Official and Confidential (51 page)

Edgar had again pressed the Attorney General to authorize a wiretap on King. Again Kennedy hesitated, knowing discovery of such surveillance would be politically disastrous. Then, bowing to the pressure, he authorized just one tap. In October, when Edgar demanded taps on four more King telephones at the height of the Rometsch affair, Kennedy caved in. The telephone taps, along with microphone surveillance, would continue until 1966.

On October 26, the morning he and Edgar discussed Ellen Rometsch, the Attorney General had found himself in an impossible situation. On the one hand he was virtually begging for assistance with the Rometsch problem. On the other, he was angry at Edgar for disseminating an outrageously misleading report – that Martin Luther King was
‘knowingly, willingly, and regularly taking guidance from Communists.' When he tried to remonstrate, Edgar just stonewalled. The Kennedys had lost control of J. Edgar Hoover.

There would have been ‘no living with the Bureau,' Kennedy told an aide, if he had not approved the King wiretaps. Once he did, though, the Kennedys were mired even deeper. ‘It was a trap,' wrote King's biographer Taylor Branch. ‘Hoover would possess a club to offset Kennedy's special relationship with the President … How could Kennedy hope to control Hoover once he had agreed to wiretap King? There was a Faustian undertow to Kennedy's dilemma, and he did not feel strong enough to resist.'

Edgar picked October 29, the day after he had rescued the President from the Rometsch scandal, to discuss his future with Robert Kennedy. What of the rumors on Capitol Hill, he asked, that he was about to be fired? Kennedy assured him, Edgar noted with satisfaction, that the rumors were unfounded. Two days later he went to lunch with the President at the White House.

It must have been an extraordinary encounter, and deeply humiliating for the President. At the height of the Rometsch crisis, he had been forced to break his own rule and telephone Edgar directly. Now they were face-to-face. The Kennedy archives list the meeting as ‘off the record,' but we know a little of what transpired from the President's friend Ben Bradlee.

‘He told me Hoover had talked to him about that German woman,' Bradlee recalled, ‘that they'd looked at pictures of her, and Hoover had discussed what she did with various politicians.' Kennedy said nothing to Bradlee about the dirt Edgar had on him and his brother.

The President's aide David Powers, meanwhile, was to hint that Edgar's future was discussed at the meeting. And, according to Bradlee, Kennedy decided he would have to have Edgar over more often. ‘He felt it was wise – with
rumors flying and every indication of a dirty campaign coming up.'

There had been only six meetings between Edgar and John Kennedy since 1961, and there would never be another. Twenty-two days after that last secret encounter at the White House, the President flew to Dallas.

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‘Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission, on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it …'

Congressman Hale Boggs, House Majority Leader and former member of the Warren Commission

E
dgar learned of the assassination the way the world's newsmen did, from the UPI teleprinter installed in his office. The first flash bulletin came in at 1:34 P.M., Washington time, four minutes after the shooting, as the President's limousine sped toward a Dallas hospital.

Nine minutes later, with UPI saying Kennedy was ‘perhaps fatally wounded,' Edgar picked up the direct line that neither he nor the Attorney General had used for months. Robert Kennedy was at home eating lunch, and the call was transferred to him there. ‘I thought something must be wrong,' the President's brother was to recall, ‘because Hoover wouldn't be calling me here.' Moments later he hung up, gagged and turned away.

Edgar merely noted, in a five-line memo, that he had passed on the news. Edgar's voice, the Attorney General would recall, had been ‘not quite as excited as if he was reporting the fact that he found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University [Washington's predominantly black college]. His conversations with me on November 22 were so unpleasant.'

Edgar would never offer a word of commiseration – he just sent one of those terse formal notes of his. In the nine months
Robert Kennedy was to remain in office, the two men would rarely speak. When the direct-line phone next rang, Edgar merely waited until it stopped. Then he ordered, ‘Put that damn thing back on Miss Gandy's desk, where it belongs.'

