Official and Confidential (67 page)

On another occasion, Clyde phoned the doctor in the early hours of the morning. ‘He said Mr Hoover had suffered a bad fall,' said Mrs Bell. ‘We opened up our office and they came in. Hoover had gashed his forehead and an eyebrow – to the bone. I would say they'd been drinking. My husband, who had a dry wit, turned to Clyde and said, “Next time you hit your boss, you should try to miss the eyebrow.” Clyde got so upset that he left the room. People don't fall at home and gash themselves every day, and my husband gave Hoover a lecture and told him it was time to start making allowances for his age.'

For months past, Edgar had spent much of his time in the office staring out the window, as the girders of the new FBI building rose, very slowly, across the street. He kept a photo album of it on his desk, which aides updated constantly. ‘At
the rate it is going up,' he would say, ‘none of us will be around by the time it is finished.'

Many of ‘us' were already gone. Of his oilmen friends, Billy Byars had died in 1965, Clint Murchison in 1969, and Sid Richardson was long gone. The previous fall, looking unsteady himself, Edgar had buried the old classmate he had been close to in the early days at the Bureau, Frank Baughman. Baughman was one of the few who still called Edgar by the old nickname, Speed. Two months earlier, Walter Winchell had died of cancer in Los Angeles. Edgar had not bothered to go to the funeral.

Others were failing fast. Lewis Rosenstiel had suffered a stroke. Clyde had been in the hospital again with heart problems. Edgar himself was talking about God more than usual. ‘For me,' he told a writer for an Evangelist magazine, ‘Jesus is a living reality … I know that I can count on our Redeemer.' Edgar had recently made his last will, leaving almost his entire fortune to Clyde.

In late April, when Cartha DeLoach saw him at a Hearst Newspapers lunch in New York, Edgar seemed feisty enough. Roy Cohn, his protege from the McCarthy days, was there, too. He thought the Director looked well, younger than his seventy-seven years. ‘I had a checkup and everything is fine,' Edgar said. ‘If I retired, I'd fall apart and rot away. That's what happens when you quit. I'm staying.'

There was another reason to hang on. ‘You've been through the same type of persecution,' he told Cohn. ‘My time had to come. But I've got the bums on the run. And I'm staying right where I am.'

Back in Washington, Edgar dined at the Cosmos Club and attended the Saturday racing at Pimlico as usual. On Sunday, April 30, he drank martinis with neighbors across the street, pottered about in the garden and watched ‘The FBI' on television.

Edgar's last day alive, by a great irony, was May Day, the workers' holiday celebrated by the Left, the Left he had
struggled all his life to suppress. Edgar arrived at work alone, without the ailing Clyde.

It was not a pleasant day at the office. That morning, in his
Washington Post
column, Jack Anderson offered revelations about FBI dossiers on the private lives of political figures, black leaders, newsmen and show business people. Hours later, in a carefully timed appearance on Capitol Hill, he promised to prove it.

‘The executive branch,' the columnist testified to a congressional committee, ‘conducts secret investigations of prominent Americans … FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover has demonstrated an intense interest in who is sleeping with whom in Washington … I should make clear that I am not offering hearsay testimony. I have seen FBI sex reports; I have examined FBI files … I am willing to make some of these documents available to the Committee.'

These were astonishing claims in 1972, and the FBI corridors were abuzz with talk about Anderson that day. This, however, was only one in a salvo of new attacks. Earlier, Edgar had obtained advance copies of two books about himself.
Citizen Hoover
, by Jay Robert Nash, was a savage attack on Edgar's entire career. Americans, Nash wrote, no longer knew what to make of Edgar. He was both ‘benefactor and bully, protector and oppressor, truth-giver and liar … The truth is the FBI of our collective memory never really existed outside of the very fertile and imaginative mind of its eternal Director … To him, all high adventure was possible in the cause of Right, all moral victories over obvious evil inevitable, so long as faith in the all-encompassing power of his good office was absolute.'

