Official and Confidential (69 page)

When Edgar died, FBI Mafia specialist Neil Welch remembered that story. ‘The last resurrection had been sometime previously,' he said dryly. ‘I wanted to see if history repeated itself. So a group of us in Detroit got together and flew to Washington, not out of a sense of great grief or anything, just out of curiosity to see the changeover. I wanted to see what machinations were going on in that temple of his over there …'

In New York, at the Aqueduct Racetrack, three mobsters in the Gambino family spotted the news in the paper. ‘You know what I feel about this,' shrugged the senior man in the group. ‘Absolutely nothing. This guy meant nothing to us, one way or the other.'

At the tracks Edgar had frequented, people felt differently. His regular table at Pimlico was dressed out in black cloth. At Bowie, his table was adorned with his name card. Edgar's lunch table at the Mayflower, where he had eaten the previous day, was draped with red, white and blue sashes.

‘The shock of Brother Hoover's loss,' a speaker told fellow Masons in Washington, ‘was felt far beyond the boundaries of our great nation … When Brother Hoover died, a giant fell and the gods wept.'

The undertakers who handled Edgar's body, from Gawler's on Wisconsin Avenue, were used to the deaths of the famous.
The company had looked after the remains of many of Edgar's friends and enemies: Joseph McCarthy and Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Estes Kefauver – a long list of prominent Americans. Even so, the half hour spent at Edgar's house left them shaken.

‘The place was like a museum,' recalled undertaker William Reburn, ‘like a shrine the man had made to himself. He must've had some ego. The picture of him at the top of the stairs was almost like the one of Napoleon with the hand inside the jacket.' A colleague, John van Hoesen, remembered the statuary: ‘Busts, like Roman busts of Caesar, but of J. Edgar Hoover.'

Edgar's corpse was obese, a heavy burden to maneuver downstairs, onto a mortuary cot and out a side entrance into an old sedan – a subterfuge designed to conceal the operation from the press. At Gawler's the body was embalmed, dressed in a suit and tie chosen by Clyde and laid out in a $3,000 casket.

‘He looked very good,' said Edgar's niece Margaret Fennell, ‘but smaller than I remembered. I guess death does that to you.' For the first time in years Edgar was without the various devices – the built-up shoes, the raised desk – that he had used to make himself appear taller than he really was. ‘My former colleagues,' said DeLoach, ‘couldn't stand to see that great dissipation of power in a man that should be revered. Miss Gandy talked to Mr Tolson and John Mohr, and they decided to have the casket closed.'

Mohr and Gandy gave up plans for a quiet Masonic ceremony, which Edgar had said he wanted, when President Nixon decided to treat him like a national hero. The next morning, in heavy rain, a hearse brought the remains to lie in the Rotunda of the Capitol. The entire Supreme Court, the Cabinet and members of the Congress were on hand to receive the casket. It was laid, wrapped in the flag, on Lincoln's catafalque – an honor that had previously been extended to only twenty-one people. Edgar was the first civil
servant to be so honored, and 25,000 people flocked to the Capitol to pay homage.'

It was Nixon, the following day, who delivered the eulogy at the funeral service in the National Presbyterian Church. ‘America,' he intoned, ‘has revered this man, not only as the Director of an institution, but as an institution in his own right. For nearly half a century, nearly one fourth of the whole history of this Republic, J. Edgar Hoover has exerted a great influence for good in our national life. While eight Presidents came and went, while other leaders of morals and manners and opinion rose and fell, the Director stayed at his post … Each of us stand forever in his debt … His death only heightens the respect and admiration felt for him across this land and in every land where men cherish freedom.'

The Watergate tapes show that ten months later, at the height of the crisis that was to bring him down, Nixon discussed Edgar with John Dean. The transcript runs as follows:

DEAN: Now, the other thing is … everything is cast that we're the political people and they're not – that Hoover was above reproach …

NIXON: Bullshit! Bullshit!

DEAN: Total bullshit. The, uh, person who could, would destroy Hoover's image is going to be this man Bill Sullivan … Also, it's going to tarnish quite severely some of the FBI and a former president.

