J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Did Kennedy understand the critical distinction that Hoover had created between wiretaps and bugs, which might seem to be pretty similar, morally and legally? With his superiors apparently none the wiser, the FBI director had labored and secretly brought forth a two-track surveillance capability of astonishing flexibility.

  On the one hand, he was reporting to an attorney general who fully shared his conviction that Congress was wrong to try to ban the use of wiretaps. It would be natural to infer that Hoover’s support of Kennedy’s approachlegislation approving the AG’s right to order the FBI to set up TELSURs—indicated at once a lawman’s desire to use a proved investigative tool and his admirable recognition that such usage should be subject to restriction.

  But Hoover had slyly opened up a whole new can of worms with his May 4 memo. While Kennedy aides were debating the fine points of the proposed legislation, the FBI director had just awarded himself the right to totally unrestricted use of an alternative device. One that, to be installed, generally required his agents to “break and enter,” in direct violation of criminal law.

  In retrospect it is a breathtaking achievement.

  At the time the solons of the Hill and the pundits of political journalism thought that the discussion of Kennedy’s proposed legislation went to the heart of basic constitutional principles. How is the right to privacy to be balanced against the need to safeguard the security of the nation? Passage or failure of the legislation would greatly influence the character of law enforcement throughout the land.

  They might have been discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, as medieval theologians were supposed to have done. SOG had mooted the debate.

  Eugene “Bull” Connor had a highly inventive plan.

  As public safety director for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, he was in charge of the police department, but an unprecedented event that was imminent had convinced him that unprecedented measures were required, and he sought the aid of the local Ku Klux Klan.

  “By God, if you are going to do this thing, do it right!” he enjoined one KKK member.

  On May 14, just days away, a Greyhound bus carrying a small group of “freedom riders,” blacks and whites who were participating in the Congress of Racial Equality’s series of sit-ins throughout the old South, would arrive in Birmingham.

  Connor expected violence. In order that his expectations would not be disappointed, he was determined to orchestrate some. First, he assured the Klan, he would turn a blind eye. No police officer would appear on the scene for “15 to 20 minutes” after the bus pulled in to the terminal—directly across the street from the city hall police station.

  Then he gave tactical advice, presumably based upon his years of peacekeeping experience. When any freedom riders entered the segregated bathrooms, recommended practice was to follow them, strip them naked, and beat them to “look like a bulldog got hold of them.” He promised that any rider who outraged public decency by emerging nude from the rest rooms would be sent to the penitentiary. He would see to that by “fixing” the jury.

  Connor suggested that, in the event a policeman was constrained to arrest a Klansman, “the Negro” be blamed for the fight. And he had another promise. Any Klansman tried and convicted would receive a light sentence.

  Assured of Connor’s cooperation, the Klan arranged to have sixty men ready to assault the men and women who were traveling together across state lines on a public bus, as was legal under the laws of interstate commerce. The forces would be divided into squads of ten men each, who would arm themselves with baseball bats, clubs, and pipes. Klan members were warned not to bring along a pistol, unless they had a license for it.

  All of this information was sent to J. Edgar Hoover on May 12, two days before the scheduled arrival of the buses in Birmingham, in a telex from the Birmingham SAC.46 He did nothing.

  In the bloodbath of May 14, one squad leader stood out in the memory of horrified victims and witnesses. He savagely attacked a black man who was waiting at the bus station for his fiancée to arrive, then restrained the man while other KKKers pummeled him. This leader also beat a newspaper photographer unconscious and ran after a second newsman who had photographed the incident, seizing and smashing his camera.

  Originally armed with a lead-weighted baseball bat, this enthusiastic Klansman switched to a blackjack, though he missed his aim when he tried to coldcock a radio reporter he had just slammed against a wall. Finally, the violent leader had his throat slit in a street fight with some local black men. Eight stitches were required. For his medical expenses he received $50 from the FBI and “for services rendered” a bonus of $125.

