Official and Confidential (63 page)

An enraged Edgar called Anderson, accurately enough on this occasion, ‘the top scavenger of all columnists.' Elliott, who had actually removed the garbage, came home one evening to find two ‘FBI types' on his doorstep. They snapped photographs of him, then ran for their car. Elliott's roommate, who happened to be the son of an FBI agent, later made it clear Elliott was no longer welcome in the apartment.

Subsequent
Post
columns contained serious revelations. Anderson disclosed that Edgar's millionaire friends had long been picking up the tab for his summer vacations in California. He said Edgar had accepted more than a quarter of a million dollars in royalties from
Masters of Deceit
and two other books on Communism he had not even written. ‘This is an offense,' Anderson pointed out, ‘that, if it had been committed by some other government official, the FBI might have been asked to investigate.'

If those articles scared Edgar, a third must have shaken him to the core. ‘Competent sources,' Anderson wrote, ‘told us that Hoover had consulted Dr Marshall de G. Ruffin, the society shrink, about his nightmares.' Anderson was perilously close to one of Edgar's most sensitive secrets, for it was Ruffin whom Edgar had consulted years earlier about his homosexuality.
¹

Edgar was rattled. He talked about Anderson with Attorney General Mitchell and, after the story about the psychiatrist, with Mitchell's deputy, Richard Kleindienst. ‘With these jackals,' he said, ‘I wouldn't put anything past them … I have been undecided whether to sue for libel or not.' ‘If they spelled your name right,' Kleindienst advised, ‘leave it alone.'

Clyde Tolson, Anderson reported, was now too ‘feeble' to do his job properly. It was true. Clyde suffered another stroke that year, failed to recognize his own nephew when he visited
him in the hospital and found it hard to follow conversation. To hide his faults when he did go to work, Clyde was henceforth smuggled out of his apartment by a back door. A discreet arrival at the office was easy – via the underground parking lot and an elevator that stopped near his office. Yet that year Edgar gave his friend a special bonus for excellent service. ‘Mr Tolson,' he wrote, ‘performs his tasks quickly and with outstanding accuracy … His services are without parallel.'

Edgar's own schedule, never as grueling as his publicity suggested, was now very light. ‘By the time I left in 1970,' said Cartha DeLoach, ‘he would come in at nine on the dot, stay until eleven forty-five, go to lunch at the Mayflower and come back around one. Then he would close his doors until three and go right on home. I never could get him during that time. That was his workday, every day.'

Out-of-town officials now found Edgar virtually inaccessible. ‘Months and months went by,' said Neil Welch, ‘when he wasn't seeing anybody. It'd been regular as clockwork that he saw all Agents in Charge once a year. But for the last year and half he cut them all off. We just couldn't get any information – just total silence. Nobody had seen him, nobody could see him. Asking how he was was like it must've been trying to find out how the Tsar was, in Russia …'

What the public now saw was a cantankerous old man, issuing blasts of bigotry at his enemies – not least those unable to answer back, like Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. When former Attorney General Ramsey Clark criticized him in a book for his ‘self-centered concern for his own reputation,' Edgar promptly proved him right. In a three-and-a-half-hour harangue to a reporter, he labeled Clark ‘a jellyfish and a softy.'

At the Nixon White House, the unease grew. One reason for keeping Edgar on had been the fear of jettisoning a national institution, a man assumed to have overwhelming public support. That assumption was no longer valid. Fifty-one percent of those questioned in a Gallup poll thought
Edgar should retire. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,' said one Washington columnist, ‘has spent too much time being a demi-god.' Lawrence Brooks, a ninety-year-old former judge who had observed Edgar in action since 1919, was moved to quote Abraham Lincoln. ‘We must,' he said, ‘disenthrall ourselves.'

In February 1971 Nixon's speech writer, future presidential contender Patrick Buchanan, advised him that Edgar was now a political liability and should be replaced as soon as possible.

He has nowhere to go but down; and he is going down steadily … With each of these new picayune battles in which he involves himself, his place is being sullied … My strong recommendation would be to retire Hoover now in all the glory and esteem he has merited and deserved; and not let him – for his own sake and ours – wind up his career a dead lion being chewed over by the jackals of the Left.

