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

  Her main concern now was what effect the news would have on her father, who was in extremely poor health. His own relationship with Hoover had been particularly close. He had cryptically told more than one person, including the then president-elect Richard Nixon, that had it not been for Edgar Hoover he could not have been president.

  Leaving the Justice Department Building, Lynda Bird Robb looked for a pay phone, to call her mother at the ranch in Texas.

  But, knowing her father, she thought it quite likely he had already heard.9

  Acting on orders from the White House, Kleindienst summoned John Mohr to the AG’s office. A telephone call would have sufficed, but the matter was sensitive, and Kleindienst did not want to take any chances of his orders being misunderstood.

  Kleindienst was not alone. Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray III was with him, Mohr meeting him for the first time.

  A bullet-headed ex-submarine commander and former Pentagon aide, Gray had retired from the Navy in 1960, to serve as a military adviser in Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. Following Nixon’s defeat, Gray joined a New London, Connecticut, law firm, where he remained until Nixon’s 1968 victory. Called to Washington, he was appointed to several second-level posts in the new administration, first serving as executive director to the secretary of health, education, and welfare, then, starting in 1970, as assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. For the past three months his main job had been steering Kleindienst through the stormy waters of the confirmation hearings. A hardworking, methodical man, he was known as a team player, intensely loyal to his superiors.

  The meeting was brief: Kleindienst ordered Mohr to secure the director’s private office.

  Although it went unmentioned, the same subject was probably on all three minds: the legendary files of J. Edgar Hoover.

  Kleindienst would later testify that he had no interest whatsoever in the files (“I might be an unique person but I do not waste my time with curiosity, and I also had a tremendous amount of work to do”),10 but he must have had at least a smidgen of interest in his own file. For example, while deputy attorney general, Kleindienst had been offered a $100,000 bribe if he would dismiss the indictments of several persons involved in a major stock manipulation case. Kleindienst had neglected to report the bribe offer—until after J. Edgar Hoover informed him he knew about it, and that the FBI was investigating.*

  Mohr did exactly what he was told to do.

  Later that day he sent Kleindienst a memo:

  “In accordance with your instructions, Mr. Hoover’s private, personal office was secured at 11:40 A.M. today. It was necessary to change the lock on one door in order to accomplish this.

  “To my knowledge, the contents of the office are exactly as they would have been had Mr. Hoover reported to the office this morning. I have in my possession the only key to the office.”11

  What Mohr neglected to tell the acting attorney general was that no files were kept in Hoover’s private office. The FBI’s most secret files were in the office of his secretary, Miss Helen Gandy.

  And now, only hours after the death of the man who had been her employer for fifty-four years, in the midst of the grief and many condolence calls and arguments over who would sit where at the funeral, Miss Gandy had already begun to go through those files, culling and separating them, marking some for destruction by shredding, setting others aside for special handling.

  Nor was she the only one doing this.

  Over the years it had various code names. It was usually referred to, however, as the “D” list, the letter possibly standing for “destruct,” and it was kept in the FBI printshop, in the basement of the Department of Justice Building, not far from the equally secret, quite select theater where the director and others screened pornographic movies.

  In the event of…The first paragraphs of the document, according to an ex-official, read like the table of contents of a book on cataclysms. Every eventuality was covered, including earthquake, fire, nuclear attack, the invasion of the United States by a foreign power, the seizure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by hostile elements, and a possible coup d’état by the CIA or another government agency.

  At the very bottom of the list was the unthinkable—which had just happened: in the event the present incumbent in the office of director ceases to serve as such…

  Within an hour of the discovery of Hoover’s body, the D list was circulated to various predetermined FBI officials, who, having consulted it, set to work destroying certain specified files, films, and recordings.12

  “It is with profound personal grief that I announce that J. Edgar Hoover passed away during the night at his residence.

  “The nation has lost a giant among its patriots.”

  Acting Attorney General Kleindienst’s announcement had been delayed until 11:45 A.M., to allow the FBI to notify its own people first. As a result, by the time Kleindienst appeared in the White House briefing room, many of the reporters had heard not only the rumor of the death but another, more disturbing one which had spread just as fast: that J. Edgar Hoover had been murdered.

  Hoping to end such speculation, Kleindienst stated, “His personal physician informed me that his death was due to natural causes.”13

  Kleindienst went on to say that Hoover’s body had been found at approximately eight-thirty that morning by his maid.

  Unknown to Kleindienst, he had already become part of a cover-up. For reasons of their own, some of Hoover’s top aides had decided to hide the fact that Crawford was at the scene. According to the official FBI version, which Kleindienst now passed on to the press, it was Annie Fields who discovered the body. James Crawford was never mentioned.

  As Kleindienst was finishing his statement, the president of the United States unexpectedly entered the room. Facing the television cameras, Nixon spoke of his own grief and loss. He’d met this “truly remarkable man” when he’d first come to Washington as a freshman congressman twenty-five years earlier, Nixon said; over that quarter century Hoover had been one of his “closest friends and advisers.”

