J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (99 page)

But the subcommittee backed off. There would be no need for putting the blame on the Kennedy brothers…not just yet.

Still, it had been close, and the director had suffered because of Long’s timidity, or divided loyalties, when the chips were down. The FBI had protected the senator, but had the latter labored with appropriate diligence to protect the FBI?

Hoover soon reached his answer. By the spring of 1967 Long’s subcommittee had drafted proposed legislation to ban wiretapping and bugging, except in national-security cases as determined under strict guidelines.

In May a
Life
magazine article using material leaked by the FBI hit the stands. Not only revealing the $48,000 payment from Hoffa’s attorney, the writer expounded his thesis that all of Long’s committee activities aimed to protect criminals and weaken legitimate law enforcement operations. In particular, the senator was supposed to be most interested in helping Hoffa get a reversal of his conviction for jury tampering in Chattanooga, Tennessee. According to this theory, the subcommittee would obtain evidence of government wiretapping in the case, thereby giving the Teamster grounds for reversal of his conviction or a new trial.
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Behind closed doors a Senate committee later investigated and exonerated Senator Long. His subcommittee’s comprehensive bill to control bugging and wiretapping was set aside. He was defeated for reelection in the Democratic primary by Thomas Eagleton.

“Mr. Speaker, this is corruption at its worst and its central figure is J. Edgar Hoover. It is he whose unchecked reign of absolute power has intimidated this Congress to the extent that a serious question has not been asked about his management of the FBI for 10 years—maybe longer. He has become the American Beria, destroying those who threaten his empire, frightening those who should question his authority, and terrorizing those who dissent from his ancient and anachronistic view of the world.”
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Forcefully delivered in the U.S. House of Representatives, these words could have riveted the nation as the brave assault of a courageous congressman. But by April 19, 1972, Representative Cornelius E. Gallagher, Democrat from New Jersey, was a drowning man. Bright, handsome, liberal, he had been on LBJ’s short list for the vice-presidency in 1964, until Hoover spoke a word in the president’s ear. Soon Gallagher would plead guilty to one count of tax
evasion and be sentenced to two years in jail. Hoover’s FBI had destroyed his credibility, and his bright political future, before he rose to speak.

It could have been much worse. Some years earlier he had given the Hoover lackey Roy Cohn a preview of a very different kind of speech: “It has been called to my attention that the Director of the FBI and the Deputy Director of the FBI have been living as man and wife for some 28 years at the public’s expense; as a member of Congress we have an oversight duty and that oversight is to make sure that the funds which go to the FBI are properly spent…” Cohn was horrified, but Gallagher was determined. “I may go down,” he said, “but I’m taking that old fag with me.”
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The speech never made the
Congressional Record.
The following day, according to the congressman, Cohn called to make a deal for Hoover.

It had all begun with Gallagher’s concern, echoing Long’s, about governmental abuse of surveillance capabilities. Later he recalled, “Senator Long was the pioneer in privacy in the Senate just as I was in the House of Representatives.” As a member of the House Committee on Government Operations, he had learned about polygraph tests, trash snooping, and mail covers. By June 1966 his privacy subcommittee was getting ready to hold hearings on the growing potential for new kinds of invasion of privacy by means of the rapid developments in computer technology.

One morning he found a strange letter among the stack of typed correspondence his secretary had left for him to sign. In it he was asking Katzenbach to send over copies of the Justice Department’s authorization for the bugs on King and the Las Vegas casinos. This missive, composed by DeLoach, had been dictated over the telephone by Cohn. When the “very unhappy” congressman reached Cohn, the explanation was that Hoover was “sick and tired” of being criticized for illegal surveillance and “furious with Senator [Robert] Kennedy, who was blaming it on Mr. Hoover.”

Gallagher, who had long known Cohn and had, along with his wife, dined several times in the home the lawyer shared with his mother, asserted sensibly that he did not want to get involved in bureaucratic infighting, though he had often expressed support of the FBI publicly.