  Gary Thomas Rowe, Hoover’s chief paid informer working undercover in the KKK, was never charged with crimes for his Sunday spree, nor was he ever to be restrained by any of his five “handlers” over the next few years.* The FBI director had known beforehand that the Klan had planned the ambush and that his man Rowe intended to carry his special bat.

  But the director’s prior information about the horrific incident went even deeper. On May 5, nearly two weeks earlier, the Birmingham SAC Thomas Jenkins had reported that a policeman in Connor’s intelligence branch, Sergeant Tom Cook, was a pipeline to the KKK. One day before that, Hoover had received the tentative schedule of the freedom rides from his plant on the CORE project. The FBI informant Simeon Booker, Washington bureau chief for black-oriented magazines like Ebony and Jet, wanted the Bureau to know that he might be facing danger and need protection.

  He was whistling in the wind.

  Jenkins, who had known about Cook’s Klan connections as early as April 24, telephoned the sergeant on May 14 to tell him that the bus was on the road from nearby Anniston.†

  The Klan was at battle stations, primed, when the bus heaved into view. Fortunately, no one brought one Klavern’s machine gun, as had been discussed.

  For a while, law enforcement officers in the South were well pleased with themselves. When questioned about his handling of the attack at the Greyhound terminal, Connor was flip. He explained that he had been shorthanded because it was Mother’s Day.

  With Hoover keeping hands off and RFK engaged with an inquiry into the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Dixie officials acted with little restraint, until the day all of the white ambulances in Montgomery, Alabama, became inoperable.

  The attorney general had come to realize that a crisis was building. The freedom riders were determined to continue their protest, and the governor of Alabama, John Patterson, refused to accept Kennedy’s telephone calls. Eventually, the president intervened, Seigenthaler met with Patterson, and the governor and his highway patrol chief promised to protect the next bus.

  This time twenty-one black and white students alighted at the Montgomery bus terminal to face a crowd of about a thousand. As John Doar, chief assistant in the Civil Rights Division, reported on the phone to the attorney general’s office, “Oh, there are fists, punching…There are no cops. It’s terrible. It’s terrible.” Once again the FBI had alerted the local police force as the bus headed toward town.

  In the bloody melee, Seigenthaler raced up in a car to try to rescue two white girls surrounded by women slapping them with purses and cursing wildly. “Come on,” he said. “I’m a federal man.” Knocked unconscious from behind, he would be ignored, stretched out on the sidewalk, for nearly half an hour. Policemen finally drove him to a hospital, because, as their commissioner explained, “every white ambulance in town reported their vehicles had broken down.”48

  Attorney General Kennedy immediately ordered in a force of U.S. marshals, and the course of the Justice Department in the civil rights struggle was set. Hundreds of times Robert and his aides would come between the opposing sides, pleading for peace but eager to uphold the law.

  Kennedy apparently had no idea that Hoover’s agency had been so fully apprised of Connor’s plans in Birmingham or was continuing to pass along information to officials like the police commissioner of Montgomery.

  As h
e had in regard to the Apalachin conclave, Hoover would contend that he had done his job. And no more.

  Hoover had at least one thing in common with the beautiful brunette Sinatra had introduced to JFK at the Sands Hotel in 1960. Both used the back entrance to the White House.

  After the FBI director met secretly with the president for lunch on March 22, 1962, Judith Campbell lost that privilege. The bug in the Armory Lounge had gradually led him to a discovery that even the old cynic must have found stunning. Campbell, mistress of the president, was also romantically involved with Sinatra, Giancana, and Johnny Roselli, who was the Las Vegas and Hollywood representative of the Chicago mob boss.

  Hoover’s education about the power and influence of the nationwide organization he had belatedly discovered at Apalachin had been a crash course.

