Official and Confidential (33 page)

An October 1958 report told Edgar of a farewell celebration at the Mayflower for Senator William Jenner of Indiana. ‘This party,' the document reads, ‘was paid for by one of Jenner's wealthy Texan friends … The party cost an estimated $2500.' Most of the rest of the report, on former congressman Harold Velde and an aide to Congressman Leslie Arends, remained censored as this was book was written. A November document, on the forthcoming election for Governor of New York, quotes someone with ‘a big file of dirt' on Nelson Rockefeller.

On June 9, 1959, Edgar received this report:

On May 16, 1960, as the Nixon-Kennedy fight for the presidency intensified, agents rushed to send Edgar information supplied that same day by a Washington prostitute. She spoke of sex with various congressmen at the Mayflower, at home and, in one case, ‘in his office at the Capitol.' Edgar's men were especially busy cultivating prostitutes that fall, in the closing stages of the election campaign. Agents were actually present on September 2, when a whore received a call from a Senator to arrange a midmorning appointment. Later, as the report relates:

In gathering such information, agents assumed it would be passed on to Hoover. ‘There was no thought of my taking any undue liberties with anyone's privacy,' said Agent in Charge Joseph Purvis, who signed some of the reports in the series. ‘These were things that I thought would be of interest to Hoover, primarily. It was a matter of advising him of things that I thought would be useful.'

Former Agent Conrad Trahern, however, had no illusions. ‘Hoover,' he declared, ‘treated people wrong. He was a despot. He did everything to impose on people on Capitol Hill who were screwing broads and that sort of thing … But the policy was to make J. Edgar Hoover happy, and I reported what I knew.'

According to Norman Koch, an FBI fingerprint specialist in World War II, scavenging for dirt had long been routine. In the forties, he recalled, colleagues complained of ‘spending all their time investigating public official number so-and-so rather than Public Enemy Number One. They were digging into the background of anyone who might pose the slightest
danger to the Director, and the idea was to find anything that could be used as leverage should any of these men dare to challenge his authority.'

Gordon Liddy, best known for his role in the Watergate affair, was an FBI agent in the fifties and early sixties. In Washington, where he worked in the propaganda department known as Crime Records, he learned firsthand exactly how compromising information was handled.

‘Say there was a bank robbery someplace. An informant might tell us the man to look for was holed up in the Skyline Motel, about six blocks south of the Capitol in Washington. Agents search the motel, and in the process they come across Senator X in bed with Miss Lucy Schwartzkopf, age fifteen and a half. They make their apologies and withdraw. But everything has to go into the record. The Supervisor who gets the report may think there's no need to keep stuff on the peccadilloes of Senator X, but he has no authority to destroy it. The report has to go up to the Director's office.'

In Edgar's office, said Liddy, a summary would be prepared for Miss Gardner of Crime Records. Those involved in congressional liaison, like Liddy himself, would come across it sooner or later. ‘Say the Director was expecting to meet Senator X or if the Senator's name had come up in some way, I would have to prepare a memorandum. I would check out the card held by Miss Gardner, and if there was something noteworthy I would write a note – perhaps a blind memorandum, “For the Director Only.” It would say something like, “The Director may wish to recall that Senator X was involved in such-and-such an incident, and is not very discreet.”'

Sometimes, said Liddy, Edgar might send an official to meet with the compromised politician soon after receiving the initial report. ‘The messenger would simply say Mr Hoover apologized for the intrusion into the Senator's privacy, assure him it came up in the course of legitimate inquiries and tell him not to worry, this had been removed from the file. The
whole point was to let the [Senator] know that Hoover knew. That's why, when Hoover would go before the Appropriations Committee and say he wanted something, they'd give him anything. Anything, because they were afraid of what he had.'

Others corroborated Liddy's statement. ‘I learned a lot,' said former CIA Director Richard Helms, ‘from fellows who had worked in Hoover's office before joining us. I used to hear how certain senators and congressmen would get caught in cathouses over in Virginia. When the report came in, Hoover would put it in his personal safe. If there was any problem with that senator, he would say, “Don't worry, I've got those papers right in my safe. You don't have a thing to worry about.”… He played a very skillful game.'

Emanuel Geller of Brooklyn, a Democratic Congressman for fifty years, many of them as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told
New York Post
publisher Dorothy Schiff that he was afraid to speak his mind about Edgar's abuses because the FBI had a hold on him. In public, he continued to speak of Edgar as a ‘most exemplary' public servant.

‘It was not uncommon,' said veteran Agent Arthur Murtagh, ‘to learn of some politically damaging information about some leading figure in politics as having been developed by the Bureau; and then, always at a time when it would be most damaging to the individual, the information would in some way show up in the
Chicago Tribune
or some other friend of the Bureau.'

Walter Trohan, the
Chicago Tribune
reporter who was close to Edgar, recalled talking with some of the victims of such tactics. ‘Some of Hoover's overwhelming support on the Hill,' he said, ‘was due to what I can only call blackmail, polite blackmail.'