His feelings were about to change. “You’ll be sorry,” Cohn replied. “I know how they work.” Subsequently Hoover’s number one conduit to gossip columnists called the congressman several more times, stressing the Bureau’s displeasure. In Hoover’s view the Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy was the perfect vehicle through which he “could relieve himself of the public criticism.” Gallagher would have none of it.

His hearings went forward, for the first time alerting the public to the specific abuses possible with computers. Unknown to him, the FBI was even then developing large data banks of information.
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The
Life
story was dated August 9, 1968, and used the same kind of leaked raw material that had fueled the exposé of Senator Long. Once again an organized crime tap had produced unexpected information about a member of the Congress. In this case Gallagher was alleged to have suspiciously close ties
with the Cosa Nostra’s Joe Zicarelli, whose various scams and rackets were based in the congressman’s hometown, Bayonne.
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The
Life
writing team was not unaware of the irony, admitting that Gallagher was “a leading congressional spokesman against government invasions of privacy, including the very investigative technique that had first disclosed his own alliance with the Mob.”

The most shocking paragraphs came from a convicted hit man turned Bureau informant, who was said to claim that he had, at Gallagher’s request, removed a corpse from the basement of the congressman’s home in Bayonne and buried it in the wooden mash pit of an abandoned whiskey still on a chicken farm.

Tagged “the tool and collaborator” of Zicarelli, Gallagher was quickly dropped from consideration for being raised in the hierarchy of House leadership. But Hoover was not satisfied. “If you still know that guy,” DeLoach said to Cohn, “you had better get word to him to resign from Congress.”
^†

If he did not, the FBI was prepared to leak the story, which it was already spreading casually around town, that the dead man of the
Life
exposé, a minor mob figure, had died of a seizure while making love to the congressman’s wife.
^‡
“I doubt if even Goebbels had the terrible capacity of a DeLoach to spread the big lie, nor could Goebbels exceed the filthy mind of a DeLoach,” Gallagher would rage in Congress in his 1972 speech.
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In 1968, however, it was his plan to launch a highly personal attack on Hoover and Tolson in the same forum. Temporarily DeLoach was stymied. Not only did Cohn call back to convey the FBI director’s pledge of friendship; he asked what the Bureau could do.

Gallagher demanded that the FBI announce that the supposed wiretap transcripts of his phone calls to Zicarelli were phony. The Bureau indeed did so, but would have anyway. It was not in Hoover’s interest to allow a story that clearly involved an illegal wiretap to go unchallenged.

Nonetheless, the congressman never carried out his threat, and the rumors about his wife were never scotched. In 1986, some three months before Cohn
died of complications resulting from AIDS, he agreed to sign a statement that affirmed Gallagher’s version of the entire episode. He did not sign cheerfully, according to observers. He was attesting that Mrs. Gallagher had been slandered as part of an FBI-engineered plot to blackmail her husband into leaving public life.
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But by then Hoover was safely dead, and he signed.

Long and Gallagher were not the only senators Hoover destroyed. Back in 1964 Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut had received some disappointing news: contrary to his firm expectations, LBJ was not going to ask him to be on the ticket as vice-president.

He was not really hewn from presidential timber, Dodd told an aide who knew he believed otherwise. “There are only two jobs I would leave the Senate for,” he went on, “FBI Director and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and I may well end up in one or the other.”
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The only reason the remark did not harm the senator’s charmed status with Hoover was that the director did not hear it at that time.

