Official and Confidential (68 page)

There is no way, now, to know why Nixon's adviser should have said Edgar committed suicide – nor why the subject upset him so much. If evidence along those lines was known
to the White House, it has vanished along with so many other mysteries of the Watergate period. Nor is it possible, today, to make a judgment on the allegation that Watergate investigators were unable to track further – that there were break-ins at Edgar's home before he died. The most troubling claim, that the second break-in involved planting a poison chemical designed to cause death by simulated heart attack, cannot be further assessed outside the judicial system.

After he heard the news of Edgar's death, Clyde Tolson made two telephone calls. The first was to Helen Gandy, the secretary who had served the Director since 1919. The second was to the office of the Attorney General, and from there the word passed to H. R. Haldeman at the White House. He in turn informed the President – at 9:15 A.M., according to his handwritten notes.

As Haldeman recalled it, the news ‘wasn't a great surprise' to Nixon. He said nothing that reflected his reported exchange with Edgar on the phone the previous night. He wrote in his diary, or so we are told in his memoirs:

Hoover … died at the right time; fortunately, he died in office. It would have killed him had he been forced out of office or had he resigned even voluntarily. I remember the last conversation I had with him about two weeks ago when I called him and mentioned the fine job the Bureau had done on the hijacking cases …

Ehrlichman and Haldeman did not recall any reaction by the President to Edgar's death, aside from his concern for the files. John Mitchell, who had left the post of Attorney General in order to run Nixon's reelection campaign, had the same worry. His orders that morning, Haldeman noted at the time, were to hunt down ‘the skeletons.' It was decided not to announce Edgar's death publicly until eleven o'clock.

Gordon Liddy, Nixon's dirty-tricks specialist, thought it
was vital to find the skeletons. As an FBI veteran, he had once worked with some of Edgar's most sensitive political files. ‘I called the White House at once,' Liddy recalled. ‘I said, “You've got to get those files. They are a source of enormous power. You don't have much time. There's going to be a race on. Get those files.”'

Liddy said he thought he spoke to Ehrlichman, who could speak directly to the President, and to Howard Hunt to get him to talk with Charles Colson. Ehrlichman confirmed he did discuss the danger with Nixon, and someone that morning took drastic action.

When the undertakers reached Edgar's house around 12:30 P.M., they walked into a scene out of Orwell's darkest imaginings. ‘They were virtually tearing the place apart,' undertaker William Reburn remembered. ‘There were men in suits, fifteen or eighteen of them, swarming all over the place, ransacking it, going through everything he had. I assumed they were government agents. They were going through Hoover's books, desk, drawers, like they were looking for something …

‘They were methodical. One agent was assigned to a bookcase, going through all the books kind of page by page. They were taking all the books off the shelves and looking under and behind the shelves. There had been this rumor that Hoover had secret files, and that was the thought that entered my mind, that they were hunting for his files.'

Whoever the searchers were, someone may have got there before them. Early that morning two of Edgar's neighbors had seen something mysterious. ‘It was early in the morning,' Anthony Calomaris recalled in 1992. ‘I was seventeen then, and I was getting ready for school. And my mother called me into her room, onto the balcony we had then. There were two men carrying something out of Mr Hoover's kitchen door, and Annie the housekeeper was at the door. What they were carrying was long and obviously heavy, wrapped in something like a quilt. They heaved it into a station wagon parked in the alley and drove away.'

Because of the shape of the bundle, Calomaris and his mother assumed at the time that it contained a body – that Edgar had died in the night and that these were undertakers, working early to avoid the press. The documented record, however, is that Edgar's body was not removed until much later, around lunchtime. At the hour the neighbors saw the men with a bundle, the body had not, according to all available testimony, even been discovered.

Yet Calomaris and his mother are adamant that they saw something being removed before Anthony left for school. The men were surely not interlopers – had they been, the housekeeper would not have been calmly seeing them to the door. Given the known desire of others to get at Edgar's secrets, were allies removing something before the death became generally known, to thwart later searchers?

