Official and Confidential (32 page)

Yet that was exactly what Edgar was doing. ‘Hoover,' said William Sullivan, ‘had a complete file developed on each incoming congressman. He knew their family backgrounds, where they had gone to school, whether or not they played football, and any other tidbits … Bureau indices were immediately reviewed to see if what we had was good or bad. Could he be looked upon as a person to cultivate and use, to draw into our stable on Capitol Hill? Or should he be looked upon as one who would be unfriendly to the Bureau?'

As an election approached, congratulatory letters from Edgar were prepared for all candidates. When the results came in, winners' letters were rushed around the country, the notes to the losers trashed. A ‘friendly' politician found himself courted by the FBI wherever he went. If he traveled to foreign capitals where the Bureau had offices, escorts were there to greet him at the airport. ‘We went out of our way,' Sullivan recalled, ‘to make it clear, “We are pleased with you.”'

On Capitol Hill, politicians were watched by men well placed to serve as Edgar's spies. From 1943 on, FBI agents were ‘loaned' to congressional committees as investigators. Others ostensibly ‘left' their Bureau jobs altogether to work as congressional staffers.

Edgar's key bridgehead in Congress was the House Appropriations Committee, which holds the purse strings of government agencies. By the seventies, no fewer than twenty-eight FBI agents were attached to that committee alone. John Rooney, the Chairman of the subcommittee that controlled the FBI budget, was the Bureau's cherished friend. The Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn kept just one signed photograph on his office desk – of Edgar. He lavished praise on the Director at every opportunity. ‘I have never cut his budget,' Rooney said, ‘and I never expect to.' Edgar, who turned down requests to testify before the House Committee on Crime, made an annual ritual out of his appearance before the Appropriations Committee, a platform from which to preach his view of the world and to reel off statistics suggesting the Bureau had achieved an extraordinarily high rate of convictions – usually around 96 percent of crimes committed.

These figures were cooked. The superb conviction rate referred only to the number of cases that came to court, not to the number of investigations undertaken. Many of the apparent successes, such as auto theft convictions, were actually achieved by local police. Over the years various public bodies and scholars have cast doubt on Edgar's statistics. Warren Olney, an Assistant Attorney General in the fifties, thought them ‘hogwash.' They were never challenged, however, by Rooney's Appropriations Committee.

Edgar protected Rooney even though the Congressman was, in the words of crime consultant Ralph Salerno, ‘up to his ears in collusion with organized crime.' Washington lobbyist Robert Winter-Berger, who said he personally saw Rooney accept a cash-filled envelope from a mob emissary, called him the ‘key connection for the underworld' on Capitol Hill.

An FBI report in 1967 noted that, in spite of allegations that Rooney had accepted a $100,000 bribe, the Bureau had ‘conducted no inquiry.' The following year, when another candidate contested Rooney's seat, Edgar obliged when the
Congressman asked him to spice his annual testimony with ‘anything timely that would perk up the ears' of his constituents. Furthermore, he supplied Rooney with the criminal record of an associate of his electoral opponent.

In 1970, when Rooney was challenged again, Edgar sent him details of a police charge against his rival, arising from a long-ago fraternity party, enabling Rooney to claim the candidate was ‘a fugitive from justice.' Rooney held on to his seat by a narrow margin.

Congressman John McCormack of Massachusetts, Speaker of the House in the sixties, also had a special relationship with Edgar. ‘I met Hoover around 1962,' Winter-Berger recalled, ‘when McCormack would send me over to the FBI to pick up files for him. If McCormack wanted some information to use against someone – a girlfriend the guy shouldn't have or some nefarious dealings – Hoover would help him. It might be someone in the House whose arm McCormack wanted to twist on a vote. Or someone in government he wanted to bring pressure on. McCormack couldn't send an ordinary messenger to pick up that sort of thing, so he used me. I'd go over to Hoover's office, and he personally would give me the file. He knew what I was coming for, and he'd have it waiting.'

Winter-Berger also recalled something that put him off. ‘When I was leaving, Hoover would pat me on the rear end, sort of the way they do athletes when they've had a good game, except that we were alone in his office and I certainly wasn't an athlete. I was thirty-six then, and he was thirty years older than me. I thought it was out of order for the head of the FBI to do that, and I eventually became uncomfortable and started trying to get out of going over there.'

Edgar dined regularly with Congressman – subsequently Senator – George Bender of Ohio, later widely condemned for his corrupt links with the Teamsters Union. Edgar energetically promoted the congressional career of Senator Thomas Dodd, who regularly made warm speeches about the
Bureau. Dodd, a former FBI agent, had once been described in a memo from Edgar's office as ‘absolutely no good … a scoundrel.' In the sixties, however, when Dodd was exposed for corruption, the Bureau helped him cover his tracks. ‘Nothing,' recalled the Senator's former aide James Boyd, ‘could have been more effective for intimidating potential witnesses into silence … FBI agents had been instructed not to take any information concerning Dodd.'

