The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  A month after the Life cover appeared, Hoover made a rare public appearance. He spoke at a dinner sponsored by the American Newspaper Women’s Club in Washington. He had accepted an invitation to introduce the person who would be honored that evening, Martha Mitchell, the wife of the attorney general. She was a prominent personality and a favorite of the Nixon administration at the time because of her frequent brash and funny public comments about whatever was on her mind. Later, when she called reporters in the middle of the night with inside secrets about Watergate crimes, she was considered a liability to the Nixon administration who had to be hushed. But now, in the spring of 1971, when Hoover warmly introduced her, she was still considered an amusing asset. She urged the audience to look at Mr. Hoover carefully that evening, for “when you’ve seen one FBI Director, you have seen them all.”

  In a rare jovial mood, Hoover nearly matched Martha Mitchell’s ability to draw laughs. “I know that those of you who subscribe to an alleged national magazine may have had some difficulty recognizing me in the conventional clothes I am wearing this evening. But, like ordinary people, we emperors do have our problems, and I regret to say that my toga did not get back from the cleaners on time.”

  President Nixon defended Hoover a month after the burglary when he answered questions at the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the same convention where CIA director Helms denied the CIA conducted domestic spying. Asked by one of the editors to comment on the fact that “J. Edgar Hoover very recently seems to have become one of the favorite ‘whipping boys’ of a number of prominent Americans,” Nixon responded angrily. The criticisms of Hoover, he said, “are unfair … and malicious.…I would ask the editors of the nation’s papers to be fair about the situation. He, like any man who is a strong man and an able man … has made many enemies.…He has been nonpolitical … nonpartisan. Despite all of the talk about surveillance and bugging and the rest, let me say I have been in police states, and the idea that this is a police state is just pure nonsense. And every … paper in the country ought to say that.…As long as I am in this office, we are going to be sure that not the FBI or any other organization engages in any [surveillance] activity except where the national interests or the protection of innocent people requires it, and then it will be as limited as it possibly can be.” As Nixon made those comments that day, his own secret plans to greatly increase political surveillance and dirty tricks against his perceived enemies were well under way.

  The hundreds of newspaper editors assembled in the convention hall that day with Nixon accepted the president’s observations without questioning him. Many of them may have been surprised when Washington journalists later reported stories about not only the dirty tricks of Hoover’s FBI but also those of the Nixon Plumbers team.

  Throughout that awful year in Hoover’s life, he was defended repeatedly by former FBI agents—individually and by the Society of Former Agents of the FBI. Organized in 1937, the society now rallied around him at meetings throughout the country. Members in chapter after chapter unanimously passed resolutions backing the director. With 5,500 members at the time, the society had been fairly independent of FBI headquarters until 1964, when the director and the society decided they needed each other and established a formal bond. They entered into an agreement that members of the society would be deputized to help the bureau round up the thousands of people listed on the Security Index in the event of a national emergency. Otherwise, the society was primarily a source of fellowship and was an informal but very valuable high-level employment agency for former agents. It found jobs for former agents in security positions and high-level executive positions in American corporations, where many former agents landed. For example, John S. Bugas, the former head of the Detroit FBI office, upon retiring from the bureau became vice president of Ford Motor Company and a close friend and aide of Henry Ford II. Such connections often were either a personal or a professional benefit to the bureau. One of the benefits of the close connection with Ford was that the corporation paid for various special events for the FBI, including a banquet at the society’s 1970 national convention at Disneyland, where the guest of honor was Efrem Zimbalist Jr., star of the The F.B.I., the very popular weekly television series sponsored by Ford. Hoover was there and, as usual, treated Zimbalist like he was not only a real FBI agent but FBI agent number one. At Hoover’s invitation, Zimbalist often spoke at various gatherings of agents, including the graduation ceremony of new agents.

  The society’s members tended to be politically conservative. Some were extremely right-wing, such as Willard Cleon Skousen, a John Birch Society official who wrote The Naked Communist in 1958 and whose ideas have been promoted in recent years by commentator Glenn Beck and by some Tea Party leaders. Some other former agents in the society created private organizations that specialized in using the skills they had learned in the bureau, including planting rumors about politicians Hoover did not like. Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, Senator George McGovern, Senator William Fulbright, and Senator Edward Kennedy were favorite targets.

  After the Media burglary, Hoover could not have asked for more from ex-agents. On April 17, 1971, the North Central chapter of the society adopted a resolution that praised the director’s record and deplored the allegations of his critics. Given extensive coverage by the press, the resolution said there was no basis “to the criticism by some” that “the FBI has become oppressive in its investigative activities and is becoming a threat to the civil liberties of citizens.…We know without any question that the FBI, under the most explicit direction of Mr. Hoover, has jealously protected the nation against any invasion of these liberties.”

