The Burglary (50 page)

They ended the conversation criticizing someone each of them obviously held in as low regard as they held the Supreme Court—
Washington Post
publisher
Katharine Graham:

The president thanked the director for the cuff links, emblazoned with the FBI seal, he had given him the previous day.

BY THE FALL OF
1971, Hoover had two major fears. On October 1, Sullivan, after a series of raging arguments with the director, arrived at work and found that his name had been removed from his office door and the locks changed. He had been fired. Hoover knew that Sullivan, after more than thirty years of devoted service to him, including creating some of the worst of the
COINTELPRO operations, knew essentially everything that could be used to destroy Hoover. Given that, Hoover added Sullivan, a loose cannon now that he was fired, to his other greatest fear at that time: the Media burglary. “Only those who worked for him,” wrote Gentry, “knew how shaken Hoover had been by the burglary of the small Pennsylvania agency.”

Comments about Hoover in the White House during those months often were not as generous or flattering, to put it mildly, as either the president's public remarks or his private comments to Hoover had been. White House
tapes that later became public reveal that the president and his top aides were eager for Hoover to retire. Their grievances against him were mounting. They thought he was too old for the job and was becoming senile. They resented him for letting his fear of being forced out of office make him less amenable to their requests for illegal operations.

They were downright harsh in their private assessments of him. “
He should get the hell out of there,” Nixon said in an October 8, 1971, conversation with Mitchell. They considered asking him to retire, and if he would agree to do so, they would have a grand public celebration of his service as FBI director.
Nixon had a meeting with Hoover in July 1971 for the purpose of asking him to step down. Hoover apparently anticipated what was afoot and spent the entire meeting filibustering Nixon about the past and about how well things were going at the FBI. Nixon said not a word to Hoover about retiring. As the director had done the previous year, he now outmaneuvered Nixon again. He left the Oval Office with his job intact and the president feeling doomed to live with Hoover as FBI director forever. Nixon also had a meeting with Hoover in October 1971 that he hoped would lead to his retirement. It did not.

The president was afraid of Hoover. He undoubtedly had the director's April 1971 threat to blackmail him in mind in October 1971, when he said of Hoover, “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me.” Finally, the president was told that he should not force Hoover to retire because of how the Catholic peace activists would capitalize on such a move.

It was
G. Gordon Liddy—the former FBI agent then on the staff of the White House and one of the planners of the burglary of the 1972 break-in, for which he was convicted, at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate—who ultimately convinced Nixon it would be dangerous to force Hoover to retire. Liddy wrote a detailed memo for the president that listed the pros and cons of removing Hoover from office, concluding that it would not be in the “best interest of the Nation, the President, the FBI and Mr. Hoover, that the Director retire before the end of 1971.” Fearful of the harm Hoover might do to him if he forced him to retire, the president concluded that Liddy had made a strong case for not removing Hoover. One of the reasons Liddy had given for not removing Hoover was that doing so would be seen during the 1972 Harrisburg trial of the Catholic peace activists whom Hoover had accused of plotting to bomb tunnels and kidnap Henry Kissinger as lending “weight to what are sure to be defense contentions of a conspiracy to justify
Hoover's accusations against the Berrigans.”

WHEN THE PRESIDENT LEARNED
on the morning of May 2, 1972, that J. Edgar Hoover had been found dead in his bedroom early that morning, he immediately started to plan the funeral as a grand public occasion that would be televised. He would give the eulogy himself. The timing was not quite right. Nixon would have preferred that Hoover had died earlier in his first term so the appointment of his replacement would not become a battleground over Nixon's law-and-order politics or over the FBI's past. “The house cleaning [at the FBI] is going to come, but it should not come now because we can't have any flaps about that now,” Nixon told
L. Patrick Gray in the White House just hours after Hoover's funeral. He had plucked Gray from the Department of Justice and appointed him acting director of the bureau the day after Hoover died. Newspaper commentary the day after Hoover's death focused on the fact that now that Hoover had died, the bureau was likely to face “the most thorough public investigation in its history.”

As Nixon and
H. R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff, discussed Hoover's funeral, Nixon, in the absence of Hoover having a family, took over. Nixon said he would like for Hoover to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Haldeman suggested that was inappropriate inasmuch as Hoover in death, as in life, “the last thing he'd want is to be anywhere near Bobby Kennedy.” Both Robert Kennedy and his brother John were buried at Arlington. Nixon settled for what Hoover wanted, burial beside his parents in the family plot at Congressional Cemetery in southeast Washington, not far from his childhood home.

