J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  *Assistant Attorney General McLaren was caught so off guard by his superior’s secret deal making that he wrote Attorney General Mitchell, “I trust that the attached FBI report inaccurately reflects the understanding received from the Department.” Mitchell didn’t even bother to respond.15

  †Richard Danner was, after all, a former Miami SAC and and onetime Hoover favorite. The minute he walked in the door of the Justice Department and signed in with the FBI guard, Hoover’s office was probably alerted that he was in the building and not on his way to see the director.

  *“Interviews” with Hoover appeared in a number of publications, but they were based on scripted answers to selected questions, the reporters never having actually talked to the director, but only to his representatives in Crime Records.

  *Ken Clawson later joined the Nixon administration as White House director of communications and penned the infamous “Canuck” letter that was used to discredit the Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie.

  *“To get Hoover off the hook,” as Mitchell himself later put it,57 in January 1971 the attorney general submitted the case to a federal grand jury, which voted to indict Father Philip Berrigan, Sister McAlister, and four others. Father Daniel Berrigan, whom the FBI director had identified as one of the leaders of the plot, was not indicted.

  In April 1971 Hoover’s sensational kidnap and bomb plot charges were dropped, and the defendants were subsequently tried for their antidraft and related activities.

  In April 1972, after an eleven-week trial (the former attorney general Ramsey Clark defended Berrigan), the jury deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal on the principal charges but convicted Father Berrigan and Sister McAlister on the minor charge of smuggling contraband letters.

  In July 1972, two months after J. Edgar Hoover’s death, the government dropped the entire case.

  34

  Under Siege

  Envisioning FBI agents watching him from every window, Charles “Chuck” Elliott drove down the alley several times before he stopped behind 4936 Thirtieth Place NW and leaped out to make the snatch.

  Although it took less than a minute, and there was no indication he’d been observed, he sped out of the alley and drove at high speed back to Jack Anderson’s office on Sixteenth Street.

  Once in his own cubicle, which he shared with several other apprentice “investigative reporters,” Elliott spread a copy of the Washington Post on the floor and dumped the garbage bag containing J. Edgar Hoover’s trash.

  Sorting through it, Elliott discovered that the FBI director drank Jack Daniel’s Black Label whiskey and Irish Mist liqueur, brushed his teeth with Ultra Brite, washed with Palmolive soap, and shaved with Noxzema.

  There were also a number of discarded menus, which Hoover had written out for Annie Fields, on embossed notepaper headed, “From the office of The Director.” One, apparently for a Saturday or a Sunday, read, “Breakfast (For 2) 10:45 A.M. Fruit, Hot Cakes, Country Sausage, Eggs, Coffee.” For dinner, to be served at 6:15 P.M., there was “Crab Bisque, Spaghetti with Meat Balls, Asparagus (Hot), Sliced Tomatoes, Sliced Onions, Bibb Lettuce, Peppermint Stick Ice Cream, Strawberries.”

  This perhaps explained the empty bottles of Gelusil Antiacid pills Elliott also found.

  On learning that he was under FBI surveillance—again, for who knew how many times*—the columnist Jack Anderson had decided to turn the tables on J. Edgar Hoover and conduct an “FBI-style” investigation of the director himself. In addition to the “trash cover,” Elliott had followed Hoover to and from work (without the FBI picking up the tail); observed his lunches at the Mayflower and his haircuts at the Waldorf barbershop; and interviewed his neighbors (one long-haired youth said Hoover was afraid to get out of his bulletproof limousine while he was playing in the street; he and his chauffeur would just sit there, waiting, until he went inside).

  Anderson also dug deeper. Interviewing a former manager of the Del Charro, he learned that during Hoover and Tolson’s California vacations all of their bills were paid by the Texas oil millionaire Clint Murchison, who in turn charged them to one of the insurance companies he owned. What Anderson didn’t discover was that America’s top cop double billed the government.

