G-Man, page 107
The worst of the documents exposed previously confidential surveillance programs, including Hoover’s instructions to recruit “ghetto informants” to report on urban conditions and civil rights protests. Others revealed some of the quirks and petty indignities of life under Hoover, including his insistence that the FBI reject all “long hairs, beards, mustaches, pear-shaped heads, [and] truck drivers” seeking Bureau employment. But the most important revelation of all went unnoticed, at least at first. Among the dozens of documents released by the commission was an article from Barron’s magazine recommending that college administrators crack down on student dissenters. Attached was a cover sheet ordering the dissemination of the article under the auspices of New Left “COINTELPRO,” the first time that the word “COINTELPRO” had appeared outside of government circles. Reporters covering the story missed that detail—which did not, in any case, signify much to those not in the know. Hoover took this as a hopeful sign, urging the field offices to “continue aggressive and imaginative participation in the program” even as he instructed them to cut back on what they were committing to paper. By the end of the month, though, his sense of caution took over. On April 28, after fourteen years of “neutralizing” and “disrupting” social movements that ran afoul of FBI priorities, Hoover reluctantly ordered a halt to COINTELPRO.[21]
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Among liberals and leftists, the release of the Media documents marked the end of whatever was still left of Hoover’s reputation as the limited-state, good-government figure that they had once embraced and admired. House Democratic leader Hale Boggs came out swinging with a series of House-floor speeches detailing Hoover’s failures, weaknesses, and abuses of power. Boggs claimed to be a disappointed Hoover admirer. “What I am going to say I say in sorrow, because it is always tragic when a great man who has given his life to his country comes to the twilight of his life and fails to understand it is time to leave the service and enjoy retirement,” he explained. In addition to the subterfuge exposed in the Media documents, Boggs accused Hoover of wiretapping members of Congress, then using what he knew to buy their silence. He called on fellow politicians to stand up to the director for once rather than cowering in fear.[22]
Several members of Congress took him up on the challenge, mustering the courage to deliver their own speeches about Hoover as an example of state-based professionalism fallen into disgrace. Most were liberal Democrats and (not coincidentally) likely candidates for a 1972 run against Nixon. Maine’s Edmund Muskie assailed Hoover for sending agents to observe the first Earth Day, as innocuous and peaceful as protests in 1971 could get. Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, endeavoring to carry on his slain brothers’ legacy, called for Hoover to step down and open the FBI to congressional investigation. McGovern gave an even more frank assessment of Hoover’s reign, delivered at some length to Playboy magazine. “Hoover should have resigned 25 years ago,” McGovern said. “He has become paranoid.” As proof, he cited “the FBI’s own documents, from the files in Media, Pennsylvania,” which showed how little Hoover cared about observing constitutional limits and how willing the FBI director was to lie to the nation.[23]
The press made the most of the drama. During April and May, several major national newsmagazines put Hoover on the cover—and not, this time, to pay homage to his professionalism and integrity. Newsweek purported simply to be raising questions: “Hoover’s FBI: Time for a Change?” Life was more forthright, depicting Hoover as a Roman patriarch, his bust carved in marble as the “Emperor of the FBI.” Time got cute by noting that the current controversies seemed to be “Bugging J. Edgar Hoover,” while The New York Times gave him a new moniker: “The Man Who Stayed Too Long.” Worried that any reaction by Hoover would only make things worse, friends and allies begged him not to respond directly to the press but “to let my friends on the Hill take care of it,” as Hoover grumbled to Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst.[24]