The memo went to a president preoccupied. At home, Nixon was beset by the highest unemployment figures in a decade. Abroad, he was embroiled in the U.S.-supported Vietnamese invasion of Laos, a public relations disaster, soon to be followed by ugly revelations about the My Lai massacre. Vietnam had become an albatross for Nixon, as it had been for Johnson. While he applied himself to such problems, Edgar piled embarrassment on embarrassment.

In a time of fervent feminism, Edgar was still dithering over whether or not secretaries should be allowed to wear pants. ‘It is absolutely essential,' he had written a year earlier, ‘that we conduct sufficient investigation to clearly establish the subversive ramifications of the Women's Liberation Movement.' Now, in a blaze of publicity, he turned down two female applicants for the job of agent. They sued. Then he fired two female clerks for working with the peace movement in their spare time.

In March 1971, burglars broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, escaping with nearly a thousand documents – including some that exposed Bureau surveillance of students, radicals and blacks for the first time. One, at least, bore the telltale letters COINTELPRO, code word for the Bureau's most secret dirty-tricks operations. Styling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, the thieves sent copies of the documents to newsmen and politicians. They were never caught – and Edgar had to close down COINTELPRO.

Angry voices were raised in Congress. Senator George McGovern, gearing up to fight Nixon for the presidency in 1972, publicly protested Edgar's savage treatment of Agent Jack Shaw, forced to resign for venturing criticism of the FBI in a private letter.
²
‘I cannot believe,' McGovern said, ‘that we want our great nation to become a land where our personal privacy and our personal freedom are jeopardized by the abuse of power by a police official who seems to believe he is a law unto himself.'

Behind the scenes, Edgar rehearsed the old routine. Agents trawled fruitlessly through McGovern's record seeking something, anything, to discredit the senator. Edgar scribbled a furious note about ‘psychopathic liar McGovern.' Clyde got twenty-one Bureau officials to fire off letters supporting Edgar, and sent one himself. The file copy bore a spiteful note: ‘The address of this letter has deliberately been phrased to avoid referring to McGovern as “Honorable.”'

Senator Edmund Muskie, meanwhile, discovered the FBI had recently surveilled a series of countrywide rallies by environmentalists – including himself. Congressman Henry Reuss learned – from one of the documents stolen in Pennsylvania – that agents had investigated his daughter, a student at Swarthmore College. ‘The FBI,' said Reuss, ‘has an important responsibility to investigate crime … not to compile dossiers on millions of Americans, congressmen's daughters or not, who are accused of no wrongdoing.'

Such protests paled beside the outburst of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, in April, when he made speeches accusing the FBI of wiretapping members of Congress and infiltrating the universities.
³
‘When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, then it is time – it is way past time, Mr Speaker – that the present Director thereof no longer be the Director … The time has come for the Attorney General of the United States to ask for the resignation of Mr Hoover.'

Edgar learned of Boggs' attack within minutes, from the congressional ticker. He had already seen an early copy of the latest
Life
magazine, its cover adorned with his own cartoon image, a disgruntled old man's face done up to look like a statue from the days of imperial Rome. The headline read:
THE 47-YEAR REIGN OF J. EDGAR HOOVER, EMPEROR OF THE FBI
, and the story suggested that reign should end. Edgar knew that
Newsweek
, too, was preparing a cover story. Its headline would be:
HOOVER'S FBI: TIME FOR A CHANGE
?

According to his memo of record, Edgar offered to resign that afternoon. He called Attorney General Mitchell, who was sunning himself at Key Biscayne, to break the news of the Boggs speech. ‘I wanted him to know and the President to know,' Edgar wrote afterward, ‘if at any time my presence embarrasses the Administration – if it is felt I may be a burden or handicap to the re-election – I would be glad to step aside.'

