J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (119 page)

This was hardly what the White House wanted to hear.

Liddy’s report received a wider circulation than he’d anticipated. It even got back to Mardian and Mitchell at the Justice Department. The attorney general was less than happy with Sullivan and Brennan, for discussing their conflicts with Hoover. “This problem is well known to and receiving the attention of the president of the United States,” he told the pair. “You don’t need to program Liddy about it.”
¹⁵

At the White House, the memo so impressed Liddy’s superiors—Young, Krogh, and Ehrlichman—that two months later he was given the sensitive assignment of developing a list of presidential options for dealing with the J. Edgar Hoover problem.

But before that, there were more pressing matters that Liddy had to handle, such as burglarizing the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

Because he couldn’t trust anyone else, Sullivan came into the office on a Saturday morning and typed out the letter himself on his old upright.

“Dear Mr. Hoover:

“It is regretted by me that this letter is necessary…”

Opinions of Bill Sullivan varied widely. Ramsey Clark thought him “a tough guy who would tell you a hard truth.”
¹⁶
Lou Nichols, while acknowledging
that Sullivan was the Bureau’s leading expert on communism (he’d helped ghost most of the director’s books and speeches on the subject), thought he’d missed his true calling: “Bill should have been a monk in a Jesuit monastery.”
¹⁷
Since no one,
ever,
openly opposed the director, there were those who thought him mad, or at least suffering delusions of grandeur. But there was one recurrent comment made by enemies and friends alike. As Alan Belmont, a friend who had also occupied the number three hot seat, put it, “Sullivan’s strongest feature was his loyalty to the director.”
¹⁸

No more. His loyalty, he now decided, belonged to the Bureau. They were not one and the same, Sullivan had finally concluded, not anymore. With his letter, Sullivan tried to separate the Siamese twins.

It was a painful, personal letter, not meant for the record. It showed the agony Sullivan had been going through, and the rage, particularly at the director’s insensitivity toward those who had served him faithfully and well. It reviewed the disagreements between him and Hoover and the times they had worked harmoniously together. It concluded:

“What I have said here is not designed to irritate or anger you but it probably will. What I am trying to get across to you in my blunt, tactless way is that a number of your decisions this year have not been good ones; that you should take a good, cold, impartial inventory of your ideas, policies, etc. You will not believe this but it is true: I do not want to see your reputation built up over these many years destroyed by your own decisions and actions. When you elect to retire I want to see you go out in a blaze of glory with full recognition from all those concerned. I do not want to see this FBI organization I have gladly given 30 years of my life to…fall apart or become tainted in any manner…

“As I have indicated this letter will probably anger you. When you are angered you can take some mighty drastic action. You have absolute power in the FBI (I hope the man who one day takes over your position will not have such absolute power for we humans are simply not saintly enough to possess and handle it properly in every instance). In view of your absolute power you can fire me, or do away with my position…or transfer me or in some other way work out your displeasure with me. So be it. I am fond of the FBI and I have told you exactly what I think about certain matters affecting you and this Bureau and as you know I have always been willing to accept the consequences of my ideas and actions.

“Respectfully submitted, W. C. Sullivan.”
¹⁹

Three days later the director summoned Sullivan to his office. They argued for two and a half hours and settled nothing. On September 3 Hoover wrote to “Mr. Sullivan”—the salutation indicating his fall from grace—requesting that he submit his application for retirement, to take effect immediately after he’d taken his accumulated leave. Sullivan took the leave, but the requested letter was not forthcoming.

They met again on September 30, for the last time, and resumed shouting.

“I’ve never received such a letter since I’ve been the director of the FBI, and nobody has ever spoken to me like this before.”

“If someone had spoken to you like this before,” Sullivan responded, “I wouldn’t have to be speaking to you like this now. I should have told you these things a long time ago.”

Hoover countered, “I’ve been giving this controversy between us a great deal of prayer.”

Humbug, Sullivan wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he told the director that he ruled the Bureau by fear and that he, for one, no longer intended to be intimidated.

“It’s very clear to me that you have no faith in my leadership,” Hoover shouted.

“Yes,” Sullivan replied, “nothing could be more clear than that.”

“You no longer have any faith in my administration.”

“Right. I think you’d be doing the country a great service if you retired.”

“Well, I don’t intend to,” Hoover sputtered.

The director’s voice now changed to a self-pitying whine. “I never thought that you’d betray me—that you’d be a Judas too.”

“I’m not a Judas, Mr. Hoover,” Sullivan retorted. “And you certainly aren’t Jesus Christ.”

Hoover had the final word. “I’ve taken this up with Attorney General Mitchell and he agrees with me that it is you who should be forced out. I’ve discussed this matter with President Nixon and he also agrees.”
²⁰

Without so much as a good-bye, Sullivan turned and walked out, returning to his office to resume packing his personal effects. The following morning, October 1, Sullivan came to work to find that his name had been removed from the door and the locks changed.

It must have been almost an afterthought on Hoover’s part, again a strong sign that he was slipping.

Not until the morning of October 1 did E. S. Miller, the new head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, search Sullivan’s office and, failing to find the object of his search there, make an equally unproductive search of the filing cabinets and other secure areas in the DID.

