J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (101 page)

For communications of substance, Hoover continued to rely upon his gouts of memorandums. To Clark it seemed that the Bureau had “thousands of people to write memos. You’d get in a memo war. You wouldn’t have time for anything else.” The attorney general found the practice to be dangerous,
wasteful, and conducive to an atmosphere of distrust. “It was a persistent practice to protect the Bureau,” he said. “No question about that.”
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Sometimes wading through the memos, sometimes passing them along to staffers, Clark was able to get things done, nonetheless. To Hoover’s great annoyance, he would occasionally stop by a FBI field office on his official travels. Once, in Chicago, he was introduced to the ASAC as “the Attorney General.” “How are you, Mr. Rogers?” the agent responded.
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Another agent said that he had always known the name of the current AG from looking at his own FBI credentials. But by the 1960s Hoover was signing the credentials.

Clark was able to prevent several wiretaps, including new surveillance of Dr. King and proposals to tap Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, and the UN mission from Tanzania. Hoover made yet another attempt to get authorization to cover King just two days before the civil rights leader was assassinated. Clark refused the request.

He also warned Hoover that agents caught breaking the law would be vigorously prosecuted as the Justice Department’s “highest priority.”
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Tom had never shown such spine with the FBI director. In this and in other ways, according to one family friend, “people speculate that Ramsey’s whole course in life was in reaction to his father.”
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Clark’s assessment of Hoover was kept off the record during these years. Much later he characterized the FBI’s obsession with the Communist party as a “terribly wasteful use of very valuable resources.”
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He was deeply concerned about the old man’s foot-dragging in civil rights cases and his hesitancy to go after cops who had overshot their boundaries. The attorney general was also frustrated with the lack of cooperation between the FBI and other agencies—specifically, the CIA—and he clearly saw how dangerously resistant the Bureau was to change.

Deciding that “from many standpoints it was desirable for Mr. Hoover to be removed from the running of the FBI,” Clark proposed to LBJ the creation of a “single oversight officer” for the more than twenty governmental investigative agencies, a kind of “ombudsman who would have the responsibility to correct abuses, misconduct, failure to meet standards, discipline, and things like that.” The attorney general even suggested that Hoover be appointed to this position, “hopefully for only a few years,” though he never discussed the notion with the FBI director. Johnson thought that the idea “was too ambitious and too heavy to take on.”
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If Clark was worried that the FBI’s effectiveness and the quality of its training programs had been declining for the preceding ten to twenty years, Hoover entertained a different level of criticism for his boss. Like RFK, Clark was casually dressed when he met with the director, not even putting on a jacket for their business luncheons. Worse, Hoover was convinced that Clark was “nothing but a hippie.” He exclaimed to one of the newsmen he used for leaks, “I went over there once and his wife was barefoot! What kind of a person is that?”
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Ironically, Clark was receiving personal criticisms of Hoover that were much more serious in nature, by generally accepted standards. Early in 1968, or thereabouts, an anonymous letter typed on the stationery of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office charged, “Hoover lives in the past…surrounded by aged or incompetent men who have spent their careers looking backward and telling [him] what he wants to hear.”

The letter alleged that one SAC, a paranoid who beat and otherwise abused his wife, was protected because he knew and “has openly stated that Hoover and Tolson, whom he knows intimately, and some of their friends are homosexuals.” There were also tales about a top official, an alcoholic, whose brother-in-law was a notorious hoodlum and whose peccadilloes included demanding two prostitutes gratis from the Chicago field office as well as a new $1,000 engine for his private motorboat.

“Hoover has become independently wealthy in his job…makes thousands out of books and articles written for him by FBI employees, and many thousands in government funds have been spent by FBI employees on his property in Washington and California…Hoover and Tolson make Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of New York look like petty thieves when you consider the 40 years they have vacationed at FBI expense in New York, Florida and California without spending a dime, but submitting outrageous expense accounts.”

