J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Dulles admitted that if he were still CIA director, and a similar situation arose, he would deny the whole thing. He would even lie under oath, he said. Although, of course, he added, he would never lie to the president.

  All the accumulated frustrations of the committee came out at this session, all its suspicions that the FBI was hiding something. Why was Hoover, who so often maintained that the FBI did not evaluate or reach conclusions, so anxious to declare the dead Oswald the lone assassin and close the case? Ranklin asked. Was this what Hoover was hiding, that Oswald had been working for the FBI?

  RANKIN: “They would like for us to fold up and quit.”

  BOGGS: “This closes the case, you see. Don’t you see?”

  DULLES: “Yes, I see that.”

  RANKIN: “They found the man. There is nothing more to do. The commission supports their conclusions and we can go on home and that is the end of it.”

  Boggs, obviously worried about Hoover’s reaction if this discussion reached him, nervously remarked, “I don’t even like to see this being taken down.”

  Dulles: “Yes, I think this record ought to be destroyed.”*

  Boggs: “I would hope that none of these records are circulated to anybody.”35

  It was a vain hope. When the committee again met on January 27, a letter was waiting for them. So angered was Hoover that he risked exposing his own informant on the committee. “Lee Harvey Oswald was never used by this Bureau in an informant capacity,” the FBI director wrote. “He was never paid any money for furnishing information and he most certainly never was an informant of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the event you have any further questions concerning the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in this case, we would appreciate being contacted directly.”36

  But Hoover’s letter didn’t resolve the matter. It only exacerbated it. The committee needed something more than Hoover’s word. The problem was howto obtain it without so offending him that he would withdraw his cooperation. The committee was totally dependent on the FBI for its investigative data, the chairman noted. The January 27 meeting lasted for three and a half hours. More than two of them were spent on the Hoover problem. To question him now, after receiving the letter, would be to impugn his veracity. No, Rankin argued, no one was calling him a liar; all they were asking for was some documentary proof that he was telling the truth—a subtle distinction that almost certainly would have been lost on the FBI director. Rankin: “I don’t see how the country is ever going to be willing to accept it [the commission report], if we don’t satisfy them on this particular issue.”37 But how do you prove a negative? Dulles: “I don’t think it can [be proved] unless you believe Mr. Hoover, and so forth and so on, which probably most of the people will.”38 Russell said that he was willing to believe Hoover but that you couldn’t base the committee’s conclusions on that. But that was exactly what the committee did. Since no one had the nerve to confront the FBI director—for months the members debated ways to approach him—the committee finally simply accepted his assurances that neither Oswald nor Ruby had been an FBI informant.

  Then, on February 24, the committee discovered that the FBI had excised the Hosty entry from the typed copy of Oswald’s address book which had been supplied to the committee. It wasn’t even a very good job: the page number was misplaced and the margins weren’t the same. The FBI’s explanation—that only investigative leads had been copied and that since this wasn’t an investigative lead (they knew who Hosty was), it hadn’t been necessary to copy it—didn’t convince anyone, but by now the commission was beyond complaining.

  The testimony of the witnesses took up the summer months—Hoover testified, as did Alan Belmont and a carefully rehearsed James Hosty—after which the committee hurriedly wrote its final report, even though some of its members and staff privately admitted that a lot of questions remained unanswered. The commission member Ford opposed criticizing the FBI for having failed to inform the Secret Service that Oswald was in Dallas and working in a building located on the parade route, but Chairman Warren insisted it go in, and so the final report, which Warren presented to President Johnson on September 27, 1964, contained a muted, almost apologetic censure that was buried in the middle of the volume. Hoover retaliated by having Earl Warren’s name stricken from his Special Correspondents list.