  Hoover reacted predictably to Anderson’s columns. He had Charles Elliott investigated and placed under surveillance; tripled his FBI escort; made other arrangements for the pickup of his trash; and wrote a letter of complaint not to Anderson but to Fortune Pope, president of Bell-McClure Syndicate, which syndicated Anderson’s “Washington Merry-Go-Round” columns—only to be informed by an executive vice-president that Bell-McClure stood behind Anderson’s facts and that, incidentally, for his information, Mr. Pope no longer had an ownership interest in Bell-McClure.

  On January 3, 1971, the Los Angeles Times reported that the government purchased a new limousine for J. Edgar Hoover every year, at a cost of about $30,000.* By contrast, the Secret Service leased the president’s bulletproof limo, for approximately $5,000. The story was by Jack Nelson.

  On January 17 Nelson broke the Jack Shaw firing story: “Letter Ends FBI Career: Hoover Blackballs Ex-Agent Who Was Critical of Him.” The American Civil Liberties Union had filed a suit on behalf of Shaw, claiming FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had failed to observe civil service procedures in suspending the agent and had violated his rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth amendments.

  On January 29 the Justice Department, reversing a long-standing policy, released the FBI’s figures on minority employment. Of the Bureau’s 7,910 special agents, only 108 were nonwhites (51 Negroes, 41 Spanish Americans, 13 Orientals, and 3 American Indians). Moreover, less than 10 percent of all the FBI’s 18,592 employees were minority group members.

  On learning that Jack Nelson and the columnist Carl Rowan both apparently had this information and were getting ready to publish it, Attorney General Mitchell had attempted to mute the effect by releasing it himself—over the very strong objections of J. Edgar Hoover.

  It was not Hoover’s month for Jacks. The FBI director started his seventysixth year under fire. And it immediately got worse.

  On February 1 George McGovern took up the Shaw case on the floor of the Senate. Declaring this “an injustice that cries out for remedy,”1 the Democratic presidential hopeful requested that the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice conduct an immediate investigation.

  There was a bit of buck-passing here. The subcommittee was chaired by another Democratic presidential aspirant, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who, well aware that the FBI had extensive files on him, as well as his family, was in no hurry to pick up the gauntlet.

  Again, Hoover’s reaction was predictable. He had the files searched for derogatory information on McGovern. The result was an eighteen-page synopsis of hearsay and gossip, mostly culled from McGovern’s opponents in past political campaigns. The choicest tidbits were then leaked, including an old, baseless smear that would resurface throughout the forthcoming election campaign, that while a college student McGovern had deserted a pregnant girlfriend.

  A few days after his speech, McGovern received an anonymous letter. Typed on FBI stationery and purportedly written by ten current special agents, it stated that FBI morale was at an all-time low because of the Shaw case and requested a congressional investigation of the Bureau’s “cult of personality.”

  To discredit the letter, one of Hoover’s assistants told the publisher of Finance that it had been penned by the KGB. In short, the senator had been duped by Soviet agents.

  But Tolson was unwilling to let it go at that. Doubling the ante, he had the Bureau’s twenty top executives write McGovern. The associate director’s own letter set the tone. Labeling McGovern an “opportunist,” Tolson claimed the senator had attacked Mr. Hoover because he urgently needed publicity to buoy his floundering political career. “You are not the first person I have encountered during almost 50 years in Washington,” Tolson wrote, “whose ambition has far exceeded his ability, an
d I cannot help wondering how many other esteemed career public servants will be maligned or abused before your political balloon runs out of hot air.”

  Parroting Tolson, John Mohr observed, “I cannot help recalling the ‘old saw’ about political ambition bringing out the worst possible traits of character in weak and expedient men.”

