Edgar said he had no thought of retiring. ‘I intend to remain as Director of the FBI as long as I can be of service to my country.’ On June 12 he appeared at the wedding of Nixon’s daughter Tricia, smiling and waving for photographers as though all were well between him and the President.
All was not well, and events the next day made things immeasurably worse. That morning, a Sunday, New York Times readers across the country were regaled with seven pages of revelatory material on the escalation of the Vietnam War. These were the Pentagon Papers, secret documents supplied to the Times – as the FBI quickly established – by former government analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The Times continued to pump out the information, in spite of frantic government litigation. It was the most blatant leak of all, and it led Nixon an irreversible step closer to the follies of Watergate. For Edgar, it brought fateful clashes with both Nixon and William Sullivan.
These shifts were set in motion by a comedy of errors involving Louis Marx, the elderly millionaire who happened to be both Ellsberg’s father-in-law and a longstanding friend of Edgar’s. Nixon, convinced Ellsberg was part of a Communist conspiracy, wanted every scrap of information on the man. He was enraged to hear that, because Marx was a friend, Edgar had ordered agents not to question him.
Edgar had issued such an order, and for the very reason reported to Nixon, that he was ‘sorry for Louis.’ Ironically, however, the order was not carried out. Charles Brennan, the head of Domestic Intelligence at the FBI, is said to have misread Edgar’s scribbled ‘No H’ as ‘OK H.’ By the time he realized his mistake, Marx had been interviewed. Edgar flew into a tantrum and ordered Brennan demoted and transferred to Ohio. This in turn upset William Sullivan, Brennan’s superior and longtime friend, triggering extraordinary events.
Sullivan had reached boiling point. Given free rein to run the COINTELPRO program, he had put up with Edgar’s ways like everyone else. Now he was frustrated, by Edgar’s stonewalling over domestic intelligence, and by the ending of COINTELPRO. He was angry, too, about Edgar’s latest empire building abroad. This included a new office in Bern, Switzerland, which seemed to exist mainly to provide hospitality to Edgar’s cronies during their travels, and a totally useless one in La Paz, Bolivia. Edgar seemed to think that, since Cuban Communist Che Guevara had been killed in Bolivia, it must be a useful place for the FBI to be.
Unlike submissive colleagues, Sullivan had argued openly with Edgar on such matters. He had had the temerity to say publicly that race riots and student unrest should not be blamed on the Communist Party. Edgar had been furious. Now there was Edgar’s hysterical treatment of Charles Brennan, an outstanding agent, over the Louis Marx misunderstanding.
Losing patience, Sullivan began covert contacts with Nixon officials who shared his feelings, and especially with Assistant Attorney General Mardian. Mardian, who knew the Director had called him ‘a goddamned Lebanese Jew,’ thought Edgar ‘garrulous, full of wind. Mean, like a mean old dog.’
To hammer home the criticism, Sullivan supplied Mardian with sheaves of Edgar’s internal correspondence. Mardian sent some of it to John Mitchell and filed the rest nervously in a folder marked ‘Jones.’ The belief that sooner or later Edgar would find out about everything had spread beyond the FBI.
At the height of the Pentagon Papers furor, Sullivan shared with Mardian his conviction that Edgar was ‘not of sound mind.’ ‘He told me,’ Mardian recalled, ‘that he had in his possession documents that were “out of channel,” wiretap information. He said Hoover had used such information against previous Presidents and was liable to use these documents to blackmail Nixon. As long as he had those files, Nixon could not relieve him.’
Sullivan was referring to the Bureau copies of Nixon’s taps on government officials and newsmen, now held under tight security in his office. Mardian passed on the blackmail warning, and the President – then in California – took it in deadly earnest. Mardian was ordered to fly to the Western White House at once, by Air Force jet, for consultations. John Ehrlichman’s handwritten notes of the meeting reflect the mood of urgency. ‘OK … Obtain and destroy all logs … Tell Hoover to destroy … Haig request the FBI (Sullivan) to destroy all special coverage.’
In Washington, Sullivan handed over two battered satchels containing the wiretap summaries. Mardian placed them in a locked vault, then waited for further instructions from the White House.
At the FBI, Edgar and Sullivan were at loggerheads. On August 28, after discussions with twenty-two colleagues, Sullivan sent Edgar a long letter laying out their differences. ‘I would like to convince you,’ he wrote, ‘that those of us who disagree with you are trying to help you and not hurt you … This letter will probably anger you. In view of your absolute power you can fire me … or in some other way work out your displeasure with me. So be it …’
Edgar began the ensuing meeting with Sullivan with a harangue. He said he had given the matter ‘a good deal of prayer.’ Then he began to sputter and stammer. When Sullivan advised him to retire, he said he would not. On the contrary, it was Sullivan who had to go. He was told to take leave due to him and apply for retirement.
Not knowing that the Nixon wiretap transcripts had been passed to Mardian, Edgar ordered other aides to look for them in Sullivan’s office while he was at home in New Hampshire. The aides searched every file cabinet and drawer and found nothing. When Sullivan returned, he refused to say what had become of the transcripts. ‘If you want to know more,’ he said curtly, ‘you’ll have to talk to the Attorney General.’
On October 1, pointedly leaving behind only his autographed photograph of the Director, Sullivan left the FBI for good. Mark Felt, who replaced him as Edgar’s key assistant, briefed Edgar on the fruitless hunt for the wiretap records. Uncharacteristically, Edgar was lost for words. Then he shook his head. ‘The greatest mistake I eve
r made,’ he murmured, ‘was to promote Sullivan.’ He stood there, lost in thought, as Felt slipped quietly from the room.
Months later, when Edgar was dead and when the full significance of the wiretaps emerged – along with so many other Nixonian secrets – Felt wondered about the Director’s silence. ‘It is very strange,’ he mused, ‘that Hoover did not explain the entire situation to me … He knew the whole story.’
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‘Anyone who opposes us, we’ll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn’t support us we’ll destroy.’
Egil Krogh, aide to President Nixon, 1971
On October 3, 1971, a Sunday, Assistant Attorney General Mardian asked John Ehrlichman to come and see him at home. The man who had custody of the wiretap transcripts was panicking.
‘Mardian was very afraid,’ Ehrlichman recalled, ‘not only of the integrity of the files but also of his own personal safety. He felt he was being surveilled by Hoover, that it was only a matter of time before Hoover caused agents of the FBI to break into his office vault and recover the records …’
At a meeting in the Oval Office that week, Ehrlichman and Attorney General Mitchell asked the President for guidance on what to do with the transcripts. What they said emerged only in 1991, on newly released tape recordings:
MITCHELL: Hoover is tearing the place up over there trying to get at them. The question is, should we get them out of Mardian’s office before Hoover blows the safe … and bring them over here?
EHRLICHMAN: My impression from talking with Mardian is that Hoover feels very insecure without having his own copy of those things. Because, of course, that gives him leverage with Mitchell and with you.
NIXON: Yeah.
EHRLICHMAN: Because they’re illegal. Now he doesn’t have any copies and he has agents all over this town interrogating people, trying to find out where they are. He’s got Mardian’s building under surveillance.
NIXON: Now, why the hell didn’t he have a copy, too?
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