  The complete report of the Warren Commission, including testimony and exhibits, ran to twenty-six volumes. Probably an equal number could have been devoted to what the commission was never told. Even though a member of the commission, the former CIA director Allen Dulles never saw fit to mention the plots to assassinate Castro, which continued up to the very day Kennedy was shot; a CIA contact passed a Cuban exile code-named AMLASH a poison device just minutes before the president was assassinated. Nor did the commission learn that the agency had been conspiring with the Mafiosi Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santos Trafficante, Jr., and thus had a vested interest in covering up any role they may have played in the Kennedy assassination.* The committee learned next to nothing about Jack Ruby, little more about certain of Lee Harvey Oswald’s associations, and nothing at all about the growing escalation of mob threats against the president and attorney general, as picked up by FBI bugs, taps, and informants. They were never informed of the Hosty note, or the Trafficante threat, or Marcello’s “Livarsi na petra di la scarpa!” or of any other assassination talk the FBI may have overheard and suppressed. Nor were they told that Hoover’s informant on the commission was Representative Gerald Ford.

  The Warren Commission concluded, as Hoover had maintained from the start, that the assassination of President Kennedy was the work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, and that there was no conspiracy, foreign or domestic. The commission further found that Jack Ruby had acted on his own in killing Oswald and that there was no other connection between the two men.

  All this may be true. Or, as the volumes of the House Select Committee on Assassinations indicate, there may have been a far different scenario. Thanks to the efforts of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, probably no one will ever know.

  Johnson, according to his biographer Robert Caro, “exercised more power in the Senate than any other man in the nation’s history.”40 In the 1950s, as he wove together the complex web of favors and threats that became his mantle of power, one minor strand was his chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that dealt with State, Justice, and the judiciary. And therefore “oversaw” the work of J. Edgar Hoover.

  The senator’s committee work did nothing to weaken the FBI director’s affinity for citizens of the Lone Star State. “They are a separate breed of man,” he said once to some newspaper editors. “I admire the intelligence and fearlessness of a man of that kind.”41 To the examples provided by Murchison and Richardson, fate had provided a neighbor on his block. The Johnson family had moved into a house on Thirtieth Place in 1945.

  Hoover’s recollections of the ensuing years could have been a paean to the virtues of small-town America in a time of postwar innocence.

  On occasional Sunday mornings, like a favorite uncle, Hoover would be invited over for breakfast with the family. The two Johnson girls, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines, considered the country’s number one G-man a protector. When their pet dog ran off somewhere in the well-tended shrubbery of the neighborhood, the congressman would ring the director’s doorbell. “Edgar, Little Beagle Johnson’s gone again. Let’s go find him.” Or the girls would race over by themselves, certain that their avuncular friend would interrupt one of his cowboy TV shows and help them out.

  Two decades later President Johnson, strolling across the White House lawn with the FBI director, suddenly snapped, “Edgar, come here!”

  Dumbfounded, Hoover measuredly replied, “I am here, Mr. President.”

  Johnson had been calling for Little Beagle’s successor, a beagle given the girls by their Thirtieth Place uncle when their first pet died. The gift bore the name of the giver.

  “I’m not calli
ng you, I’m calling the dog,” said the Texan known for a sidewinding sense of humor.42

  More than most men in public life, Johnson was unsuccessful in merging his private and official personalities. Grave and statesmanlike for an Oval Office interview with newspaper reporters, he paused thoughtfully when asked to name the “greatest living American.”

  “J. Edgar Hoover,” he finally replied. “Without Hoover, this country would have gone Communist 30 years ago.”

  To cronies who feared that the old man was abusing his police powers, LBJ responded in a different key.

  “I would rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”43

  In fact, President Johnson, despite his image, was never squeamish about the FBI director’s output.

  “Who went out with who, and who was doing what to who,” as the Kennedy factotum O’Donnell would put it, came directly from Hoover to LBJ.*44 The material included such “garbage,” according to one aide, that it was returned as unfit for a president’s eyes. Perhaps. But more made its way through, including transcripts of the amorous interludes of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the tapes as well, punctuated with the creaking of bedsprings.