  Nixon did not mention Hiss and the Pumpkin Papers, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or any of his six crises, but the older reporters remembered. He and Hoover had made a lot of history together.

  Nor did Nixon mention some much more contemporary history which was unknown to any members of the press: how he had tried to fire Hoover in 1971, and failed; how this old man had stood up against him and the entire intelligence community and opposed the Huston Plan, and won; and how, since Hoover had refused to let the Bureau be used, he’d been forced to create his own secret police, known as the Special Investigations Unit or the “White House Plumbers.”

  The White House speech writer Patrick Buchanan had written the president’s statement, but Nixon had added his own touch, observing that although he had ordered the flags on all government buildings lowered to half-staff, “Edgar Hoover, because of his indomitable courage against sometimes vicious attacks, has made certain that the flag of the FBI will always fly high.”14

  As soon as the president left the room, reporters rushed to the phones.

  AP beat UPI with the first URGENT BULLETIN, at 11:55 A.M., but both were scooped by radio and by ABC, CBS, and NBC TV, which had interrupted their regular programming with the announcement.

  Within an hour many of the larger newspapers had extras on the streets, with full-front-page headlines:

  HOOVER DEAD!

  AMERICA’S TOP COP DIES IN SLEEP

  NATION MOURNS #1 G-MAN

  There was an end-of-an-era feeling in most of the press accounts, which were filled with such evocative names as Dillinger, Ma Barker, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, Machine Gun Kelly, the Rosenbergs, Harry Dexter White, and Alger Hiss, and such memory-laden events as the Lindbergh kidnapping, the capture of the Nazi saboteurs, and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Any obituary is, of nec
essity, a summing up, but this particular death seemed to call forth judgments. This was especially the case with the editorials of the large eastern dailies:

  The New York Times: “For nearly a half century J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were indistinguishable. That was at once his strength and its weakness…”15

  The Washington Post: “Few, if any, men in the history of the United States have accumulated so much power and wielded it for so long as did J. Edgar Hoover…”16

  The Washington Star: “Today, in Washington, a city that was built and populated by bureaucrats, they are mourning the man who was probably the most powerful of them all.”17

  Yet it was the smaller papers, middle America extended coast to coast, which really mattered, and always had, as far as the FBI itself was concerned. For they, more than the metropolitan press, had accepted, supported, and helped foster the Hoover legend. For more than three decades they’d published the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s press releases, and been glad to have them; run congratulatory editorials each May 10, on his anniversary as director; and launched letter-writing campaigns whenever someone suggested replacing him.

  While in the urban papers the consensus seemed to be that Hoover was a legend who had long outlived his own time, their common theme was that, in a time when America most needed leaders, the country had lost one of the greatest of them all.

  The Enid (Okla.) Morning News: “Mr. Law Enforcement USA is dead.”18 The Monroe (La.) Morning World: “His death Tuesday was like the fall of a main supporting pillar of the Republic.”19

  The Las Vegas Sun: “Were there no J. Edgar Hoover with his dedication and stature, who knows but we might have awakened some morning and found we had no liberties left at all.”20

  Not everyone was saddened. Nor were all the comments tributes.

  Coretta King, who felt her husband had been destroyed by this man, made no attempt to hide her bitterness in a long statement she released. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded his slain friend as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and who had once preached a sermon to Hoover via a “bug” secreted in the pulpit of his church) whimsically observed, “With the passing of J. Edgar Hoover, I am reminded that almighty God conducts the ultimate surveillance.”21

  Several radicals commented on the ironic possibility that if Hoover had expired before midnight, his death had occurred on communism’s greatest holiday, May Day.

  Much less imaginative, but more than usually vitriolic, Gus Hall, general secretary of the Communist party USA—an organization which some felt only Hall and Hoover took seriously—called the late FBI director “a servant of racism, reaction and repression” and a “political pervert whose masochistic passion drove him to savage assaults upon the principles of the Bill of Rights.”22

  Tass, by contrast, simply reported the death in a single sentence, without editorial comment: “J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation since 1924, died in Washington at the age of 77.”23

  Confirmation reached the Hill just before noon.

  From the balconies you could see the whispered news traveling up the aisles of both houses of Congress, long before the official word reached the speakers’ platforms.

  In the House of Representatives and the Senate the announcement was followed by a minute of silent prayer, then eulogies, which continued not only throughout that day but for more than a week to come. They were delivered by friends and foes alike, although it was difficult to tell them apart now. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, who only a few months earlier had accused the FBI of tapping his phones, was no less fulsome in his praise than Representative John Rooney, who took inordinate pride in the fact that while chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee he had never cut a single nickel from the FBI budget, that sometimes he’d even given Hoover more money than he’d requested.

  Though absent campaigning—the Democratic and Republican conventions being only months away—the leading presidential candidates also sent solemn tributes, although two, Senators George S. McGovern and Edmund S. Muskie, had already vowed to replace the aging director if they were elected.