When Edgar called Kennedy a second time, forty minutes after the shooting, he was still talking only of ‘critical' wounds. The Attorney General, who had better sources, set him straight. ‘You may be interested to know,' he snapped, ‘that my brother is dead.'

That evening, Edgar went home to watch television. The next day he went to the races.

‘The track raced on the Saturday, the day after Kennedy died,' said Bill Koras, an official at Pimlico, ‘and Mr Hoover was there. He used our little private office and was there most of the day conducting business about the assassination. Mr Tolson was with him, and he went down to place the bets.'

Within hours of the murder, before leaving his office, Edgar had written an ingratiating letter to Lyndon Johnson, the man who had gambled – correctly – that fate might bring him the presidency.

My dear Mr President,

I was indeed shocked by the brutal assassination today of President Kennedy and I want to offer my deepest sympathy on the Nation's tragic loss of your personal friend.

My staff and I want to reaffirm our earnest desire to be of assistance to you in every possible way.

This was pure hypocrisy. Edgar well knew that Johnson and the Kennedys had at best tolerated one another. By contrast, he and Johnson had long been exchanging letters of mutual admiration. In one, just months earlier, the Vice President had expressed his ‘complete and utter devotion' to Edgar.

Johnson's first calls as President were to two former leaders – Truman and Eisenhower – and to Edgar. Within
days, at the White House, he would be pouring out his concern that he might be assassinated himself. Edgar offered the use of one of his own bulletproof cars, and Johnson responded emotionally. He thought, Edgar noted, ‘I was more than head of the FBI – I was his brother and personal friend … that he had more confidence in me than anybody in town …'

In one of his notes as Vice President, Johnson had spoken of continuing to rely on Edgar ‘in the years ahead.' Now, his accession to power offered Edgar the likelihood of reprieve from the forced retirement that, under Kennedy, would soon have been his fate. Meanwhile, there was a most sensitive game to be played – tidying up after Dallas.

Thanks to two conflicting official verdicts, millions of Americans remain confused about the assassination. The initial inquiry, the Commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that the President had been killed by twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, former Marine and recently returned defector to the Soviet Union, acting on his own. Yet as we now know, four of the Commission's own eminent members had doubts. And in 1978, Congress' Assassinations Committee decided that there had ‘probably' been a conspiracy.

The committee believed Oswald was only one of two gunmen and that the murder was most likely planned by the Mafia. Others, pointing to evidence that Oswald had links to U.S. intelligence, wondered if it was quite so simple. Even a former chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, David Phillips, himself a committee witness, in 1988 declared his belief in a plot involving ‘rogue American intelligence people.'

There might never have been such confusion had the Warren Commission not had to rely on the FBI for the vast majority of its information. Edgar's priority from the start was to protect himself and the Bureau and to insist that
Oswald was the lone assassin. Less than four hours after the shooting, Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei was astonished to hear the Director declare himself ‘quite convinced they had found the right party.' Yet called upon to brief the new head of state the next day, Edgar was less positive. Jotting down what Edgar told him, President Johnson wrote:

Evidence not strong … not strong enough to get conviction …

There was no more talk about weaknesses in the evidence the day after that, when Oswald had in turn been shot by Jack Ruby, and with no further prospect of a trial. ‘The thing I am concerned about,' Edgar told the White House two hours after Oswald's murder, ‘is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.' Soon the President was saying he hoped he could ‘get by' with a hastily prepared FBI report.
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Of the few FBI veterans prepared to discuss the Kennedy assassination, two senior officials
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and a field agent told a story of rush to judgment and information distorted. ‘Hoover's obsession with speed,' said Assistant Director Courtney Evans, ‘made impossible demands on the field. I can't help but feel that had he let the agents out there do their work, let things take their normal investigative course, something other than the simple Oswald theory might have been developed. But Hoover's demand was “Do it fast!” That was not necessarily a prescription for getting the whole truth.'

