The Burglary (49 page)

Some of the extremely critical reaction that spring was from unexpected sources. Two publications that over many years had written only laudatory commentary about the director,
Time
magazine and
Life
magazine,
delivered harsh criticism after the burglary.
There was evidence,
Time
reported, that Hoover's “fiefdom,” the FBI, was “crumbling, largely because of his own mistakes. The FBI's spirit is sapped, its morale low, its initiative stifled.” The FBI had become, according to
Time,
“a secretive, enormously powerful Government agency under dictatorial rule, operating on its own, answerable to no authority except the judgments—or whims—of one man.”

On April 9, just a month after the burglary and two weeks after the first stolen files became public,
Life
ran a striking image of the director on its cover. It was a portrait of a sculpture of Hoover as a Roman emperor, complete with toga, with the title “The 47-year Reign of J. Edgar Hoover: Emperor of the FBI.” Inside the magazine, the headline was, “After almost half a century in total and imperious charge: G-Man under fire.” Pointing to reaction to recent revelations,
Life
noted that “the thrust of the criticism appears to be changing, and Mr. Hoover has drawn the attention of more powerful critics. Now he has been challenged—of all places—on the floor of the House. It has been widely charged that the director's imperious disregard for any but his own views of the national interest diminishes his Bureau's effectiveness and has even become a serious infringement on civil rights.”

A month after the
Life
cover appeared, Hoover made a rare public appearance. He spoke at a dinner sponsored by the
American Newspaper Women's Club in Washington. He had accepted an invitation to introduce the person who would be honored that evening,
Martha Mitchell, the wife of the attorney general. She was a prominent personality and a favorite of the Nixon administration at the time because of her frequent brash and funny public comments about whatever was on her mind. Later, when she called reporters in the middle of the night with inside secrets about Watergate crimes, she was considered a liability to the Nixon administration who had to be hushed. But now, in the spring of 1971, when Hoover warmly introduced her, she was still considered an amusing asset. She urged the audience to look at Mr. Hoover carefully that evening, for “when you've seen one FBI Director, you have seen them all.”

In a rare jovial mood, Hoover nearly matched Martha Mitchell's ability to draw laughs. “I know that those of you who subscribe to an alleged national magazine may have had some difficulty recognizing me in the conventional clothes I am wearing this evening. But, like ordinary people, we emperors do have our problems, and I regret to say that my toga did not get back from the cleaners on time.”

President Nixon defended Hoover a month after the burglary when he
answered questions at the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the same convention where CIA director Helms denied the CIA conducted domestic spying. Asked by one of the editors to comment on the fact that “J. Edgar Hoover very recently seems to have become one of the favorite ‘whipping boys' of a number of prominent Americans,” Nixon responded angrily. The criticisms of Hoover, he said, “are unfair … and malicious.…I would ask the editors of the nation's papers to be fair about the situation. He, like any man who is a strong man and an able man … has made many enemies.…He has been nonpolitical … nonpartisan. Despite all of the talk about surveillance and bugging and the rest, let me say I have been in police states, and the idea that this is a police state is just pure nonsense. And every … paper in the country ought to say that.…As long as I am in this office, we are going to be sure that not the FBI or any other organization engages in any [surveillance] activity except where the national interests or the protection of innocent people requires it, and then it will be as limited as it possibly can be.” As Nixon made those comments that day, his own secret plans to greatly increase political surveillance and dirty tricks against his perceived enemies were well under way.

The hundreds of newspaper editors assembled in the convention hall that day with Nixon accepted the president's observations without questioning him. Many of them may have been surprised when Washington journalists later reported stories about not only the dirty tricks of Hoover's FBI but also those of the Nixon Plumbers team.

Throughout that awful year in Hoover's life, he was defended repeatedly by former FBI agents—individually and by the
Society of Former Agents of the FBI. Organized in 1937, the society now rallied around him at meetings throughout the country. Members in chapter after chapter unanimously passed resolutions backing the director.
With 5,500 members at the time, the society had been fairly independent of FBI headquarters until 1964, when the director and the society decided they needed each other and established a formal bond. They entered into an agreement that members of the society would be deputized to help the bureau round up the thousands of people listed on the Security Index in the event of a national emergency. Otherwise, the society was primarily a source of fellowship and was an informal but very valuable high-level employment agency for former agents. It found jobs for former agents in security positions and high-level executive positions in American corporations, where many former agents landed. For example,
John S. Bugas, the former head of the Detroit FBI office, upon retiring from the bureau became vice president of
Ford Motor Company
and a close friend and aide of Henry Ford II. Such connections often were either a personal or a professional benefit to the bureau.
One of the benefits of the close connection with Ford was that the corporation paid for various special events for the FBI, including a banquet at the society's 1970 national convention at Disneyland, where the guest of honor was Efrem Zimbalist Jr., star of the
The F.B.I.,
the very popular weekly television series sponsored by Ford. Hoover was there and, as usual, treated Zimbalist like he was not only a real FBI agent but FBI agent number one. At Hoover's invitation, Zimbalist often spoke at various gatherings of agents, including the graduation ceremony of new agents.