  The president of the North Central chapter, Duane Traynor, released this statement: There was “no fairer man who ever lived or was more attuned to the needs of the nation than Mr. Hoover.” In the society’s spring 1971 newsletter, the Grapevine, a column charged that a “strongly suspected undercover conspiracy” to smear Hoover had been hatched by everyone from “anarchist revolutionaries” to “bleeding-heart liberals.” At the former agents society’s annual national convention in Atlanta that year, the members passed a vote of confidence in Hoover against “vicious and unwarranted attacks” that were “politically motivated.”

  So many people signed up in the spring of 1971 to support the director by attending the society’s annual Congressional Night dinner in Washington that the event had to be moved from the Rayburn House Office Building to a larger space at the Shoreham Hotel. The Grapevine reported that the April 1971 Congressional Night dinner, attended each year by society members and members of Congress, “developed into an evening of serious commentary about numerous recent scurrilous attacks against the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover.” Those present included former FBI official and then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Joseph F. Carroll and seven members of Congress who were former FBI agents. Hoover didn’t usually attend this annual dinner, but he did now when he was under attack. When Carroll introduced the director that evening, he received a standing ovation that lasted several minutes.

  Hoover spoke harsh words that night. He attacked the “few journalistic prostitutes” who could not appreciate the FBI. He assured the former agents and others in the audience that the FBI would not compromise its standards “to accommodate kooks, misfits, drunks and slobs.”

  “It is time we stopped coddling the hoodlums and the hippies who are causing so much serious trouble these days,” he said. “Let us treat them like the vicious enemies of society that they really are, regardless of their age.”

  The director was given more public accolades from President Nixon two months after he had defended him to the newspaper editors. He and Attorney General Mitchell both spoke at the ceremony that marked the graduation of police officers from the FBI Academy on June 30, 1971. The president told the young police officers from throughout the country that more than twenty years earlier, as a young member of Congress from California, he had worked
with Hoover on “major investigations of various subversive elements in this country.” Regarding current attacks on the director, the president said, “Anybody who is strong, anybody who fights for what he believes in, anybody who stands up where it is tough is bound to be controversial.…The great majority of the American people back Mr. Hoover.”

  In what Nixon later said was the strongest part of his defense of Hoover that day, he told the graduates that “he is a man who has never served a party, he has always served his country.” Nixon assured the police officers that, like the director, he and the attorney general “back law enforcement officials in their attempts to reestablish respect for the law.”

  A remarkable series of expressions of both contempt and respect for the law took place in exchanges at the White House that day and the next. After telling the young police officers about his deep respect for the law and the need to reestablish the rule of law, the next evening the president, according to White House tapes, ordered White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Institution and steal material related to the conduct of the Vietnam War. The president was forceful in his recommendation: “Just break in. Break in and take it out! You understand? Just go in and take it! … Go in around 8 or 9 o’clock … and clean it up.”

  White House aide Charles Colson was recorded that day proposing that the Brookings burglary be accomplished by firebombing the think tank. As firefighters would rush to the scene, he said, they would supply cover for FBI agents, working on behalf of the White House, to enter the building and steal the documents, presumably while the firefighters were putting out the fire. That criminal favor would be done by the FBI, aides confidently predicted, on the orders of the FBI director the president had just publicly insisted to young police officers never served the interest of a political party.

  Only a few hours before Nixon gave bold advice on how to break into Brookings, he and Hoover discussed the events of the previous day in a phone conversation. Hoover thanked the president for his generous remarks at the graduation ceremony. He said the president’s remarks were especially meaningful at this time when he “was being attacked from many sides.” They commiserated with each other about the U.S. Supreme Court decision that was issued while Nixon was at the ceremony at the FBI—the decision supporting the right of the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish the Pentagon Papers. The decision inspired them to air their mutual low regard for the court:

  PRESIDENT NIXON: I wanted to tell you I was so damn mad when that Supreme Court had to come down.…I didn’t like their decision.

  DIRECTOR HOOVER: It was unbelievable.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: You know, those clowns we got up there. I’ll tell you, I hope I outlive the bastards.

  DIRECTOR HOOVER: Well, I hope you do, too.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: I mean politically, too. Because, by God—we’ve got to change that court.

  DIRECTOR HOOVER: There’s no question about that whatsoever.

  They both expressed regret that Nixon’s praise of Hoover at the FBI ceremony was not the leading story in newspapers the next day.

  The president explained why it wasn’t:

  PRESIDENT NIXON: If it hadn’t been for that stinking [Pentagon Papers] court decision we’d have been the lead story.

  DIRECTOR HOOVER: And it should have been. Your remarks were simply wonderful.

  Hoover told the president his praise was so wonderful that he had ordered that it be published in Law Enforcement Bulletin, a publication the bureau then distributed regularly to 15,000 police departments in the country.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Oh, heck.

  They ended the conversation criticizing someone each of them obviously held in as low regard as they held the Supreme Court—Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham:

  DIRECTOR HOOVER: I saw her on the TV last night. Mrs. Graham. I would have thought she’s about 85 years old. She’s only about, I think, something like 57.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: She’s a terrible old bag.