  Less than a month before the election, on October 18, he was informing the CIA and military security agencies that Giancana had met three times with a hit man who intended to assassinate the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in November. Actually, according to the mob leader, the “assassin” intended to pass a “pill” to a “girl,” who would slip it into the revolutionary’s food or drink.49

  That same day Hoover exhorted his agents in New York, Chicago, and Miami to get more information and keep close tabs on Giancana, noting that he himself was disseminating the story in a “carefully paraphrased version.” To hide his use of a MISUR from other intelligence chiefs, he had cited “a source whose reliability has not been tested but who is in a position to obtain information.”50

  But the hated CIA was hiding even more.

  Deputy Director Richard Bissell had had a brainstorm in August. Would not certain members of the gambling syndicates, deprived of hefty casino profits by Castro’s rigorously socialist state, have a sound business motive for getting rid of him? Robert Maheu, a favored Hoover aide during World War II, had gone into the private security business. According to an internal CIA memo, Maheu was asked “to make his approach to the syndicate as appearing to represent big business organizations which wished to protect their interests in Cuba.”51

  Undeceived as to who their real employer was, Roselli and Giancana took warmly to the idea, with one exception. They told Maheu they wanted “no part of” the $150,000 payment approved by the agency. Clearly, the man who knew the real value of a few thousand votes beside the Chicago River could shrewdly estimate the nonfinancial rewards that might come to a friend of the nation’s international intelligence-gathering arm.

  Unknown to the CIA, Giancana had asked Maheu to arrange a bug on the comedian Dan Rowan, who seemed much too friendly with the mobster’s girlfriend, Phyllis McGuire of the famous and beloved McGuire Sisters trio. Caught in the act of attaching a tap to the phone in Rowan’s Las Vegas hotel room, a man hired by a Maheu associate was arrested* by the local sheriff and bailed out by Roselli.

  This farcical episode—Giancana laughed so hard he almost swallowed his cigar, according to Roselli—irked the director of the FBI. Determined to have the luckless wiretapper prosecuted, he gradually began to realize that more was at stake than the flouting of right-to-privacy laws. Seismic rumbles were heard from the direction of enemy headquarters in Langley.

  On April 18, 1961, Hoover lost all affection for Maheu, who would tell the FBI only that the aborted incident had been connected to a project “on behalf of the CIA relative to anti-Castro activities.”52 He suggested that his former colleagues contact the spy agency directly.

  According to a summary memo sent to RFK on May 22, Hoover learned from the CIA that Maheu and Giancana had indeed been engaged to conspire against the Cuban leader, although agency officials did not want to know the details of the “dirty business” the pair came up with.53

  He did not mention to the attorney general that Giancana had once discussed the very dirty business of murder as an “anti-Castro activity.” Had he neglected to make the connection? Or was he holding his cards close to his chest, suspecting that he could learn more if he didn’t alarm the CIA—or perhaps his immediate superior—by admitting how much he already knew?

  The CIA let Hoover know that the Las Vegas comedy somehow involved national security, the Justice Department did not pursue the prosecution of the wiretapping charges, and the director of the FBI watched and wondered.

  And heard. By November, he knew that Judith Campbell had placed calls to the White House on at least two occasions,* once from the FBI-tapped telephone in Sam Giancana’s house.†

  On December 11 he had a different kind of bombshell to place on Robert Kennedy’s desk. The ongoing Chicago surveillance had revealed a disturbing confidence in Giancana’s attitude. He seemed certain that he could get the president of the United States to call off the heat. There was the Sinatra conduit, which he meant to use to contact both Jack and Robert. And there was Joe Kennedy, Sr.

  Giancana had channeled an undetermined amount of cash through the Kennedy dynast to help his son win the essential West Virginia primary.* He had also pumped up Teamsters Union muscle, undoubtedly leading to the twisting of arms and the conversion of hearts and minds. But this earnest effort had not been rewarded, Giancana felt, and he had been overheard shrieking that he would never donate another penny to a Kennedy campaign.

