Official and Confidential (59 page)

The Assassinations Committee did not believe the Bureau was involved in the murder. It did, however, conclude that the inquiry into the crime was inadequate. No one has satisfactorily explained why it was two weeks before the FBI issued an alert for Ray, a prisoner on the run from jail, when his fingerprints had been found on personal belongings found near the scene of the crime. ‘The belongings even included a radio bearing Ray's prison identification number – 00416.'

Former Atlanta agent Donald Wilson remained bewildered by his superiors' actions during the hunt for Ray, recalling as he did the strange reaction when he and a colleague spotted a man they believed to be the suspect. ‘We saw the guy when we were driving near an apartment Ray was known to have used … He was the spitting image of Ray, and we thought, you know, “This is it, this is our future. We're golden!” We got on the radio to the control post and said we wanted to detain the man and ask for identification. But the radio came back and said we were to take no action, return to the office and sign out. We looked at each other in disbelief, but we did as we were told.

‘I'm not saying it
was
Ray,' Wilson said. ‘The point is that it could well have been. He wasn't apprehended till much later, by the police in London. Why were we stopped? The top people were calling the shots, including someone they'd sent down from Washington. I was really suspicious even then. I thought there was something wrong going on …' Arthur Murtagh, who was also serving in Atlanta at the time, had misgivings, too. ‘I was told we weren't to talk about conspiracy,' Murtagh recalled. ‘I think it was a political decision.'

Murtagh recalled the depth of hatred whipped up by Edgar's long vendetta. ‘When they announced King's death on the radio,' he said, ‘my colleague literally jumped in the air and said, “We finally got the son of a bitch!” I don't know what he meant by “
We
got him,” but that's what he said …'

Even if Edgar and the FBI had no part in the actual crime, they must surely bear some of the blame. ‘Among the kind of paralegal groups they did business with,' said King's colleague Andrew Young, ‘it is quite possible that one of those groups took it upon themselves to plan and execute Martin's assassination – knowing that the FBI would be pleased with it and wouldn't give them too much trouble … They created the climate in which Martin's assassination was acceptable.'

Character assassination of King continued even while his
murder was being investigated. ‘Hoover sent word through one of his appointed leaks,' said Jack Anderson, ‘that they had a line on the assassination. They said King had been playing around with a dentist's wife in Los Angeles, and they thought the dentist might have killed King in revenge. I couldn't ignore the lead, so I went to see her – she was a very beautiful woman. She more or less admitted she and King had been lovers.

‘What the FBI had told me seemed to fit together, until I talked to the husband. It was obvious that he had neither the inclination nor the ability to have killed King, and that the FBI story was false. My conclusion was that Hoover was hoping I'd bite and run a story – because the effect would've been to discredit King. The real story he wanted out was that King had been running around with other men's wives.'

Edgar later strove to prevent King's birthday from being declared a national holiday, and approved a scheme to persuade members of Congress that King had been a ‘scoundrel.' Such briefings, he stressed, should be conducted ‘
very cautiously
.' The politicians were briefed, and King's birthday was not declared a holiday until 1983.

In 1975 President Ford would declare that those responsible for the FBI smear operation against King should be brought to trial. The FBI Director who succeeded Edgar, Clarence Kelley, agreed with him. By then Edgar was dead, as was Clyde. Other officials involved were still alive, but none was ever charged.

There was no grief in Edgar's office, two months after King's assassination, when Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. ‘Goddamn the Kennedys!' William Sullivan had heard Clyde Tolson say in 1963, after President Kennedy's death. ‘First there was Jack, now there's Bobby, and then Teddy. We'll have them on our backs until the year 2000.' In the summer of 1968, when it began to look as though Robert might win the presidency, Clyde startled colleagues at an
executive meeting. ‘I hope,' he said, ‘that someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.'

Now someone had, and Edgar was roused from sleep by President Johnson to be told that, as in 1963, he would rely on the FBI for the best information. Yet, as in the case of the Dallas assassination, the murder of Robert Kennedy was to remain a historical muddle. The notion that only Sirhan Sirhan was responsible was doubted. The initial FBI report on the crime, released only after Edgar's death, indicated that twelve or more bullets were fired. Sirhan's gun was capable of firing only eight. Other evidence, meanwhile, suggested to some that two gunmen were involved.

