G-Man, page 110
Edward Elson opened the service with a prayer spoken from a low wooden table positioned just behind Hoover’s flag-draped casket. Many of the readings that followed might have been spoken at any Presbyterian funeral, well-worn passages intended to wrest meaning out of death. Elson also spoke more personally of Hoover’s religious journey—how the young man had supposedly longed to become a minister, how he came to believe that enforcing the law could be a way of serving God—and expanded the morning’s readings to include passages that Hoover might have liked. From Corinthians, Elson spoke of putting away “childish things” and taking up the burdens of manhood. From Ephesians came the admonition to “stand against the wiles of the devil” and to maintain discipline in the face of temptation. From Timothy came a passage declaring, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,” sentiments Hoover surely would have appreciated.
The only other speaker that day was Nixon himself, somber if not tearful as he spoke from a raised white pulpit at the front of the room. The eulogy contained little that had not been said in the papers: Hoover as law-and-order icon, as nonpartisan patriot, as professional administrator, respected if not always loved by much of the country. Certain comments had an edge to them, as Nixon decried the “disorder, disruption and disrespect for law” sweeping the land and recalled Hoover’s scorn for the “permissiveness” that allowed it to happen. He declared Hoover “one of the giants” of American history, a public servant who “stayed at his post” from the difficult days after World War I up through the present, as “eight Presidents came and went, while other leaders of morals and manners and opinion rose and fell.” When the eulogy was complete, Elson joined Nixon for a moment of silence, their backs to the pews and their heads bowed in respect. After a prayer of amen sung by the Army Chorus, the honor guard hoisted Hoover’s casket onto their shoulders and led the way out of the church, followed by a procession of dark-suited, mostly gray-haired G-Men according to rank.
Only then did the more personal side of Hoover’s life once again take precedence, as a motorcade—eleven vehicles this time, plus the motorcycle escort—rolled off for Congressional Cemetery. Of the two thousand people at the funeral, just a few dozen made their way to the cemetery, where Hoover was to be buried alongside his mother, his father, and the sister he had never met. Like the political pageant at National Presbyterian, this smaller, more intimate service reflected something important about how Hoover had lived his life: after seventy-seven years, despite all his fame and influence, his parents and siblings were still his only close family members. But the ceremony also recognized that there were other relationships that had mattered—one above all. Before Hoover’s coffin was lowered into the ground, the honor guard removed the American flag draped across the top and folded it into a crisp-cornered triangle. Then they handed it to Tolson, in quiet acknowledgment of his forty-four years at Hoover’s side. The crowd drifted off before the casket could be lowered into the ground, laying Hoover to rest in the federal city of his birth, where he had made such an indelible imprint as a Government Man.[36]
Epilogue
On the night of June 17, 1972, just over a month after Hoover’s funeral, five men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington. They had pulled off a similar operation three weeks earlier, planting listening devices on selected phones before slinking back into the night. Now they were returning to adjust the wiretaps. To ensure that they could get out the way they got in, they placed a piece of duct tape over the lock on the door to the underground parking garage. When a security guard noticed the tape during inspection rounds, he called the police, who arrested all five men, thus setting in motion the improbable political saga known as Watergate.
