J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (117 page)

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 days 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

But
Newsweek
beat
Time
to the punch, with its own cover story, “Hoover’s FBI: Time for a Change?” It cited a new Gallup poll in which 51 percent of those queried thought Hoover should retire, and it named, among his possible successors, William Sullivan.
^†

On May 5 the
Los Angeles Times
reported that the FBI had twenty-eight special agents on loan to the House Appropriations Subcommittee as investigators; thus, in effect, the FBI was investigating its own budget requests. There was even a bit of nepotism involved. One of the four agents assigned to the committee full-time was Paul J. Mohr, the brother of John Mohr, who prepared the FBI’s budget.

May 10, 1971, the day the
Newsweek
story appeared, was also J. Edgar Hoover’s forty-seventh anniversary as director of the FBI, and Crime Records mobilized his congressional stable well in advance. Although many of his strongest supporters had died, retired, or been defeated for reelection (Hoover had the habit of outliving his friends as well as his enemies), seventy-one members of the House of Representatives and five senators put their tributes in the
Congressional Record.

Even the columnist Jack Anderson contributed to the director’s anniversary celebration, albeit indirectly.

Four times a year (at Christmas, on Hoover’s birthday, on the anniversary of his joining the Justice Department, and on the anniversary of the day Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone named him acting director), the bite was put on headquarters personnel, SACs, and ASACs to contribute to “the director’s gift.”
^*

This year they bought him a trash compactor.

But the congressional accolades weren’t enough to hide the obvious fact that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was under the most sustained, devastating crossfire in his entire career.

Like any experienced general, Hoover tried to reduce his areas of exposure.

On April 28, 1971, less than two months after the Media break-in and less than a week after Boggs’ second attack, the FBI director sent an “all SACs” memo officially discontinuing all seven remaining COINTELPROs.

This didn’t mean the end of COINTELPRO-type activities, however, for one paragraph read, “In exceptional instances where counterintelligence action is warranted, it will be considered on a highly selective individual basis with tight procedures to insure absolute security.”

Moreover, many of the agents had relied on these harassment and disruption techniques for so long that they were loath to abandon them. Many of the acts continued, authorized or not.

And, though the memo
officially
ended the COINTELPROs, one sentence, if read carefully, gave the strong impression that the hiatus might well be
temporary: “Although successful over the years, it is felt that they should
now
be discontinued for security reasons because of their sensitivity” (emphasis added).
²⁹

Nor was this the only way Hoover covered himself. Faced with the frightening prospect of having to personally justify his employment practices in a court of law, the FBI director reluctantly agreed to settle the suit the ACLU had brought on behalf of the former special agent Jack Shaw.

Although Shaw was not reinstated, the “with prejudice” designation was dropped from his records, and on June 16, 1971, Shaw received a settlement check for $13,000. This just about covered the hospital and medical expenses of his wife, who had died of cancer three months earlier.

Still another technique Hoover used to retain his job was to ingratiate himself publicly with the president and attorney general. In a special ceremony, Hoover presented Nixon, once an FBI reject, with a set of gold cufflinks bearing the FBI seal, while Mitchell was given a gold special agent’s badge, symbolizing the confidence he had brought to law enforcement, “which we didn’t have before your administration.”
³⁰

He did further favors for his nominal superior. On the evening of May 24 the American Newspaper Women’s Club held its annual dinner at the Shoreham Hotel. The highlight of the black-tie gala was the presentation of the club’s Headliner of the Year Award. Although this year’s recipient was Martha Mitchell, the scene stealer of the evening was the man who had consented to make the presentation: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

In recent years Hoover had rarely attended such public functions. To the surprise of many of the reporters, seeing him up close for the first time, the FBI director seemed far from aloof. Arriving in the middle of the cocktail party that preceded the dinner, he went directly to the bar, ordered a Jack Daniel’s, then mixed with the crowd. An even bigger surprise was that the director appeared to have a sense of humor. Asked if he had ever received any of Mrs. Mitchell’s middle-of-the-night telephone calls, Hoover responded, “I stay up waiting for that.”

Entertainment for the event was provided by the Grand Ole Opry star Minnie Pearl, who wore hot pants and a hat with a price tag dangling from it. This was the first time he had met Miss Pearl, Hoover said, and he was delighted, because he’d always been a fan of country music. “I guess I’m square,” the FBI director observed. “I’m fond of country music, Western music and girls, too.”

What about hot pants? someone asked.

“They’re okay on the proper person,” Hoover replied, “just like the mini skirt.”

(But the next day at FBIHQ none of the female employees dared put the director’s remarks to the test.)

However, it soon became apparent that Hoover’s sense of humor was short-lived. Speaking of his hosts, Hoover commented, “The ladies of the press are less cattier than the men. There are very few jackals among the ladies of the
press. I have a scavenger, you know. Jack Anderson’s aide goes through my garbage. I view Jack Anderson as the top scavenger of all columnists. Jack Nelson is next to a skunk.”

The AP reporter Janet Staihar chose this moment to ask the director if he had any retirement plans. “None whatsoever,” Hoover forcefully replied, “not so long as I’m healthy.”

Attorney General John Mitchell, who was standing nearby, took umbrage at the question. “You’re so far off base I’m going to belt you one,” he said menacingly, “or pour a drink—.” When someone grabbed his arm in what appeared to be midpour, Mitchell said, “Oh, I’m just kidding. She’s a friend of mine.” Staihar later said she’d never met Mitchell before.

Martha Mitchell didn’t share her husband’s mood. After his introduction she hugged Hoover and remarked, “Edgar, I know you don’t come to many dinners, so I want the audience to take a good look at you, because if you’ve seen one FBI director, you’ve seen them all.”

Then she added, tweaking the cheek of her husband, who seemed to be perpetually embarrassed by the antics of his wife and former mistress, “John tells me he’s never worked for a nicer fellow.”
³¹

But when it came to shoring up his relationship with the White House, Hoover ran into problems.