J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (4 page)

Several radicals commented on the ironic possibility that if Hoover had expired before midnight, his death had occurred on communism’s greatest holiday, May Day.

Much less imaginative, but more than usually vitriolic, Gus Hall, general secretary of the Communist party USA—an organization which some felt only Hall and Hoover took seriously—called the late FBI director “a servant of racism, reaction and repression” and a “political pervert whose masochistic passion drove him to savage assaults upon the principles of the Bill of Rights.”
²²

Tass, by contrast, simply reported the death in a single sentence, without editorial comment: “J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation since 1924, died in Washington at the age of 77.”
²³

Confirmation reached the Hill just before noon.

From the balconies you could see the whispered news traveling up the aisles of both houses of Congress, long before the official word reached the speakers’ platforms.

In the House of Representatives and the Senate the announcement was followed by a minute of silent prayer, then eulogies, which continued not only throughout that day but for more than a week to come. They were delivered by friends and foes alike, although it was difficult to tell them apart now. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, who only a few months earlier had accused the FBI of tapping his phones, was no less fulsome in his praise than Representative John Rooney, who took inordinate pride in the fact that while chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee he had never cut a single nickel from the FBI budget, that sometimes he’d even given Hoover more money than he’d requested.

Though absent campaigning—the Democratic and Republican conventions being only months away—the leading presidential candidates also sent solemn tributes, although two, Senators George S. McGovern and Edmund S. Muskie, had already vowed to replace the aging director if they were elected.

Undoubtedly many of the remarks were sincere. There was no mistaking the grief of Representative H. Allen Smith of California, himself a former special agent, when he said, “Outside of my father, J. Edgar Hoover was the finest man I have ever known.”
²⁴
Or the gratitude of Representative Spark M. Matsunaga of Hawaii when he recalled that, following Pearl Harbor, it was Hoover who courageously opposed the mass incarceration of one-third of Hawaii’s population, its Americans of Japanese ancestry.
²⁵

So accustomed were several to praising him that out of habit they referred to him as “our greatest living American.”

Yet, though it is not to be found in the printed pages of the
Congressional Record,
in many the news evoked still another emotion: a sense of relief.

It was followed, almost as quickly, by the realization that although Hoover was gone, he would have a successor. And the files remained.

Some had reason for concern. The file of one representative, who lavishly praised the crime-fighting abilities of the FBI, was heavy with memos bearing the Mafia classification number 92-6054, while on the Senate side, even more effusive in his praise was a liberal critic turned Bureau friend whose file contained, among other things, the police report of his 1964 arrest in a Greenwich Village homosexual bar.

Even those whose files contained little or no derogatory material were uneasy, for they didn’t know this was true.

Amid the eulogies, the Senate voted to name the still-uncompleted new FBI building for the late director; while both houses of Congress voted permission for Hoover’s body to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

It was a remarkable honor, accorded to only twenty-one other Americans—presidents, statesmen, and war heroes—and never before to a civil servant, or a cop.

At 12:15
P.M.
an inconspicuous sedan edged slowly out of the alley behind 4936 Thirtieth Place NW. Inside, where the backseat would ordinarily have been, strapped to a stretcher and covered with a gold cloth, was the body of J. Edgar Hoover.

Although the street out front was crowded with reporters, camera crews, and FBI agents, removal of the body had been delayed nearly four hours after its discovery on orders from the White House, so that the news would not leak out before the official announcement. Apparently the funeral directors, Joseph Gawler’s Sons, Inc., had used the sedan, rather than a regular hearse, for the same reason.

While Dr. James L. Luke, the District of Columbia’s coroner, attributed the death to “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,”
²⁶
basing his conclusion on the medical history furnished him by Hoover’s personal physician, Dr. Robert V.
Choisser, Dr. Choisser himself was denying to reporters that his patient had ever shown any evidence of heart disease. While Hoover had had very mild hypertension, that is, slightly elevated blood pressure, for some twenty years, Dr. Choisser said, it had never affected his work and he took no medication for it.
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In this, a time of assassinations and conspiracies, it was perhaps inevitable that Hoover’s death would cause rumors. Yet, lacking any evidentiary support, they died quickly, for although the exact cause of death remained in dispute—Dr. Luke having decided an autopsy was “not warranted”—the facts seemed simple enough: he was an old man, and old men die.

Few apparently noticed, until much later, that there were a number of other discrepancies in various accounts of the death.

Not until a year later would the rumor again surface, this time dramatically, behind the closed doors of the Watergate hearings, when, to the shock of the assembled senators and aides, a witness matter-of-factly, as if it were common knowledge, referred to “the murder of J. Edgar Hoover.”
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Coincidentally, at the same time Hoover’s body was to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, another event was scheduled to occur on the steps outside: an antiwar demonstration, beginning late the following afternoon, during which congressional aides would read the names of American Vietnam War dead. The announced speakers included the actress Jane Fonda, the lawyer William Kunstler, and the administration’s current number one enemy, Daniel Ellsberg.

Someone thought the opportunity too good to miss. Just who suggested the plan is unclear, but when the White House counsel Charles Colson called Jeb Magruder and told him about it, Colson said the orders came directly from President Nixon.

To avenge this slur on Hoover’s memory, Colson wanted Magruder to arrange a counterdemonstration, its real purpose to disrupt the rally and tear down any Vietcong flags. When Magruder raised objections (specifically to sending innocent young Republicans into such a battle), Colson accused him of being disloyal to the president. Magruder then checked with his boss at CREEP, the former attorney general John Mitchell, and the pair decided to turn the assignment over to G. Gordon Liddy.

Liddy, a former FBI agent who was working as CREEP’s intelligence chief, apparently embellished the plot a little, for when he later discussed it with the White House consultant and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, he said that the demonstrators planned to overturn the catafalque on which Hoover’s coffin would lie.