The society's members tended to be politically conservative. Some were extremely right-wing, such as
Willard Cleon Skousen, a John Birch Society official who wrote
The Naked Communist
in 1958 and whose ideas have been promoted in recent years by commentator
Glenn Beck and by some
Tea Party leaders. Some other former agents in the society created private organizations that specialized in using the skills they had learned in the bureau, including planting rumors about politicians Hoover did not like. Senator
William Proxmire of Wisconsin, Senator
George McGovern, Senator William Fulbright, and Senator
Edward Kennedy were favorite targets.

After the Media burglary, Hoover could not have asked for more from ex-agents.
On April 17, 1971, the North Central chapter of the society adopted a resolution that praised the director's record and deplored the allegations of his critics. Given extensive coverage by the press, the resolution said there was no basis “to the criticism by some” that “the FBI has become oppressive in its investigative activities and is becoming a threat to the civil liberties of citizens.…We know without any question that the FBI, under the most explicit direction of Mr. Hoover, has jealously protected the nation against any invasion of these liberties.”

The president of the North Central chapter, Duane Traynor, released this statement: There was “no fairer man who ever lived or was more attuned to the needs of the nation than Mr. Hoover.” In the society's spring 1971 newsletter, the
Grapevine,
a column charged that a “strongly suspected undercover conspiracy” to smear Hoover had been hatched by everyone from “anarchist revolutionaries” to “bleeding-heart liberals.” At the former agents society's annual national convention in Atlanta that year, the members passed a vote of confidence in Hoover against “vicious and unwarranted attacks” that were “politically motivated.”

So many people signed up in the spring of 1971 to support the director by attending the society's annual Congressional Night dinner in Washington
that the event had to be moved from the Rayburn House Office Building to a larger space at the Shoreham Hotel. The
Grapevine
reported that the April 1971 Congressional Night dinner, attended each year by society members and members of Congress, “developed into an evening of serious commentary about numerous recent scurrilous attacks against the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover.” Those present included former FBI official and then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency
Joseph F. Carroll and seven members of Congress who were former FBI agents. Hoover didn't usually attend this annual dinner, but he did now when he was under attack. When Carroll introduced the director that evening, he received a standing ovation that lasted several minutes.

Hoover spoke harsh words that night. He attacked the “few journalistic prostitutes” who could not appreciate the FBI. He assured the former agents and others in the audience that the FBI would not compromise its standards “to accommodate kooks, misfits, drunks and slobs.”

“It is time we stopped coddling the hoodlums and the hippies who are causing so much serious trouble these days,” he said. “Let us treat them like the vicious enemies of society that they really are, regardless of their age.”

The director was given more public accolades from President Nixon two months after he had defended him to the newspaper editors. He and Attorney General Mitchell both spoke at the ceremony that marked the graduation of police officers from the FBI Academy on June 30, 1971. The president told the young police officers from throughout the country that more than twenty years earlier, as a young member of Congress from California, he had worked with Hoover on “major investigations of various subversive elements in this country.” Regarding current attacks on the director, the president said, “Anybody who is strong, anybody who fights for what he believes in, anybody who stands up where it is tough is bound to be controversial.…
The great majority of the American people back Mr. Hoover.”

In what Nixon later said was the strongest part of his defense of Hoover that day, he told the graduates that “he is a man who has never served a party, he has always served his country.” Nixon assured the police officers that, like the director, he and the attorney general “back law enforcement officials in their attempts to reestablish respect for the law.”

A remarkable series of expressions of both contempt and respect for the law took place in exchanges at the White House that day and the next. After telling the young police officers about his deep respect for the law and the need to reestablish the rule of law, the next evening the
president, according to White House tapes, ordered White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Institution and steal material related to the conduct of the Vietnam War. The president was forceful in his recommendation: “Just break in. Break in and take it out! You understand? Just go in and take it! … Go in around 8 or 9 o'clock … and clean it up.”

White House aide
Charles Colson was recorded that day proposing that the Brookings burglary be accomplished by firebombing the think tank. As firefighters would rush to the scene, he said, they would supply cover for FBI agents, working on behalf of the White House, to enter the building and steal the documents, presumably while the firefighters were putting out the fire. That criminal favor would be done by the FBI, aides confidently predicted, on the orders of the FBI director the president had just publicly insisted to young police officers never served the interest of a political party.

Only a few hours before Nixon gave bold advice on how to break into Brookings, he and Hoover discussed the events of the previous day in a phone conversation. Hoover thanked the president for his generous remarks at the graduation ceremony. He said the president's remarks were especially meaningful at this time when he “was being attacked from many sides.” They commiserated with each other about the U.S. Supreme Court decision that was issued while Nixon was at the ceremony at the FBI—the decision supporting the right of the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
to publish the Pentagon Papers. The decision inspired them to air their mutual low regard for the court:

They both expressed regret that Nixon's praise of Hoover at the FBI ceremony was not the leading story in newspapers the next day.

The president explained why it wasn't:

Hoover told the president his praise was so wonderful that he had ordered that it be published in
Law Enforcement Bulletin
, a publication the bureau then distributed regularly to 15,000 police departments in the country.