  DIRECTOR HOOVER: Oh, she’s an old bitch in my estimation.

  PRESIDENT NIXON (LAUGHING): That’s right.

  The president thanked the director for the cuff links, emblazoned with the FBI seal, he had given him the previous day.

  BY THE FALL OF 1971, Hoover had two major fears. On October 1, Sullivan, after a series of raging arguments with the director, arrived at work and found that his name had been removed from his office door and the locks changed. He had been fired. Hoover knew that Sullivan, after more than thirty years of devoted service to him, including creating some of the worst of the COINTELPRO operations, knew essentially everything that could be used to destroy Hoover. Given that, Hoover added Sullivan, a loose cannon now that he was fired, to his other greatest fear at that time: the Media burglary. “Only those who worked for him,” wrote Gentry, “knew how shaken Hoover had been by the burglary of the small Pennsylvania agency.”

  Comments about Hoover in the White House during those months often were not as generous or flattering, to put it mildly, as either the president’s public remarks or his private comments to Hoover had been. White House tapes that later became public reveal that the president and his top aides were eager for Hoover to retire. Their grievances against him were mounting. They thought he was too old for the job and was becoming senile. They resented him for letting his fear of being forced out of office make him less amenable to their requests for illegal operations.

  They were downright harsh in their private assessments of him. “He should get the hell out of there,” Nixon said in an October 8, 1971, conversation with Mitchell. They considered asking him to retire, and if he would agree to do so, they would have a grand public celebration of his service as FBI director. Nixon had a meeting with Hoover in July 1971 for the purpose of asking him to step down. Hoover apparently anticipated what was afoot and spent the entire meeting filibustering Nixon about the past and about how well things were going at the FBI. Nixon said not a word to Hoover about retiring. As the director had done the previous year, he now outmaneuvered Nixon again. He left the Oval Office with his job intact and the president feeling doomed to live with Hoover as FBI director forever. Nixon also had a meeting with Hoover in October 1971 that he hoped would lead to his retirement. It did not.

  The president was afraid of Hoover. He undoubtedly had the director’s April 1971 threat to blackmail him in mind in October 1971, when he said of Hoover, “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me.” Finally, the president was told that he should not force Hoover to retire because of how the Catholic peace activists would capitalize on such a move.

  It was G. Gordon Liddy—the former FBI agent then on the staff of the White House and one of the planners of the burglary of the 1972 break-in, for which he was convicted, at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate—who ultimately convinced Nixon it would be dangerous to force Hoover to retire. Liddy wrote a detailed memo for the president that listed the pros and cons of removing Hoover from office, concluding that it would not be in the “best interest of the Nation, the President, the FBI and Mr. Hoover, that the Director retire before the end of 1971.” Fearful of the harm Hoover might do to him if he forced him to retire, the president concluded that Liddy had made a strong case for not removing Hoover. One of the reasons Liddy had given for not removing Hoover was that doing so would be seen during the 1972 Harrisburg trial of the Catholic peace activists whom Hoover had accused of plotting to bomb tunnels and kidnap Henry Kissinger as lending “weight to what are sure to be defense contentions of a conspiracy to justify Hoover’s accusations against the Berrigans.”

  WHEN THE PRESIDENT LEARNED on the morning of May 2, 1972, that J. Edgar Hoover had been found dead in his bedroom early that morning, he immediately started to plan the funeral as a grand public occasion that would be televised. He would give the eulogy himself. The timing was not quite right. Nixon would have preferred that Hoover had d
ied earlier in his first term so the appointment of his replacement would not become a battleground over Nixon’s law-and-order politics or over the FBI’s past. “The house cleaning [at the FBI] is going to come, but it should not come now because we can’t have any flaps about that now,” Nixon told L. Patrick Gray in the White House just hours after Hoover’s funeral. He had plucked Gray from the Department of Justice and appointed him acting director of the bureau the day after Hoover died. Newspaper commentary the day after Hoover’s death focused on the fact that now that Hoover had died, the bureau was likely to face “the most thorough public investigation in its history.”

  As Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff, discussed Hoover’s funeral, Nixon, in the absence of Hoover having a family, took over. Nixon said he would like for Hoover to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Haldeman suggested that was inappropriate inasmuch as Hoover in death, as in life, “the last thing he’d want is to be anywhere near Bobby Kennedy.” Both Robert Kennedy and his brother John were buried at Arlington. Nixon settled for what Hoover wanted, burial beside his parents in the family plot at Congressional Cemetery in southeast Washington, not far from his childhood home.

  Hoover’s remains lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda the day after he died. He was only the twenty-second person, and the first civil servant, accorded that honor since the Rotunda was completed in 1824. Most of the others who had been given that high honor were presidents and select members of Congress and the military. A thousand people an hour filed past Hoover’s closed casket. Outside the Rotunda, a few hundred protesters quietly read the names of the thousands of Americans who had been killed in the Vietnam War. It was not reported whether they were being photographed by FBI agents or informers, as such demonstrations routinely were.