Over the next two and a half years, as Watergate slowly but inexorably consumed his presidency, Nixon found himself thinking back upon his friendship with Hoover, longing for the sort of protection that he imagined Hoover might have been able to provide. Despite their differences over the past few difficult years, Nixon clung to the idea of Hoover as a true loyalist and ally, the one dependable soul in a city of feckless men. “There were times—and Lyndon Johnson told me this same thing—when I felt that the only person in this goddamned government who was standing with me was Edgar Hoover,” Nixon mused in the winter of 1973, as everything was starting to unravel. White House counsel John Dean took the idea even further, arguing that Hoover might have been the one person able to contain the Watergate scandal before it reached the White House. “I think we would have been a lot better off during this whole Watergate thing if he’d been alive,” Dean told Nixon, “ ’cause he knew how to handle that Bureau.”[1]
As it was, Watergate proved impossible for Nixon to contain—and the same forces that brought him down ultimately came for Hoover’s FBI. After years of anguish and disillusionment over Vietnam, Watergate unleashed a new age of cynicism about government conduct and about the men and women who chose to make politics their profession. By 1975, that sense of outrage extended to the FBI, as Congress delivered for the first time on its long-standing promise to investigate Hoover’s secretive and insular institution. When it was all over, decades of FBI secrets—from COINTELPRO to wiretapping to what Hoover had done to Martin Luther King—were laid bare to public scrutiny. Just before his death, Hoover had spoken with a senator about his wish to have been born twenty years earlier, so that he might have passed on before seeing what became of the modern world. As it turned out, he died just in time to avoid witnessing the public repudiation of his life’s work and the destruction of his reputation.[2]
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Gray began his term at the FBI by trying to do what Hoover had done in 1924: crack open the windows to let in some fresh air. In the weeks after Hoover’s death, Gray announced in quick succession that he planned to hire women as agents, expand minority recruitment, and allow existing employees to grow out their hair. He cut down on Hoover’s “awesome and formidable” flow of paperwork, reasoning that “there had to be a better way to manage and control this organization of superb human beings.” He also tried to shift the FBI’s internal culture, in which Hoover “had these guys so brainwashed they even talked like him.” He abolished Crime Records, banned the use of the phrase “seat of government,” and set up an office of planning and evaluation to explore what other changes might be necessary. Despite his status as acting director, Gray hoped to make the FBI “more open to legislative scrutiny, more responsive to public needs, and much less defensive and self-promotional,” as his son later recounted.[3]
Gray did not understand what he was up against. Before he suggested a single reform, his appointment had already sparked “a wave of bitterness and suspicion between senior FBI officials and the White House,” as the Washington Daily News noted in early May. Once the reforms began to take hold, that “bitterness and suspicion” began to coalesce into a bureaucratic rebellion, carried out by men who had trained under Hoover. Lou Nichols tried to warn Nixon of the peril ahead, drawing upon the goodwill he had earned through his service in the 1968 campaign. “I fear that a tragic mistake has been made, altho I hope not,” he wrote in a May 19 letter, warning of the smoldering discontent among top FBI officials over the appointment of an outsider.[4]
Mark Felt stayed on as Gray’s acting associate director, now the Bureau’s number-two man. On the surface, he treated Gray as he had treated Hoover, soliciting favor by hanging Gray’s “beautiful autographed picture” on the office wall and sending flowers to the hospital when his boss got sick. Beneath that surface, though, Felt was roiling with a career man’s resentment. More than any other official, Felt interpreted Gray’s appointment as a personal insult. He also worried about Gray’s ability—or even desire—to withstand pressure from the White House, and to preserve the hard-won autonomy, privileges, and secrets of Hoover’s Bureau. Like other executives, he mocked his new boss as “Three Day Gray,” a reference to Gray’s penchant for spending time away from Washington giving speeches or meeting field agents. He also set out to undermine Gray through a method that Hoover had once used with exquisite skill: manipulating the press. Felt was at once an opportunist and an avid student of Hoover’s methods, especially when it came to protecting the Bureau’s freedom of action.[5]
Into this stew of ambition, uncertainty, and competing agendas came the Watergate burglary—at first, nothing more than a bungled dirty trick by a few mid-level operatives. As the highest-ranking official with investigative experience, Felt was appointed to take charge of the federal inquiry. On the side, he plunged into what would become the most famous episode of leaking in the history of journalism. Within days of the burglary, he began sharing investigative details with a young Washington Post reporter named Bob Woodward, already an acquaintance and the occasional recipient of tips. Around the Post office, Felt became known by the pseudonym “Deep Throat.”