The writer noted, “Action on your part, Mr. Clark, will take great moral courage.” The attorney general did not respond. A second letter, dated August 28, 1968, also typed on the stationery of the Los Angeles office, was written in much the same vein. A new charge was that Hoffa’s men had been able to frame yet another top FBI official “with a blonde, liquor and lavish hotel, but with unseen cameras and tape recorders,” so that he was forced “to make a move on behalf of Hoffa.” Each of the officials he cited were named. The main target was Hoover himself, however, who “sold out his organization and his integrity to remain on the job past mandatory Federal retirement age.” The anonymous FBI employee prayed for “an able Director, young and vigorous in approach, preferably a normal, married, Christian man with integrity so we can get our organization out of politics and again doing the job concerned Americans expect us to do.”

The Justice Department did not investigate. When the author showed him copies of the letter, years later, Clark commented, “You get thousands of letters, and a lot of them are obviously from unbalanced people. When a guy writes you from way out in California telling you that President Johnson seriously considered replacing Hoover, and you’ve been close to the president all the time, an adviser of his, and this is in an area that you know a lot more about, you have to question the person’s judgment.”
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Also, it was not in Clark’s nature to rise to bait on personal matters. Both LBJ and Hoover knew that he would not relish sharing the intimate revelations about public figures that they shared with each other.

Later, it would seem that both the attorney general and the FBI director had
barely restrained themselves until the conclusion of LBJ’s term in 1968.
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Apparently Hoover got a look at prepublication galley proofs of Clark’s 1970 book,
Crime in America,
in which the FBI was described as blighted by “the excessive domination of a single person, J. Edgar Hoover, and his self-centered concern for his reputation and that of the FBI.”
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The director denounced the former AG as “a jellyfish…a softie,” “worst” head of Justice in his long experience.
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Clark replied that the Bureau, under Hoover, had become “ideological.”
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Johnson seemed to take Hoover’s side in later years. “I thought I had appointed Tom Clark’s son,” he told an interviewer. “I was wrong.”
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The retired Supreme Court justice had no such doubts. “(Ramsey has) always spoken up,” he said during the flap over his son’s book. “I’ve never known him to dodge any issue.” He also praised Hoover, “an old friend,” for having done “a very fine job” in office.

But he didn’t stop there. “We’re both getting pretty old,” said the former justice and attorney general of the postwar years. “That’s why I retired.”
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That word. Bowing slightly to the threat of the inevitable as it concerned lesser men, Hoover had gone along with a 1968 statutory provision that future FBI chiefs be subject to Senate approval. This did not mean he was ready to pack up his files and go gently. This was insurance, in the event that he was forced into retirement, giving his supporters the clout to approve a nominee in his mold. Future directors would serve no more than ten years.

Presumably it would be someone who would react as Hoover had to the wrenching ghetto riots in the summer of 1967. When forty-three people were killed in Detroit within four days in late July, Hoover told Johnson, “They have lost all control in Detroit. Harlem may break loose within thirty minutes. They plan to tear it to pieces.”
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Other observers restricted themselves to informing Johnson that Detroit was in fact in chaos, and he sent in federal troops to restore order to the riot-torn city. Harlem did not break loose.

On another track, the FBI was planning to help Johnson’s reelection chances by “disrupting” a ticket envisioned by the antiwar “Peace Party.” The thinking was that “effectively tabbing as communist or as communist-backed the more hysterical opponents of the President on the Vietnam question would be a real boon to Mr. Johnson.”
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But as civil disobedience threatened and another presidential contest loomed, as the war in Vietnam heated up, J. Edgar Hoover attained a grand climacteric on July 26. For six days he was honored and feted and publicly praised for his fifty years in government service.

Perhaps this was a time for profound reflection. Or perhaps he simply continued business as usual. Let the facts speak for themselves.

