J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (103 page)

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DeLoach later explained that his mandate was “to provide information…which would reflect on the orderly progress of the convention and the danger to distinguished individuals, and particularly the danger to the President of the United States.”
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One danger to Johnson was the possibility of open disagreement with the Reverend King, as revealed by DeLoach in a telephone call to someone in the White House, reported in an unsigned memorandum. The civil rights leader was planning, it was feared, to “speak up to the President” in a meeting that the president was scheduled to attend. For this timely warning and all the rest, Hoover would comment on DeLoach’s final report of the Atlantic City operation, “DeLoach should receive a meritorious award.”’

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Although the G Street YMCA was one of several dozen Washington establishments off-limits to FBI personnel, a number of agents surreptitiously used its facilities because it was open evenings and had handball courts. Other prohibited areas included certain parks and public rest rooms, most nightclubs, and many hotels, residence clubs, and apartment buildings.

Although they were not on the official list, new headquarters personnel were usually warned that the two most off-limits establishments in the capital were the Rib Room of the Mayflower Hotel (at lunchtime) and Harvey’s Restaurant (at night). Attempts to socialize with the director and associate director, they were informed, were definitely not the road to advancement.

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Goldwater’s staff was preternaturally clean, except for one assistant’s traffic violation and another’s minor mention in the FBI files. Since he couldn’t find someone as vulnerable as Jenkins on his opponent’s staff, Johnson considered linking Jenkins himself with Goldwater, for the two had flown together in the senator’s Air Force squadron.

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Perhaps to cover himself, DeLoach dispatched a memo to Hoover proving that LBJ remained supportive: “He stated that despite any criticism the Director might receive over this incident he, the President, felt that history would record the fact that the Director had done a great humanitarian deed. The President added that he received flowers from Khrushchev every time he had a bad cold or was laid up in bed for a day or two. He stated this did not make him love Khrushchev any more and that the American public certainly recognized this fact.”
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Actually the phrasing was not without interest: “When he assumed office as President in November, 1963, Mr. Johnson still did not know of the January, 1959, arrest.”
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In addition to the Bureau’s cooperation and advice, official sanction meant that the production company could use the FBI seal on the screen. In 1954 Congress had named it one of two government symbols that could not be used commercially. The other was Smokey the Bear.

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This is no exaggeration. In one shooting script, two old ladies were chatting by the by about the good old days. The actor Efrem Zimbalist was to smile. According to Richard Gid Powers, this reaction shot had to be changed because of the possibly suggestive implications of his expression.
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Kennedy supporters naively thought that Johnson could be forced to accept RFK as his vice-presidential nominee at the convention, and the president gleefully strung them along. In fact, the nomination of Goldwater, and Johnson’s own success in the White House, strengthened him with the types of voters Kennedy might have been expected to attract. In Johnson’s traditional power base, the South, the Massachusetts liberal would have been a liability. “I don’t need that little runt to win,” the president said. Kennedy certainly understood that Johnson would not want, as RFK put it, “a cross little fellow looking over his shoulder.” When Johnson finally asked his attorney general over to the Oval Office in order to tell him he would not be chosen, Kennedy noted from several unusual conversational items on the agenda that it was obvious that “he was receiving detailed reports from the FBI on the activities of several of the Congressmen and Senators.” Kennedy also noticed that the lights on LBJ’s tape recording equipment were on, indicating that the talk was being recorded.
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While acknowledging that the FBI director was officially subordinate to the attorney general, Katzenbach doubted that “any Attorney General after Harlan Fiske Stone could or did fully exercise the control over the Bureau implied in that formal relationship.” The comment could be construed as self-serving, perhaps, but it was deeply felt. “Absent strong and unequivocal proof of the greatest impropriety on the part of the Director, no Attorney General could have conceived that he could possibly win a fight with Mr. Hoover in the eyes of the public, the Congress, or the President.”
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Hoover noted in his memorandum to Watson, “A copy of this communication has not been sent to the Acting Attorney General” (Ramsey Clark).
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Even though the FBI’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination had been closed, its investigation of the Warren Commission critics was open-ended. Hoover continued to send new material to the White House even after the administration changed.

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Journalists and public delighted in the revelation during the hearing, by the San Francisco private eye Hal Lipset, of the existence of an olive-shaped “bug,” designed to be used in martinis.