  The president was not offended.

  “He sometimes found gossip about other men’s weaknesses a delicious hiatus from work,” said Johnson’s aide Bill Moyers, hinting that this interest may have inspired “constitutional violations” in pursuit of more of the same.

  But LBJ recognized the two-edged nature of this type of weapon. At his request, tapes and memoranda documenting some of his own questionable activities—sexual and financial—were lifted from the raw files of the FBI and sent over to the White House. They have not been seen since.

  Even so, it was clear to Moyers that the president “personally feared J. Edgar Hoover.”45

  It was reasonable to assume that the fabled FBI director would have gathered more information than, say, the jackals of the press.

  “The damn press always accused me of things I didn’t do,” LBJ told a former aide when he was in retirement. “They never once found out about the things I did do.”46

  Texas scuttlebutt about Johnson’s electoral shenanigans, including faked results in his 1948 Senate win and the enormous financial support he received from rich contractors and oil men, must have passed the rounds in the cabanas at La Jolla, where Hoover and Tolson vacationed each year. Specifically, in 1956 the director discovered a vote-buying scheme that worked out of Laredo County. His agents were thwarted, however, because, in the words of a FBI informant, Johnson “considers Laredo his private county.” If the agency started asking questions, “Mr. Johnson would be advised of this matter within six hours and would have the investigation stopped.”47

  But Hoover made a note for his files, as he did when Attorney General Brownell asked whether the FBI had investigated the Johnson’s purchase of an Austin radio station. The director found that the IRS had not become interested, in part because discreet inquiry was unlikely “in view of the close political ties of all employees of the local Internal Revenue Service with persons of local political prominence.”48

  This wasn’t proof that Johnson had cheated on his income taxes. It was a pretty good indication that he could have, if he’d wanted to.

  Rumor and innuendo stuck easily to LBJ. In 1962 Vice-President Johnson was described in a Bureau report as consorting with “hoodlum interests,”49 perhaps joining them in immoral activities.* Johnson’s name was also raised in an FBI inquiry into the peculiar demise of a man whose own inquiries had led to the indictment of Billie Sol Estes, a con artist who was close to LBJ.

  What did Hoover discover about these allegations, and scores of others? No one living is likely to find out. Citing privacy rights, the FBI has withheld some reports and censored the sense out of others. Then too, the huge collection of LBJ materials that Hoover amassed over the whole of Johnson’s political career has apparently dwindled.

  Many would have been as damaging to Hoover as to his president, for LBJ had made use of the FBI in rather surprising ways. In the 1950s he had asked John Henry Faulk, a radio humorist, to join the Texas Broadcasting Company as head of its public affairs division. Then the offer was suddenly withdrawn. A call to Hoover had revealed that Faulk’s political views had aroused the Bureau’s suspicions.†

  In fact, the FBI director often supplied Senator Johnson with background checks on potential employees, both at the growing radio-television empire in Texas and in his Senate office. Arguably, the agency was keeping subversives out of influential positions.

  But what was the government’s interest in setting up a liaison for the purpose of expediting FBI intimidation of anyone who attacked Johnson and hit too close to home? When Vice-President Johnson was annoyed with an editorial, the FBI’s DeLoach would see to it that agents descended upon the writer “to ascertain if (he) had any basis for making such false allegations.” The arrangement was simplicity itself. The offended Johnson would have Walter Jenkins, an assistant, contact DeLoach for help—an action that Director Hoover had described as “the thing to do.”50

  When Johnson assumed the presidency, DeLoach replaced Courtney Evans. LBJ’s need for FBI aid was apparently so unremitting that a private White House line was installed to DeLoach’s bedside. Eventually rumors developed that DeLoach would soon succeed Hoover, who had begun to fret about his underling’s intimacy with Johnson.

  And DeLoach seemed to have a powerful ally in federal law itself. Hoover’s seventieth birthday—and day of mandatory retirement from government service—was rapidly approaching. January 1, 1965.

