J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Books by Curt Gentry

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE Three Days in May

  1 Tuesday, May 2,1972

  2 Wednesday, May 3,1972

  3 Thursday, May 4,1972

  BOOK TWO Something Big

  4 Inauguration Day

  5 The Missing Years

  6 “Palmer-Do Not Let This Country See Red!”

  7 The Soviet Ark

  8 The Facts Are a Matter of Record

  BOOK THREE The Director

  9 The Department of Easy Virtue

  10 The Director

  11 “This Is the Last Straw, Edgar.”

  12 A Stay of Execution

  BOOK FOUR The Gangster Era

  13 The Rise and Fall of Public Hero Number One

  14 A Problem of Identity

  15 The Man Who Came to Dinner

  BOOK FIVE A Curious Relationship

  16 Coup d’Etat

  17 Smear

  18 Roosevelt Calls In His Due Bills

  19 The View from the Balcony

  BOOK SIX The Secret War

  20 “Listen!”

  21 The FBI Director, the First Lady, and Other Matters

  BOOK SEVEN The Man from Independence

  22 A Case of Somewhat Rancid Morals

  23 Chief Justice Hoover

  24 The Punch-and-Judy Show

  25 Friends, Enemies, and the Investigation of Jesus Christ

  BOOK EIGHT Virtually Untouchable

  26 “We Didn’t Want Them to Die.”

  27 An “Incident”

  BOOK NINE The Director versus the General

  28 The Kennedys

  29 “We Must Mark Him Now.”

  BOOK TEN On Borrowed Time

  30 Seriously Flawed

  31 The Fall of LBJ

  BOOK ELEVEN The Unforgotten Man

  32 Hail, Caesar!

  33 Moles

  34 Under Siege

  35 The Third Judas

  36 The Last Days

  Epilogue: Pandora’s Box

  Source Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Interviews and Other Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  Books by CURT GENTRY

  J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

  Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

  Second in Command: The Uncensored Account of

  the Capture of the Spy Ship U.S.S. Pueblo

  Operation Overflight: U-2 Spy Pilot Francis Gary Powers

  Tells His Story for the First Time

  The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California

  The Killer Mountains: A Search for

  the Legendary Lost Dutchman Mine

  A Kind of Loving

  Frame-up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney

  and Warren Billings

  The Vulnerable Americans

  John M. Browning: American Gunmaker

  The Madams of San Francisco: An Irreverent History

  of the City by the Golden Gate

  Jade: Stone of Heaven

  The Dolphin Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area:

  Present and Past

  J. Edgar Hoover

  The Man

  and

  the Secrets

  Curt Gentry

  To my brother, G. Pat Gentry;

  my editor, Eric P. Swenson;

  and my good friends

  Donald R. Hazlewood, Denne Bart Petitclerc,

  and Tom and Bea McDade—each of whom

  gave something special to this book

  “There’s something addicting about a secret.”

  —J. EDGAR HOOVER

  BOOK ONE

  Three Days in May

  “It was a shocker. If anyone on this earth seemed immortal…it was Mr. Hoover.”

  —Savannah (Ga.) Morning News,

  May 4, 1972

  1

  Tuesday, May 2,1972

  James Crawford had no reason to feel apprehensive. But he did.

  As he turned onto Thirtieth Place NW, he scanned both sides of the dead-end street.

  Everything looked all right. There were no strange cars, little activity, only a few people leaving for work, all familiar.

  They should have been. After all these years he knew their habits as well as his own.

  Since he saw nothing out of the ordinary, the feeling should have gone away. But it didn’t. Instinctively he knew something was wrong. He wondered if there had been any recent threats against the Boss.

  Retired now, since January, Crawford no longer heard the daily scuttlebutt. For a secret outfit, the men sure talked a lot, though only among themselves. They even had a name for it: the grapevine. Yet if something really were wrong, surely someone, Annie or Tom or Miss Gandy, would have let him know.

  Despite what some people believed, James Crawford had never been the Boss’s bodyguard. A reporter for Ebony had written that years earlier and others had picked it up. “It must be exciting, Mr. Crawford, being his bodyguard!” people would say. At first he’d corrected them, explaining that he was the Boss’s chauffeur—and quite proud to be that—but, since they never seemed to believe him, thinking this was something he’d been instructed to say, he finally stopped telling them otherwise. The truth was, he didn’t even carry a gun, never had, in all those years. Oh, he knew how to shoot one. He’d gone through the training, at Quantico, living by himself and segregated, of course, for that was back in the forties. One of the very first of his people to go through. And he’d been issued a gun. But he’d left it in the clerk’s office. Never checked it out.

  No, there hadn’t been a threat. He’d have seen them by now. Others might not notice, but he could spot a surveillance blocks away. Sometimes when there was trouble, like the Communist things, as many as two dozen men would be watching this quiet residential street. The Boss’s neighbors bragged it was “the safest street in Washington, D.C.” Only, nowhere was really safe anymore. Just a couple years back someone had stolen the Boss’s Christmas tree lights!