Whatever was or was not found at Edgar's home, Nixon's men were worried about the contents of his office. That same morning, after a conversation with the White House, Acting Attorney General Kleindienst ordered that it be sealed – to secure Edgar's files. That afternoon, the man Nixon had picked as Acting FBI Director, L. Patrick Gray, arrived to ask John Mohr where the ‘secret files' were. Mohr told him there were none.

Gray was back, asking the same question, before nine o'clock the next morning. ‘Judging from his conversation and his comments,' Mohr recalled, ‘I thought he was looking for secret files that would embarrass the Nixon administration … I told him in no uncertain terms that there were no secret files.' There was a stand-up row, with Gray yelling that he was ‘a hardheaded Irishman and nobody pushes me around.' Mohr said he was a hardheaded Dutchman – no one pushed him around, either. The shouting could be heard several offices away.

Gray, who later narrowly escaped prosecution for destroying documents after Watergate, may in the end have had some success. Joe Diamond, a young file clerk who
joined the FBI a week after Edgar's death, recalled a curious episode.

‘It was my second day on the job, and the Supervisor asked me and three other men to go upstairs to do a job. We went up, and there were four gentlemen in suits there. And they had us take these crates stuffed with papers down to the basement to the shredder. We picked up the crates and it was like we were carrying gold or something the way they acted. It took about two hours to get the stuff shredded, and then they took the sacks and left … I recognized two of the men in suits. One of them was L. Patrick Gray and the other was [Deputy Associate Director] Mark Felt.'

Almost certainly, a mass of documents were gone even before Gray took over. ‘I learned later,' recalled Kleindienst, ‘that certain files were removed even before I called to order that Hoover's office be locked.' ‘It was reported to me by my FBI sources,' said Liddy, ‘that by the time Gray went in to get the files, Miss Gandy had already got rid of them.'

Kleindienst's instructions to seal Edgar's office had no effect anyway, because John Mohr placed a literal interpretation on the order. He locked up only Edgar's personal office, which contained no files at all. The other nine rooms in the office suite, which were bulging with documents, remained unsecured. They housed some of the most secret documents of all, including the Official and Confidential files stored in locked file cabinets under the eagle eye of Helen Gandy.

Three years later a congressional committee would make what it could of the stories told by Gandy, Mohr, Felt and others. It would conclude only one thing for certain: that a mass of documents were trucked to Edgar's home in the weeks that followed his death. According to Gandy, these were merely Edgar's personal files, containing private correspondence, investment records and the like. In line with Edgar's known wishes, she said, she sorted through them, then sent them to be destroyed in the office shredder.

The staff of Congress' Government Information Subcommittee, which heard Gandy's testimony, were convinced she was lying. Surviving records indicated that the truckload taken to Edgar's home had included official records. Gandy, who said the consignment consisted of just four file cabinets and thirty-five cardboard boxes, was contradicted by Raymond Smith, the truck driver who made the delivery. He said he transported at least twenty, possibly twenty-five, cabinets from headquarters to the basement of Edgar's house. A file drawer came open during the transfer, and he saw that it was crammed with folders, each about an inch thick. Edgar's housekeeper Annie Fields told neighbors the files were kept under tight security from the moment they arrived.

Finally, it is clear that in Edgar's office the label ‘Personal' had a significance quite different from the ordinary sense of the word. Early in his tenure, Edgar had established a procedure designated ‘Personal and Confidential,' under which senior officials could communicate with him in total secrecy, outside the central records system.

In the opinion of the scholar who has done most to expose FBI secret dossiers, Professor Athan Theoharis of Marquette University, the Personal and Confidential files probably contained material even more explosive than the Official and Confidential dossiers that have since so shocked the public.

It is not certain that all the files removed to Edgar's home were eventually destroyed.
Newsweek
reported in 1975 that dossiers ‘very, very damaging to the Nixon White House' remained in Clyde Tolson's custody. When he in turn died,
Newsweek
said, FBI agents descended on the house to cart the documents away. Clyde's former secretary, Dorothy Skillman, told a story similar to Helen Gandy's. She destroyed Clyde's correspondence, she said, and it was ‘mostly birthday cards.' Anthony Marro, the
Newsweek
reporter, stood by his story.