NIXON: Fine …

Policemen from across the country lined the route to Congressional Cemetery, where Edgar's parents lay buried. Clyde had insisted that his friend's wish was to be buried there rather than at Arlington, as Nixon suggested. The cortege was now reduced to ten limousines, carrying Clyde, Congressman John Rooney, a few colleagues and the handful of relatives, nephews and nieces and their children.

The cemetery, one of Washington's oldest, was somewhat neglected in those days – an unlikely final destination for a man of Edgar's stature. The limousines inched their way between the narrow gateposts, and the mourners gathered for the final ceremony. Clyde was pushed to the site in a wheelchair. ‘I was shocked,' said Edgar's nephew Fred Robinette. ‘It looked like he didn't know where he was. He had this vacant stare.'

In the absence of a widow, it was Clyde who received the flag from the coffin. Then it was over. Minutes after the mourners had left, neighborhood children ran to pilfer the flowers from the grave.

Clyde now became a virtual recluse. He refused to accept a condolence call from Acting FBI Director Gray, and he never set foot in the office again. His resignation letter, pleading ill health, was composed by another Bureau official, its signature forged by a secretary. Clyde moved into Edgar's house and remained there for the rest of his life.

He received the bulk of Edgar's fortune, officially valued at half a million dollars – $2.3 million at today's rates – although Justice Department investigators would later suspect that his true wealth was hidden by secret investment accounts. Clyde soon began selling off the myriad collectibles his friend had gathered over the years. They went under the hammer at Sloan's Auction Gallery, with the vendor's name concealed by the code name ‘JET' – for ‘J. Edgar' and ‘Tolson.'

In his will, Edgar had entrusted the welfare of his two cairn terriers to Clyde. Clyde, however, soon had the dogs put down. He sank into a listless existence, whiling away his days munching candy – a longtime addiction – and watching television.

In the time that remained to him, Clyde would be stirred to action only once, in 1973, when William Sullivan spoke out about the transfer of wiretap records to the Nixon White House. The administration, Sullivan said, had feared Edgar
would resort to blackmail to hold on to his job – not least because he ‘had been of unsound mind for the past few years.'

This moved Clyde to write a letter of protest to
The Washington Post
, dismissing Sullivan as ‘a disgruntled former employee.' A month or so later, however, when Watergate investigators interviewed Clyde, they doubted his own ‘mental competency.'

Clyde had become a pathetically lonely figure, visited mainly by thoughtful neighbors. One, Betty Nelson, came in to give him chocolate bars and a kiss on Valentine's Day 1975. He was taken to the hospital in early April and died there of heart failure a few days later.

A new FBI Director, Clarence Kelley, would say Clyde's death left ‘a great void in the law enforcement field.' The truth was that he was virtually forgotten. In his final three years, reportedly, his only excursions had been to visit Edgar's grave at Congressional Cemetery. Now Clyde lay buried there, too, about ten yards from the man he loved. According to cemetery officials, each man had asked to be buried near the other.

President Nixon had responded cynically on the morning of Edgar's death as he wondered how to replace him. His first choice had been Clyde, not in spite of but because of the fact that he was a virtual invalid. ‘Tolson's incapacity,' the President told H. R. Haldeman – a thought duly minuted for the record – ‘may be an advantage.' Nixon wanted the control of the FBI Edgar had denied him, and a sick man seemed just the candidate.

‘We have not used the power in the first four years,' the President would remark to his aide John Dean. ‘We have never used it. We haven't used the Bureau, and we haven't used the Justice Department, but things are going to change …'

It was when Clyde declined the Director's job that Nixon decided on L. Patrick Gray as a stopgap, an uncontroversial Acting Director for election year. Gray was a former Navy
man whose career watchword, unkind critics say, had been ‘Aye, aye, sir.' For a long time now, the ‘sir' in question had been Nixon himself – and the President liked that.

Edgar had run his fiefdom as though he would live forever, and it remained in disarray for years, not least because of the chaos that followed Watergate. Gradually, however, first under Gray, then under FBI veteran and former police chief Clarence Kelley and – above all – during the nine-year directorship of William Webster, the Bureau entered the modern world. Women were admitted as agents, and staff across the country were released from the sillier of Edgar's rules and regulations. Men no longer lived in constant fear of irrational punishment. The aging leaders Edgar had gathered around him were gradually forced out or left of their own accord. And, it is believed, the worst abuses of FBI power – against the Congress and ordinary citizens – have since been exposed and eradicated.