An FBI agent himself for a year, Dodd was the Bureau’s champion in the Senate. The connection was not loose. In 1933 Attorney General Cummings had sent young Dodd to Hoover with the express intent of creating a springboard for the ambitious young man’s political career. As the senator’s top aide later explained, the short tenure was “long enough to put the FBI stamp permanently on his public image.”
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Nor was the Connecticut senator a merely parochial figure. Number two Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, head of the Internal Security Subcommittee, and member of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, he was part of the so-called Club, the Senate within the Senate. With the input of Bureau staffers, he delivered dozens of speeches extolling the personal virtues of J. Edgar Hoover, often streaking first out of the starting gate when either the director or his Bureau was criticized.
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Hoover was grateful. Dodd was handed politically beneficial information uncovered by the FBI. He was warned when rumors and evidence turned up concerning his financial irregularities and other dangerous matters. When the senator visited New York on personal business, an FBI agent was there to drive him around in an FBI vehicle. When Dodd became suspicious that a member of his staff was romancing during work hours, Hoover ordered his agents to tail the fellow and produce hour-by-hour reports of his activities and whereabouts.

Through it all the senator was treading on thin ice, despite the solicitude of the FBI. A restive staff was angry that he delivered speeches written for him by right-wing interests, pocketed large speaking fees, developed many relationships with the rich and powerful that were clearly prone to conflict of interest, and diverted funds from testimonial dinners and campaign contributions to his personal use. He found jobs for relatives, as well as for people who could give or lend him money. He charged his constituents for the routine services that senators provide.

Finally, the activities of the FBI’s chief spokesman in Congress for the entire 1960s provoked his employees to take desperate action. Knowing that they could not trust Hoover, four of them, including Dodd’s administrative assistant, copied nearly seven thousand documents from the senator’s files and passed them along to the columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. The twenty-three columns of investigative journalism that resulted were clear proof to most readers that a federal investigation was in order.

Hoover agreed. He immediately saw to it that the staff members were interrogated by FBI agents in order to determine how the disclosures had occurred. Surveillance was instituted on employees. Dodd was soon given derogatory information, developed by Hoover’s men, on those who had blown the whistle as well as on the columnist Pearson.

Once, Jack Anderson mailed a letter with anti-Dodd material to someone for fact checking, but it was removed from the mail collection sack in the lobby of his office building. Postmaster Lawrence O’Brien investigated and later implied to the president that the FBI was responsible. Dodd hired a private detective, another former agent, to go through the wastepaper baskets in Anderson’s office.

Foolishly, Dodd asked the Senate to investigate the allegations against him and sued Pearson and Anderson. That only turned up the heat, both on him and on the FBI, with which he had become so closely associated over the years.

The FBI then obtained an advance copy of an article with excerpts from a book to be published by the disgruntled administrative assistant. It highlighted the senator’s prediction that, in effect, LBJ was planning to give him either the FBI or the CIA post.

That all along the senatorial ex-agent had been eyeing his job, and possibly even conspiring with LBJ to get it, enraged the director. It was the unpardonable sin.

Hoover offered no more help to Dodd in his troubles and probably contributed to them by using the information in FBI files. Johnson, warned privately by Pearson that there were more damaging revelations to come, backed away from his longtime ally and fellow hawk on the issue of Vietnam.
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On June 23, 1967, less than three years after he might have become vicepresident of the United States, the U.S. Senate censured Thomas Dodd by a vote of 92 to 5. His own state party denied him renomination in 1970, and his attempt to win as an independent failed. He died the following year.

Robert Kennedy, now the junior senator from New York, stimulated a burst of activity at SOG with some evasive remarks to TV newsmen on June 26, 1966. The panelists were trying to get him to say what he would rather not: that the FBI had used wiretaps without his knowledge when he was attorney general. He would prefer to imply…

“Well, I expect that maybe some of those facts are going to be developed,” Kennedy finally replied.
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Fired by very similar expectations, Hoover began preparing the kind of offense that had always been his most effective defense. An FBI leak inspired a national news weekly to report that Kennedy had indeed overseen the Bureau’s bugging activities during his tenure at Justice. In this, Hoover had gone straight for the most vulnerable of the senator’s on-air answers. RFK had denied having authorized “FBI wiretaps of gamblers’ telephones in Las Vegas in ’62 or ’63.” An honest answer, so far as it went, but he
had
authorized the use of MISURs, a distinction made clear in the leak.