J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  A black congressman, Parren J. Mitchell, was sent J. Edgar Hoover’s order to investigate all black student unions and similar organizations. The president of Swarthmore College was sent a packet identifying the campus police chief, the switchboard operator, and the secretary to the registrar as FBI informants. The Boy Scouts of America, Inc., was sent the report of an FBI investigation of a Scout leader who had written the Soviet embassy inquiring about the possibility of taking a group of Explorer Scouts on a camping trip to Russia. The Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers was sent the log of a wiretap of its headquarters. Representative Henry Reuss was informed that his daughter Jacqueline, a student at Swarthmore, had been the subject of FBI inquiries, apparently because of the congressman’s “dovish” stand on Vietnam. New Left organizations were allowed to share the notes of an FBI conference on the New Left, in which agents were urged to intensify the number of interviews of potential subjects since “it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”9

  They were like time bombs. Every two or three weeks a new batch of documents exploded into print or on the air or in a hastily called press conference. There was no way to defuse them. Any attempted explanation by the Bureau was negated by the exposure of still more illegal activities.

  Most embarrassing to the FBI itself was that each new shipment highlighted the Bureau’s inability to solve the case.

  Even more infuriating to its director, many of the memos held the Bureau up to ridicule. For example, each agent was ordered to develop a ghetto informant. Some areas did not have ghettos, however, in which case the agent should inform headquarters of this, “so that he will not be charged with failure to perform.”10

  “Please, when interviewing [clerical] applicants,” another memo read, “be alert for long hairs, beards, pear shaped heads, truck drivers, etc. We are not that hard up yet.”11

  Still another memo pointed out one of the disadvantages of recruiting veterans as special agents: “Because the discharged veteran is several years further along than the current high school graduate, some may have had a ‘wild oats’ period. The investigations may be more demanding.”12

  There was no single, headline-making revelation in the Media documents. But Mark Felt was right when he categorized the break-in as “a watershed event” that “changed the FBI’s image, possibly forever, in the minds of many Americans.”13 For decades, only a few liberal publications, chief among them the Nation and the New Republic, had claimed that the FBI was systematically violating the rights of U.S. citizens, invading their privacy, trampling their civil liberties, monitoring their beliefs and associations.

  Now, with these piecemeal disclosures from the FBI’s own files, everyone knew.

  There was, however, one delayed-action incendiary, a single-page memorandum on the New Left. The contents were relatively innocuous, the suggestion that an attached article on campus radicalism from the conservative magazine Barron’s be mailed anonymously to educators and administrators.

  Scanning the memo, the NBC newsman Carl Stern noticed a cryptic word on the top of the page.

  What did the term “COINTELPRO” mean? He wondered.

  He decided he’d try to find out.

  Although the Media break-in had occurred nine days earlier, the first shipments of documents had not yet been mailed when J. Edgar Hoover made his annual appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on March 17, 1971.

  It was like stepping into a time warp. Outside, everyone seemed to be sniping at the FBI director. Behind these closed doors, J. Edgar Hoover was treated like visiting royalty.

  Still, this year he found it necessary to spend an inordinate amount of time rebutting his critics.

  He’d called the former attorney general Ramsey Clark a “jellyfish,” Hoover explained, after comparing what Clark had written in his book with a tape of the remarks he’d made to the 1967 convention of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in which he’d effusively praised both the Bureau and its director.

  CHAIRMAN ROONEY: “He did the same thing to me. He spoke at a dinner in my honor at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and lauded me to the skies. As a matter of fact, it was to me a little sickening, he was laying it on so heavy.”

  MR. HOOVER: “He was too syrupy.”

  CHAIRMAN ROONEY: “He later attacked me and endorsed my primary opponent…”

  As for Ronald Kessler’s Washington Post articles on FBI wiretapping, the jackals of the press were suffering from “tap mania,” Hoover continued. The articles were full of “distortions, inaccuracies and outright falsehoods.”

  Ramsey Clark’s claim that he removed taps just before his committee appearance was untrue, the FBI director assured the committee, as was his charge that he falsified his figures.

  “I would like to add, also, that we have never tapped a telephone of any congressman or any senator since I have been director of the Bureau.

  “Furthermore, the charge that the FBI has tapped Central Intelligence Agency phones is absolutely false. At no time in the history of the FBI has this ever been done.”

  Student unrest was due to pro-Soviet and Peking-oriented dissident groups on the campuses, and not to the war, Hoover said. “I think if the war in Vietnam ended today they would find something else.”

  Although the associate director accompanied the director to all his congressional appearances, when well enough to do so, he rarely spoke. This time was an exception. The FBI’s armored cars were necessary, Clyde Tolson testified, because “during the calendar year 1970, Mr. Hoover received 26 threats on his life and so far this year, he has received another 16 threats.”

  When the FBI director authorized the public release of his testimony—always at a time when he needed favorable publicity—the headline was ready-made: “Hoover’s Life Threatened 16 Times This Year.”14

  Mr. Bow: “It is a pleasure to have you here. We have great confidence in you and your associates. I think we sleep a little better at night because of your efforts.”