‘I find your testimony very difficult to believe,' Congressman Andrew Maguire told Helen Gandy when she
testified in December 1975 about the fate of the files. ‘That,' she answered haughtily, ‘is your privilege.'

‘You're beating a dead horse,' Mark Felt told congressional investigators. ‘So what, you won't find out what was destroyed. Only Miss Gandy knows that. And what if you do?… There's no serious problem if we lose some papers. I didn't see anything wrong, and I still don't.'

EPILOGUE

‘You know, he was the last reigning monarch in the Western World.'

Tom Huston, former Nixon aide, 1975

A
t midday Washington time on the day Edgar died, the Stars and Stripes slid down to half-staff on American government buildings, military installations and Navy ships around the world. President Nixon, relieved of his Hoover problem at last, was diverting the nation with a show of public grief.

The President now claimed the man he had been trying to dump had been ‘one of my closest personal friends and advisers.' Edgar, he said, had been ‘the symbol and embodiment of the values he cherished most: courage, patriotism, dedication to his country and a granite-like honesty and integrity.'

Vice President Spiro Agnew, who would soon face trial for bribery and tax evasion, said Edgar had endeared himself to Americans for ‘his total dedication to principle and his complete incorruptibility.' John Mitchell, who had urged Edgar's dismissal, called the death ‘a great tragedy.' Acting Attorney General Kleindienst, who used to hold the phone away from his ear when Edgar called, now thought him ‘a giant among patriots' who never allowed the taint of political influence. Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, declared that ‘No twentieth-century man has meant more to this country than Hoover.'

In Congress, politicians rushed to praise Edgar. John Rooney, who had been party to many of Edgar's abuses,
spoke of Edgar's ‘deep respect for his fellowman.' Congressman Hale Boggs, who had called for Edgar's retirement the previous year, now claimed he had never criticized him personally at all. Even Senator Edward Kennedy spoke of Edgar's ‘honesty, integrity and his desire to do what he thought best for the country.' In all, 149 representatives and senators eventually paid tribute.

The few that raised their voices in dissent included Martin Luther King's widow, Coretta. She spoke of Edgar's ‘deplorable and dangerous' legacy and of a file system ‘replete with lies and sordid material on some of the highest people in government, including presidents.' Dr Benjamin Spock was glad Edgar was dead. ‘It's a great relief, especially if his replacement is a man who better understands democratic institutions and the American process.'

At FBI headquarters, a telex went out to the furthest corners of Edgar's empire, asking Bureau employees to offer up prayers. It was signed by Clyde, but probably penned by John Mohr. In Miami, Agent in Charge Whittaker said Edgar's passing was ‘like losing a father.' From retirement, Cartha DeLoach told the press Edgar had been ‘a great American, a compassionate man with unswerving loyalty and dedication.'

In private, DeLoach had reservations. ‘I respected him,' he recalled, ‘but I never loved him as a true friend.' ‘For me,' said Mark Felt, ‘it was no personal loss. I never did feel emotional about it. My main thought that day was about the problems created by his death.'

There was little solemnity at FBI field offices around the country. In California, Agent Cril Payne arrived at a colleague's retirement party expecting gloom. ‘I couldn't believe my eyes,' he recalled. ‘The place was packed! The older agents had showed up in record number. Had a stranger wandered into the room he might have thought it was the office Christmas party! Instead of the somber gathering I had envisioned, the luncheon became a time for
joyous celebration. If the truth were known, I think the great majority of agents felt an overwhelming sense of relief …'

‘It was fitting,' quipped another agent, ‘that the Director passed away in his sleep. That's the way the Bureau was run lately.'

For years now a joke had been going the rounds in the Bureau – about the day Clyde told Edgar how much burial lots for the two of them would cost. ‘I'm not going to pay that for a burial lot,' cried Edgar. ‘I'll tell you what you do. Go ahead and buy your own lot and rent a vault for me for three days. I'll only be there three days.'