J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Mohr was also to handle all the funeral arrangements. And he should immediately inform the acting attorney general and ask that he inform the president.

  Although this particular chain of command had often been ignored over the years, the Boss going directly to the president, Tolson was a stickler for form, and now, more than at any other time, it was not only needed, it was vital.

  Even though the occasion was unprecedented—the Boss had been director for forty-eight years, serving under eight presidents and eighteen attorneys general—provision had been made for it.

  It’s possible that Tolson did not recall the Justice Department regulations until much later, that he gave orders simply because he had always given orders and not because he was now the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the appropriate statute providing that in the event of the death of the director the associate director would fill his office until such time as the president named his replacement.

  It’s not only possible but probable that Tolson didn’t even think about this. To consider someone other than the Boss as head of the FBI was, and had been for many years, the ultimate heresy.

  She had always feared that such a call might come someday, yet fearing something does not mean you’re prepared for it.

  Helen Gandy had worked for him since 1918, six years before he even became director, briefly as a clerk, then as his secretary, and, since 1939, with the title executive assistant. Like her boss, she had never married, having devoted her whole life to the FBI. Although she was now seventy-five, she still ran the entire office, overseeing every phase of its operations.

  Her genteel manners and pleasant voice contrasted sharply with his domineering presence. Yet behind the politeness was a resolute firmness not unlike his, and no small amount of influence. Many a career in the Bureau had been quietly manipulated by her.

  Even those who disliked him praised her, most often commenting on her remarkable ability to get along with all kinds of people. That she had held her position for fifty-four years was the best evidence of this, for it was a Bureau truism that the closer you were to him, the more demanding he was.

  Theirs was a rigidly formal relationship. He’d always called her Miss Gandy (when angry, barking it out as one word). In all those fifty-four years he had never once called her by her first name.

  She did not break down on hearing the news, or take the rest of the day off, or any of those that followed. Whatever her private feelings, she did not share them. Calling John Mohr to her office, she quietly informed him of the director’s death and Tolson’s instructions.

  They also briefly discussed in this, or a subsequent conversation, the disposition of certain files.

  John Mohr did not occupy the number three spot on the Bureau’s organizational chart. That position, deputy associate director, was filled by Mark Felt, the director’s latest fair-haired boy.* But Felt’s was a recently created position, with no inherent power. Insiders knew that Mohr, a bluff, often abrasive Dutchman who had been in the FBI since 1939, was the most powerful man in the Bureau, excepting only the director and Tolson.

  As assistant to the director for administrative matters, Mohr, among his other duties, prepared the Bureau’s budget. Thus he not only controlled its purse strings but also influenced its assignments, choice and otherwise. Whether a man finished his career as special agent in charge in Honolulu or as a brick (street) agent in Oklahoma City was often dependent less on his ability than on whether Mohr was his mentor. As if this weren’t power enough, he was also responsible for the Bureau’s six and a half million files.

  The columnist Joseph Kraft, a longtime student of the FBI, observed that in recent years the Bureau had degenerated into a tangle of rival cliques, united only by the fear of one old man. There was some truth in this. There had been a number of often-feuding groups, including the Nichols, DeLoach, Sullivan, and Mohr factions. But although many of their followers remained, Nichols, DeLoach, and Sullivan had long since left the Bureau. Only Mohr had survived.

  An excellent poker player, John Mohr had systematically covered his losses and consolidated his gains. Aware that open displays of power could be dangerous, he played his cards close to the vest, usually acting quietly behind the scenes. Very little happened in the Bureau, whether on the administrative or the investigative side, that Mohr did not know about. Also aware that in the Bureau power could be a very transient thing, he hedged his bets, ingratiating himself with the director, and, especially, with Tolson.

  It appeared to have paid off. Although there was no heir apparent, the director never having seen fit to groom one, Tolson’s choice of Mohr to handle the notifications, and especially the director’s funeral arrangements, was, in its own way, a patriarchal blessing, one which would not be lost on Bureau insiders.

  One of the first he told was Mark Felt. Felt was surprised to see John Mohr standing in the doorway of his office. Usually he called first. Usually, too, he spoke in a booming voice. Only this time, after carefully closing the door behind him, his voice was remarkably soft, almost a whisper: “He’s dead.”

  Felt was startled but not really surprised. Having worked closely with him, having in fact taken over many of his duties, Felt was well aware of Clyde Tolson’s poor health.

  “Did he have another stroke?” Felt asked.

  “No, you don’t understand,” Mohr replied. “The director is dead.”2

  Although many found it easy to dislike John Mohr, almost everyone liked Mark Felt. That was the problem, some said; he had just a touch of the chameleon. Talking with Roy Cohn, he seemed an arch-conservative; with Robert Kennedy, an enlightened liberal. Yet, though Mohr and Felt were almost opposites, they had one thing in common: once the initial shock had worn off, each saw himself as the most logical person to succeed the director. Nor were they alone.