  When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover left the hearing room—having just received a $31 million increase in his appropriation for 1972, bringing the FBI’s total budget for the forthcoming year to over $318 million—he had every reason to believe that, with the exception of a few opportunistic presidential candidates, he still had the warm support of Congress.

  Three weeks later, in the House of Representatives, Majority Leader Hale Boggs requested permission to speak.

  “Mr. Speaker and my colleagues. I apologize for my voice. I have a cold.

  “What I am going to say I say in sorrow, because it is always tragic when a great man who has given his life to his country comes to the twilight of his life and fails to understand it is time to leave the service and enjoy retirement.

  “Mr. Speaker, I am talking about J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The time has come for the Attorney General of the United States to ask for the resignation of Mr. Hoover.”

  There was a stunned silence. Not even House Speaker Carl Albert had advance warning of what the Louisiana congressman was going to say. Hale Boggs was part of the FBI stable, one of “Edgar’s boys,” and had been during all of his eleven terms in office.

  “When the FBI taps the telephones of Members of this body and of Members of the Senate,” Boggs went on, “when the FBI stations agents on college campuses to infiltrate college organizations, when the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo, then it is time—it is way past time, Mr. Speaker—that the present Director no longer be the Director…I ask again that Mr. Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States, have enough courage to demand the resignation of Mr. Hoover.”15

  Caught off guard, only one representative, House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, stood up to rebutt Boggs’s charges; since he had no idea what had occasioned them, he stumbled through
a lame defense of the FBI, observing, “They are humans, as we are.”16

  “Was he drunk?” That was the question everyone in Washington seemed to ask, on hearing of Boggs’s sensational speech. It was hardly a secret that the House majority leader had a problem with alcohol, that on at least two occasions when drinking he’d ended up throwing a punch, or receiving one.

  But reporters who questioned Boggs after his remarks said he was sober, though quite angry. Beyond hinting that his own telephone was one of those which had been tapped, he declined to discuss his “evidence,” although he promised to do so in the near future.

  Boggs had a good reason for the delay. There was no evidence—at least not yet. A few weeks earlier a telephone company repairman had found, and removed, a tap on Boggs’s home telephone. Apparently he’d brooded about it and, further disturbed by Ron Kessler’s articles and the Media disclosures, had concluded that the FBI was the guilty party.*

  Having made the charge, Boggs now faced the problem of having to prove it.

  At FBI headquarters, the initial reaction, extreme anger, turned to puzzled astonishment. William Sullivan later asserted, “We didn’t have any tap on Hale Boggs, or on anybody else up on the Hill. Why, it would be stupid.”17

  Not wanting to lose the House majority leader’s support, Hoover sent Robert Kunkel, SAC of the Washington field office, to see the congressman. But Boggs, fearing Kunkel might be conveying more than a denial (he hadn’t forgotten Hoover’s use of the “Pinhead” photographs to discredit one of the Warren Commission critics), refused to see him.

  At the White House the president’s aides met for forty-five minutes, trying to decide what to do. Was there any basis to the wiretapping claim? No one was sure. Finally, after calls to the FBI and to the attorney general, who was in Florida, they were persuaded that it was safe for the president to defend the FBI director, and a statement was issued saying President Nixon still had complete confidence in J. Edgar Hoover.

  Meanwhile, Attorney General Mitchell, contacted by the press in Key Biscayne, denied “categorically” that the FBI had ever tapped the telephone of any member of the House or the Senate, “now or in the past,” and demanded that Boggs recant his “slanderous falsehoods” and “apologize to a great American.”18

  With Mitchell out of the capital, Hoover’s defense fell to Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Hoover called Kleindienst and told him, according to the director’s memorandum of the conversation, that he wanted the attorney general and the president to know that if at any time it was felt that he might be “a burden or handicap to the re-election,” he “would be glad to step aside.” Phrased in this way, it was a fairly safe gamble on Hoover’s part.

  Kleindienst, after telling Hoover he was “a good American,” assured him, “The thing is going to subside and we will just go on and carry the business as we should.”19

  Hoover, however, quickly found Kleindienst a less than satisfactory advocate. Interviewed on television on April 7, the deputy attorney general, in a thinly veiled reference to Boggs’s drinking problem, said the House majority leader must have been “either sick or not in possession of his faculties,”20 and—to the horror of J. Edgar Hoover, who was watching the program at home—added that the Justice Department would welcome a congressional investigation of the FBI.

  Infuriated, Hoover called Kleindienst the following morning and denounced him so loudly the deputy AG had to hold the receiver away from his ear. As a result, Robert Mardian, the head of the department’s Internal Security Division, who was in Kleindienst’s office at the time, overheard most of the conversation. It was all very well for Kleindienst to “welcome the investigation,” but Kleindienst should understand something else: “If I am called upon to testify before Congress,” Hoover shouted, “I will have to tell all that I know about this matter.”21

  Unaware of the Kissinger wiretaps, Kleindienst missed the implied threat to the president. Apparently realizing this, the FBI director then called the president and repeated his comments directly.

  The New York Times, April 9, 1971: “Kleindienst Assails Boggs: Invites Inquiry into FBI.”

