J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (129 page)

Gray also made speeches that were just short of Nixon endorsements; destroyed the contents of Howard Hunt’s safe; gave the presidential counsel John Dean some eighty 302s, the raw unevaluated investigative reports which were never circulated outside the Bureau; allowed Dean, and attorneys for CREEP, to sit in on interviews, thus intimidating the witnesses to be less than forthright; and met surreptitiously with Dean and Ehrlichman to subvert the Watergate probe.

In February 1973 Nixon nominated Gray permanent director. His confirmation hearings—the first ever for an FBI director—began on the twenty-eighth and were in trouble from the start. Gray kept volunteering information that the judiciary committee members might otherwise have never found out about, and it was Gray who turned the Watergate investigators’ attention on Dean. By March 7 the White House had decided to abandon Gray, Ehrlichman telling Dean, “Well, I think we ought to let him hang there. Let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind.”
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On March 13 the president could be heard saying, on the White House tapes, “Gray, in my opinion, should not be the
head of the FBI.” On March 22 he said, “The problem with him is he is a little bit stupid.” On April 27 Gray asked that his name be withdrawn. He’d lasted fifty-one weeks.
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When it was obvious that Gray was on his way out, Dean asked Mark Felt how the Bureau would react to the appointment of William Sullivan as director. Obviously upset—he’d thought that he was the most logical choice—the acting associate director predicted it would throw the Bureau into “chaos.” Another name much discussed, not always kindly, was that of John Mohr. Although he’d resigned nine months earlier, in June 1972, Mohr had kept in close touch with the remaining FBI executives, and many believed he’d secretly orchestrated Gray’s downfall. Instead Nixon appointed William Ruckelshaus, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, acting director.

Ruckelshaus reported to work on April 30, 1973—the same day the president announced the resignations of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, and John Dean—to find a copy of a telegram on his desk. The acting associate director, all the assistant directors, and all the special agents in charge except one
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had wired the president, urging him to appoint a highly qualified professional from “within the organization.”
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There was nothing personal about it, the FBI officials told Ruckelshaus; they were sure he was a nice guy; but he had no law enforcement experience and knew nothing of the traditions of the Bureau.

Ruckelshaus was a caretaker, and was treated as such. He lasted only seventy days, not long enough to make any significant changes. He did discover that Daniel Ellsberg had been overheard on the Kissinger wiretaps, which resulted in the dismissal of all charges against Ellsberg and Anthony Russo in the Pentagon Papers case. And he made one personnel change. After a clash with Mark Felt, whom he’d caught leaking stories to the press, Felt submitted his resignation. To his surprise, Ruckelshaus accepted it.

In choosing a permanent director, Nixon and Ruckelshaus went outside the FBI, but not far. They picked Clarence M. Kelley, a twenty-one-year-veteran of the Bureau (1940-61), who had spent his last twelve years as police chief of Kansas City, Missouri. Kelley had a reputation as a tough cop and a “strict but compassionate disciplinarian.” As the
Los Angeles Times
’s staffer Jack Nelson observed, “As director of the FBI, Clarence Kelley will face a situation similar to the one he encountered when he became police chief of Kansas City. A demoralized agency with a deteriorating public image.”
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He had an even bigger problem: laying the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover.

Confirmed by a vote of 96 to 0 in the Senate, Kelley had a mandate for change, but showed no undue haste in exercising it. He did institute a policy of “participatory
management,” which he’d used most successfully in Kansas City; as a result, according to the writer Sanford Ungar, whom he allowed unprecedented access to the inner workings of the FBI during the transition period, “Meetings of the executive conference have become more like those of a corporate board of directors than of the disciples of Christ.”
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But he surrounded himself with unreconstructed Hooverites and J. P. Mohr loyalists, who did their best to co-opt him and even managed to involve him in their petty pilferings.

For every change Kelley made, however minor, he had to face the criticism “This isn’t the way
the director
did it.” A mini-rebellion almost broke out when the field offices were ordered to display the current director’s photograph alongside that of his predecessor. The question was one not of placement but of size. Kelley decreed the photographs be equal, and after much grumbling the SACs went along with it, taking some consolation from the fact that since Gray and Ruckelshaus had been only “acting” directors, they wouldn’t be sharing the field office walls.