  Crawford spotted the black bulletproof Cadillac from two blocks away. It was parked on the left side of the street, facing him, directly in front of 4936—exactly where it was supposed to be. The familiar sight should have reassured him. But it didn’t.

  He’d driven the car, or one like it—the first was a Pierce Arrow—for thirty-seven years. But no more. After his retirement his brother-in-law, Tom Moton, had become the Boss’s new driver. All the problems were his now. No more fretting about blowouts, or brakes that had to be replaced every few hundred miles, because of the weight of the armor-plated chassis. No more worrying about the Boss’s obsession with cleanliness or his frightening rages. Tom had inherited them all.

  Though “officially” retired, Crawford came by nearly every day. The Boss didn’t trust “outside people,” as he called them, so Crawford still supervised repairs on the house, maintained the gardens, fish pond, and yard. Today’s job was one he especially enjoyed. The Boss had ordered some rosebushes flown in from his favorite nursery, Jackson & Perkins, and last night he’d called, telling Crawford they’d arrived and asking him to come by at 8:30 to help him plant them.

  Crawford was punctual. Which meant early. After driving to the end of the street and making a U-turn, parking behind the Cadillac but leaving enough room so it wouldn’t be blocked if there were trouble, he checked his watch. It was exactly 8:15.

  The house—two stories, of red brick with cream trim and a gray slate roof, of the style older
natives once called Federal Colonial—was set back from the street by a small front yard. Seeing it, Crawford grimaced. It was a habit by now. In 1968, when Crawford was hospitalized for brain surgery, the Boss, perhaps fearing that he wouldn’t survive, had replaced his beloved Merion bluegrass with Astroturf. It still offended him.

  Walking up the driveway, Crawford heard the two cairns, G-Boy and Cindy, barking inside. It wasn’t their hungry whine—Annie Fields, the Boss’s live-in cook and housekeeper, always fed them before the Boss came down—but their impatient yelp, the kind they made at night when the Boss was due home. Crawford guessed that for some reason the Boss had slept late.

  That didn’t happen often, even now that he was well along in years, for he remained a man of very rigid habits.

  Waving to Annie and Tom, who were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, Crawford went around to the backyard and began unpacking the roses. He postponed digging the holes, unsure where the Boss wanted them.

  Crawford did not keep track of the time, but apparently some fifteen or twenty minutes passed before Annie came out into the yard and told him that she was “concerned.” By now she should have heard the shower. Of course, the dogs had been barking.

  Crawford said he’d check.

  Though the reason went unspoken, Crawford knew why Annie didn’t want to go upstairs herself. Although he had a closet full of silk pajamas, the Boss slept in the nude.

  The kitchen opened onto the dining room, and here, as throughout the rest of the house, there were so many antiques you had to zigzag your way around them. Together with the Oriental rugs, and the throw rugs on top of them, it was like walking through an obstacle course.

  There were more antiques in the foyer, plus, at the foot of the stairs, facing the front door, a large autographed photo of the incumbent president with the Boss. (From Roosevelt to Nixon, they’d all hung here at one time, with the single exception of Truman.) On the first landing, the Boss appeared in an oil painting, as he’d looked perhaps some thirty years earlier. (Elsewhere in the house, he was depicted in a large bronze bust, a plaster bust, in a wooden figurine, in scrimshaw, as well as carved in bas relief on the cover of the guest book.) Along the walls of the upstairs hallway, past the den and rarely used guest room, were dozens of drawings, etchings, and cartoons. The Boss was portrayed in nearly all of them, usually with an exaggerated bulldog chin. Interspersed were photographs of famous people, including many Hollywood stars, some present but mostly past. Again he was in almost all. The other people looked as if they were proud to be photographed with him.

  The rugs muffled Crawford’s footsteps, so he knocked sharply when he reached the door of the master bedroom. When the second knock brought no response, he tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Opening it just a little, he looked in.

  It was a bright spring morning outside, with only a trace of clouds, but the room itself was still dark, because of the Boss’s obsession with privacy. Not only were there closed venetian blinds over the windows, and thick draperies over them; there was also a large Chinese screen between the windows and the four-poster canopied bed.

  There was enough light, however, for Crawford to see the body sprawled on the Oriental rug next to the bed. In shock, he walked over and touched one of the hands. It was cold.

  His world seemed to slip out from under him. Stumbling back out into the hallway, he yelled, “Annie! Tom!”1

  While Annie called Dr. Robert Choisser, the Boss’s personal physician, Crawford used another phone to dial Clyde Tolson’s private number, hoping to reach him before he left his apartment. Tolson had left, but, forgetting something, he’d come back and was just unlocking the door when the telephone rang.

