Read J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Online
Authors: Curt Gentry
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #United States, #Political Science, #Law Enforcement, #History, #Fiction, #Historical, #20th Century, #American Government
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (97 page)
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In
The FBI Pyramid,
Mark Felt, formerly deputy associate director of the Bureau, observed, “When the puritanical Director read the transcripts of the tapes disclosing what went on behind Dr. King’s closed hotel doors, he was outraged by the drunken sexual orgies, including acts of perversion often involving several persons. Hoover referred to these episodes with repugnance as ‘those sexual things.’ ”
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According to other FBI officials, the director was even more exercised by the minister’s penchant for consorting with white women.
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This degree would have been an especially unkind cut, in the view of the FBI official whose memo noted, “It is shocking indeed that the possibility exists that King may receive an Honorary Degree from the same institution which honored the Director with such a degree in 1950.”
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The upper levels concurred. The agent who apparently persuaded the university official to reconsider was rewarded with a letter of commendation from Hoover as well as a monetary award.
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According to the Church committee report, the recipients included the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA director, Acting Attorney General Katzenbach, and the heads of all military intelligence agencies and the USIA.
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Some accounts of this incident have missed the point, taking the apologists’ line that the FBI intended that only King see the contents of the package. On the contrary, it knew that he would be out of the office and that Coretta would be at her post. It doesn’t take a Jesuit to see that, in such circumstances, a package addressed to Martin Luther King, Jr., is in effect and intent a package intended for Coretta Scott King.
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FBI insiders felt that Nichols would never have allowed Hoover to expose his true feelings to this extent, and they even suspected that DeLoach was setting the old man up. Perhaps, but DeLoach did pass three notes in succession to the director after the “liar” remark, urging him to take it off the record. But Hoover had taken his stand: “DeLoach tells me that I should keep these statements concerning King off the record but that’s none of his business. I made it for the record and you can use it for the record.”
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Nonetheless, when he later saw that the whole episode had tarnished his image in the press, he was not above attaching blame to his subordinate.
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“Everyone knows he can’t stand spontaneous exposure,” said one anonymous FBI source years later. “He either has to have a text in his hand or he’s going to say what he thinks and then there’s hell to pay.”
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Or was there? “Hoover Steals the Show” was the headline when Hoover made a rare appearance at a society cocktail party in Washington two days after his meeting with the lady journalists. He reported then that he had already received four hundred telegrams in response to his remarks, “all favorable except for two or three who were critical or hostile,” and these, he said, “were probably from racist groups associated with Martin Luther King.” He did say he had held his last press conference, however. “I’m going to get writer’s cramp from answering all those messages.”
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Bradlee had been much too personally close to John Kennedy for Johnson’s comfort. The newsman, according to Moyers, had made a comment that could certainly have a bipartisan moral, however: “If the FBI will do this to Martin Luther King, they will undoubtedly do it to anyone for personal reasons.”
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It was in Johnson’s interest to let Hoover know that the tactics of his Bureau were becoming all too obvious, at least in some capital circles.
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DeLoach called it a “love feast.”
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Newsweek
reported on December 14, 1964, that King was “awed” by the director’s information about corrupt law officers throughout the old South. By 1970 Hoover had created a wholly fictional account: “He sat right there where you’re sitting,” he told a
Time
reporter, “and said, he never criticized the FBI. I said, Mr. King—I never called him reverend—stop right there, you’re lying. He then pulled out a press release that he said he intended to give to the press. I said, don’t show it to me or read it to me. I couldn’t understand how he could have prepared a press release even before we met. Then he asked if I would go out and have a photograph taken with him, and I said I certainly would mind. And I said, if you ever say anything that is a lie again, I will brand you a liar again. Strange to say, he never attacked the Bureau again for as long as he lived.” Unless the other participants all lied—King, DeLoach, Young, Ralph Abernathy, and Walter Fauntroy—Hoover’s version was only wishful thinking.
