J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (78 page)

Kennedy’s razor-thin win did not require the Illinois electoral votes. He would have prevailed with the results in Texas, home state of his running mate, Lyndon Johnson, whose vote-getting prowess included the ability to raise the dead. A last-minute freshet of ballots from the grave had elected him senator and earned him the sobriquet Landslide Lyndon.

But to Hoover the Illinois vote itself was less important than his knowledge of how it had been obtained.

Ben Bradlee, then a
Newsweek
correspondent, and Bill Walton, an artist, were relaxing after dinner at Hyannis Port on the day after the election.

Impishly, “Prez,” as JFK suggested they call him, said, “Okay, I’ll give each one of you guys one appointment, one job to fill.”
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Walton, a longtime family friend, immediately urged him to get rid of Hoover. The journalist thought the CIA’s Allen Dulles should go. The next day the president announced publicly that the first two appointments of his administration would be Hoover and Dulles.
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The previous morning, as soon as the election results seemed certain, the FBI director had called to offer his support and Kennedy had assured him he would not be replaced. The son of Joe Kennedy, Sr., had not had any other choice.

Moreover, as Jack Kennedy was fond of telling people when they asked him why he didn’t replace Hoover, “You don’t fire God.”
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The first item appeared in the
New York Times
on November 9, one day before the election. Hoover recognized it for what it was, a trial balloon, and his apprehension was not eased when the paper’s editorial page shot it down.

The call for an appointment came a few days later. Undoubtedly, the director
suspected that the courtesy visit had been arranged by Joseph Kennedy, and he was right.

According to Robert, his father, his brother, and a number of others had been urging him to accept the attorney generalship. But he was still undecided and very seriously wanted Mr. Hoover’s opinion.

Kennedy approached his potential subordinate respectfully, treating him as both a senior statesman and a friend and contemporary of his father. This was not the brusquely contemptuous impertinent who had dared citicize him following the rackets probe, but the director had not forgotten.

Still, he was in a very uncomfortable position. Like everyone else in Washington, he had to deal with the reality that this difficult young man was the brother of the president-elect.

Blandly, he told Kennedy that it was a good job and that he should take it. “I didn’t like to tell him that, but what could I say?”
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Hoover later told William Sullivan, who had become head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, an appointment he knew was due to his being a Catholic and a Democrat. As far as he was concerned, the FBI director remarked with heavy irony, Robert Kennedy had all of the qualifications necessary for becoming the nation’s number one lawyer: he had managed the president’s campaign, had never practiced law, had never tried a case in court.

Waiting outside the inner sanctum during this odd meeting was John Seigenthaler, a reporter for the
Nashville Tennessean,
who had taken a leave of absence to work under Robert in the campaign. When Kennedy emerged, he told Seigenthaler that Hoover had not been straightforward. It was clear, at least to Robert, that the wary bureaucrat did not want him to accept the nomination.

He was right. And Hoover was not alone. Robert’s consultations with several other wise old stalwarts of government had not won him any ringing endorsements. Hoover’s friend the former attorney general William Rogers warned him the job was lousy. Justice Douglas suggested he either accept a college presidency or take a sabbatical.

On December 29 President-elect Kennedy made it official. For the first time in history, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States would be the brother of the commander in chief.

On inauguration day J. Edgar Hoover rejoiced. Favored friends, agency cronies, and their families crowded together festively in his office to watch the changing of the guard on television. Certain that the Kennedys were committed to waging a major new war on crime (when meant more agents), convinced as always that the presidency was a sacred institution and that it was his job to protect the reputation of the president himself, the director was pleased at the prospects of the Republic. That, at least, was how Quinn Tamm recalled the day in a letter to the
New York Times
some twenty-two years later.

Indeed, the FBI head did have good reason to feel pleased, for he had
already proved that he could use his old bureaucratic ploys to good effect with the bright young men of the New Frontier. At the height of the pre-inaugural celebrations, when top Kennedy people were inundated with organizational work and social obligations, Hoover had sent a densely worded five-page letter to the designated attorney general, his deputy Byron R. White, and Dean Rusk, the incoming secretary of state.