  Almost all of the letters attack, rightly, the senator’s use of an anonymous communication. Many, however, went beyond this, commenting on McGovern’s personal or political ambitions. None addressed the charges, with the inadvertent exception of James Gale, who apparently got carried away and accused the director’s critics of “trying to picture Mr. Hoover as an egomaniac, arbitrary, capricious and senile person whose only aim is to personally aggrandize himself.”2

  McGovern inserted nineteen of the letters in the Congressional Record. Only one letter was missing, that of Assistant to the Director William Sullivan, who was late responding (his letter was placed in the Record on April Fool’s Day). Within the Bureau hierarchy, it was deemed a less than wholehearted defense of the director: “Mr. Hoover’s unique record, down through the decades, speaks for itself. Any commentary from me would be superfluous…”3

  Mohr and Felt saw Sullivan’s cautious equivocation as evidence that he was angling for the directorship in case Hoover was forced to retire, and they were probably right.

  The average age of the twenty FBI executives who wrote McGovern was fifty-eight years; their average time in the Bureau, thirty-one years. This, McGovern noted, was part of the problem, and one of the reasons he wanted to secure congressional review of the administration of the FBI.

  Again, nothing came of this request, and few, outside of the FBI, took McGovern’s charges seriously. He was, after all, running for election, and at least part of his evidence, the anonymous letter, was suspect.

  Actually, although Hoover didn’t realize it at the time, McGovern’s attack helped him in the one place where help mattered the most, the White House.

  The pressure was not off, however. Suddenly, after years of near-idolization, J. Edgar Hoover was no longer untouchable. The FBI director was now fair game.

  In early February the Washington Post ran a two-part series by Ronald Kessler entitled, “FBI Wiretapping: How Widespread?” Kessler’s carefully researched articles cast doubt on the accuracy of the wiretap figures the FBI director reported to Congress (former attorney general Ramsey Clark claimed the correct numbers were at least double those cited by Hoover, who he said had the habit of removing taps just before his congressional appearance so as to lower the totals); identified Horace Hampton as the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company official who handled FBI wiretaps; noted that numerous congressmen believed they had been the subjects of FBI taps; and quoted Robert Amory, Jr., the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence from 1952 to 1962, as saying that during his tenure White House officials had shown him evidence that his phones had been tapped by the FBI. Amory said he suspected that he’d been tapped because he’d favored admitting Red China to the United Nations.4

  An FBI spokesman denied all these charges.

  A couple of days later the director called in Sullivan. He was due to make his annual appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee the following month. Could he persuade Haig to remove some of the special taps? Sullivan said he’d try.

  Seizing his chance, Sullivan went one better: he asked Haig if all of them could be eliminated. The Halperin tap, for example, had been in use for twenty-one months—long after Morton Halperin had left the government—and had produced nothing of value. Haig said he’d check, then called back to say, Okay, take them off.

  On February 10, 1971, the last nine of the seventeen Kissinger-ordered, White House-approved wiretaps were removed.

  Sullivan queried Hoover: Did he now want the logs, summaries, authorizations, and other documentation relating to the Kissinger wiretaps sent to his office?

  No, the director responded, Sullivan was to keep them in his own office, in a secure, off-the-record capacity.

  Coincidentally, just four days after the taps were removed, President Richard Nixon had his own secret taping system installed in the White House. The seed J. Edgar Hoover had accidentally planted shortly after Nixon’s election had finally flowered.

  The taping system Richard Nixon had installed was automatic: to record a conversation, the president didn’t need to activate it; but then neither could he turn it off. (“For want of a toggle switch,” a White House staffer later reportedly said, “the presidency was lost.”)5

  Although there is no documented evidence that the FBI director knew of the secret taping system—even Rose Mary Woods supposedly didn’t know—he probably did. James Rowley, then director of the Secret Service, which installed the system, for one was convinced that “of course Hoover was aware.”