  The New York Times, April 10, 1971: “Kleindienst Modifies Suggestion Congress Investigate the FBI.”

  Following the lead of the other four Democratic presidential aspirants—George McGovern, Edmund Muskie, Harold Hughes, and Birch Bayh—Edward Kennedy now asked for the resignation of J. Edgar Hoover and, finally picking up the gauntlet, suggested that his Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practices would be willing to investigate the FBI.

  Nothing came of this suggestion, or of another made about the same time, that the FBI be investigated by the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which was currently holding hearings on invasions of privacy. No sooner was the suggestion made than its chairman vetoed the idea. His committee had yet to find any evidence of illegal activities by the FBI, Sam J. Ervin, Jr., stated. As of its director, J. Edgar Hoover, Ervin said, “I think he has done a very good job in a difficult post.”22

  According to William Sullivan, the folksy senator from North Carolina, who would gain worldwide fame for his role in the Watergate hearings, was “in our pocket. It was financial, something like the Abe Fortas affair. This is why he came out praising the Bureau.”23

  A few days after his April 5 speech, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs had two visitors, Representatives Mario Biaggi, Democrat of New York, and Cornelius “Neil” Gallagher, Democrat of New Jersey, the latter a Hoover enemy since the 1968 Life allegations regarding his wife and the dead Mafiosi.

  Biaggi, himself a former New York City policeman, came bearing a gift: a tape recording, which he claimed had been made by the FBI, of wiretapped conversations of various members of Congress. Boggs was not on the tape, but he knew everyone who was, and after some checking he determined that the conversations were authentic and were indeed the result of unauthorized monitoring. Here, he was sure, was the proof he needed. Using the tape as documentation of his charges, Boggs prepared a second House speech, to be delivered after the Easter recess.

  But then, inexplicably, Biaggi withdrew his offer to make the tape public, claiming that to do so would reveal the identity of the person from whom he’d obtained it.*

  On April 22 the House majority leader gave his much anticipated speech. It lasted an hour and was quite eloquent, but, lacking the promised evidence, it received only negative publicity. As J. Edgar Hoover himself summarized it, in an interview some months later, “He was put in the position of having to ‘put up or shut up’ on that charge and he shut up.”24

  The FBI’s director’s retribution was swift and sure. His aides assembled a list of Boggs’s drinking escapades—including the time he’d been decked by a Nixon supporter during a political argument in the men’s room of a Washington hotel—and leaked it to the press. (Even Jack Anderson used it.) And the rumor was spread around the capital that Hale Boggs had been wiretapped, but that the tapping had been done by a private detective, in the employ of his wife, who was seeking evidence that he was keeping a mistress in Arlington.

  Anticipating sensational disclosures, and not getting them, few paid attention to the content of Boggs’s second speech, in which he stated that Congress alone, “by consent and complicity” in its failure to maintain oversight of the FBI, was responsible for its many illegal acts.

  “Over the postwar years,” Boggs said, “we have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people. At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of power from due accounting and strict surveillance. And history has run its inexorable course.

  “Liberty has yielded.

  “The power of government has gained commanding ground…

  “Mr. Speaker, I submit that 1984 is closer than we think.”25

  The pressure on Hoover didn’t let up. Four da
ys after the initial Boggs attack, Life ran a cover story entitled “The 47-Year Reign of J. Edgar Hoover: Emperor of the FBI.” The magazine, which had commissioned a sculptor to do a Romanesque, warts-and-all bust of the director, suggested that reign was now nearing its end.* Three days later the National Observer, a weekly newspaper published by Dow Jones, followed with a carefully balanced piece by the Justice and Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg entitled, “The Life and Times of a 76-Year-Old Cop.” Totenberg’s article took up two pages; Hoover’s angry response and the managing editor Henry Gemmill’s point-by-point defense of his reporter filled five. What disturbed Hoover most was the following allegation: “During a recent 24-hour stint at work, pursuing a hot case, Mr. Hoover was seen holding onto the corridor wall for support. After a moment of apparent faintness he regained his strength.”27

  Despite Totenberg’s attempt to separate fact from fiction, this was a bit of both. The apparent fainting spell had occurred—several Justice Department staffers had witnessed it—but, though Crime Records still maintained that the ever-vigilant director often worked around the clock, Hoover hadn’t done so in decades. (Nor, for that matter, had probably any other government bureau chief.)

  Having written to the president of Dow Jones in an unsuccessful attempt to get Totenberg fired, Hoover had to be content to put her, and the newspaper, on the Bureau’s no-contact list. Gemmill, however, rated a special investigation and his own folder in Hoover’s Official/Confidential file.

  On April 12, four months after his interview with the director, Dean Fischer suggested, in an in-house memo, that Time give J. Edgar Hoover a cover. “The old man has been subjected to unprecedented criticism,” Fischer wrote his editors. “Liberal Democrats are demanding his ouster. Conservative Republicans are beginning to have doubts about his ability to continue as FBI director. There are rumblings of discontent in the ranks. Morale is suffering…He clearly suffers from an arrogance of power. He shows increasing signs of senility. He should resign.”28