G-Man, page 106
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Had the politics aligned differently, Hoover’s bureaucratic virtuosity might have earned him a certain amount of respect within the White House—proof that even at the age of seventy-five, he still knew how to do political battle and win. Instead, the meltdown of the Huston Plan confirmed for many Nixon staffers what they had only begun to whisper about during the campaign: that Hoover was growing too old and obstreperous, and that perhaps it was time for him to go.
The FBI itself was growing rapidly. During Nixon’s first few years in office, Hoover’s budget nearly doubled, to $334 million (about the same as the State Department’s), while the number of agents grew by about 30 percent, up to 8,900 by the end of Nixon’s first term. At the same time, Hoover seemed less and less in control. While agents still feared and respected his power, they also spent a good deal of time strategizing about how to avoid his rules and get around his personal authority. Hoover’s mercurial disciplinary system, once a fearsome pillar of Bureau culture, now looked to many of them like random and unnecessary punishment. In response, they adopted a “tell the man nothing” policy as a means of collective protection. Hoover knew it was happening. “I am noting more and more that officials of the Bureau are making decisions and committing the Bureau to certain action in substantive matters without first consulting me about them,” he complained to Tolson. He did little to change his methods, though. One agent later described the situation as a “degenerate dictatorship”: Hoover was still at the top, with his long-standing policy of “blind loyalty” in place. But fewer and fewer agents were buying into his system.[10]
Congress had tacitly recognized this problem in its 1968 crime bill, which sought to intervene in the structure of the FBI director’s position. Under the new law, the president, not the attorney general, would nominate Hoover’s successor to be approved by the Senate, the routine process for cabinet-level appointments. The next FBI director would be appointed for just ten years, longer than two presidential terms but far shorter than Hoover’s tenure. The changes recognized how much Hoover had done to enhance the status of the FBI director’s position over the past four and a half decades but also sought to take back some of that power. The idea was to preserve the position’s apolitical character while ensuring that nobody else would stay in office for quite so long.[11]
The law had nothing to say on the next obvious question: Who could possibly replace Hoover? For years the easy answer had been DeLoach, the FBI’s point man on all things public and political during the Johnson years. By 1969, though, DeLoach had lost his patron in the White House and his seamless relationship with Hoover was starting to fray. Despite his frequent protestations of loyalty, DeLoach had grown frustrated by many of the same things that baffled ordinary agents: Hoover’s obstinance, his resistance to criticism, his blithe disregard for others’ advice. In late April 1970, Hoover reprimanded DeLoach for planning a trip to American Legion headquarters in Indianapolis at the very moment when protesters were preparing to descend upon New Haven, Connecticut, where Bobby Seale and other Panthers were heading to trial. After years of swallowing his pride in such situations, DeLoach finally cracked, firing off a testy memo insisting upon his right to be treated as more than a mere underling. “I have never deserted my post at any time when needed,” he wrote to Hoover. “To the contrary, I give up ample leave each year simply because I feel that my responsibilities demand my presence in the office. I work every Saturday and many Sundays. It is most unusual for me to get a good night’s sleep because of telephone calls from the office.” A month later, following several rounds of “agonizing deliberation,” DeLoach decided to submit his resignation. After more than a quarter century of working together, Hoover sent DeLoach on his way with a set of gold cufflinks, a few gold buttons, a mounted gold badge, and good wishes for a new life as a Pepsi executive.[12]
DeLoach’s departure left William Sullivan, architect of Hoover’s campaigns against Martin Luther King, the Klan, and the New Left, as the next most obvious candidate. Hoover liked Sullivan and even called him by his first name, a rare honor within the formal Bureau. But Sullivan, too, sometimes ran afoul of Hoover’s temper. After receiving his own reprimand before the New Haven trial, he apologized in a self-critical memo. “Because of the nature of our work in the Bureau, necessarily we have to be pragmatists in the main,” he wrote. “When something works out well, we have done the right thing, and when it does not, obviously we have done the wrong thing which happened in my case.” Hoover rewarded his diffidence with a promotion into DeLoach’s job, placing Sullivan in charge of all investigative, intelligence, and public relations operations. No sooner did Sullivan take up the post than he, too, began to lose patience with Hoover. In October 1970, just three months into his new job, he made the mistake of admitting publicly that the Communist Party is “not nearly as extensive or effective as it was a number of years ago.” Hoover chastised him for minimizing the situation, predicting that Sullivan’s words “will no doubt result in difficulty” convincing Congress and the public to fund ongoing anticommunist work. Rather than fight Hoover, Sullivan gave in. “I would prefer not to give any more speeches as long as I remain in the Bureau,” he wrote in a memo to Tolson—an early hint that he, too, might not be around to succeed Hoover as director.[13]