  Rowley did not know this as a fact, but rather surmised it. In an interview with William R. Corson, Rowley remarked, “There’s a portable oscilloscope that you can carry around in your pocket—it’s very small—that will tell you if you’re being taped. Hoover was obsessed with this sort of thing and he was very much into using this type of device.”6 As a wry afterthought, Rowley added that perhaps it went without saying that the Secret Service did not search the director of the FBI when he visited the president.

  February ended just as badly as it had begun. On the twenty-eighth, Clark Mollenhoff, Washington bureau chief of the Des Moines Register, reported, “There is grave concern at the White House over some of the more recent controversies involving FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, and an effort will be made to replace him prior to next year’s election campaign.”

  Other reporters had speculated similarly, but Mollenhoff was known to be especially close to the Nixon administration. Also, eschewing the usual vague attributions, Mollenhoff so phrased his report that he seemed to be quoting the president directly.

  “The White House has concluded that, for the benefit of Mr. Nixon’s political image in 1972 and for the long-time value of the Hoover image, a way must be found to force the issue on the resignation. The President has said this must be arranged so as to accord Hoover full honors for his contribution and to give the least satisfaction to Hoover’s critics.”

  There was only one hopeful note. Mollenhoff also stated, “Perhaps the strongest thing going for Hoover at present is the identity of his major critics—Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and George McGovern…Nixon doesn’t want to be in a position of appearing to bow to criticism from two Democrats who are likely to be vying for the chance to oppose him for the presidency in 1972.”

  It was in the open now. Even Nixon wanted him out.

  The columnist Jack Anderson had used trash covers, surveillances, and interviews to investigate J. Edgar Hoover.

  On the night of March 8, 1971—while millions of Americans were watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier heavyweight championship fight on TV—a small number of the Bureau’s enemies, “perhaps three or four,” according to one account,7 adopted still another FBI technique. They burglarized the FBI’s resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania, carrying off more than one thousand documents.

  Like most resident agencies, the Media office was small. Only two agents were assigned there, and they occupied a single suite on the second floor of the Delaware County Building, which had no alarm system. Although there were secure filing cabinets, the agents stored in them not documents but their guns, handcuffs, and credentials.

  Getting in was easy; picking what to take, less so. Passing up the bulky manuals, much of the internal paperwork, and all of the criminal cases, the burglars concentrated on the security files.

  Media’s, however, was not a typical resident agency. Located in a quiet Philadelphia suburb, it was surrounded by academia. Most of the documents dealt with investigations on college campuses—twenty-two institutions in all—although a spillover of serials from the Philadelphia field office gave glimpses of some of the FBI’s more widespread interests and practices. />
  It has become an FBI legend that when the Media RA arrived for work the following morning, and discovered his office had been burglarized, he made two calls, the first to SOG and the second to his wife, telling her to begin packing.

  The Media break-in touched off one of the most intensive investigations in the history of the FBI. Hoover’s first reaction, once he’d assigned blame (the resident agent was suspended without pay for one month and given a disciplinary transfer to Atlanta), was to order the closing of all 538 resident agencies. Although John Mohr persuaded him to rescind the order, 103 offices were closed and security beefed up on those remaining. Though classified a major special, with the codename MEDBURG, and headed by Assistant Director Roy Moore, the case was never solved—at least not by the FBI.

  According to the writer Sanford Ungar, who developed his own sources familiar with the operation, the participants, about twenty antiwar activists, “most but not all of them from the Philadelphia area,” were divided into three separate units: “the thieves, who actually broke into the resident agency and removed the documents; the sorters, who determined which of the papers were worth circulating; and the distributors, who duplicated them and chose the reporters and organizations they thought would be appropriate recipients.”8

  The latter apparently had an excellent sense of timing. For two weeks they let the FBI sweat, before sending out the first batches of Xeroxed documents, to carefully selected senators, congressmen, and newsmen. Although Attorney General Mitchell tried to stop their publication, threatening to obtain a court order, the Washington Post published the first story on March 24.

  Another week passed, and there were more shipments.