Hoover's remains lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda the day after he died. He was only the twenty-second person, and the first civil servant, accorded that honor since the Rotunda was completed in 1824. Most of the others who had been given that high honor were presidents and select members of Congress and the military. A thousand people an hour filed past Hoover's closed casket. Outside the Rotunda, a few hundred protesters quietly read the names of the thousands of Americans who had been killed in the Vietnam War. It was not reported whether they were being photographed by FBI agents or informers, as such demonstrations routinely were.

In the front pews at Hoover's funeral at National Presbyterian Church in northwest Washington on May 4 were Chief Justice
Warren Burger;
Mamie Eisenhower, whose husband had been buried from the same church just two
years earlier; John Mitchell, who recently had resigned as attorney general to become the director of the Committee to Re-elect the President; and Vice President Spiro Agnew, who would be forced out of office the next year and charged with political corruption and income tax evasion. Agnew released a statement saying Hoover was dear to Americans because of “his total dedication to principle and his complete incorruptibility.” Among the other dignitaries seated near the front of the church were two new Supreme Court justices, William Rehnquist and
Lewis Powell, and
Frank Rizzo, then the mayor of Philadelphia, formerly the police commissioner, and a longtime admirer of the director.

Among the couple thousand attendees were hundreds of FBI agents. Seated in the midst of them was Efrem Zimbalist Jr., the actor selected years earlier by Hoover to be the star of
The F.B.I.
Mark Felt, Hoover's man at Media the morning after the burglary, was seated among the agents and was an honorary pallbearer. As of the previous day he had become the second-highest-ranking person in the bureau, taking the place of Tolson, who retired within hours of Hoover's death. Felt, very disappointed that he was not appointed to succeed Hoover, would soon expand his power over day-to-day operations of the bureau while Gray was acting director.
Felt also took over Hoover's responsibility for editing and giving final approval to scripts of
The F.B.I.,
sometimes spending several hours a day writing multipage single-spaced elaborate edits and critiques. He did this throughout the time he served as a high administrator at the bureau, including, beginning the following fall, during the period when he met
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward occasionally late at night in a dark garage in Arlington, Virginia, complicating the life of the man who gave the eulogy at Hoover's funeral.

In his eulogy, Nixon expressed the highest praise for his longtime friend. “America has revered this man not only as the Director of an institution,” he said,

The president concluded, “He loved the law of this country.”

Within the next two years, Americans would learn that neither of these two very powerful leaders, the president at the podium or the FBI director in the coffin, seemed to love the law very much.

16

F
OR TWO MONTHS
in the summer of 1971, the FBI prepared to arrest the Media burglars. Bureau officials were sure they were going to raid a draft board in Camden, New Jersey. Kept informed by a local building contractor who infiltrated the group planning the raid, FBI officials secured the approval of the Nixon administration's Department of Justice and planned for the arrests with meticulous care, seeming to leave nothing to chance.

As preparations for the arrests were under way, William C. Sullivan, the third-highest official in the bureau, expressed certainty that the Camden burglars were the Media burglars. In a July 1971 memorandum to assistant director Al Rosen, he wrote:

For Hoover, the elaborately planned Camden arrests promised victory in a case that so far seemed impossible to solve. He had expected the Media burglars to be arrested soon after the burglary and the documents secured. Even with the bureau's highly regarded Roy Moore in charge of the investigation, no progress had been made. Now, at last, victory seemed to be at hand. It looked like Hoover might restore his half-century legacy to the well-burnished gloss it had before the Media burglary, to the prestige he had long assumed he would hold forever in history books: the country's greatest crime fighter, the country's greatest defender against enemies both internal and external.

Before the summer of 1971, Camden probably was not a place where Hoover would have expected to retrieve his legacy. In 1971, as now, the small, blighted city across the Delaware River from downtown Philadelphia via the Ben Franklin Bridge was one of the poorest, most damaged, and most dangerous in the nation. It was second only to Newark as the most likely place in the nation to be mugged or killed. It was a city where industries, stores, and schools had closed and where the people who could not leave struggled to survive.