J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (3 page)

Anderson had heard the news not from one of his legendary sources but via the capital’s fastest method of communication, the secretarial grapevine. He had been interviewing a minor governmental official when the man’s secretary broke in, “I thought you should know…J. Edgar Hoover is dead.”

If he hadn’t dropped the paper clip he had been toying with, the bureaucrat might have successfully masked his shock.

Hurrying back to his office, Anderson made a confirming call, then told his secretary, Opal Ginn, to alert the syndicate there would be a substitute column the next day. He did not consider dropping the series, which had another week to run. It was more important now than ever.

Knowing he would be asked for one as soon as the news got out, Anderson, after finishing the substitute column, typed a brief statement:

“J. Edgar Hoover transformed the FBI from a collection of hacks, misfits and courthouse hangers-on into one of the world’s most effective and formidable law enforcement organizations. Under his reign, not a single FBI man ever tried to fix a case, defraud the taxpayers or sell out his country.
^*

“Hoover was also scrupulous at first not to step beyond the bounds of a policeman. But I would be hypocritical not to point out that in his fading years he sometimes stepped across those bounds.

“I have been critical of the FBI for going beyond its jurisdiction to investigate the business dealings, sex habits and personal affairs of prominent Americans.

“It is my hope for the country that Mr. Hoover’s successor will run the FBI as Hoover did in the beginning.”

It was an honest statement, yet, like the bureaucrat’s face, it also masked his personal feelings. But then how can you describe the tremendous sense of loss you feel on learning of the passing of one of your most worthy adversaries?
⁸

Mrs. Charles Robb had a 10:15 appointment with the director, but arrived well in advance. For a new writer, recently hired by the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
the interview was quite a coup—especially since the director almost never gave interviews, and hadn’t given one to a woman since 1964, eight years earlier, when, appearing before a group of Washington newswomen, he’d called the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.—among other things—“the most notorious liar in the country.” But then her relationship to the old man was special.

At ten one of his assistants came out into the reception room and, speaking very softly, asked her, “Can you keep a secret?”

Amused, she replied that she had kept more than a few when her father was president.

“The director died during the night.”

Like everyone else, she was shocked, but perhaps even more deeply than most, for she had known more than one side of the man. The Johnson girls had grown up across the street from Hoover, during the years when their father was a congressman. He had been like a kindly old uncle, who remembered each of their birthdays, helped them find their stray pets, even gave them a beagle to replace one who had died.

By the time their father had become president, she and Luci realized Hoover had another side. For example, at the request of their father, he had ordered FBI investigations of each of their suitors, one such report ending her own much-publicized romance with a motion picture star.

Her main concern now was what effect the news would have on her father, who was in extremely poor health. His own relationship with Hoover had been particularly close. He had cryptically told more than one person, including the then president-elect Richard Nixon, that had it not been for Edgar Hoover he could not have been president.

Leaving the Justice Department Building, Lynda Bird Robb looked for a pay phone, to call her mother at the ranch in Texas.

But, knowing her father, she thought it quite likely he had already heard.
⁹

Acting on orders from the White House, Kleindienst summoned John Mohr to the AG’s office. A telephone call would have sufficed, but the matter was sensitive, and Kleindienst did not want to take any chances of his orders being misunderstood.

Kleindienst was not alone. Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray III was with him, Mohr meeting him for the first time.

A bullet-headed ex-submarine commander and former Pentagon aide, Gray had retired from the Navy in 1960, to serve as a military adviser in Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. Following Nixon’s defeat, Gray joined a New London, Connecticut, law firm, where he remained until Nixon’s 1968 victory. Called to Washington, he was appointed to several second-level posts in the new administration, first serving as executive director to the secretary of health, education, and welfare, then, starting in 1970, as assistant attorney
general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. For the past three months his main job had been steering Kleindienst through the stormy waters of the confirmation hearings. A hardworking, methodical man, he was known as a team player, intensely loyal to his superiors.

The meeting was brief: Kleindienst ordered Mohr to secure the director’s private office.

Although it went unmentioned, the same subject was probably on all three minds: the legendary files of J. Edgar Hoover.

Kleindienst would later testify that he had no interest whatsoever in the files (“I might be an unique person but I do not waste my time with curiosity, and I also had a tremendous amount of work to do”),
¹⁰
but he must have had at least a smidgen of interest in his own file. For example, while deputy attorney general, Kleindienst had been offered a $100,000 bribe if he would dismiss the indictments of several persons involved in a major stock manipulation case. Kleindienst had neglected to report the bribe offer—until after J. Edgar Hoover informed him he knew about it, and that the FBI was investigating.
^*

Mohr did
exactly
what he was told to do.

Later that day he sent Kleindienst a memo:

“In accordance with your instructions, Mr. Hoover’s private, personal office was secured at 11:40
A.M.
today. It was necessary to change the lock on one door in order to accomplish this.

“To my knowledge, the contents of the office are exactly as they would have been had Mr. Hoover reported to the office this morning. I have in my possession the only key to the office.”
¹¹

What Mohr neglected to tell the acting attorney general was that no files were kept in Hoover’s private office. The FBI’s most secret files were in the office of his secretary, Miss Helen Gandy.

And now, only hours after the death of the man who had been her employer for fifty-four years, in the midst of the grief and many condolence calls and arguments over who would sit where at the funeral, Miss Gandy had already begun to go through those files, culling and separating them, marking some for destruction by shredding, setting others aside for special handling.

Nor was she the only one doing this.