  In the hours ahead, there would be many whispered calls and conversations, as if, in an era of scrambler phones and antibugging devices, the whisper were still the only safe way to convey such momentous news. And there would be politicking—the testing of pressure points, attempts to collect on old favors, alerts to key men on the Hill and the real movers in such FBI support groups as the Society of Former Special Agents and the American Legion—yet with no assurance it would accomplish anything.

  If, as Kraft observed, fear was the cement holding the Bureau together, it did not lose its force with the director’s death but rather grew more binding, for now it was not the fear of one old man who, whatever his faults, was one of them, but of outsiders who, for the first time in nearly fifty years, would determine the Bureau’s fate.

  The news spread selectively at first. Assistant directors. Section heads. Their staffs. The fifty-nine field offices, whose territories covered every inch of the United States. The legats in nineteen foreign cities, from Tokyo to London.

  On the fifth floor of the Justice Department Building, the command post of the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation—known in recent years as FBIHQ but still called SOG by old-timers, for Seat of Government—there was little crying, but a tremendous sense of bewilderment and loss.

  For many of the agents, secretaries, typists, file clerks, translators, lab technicians, and fingerprint classifiers it was akin to the loss of a father, albeit one most had never met and seen only in passing. For the Federal Bureau of Investigation was undoubtedly the most paternalistic agency in the U.S. government. Its strict guardian—through innumerable memos and the FBI Manual, a book not only bigger but filled with more thou-shalt-nots than the Bible—told them how to perform every aspect of their jobs; suggested, with the strength of a command, who their friends should or should not be, what organizations they could or could not join; decided where they would live; monitored their morals; even told them what to wear and what they could weigh; and bestowed praise and awards, blame and punishments, when he decided they were due.

  Yet it was even more than that. For longer than most could remember, the director and the F
BI had been synonymous. To sever them now seemed a surgical impossibility. The question was, and it was far from rhetorical, Did the death of one mean the demise of the other?

  Some reactions were odd. One agent took a sheaf of correspondence to the director’s office for his signature, totally ignoring those who told him that the director was dead. And one assistant director ordered the whole Department of Justice Building sealed, with guards on every door.

  Before all this occurred, however, a few minutes after nine in the morning, John Mohr dialed the attorney general’s office.

  Ordinarily the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the attorney general of the United States shared the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building—the common corridor between their two offices being in some cases the only thing they had in common. But since his confirmation as AG was hung up in the Senate, Richard Kleindienst was still occupying the deputy AG’s office on the fourth floor, directly below that of the director.

  The arrangement seemed more than a little symbolic to Kleindienst’s staff. It also brought rueful smiles from other Justice Department officials whenever there was talk that the director should be “kicked upstairs,” for he was already up there, hovering over them like some all-knowing deity.

  Such talk had been common of late, and the acting attorney general had secretly participated in much of it. Although publicly Kleindienst spoke of the director with all the fervor of a disciple, privately he’d told William Sullivan, a former assistant to the director but now an FBI outcast, that, unlike most people, he didn’t believe the director was senile; he thought he was nuts.

  Yet, whatever his true feelings, the news hit Kleindienst hard.

  According to John Mohr, “To put it mildly, he was in a state of shock.”3

  It was as if a man walking on a tightrope had just been tossed a 500-pound boulder and told to juggle it.

  On February 15, over two months earlier, the White House had announced that Attorney General John Mitchell was resigning to head the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) and that his successor would be Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. A protégé of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona—credited with suggesting the “law and order” slogan of his 1964 campaign—Kleindienst had made it through the Senate confirmation hearings without a single dissenting vote, only to be called back after Jack Anderson’s release of the Dita Beard memo; the Senate Judiciary Committee this time focused on Kleindienst’s approval of the out-of-court settlement of three major antitrust cases the government had brought against ITT, and ITT’s almost simultaneous pledge of up to $400,000 toward the cost of the 1972 Republican National Convention.

  Just five days before, the hearings had finally ended, with the payoff charges still unproven, and the committee again voting for confirmation, this time 11 to 14. But the Senate floor fight was still ahead, with the final vote far from certain.*

  At the moment the last thing Kleindienst needed was another complication, and this could be the biggest of them all. Yet, seasoned politician that he was, he must have also realized that the news had a positive side: it was possible, if the right man were nominated and confirmed, that for the first time in decades the attorney general would be the actual, instead of merely the nominal, superior of the director of the FBI.

  And the choice would, Kleindienst suspected, probably be his own. Although by law the president would name the new director—a step John Mitchell had predicted would be “the most important appointment to be made by a president in this century”—Kleindienst was fairly sure Nixon would ask him to provide a candidate.4

  But before that he had to inform the president of the astonishing news.