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Hoffa’s “Motion for Relief Because of Government Wiretapping, Electronic Eavesdropping and Other Intrusions” was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court, which assessed it was, in effect, a motion for a new trial that should be filed in the district court in Chattanooga. The new trial was never granted, and the Hoffa team’s frantic efforts to prove wiretapping got nowhere. The Teamsters leader went off to jail more than three years after his conviction with a touch of sangfroid. When an attorney was unable to get through to check a last-minute appeal to the federal judge in Chattanooga, his client grabbed the telephone, and the bottom of the instrument fell out. “See, what did I tell you,” Hoffa said, “even this phone is bugged.”
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According to the magazine article, Zicarelli, known locally as Joe Bayonne, was a capo in the Joe Bonanno family and ran gambling rackets, sold arms to the dictator Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and was involved in a scheme to legalize the importation of laetrile, a supposed cancer cure made from apricot and peach pits. Gallagher defended this last enterprise to the
Life
reporters: “Look, if Bonnie and Clyde had a cure for cancer, you should listen.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t agree.
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The major article in 1968 had been foreshadowed by a brief paragraph in a
Life
article the year before, which Gallagher characterized as “the first shot across my bow.” In a survey of organized crime, the congressman had been briefly mentioned as, once again, “a tool and collaborator” of the Bayonne racketeer. Immediately afterward Cohn called DeLoach to say, “That was a pretty dirty trick the Bureau did to Neil Gallagher.” According to the lawyer, DeLoach replied, “That’s just like you, Roy, always standing up for guys who don’t stand up for us.” Gallagher recognized that Cohn’s motives for telling this anecdote might not have been entirely pure.
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According to Gallagher, it was about this time that FBI agents burst into the Washington apartment his daughter was sharing one summer with three girlfriends. Gallagher had signed the lease, since the vacationing coeds were all underage. The agents demanded to know which one of the “broads” was sleeping with the congressman.
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Dodd had almost made a fatal mistake with Hoover immediately after John Kennedy’s assassination. On November 25 the FBI director learned that his former agent was proposing that Congress, not the Bureau, be in charge of an investigation of the murder and was urging this course upon President Johnson. The two were at least politically close; as Senate majority leader, LBJ had skipped over several senior senators to give Dodd a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee. The appointment of the Warren Commission ended Dodd’s initiative, but Hoover was furious at the mere suggestion. The Connecticut senator had an unusual reservoir of good feeling to draw against, however, because in 1963 and again in 1965, he helped quash proposed legislation that would have mandated Senate confirmation of the director of the FBI.

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At least one reason Dodd enjoyed such favor with both Hoover and LBJ was his expressed contempt for the Kennedys. On the day of the assassination, his startled aides picked up the drunken senator at the airport and were treated to a volley of slanderous remarks about the dead president and the pope, interrupted with their boss’s speculations that he would be named vice-president soon. When the late president’s funeral services were aired on national television on all channels, Dodd became incensed that nothing else could be viewed and resorted to directing the funeral march, interjecting obscene gestures.

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In a think piece, the
Washington Post
’s Richard Harwood deftly summed up the conflict: “If, as Director Hoover has insisted, Attorney General Kennedy was not only cognizant of but encouraged the illegal eavesdropping in which the FBI has been engaged for years, his political position is hardly enhanced. His credibility would be damaged, for he has denied the Hoover claim without reservation. His position with the liberal intellectual establishment would likewise be impaired, for eavesdropping is inconsistent with prevailing concepts of civil liberty in the United States.”
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According to Mark Felt, once deputy associate director of the FBI, Hoover, “sensitive to the moods of Congress,” had already asked him for a “substantial” cutback in wiretapping during 1965. The director, without laying down specific guidelines, simply asked Felt to winnow out the least-productive taps, apparently relying upon the agent’s judgment and initiative. These qualities received national attention in 1980, when he and Edward Miller were convicted of conspiring to violate individual civil rights by authorizing break-ins and searches of the homes of five people suspected of having ties to fugitives who belonged to the Weather Underground, a radical leftist organization. The prosecutor noted that he had “tons of examples of entries that continued from 1966 to 1972.”
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Despite Hoover’s January 6 memo, FBI agents were repeatedly staging break-ins in New York City during the last six months of his life. Felt and Miller were the first top FBI officials ever convicted of this charge. Both were given “full and unconditional” pardons by President Ronald Reagan before they were sentenced.
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The following day former President Richard Nixon sent champagne to the two men. “I think he’s a fabulous guy,” said Miller.
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In November the director informed selected SACs about the Bureau’s inspiration for a Klanzi party COINTELPRO: “We created the impression that the Klan and the American Nazi Party might form the Klanzi Party…for the purpose of ridicule and to provoke certain Klan leaders to an attack on the ANP.”
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A month before, someone suggested a rather similar plan to disrupt the Communist party and La Cosa Nostra by “having them expend their energies attacking each other.”
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A supposedly Communist leaflet attacking the working conditions at a mob-owned business was to be the first fruit of Operation Hoodwink.

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The
New York Times
columnist James Reston noted tongue-in-cheek, “Johnson is staying out of the Kennedy-Hoover controversy. He is managing to restrain his grief over seeing the Senator in an embarrassing situation with Kennedy’s new-found liberal supporters.”
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When he announced publicly that his written consent would be required for all wiretaps, Clark also asserted that tapping was justified only in cases of national security where there was a direct threat to the security of the nation. By his own account, the new attorney general knew of only thirty-eight wiretaps in existence at the time, all in the national-security area.

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“I was no stranger to the Department,” Clark would tell the Church committee. “When I first officially entered here, I padded the halls as a 9-year-old kid beside my father. I love the place.”
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To avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, Justice Clark stepped down from the Supreme Court when his son was appointed attorney general. President Johnson thereupon appointed Thurgood Marshall, the first black to sit on the Court.

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Of talks with Hoover, Clark would recall, “I don’t think that I ever really engaged in philosophical discussion or arguments with him. These would basically be soliloquies; these were things that he would get off on.” Tolson, on the other hand, struck the attorney general as “a gentle and thoughtful man.” He could “carry on a very engaging conversation on many subjects, but you never felt any fervor of opinion and you never thought that here was a man who made a decision. If it ever came to an issue that required a decision, he would always defer to Hoover or say, ‘I’ll have to see what the boss says.’ ”
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Early in 1968 Ramsey Clark drily answered a question about his dealings with his famous employee: “I describe our relationship as cordial and he describes it as correct.”
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The FBI’s inability to discover any Marxist-Leninist influence in this organization caused the probe to be closed down the following month. A similar program began in 1968; a full investigation was launched in August 1971 and continued up to 1974.