Those friends did at least some of what they promised, though their response arguably exacerbated the partisan divide building around the director and the methods he employed. From April into May, as the left jeered at Hoover’s “paranoid” tendencies and old-man prejudices, a loyal array of congressmen put themselves on record as his staunch supporters. Among them were several former FBI agents now serving in the House. “I am shocked, I am disgusted, and I am upset by the stench of red herring in this Chamber,” one declared. In the Senate, longtime allies such as Barry Goldwater, James Eastland, and Strom Thurmond stepped up to praise Hoover yet again as “one of our greatest living Americans,” in Goldwater’s words, now being subject to “slander unworthy of the halls of Congress.” On May 10, Hoover’s forty-seventh anniversary as Bureau director, more than seventy members of Congress, a large percentage of them Republicans, put themselves on record with statements extolling Hoover’s virtues.[25]
Among conservatives, the Media documents only increased enthusiasm for Hoover’s FBI, with its willingness to tackle “those tough and distasteful things” necessary to keep Americans safe, in the words of columnist James Kilpatrick. “The case against the F.B.I. is very weak,” William F. Buckley agreed in his newspaper column, dismissing the criticism of Hoover as “mostly ideological” carping, designed to allow leftists and criminals to run amok. Few commentators made much distinction between Hoover and the broader institution; after more than four decades, they were one and the same. California governor Ronald Reagan, the rising star of the conservative movement, saluted Hoover in a speech before the California Peace Officers’ Association as “one of America’s greatest law enforcement officials,” now being subjected to an unfair and deeply “bitter verbal assault.” A newsletter affiliated with Phyllis Schlafly raised the possibility of a conspiracy—“Can the ‘Get Hoover’ campaign be traced to a common Communist source?”—while Norman Vincent Peale urged Hoover to ignore the whole thing. “Please tell him to pay no attention to all the pipsqueaks,” Peale instructed his audience at a Knights Templar dinner gala. “They are nothing more than gnats on the hide of an elephant—and I certainly meant no disrespect by the term, elephant.”[26]
Under the circumstances, Nixon saw little choice but to throw in his lot with Hoover, despite the tensions over the Huston Plan—and despite the growing desire among White House staffers to be rid of Hoover altogether. On April 16, the president sat down for a long and searching interview in front of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, an institution all but guaranteed to give wide publicity to whatever he said. He devoted several minutes to Hoover, portraying his old friend as a well-meaning public servant “taking a bad rap on a lot of things” in what should have been his joyful twilight years. He also showed how well he knew Hoover, predicting that the “unfair and malicious criticism” coming out of Media would lead Hoover to “dig in” rather than consider retirement. When Hoover expressed his thanks during a phone call with Nixon, the president explained, “I always stick by my friends—you know that.” It was an acknowledgment of their long history together, if not necessarily an accurate account of the president’s latest thoughts about his FBI director.[27]
Just as Nixon had predicted, Hoover refused to entertain the idea of stepping down. “I have a motto in my office which reads as follows: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going,’ ” he wrote to a friend in California. “This is my philosophy and the way I am meeting the current attack.” He apparently concluded that in order to move forward, he would have to stop letting other men speak on his behalf. For his grand reentrance he chose a dinner in honor of Martha Mitchell, the gregarious and much-gossiped-about wife of the attorney general. On the night of May 24, Hoover showed up at the Shoreham Hotel in a tuxedo for the occasion, heading directly to the bar for a stiff glass of Jack Daniel’s before turning to face the crowd.
