G-Man, page 101
Kennedy mounted a comeback in California the next week. On the night of his June 4 primary victory, he was celebrating with supporters at the Ambassador Hotel when a gunman walked right up, in full view of dozens of witnesses, and shot him in the head. Kennedy died at the hospital in the early morning hours of June 6, the latest of Hoover’s enemies to be brought down by an act of violence that seemed to symbolize everything wrong with America.
* * *
—
This time, there were no riots, just a deepening sense of despair. There was also little mystery about who had committed the murder. After the shots rang out, bystanders tackled Sirhan Sirhan, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian who was just standing there, gun in hand. At four a.m., Johnson called Hoover to confirm that the White House would be kept abreast of all developments. Hoover instructed DeLoach “to help in any way we could” but insisted that “the King matter” remain top priority.[27]
Kennedy’s funeral took place on June 8 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, his adopted home state as senator. Hoover happened to be in the city, staying at the nearby Waldorf-Astoria, but he made no attempt to attend the funeral. The day turned out to be momentous anyway. That morning, British authorities arrested a man named Ramon George Sneyd as he attempted to depart London for Brussels. Sneyd was actually James Earl Ray. The Canadian authorities had matched the name with Ray’s photo during a painstaking review of more than a hundred thousand passport applications. It was just the extraordinary breakthrough Hoover had been waiting for.[28]
Given Kennedy’s funeral, Hoover could have waited to announce Ray’s arrest, allowing the British to hold their prisoner in secret, at least for a few hours, just as they had once held Klaus Fuchs. He does not appear to have entertained the idea. Because it was a Saturday, DeLoach received the news first. After confirming Ray’s identification, he called Hoover in New York. “Fine, have the usual press release prepared,” Hoover instructed by phone. In Washington, DeLoach called in his favorite Star reporter, Jerry O’Leary, for a “lead start.” Then, with Kennedy’s funeral still underway, he announced the big news and “the heavens came down” around them.[29]
In his story the next day, O’Leary marveled at the sheer scale of the effort that had been required to pull off Ray’s arrest: three thousand full-time agents, $1.4 million, more than half a million miles logged on the Bureau’s fleet of cars. He attributed the FBI’s success not only to Hoover’s emphasis on technical expertise and effective coordination, but to the extra pressure and worry brought on by his fractious history with King. “Hoover and every one of his 6,700 agents was aware that failure to find King’s slayer would be attributed by some to Hoover’s public dispute with King a few years ago,” O’Leary wrote. That assessment barely started to capture the vast scope of Hoover’s campaign against King, most of which would not be publicly known for several more years. But even O’Leary could not help but hint at the cruelty inherent in Hoover’s timing of the announcement. That morning, Coretta King had been attending Kennedy’s funeral in New York. She learned of Ray’s arrest only once she walked out of the church and heard that Hoover had made a public announcement.[30]
Later that day, a funeral train transported Kennedy’s body to Washington, where he was due to be buried in Arlington Cemetery. More than two million people lined the tracks along the way, mourning not only Kennedy, but the promise—of youth, of peace, of racial reconciliation—that so many Americans had seen in his candidacy. At the same time, another set of tributes was getting underway in Congress: statements celebrating the genius of J. Edgar Hoover and all he stood for. Some congressmen simply praised the FBI for “one of its most outstanding jobs” in effecting Ray’s arrest. Others used the occasion to make a political point. “I hope these selfish critics who have accused Mr. Hoover and the FBI of giving less than their best where crimes against civil rights activities are concerned will once and for all realize that their unfounded charges, are preposterous and entirely out of order,” said Senator Roman Hruska. Senator Robert Byrd, who had scorned King as a false messiah just days before the assassination, railed against the legions of naysayers who “do not know the true character of Mr. Hoover and his associates.” Hoover had found his needle in a haystack, and its point was sharp and unyielding.[31]
Attorney Melvin Belli suggested that Hoover take advantage of whatever goodwill the Ray arrest had produced to hang up his hat once and for all. “He should resign on this note of high triumph and depart,” Belli wrote. “Such a chance may not come his way again.” Hoover chose not to listen. Instead, he turned to the last remaining task of the King assassination case: getting Ray out of London and safely into an American prison.[32]
* * *
—
Oswald’s shooting had shown the world what could happen when police mismanaged a high-profile prisoner. Both then and since, Hoover had criticized the Dallas police for negligence. Now his top priority was to make good on those claims by ensuring that Ray survived the journey from London to Memphis and from federal to local custody. Within hours of announcing Ray’s arrest, Hoover ordered two FBI agents overseas to begin the extradition process. They flew the first leg of their trip in Lyndon Johnson’s private plane, a favor from a grateful president.