In one paragraph was buried a terse but vague admission of enormous importance, referring to the Bureau’s “carefully planned program of counterattack against the CPUSA which keeps it off balance” and was “carried on from both inside and outside the Party organization.” This scheme, Hoover wrote, had been “successful in preventing communists from seizing control of legitimate mass organizations.”
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None of the three recipients had called to complain. Probably, in the flurry of the moment, none had read it.

But long in the future, when a Senate committee was investigating the agency’s abuses of power, the letter could be, and was, adduced as proof that the FBI had alerted the top officials of the Kennedy administration to the existence of COINTELPRO.

In his congratulatory telephone call to the president on the morning after the election, the FBI director had informed him that Special Agent Courtney Evans would be his personal liaison to the administration.

Both Jack and Bobby liked Evans, an unusually dedicated young agent they’d come to know well during Senator Kennedy’s investigation of improper activities in labor management. During the campaign Robert had called Evans whenever he felt the need to deal with the FBI in any way.

Evans’s problem was that he liked the Kennedys, and was also loyal to the FBI. Although placed in an extremely difficult position, Evans had a remarkable talent for coolly assessing both sides, even when friction heated up between Hoover and the young man who was his boss and took the designation seriously.

Many reasons would be given for the conflicts between Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, but Courtney Evans, who saw the situation up close, too close sometimes, reached a startling conclusion. One reason they clashed, thought Evans, was that “they were too much alike. When I looked at Bob Kennedy operating in 1961, I figured that’s the way Hoover had operated in 1924…same kind of temperament, impatient with inefficiency, demanding as to detail, a system of logical reasoning for a position, and pretty much of a hard taskmaster.”
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According to Evans, all myths to the contrary, there was never a direct confrontation between the two. With him as liaison, there wasn’t much opportunity. Although Evans was officially the FBI’s liaison with the Justice Department, he also was Hoover’s contact with the Kennedy White House, where he worked mostly through Kenny O’Donnell, JFK’s appointments secretary and devoted factotum. That Hoover was denied his familiar perk of ready access to
the Oval Office made him “very unhappy,” according to O’Donnell. During the nearly three years of the Kennedy administration, the proud director was invited to the White House fewer than a dozen times.

Yet JFK seemed to get along with the man whose files could destroy his presidency and embarrass his family. Even though his decision to retain Hoover had been coerced by circumstances—not only his father’s wishes but the risk of alienating voters after a close election—Kennedy apparently understood the director and his obsessions. In their unspoken gentleman’s agreement, neither was going to rock the boat.

Robert Kennedy’s people were determined to “hit the ground running.” Efficiency, hard work, and dedication were prized, and so it was not strange that one enthusiastic assistant attorney general, whose office was in Hoover’s corridor, was first to arrive each morning. In the dark depths of a Washington winter, he would automatically switch on the corridor lights on the way to his office door. Soon, an FBI agent appeared and asked him to discontinue this habit. “The director likes to turn them on,” he explained impassively.
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Mild eccentricity was hardly the worst, however, in the wide gulf between the styles and beliefs of Kennedy loyalists and old-time Hoover janissaries. But the pettiness of some conflicts seemed to be the tip of a very ugly iceberg.

On the one hand, it was clear that the director could not resist the opportunity for reminding his young boss who was the veteran. Ignoring Washington’s Birthday, as he did most federal holidays, Kennedy worked in his office.

“After observing your car in the Department garage,” began the next day’s letter from Hoover, “I would like to thank you for coming to work on February 22nd, a national holiday…The spirit you demonstrated—the spirit of Valley Forge and Monte Cassino—will, we hope, spread through the entire Department of Justice. Keep up the good work.”
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If the letter can be excused as subtle in its condescension, other Hoover actions cannot be.

When tourists lined up for the official FBI tour in order to see how national law enforcement worked, they got a telling hint. Guides were instructed to use this line: “Mr. Hoover became the Director of the Bureau in 1924, the year before the Attorney General was born.”
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When Kennedy found out, he had the offending comment taken out of the printed tour guide.