Hunt placed a call to Miami, to an old comrade-in-arms, Bernard Barker. Under the code name Macho, Barker had served as Hunt’s assistant during the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. Even earlier, Barker had been an FBI informant while serving with Batista’s secret police.

Again, in the retelling, the plot thickened. Barker recruited nine other men,
mostly Cubans, all anti-Castroites, telling them that “hippies, traitors and communists” intended to “perpetuate an outrage on Hoover.”
²⁹

Supplied with airline tickets and expense money, the group made arrangements to fly to Washington, D.C., the following day, their objective to disrupt the antiwar demonstration and, specifically, to totally incapacitate Ellsberg.

Perhaps there was a leak. Or maybe someone simply realized that the files might
not
be in the securely locked office of the former director. For early that afternoon Assistant to the Director John Mohr had a visitor—Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray III.

Mohr was busy making arrangements for Hoover’s funeral, and he told him so. Speaking for the Justice Department, Gray had a few suggestions about seating and protocol. Always a somewhat brusque man, Mohr was unusually so that day and he informed him the funeral would be handled by the FBI, in its own way.

Eventually Gray got around to the real point of his visit: “Where are the secret files?” As head of the administrative side of the Bureau, responsible for the Files and Communications Division, Mohr was the logical person to ask.

Mohr replied that there were no secret files.

Ignoring his response, Gray repeated his question. And Mohr repeated his reply.

Gray gave up, for the time being.
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“Old Gray was all spooked off,” Mohr recalled, years later, in explaining his denial to the
Washington Post
reporter Ronald Kessler. Moreover, Gray had asked the wrong question. Although the files were secret to the public, they were not secret to FBI personnel, Mohr disingenuously explained. Had Gray asked if there were any dossiers on members of Congress, for example, “I’d obviously have said yes.”
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Mohr provided an even simpler explanation in 1975, when called before a House subcommittee investigating the disappearance of the files. By definition, Mohr said, “a secret file is one marked secret.” And these bore no such markings.
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Still later, in a letter to the same subcommittee, Gray himself would observe, “It now appears, in retrospect, that I did not know how to ask the right questions.”
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Gray was neither the first nor the last to be deceived by the semantics of the files.
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Hoover having been a Mason for over half a century, John Mohr had planned a Masonic funeral. But at 2:15
P.M.
Mohr received a call from the White House:
the president had decided that Hoover would be given a state funeral, with full military honors.

Mohr spread the word. Almost automatically, Crime Records, the FBI’s public relations division, began preparing a press kit, to be passed out before the services.

That afternoon, it was widely reported, Acting Attorney General Kleindienst held a number of “name dropping” sessions, their purpose to pick a new director of the FBI.

As Kleindienst had anticipated, the president had tossed the ball right back into his court. With rare exceptions, Nixon seemed incapable of hiring or firing people, much preferring that others do it for him. Twice the previous year the president had called Hoover to the White House, with the intention of asking for his resignation. Although only Nixon and Hoover—and the White House tapes—knew what transpired during these meetings, both times Hoover emerged from the Oval Office still director.

Exactly who participated in the name-dropping sessions, and what force their opinions had, is unknown, but it is known who was
not
consulted: any current or former executives of the FBI.

Press speculation put Mark Felt, John Mohr, and Alex Rosen high on the list of “possibles,” with the former FBI executives William Sullivan, Louis Nichols, and Cartha “Deke” DeLoach also in the running.

It’s probable, however, that none of these names was even mentioned; a decision had apparently been made that the new director would not come from within the Bureau. The risk of perpetuating the Hoover reign was far too great. An insider would insist on holding to the FBI’s traditions, including its independence. And as this president had already shown, repeatedly, independence was not something he desired in his administration. Loyalty was everything.

Among the “outsiders” suggested in the press were Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White (who, it was suspected, probably had no interest in changing jobs); the Washington, D.C., police chief, Jerry Wilson; the Los Angeles sheriff, Peter Pitchess, himself an ex-agent; and Joseph Woods, former sheriff of Cook County, Illinois (and brother of the president’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods).

The man Kleindienst picked was on only a couple of the lists, and very near the bottom. Few Washington reporters had ever heard of him. He was totally lacking in law enforcement experience, but among his qualifications was one big plus: he was intensely loyal to both Richards—Kleindienst and Nixon.

It was decided that the announcement of L. Patrick Gray III’s appointment would be made the following day, after the Rotunda services but before Hoover’s funeral.

One name unmentioned in any of the speculation, because of his age and poor health, was that of the current acting director, Clyde Tolson.

Even death could not stop bureaucratic paperwork; one of the first directives FBIHQ sent out after Hoover’s death specified that all official correspondence should be prepared for Acting Director Clyde A. Tolson’s signature.

Since Tolson had not returned to headquarters, his secretary, Dorothy Skillman, did most of the signing for him. However, either in error or to make Tolson feel that he was still needed, several batches of memos were sent to the Thirtieth Place residence. But Tolson was too grief stricken to handle them, so Crawford read them aloud to him and, with Tolson’s approval, signed Tolson’s name on them.

The memos were routine, but the moment was not. For decades J. Edgar Hoover had resisted hiring blacks for anything except the most menial jobs in the FBI. Under pressure from the NAACP, and to keep them from being drafted during World War II, Crawford and a few others, all chauffeurs or office help, had been made special agents, though their duties remained much the same. Later, when Robert Kennedy was attorney general, Hoover had been forced to accept more, but not many.

On the day Hoover died there were 8,631 special agents in the FBI. Of that number, 3 were American Indians, 15 Asian Americans, 62 Spanish-surnamed, and 63 black.