Agent Harry Whidbee was assigned to talk to people who had known Oswald in California, where he had served during his stint in the Marines. ‘I remember distinctly,' he told the author. ‘It was a hurry-up job. Within three weeks a letter of
general instruction came to the field divisions. We were effectively told “They're only going to prove he was the guy who did it. There were no co-conspirators, and there was no international conspiracy …” I had conducted a couple of interviews, and those records were sent back again and were rewritten according to Washington's requirements.'

There are numerous stories of badgered witnesses and edited evidence. Two of President Kennedy's senior aides, Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers, both believed shots had come from behind the fence in front of the motorcade – rather than from the building behind it, where Oswald supposedly lay in ambush. ‘I told the FBI what I had heard,' O'Donnell recalled, ‘but they said it couldn't have happened that way … So I testified the way they wanted me to.'

As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy would normally have played a key role in the investigation. But he remained traumatized and away from his office for weeks after the assassination. According to a senior FBI official, Edgar ordered aides to get the Bureau's assassination report out of the Justice Department ‘before Bobby gets back.'

Edgar opposed inquiry by any body other than the FBI. Then, once Johnson decided he had to have a presidential commission to ward off calls for independent investigation, Edgar wanted to head it himself. When the job went to Chief Justice Warren, Edgar interfered from the start. He opposed the Chief Justice's choice of Warren Olney, a former head of the Criminal Division at Justice and an expert on organized crime, as the Commission's Chief Counsel. Lee Rankin, who was appointed, would conclude belatedly that ‘the FBI couldn't be trusted.'

Edgar used Cartha DeLoach to liaise secretly with two members of the Commission: Senator Richard Russell and Congressman Gerald Ford, the future President. DeLoach gleaned details of the Commission's secret deliberations from Ford, and supplied him with a secure briefcase to carry documents on a ski trip. Ford, said William Sullivan, was a
member of the FBI's ‘congressional stable …“our man” on the Warren Commission. It was to him that we looked to protect our interest and to keep us fully advised of any development that we would not like … and he did.'

Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's former aide, offered an explanation for Ford's readiness to help the FBI. For a period in the year preceding the assassination, he and Ford both had access to a ‘hospitality suite' at Washington's Sheraton-Carlton Hotel rented by a mutual friend, the lobbyist Fred Black. ‘Like me,' Baker said, ‘Jerry Ford had a key to the suite. And sometimes Black would tell me not to use the room, because Ford was meeting someone there.'

For two months in 1963, as later emerged during court proceedings against Black for tax evasion, the hotel room in question was bugged by the FBI. Baker speculated that the surveillance targeted against Black picked up compromising information on Ford, that it was passed on to Edgar, who then used it to pressure Ford into cooperating during his spell on the Warren Commission.

Edgar had long buttered up Chief Justice Warren, to the extent of running FBI checks on his daughter's boyfriends. Now, however, he treated him as a nuisance. ‘If Warren had kept his big mouth shut,' Edgar scrawled on one memo, ‘these conjectures would not have happened.' He sent agents hunting for derogatory information on the staff of the Warren Commission.

At least one Commissioner felt pressured to toe the FBI line on the assassination. According to his son Thomas, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs ‘felt personally intimidated by the FBI's visits to see him. It was, you know, “We know this and that about you, and a lot of things could come out in public about you …” My father tried not to let it affect his judgment.'
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Former Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, who stood in for Robert Kennedy in the wake of the assassination, would recall ruefully that Edgar and the FBI had a virtual
monopoly on vital information. ‘I did not know what was going on,' he said. ‘Nobody else in the government knew.' Had they known, neither Katzenbach nor the Warren Commission would have placed any trust at all in Edgar. The FBI concealed evidence from the Commission and, in one damning episode, destroyed it.

Early on, Warren staffers became suspicious about a discrepancy between the original of Oswald's address book and the FBI's typed inventory of its contents. In the FBI version one page had been retyped, omitting some information that had appeared in the original. And part of the excised material was the name, address and car license plate number of an FBI agent, James Hosty.
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