Over the years it had various code names. It was usually referred to, however, as the “D” list, the letter possibly standing for “destruct,” and it was kept in the FBI printshop, in the basement of the Department of Justice Building, not far from the equally secret, quite select theater where the director and others screened pornographic movies.

In the event of
…The first paragraphs of the document, according to an ex-official, read like the table of contents of a book on cataclysms. Every eventuality
was covered, including earthquake, fire, nuclear attack, the invasion of the United States by a foreign power, the seizure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by hostile elements, and a possible coup d’état by the CIA or another government agency.

At the very bottom of the list was the unthinkable—which had just happened: in the event the present incumbent in the office of director ceases to serve as such…

Within an hour of the discovery of Hoover’s body, the D list was circulated to various predetermined FBI officials, who, having consulted it, set to work destroying certain specified files, films, and recordings.
¹²

“It is with profound personal grief that I announce that J. Edgar Hoover passed away during the night at his residence.

“The nation has lost a giant among its patriots.”

Acting Attorney General Kleindienst’s announcement had been delayed until 11:45
A.M.
, to allow the FBI to notify its own people first. As a result, by the time Kleindienst appeared in the White House briefing room, many of the reporters had heard not only the rumor of the death but another, more disturbing one which had spread just as fast: that J. Edgar Hoover had been murdered.

Hoping to end such speculation, Kleindienst stated, “His personal physician informed me that his death was due to natural causes.”
¹³

Kleindienst went on to say that Hoover’s body had been found at approximately eight-thirty that morning by his maid.

Unknown to Kleindienst, he had already become part of a cover-up. For reasons of their own, some of Hoover’s top aides had decided to hide the fact that Crawford was at the scene. According to the official FBI version, which Kleindienst now passed on to the press, it was Annie Fields who discovered the body. James Crawford was never mentioned.

As Kleindienst was finishing his statement, the president of the United States unexpectedly entered the room. Facing the television cameras, Nixon spoke of his own grief and loss. He’d met this “truly remarkable man” when he’d first come to Washington as a freshman congressman twenty-five years earlier, Nixon said; over that quarter century Hoover had been one of his “closest friends and advisers.”

Nixon did not mention Hiss and the Pumpkin Papers, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or any of his six crises, but the older reporters remembered. He and Hoover had made a lot of history together.

Nor did Nixon mention some much more contemporary history which was unknown to any members of the press: how he had tried to fire Hoover in 1971, and failed; how this old man had stood up against him and the entire intelligence community and opposed the Huston Plan, and won; and how, since Hoover had refused to let the Bureau be used, he’d been forced to create his own secret police, known as the Special Investigations Unit or the “White House Plumbers.”

The White House speech writer Patrick Buchanan had written the president’s statement, but Nixon had added his own touch, observing that although he had ordered the flags on all government buildings lowered to half-staff, “Edgar Hoover, because of his indomitable courage against sometimes vicious attacks, has made certain that the flag of the FBI will always fly high.”
¹⁴

As soon as the president left the room, reporters rushed to the phones.

AP beat UPI with the first URGENT BULLETIN, at 11:55
A.M.
, but both were scooped by radio and by ABC, CBS, and NBC TV, which had interrupted their regular programming with the announcement.

Within an hour many of the larger newspapers had extras on the streets, with full-front-page headlines:

HOOVER DEAD!

AMERICA’S TOP COP DIES IN SLEEP

NATION MOURNS #1 G-MAN

There was an end-of-an-era feeling in most of the press accounts, which were filled with such evocative names as Dillinger, Ma Barker, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, Machine Gun Kelly, the Rosenbergs, Harry Dexter White, and Alger Hiss, and such memory-laden events as the Lindbergh kidnapping, the capture of the Nazi saboteurs, and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Any obituary is, of necessity, a summing up, but this particular death seemed to call forth judgments. This was especially the case with the editorials of the large eastern dailies:

The
New York Times:
“For nearly a half century J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were indistinguishable. That was at once his strength and its weakness…”
¹⁵

The
Washington Post:
“Few, if any, men in the history of the United States have accumulated so much power and wielded it for so long as did J. Edgar Hoover…”
¹⁶

The
Washington Star:
“Today, in Washington, a city that was built and populated by bureaucrats, they are mourning the man who was probably the most powerful of them all.”
¹⁷

Yet it was the smaller papers, middle America extended coast to coast, which really mattered, and always had, as far as the FBI itself was concerned. For they, more than the metropolitan press, had accepted, supported, and helped foster the Hoover legend. For more than three decades they’d published the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s press releases, and been glad to have them; run congratulatory editorials each May 10, on his anniversary as director; and launched letter-writing campaigns whenever someone suggested replacing him.

While in the urban papers the consensus seemed to be that Hoover was a
legend who had long outlived his own time, their common theme was that, in a time when America most needed leaders, the country had lost one of the greatest of them all.

The
Enid
(Okla.)
Morning News:
“Mr. Law Enforcement USA is dead.”
¹⁸
The
Monroe
(La.)
Morning World:
“His death Tuesday was like the fall of a main supporting pillar of the Republic.”
¹⁹

The
Las Vegas Sun:
“Were there no J. Edgar Hoover with his dedication and stature, who knows but we might have awakened some morning and found we had no liberties left at all.”
²⁰

Not everyone was saddened. Nor were all the comments tributes.

Coretta King, who felt her husband had been destroyed by this man, made no attempt to hide her bitterness in a long statement she released. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded his slain friend as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and who had once preached a sermon to Hoover via a “bug” secreted in the pulpit of his church) whimsically observed, “With the passing of J. Edgar Hoover, I am reminded that almighty God conducts the ultimate surveillance.”
²¹