The first autopsy pictures of Kennedy were rushed to Edgar personally, to be joined in his Official and Confidential files by gruesome color pictures and medical reports. Of all the famous deaths in the Director's long career, they are the only death pictures thus preserved.

Edward Kennedy, too, was a victim of Edgar's spite. In 1962, when he first ran for the Senate, the youngest of the brothers was embarrassed by the revelation that he had been suspended from Harvard for getting a friend to take an exam in his place. It was Edgar, according to FBI sources, who ensured the story got into the newspapers.

By 1967 Edgar had written Edward Kennedy off as ‘irresponsible,' a judgment vindicated two years later when the Senator abandoned a female companion in the wreckage of his sunken car at Chappaquiddick. The accident was a local police matter, but Edgar would readily oblige when the Nixon White House asked him to send agents looking for additional dirt. He loved to gossip about the tragedy, sometimes for hours on end.

In the summer of 1968, with Robert Kennedy gone, Edgar's horizon seemed free of serious opposition. It was an illusion.

32

‘Mr Hoover served with distinction, but he served too long … Those who had recent contact with him knew that age increasingly impacted his judgment. We all – the Presidents, the Congress, the Attorneys General, the press – knew that, and yet he stayed on struggling against change and the future.'

Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General, 1975

‘T
he greatest enemy,' Edgar had said, ‘is time,' but he acted as though he could hold the clock back. In 1968, when he turned seventy-three, the familiar bulldog profile seemed little changed. Edgar's doctors pronounced him fit, and aides passed on the reassuring news to the press. They said as little as possible about Clyde Tolson.

Though five years Edgar's junior, Clyde had undergone open-heart surgery and suffered the first of several strokes. So feeble was his eyesight that he would soon need help to read his mail, and sometimes he did not make it into the office at all. Edgar could not stand to see his friend show his weaknesses in public. When Clyde stumbled and fell at the track in California, Edgar ordered an accompanying agent not to help him. ‘Leave him alone,' he snapped. ‘Let the dumb asshole get up by himself.'

Clyde ‘retired' when he reached the automatic retirement age of seventy, but only for a day. By dint of some bureaucratic sleight of hand, Edgar promptly rehired him. Clyde continued to get ‘outstanding' performance reports and, in spite of his failing eyesight, was issued a new service revolver.
FBI propaganda insisted that the Director and his right-hand man were hale and hearty, as indomitable as ever.

Increasingly, however, people who mattered were unconvinced. A group of Los Angeles agents wrote to the Attorney General complaining of the Director's ‘rapidly advancing senility and increasing megalomania.' Two former agents dared to write books criticizing him, and Edgar found that old suppression techniques no longer worked. Even the conservative press, he found, was now prepared to run articles mocking him and asking how much longer he could remain Director of the FBI.

History was leaving Edgar behind. In the past he had always known how to maneuver, how to respond to change in ways that left the FBI looking good. Now he failed to see how Middle America, his traditional constituency, was changing. The tide of opinion was running in favor of civil rights, a factor the FBI could have exploited by being seen to enforce the law. Instead, Edgar ranted on about supposed Communist influence on the black movement and about Martin Luther King's ‘lies.' Millions of Americans were turning against the Vietnam War, but Edgar exacerbated the situation by having his agents infiltrate the protest groups and sending agents provocateurs to disrupt demonstrations. The manipulator of public opinion had lost his touch.

Then, when Edgar's decline and fall seemed inevitable, along came Richard Nixon.

It was as if some historical magnet had pulled the two together. Twenty-one years had passed since Edgar first cast an approving eye on Nixon. He and his wealthy friends, the Texas oilmen, had nursed Nixon on his way to becoming Vice President in 1952. Nixon had been seen repeatedly at Edgar's side, on trips to the races and at baseball games, before the 1960 upset that swept Nixon into the political wilderness.

Even in the wilderness Edgar had been there, a sympathetic houseguest at the Nixon home in California. ‘Hoover,' Nixon
would say ruefully when Edgar was gone and when Watergate dragged him down in disgrace, ‘was my crony.'