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The infighting took its toll on Hoover, not least because Tolson, his one true intimate and ally, could no longer provide the accustomed support. By 1970 Tolson was blind in one eye, tended to drag one of his legs, and could no longer use his hands with any dexterity. Hoover insisted that Tolson come into the office anyway, a daily spectacle of agony that put many younger officials on edge. Even as Hoover bid farewell to DeLoach, he refused to let Tolson retire, finagling another special deal to avoid the mandatory retirement age of seventy. “My alter ego is Clyde Tolson,” he explained to a reporter. “He can read my mind. It doubles my work when he is not here.” In truth, Tolson could barely keep up with his Bureau duties. Hoover tried to encourage him with tough love, walking several steps ahead rather than falling back to Tolson’s pace. He also considered setting up a punching bag for Tolson to hit when it all became too much. “I can leave my problems behind when I leave the office at night,” Hoover said. “Tolson can’t and he needs to get rid of his tensions.” In Hoover’s narrative, it was Tolson who was sick, Tolson who was growing old, Tolson who was finding it difficult to cope. But Hoover’s volatile treatment of his subordinates suggests that he, too, needed an outlet for his frustrations.[14]
He directed at least some of his anger toward the press, where speculation about his retirement and declining competence had started to chip away at his once-invincible image. According to Gallup, the FBI still boasted an impressive approval rating in the summer of 1970, with 71 percent of the public reporting a “highly favorable” view. All the same, approximately half of Americans felt that Hoover needed to retire. The polls reflected an important shift in Hoover’s public identity. For much of his career, he had succeeded in promoting himself as a bipartisan figure, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. By 1970, he could no longer pull it off. “Now the case of J. Edgar Hoover has been added to the list of issues—ranging from the war in Viet Nam, to race relations, welfare and the plight of the cities—which are the source of deep division across America today,” wrote pollster Louis Harris. Hoover’s strongest support came from Nixon’s so-called Silent Majority: working- and middle-class whites, residents of the South and Midwest, with incomes under fifteen thousand dollars and a high school education or less. His favorable ratings were falling precipitously among “younger adults, Easterners and persons with a college background,” according to Gallup—in other words, among college-educated liberals. The surveys did not separate out Black opinion, but there Hoover’s reputation was no doubt declining even faster, as his tirades against King and the Panthers did their work. According to Harris, the chief complaint among those surveyed was “that the FBI head is beyond his prime and is no longer doing as effective a job as could be done.” But that sentiment only captured part of what was taking place. After a lifetime of straddling the liberal-conservative divide, Hoover was now despised by one side and beloved by the other.[15]
One sign of his declining support among liberals came from former attorney general Ramsey Clark, who wrote of Hoover’s “petty and costly” style of leadership and “self-centered concern for his reputation” in his new book, Crime in America, published in the fall of 1970. A similar critique was proffered by William Turner, a former agent whose writing in Ramparts magazine had made him the New Left’s go-to authority on the FBI. The Washington press corps began to gang up as well, promising to reveal Hoover’s juiciest secrets after years of adulation. The most influential attack came from Washington Merry-Go-Round columnist Jack Anderson, heir to his former boss Drew Pearson’s position as king of the political muckrakers. Day after day Anderson took it upon himself to expose the seamier side of Hoover’s reign: how Hoover had allegedly seen a psychiatrist; how he siphoned off money from Bureau book deals into his personal accounts; how Clint Murchison had repeatedly allowed “the durable old G-man and his faithful companion Clyde Tolson, both bachelors” to stay at the Del Charro for free. Anderson went so far as to collect and analyze the trash Hoover left behind his house, a deliberate invasion of privacy in revenge for the FBI’s “peephole practices.” (He found that Hoover liked spaghetti and meatballs, crab bisque soup, and peppermint ice cream but needed heartburn medicine to help with digestion.)[16]
At the Los Angeles Times, reporter Jack Nelson took things still further. In his own series of articles, he attacked Hoover for matters ranging from the personal gifts he demanded from his agents to the FBI’s lack of accountability on racial violence. There was even talk of pushing toward the third rail of FBI coverage: the rumors of Hoover’s homosexuality. When Hoover caught wind of that possibility, he called Nelson’s editor in for a vicious dressing down. “He was intense,” the editor recalled in a panicked memo. “It was quite evident that he was upset, particularly on the question of the homosexual charge.” Hoover threatened to sue for criminal slander and succeeded in getting that particular article shut down.[17]
He fumed over the press coverage as “hokum,” “an absolute lie,” and “just a lot of hog-wash,” while individual reporters and critics earned even more unsparing labels: “sick columnist,” “skunk,” “whore-monger,” “bleeding-heart,” “jerk” with “mental halitosis.” Like Nixon, he reserved much of his bitterness for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Eastern liberal papers supposedly conspiring to destroy his reputation. Under duress, he often extended that view to other publications. “I put the Sun in the same category as the Washington Post and the New York Times,” he informed the Baltimore SAC in May 1970, responding to the coverage of a local Panthers case. Such papers were “left-wing and trying to downgrade law enforcement and not support it.”[18]
DeLoach had once made it his job to prevent Hoover from engaging in direct spats with the press. Sullivan either lacked the independent judgment to save Hoover from himself or cared less about doing so. The results were disastrous. In November 1970, furious about Ramsey Clark’s attacks, Hoover called the former attorney general a spineless “jellyfish” during a newspaper interview. The following month, Time quoted him musing aloud about the violent tendencies of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (“They don’t shoot very straight. But if they come at you with a knife, beware”) and King’s moral vicissitudes (“I held him in complete contempt because of the things he said and because of his conduct”).