  Undoubtedly many of the remarks were sincere. There was no mistaking the grief of Representative H. Allen Smith of California, himself a former special agent, when he said, “Outside of my father, J. Edgar Hoover was the finest man I have ever known.”24 Or the gratitude of Representative Spark M. Matsunaga of Hawaii when he recalled that, following Pearl Harbor, it was Hoover who courageously opposed the mass incarceration of one-third of Hawaii’s population, its Americans of Japanese ancestry.25

  So accustomed were several to praising him that out of habit they referred to him as “our greatest living American.”

  Yet, though it is not to be found in the printed pages of the Congressional Record, in many the news evoked still another emotion: a sense of relief.

  It was followed, almost as quickly, by the realization that although Hoover was gone, he would have a successor. And the files remained.

  Some had reason for concern. The file of one representative, who lavishly praised the crime-fighting abilities of the FBI, was heavy with memos bearing the Mafia classification number 92-6054, while on the Senate side, even more effusive in his praise was a liberal critic turned Bureau friend whose file contained, among other things, the police report of his 1964 arrest in a Greenwich Village homosexual bar.

  Even those whose files contained little or no derogatory material were uneasy, for they didn’t know this was true.

  Amid the eulogies, the Senate voted to name the still-uncompleted new FBI building for the late director; while both houses of Congress voted permission for Hoover’s body to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

  It was a remarkable honor, accorded to only twenty-one other Americans—presidents, statesmen, and war heroes—and never before to a civil servant, or a cop.

  At 12:15 P.M. an inconspicuous sedan edged slowly out of the alley behind 4936 Thirtieth Place NW. Inside, where the backseat would ordinarily have been, strapped to a stretcher and covered with a gold cloth, was the body of J. Edgar Hoover.

  Although the street out front was crowded with reporters, camera crews, and FBI agents, removal of the body had been delayed nearly four hours after its discovery on orders from the White House, so that the news would not leak out before the official announcement. Apparently the funeral directors, Joseph Gawler’s Sons, Inc., had used the sedan, rather than a regular hearse, for the same reason.

  While Dr. James L. Luke, the District of Columbia’s coroner, attributed the death to “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,”26 basing his conclusion on the medical history furnished him by Hoover’s personal physician, Dr. Robert V. Choisser, Dr. Choisser himself was denying to reporters that his patient had ever shown any evidence of heart disease. While Hoover had had very mild hypertension, that is, slightly elevated blood pressure, for some twenty years, Dr. Choisser said, it had never affected his work and he took no medication for it.27

  In this, a time of assassinations and conspiracies, it was perhaps inevitable that Hoover’s death would cause rumors. Yet, lacking any evidentiary support, they died quickly, for although the exact cause of death remained in dispute—Dr. Luke having decided an autopsy was “not warranted”—the facts seemed simple enough: he was an old man, and old men die.

  Few apparently noticed, until much later, that there were a number of other discrepancies in various accounts of the death.

  Not until a year later would the rumor again surface, this time dramatically, behind the closed doors of the Watergate hearings, when, to the shock of the assembled senators and aides, a witness matter-of-factly, as if it were common knowledge, referred to “the murder of J. Edgar Hoover.”28

  Coincidentally, at the same time Hoover’s body was to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, another event was scheduled to occur on the steps outside: an antiwar demonstration, beginning late the following afternoon, duri
ng which congressional aides would read the names of American Vietnam War dead. The announced speakers included the actress Jane Fonda, the lawyer William Kunstler, and the administration’s current number one enemy, Daniel Ellsberg.

  Someone thought the opportunity too good to miss. Just who suggested the plan is unclear, but when the White House counsel Charles Colson called Jeb Magruder and told him about it, Colson said the orders came directly from President Nixon.

  To avenge this slur on Hoover’s memory, Colson wanted Magruder to arrange a counterdemonstration, its real purpose to disrupt the rally and tear down any Vietcong flags. When Magruder raised objections (specifically to sending innocent young Republicans into such a battle), Colson accused him of being disloyal to the president. Magruder then checked with his boss at CREEP, the former attorney general John Mitchell, and the pair decided to turn the assignment over to G. Gordon Liddy.

  Liddy, a former FBI agent who was working as CREEP’s intelligence chief, apparently embellished the plot a little, for when he later discussed it with the White House consultant and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, he said that the demonstrators planned to overturn the catafalque on which Hoover’s coffin would lie.

  Hunt placed a call to Miami, to an old comrade-in-arms, Bernard Barker. Under the code name Macho, Barker had served as Hunt’s assistant during the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. Even earlier, Barker had been an FBI informant while serving with Batista’s secret police.

  Again, in the retelling, the plot thickened. Barker recruited nine other men, mostly Cubans, all anti-Castroites, telling them that “hippies, traitors and communists” intended to “perpetuate an outrage on Hoover.”29