  Like others once close to Nixon, Kleindienst rarely spoke to him in person anymore. Although still not public knowledge, Nixon’s self-imposed isolation, which had begun during the 1968 campaign, was near complete now. No matter how important the subject, even the attorney general could not call him directly but had to give his message to one of the “palace guard,” usually John Ehrlichman or H. R. Haldeman. Disliking Ehrlichman just as much as Ehrlichman disliked him, Kleindienst wasn’t left much of a choice. Pushing a button which automatically gave him a secure line to the White House switchboard, he identified himself and asked for the president’s chief of staff.

  The president had just come down from his quarters a few minutes before Haldeman entered the Oval Office. His “Oh, hi, Bob,” was left hanging when, without preamble, Haldeman said, “J. Edgar Hoover is dead.”

  Following an almost unbearably long silence, the president gasped audibly, then uttered two of his most-favored expletives: “Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!”5

  As Jeremiah O’Leary entered the city room of the Washington Star, someone yelled, “J. Edgar Hoover is dead!” Muttering, “Oh, shit!” O’Leary headed for the paper’s morgue. But, to his amazement, there was no prepared obit.

  There were, however, at least forty drawers of clippings and the Star being an afternoon paper, not even time to scan them. But having covered Hoover for so many years—for most as a highly favored “special correspondent,” though even he of late had made the dreaded “no contact” list*—O’Leary felt he knew Hoover as well as anyone, and within twenty minutes he’d run off a capsule history of the man, the Bureau, and their most famous cases, having to look up only two facts: Hoover’s birth date and his mother’s maiden name.

  But that astonishing omission of a prepared obit kept coming back to haunt him: We didn’t think that old bastard was mortal.6

  At the Washington bureau of the New York Times there was no such problem. Not only was there a frequently revised obit; a young reporter, Chris Lydon, had been working on a Hoover cover story for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Revising rapidly, he quickly finished it and got it off to New York.

  But when it appeared in print late that night the transition showed. In several places in the article the tense hadn’t been changed from present to past. Reading it, one got the strange feeling that the New York Times was not quite sure that J. Edgar Hoover was dead.7

  “There will never be another J. Edgar Hoover.”

  Jack Anderson abandoned the lead, tried another.

  “The news came early in the morning.”

  He didn’t like that either, or the attempts that followed. Finally, one rejected page later, he settled on:

  “J. Edgar Hoover died, as he would have wished, in harness.”

  Anderson had heard the news not from one of his legendary sources but via the capital’s fastest method of communication, the secretarial grapevine. He had been interviewing a minor governmental official when the man’s secretary broke in, “I thought you should know…J. Edgar Hoover is dead.”

  If he hadn’t dropped the paper clip he had been toying with, the bureaucrat might have successfully masked his shock.

  Hurrying back to his office, Anderson made a confirming call, then told his secretary, Opal Ginn, to alert the syndicate there would be a substitute column the next day. He did not consider dropping the series, which had another week to run. It was more important now than ever.

  Knowing he would be asked for one as soon as the news got out, Anderson, after finishing the substitute column, typed a brief statement:

  “J. Edgar Hoover transformed the FBI from a collection of hacks, misfits and courthouse hangers-on into one of the world’s most effective and formidable law enforcement organizations. Under his reign, not a single FBI man ever tried to fix a case, defraud the taxpayers or sell out his country.*

  “Hoover was also scrupulous at first not to step beyond the bounds of a policeman. But I would be hypocritical not to point out that in his fading years he sometimes stepped across those bounds.

  “I have been critical of the FBI for going beyond its jurisdiction to investigate the business dealings, sex habits and personal affairs of prominent Americans.

  “It is my hope for the country that Mr. Hoover’s successor will run the FBI as Hoover
did in the beginning.”

  It was an honest statement, yet, like the bureaucrat’s face, it also masked his personal feelings. But then how can you describe the tremendous sense of loss you feel on learning of the passing of one of your most worthy adversaries?8

  Mrs. Charles Robb had a 10:15 appointment with the director, but arrived well in advance. For a new writer, recently hired by the Ladies’ Home Journal, the interview was quite a coup—especially since the director almost never gave interviews, and hadn’t given one to a woman since 1964, eight years earlier, when, appearing before a group of Washington newswomen, he’d called the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.—among other things—“the most notorious liar in the country.” But then her relationship to the old man was special.

  At ten one of his assistants came out into the reception room and, speaking very softly, asked her, “Can you keep a secret?”

  Amused, she replied that she had kept more than a few when her father was president.

  “The director died during the night.”

  Like everyone else, she was shocked, but perhaps even more deeply than most, for she had known more than one side of the man. The Johnson girls had grown up across the street from Hoover, during the years when their father was a congressman. He had been like a kindly old uncle, who remembered each of their birthdays, helped them find their stray pets, even gave them a beagle to replace one who had died.

  By the time their father had become president, she and Luci realized Hoover had another side. For example, at the request of their father, he had ordered FBI investigations of each of their suitors, one such report ending her own much-publicized romance with a motion picture star.