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Immediately afterward, DeLoach was attempting to work his own brand of charm on CORE’s James Farmer, who had come over at King’s behest because of a rumor that the FBI was planning to “expose” the civil rights leader the following day. “I told him that our files were sacred to us and that it would be unheard of for the FBI to leak such information to newsmen,” DeLoach reported in his official memo. “I told him I was completely appalled at the very thought of the FBI engaging in such endeavors.”
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The Bureau learned of these pleasingly salacious events, and many others, from its wiretap on Rustin. The highlights were passed along to President Johnson.
The Fall of LBJ
A
lone on his balcony at the Justice Department, high above the 1.2 million cheering citizens, Hoover watched Lyndon Baines Johnson’s inaugural parade. Lady Bird noticed the “lone spectator.” In her diary entry for January 20, 1965, she commented, “He has seen a lot of us come and go.”
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In fact, her husband had been watching many come and go right along with him.
Take the rich, ambitious senator who didn’t especially admire LBJ but had expected to become his running mate…and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., certain that the president and he shared fundamental goals, but foolhardy enough to work for reform at the Democratic party convention…and Robert Kennedy, who despised Johnson, along with Walter Jenkins, who was devoted to him.
One by one, together with countless others, they came under the scrutiny of the FBI, and Lyndon artfully pushed and pulled, letting Hoover see clearly how he could make himself indispensable to the political aims of the White House.
The senator’s estimation of his worth in the national political arena was seriously inflated—even more so when he was arrested by New York City police on a raid of a bar where male homosexuals sought companionship. The senator would never rise higher than the Senate. Soon, although considered to be liberal on most social issues, he was regularly singing the praises of the FBI director for inclusion in the
Congressional Record.
The story was passed along to President Johnson, who knew that Hoover’s web extended somehow through the nation’s lowliest police precincts—but could always be reminded.
If Hoover understood exactly how much his president enjoyed salacious
gossip, he also felt that he could anticipate the forceful Texan’s political needs. Apparently without informing the White House, the FBI initiated electronic surveillance at the Democratic National Convention in August. CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were bugged. Dr. King was tapped.
The White House had requested a special squad of thirty agents to help forestall any “civil disruption.”
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As reams of material were passed along to Jenkins, it must have been clear that some of these agents were engaged in transcribing information that could only come from wiretaps and bugs. In addition to these “confidential techniques,” as DeLoach termed them, the FBI team also gathered information by “informant coverage,…by infiltration of key groups through use of undercover agents, and through utilization of agents using appropriate cover as reporters.”
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The King wiretap revealed the tactics—none of them “disruptive”—planned in a seating challenge of the all-white Mississippi delegation. Within hours, Jenkins knew each element of the changing strategies to be employed by the predominately black Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, including telephoned advice and counsel from several congressmen, senators, and governors.
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Hoover had not asked Attorney General Kennedy for permission to tap the Reverend King. He was broadly interpreting the earlier authorization with its vague phrase about “residences.” So it was that RFK’s grudging approval led to his being tapped by his subordinate. Any contact Kennedy enjoyed with the civil rights leader, by telephone or in person, was closely observed and immediately reported to DeLoach, Johnson’s man in the FBI.
The strange spectacle of White House aides giving medical and psychological diagnoses—without benefit of knowledge or examination—was occasioned by an arrest in a men’s room. Ordinarily the suspect might feel at least a little foolish, while the director of the FBI and the president of the United States would, with more important things to think about, comport themselves with appropriate dignity. In October the exact opposite was true.
Walter Jenkins had been arrested in the same YMCA rest room, two blocks from the White House, back in January of 1959.
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That incident had not been
publicized, and for about a week neither was this occasion of “disorderly conduct (pervert).” When newsmen began to track down rumors about the incident, Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford persuaded their editors not to go with the story, explaining that exhaustion had occasioned the contact with another man and that Jenkins would be asked to resign.
The Republican party’s national chairman, mired in Barry Goldwater’s moribund campaign for president, couldn’t resist, however. “The White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security.”