The second book, which the FBI had obtained by covert means in proof form, was more damaging. In a daring expose called simply
John Edgar Hoover
, award-winning reporter Hank Messick hinted at the dark truths behind Edgar's compliant attitude toward organized crime. He highlighted, too, the relationship with Lewis Rosenstiel that placed Edgar close to top mobsters.

‘Besides,' reads a de Tocqueville quotation on the flyleaf of the Messick book,

what is to be feared is not so much the immorality of the great as the fact that immorality may lead to greatness.

The Nash book would be found on Edgar's night table after his death, and Messick's book may have been in the house as well. Secret FBI intervention no longer cowed publishers. These books were going to be published whether Edgar liked it or not.

Edgar stayed at work until nearly six that last day, late by his standards, then went to Clyde's apartment for dinner. He probably arrived home about 10:15 P.M., to be greeted by the two yapping Cairn terriers. Edgar liked to have a nightcap, a glass of his favorite bourbon, Jack Daniel's Black Label, poured from a musical decanter. When raised from its rest, the decanter tinkled ‘For he's a jolly good fellow.' Edgar was fond of it.

If there was such a quiet moment that night, it was reportedly shattered by an unwelcome telephone call. Later, Helen Gandy would claim that, somewhere between ten and midnight, President Nixon called Edgar at home. His purpose, Gandy said, was to tell Edgar once and for all that he must quit. Afterward, Edgar phoned Clyde to talk about the call. Clyde subsequently told Gandy, and that is how the story survives.

If Gandy's account is accurate, Edgar must have gone to bed feeling shattered. He would have walked into the hall, past the bust of himself waiting to greet visitors, past the pictures and inscriptions that spoke of fifty-nine years in government service; one showed him with a smiling Richard Nixon. Then he would have climbed the stairs, passing an oil painting of himself on the landing, to the master bedroom with its maplewood four-poster.

May 2, a Tuesday, began as a typical Washington spring
day – too hot for comfort even in the early morning. Edgar's black housekeeper, Annie Fields, always came up from her basement apartment to fix breakfast, and Edgar always came down to eat at 7:30
A. M
. But today he did not.

The chauffeur reportedly arrived at 7:45, to be followed by his predecessor in the job, James Crawford. Crawford, one of the blacks Edgar had once elevated to agent rank to avoid accusations of discrimination, still worked on in retirement as handyman and gardener. He was there that morning by appointment with Edgar, to discuss where to plant some new rosebushes.

The Director, however, did not appear. As the servants waited, the dogs scurried about, eager for the morning ritual of scraps from the master's table. Then it was 8:30, and the old retainers began to worry. There had been no sound from upstairs, not this morning.

Annie Fields, it is said, went upstairs to investigate. She knocked timorously at the bedroom door, then – answered only by silence – tried the door. It was unlocked, which was highly unusual.

The housekeeper saw Edgar's body the moment she stepped into the room. It was dressed in pajama trousers, naked from the waist up, and lying beside the bed. She went no farther and ran downstairs to find Crawford, the longestserving member of the household staff. Crouched on the bedroom floor, holding the rigid, cold hand in his, Crawford knew at once that his boss was dead.

Crawford rushed to telephone first the doctor and then Clyde, the one other person he knew should be alerted at once. Clyde nearly missed the call. He was already out of the apartment, on his slow way to the limousine he assumed was about to arrive, when he realized he had forgotten something. So he came limping back, one leg dragging because of the strokes he had suffered, to hear the phone that was ringing and ringing.

Edgar's doctor, Robert Choisser, was at the house within
an hour of the discovery of the body. ‘Mr Hoover had been dead for some hours,' he recalled. ‘I was rather surprised by his sudden death, because he was in good health. I do not recall prescribing him medication for blood pressure or heart disease. There was nothing to lead anyone to expect him to die at that time, except for his age.'

The body was in rigor mortis, suggesting Edgar had been dead for many hours – since about 2:00 or 3:00
A.M
., Choisser thought. Later that morning, because deaths at home must be reported to the coroner's office, he contacted Dr Richard Welton, a former classmate working as a Medical Examiner. Routinely in such cases the coroner takes the doctor's word for it and simply registers the death. Welton and Coroner James Luke, however, decided the death of a man as prominent as Edgar required their presence at the scene.