But he apparently did not know about the standard line used by an assistant director who welcomed the new-agent classes. The administrator praised the young initiates because 36 million men had applied for their jobs and failed, including Richard Nixon and Robert Kennedy. The reasons given: Nixon was “not aggressive enough”; the current AG had been rejected for being “too cocky.”

The fitness buff Kennedy did not discover that the FBI had a gym in the basement of the Justice Building until two weeks after the inauguration. But Hoover had anticipated him. When the attorney general went down one day to work out, an agent guard posted at the door refused him entry, explaining that
no one
without FBI credentials could be admitted. Apparently deciding not to go to war over such a silly issue, Kennedy backed off.
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Unwisely, he backed off at other times as well. Once, in the midst of a meeting about civil rights, he needed an answer immediately and, characteristically, picked up the phone and called the director. “How many FBI agents do we have in Birmingham?” he asked. Hoover: “Enough.”
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For the next twenty minutes, the two men talked, or rather Kennedy listened. When he hung up, he still had no idea how many FBI agents there were in Birmingham.

Yet if Kennedy and his staff were annoyed, Hoover, Tolson, and others in the FBI hierarchy were horrified by the strange ways of the new intruders. The attorney general’s actions were considered so unlike anything the Bureau had ever seen before that they were almost immediately transmuted into legends.

There was the time the director, adopting a grandfatherly stance, kindly invited the rambunctious Kennedy kids into his famous office. Uncowed, they swarmed around the room, and one of them playfully pushed Hoover’s “panic button,” which sent agents racing in to protect him from danger. His mortification was apparent.

Worse still was the freedom afforded Brumus. His daily presence on the fifth floor, where both Kennedy and Hoover had their offices, was in direct violation of Section 201, Chapter 8, Title 2, of the Rules and Regulations for Public Buildings: “Dogs…shall not be brought upon property for other than official purposes.”

Kennedy’s beloved pet, an overgrown beast, shared his owner’s distaste for ceremony. Finally, an indiscretion led to a crisis meeting of the FBI’s executive conference, the twelve top officials (excluding Hoover, who never attended), averaging more than thirty years’ experience apiece, who were responsible for overseeing the enforcement of something like 160 different kinds of crime.

It seems that one day Kennedy brought his dog to work with him, and it peed all over the rug in the AG’s office. At the next executive conference the twelve grown men discussed bringing charges against him for the destruction of government property, an even more serious charge than violation of Section 201, but, after much heated debate, decided not to officially pursue the matter, this time.

To the director, Kennedy was almost as unrestrained as his dog. In fact, he insouciantly destroyed government property even as Hoover watched. On one occasion, as the head of the FBI and his second-in-command, Tolson, tried to control their rising rage, the attorney general scarcely acknowledged their entrance into his office. He was engrossed in an English pub game, throwing darts. Although the conversation went forward, Kennedy obviously did not, as
an aide wryly remarked, “give the Director undivided attention.” But Hoover felt that the insult was compounded by lawbreaking. “It was pure desecration,” he would charge. “Desecration of government property.”
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Kennedy had missed the target, and darts pockmarked the wood-paneled walls.

During the workday the AG and his inner circle tended to throw off their jackets, unbutton collars, loosen ties, and roll up sleeves. “It is ridiculous to have the Attorney General walking around the building in his shirtsleeves,” Hoover groused to William Sullivan. “Suppose I had had a visitor waiting in my anteroom. How could I have introduced him?”
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But Kennedy’s intrusiveness was not merely a matter of style. Although friends thought he was sincerely trying his best to show deference to the older man, Hoover could not help thinking otherwise when Kennedy, at least once, buzzed him to come over and explain some foot-dragging. “Nobody had ever buzzed for Hoover!” marveled a Justice Department official.
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And the director certainly resented Kennedy’s unprecedented requests, on occasion, that his speeches be revised. Or the rule that FBI press releases be sent through the department’s public relations hierarchy. Or Kennedy’s appearing in his office unannounced.
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