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At the FBI the “national security” angle was being taken very seriously by Hoover’s subordinates. If anything, the doggedly hardworking and infinitely loyal Jenkins might know even more than his boss about some matters, for avalanches of information funneled through him to the Oval Office. Including questionable FBI memos.
The Johnson election bandwagon felt the ruts in the road, and the president, who yearned to swamp the Kennedy showing of 1960, was furious. He was also suspicious and in a mood for revenge. DeLoach was ordered to comb Goldwater’s staff for derogatory information, but a quick check of fifteen names taken out of the Senate telephone directory got nowhere.
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Johnson had announced the resignation of Jenkins, who had followed Fortas’s advice and checked himself into a hospital. He also told the American people that he had asked J. Edgar Hoover for “an immediate and comprehensive inquiry,”
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especially in regard to the possibility that national security could have been compromised.
To Hoover’s great embarrassment, word got out that a bouquet of flowers had appeared at Jenkins’s bedside, accompanied by a warm personal message signed, “J. Edgar Hoover and Associates.” According to Sullivan, DeLoach had engineered this kindly gesture in order to humiliate the director.
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While Hoover smarted from the jokes about his hospital gift, LBJ concentrated on the matter at hand. First, the president had FBI agents pressure the man arrested with Jenkins, ordering that “agents should bear down on [the suspect] with respect to his knowledge of…Republican National Committee members.”
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Next, Johnson and Fortas decided that Jenkins was afflicted with
“a very serious disease which causes disintegration of the brain.”
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When the FBI sought confirmation from Jenkins’s physician, however, he stood firm. The White House diagnosis was never made public, “inasmuch as the medical authorities are not yet certain of their findings,” as DeLoach phrased it in a memo to Hoover.
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Spurred on by LBJ, the FBI tried to pressure Interior Secretary Stewart Udall to lean on a Park Service cop who had told a story about Jenkins trying to solicit his favors in LaFayette Park earlier in October. The Bureau had been inspired too late. The president had already tried that ploy. The policeman, too, stood firm.
The hysteria at SOG and the White House subsided when a special poll, commissioned by LBJ, showed that the American public, by and large, couldn’t care less.
The president praised his loyal old friend in public at last for “dedication, devotion and tireless labor.” Privately, he made sure the FBI report contained yet another medical diagnosis from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fatigued Jenkins was not a homosexual “biologically.”
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More than three hundred people were interviewed in the Bureau’s zeal to prove that Johnson’s aide had not compromised the nation’s security. And that the inquisitive president with a gossipy FBI chief knew nothing about his aide’s prior arrest on a morals charge.
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The incident probably cost LBJ few votes in his landslide election victory in November. Some well-known voices of the anti-civil rights radical Right, however, turned viciously on their former hero at SOG, calling his Bureau report a “whitewash.” The former congressman Walter H. Judd, himself a virtual icon of outspoken anti-Communists, seethed with rage. He wondered aloud if Hoover or his agency might be “involved in such a way that it fears being hurt by some revelation Jenkins could make.” The famous bouquet, he charged, had “compromised” the Bureau.
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Quietly and with dignity, Walter Jenkins, forty-six, returned to Texas with his wife and six children.
In December, after turning down (he said) more than six hundred offers over the years, Hoover signed with ABC, now managed by his old friend, the former Eisenhower press secretary Jim Hagerty.
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Produced by Jack Warner, who had produced
The FBI Story,
the new Bureau-approved TV series premiered the following fall. The top new series in the 1965 season in terms of ratings, “The FBI” endured for nine years.
What forty million Americans viewed in their living room once a week was
in every scene, word, and gesture vetted by Tolson and others in the FBI.
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An agent was stationed in Hollywood to oversee the writing and production.
Hoover’s experience with filmmaking had been positive, though he grumbled that some unauthorized pictures had not been of top quality. Certainly, none contained a line like Jimmy Stewart’s character’s reaction to his first meeting with the FBI director in the authorized film: “He can make water run uphill.”