If Edgar did offer to resign, neither Mitchell nor anyone else in the Nixon administration remembered the momentous event.
⁴
For men who hoped to be rid of Edgar, moreover, he and the President responded oddly to the Boggs episode. Nixon said he thought Edgar was ‘taking a bad rap,' and Mitchell demanded that Boggs ‘recant at once and apologize to a great and dedicated American.' A few weeks later he defended Edgar aggressively when a reporter asked the Director if he planned to retire. ‘You're so far off base,' Mitchell snapped, ‘that I'm going to belt you one … Why, he's
the most outstanding individual who has ever had anything to do with law enforcement.'

Nixon and his officials had no choice but to grovel to Edgar. For he now possessed information that strengthened his hold over the President – a hold that, even in the clamor for his resignation, made dismissing him unacceptably risky.

Two years earlier, in the spring of 1969, Nixon and Henry Kissinger had been enraged by a series of news stories that in their view compromised national security, especially on Vietnam. They thought the stories had been leaked by trusted officials, and asked Edgar and the Attorney General how best to track down the culprits. As a result, the FBI began a wiretapping operation that targeted six of Kissinger's aides, eight other officials and four prominent journalists. The bugging continued until 1971.

It was Edgar, according to Kissinger, who proposed that course. In his memos for the record, however, he made it appear otherwise. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,' Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, ‘invariably listed some official outside the FBI hierarchy as requesting each wiretap, even in cases where I had heard Hoover himself specifically recommend them to Nixon.'

What Edgar had done was to lure the administration into danger, while – as Kissinger put it – ‘protecting his flanks.' He saw to it that the taps were authorized by Attorney General Mitchell, in writing.

The fact that the targets included eminent correspondents – William Beecher and Hedrick Smith of
The New York Times
, Marvin Kalb of CBS and columnist Joseph Kraft – made the surveillance especially sensitive. The effort produced not an iota of evidence to identify the leaks, but a time bomb of potential trouble for the President.

The fact that Nixon had approved the bugging meant that the buck would stop with him if it were exposed. Such a revelation might wreck his chances of reelection in 1972. Edgar
knew the President feared exposure, for Nixon ordered that summaries of the tapped conversations be delivered only to H. R. Haldeman in person, in sealed envelopes.

The man in charge of the wiretap operation was William Sullivan, the highest-ranking official in the Bureau below Edgar and Clyde. He, too, knew that secrecy was essential. On Edgar's orders, copies were kept to a minimum, one for the White House and one for Edgar. ‘This is a White House operation,' Edgar told Sullivan. ‘It's not an FBI operation and we're not going to put them in the FBI files …' The transcripts were closely held, first in Edgar's office, then in Sullivan's.

Transcripts under Edgar's control were a potential weapon for use against Nixon. In April 1971, according to three sources, he used it – just days after Congressman Boggs' claim that the FBI had been tapping politicians. He did so, specifically, after Richard Kleindienst, the Deputy Attorney General, declared himself in favor of a congressional inquiry into Boggs' allegations.

If he was to be pilloried for illegal bugging, Edgar had no intention of suffering alone. He angrily called Kleindienst and rambled on at length. The Deputy Attorney General, weary of such calls, held the phone at arm's length – allowing a colleague, Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, to listen in. ‘You understand,' Mardian heard Edgar say, ‘that if I am called upon to testify before the Congress, I will have to tell all that I know about this matter.'

The threat was lost on Kleindienst, who knew nothing of the buggings Nixon had ordered. Mardian, who did, thought Edgar had ‘threatened the President of the United States.' He reported the conversation to the White House – and, two years later, to Watergate investigators.

Edgar went further, according to a note by William Sullivan found among Mardian's private papers. On April 10, still furious that Kleindienst had welcomed an inquiry, the Director called the President himself at Camp David. Should
he be called before Congress to discuss bugging, Edgar said, he ‘would have to lay bare the FBI's sensitive operations, and this would be very undesirable and damaging.'

There was no inquiry into Boggs' allegations. In May, celebrating his forty-seventh year in office, Edgar said he had no thought of retiring. ‘I intend to remain as Director of the FBI as long as I can be of service to my country.' On June 12 he appeared at the wedding of Nixon's daughter Tricia, smiling and waving for photographers as though all were well between him and the President.