  For more years than most people in Washington, D.C., could remember, Tolson and the Boss had ridden to work together. After picking up the Boss, Crawford would swing by and get Tolson; then, if the weather was good, he would let them out at about Seventeenth and Constitution Avenue. Long before the coming of Harry Truman, they would walk briskly down Constitution the half dozen blocks to the rear entrance of the Justice Department Building. Reporters would lie in wait along the route, knowing, if he was so inclined, that the Boss would give them an instant headline.

  All that had changed. There were no more walks, no morning rides together. Since Tolson’s last stroke, a year earlier, his own driver took him first to the doctor’s office, then to work.

  Many myths had grown up about those rides. One, oft repeated—especially by “that odious garbage collector,” as Tolson referred to the columnist Jack Anderson—concerned the Boss’s hat. The Boss rode on the right side of the backseat, Tolson the left. But the Boss’s hat would be perched up behind the seat on Tolson’s side, so that, in case of an assassination attempt—or so the story went—it wouldn’t be the Boss who would be hit.

  The truth was simpler, but, given the circumstances, it couldn’t be used to rebut the lie. In bullet- and bomb-proofing their first armored cars, they had had to build up the floor. This raised the seat so high that a hat rubbed against the ceiling. That was only part of the explanation, however. Although he required all his agents to wear them, the Boss secretly hated hats. So when he slid into the car, the first thing he did was take his off and, with his left hand, flip it behind the seat. On Tolson’s side.

  It was an innocent habit. But the press, of course, made something disparaging out of it.

  Clyde Tolson was not very fond of the press.

  In the old days it had been different: there had been more friends, fewer enemies. Although it galled him to recall it, even Jack Anderson had once been on the “special correspondents” list.

  Anderson was probably much on Tolson’s mind. The previous day the Washington Post had begun publishing a new series of his columns attacking both the Bureau and the Boss. Such attacks were nothing new, but these were based on the Bureau’s own files! In the old days nothing had leaked unless they wanted it to.

  Nor was Anderson the only turncoat. There was a conspiracy, Tolson knew, in the highest levels of government, to get the Boss to resign. Again this was nothing new. Other presidents and attorneys general had considered replacing him but soon dropped their plans. He had too much on all of them. The current effort would undoubtedly meet the same fate. What hurt, however, was that this president, unlike some of his predecessors, had once been among the Boss’s closest friends. The Boss had, in fact, created Richard Nixon.

  In the old days…Tolson used that phrase often now. So much had changed in recent years, so little of it for the better.

  He missed the rides and morning walks, aware that they were now of the past.

  His health was not good. In addition to heart disease, high blood pressure, a duodenal ulcer, and an abdominal aneurysm, he’d had three severe strokes in the last five years. Although elaborate attempts had been made to keep his various illnesses secret, there was no hiding their effects. His weight had dropped from 175 to 135 pounds. He walked slowly, dragging his left leg behind him. He had partial paralysis of both his right and left sides, and there were times when he could neither write his name nor shave himself. He was nearly blind in his right eye, the sight returning for a few weeks, then without warning vanishing again. On occasion his speech was slurred and, though he tried to conceal it from others, sometimes—not often, but sometimes—his mind rambled.

  He was seventy-one years old, six years younger than the Boss, who, when others weren’t around, called him Junior. He’d had other nicknames over the years. One, from the thirties, was Killer Tolson, bestowed after the famous New York shootout with Harry Brunette. The men in the field didn’t think he’d heard it, but he heard everything. That was his job. Clyde Tolson’s mandate was simple: to protect the Boss from any possible attack, whether from enemies without or within, by whatever countermeasures were felt necessary.

  “Hatchetman” was another epithet more than infrequently used. He didn’t particularly mind knowing people called him that. Whether it was true or not, s
uch fear had its uses.

  He’d also been called “the sharpest mind in the Bureau” (the speaker always adding, “Except the Boss, of course”) and “a human encyclopedia with a photographic memory.”

  But that, too, was in the old days. In the old days he hadn’t forgotten things.

  Tolson answered the phone, and, as gently as he knew how, Crawford told him. Tolson responded by saying that Crawford had almost missed him, that he’d started for the car when he realized he’d forgotten something. If he’d called two minutes earlier or later…

  Aware that Tolson was in deep shock, and knowing that Dr. Choisser would soon be at the Thirtieth Place house, Crawford suggested he tell his driver to take him directly there.

  After Tolson hung up, something happened. It was almost like the old days, though now they were gone forever. Tolson dialed the private number of the Boss’s longtime secretary, Helen Gandy, told her the news, and began giving orders.

  She was to inform Assistant to the Director John Mohr. Mohr was in turn to tell his counterpart on the investigative side, Alex Rosen, as well as Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt, and they were to inform the twelve assistant directors, each of whom would have responsibility for informing his own division. Also, a coded telex should be sent to all fifty-nine field offices, to the special agents in charge, as well as all nineteen foreign légats. (Bureauese for legal attachés).