‘J. Edgar Hoover's greatness,' his old adjutant Louis Nichols wrote confidently in late 1972, ‘will grow with the passage of time.' To fulfill that hope, loyalists busied themselves trying to perpetuate Edgar's memory. They pressed Congress for a bill to create commemorative medals, commissioned portraits and sculptures. Edgar's FBI badge – No. 1 – was presented to the Smithsonian Institution. His gun, a .32 Colt Pocket Positive, was solemnly preserved. FBI stalwarts, members of the old guard, made an annual pilgrimage to the cemetery. Their numbers soon dwindled, however, and Edgar's grave was often seen to be untended, overrun by vines and weeds.
²

Even four decades after his death, however, the name J. Edgar Hoover can still stir controversy. There are Americans who either yearn for the certainties he seemed to embody, or wonder how it was that his abuses were tolerated for so long. To understand the phenomenon better, we may ask what drove Edgar, what led him to the narrow world of the mind
he came to inhabit – the world in which, with some success, he sought to confine his countrymen as well.

The vast library Edgar left behind, which was transferred to the FBI National Academy, offers few answers – just the predictable mountain of books on Communism, a stack of books on religion and health and some whodunits. There is no evidence that Edgar was steeped in any particular philosophy, nor that his life was the execution of any conscious plan.

Leading psychologists and psychiatrists, however, asked to study the information gathered for this book, all recognize a distinct pattern in Edgar's makeup, one that began forming in childhood and led to serious mental disorder in the grown man.
³
Separated by twelve years from his youngest sibling, conceived when his parents were mourning the death of his infant sister Sadie, Edgar had been rather more than the apple of his mother's eye.

Annie Hoover saw herself as ‘a lady,' with pretensions to a certain social status. If she ever nursed hopes that her husband would improve himself, rise above his origins, they were gone by the time Edgar was born. They vanished altogether when Dickerson was overwhelmed by serious mental illness. Instead, Annie had great expectations of Edgar, too great perhaps for his emotional well-being.

Edgar missed a vital stage of normal childhood development: the end of total dependence on the mother, a growing bond to a supportive father and the discovery of himself as an independent personality. Rather than working out a set of moral values for himself, he had little more to work with than the unreasoned rules of behavior imposed in childhood. Pushed by his forceful mother, he came to believe that only greater achieving could make him ‘good.' His was a childhood that left him prone to lifelong insecurity and lack of self-esteem.

Studies now suggest that, being especially vulnerable, people with such a background tend to block their feelings
and cut themselves off from meaningful relationships. They come to think of life in terms of the Good, represented by themselves, and the Bad, represented by everyone and everything that seems to run counter to their way of thinking. Such people often gravitate to groups or organizations, groups that reflect their own limited view of the world. They surround themselves with acolytes who reinforce the notion that they are always right about everything. Such factors are typical of the state psychologists call
paranoia
.

Edgar fit the profile. Annie's expectations account for his compulsion to perform not just well but perfectly. Edgar's early obsession with record-keeping, his excessive misery when the school Cadet Corps troop failed to carry off a prize, his insistence on tidiness and his neurotic concern about germs are characteristic of his personality type.

Early on, at an age when a healthy youngster will have an open, inquiring mind, Edgar had rigid, backward-looking attitudes. Even then there was the rapid-fire speech for which the grown man would become famous, talking rather than listening, defense by way of constant attack, the snuffing out of potential argument by never letting the other side have its say. At the FBI, Edgar achieved the paranoid's ideal. He not only joined a highly disciplined group, he joined one he could mold and totally control for the rest of his life.

‘There is no doubt,' concluded psychiatrist Dr Harold Lief, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, ‘that Hoover had a personality disorder, a narcissistic disorder with mixed obsessive features. I picked up some paranoid elements, undue suspiciousness and some sadism. A combination of narcissism and paranoia produces what is known as an Authoritarian Personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi.'