The Kissinger wiretaps were one of the most closely held secrets of the FBI. Within the Bureau itself, only the director, Sullivan, and those who worked on the taps were aware of their existence. Even Miller was at first unsure what “the extremely sensitive material which Mr. Sullivan had been maintaining for the Director” consisted of.
²¹

But when he found out, Miller was quick to grasp its importance. As he reported to Alex Rosen, “It goes without saying that knowledge of this coverage represents a potential source of tremendous embarrassment to the Bureau and political disaster for the Nixon administration. Copies of the material itself could be used for political blackmail and the ruination of Nixon, Mitchell and others of the administration.”
²²

All day long, headquarters personnel peeked into Sullivan’s office to see if the rumor was true. It was. Except for one item, Sullivan’s desk, reputedly the
messiest in the entire FBI, was bare. The only thing Sullivan had chosen to leave behind was a personally autographed photograph of the director.
^*

As a sample of things to come, the
Washington Post
had the story the next morning: “Top FBI Official Forced Out / in Policy Feud with Hoover.” True to his promise, William Sullivan did not go quietly. The official FBI statement, that Sullivan had “voluntarily retired,” was quickly debunked. Although he was not quoted directly, it was obvious that Sullivan was talking.

He was also writing another letter, this one for the record, if that became necessary.

Despite its much touted investigative abilities, the FBI was unable to find a clue to the disappearance of the Kissinger wiretap records until Mark Felt called William Sullivan and asked him where they were. He had given them to Robert Mardian in the Justice Department, Sullivan told him, with, one suspects, a certain amount of satisfaction.

Mardian, however, claimed that he’d destroyed the records.

Although it must have been a difficult call to make, the director telephoned the attorney general on October 2 and informed him that the materials from the “special coverage” which had been in William Sullivan’s custody were missing.

Mitchell told Hoover he shouldn’t concern himself, that they were in the White House. It was Ehrlichman now, however, who claimed the records had been destroyed.

Hoover didn’t know whom to believe. But it didn’t matter. All that really mattered was that
he
no longer had them.

Physical possession of the materials, although desirable, was not entirely necessary for Hoover’s purposes, however. If he intended to use the threat of making the wiretaps public as a means of forcing Nixon to retain him as director, all he needed was the basic facts: who was tapped, when and for how long, and upon whose request and authorization. What was actually heard was really immaterial. On Hoover’s instructions, an investigative team was assigned the job of reconstructing the history of the taps. But it quickly ran into a problem: the best source for the identities and dates was Horace Hampton of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company; however, since the publication of Kessler’s articles, it was deemed unwise to contact him. Instead Belter and the men who did the actual listening and transcribing were interviewed, and they were able to recall most of the names and approximate dates. But only Sullivan was present during the conversations with Kissinger and Haig. And—because Hoover had insisted on it—there were no copies of the
cover letters linking the materials to the White House or, most important of all, of Attorney General Mitchell’s signed authorizations.

Nor could Hoover bluff. Since Sullivan knew there were no duplicates, the White House probably did also. In the last analysis, it would be J. Edgar Hoover’s word against John Mitchell’s. But if it reached that stage, he would have already lost the battle.

As far as the Kissinger wiretaps were concerned, Hoover was stalemated. But these weren’t the only files he could use against Nixon.

When Sullivan completed his final letter to Hoover, on October 6, he sent it to the director’s home, rather than to FBIHQ, explaining “As you are aware the Bureau has become a bit of a sieve and this letter if seen would be the subject of gossip which, I am sure, we both wish to avoid.”

“Many times I have told you what I think is right and good about the FBI,” he began, “but now I will set forth what I think is wrong about it…”

The letter, which ran to twelve single-spaced pages, was divided into twenty-seven separate categories, each containing one or more potentially embarrassing news stories, as a sampling of the headings indicates: Senator Joseph McCarthy and Yourself; The FBI and the Negro; The FBI and Jewish Applicants; Your Book Masters of Deceit; Free Services at Your Home; Concealment of the Truth; FBI and CIA; FBI and Organized Crime; Our Statistics; Leaks of Sensitive Materials; The Hoover Legend and Mythology; and, finally, FBI and Politics.

Any reporter in the capital would have given a week’s pay for the chance to quote only a few of the passages: “My first recollection was leaking information about Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt whom you detested…You know well we have avoided hiring Jewish agents. You have always had one Jewish agent up front for people to see. Years ago it was Mr. Nathan I am told. In my time it is Al Rosen…More than one of us at the Bureau were disturbed when you identified yourself with Senator McCarthy and his irresponsible anti-Communist campaign. You had us preparing material for him regularly, kept furnishing it to him while you denied publicly that we were helping him. And you have done the same thing with others…We all know [our statistics] have been neither definitive nor wholly reliable…Breaking direct liaison with the CIA was not rational…As you know I had a number of men working for months writing [the book
Masters of Deceit
] for you. Only recently did I learn that you put some thousands of dollars in your own pocket and Tolson likewise got a share…I think we have been conducting far too many investigations called security which are actually political. During the Johnson administration…”

Despite its many categories, Sullivan’s letter was very selective. There was no mention of the Kissinger wiretaps or other special favors the FBI had done for the Nixon administration (although previous, Democratic administrations were mentioned). Nor was anything said about any other wiretaps, bugs, or bag jobs; the deficiencies in the FBI investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination; the plan to neutralize Martin Luther King, Jr.; or the
COINTELPROs—in all of which William Sullivan had figured so prominently.

Sullivan’s letter was part bluff, part blackmail. Hoover’s problem would be to decide how much of each. These are
some
of the things I know, Sullivan seemed to be saying, and if you don’t “reform, reorganize and modernize the Bureau”—
or resign
—I’ll make them public. The threat was implicit in the last paragraph:

“Mr. Hoover, if for reasons of your own you cannot or will not [reform the Bureau] may I gently suggest you retire for your own good, that of the Bureau, the intelligence community and law enforcement…For if you cannot do what is suggested above you really ought to retire and be given the recognition due you after such a long and remarkable career in government.”
²⁵

Minus the politeness, it sounded more than vaguely reminiscent of another letter William Sullivan had written seven years earlier, anonymously:

“King there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days…There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

Hoover did not respond to the letter. But then neither did he show it to Mitchell or Nixon.