The room was full of reporters, mostly members of the American Newspaper Women’s Club, which sponsored the event. They were stunned to see Hoover there. “J. Edgar Hoover, to understate it, is not a regular on the Washington party scene,” one newspaper noted. They soon began peppering him with questions: not only about the latest round of criticism and his possible retirement, but about the youth counterculture and the new fashion of hot pants and the relative merits of country comedian Minnie Pearl, who was the evening’s entertainment. It was a perilous situation for Hoover, in which he might at any moment burst out with the sort of comments that had been getting him into so much trouble. On the whole, though, he stuck with his mandate to appear cheerful and relaxed. Questioned by reporters about his critics, he merely smiled and shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he insisted. “I’ve been under that kind of pressure for 40 years.”[28]
When asked to introduce Martha Mitchell, Hoover delivered his lines with a rare touch of self-deprecation. “I know that those of you who subscribe to an alleged National picture magazine may have had difficulty recognizing me in the conventional clothes I am wearing this evening,” he read from a prepared script, referring to the Life spread depicting him as a Roman ruler, “but, like ordinary people, we ‘Emperors’ do have our problems, and I regret to say that my toga did not get back from the cleaners on time.”[29]
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For a few weeks after the Mitchell dinner, it looked as if Hoover and Nixon might be back on track, their political alliance secure despite all the twists and turns. The idyll did not last. On June 13, The New York Times began printing a series of classified papers revealing government deception in the planning and execution of the Vietnam War (soon to be known as the Pentagon Papers). The fact that the papers had been leaked by someone in the defense establishment thrust Nixon and Hoover back into the situation that had plagued them for much of 1969 and 1970, with Nixon pushing Hoover to be more aggressive in hunting down the leaker and Hoover, in Nixon’s words, “dragging his feet.” Hoover worried about media sensitivities toward the presumed leaker, a RAND Corporation analyst named Daniel Ellsberg. He also had personal ties to Ellsberg’s father-in-law, the toymaker Louis Marx, and hesitated to insult his friend. “We ought to be awful careful what we do in this case of this man Ellsberg,” Hoover warned Nixon on July 1, arguing that the press would be only too happy “to make a martyr out of him.” But Nixon “did not care about any reasons or excuses,” as he later acknowledged in his memoir.[30]
Over the next several weeks Nixon made two fateful decisions in response to Hoover’s reluctance to pursue Ellsberg. First, he authorized the creation of the Plumbers, a team of independent intelligence operatives—including former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy—who would act at the behest of the White House, fixing “leaks” and doing the dirty tricks that Hoover refused to do. He also decided, reluctantly and with trepidation, that the time had come at last to ease his old friend Hoover out of office.
The confrontation took weeks of planning, as Nixon aides speculated about the right strategies and made their case about why it had to happen now. Above all, Nixon wanted to prevent Hoover from exposing the White House wiretaps and other secrets. There was also the broader political equation to consider. After building his campaign around Hoover’s law-and-order politics, Nixon did not want to risk a revolt by his own silent majority on Hoover’s behalf. He could also use Hoover’s anticommunist bona fides as he prepared to open diplomatic relations with China. Picking up on Nixon’s dilemma, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak noted that Hoover was unlikely to resign voluntarily. “Any private White House suggestion that he do so likely would trigger a public blast from Hoover, stirring the director’s legion of supporters and shaking Mr. Nixon’s tenuous conservative constituency,” they wrote. “Besides, administration officials fear any official criticism of Hoover would play into the hands of the far left’s campaign to discredit law enforcement.”[31]
The upshot was that Hoover would, indeed, have to retire willingly. “If he does go, he’s got to go of his own volition,” Nixon explained to Attorney General John Mitchell. “That’s what we get down to, and that’s why we’re in a hell of a problem.” His staff spent the late summer and early fall of 1971 brainstorming how to make that happen, entertaining ideas as far-fetched as allowing Hoover to keep his car and personal staff after retirement, or even bumping him up to the Supreme Court. Throughout it all, Nixon continued to treat Hoover as the same confidant he had always been. In mid-June, Hoover attended Tricia Nixon’s wedding at the White House, an invitation reserved for the family’s “oldest and closest friends.” On July 1, after the Supreme Court ruled that the Pentagon Papers could continue to be published, Nixon called Hoover to complain that the justices were a bunch of “clowns” and “bastards,” and that Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham was nothing more than an “old bag.” (Hoover preferred to describe her as “an old bitch.”)[32]