On August 1 he busily responded to the challenges of the inner-city rioting.
In testimony before the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, he included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among “vociferous firebrands who are very militant in nature and who at times incite great numbers to activity.”
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Later in the day he started the FBI’s “Rabble-Rouser Index,” urging agents to intensify their efforts to collect information about the “rabblerousers who initiate action [in the disturbances] and then disappear.”
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On the twenty-fifth of the month the Bureau was ready to establish a new COINTELPRO targeting black nationalists, in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” their activities. The director signed off with a motivational message: “You are urged to take an enthusiastic and imaginative approach to this new counterintelligence endeavor and the Bureau will be pleased to entertain any suggestions or techniques you may recommend.”
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In September, Attorney General Clark asked the FBI to investigate whether or not the riots had resulted from some “scheme or conspiracy.” Specifically, he suggested that Hoover develop “sources or informants in black nationalist organizations, SNCC and other less publicized groups.”
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The director began the “ghetto informant program,” which continued to operate until 1973. There were 7,402 participants in 1972. At first the goal was to enlist the help of community listening posts, as it were, like “the proprietor of a candy store or barber shop.” Eventually, the program encouraged informants to identify “extremists,” including the owners, operators, and clientele of “Afro-American type book stores.”
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At the same time, the FBI was investigating chapters of the Vietnam Veterans against the War to see if the organization was directed or controlled by the Communist party.
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And the Bureau had joined with the CIA to encourage the National Security Agency to institute the illegal MINARET, a program designed to monitor antiwar and civil rights activists.

In this climate LBJ’s request in October that the Bureau run a check on the senders of “negative” telegrams after a speech about his Vietnam policies may not have seemed unusual. Fifty of the “clearly critical” missives were duly handled by the Crime Reports Division.
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But they could not check out, monitor, question, file, and intimidate everyone engaged in the great social protests of the 1960s. On October 21 and 22 more than fifty thousand Americans marched in Washington to protest the war in Southeast Asia.

Yet Hoover did not hear. It was indeed business as usual. His staff prepared a long memorandum for Clark’s attention, ten pages with the puff title “Ku Klux Klan Investigations—FBI Accomplishments.” Buried in the text was a reference to Bureau informants’ “removing” Klan officers and “provoking
scandal” within the organization.
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Since this was just one of a blizzard of memos he received, Clark failed to spot the snowflakes. Hoover could now say, if challenged, that Ramsey Clark had been informed of the White Hate COINTELPRO.

In February, Hoover shared his reflections on the events of 1967 with Congressman Rooney’s subcommittee on appropriations.
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As he saw it, the riots always began when an “already troubled situation” was fanned by “troublemakers, extremists, and subversives.” Tense situations were “further aggravated with the crowd taking violent action following the exhortations of extremists.” He could not find a single cause for the series of riots and had no evidence of overall conspiracy but warned his congressional watchdogs, “We should never overlook the activities of the Communists and other subversive groups who attempt to inject themselves into the turmoil once it is started.” He did not have a “panacea,” but he did recommend that “lawlessness and violence must be met head-on by prompt detection of those violating the law, followed by prompt trial and realistic punishment.”

He was not more specific in his prescriptions for allaying the unrest of the ghettos, but he did praise the achievements of a Miami police chief. There was a 62 percent drop in robberies “in the three districts where the Negroes live” after cops started carrying shotguns into the neighborhoods and traveling with police dogs at their side.
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As for the discontent of students, this generation of new leftists was not “legitimately interested in bringing about a better nation.” No, they had been seized by “an almost passionate desire to destroy, to annihilate, to tear down.” He worried that the Communist party was taking advantage of the concerns of disaffected young Americans.
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In his view the growing tendency of civil rights leaders to support the antiwar movement was “some progress” for the American Communists, who were pleased to see these leaders “advise Negroes to refuse to fight in Vietnam.” The black nationalist movement, he warned, presented “real opportunities for foreign exploitation…a definite threat to our internal security.”
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