But Kelly didn’t need pictures to remind himself of Hoover. He was omnipresent, a lingering, brooding presence, affecting every decision Kelley did or didn’t make.

Unlike Hoover, Kelley had great sympathy for and worked closely with the police, including the late director’s longtime nemesis Patrick Murphy, who now headed the Police Foundation.
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He also established good working contacts with the other intelligence agencies, as well as with the Justice Department. He worked hard to improve the accuracy of the crime statistics, stressed quality and impact over quantity of cases, gave more authority to the field, and, after Nixon left office, resumed the war against organized crime, scoring several major victories. He deemphasized Domestic Intelligence—where most of the abuses had occurred—reducing its caseload to less than 10 percent of the Bureau’s total, but he also stressed taking “protective action…before very serious threats become clear violations of Federal law.”
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He apologized for the COINTELPROs, but in a way that indicated he did not take them all that seriously. He stated that he welcomed congressional oversight, but often was less than forthcoming in producing documents the committees requested. He authorized the release of large quantities of files under the Freedom of Information Act, but usually not the most incriminating, trying, not altogether successfully, to keep the lid on Pandora’s box. He said the days when the FBI smeared people were in the past, but one of his aides in External Affairs, as Crime Records had been rechristened, cautioned the author not to take anything
William Sullivan said seriously, that he’d had a nervous breakdown. At times Kelley almost sounded like Hoover. Speaking on behalf of a bill to increase electronic surveillances, he said, “And I hope the Good Lord enables me to adequately convey to you the enormous value of this statutory weapon against the panderers of vice, corruption and violence.”
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But then, he had the same speechwriters, chief among them William George “Bill” Gunn.

Looming over everything he did was the shadow of his predecessor. Kelley had to walk a fine line, distancing himself from Hoover but never denouncing him, not even after the Church committee hearings, which took place while Kelley was director. One of his most controversial speeches was at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, where, thirty years earlier, Sir Winston Churchill had delivered his famous “iron curtain” address.

In a speech entitled “Perspectives of Power,” Kelley told his audience, “During most of my tenure as director of the FBI, I have been compelled to devote much of my time attempting to reconstruct and then explain activities that occurred years ago.

“Some of these activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible. We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated. It is true that many of the activities being condemned were, considering the times in which they occurred—the violent Sixties—good faith efforts to prevent bloodshed and wanton destruction of property. Nevertheless, they were wrongful uses of power.”

After stating that the abuses had occurred “chiefly during the twilight of Mr. Hoover’s administration” (Kelley, who had served in the Bureau from 1940 to 1961, knew better), and noting that no man should serve as director for more than ten years, Kelley added, “Yet I feel we should not utterly disregard Mr. Hoover’s unparalleled contributions to peace-keeping in the United States.”
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Wrong? Indefensible? Abuses?
The furor over Kelley’s almost apologetic remarks was so great that the FBI director had to send a “clarification” to the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Inc. The society had a vested interest in preserving, untarnished, the reputation of the late, great, incorruptible J. Edgar Hoover and his force of squeaky-clean Boy Scouts.
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Kelley’s speech was delivered on May 8, 1976,
three years
after he’d become director and
one year
after the Church committee had exposed thousands of illegal, unethical, and immoral actions by Hoover’s FBI. To the day he retired, in 1978, Kelley was still treading that thin line. “I say it is time for the FBI’s
critics to concentrate on the FBI present and the FBI future” (May 8, 1976). “My approach to my job since becoming FBI director has been to try to bring about change for the better, not to prove, or condemn, things that were wrong” (December 2, 1976). “It is my fervent desire to let the old wounds heal and to permit the FBI to move forward” (March 3, 1977).