  First, Tolson put DeLoach in the unpleasant position of suggesting to Johnson that the requirement be waived—and his own chances of becoming director thereby diminished. “Deke,” said Johnson, “I hope you know what you’re getting into.”51

  To a senator, he had said, “I don’t want to be the one that has to pick his successor.”52

  Press speculation was only adding confusion to the situation. Hoover would sulk when DeLoach was mentioned as a good choice to succeed him. LBJ, typically, became furious when reporters seemed able to predict his next move.

  In early May of 1964, the Newsweek editor Ben Bradlee learned, from Johnson’s press secretary, Bill Moyers, that the president intended to replace J. Edgar Hoover. “We finally got the bastard,” Moyers told Bradlee. “Lyndon told me to find his replacement.” The leak was so momentous that Bradlee prepared a cover story on LBJ’s search for Hoover’s successor.

  On May 8 the president summoned reporters to the Rose Garden for a special announcement, the reading of an executive order. Standing next to the president, Hoover beamed as LBJ read from that directive. “J. Edgar Hoover is a hero to millions of decent citizens, and an anathema to evil men,” he intoned. For that reason, Johnson had determined to exempt his FBI director “from compulsory retirement for an indefinite period of time.”53

  Hoover, the consummate bureaucrat, understood the whiplash in the last little phrase. The “indefinite period of time” was the short leash in Johnson’s hand. Theoretically it could be yanked any time he damn well pleased.

  On the fortieth anniversary of his assumption of the directorship, Hoover did not have a contract.*

  Moments before appearing before the TV cameras, Johnson had turned to Moyers and whispered, “You call up Ben Bradlee and tell him, ‘Fuck you.’ ” For years afterward, Bradlee would recall, people said, ‘You did it, Bradlee. You did it, you got him appointed for life.”54

  Hoover had never been inspired with the notion that covering the entrance to the Soviet embassy might yield useful information in the Cold War against communism.

  This brainstorm, according to Sullivan, was Johnson’s. In particular, since “Johnson was almost as paranoid about the Communist threat as Hoover was,”56 he wanted to know whenever a senator or congressman visited the embassy. As criticism of his policies in Vietnam began to heat up, he was apparently sincere in his be
lief that opponents had fallen under the spell of Moscow.

  The FBI was the place to go for this kind of thing. And for special protection, as well.

  “The President was obsessed with fear concerning possible assassination,”57 DeLoach told the Church committee in 1975. For the first time in its crimebusting history, Hoover’s Bureau was supplying agents to ride shotgun on Air Force One. Or stand duty on street corners as the presidential motorcade raced by. Hoover’s investigators were therefore used as bodyguards, and the FBI director did not complain.

  Johnson was also learning just how far he could push the Bureau when it came to intimidating or punishing anyone who disagreed with him. The limits were few.

  “Those people don’t work for us any more.”

  The attorney general was quite correct. His direct phone to Hoover had been put back on Gandy’s desk. Communications between SOG and the Oval Office were brisk. Dossiers on Jack Kennedy’s appointees were conveyed to Johnson with dispatch. RFK called this turn of events the “revolt of the FBI.”58

  Like Hoover, Lyndon Johnson was deeply suspicious of “the Harvards.” Both had been forced by circumstances to keep their true feelings toward the Kennedys bottled up for almost three years. Now each fueled the other’s hate. Johnson would avidly read whatever Hoover dished up, and encourage his onetime neighbor to produce even more. According to one former FBI agent, the new president’s first request was for confidential material on upwards of twelve hundred actual and presumed adversaries.

  But the FBI director did not entirely neglect his superior at Justice. In July 1964 he warned RFK that a new booklet was about to be published. The author intended to “make reference to your alleged friendship with the late Miss Marilyn Monroe…He will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate, and that you were in Miss Monroe’s home at the time of her death.”*59