In 1968, as Nixon reached for the presidency, he committed himself to keeping Edgar on as soon as his campaign went into high gear. Edgar leaked information designed to hurl the Democratic opposition. He laughed off a bid, meanwhile, to get him to run for Vice President alongside the southern conservative George Wallace. Dreams of a place for himself at the White House were long past – what Edgar wanted now was safe passage in a seaworthy Republican ship.

All the gang were there, the millionaires and the middlemen. That summer, funds flowed into the Nixon coffers from Clint Murchison in Texas and Lewis Rosenstiel in New York. Louis Nichols, once Edgar's political fixer and now Rosenstiel's, became one of Nixon's political advisers.

Edgar covered his bets. He knew Vice President Hubert Humphrey, by then the leading Democratic contender, still had a good chance of winning. He raised no objection, therefore, when Humphrey's people asked for the ‘same service' at the Convention that the FBI had given Johnson four years earlier. This time, however, there would be no electronic surveillance; when Edgar asked Attorney General Ramsey Clark for approval, he was turned down flat.
¹

Edgar worried about his fate should Humphrey become president. In the White House, a depressed Lyndon Johnson worried – again – about his personal safety. ‘Tell Edgar Hoover,' he told an aide, ‘that I have taken care of him since the beginning of my administration, and now that I am leaving, I expect him to take care of me … There will be any number of crackpots trying to get at me after January 20, 1969.'

In November, when Nixon scraped home to victory, Edgar wrote Johnson a last obsequious letter:

My dear Mr President,

You have afforded me many pleasant moments for many years. As a personal friend, neighbor and subordinate, I
have enjoyed your company … Clyde Tolson and Deke DeLoach join me in expressing appreciation for your kindness. They, too, are very grateful for the time spent with you.

Sincerely,

Edgar

Within two days of writing this farewell note, Edgar was closeted with Nixon at New York's Pierre Hotel, telling him of Johnson's illicit use of the FBI during the campaign. ‘Hoover told me the cabin on my plane was bugged for the last two weeks,' Nixon would recall. ‘Hoover told [Attorney General-to-be] Mitchell and me separately … Johnson ordered it.'

FBI files contain no evidence that Nixon was bugged, only that checks were made on the phone records of his running mate, Spiro Agnew, because Johnson suspected Republican sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks. Yet as Nixon's aide H. R. Haldeman confirms, Edgar not only claimed the bugging had occurred, he played on Nixon's fears in other ways.

‘When you get into the White House,' the Director warned, ‘don't make any calls through the switchboard … Little men you don't know will be listening.' Edgar claimed that presidential communications, run by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, were insecure – that ‘the President should know that if he talked on those lines he would probably be monitored.'

‘We were to find that Hoover always came in with a little bag of goodies,' Haldeman recalled, ‘tidbits of information that he doled out, alarums and excursions on which your imagination would feed. He would roll his eyes skywards, without offering a firm conclusion – all to create an impression of how useful the Bureau could be to the President.'

Edgar must have hoped for a smooth run, a return to the power and privilege he had exercised during the last Republican administration, when Nixon had been Vice President. Haldeman, watching him with Nixon at the Pierre,
thought they greeted each other ‘like old pals.' ‘Edgar,' Nixon said, ‘you are one of the few people who is to have direct access to me at all times.'

Yet Nixon's counsel John Ehrlichman, also present, thought his boss said this ‘ostentatiously, for effect.' Haldeman thought Nixon doubted Edgar's competence and was secretly considering firing him. Even as he was making promises to Edgar, Nixon was approaching others to fill the post.

At a meeting in Palm Springs, Nixon dangled the job in front of Pete Pitchess, Sheriff of Los Angeles County, a Goldwater conservative and a former FBI agent. Pitchess responded with care. ‘Hoover,' he noted, ‘hasn't yet said he's retiring.' ‘No,' said Nixon, ‘but he's told me he's preparing to, on his birthday.' ‘Ah,' Pitchess responded, ‘but
which
birthday?' Nixon changed the subject.