Kelley was never able to exorcise Hoover’s ghost. Even the move into the new FBI Building was not symbolic of a new start. For one thing, the building had been named for J. Edgar Hoover. For another, workers on the night shift claimed they could hear the late director hurrying down the halls of the floor above, the tip, tap of his little feet followed a minute or two later by the painful, shuffling steps of the late associate director, dragging his bad leg.

On moving to Washington from Kansas City, the new FBI director had gratefully accepted the help of the Bureau in settling into his apartment. New valances had been installed, by the Exhibits Section, and two television sets purchased and installed, on the directions of Associate Director Callahan. The Exhibits Section also built a walnut table, a set of stack tables, and a jewelry box, which were given to Director Kelley as gifts from the executive conference. Kelley was not told the Exhibits Section made the gifts. Exhibits Section employees also repaired a broken cabinet for the FBI director and mounted the FBI seal on a gold disk as a charm for the director’s wife, who was dying of cancer. In addition, Director Kelley’s automobile received occasional servicing by FBI employees and his FBI-provided chauffeur performed personal errands for him. One weekend, while his wife was still able to travel, Director and Mrs. Kelley joined a number of former and current FBI executives and their wives on a trip to New York, where they met with officials of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which underwrote the Special Agents Mutual Benefit Association (SAMBA) policy. The others attending included former Assistant to the Director John Mohr and Mrs. Mohr and current Assistant to the Director Tom Jenkins and his wife.
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The group stayed at the Waldorf Astoria. Director Kelley’s travel from Kansas City, Missouri, to New York and return to Washington, D.C., was by Government Travel Request (GTR). Travel for Mrs. Kelley and the others was paid by SAMBA. Prudential paid all other expenses.

Once he realized how he’d been set up, and how crudely, from the valances to the complimentary weekend in New York, Kelley got mad. “I’ve never seen him so mad,” an aide recalled. “He burned and burned and burned and then he exploded.”
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When the Justice Department took over the corruption investigation—his own Inspection Division having found nothing amiss—Kelley cooperated fully
with the JD team. As the latter stated in its final report, “Director Kelley should be given credit for putting an end to the improper practices described in the report. His cooperation greatly assisted Departmental investigators in uncovering the facts. His cooperation made this report possible.”
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It was because Kelley had ordered them to do so that “hundreds” of current and former FBI employees cooperated with the investigators.

If the chief casualty of the probe was the reputation of J. Edgar Hoover, the chief beneficiary was the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although it had taken him five years to get around to it, Kelley cleaned house. He fired Associate Director Nicholas P. Callahan, citing not the charges in the report but other, unspecified “abuses of power.”
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He completely reorganized the Inspection Division, restructured the FBI inventory system to provide built-in controls and audit trails, instituted new auditing and accounting practices, separated budget from property procurement, ended the exclusive relationship with U.S. Recording, replaced the Confidential Fund, reorganized the FBI Recreational Association, and, perhaps most important, as AG Bell carefully phrased it, “developed and improved the FBI career development program for special agents to ensure that the best qualified individuals are selected for administrative advancement, subsequently reducing the possibility that one person or group can control the selection of such candidates.”
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Bell didn’t name names. He didn’t need to.

Kelley’s shake-up, completed before the release of the Justice Department report on January 10, 1978, was his last hurrah. Nine days later President Jimmy Carter named a new FBI director.

William Sullivan wasn’t around to see either the Justice Department report or the change in directors, although he would have greatly welcomed both.

After leaving the FBI in 1971, Sullivan had tried to ingratiate himself with the Nixon administration, by writing two memos to John Dean citing instances in which the Democrats, and particularly the Johnson administration, had made political use of the FBI.
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Nixon was frantically collecting any and all such material for use in defending his actions in Watergate. Despite his help, Sullivan was only briefly considered as a possible replacement for Gray—Felt having told Dean there would be open rebellion in the Bureau if Sullivan was appointed and Haldeman rejecting him as being “too independent”—although he did serve for a short time as director of the Justice Department’s Office of National Narcotics Intelligence. Upon his retirement, Sullivan divided his time between his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, and a crude, isolated cabin
he’d built in the woods near Bolton, Massachussets, not far from where his sister lived.