The way Edgar secured a man's allegiance, and by contrast silenced potential enemies, was ruthless. FBI agents were forever on the alert to record human failings. ‘We had a general instruction,' said former senior agent Curtis Lynum, ‘to record anything we might need in the future, in what we called a “Zero file.” I was skiing with my wife once when I was serving in Nevada, and we saw a man in a homosexual embrace with a teenage boy outside a chalet. We both recognized the guy, a big name in the business circles of Las Vegas. I wished I hadn't seen it, but I had. I figured it might be important later on, so I reported it to my Special Agent in Charge. I probably put a recommendation “File for future reference.” But the SAC could look at that thing and say, “This is a prominent guy. I guess I'd better send that back to Washington for indexing.” It was a wellestablished procedure. I made those decisions myself when I became an SAC. I'd think, “Maybe I'd better send that to Mr Hoover.”'

Long before a new member of Congress boarded his plane for Washington, said William Sullivan, FBI files had been scoured for any references: a criminal record perhaps, an occasion the name had come up in any investigation, however incidentally, any mention of a sexual or ethical lapse. ‘The leadership of the Bureau knew exactly what he wanted,' Sullivan said, ‘every bit of derogatory information on every congressman, every senator … and on anybody else in Washington. He didn't have to make any requests – they'd feed it to him.'

After Edgar's death, by one official count, the Bureau was holding 883 files on senators, 722 on congressmen. Some were still withheld, as this book was written, others had been shredded. Many, as former Assistant Director Nicholas Callahan claimed, no doubt contained nothing sinister, just ‘informative material.' A scattering of surviving documents, however, prove that politicians' fears were well founded. Many come from the files designated ‘Official and Confidential,' which were closely held in locked file cabinets in Edgar's office suite. His secretary, Helen Gandy, reportedly took the keys home with her each evening.

The dirt in Edgar's files was often sexual in nature. In 1948, when Senator Vandenberg of Michigan was a darkhorse Republican presidential candidate, aides kept Edgar up to date on gossip about him. OC file 50 shows that the Senator expressed himself ‘deeply indebted' to the FBI for passing on information about his relationship with a woman not his wife. This was a direct clash of interest. Edgar was poking around in the private affairs of a potential presidential candidate at the very time he himself was dreaming of advancement under the man he wanted in the White House, Thomas Dewey.

In the late thirties, Clyde's woman friend Edna Daulyton had listened in horror as Edgar and Clyde discussed Congressman Harold Knutson, a Republican from Minnesota, over dinner at the Mayflower. ‘It was clear to me,' Daulyton recalled, ‘that they'd done something awful, something very detrimental to that congressman. I didn't exactly understand what they'd done, or why. I was very young and I didn't ask questions.'

Knutson, who served in Congress from 1917 until 1948, was a bachelor who lived with a male Mexican companion. A rumor, never published, suggested he was involved in a homosexual scandal – successfully hushed up. ‘I heard,' said his fellow congressman George MacKinnon, now a federal judge, ‘that someone had allegedly caught him buggering a
younger man. It was put about by someone who didn't like him.' The word in Washington police circles was that Edgar was somehow involved. Some even whispered that he was himself involved in the homosexual scandal. Whatever the truth, Edna Daulyton remembered something Edgar said that evening at the Mayflower. It stuck in her mind, she said, because it was so cold and vicious. Congressman Knutson, Edgar remarked, would ‘always be in our pocket now …'

The Official and Confidential files show that between 1958 and 1965 Washington Agents in Charge systematically collected scandal on politicians. Politically damaging tidbits were culled from the reports of agents engaged in other investigations, from human eavesdroppers on the Hill and from electronic devices, and hand-delivered to Edgar.

An FBI roundup of information dated June 13, 1958, and including a passage headed ‘Government Circles,' tells Edgar what Agent Conrad Trahern overheard ‘in the cafeteria of the Senate Office Building.' Parts of the document, reproduced below, were censored by FBI officials before its release under the Freedom of Information Act in 1989.

Edgar responded that he ‘deeply appreciated' this information. The report was followed, on July 7, by a summary of an interview with a photographer for the Democratic National Committee, describing how politicians had suppressed a compromising photograph. There was gossip on a Guggenheim family member – he had attended a masked ball with someone other than his wife – and information on a Washington ‘telephone answering service for homosexuals.'

The report of August 8 ends with smear information on a member of the Senate:

That same month Edgar was told about an aide to Congressman James Morrison of Louisiana who had been conned out of $254 while attempting to attend a live sex show. He learned that a congressional critic of Army security regulations – name censored – was consorting with a person with ‘the morals of an alley cat.' He was advised that President Eisenhower's nephew Michael Gill was soon to open a club for politicians, staffed by ‘college girls in low-cut blouses and short, short skirts.'