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Casting, of course, was the first priority, and Hoover was pleased that the very clean-cut, unbesmirched Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., was chosen. For his part, the actor would several times characterize the FBI director as “very sweet” and the agents he met as “very kind.” Describing his first meeting with Hoover at SOG, Zimbalist recalled that “he had this marvelous old colored man who would take you in.” After one of Hoover’s monologues, a two-hour-long ramble punctuated with contrasting observations about Khrushchev and Shirley Temple, Zimbalist became convinced that the old man was not only “a breath of fresh air” but was indeed “the ideal, he was the benevolent ruler.”
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Hoover was pleased with his new star.
Not only the actors playing FBI agents were given background checks but many others as well. Hoover let it be known that he did not want criminals, subversives, or Communists in any way connected with the production. The problems of a Hollywood casting director were not thereby eased. Presumably Warner or his associates knew the story about the scene in
The FBI Story
that had to be restaged and reshot. The Bureau found something derogatory about one of the extras glimpsed on-camera.
Despite all of the precautions, the premiere episode shocked Tolson, who immediately wrote a one-line memo recommending cancellation. “I concur,” wrote Hoover.
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The problem was that the criminal in that episode was incited to murder because of an unusual personality disorder. Whenever he touched a woman’s hair, the handsome villain felt an uncontrollable urge to strangle her. DeLoach, who had signed a five-year personal contract with Ford Mercury in connection with the series, went into action, schmoozing with the TV critics, who, like Tolson and Hoover, had disliked the opening episode. There were no more hair fetishists.
The Bureau’s creative control led to the creation of a strange mix of reality and fantasy. All of the TV agents were middle class, white, and male, which was not far from the truth. But while Zimbalist went on assignment in a radio-equipped late-model car, real-life FBI agents in Washington were handed bus tokens for jobs outside the office. At first, Zimbalist was blasting away at various malefactors each week, though actual FBI agents rarely had occasion to draw a weapon. Then, as escalating TV violence came under heavy
criticism, Tolson banished death. “We didn’t kill anybody, I think,” said the star of “The FBI,” “the last two or three years.”
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And Hollywood’s FBI, at Tolson’s direction, did not investigate the activities of the Cosa Nostra or the Mafia. Indeed, they had never heard of them. The very words were banned from the screen.
Banned, too, was behavior that was familiar to many people who had been interviewed by agents from the Bureau. On television, FBI personnel were always polite to citizens, solicitous of their feelings, and “very kind.” They never lied on the witness stand.
Even so, Hoover would try to cancel the show at least seven more times. On each occasion the weary DeLoach composed yet another memo defending the series. To the younger man it seemed that Hoover had lost his nerve, easily frightened that an episode might somehow give his enemies some new ammunition. “He would only go for sure winners,” DeLoach said later. “No longer was he creating an image for the Bureau, but only maintaining it.”
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In general, it was an image with which the director was well pleased. The doggedly traditionalist star had kept to the straight and narrow, on-screen and off, and Hoover favored him with notes of congratulations or sympathy, as with offers of FBI help in personal matters.
Perhaps Hoover himself, like many viewers, had come to think that the well-tanned Zimbalist actually was an agent of the Bureau. At a graduation ceremony at the academy, he urged the fledgling agents to “emulate” the star in their new career.
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As had happened before, J. Edgar Hoover seemed to find fantasy more appealing than reality.
Courtney Evans, onetime pretender to a throne that would not soon be vacated, asked Belmont a sensible bureaucratic question. As FBI liaison to an attorney general who was ignored by the director, what was his probable future with the Bureau?
“You have no future, Court,” Belmont replied.
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Robert Kennedy, depressed by his brother’s murder and hated by the president he served, resigned in September 1964. He had decided the previous summer to run for the Senate from New York.
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Nicholas Katzenbach became acting attorney general.
Courtney Evans, who had been whipsawed between Hoover and the Kennedys for almost four years, resigned on December 12—and went to work for Katzenbach. He was immediately placed on the list of persons not to be contacted. Hoover also launched some sort of smear campaign, aimed at having Evans fired from Justice, but it failed.