Hoover hoped that the whole thing could be wrapped up swiftly, that the FBI would soon be done with the assassination investigation and on to other business. Instead, he found himself “more or less stymied in legal technicalities in Great Britain,” as he complained to Ramsey Clark on June 20. Among those creating the obstacles was Arthur Hanes, the former FBI agent who had served as mayor of Birmingham during King’s demonstrations, then went on to defend the Klansmen who had killed Viola Liuzzo in Selma. To Hoover’s disgust, Hanes showed up in the assassination case as Ray’s lawyer, still with “a strong smell of the Klan about him.” Hanes tried to prevent the FBI from interviewing Ray while in transit and requested to fly back across the Atlantic with his client. Hoover “was absolutely opposed to that,” as he informed the attorney general. He was also opposed to meeting with Hanes or acknowledging any connection between the lawyer’s current activities and his time as an FBI agent.[33]
It was not until mid-July that all the “technicalities” were worked out. On July 16, FBI officials met with the agents selected for the trip and reviewed “how to handle themselves upon delivery of the prisoner, during flight, and at touchdown in Memphis.” Two days later, the agents left for London. By seven p.m. East Coast time on July 18, they were heading back across the Atlantic with Ray, accompanied by a doctor who could testify that they had not abused their prisoner while in flight.[34]
DeLoach recalled the hours that the flight was in the air as among the longest of his life. Hoover and Tolson had left for California midday, landing in Los Angeles just before Ray took off from London. DeLoach stayed behind at headquarters, awaiting news of the touchdown. As the hours ticked by, he replayed the Oswald shooting in his mind: Jack Ruby stepping forward, the gun in Oswald’s belly, the “muffled explosion” followed by Oswald’s “anguished look” as he slumped forward and collapsed. “This could not, would not happen to James Earl Ray,” he repeated—until he learned that, in fact, it hadn’t. Just before five a.m., he received word that the plane had touched down at a naval air base near Memphis, where an armored personnel carrier was waiting to whisk Ray off into the early morning.
Once the convoy departed for jail, DeLoach “breathed a sigh of relief,” called Hoover, and began to orchestrate the FBI’s retreat from the assassination inquiry, now in the hands of local law enforcement. But Hoover soon discovered that it was not quite so easy to put the case to rest. In March, Ray pleaded guilty to King’s murder, accepting a ninety-nine-year sentence and thus seeming to close the case. As he registered his plea in court, though, he insisted to the judge that there was more for the FBI to learn. “I don’t exactly accept the theories” put forth by the attorney general and “Mr. J. Edgar Hoover,” he explained. When asked which “theories” he meant, he specified “the conspiracy thing” and hinted that he had not, in fact, acted alone.[35]
That “conspiracy thing” has since come to taint what once appeared to be an unblemished—indeed, unassailable—FBI triumph. Inspired by Ray’s claims, generations of lawyers, investigators, and writers have floated a variety of alternative theories, including the suggestion that Hoover himself, enraged at King, frustrated by the FBI’s counterintelligence failures, helped to orchestrate the assassination. In the 1970s, after Hoover’s death, a House committee concluded that the FBI did, indeed, fail to adequately explore clues suggesting a possible conspiracy. But they found no credible evidence that Hoover or the FBI played any role in the assassination itself—because, indeed, no credible evidence exists.[36]
If anything, they argued that Hoover’s history of animosity toward King “had the effect of inspiring an intensified investigation,” lest the FBI be accused of slacking on the job. While Hoover may have pushed his agents to deliver on a culprit, though, he bears responsibility for the assassination itself in at least one important sense. At the committee hearings, one member asked “whether the FBI created a moral climate” that encouraged white Americans to view King as an urgent and existential threat. On that question, at least, the record is clear. The answer is yes.[37]
Chapter 55
Nixon’s the One
(1968–1969)
By the time Richard Nixon became president, he and Hoover had been friends for twenty years. Pictured in 1971 at the FBI National Academy graduation.