Even on occasions when Hoover’s words were carefully scripted, he showed increasing levels of vitriol and instability. In an appearance before the appropriations committee, he outlined a fantastical “conspiracy” by anti-war activists “to kidnap a highly placed government official” (later revealed to be Kissinger) and hold him hostage until Nixon called off the bombing campaign in Southeast Asia. In a hectoring “Open Letter to College Students,” he urged young people to resist the entreaties of campus “extremists” who “ridicule the flag, poke fun at American institutions, seek to destroy our society.” From college administrators, he demanded the “courage and guts” to expel such students and to control their own faculty, who were “worse than the hippies.” When the former governor of Kentucky went so far as to punch a “long-haired student” in the midst of a demonstration, according to the local paper, Hoover sent a note cheering the bold action. He even found it hard to sympathize with the four students shot and killed by National Guardsmen during an anti-war demonstration at Ohio’s Kent State University, informing the White House that “the students invited and got what they deserved.”[19]
To liberals and leftists, Hoover’s diatribes made him seem more out of touch than ever, a relic from the benighted and preachy past. But even Nixon and his aides worried that Hoover’s political value was fast eroding. “Several new controversies have changed the minds of some of Hoover’s most ardent defenders in the White House,” former Nixon counsel Clark Mollenhoff noted in early March 1971. “Some moderates and conservatives are now expressing the view that the 76-year-old Hoover must be replaced before the 1972 campaign gets under way.” In a letter to the president around the same time, speechwriter Pat Buchanan took note of Hoover’s declining approval ratings and argued that it was time to cut the FBI director loose. “My strong recommendation would be to retire Hoover now in all the glory and esteem he has merited and deserved,” Buchanan wrote, “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.”[20]
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But the “jackals” were just getting started, and when the next bite came, it did more damage to Hoover’s reputation than any single event in his lifetime. On the night of March 8, 1971, burglars broke into the tiny FBI resident office in Media, Pennsylvania, a drowsy suburban town southwest of Philadelphia. They left behind the office valuables—cameras, radios, typewriters, Dictaphones, guns—but took something immeasurably more precious to Hoover. After picking the locks on the office filing cabinets, they cleared out the documents, making off with stacks of paper showing what the FBI did day-to-day. It was the first time since the Coplon case, twenty-two years earlier, that raw files had slipped out of Hoover’s control. Even worse, these files were floating around in public, and he had no idea who took them, what the burglars planned to do with them, or how to get them back.
Local agents discovered the break-in around seven forty-five a.m. on March 9, realizing within minutes that “all serials and notes in these cabinets are missing,” as they explained in a horrified cable to Washington. When Hoover arrived at the office and heard the news, he “went into a towering rage,” in the words of one witness. Within hours, he opened the MEDBURG (“Media Burglary”) investigation and dispatched almost two hundred agents on “urgent” and “top priority” status to Philadelphia, where it was assumed that the burglars would be found within local anti-war and New Left circles. That assumption was confirmed when a group calling itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI contacted a Reuters reporter to announce that it had “removed files from the Media, PA, office of the FBI” and planned to study the files to determine “the nature and extent of surveillance and intimidation carried on by this office.” Apparently not realizing the significance of the tip, Reuters declined to make much of the story, and the local papers reported only that a burglary had taken place at the Media office without specifying what had been stolen. For almost two weeks, Hoover held out hope that the secret would hold until the FBI could locate the burglars and retrieve the files, thus preventing a “serious” blow to the Bureau’s operations and reputation. “Final damage will hinge primarily on extent of disclosure of various documents and whether they are revealed to unfriendly, subversive or hostile elements,” a Bureau assessment predicted.
Democratic senator George McGovern dashed Hoover’s hopes on March 22, when an aide called the FBI to report the arrival of a mysterious envelope at McGovern’s Senate office. Inside were photocopies of more than a dozen FBI files, plus a note from the Citizens’ Commission urging him to “disseminate it (or not) according to your own judgment.” One of the enclosed FBI documents spoke about interviewing anti-war protesters as a way to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles.” Another revealed Hoover’s orders to investigate every Black student union in the country on grounds that “the violence, destruction, confrontation and disruptions on campuses” made widespread surveillance necessary. Left-wing activists had long speculated about the FBI’s practices, certain they were being watched and manipulated. Now they had the documents to prove it.
In addition to sending the documents to McGovern, the burglars delivered copies to Congressman Parren Mitchell of Maryland and to three newspapers despised by Hoover: the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Though Mitchell, McGovern, and the Los Angeles Times turned the documents over to the FBI, the Post and The New York Times decided to move ahead with publication. The Post justified its decision on the basis that “the records afford a glimpse, not often granted to the general public or even to committees of Congress, of some of the ways in which the FBI works.” Other glimpses emerged periodically over the next several weeks, as the burglars mailed out their haul in strategic increments.