The two medical examiners arrived at the house soon after 11:00 A.M., and, except that Dr Welton was to say he thought the body had been moved from the floor to the bed, found the scene as described by Dr Choisser. ‘It was totally normal,' Welton recalled. ‘There was nothing to suggest trauma. Hoover was in an age group where it could be expected … It is common for such a person to be found dead after apparently trying to get to the bathroom during the night.'
⁵

On the way to the car, Welton wondered aloud whether there should be an autopsy. ‘What if,' he asked Luke, ‘someone should pop up six months from now and say someone had been feeding Hoover arsenic? We'll think we should have done an autopsy.' It was only a passing thought. Back at the office, however, Dr Luke consulted by telephone with the Medical Examiner for New York City, Dr Milton Helpern, perhaps the world's most renowned forensic detective.

Neither pathologist had any reason to suppose anyone had been feeding Edgar arsenic, or any other poison. No one then knew that the Watergate burglars even existed, let alone that two of them had consulted a CIA expert about ways of killing
columnist Jack Anderson, including the option of planting poison in his medicine cabinet. They knew nothing of alleged break-ins at Edgar's home, nothing of the suggestion that a poison might have been ‘placed on Hoover's personal toilet articles' – a poison capable of inducing cardiac arrest, detectable only if an autopsy was speedily performed.

Nor, on the other hand, did the doctors have any notion of the stress Edgar had been under, of the latest threats to his reputation – Jack Anderson's congressional testimony promising to produce proof of Edgar's snooping on public figures and Hank Messick's forthcoming book hinting at his links with organized crime. They knew nothing of the call Nixon had reportedly made to Edgar late the previous night, telling him it was time to step down.

Three days after Edgar's death, having decided an autopsy was unnecessary, Coroner Luke signed the death certificate:

John Edgar Hoover, male, white.
Occupation: Director, FBI.
Immediate cause: Hypertensive cardiovascular disease.

On May 5, three days after Edgar died, the men who were to break into Democratic Party headquarters moved into Room 419 at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, directly opposite the Watergate building they were to make so famous. Their first break-in attempt, three weeks later, failed. It was followed by one successful entry, then a second – in June – when they were caught. The Watergate saga followed, leading to the resignation of President Nixon and jail terms for most of the burglars and for John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, Charles Colson, Egil Krogh and others.

Krogh, Nixon intimate and chief Plumber, wound up serving time in Allenwood minimum security prison in Pennsylvania. Also in Allenwood in early 1974 was former Congressman Neil Gallagher, once a victim of Edgar's rage
for his failure to cooperate in smearing Robert Kennedy, now serving time for the income-tax conviction that followed.
⁶
According to Gallagher, Krogh had something strange to say about Edgar's death.

‘I was the prison librarian,' Gallagher recalled in 1991, ‘and Krogh would come in with his two Bibles. He was very religious, a Christian Scientist. He'd sit writing letters at the big table in the library, and sometimes we'd talk. One night, when I was about to close the place and there were only the two of us there, we talked about Hoover.

‘I said I thought the circumstances of Hoover's death were a bit strange. Because of my war with Hoover, I'd followed everything about him closely. I said to Krogh, “Hoover knew everything that was going on in Washington. He must surely have known about the Plumbers and everything. Do you think Hoover was blackmailing the President?” And then I said, and it surprises me now, “Did you guys knock Hoover off? You had the troops to do it, and the reason …”'

‘It took several seconds for it to sink in. Then Krogh literally jumped out of his chair. And in a highly charged voice he sort of screamed, “We didn't knock off Hoover. He knocked himself off.” And I said, “My God, that explains a lot about the bastard's death coming the way it did.” And with that Krogh jumped up, gathered his papers and his Bibles and rushed out of the library. We never had another conversation the rest of the time we were in Allenwood.'

Interviewed in 1991, Krogh recalled knowing Gallagher in the prison. Told what Gallagher had said of their discussion about Edgar's death, he replied, ‘I might have had a conversation like that, but it was a long time ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. I don't remember it.' Gallagher, for his part, signed an affidavit swearing to the truth of his account.