United Press International/National Archives and Records Administration
Since his 1960 loss to Kennedy, many former allies had written off Nixon as a political has-been, a man whose chance to seize the presidency had been stymied by a few thousand votes, then demolished by the charm of Camelot. Nixon wrote himself off in 1962, when he lost the California governor’s race and assembled a “last press conference” to inform his adversaries that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Hoover had encouraged his friend to enter the governor’s race as a strong anticommunist candidate. After the loss, he ignored all professions of retirement, assuring Nixon that “many chapters are yet to be written about your past and future service” to the nation. “The greatest fighters in the history of our country have, without exception, suffered numerous reverses,” he wrote to Nixon on the day after the election. Even in defeat, Hoover thought of himself as someone who shared most of Nixon’s goals and almost all of his enemies.
Out of this sense of common mission—and common grievance—their friendship had continued not just unscathed but strengthened by the trials of the Kennedy and Johnson years. Their correspondence throughout the 1960s displayed affection and openness, qualities rare for either man. “It is such a real pleasure to be able to relax and not have to guard every word and to know that one is with real, understanding friends,” Hoover wrote to Nixon’s wife, Pat, after an especially meaningful gathering. During the darkest days of the Kennedy administration, Hoover had spent hours complaining of his predicament. “I remember sitting with Hoover in his house during a visit to Washington in 1961,” Nixon recalled, “listening to him go on about ‘that sneaky little son of a bitch,’ who happened to be the President’s brother and Hoover’s boss.” Nixon provided what Hoover needed most during those years. He was knowledgeable and discreet, happy to strategize, and eager to listen.[1]
Hoover did the same for Nixon. Though they no longer lived in the same city or shared the same church, Nixon continued to consult Hoover about major life decisions. After the loss in California, he asked Hoover whether he should stay out west or venture east and start a new life. “It was just like old times to enjoy superb food, good hospitality and stimulating conversation with friends with whom you feel you can safely let down your hair,” he wrote after a dinner at Hoover’s house, as he wrestled with the choice. Once he decided to settle in New York, joining a well-connected corporate law firm, they visited regularly, keeping up with holiday greetings and gift exchanges and treating each other more or less as family. When Nixon’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Julie, performed a water ballet for Hoover and Tolson during one of their California vacations, Hoover took the time to write a note of thanks. “It was a most beautiful exhibition and I could understand that you girls had worked hard on both the decorations and the ballet in order to make it so perfect.”[2]
When crisis struck during those years, Hoover and Nixon came back together almost instinctively, rushing to provide the same mutual support that had gotten them through earlier times of trial. In November 1963, it was Hoover who provided Nixon with the first solid details about Kennedy’s death, taking the time to brief Nixon by phone even in the midst of the post-assassination chaos. During the King controversy of late 1964, Nixon expressed his private outrage at the news coverage, identifying with Hoover as a victim of the pseudo-liberal press. “As I look at the cartoons and read of the vitriolic comments in the columns and editorials,” he wrote in a personal letter, “I am reminded of some of the things I went through during the years I was in Washington. I just wanted you to know that you can number me among the legion of friends who are standing with you during these attacks.” Now that shared sense of embattlement was bringing them together once again.[3]
* * *
—