While Nixon dithered, the uncertainty began to create problems at the FBI, with its backlog of ambitious younger officials. Sullivan caught on early to the discontent at the Nixon White House, and sought to nudge it along with regular complaints and updates. Still hoping to position himself as the modern, with-it heir to Hoover’s power, he fired off memo after memo laying out his critique of Bureau culture, from his fellow officials’ “lack of objectivity, originality, and independent thinking” to the fact that ordinary agents “said what they did because they thought this was what the Director wanted them to say.” The plan backfired, though, and Sullivan soon found himself, like DeLoach before him, cast out of the director’s inner circle. In July 1971, Hoover sidelined him by promoting Inspector W. Mark Felt into the newly invented position of deputy associate director. The title made Felt the number-three man at the Bureau, though his actual job, as Hoover made clear in a one-on-one meeting, was mainly to “control Sullivan.” Recognizing the slight for what it was, Sullivan decided to go out with a bang. In late August, he wrote a letter to Hoover scorning the “ ‘yes men,’ ‘rubber stamps,’ ‘apple polishers,’ flatterers, self-promoters and timid, cringing, frightened sycophants” who populated the Bureau’s upper ranks. To no one’s surprise, Hoover asked him to resign. “I don’t want yes men but I want men to give me their views, and, when I make a final decision, I want them to carry them out,” Hoover explained, apparently seeing little irony in the idea that Nixon might want the same thing from his own FBI director. In his final act of defiance, Sullivan handed over the transcripts of the so-called Kissinger wiretaps—the ones Hoover had placed on presidential staffers and press figures—to an assistant attorney general loyal not to the FBI but to the White House.[33]
Nixon’s own confrontation with Hoover came a few weeks later. The president’s staff instructed him to be forthright about setting a real retirement date while promising that Hoover would leave office with “full honors (medal, dinner, etc.),” unmistakably showered in glory. They even wrote out the best way to deliver the news. “Edgar, as you can imagine I’ve been giving your situation a great deal of thought,” read Nixon’s script. “I am absolutely delighted that you have weathered the attacks upon you and the Bureau so well.” But, the script went on, the time had come for Hoover to announce that he would serve just one more year “and that then you will retire on ‘senior status’ ” following the presidential election.[34]
When the moment arrived, though, Nixon “flinched,” in Ehrlichman’s words. Hoover came to the White House for breakfast at Nixon’s invitation, sitting alone with the president for almost an hour. According to Nixon, Hoover expressed no great enthusiasm about retiring. Nor, however, did he refuse to do so. Instead, he adopted the same strategy he had used with the wiretaps and with the Huston Plan, agreeing to go along with Nixon’s agenda as long as it came as a direct request. Faced with the prospect of firing Hoover rather than gently easing him into retirement, Nixon backed off. Instead of letting Hoover go, Nixon ended up promising approximately a 20 percent increase in personnel for the FBI’s foreign offices.
Over the next several weeks, Nixon puffed himself up to nudge Hoover out of office but came away defeated again and again. “I was told five times that Hoover would be fired,” one Justice official recalled. “The last time, for sure, they told me was on October 5, 1971.” In his memoirs, Nixon maintained that he simply could not bring himself to “desert a great man, and an old and loyal friend, just because he was coming under attack.” To his aides, though, he revealed something more acute: a fear of Hoover’s skill at wielding power, and a sense that even the president was no match for the FBI director. Perhaps because of their friendship and deep affinity, he recognized in Hoover a determination to carry on no matter the cost. “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me,” Nixon warned.[35]
Hoover relished the victory, not yet aware that it would be the last great triumph of his career. Despite everything that had gone wrong in recent months—the Huston Plan tensions, the theft of the Media documents, the erosion of his reputation—he looked forward to 1972 as a year when he would once again be able to assert his own priorities. “There has to be somebody at the top to make those decisions,” he explained to a subordinate. “The President and the Attorney General have left me here,” he added, and “I intend to continue to make them.”[36]
Chapter 58
One of the Giants
(1972)
Hoover’s body lying in state at the Capitol, May 3, 1972. Hoover is the only federal civil servant ever to be accorded that honor.