  Hoover’s deadpan paraphrase of the conversation was subtly malicious. To his boss, the president’s brother, he would write, “He made a donation to the campaign of President Kennedy but was not getting his money’s worth.”57 The insult was palpable.

  What happened between the three Kennedys during the next few days can only be surmised. Robert would obviously warn John that Hoover believed the story (that is, had yet another arrow in his quiver), whether it was true or not. Typically, the attorney general would have confronted Joe, certainly to ask about the tale and probably to rant and rave. He’d had occasion to snap feistily at his father more than once during the campaign, when clumsy missteps threatened to undercut the mint-new Kennedy image of uncorrupted, idealistic youthfulness. And Robert would surely be writhing furiously at this latest twist of Hoover’s thumbscrew.

  On December 18 the head of the clan, who was vacationing in the sun and balmy beach air at the family estate in Palm Beach, suffered a massive stroke. He was never able to speak again, though he stayed alive for almost eight years—during which two sons were killed and the third disgraced.

  Hoover found out about a third telephone call.

  On February 27, as the Kennedys still reeled from the shock of losing, for all practical purposes, the advice and encouragement of their father, possibly as the result of a telephone call Robert Kennedy may have made, another old man eased into a fatherly role. In identical memos to Robert and to O’Donnell, the FBI director expressed his concern that Campbell, who had called the White House at least three times to his knowledge, was an associate of Roselli and of Sam Giancana, whom he described as “a prominent Chicago underworld figure.”58

  JFK presumably saw this new indication of Hoover’s spidery watchfulness and knew that a copy was tucked into his files.

  On March 22 the president and his FBI chief met privately for lunch in the White House living quarters. “What actually transpired at that luncheon may never be known,” said a Senate report thirteen years later, “as both participants are dead and the FBI files contain no records relating to it.”59

  Perhaps for the first time Jack Kennedy had no doubts that Hoover now possessed information that, if leaked, could destroy his presidency. And Jack had to handle this problem on his own.

  This could hurt you very badly, Mr. President, is the likely approach Hoover took, imputing a patriotic motive to his violation of White House privacy. It would have been his style to emphasize the connection to the boss of the Chicago Mafia and let the other matter of Mrs. Campbell materialize, unexpressed, on its own.

  I’ll do everything I can to protect you, but if a reporter got hold of this story…, Hoover may have warned. Always eager to nail down the particulars, he must have astonishe
d Kennedy with the amount of information he had in hand on Giancana, Roselli, Sinatra, and Mrs. Campbell. It would have been strange if the sanctimonious bachelor had not lectured the younger man a bit on the sacred responsibility of high office.

  He did not have to mention Inga, who would have been on both their minds. Compared with this, Jack’s unknowing involvement with an older woman who may or may not have been a Nazi spy was a youthful escapade.

  Many speculate that Hoover used this climactic luncheon to unveil another surprise—his discovery that the CIA was behind Giancana’s plot to assassinate Castro.*

  But Kennedy was innocent of that foolishness. That was not true of the liaison with Mrs. Campbell, who had actually, according to White House logs, telephoned him seventy times since his inauguration.

  Both men knew, though from very different perspectives, how much power J. Edgar Hoover now wielded over his commander in chief.

  And perhaps John Kennedy matured somewhat that day. Now head of the family clan, now faced with the increasingly seamy realities of bureaucratic infighting and his own vulnerabilities, he apparently took steps to protect himself and his job. He made the last recorded call to Judith from the White House line.

  The following day, as Hoover knew from the Los Angeles SAC, the president intended to spend the weekend with Sinatra. Hopeful of establishing a kind of West Coast White House, the singer had added two guest houses to his estate in Palm Springs, put in a helipad, and wired the place for serious communications: five private telephone lines, equipment for teletype facilities, and, according to the FBI report, “enough cable available to handle a switchboard if necessary.”61 Arrangements also covered the special amenities for which the host was famous and which the president had greatly enjoyed on past occasions.