The truth was that Nixon and Hoover didn’t just like each other. In 1968, they needed each other more than ever. At the age of seventy-three, Hoover could no longer survive in office without a sympathetic man in the White House. For Nixon, matters were more complicated but no less urgent. Everyone agreed that his greatest challenge for the Republican nomination would come from the party’s conservative wing, where true believers and inside operatives had nominated Goldwater in 1964. Despite the landslide loss to Johnson, most of them still felt it was the best thing they had ever done. While liberals painted Nixon as a far-right reactionary, conservatives viewed him as an Eisenhower moderate, all too ready to compromise. Nixon needed to convince conservatives that he was on their side. So Hoover’s status as a “patron saint” of the far right was valuable.[4]
Despite his collaborations with Johnson, most conservatives still expressed admiration for Hoover, viewing him as one of the last holdouts in a federal government lurching toward the left. Almost alone among members of the Johnson administration, he seemed to be willing to speak out in favor of conservative verities on crime, religious faith, anticommunism, and, in more coded terms, race and segregation. His open hostility toward King, the New Left, civil disobedience, Stokely Carmichael, anti-war protesters, and the muddle-headed liberals who supported them only added to his luster. After all, Hoover controlled an institution that could inflict real damage on those groups. For any conservative seeking a role model within the Johnson administration, Hoover was as good as it got. “I’d a lot rather have my own kids grow up hero-worshipping J. Edgar Hoover than Mario Savio or Stokeley [sic] Carmichael,” explained California superintendent of public instruction Max Rafferty, famous for his own diatribes against out-of-control teens and the national turn toward lawlessness.[5]
Conservatives throughout the country agreed. Between 1964 and 1968, Hoover received national awards from right-wing groups including the American Educational League, a self-proclaimed promoter of “Southland” values; the American Security Council, an anticommunist research agency staffed by former FBI employees; Young Life, an umbrella organization for teenage evangelicals; and We the People!, a political group affiliated with the far-right Christian Crusade. At the same time, he retained overwhelming popularity among mainstream Republicans. In a 1965 Gallup poll, 84 percent of Republicans gave the FBI a “highly favorable” rating, making Hoover’s Bureau by far the most popular institution in the survey. By comparison, 50 percent of Republicans expressed “highly favorable” views of the American Medical Association, making it a distant second. Just 3 percent admired the John Birch Society and 1 percent supported the Ku Klux Klan.[6]
Nixon’s popularity—among Republicans but especially among conservatives—was not nearly as secure as Hoover’s. “I know my positions on civil rights and foreign aid and reciprocal trade haven’t changed,” he told a New York Times reporter during an exploratory interview in 1966, “and the conservatives—the real conservatives—don’t like that.” To drive the problem home, he rummaged around his desk and produced a recent poll of subscribers to right-leaning magazines. Asked to name the nation’s “most trusted” conservatives, readers came up with a list that included Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and J. Edgar Hoover—but excluded Nixon. Upon declaring his candidacy, Nixon had set out to woo these other men, meeting with Goldwater and his fellow conservative Republicans, hosting elaborate gatherings for the National Review crowd and their acolytes at Young Americans for Freedom. Their support turned out to be grudging and uneven, though, especially once Reagan declared his own primary campaign. Only Hoover was an unequivocal Nixon man.[7]
And of them all, Hoover was arguably the most valuable. Despite his growing disconnect with the younger generation, many of his views—especially on crime and policing—seemed ready-made for the 1968 campaign. According to a Gallup poll released in February, crime now ranked as the number one domestic concern for most Americans. Hoover remained the nation’s most prominent exponent of the “law-and-order” approach. Under the pressures of the campaign, Nixon now chose to adopt it as his own signature issue.[8]