Senator Sam Ervin, remembered for his presiding role during the Watergate hearings, behaved differently in 1971 when, as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional
Rights, he vetoed a probe of FBI abuses. ‘I think,' he said of Edgar, ‘he has done a very good job in a difficult post.' According to William Sullivan, Ervin was ‘in our pocket. It was financial, something like the Abe Fortas affair. This is why he came out praising the Bureau.'
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Edgar liked to send dirt on politicians to the White House. ‘I know he had a dossier on me,' recalled former Florida Senator George Smathers, ‘because Lyndon Johnson read it to me. Johnson called me in the middle of the night – he loved to do that – and said, “These are rumors the FBI have been picking up about you …”
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He also read me the file on Senator Thruston Morton, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and the one on Barry Goldwater. There was a lot about Nixon in there, too. A lot of people were very nervous …'

‘Information,' President Nixon would reflect after his disgrace, ‘was one of the primary sources of Edgar Hoover's power. He usually knew something about everything that was going on, and that knowledge made him as valuable to his friends as it made him dangerous to his enemies.'

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‘The allegation that Mr Hoover used FBI files as a power broker or as blackmail, or something of that nature, is probably one of the greatest distorted allegations in the history of mankind.'

Cartha DeLoach, former FBI Assistant Director, 1982

P
oliticians were not the only public figures on whom Edgar gathered information. Over a period of thirty years, starting in 1945, FBI wiretappers learned the private thinking of at least twelve Supreme Court justices – Chief Justices Earl Warren and Frederick Vinson, Associate Justices Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William Douglas, Stanley Reed, Robert Jackson, Frank Murphy, John Harlan, Potter Stewart, Harold Burton and Abe Fortas. Some of the justices were overheard holding telephone conversations with other targets of Bureau surveillance. References to justices in yet other surveillances were duly logged and filed. The Constitution protects the Supreme Court from such intrusions, but Edgar did not have the transcripts destroyed. He preserved them, and on occasion used them to advantage.

Justice Douglas' conversations were picked up during the wiretapping of political maverick Thomas Corcoran, on behalf of the Truman White House. Truman, who read the transcripts himself, decided in 1946 not to nominate Douglas as Chief Justice, a choice that determined the shape of the Supreme Court for many years to come. What he learned about Douglas from Edgar's wiretaps may well have influenced his decision.

Douglas' liberal views infuriated Edgar, and he kept a running dossier on him. The Justice had been married four times, and three of his wives were much younger than he; Bureau summaries kept Edgar up to date. ‘Information has been received,' read one entry, ‘that Douglas frequently becomes intoxicated at parties and has a habit of pawing women …' The Bureau also checked up on Douglas' friends, noting that some were ‘of doubtful loyalty.' The Justice himself suspected that his chambers were bugged.

In 1957, while investigating an allegation about a ‘ring of left-wing law clerks,' the FBI collated information on the political attitudes of the justices themselves. Edgar's files show, too, that he had three sources on the Supreme Court during the Rosenberg spy case in 1953. Not even talk in a car was safe. When Justice Burton discussed a case in an FBI limousine, the accompanying agent reported straight back to Edgar.

While 20,000 pages of records on the Supreme Court and federal judiciary had been released as this book was being written, the FBI insisted that others, notably electronic surveillance transcripts, ‘must be kept secret in the interests of national defense or foreign policy.' It was impossible to know just what intelligence Edgar obtained on the nation's justices.

Judge Laurence Silberman, who examined the Official and Confidential files while serving as Acting Attorney General in 1974, concluded that Edgar ‘did not have one ounce of scruple' about using wiretaps and hidden microphones. Today it seems certain he used them against members of Congress, as the politicians themselves long suspected.

In 1956, at the height of an election campaign, Senator Wayne Morse found himself on hands and knees in his living room, peering up the chimney and poking about under the furniture, hunting for hidden microphones. A Secret Service agent had warned him that both his office and his home were bugged, and quoted some of Morse's conversations to him to prove it. Though he never found a bug, Morse believed the FBI was responsible.

In 1965, when the Judiciary Committee called in experts to ‘sweep' Senate corridors, they reported a ‘strong indication of bugs' in the offices of Senators Maurine Neuberger and Ralph Yarborough, the liberal Democrat from Texas. A bug was later found in Yarborough's desk intercom, and he believed it had been installed by the FBI on behalf of President Johnson. Johnson boasted at the time that he was privy to every call that went in or out of the Senate offices.

Members of Congress wondered and worried and held meetings in the Speaker's office, but felt impotent to do anything. The issue was not aired publicly until the year before Edgar died, when Senator Joseph Montoya and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs claimed the FBI had been bugging congressional phones. Boggs accused Edgar of using ‘the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo.' Edgar issued a flat denial and circulated derogatory information on Boggs, typed on the usual untraceable paper, to influential people. The row blew over.
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According to Boggs' son Thomas, however, the Congressman had proof of his charge – transcripts of bugged conversations, supplied to him by Bureau officials with uneasy consciences. An investigator for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, moreover, told Boggs that his own home telephone had been tapped by the FBI.

In his denial, Edgar insisted that agents had longstanding orders to abort operations rather than follow a suspect into a building on Capitol Hill. Court testimony, however, later established that an agent working a corruption case had taped a conversation in the office of Senator Hiram Fong using concealed equipment. Others had sent an informant into Congressman John Dowdy's office on a similar mission, and the FBI had tapped several calls between Dowdy and the informant, with Edgar's approval.
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