Felt denied his role as Deep Throat until 2005, when, in ill health, he finally confessed to Vanity Fair and then published an updated memoir. Today, some close observers still doubt that Felt’s revelation is the whole story, suggesting that Deep Throat must have been a composite or that Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein, must have had other sources. Whether Deep Throat was a hero, protecting the nation from malfeasance on high, or a self-interested actor, seeking professional advancement, remains a contested question. Whatever his motivation, Felt helped to keep the Watergate story alive at a moment when even Washington insiders showed little interest. But he did not, as the heroic legend might suggest, entirely get away with it. By October, Nixon suspected that Felt himself was the leaker, thanks to a tip from a press source. The White House decided not to act on the information, for fear that Felt would “go out and unload everything,” in Haldeman’s words, just as they had once worried that Hoover might “bring down the temple.”[6]
That gamble paid off, at least in the short run. Nixon won the 1972 election in a landslide, taking every state except Massachusetts. The victory only accelerated his problems at the FBI. Having delayed the appointment of a permanent FBI director until after the election, in early 1973 Nixon faced the same dilemma he had encountered after Hoover’s death: Should he appoint an outsider or one of Hoover’s men? He chose to continue on with Gray, a misstep that one historian later described as Nixon’s “most fateful and disastrous decision in this crucial period.” Nixon acknowledged that Gray would have to be “careful” during the nomination hearings, given his reputation as a Nixon loyalist. Once it was all over, though, Nixon had hoped that Gray would be more like his predecessor as FBI director. Hoover “knew that he could trust me, I knew that I could trust him and as a result, he told me things,” Nixon explained to his nominee, conveniently forgetting the struggles and mutual animosity that had characterized Hoover’s final years. “The moment you’re confirmed then I think we’ve got to have the kind of relationship we had with Hoover.”[7]
Gray never got the chance to try. Far from being “careful” at the hearings, he was gloriously, ineptly honest, far more open than Hoover ever would have been. Where Hoover had always refused to supply “raw” FBI files to Congress, Gray volunteered to let the committee review the entire Watergate investigation (an offer that left the Nixon White House apoplectic). He also revealed an agreement, made just days after the burglary, to allow White House counsel John Dean to sit in on all Watergate-related interviews. White House aides found the scene excruciating. “Let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind,” Ehrlichman mused as the hearings wore on. In April, Nixon mercifully withdrew his nomination, but the revelations continued. Soon the press revealed that Dean had given Gray a stack of papers retrieved from the safe of Watergate burglar Howard Hunt and asked him—not in so many words—to dispose of the contents. “Had I been a Hoover,” Gray later reflected, he would have held on to the files and used them “against Dean, Ehrlichman and the President.” Instead, he burned them in the fireplace of his Connecticut home. Once the details came out, he took the whole disaster to heart. Gray contemplated suicide in the months after the hearings, but worried that “if I took my own life,” there might be “no one to defend me.”[8]
After Gray’s withdrawal, Hoover’s former deputy Lou Nichols wrote in to express “heartfelt sympathies,” but also to note that the whole disaster could have been avoided simply by giving Hoover-era veterans the respect they deserved. “I cannot help but believe that had you summoned a few of the old timers at the very outset, you could have been spared a lot of grief, and I feel the results could have been entirely different,” Nichols wrote. But Nixon showed less interest than ever in listening to the old guard. To replace Gray as acting director, he appointed William Ruckelshaus, a moderate lawyer and top administrator from the Environmental Protection Agency. Looking ahead, Nixon made no secret of the fact that he wanted the FBI “cleaned out”—starting with Felt, who resigned under pressure in June 1973.[9]
It would be another fourteen months before Nixon himself resigned, the first president ever to give up and leave office midterm. As the noose tightened, he continued to long for Hoover. “He’d have scared them to death,” Nixon mused to Dean during the Gray hearings. “He’s got files on everybody, God damn it.” Nixon was exaggerating Hoover’s power—but in any case, Hoover was not there to save him. To the contrary, the conflicts and tensions of Hoover’s final years continued to play out as Nixon battled his way through the last painful months in office. As the Senate took up its own Watergate investigation, committee chairman Sam Ervin pushed well beyond the burglary and into the operations that had once caused Hoover so much worry: the Kissinger wiretaps, the Huston Plan, the creation of the Plumbers.[10]
When the final moments came, it was the attempt to interfere with the work of the FBI that helped to bring Nixon down. In late July, after months of court battles and political grandstanding, the White House was forced to turn over what would soon be known as the “smoking gun” tape, a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman recorded just a week after the Watergate burglary. In that conversation, they complained that Gray could not “control” the FBI, and that the burglary investigation was moving “in some directions we don’t want it go.” To head it off, they agreed to ask CIA leaders to call up the FBI and explain, untruthfully, that the “directions” they were following involved CIA operations and should be left alone. Upon its release, the conversation showed that Nixon had taken an active role in the cover-up after the burglary. It also fulfilled Nichols’s warning that going to battle with Hoover’s FBI—trying to bend the institution to another man’s political will—might well prove to be “a tragic mistake.” On August 8, 1974, three days after the tape’s release, Nixon resigned the presidency.[11]
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The FBI television show was not renewed for ABC’s fall broadcast schedule that year, its noble-agents theme increasingly at odds with the national temper. By that point, the Bureau had yet another director, former Kansas City police chief Clarence Kelley, who managed to be nominated by Nixon and approved by the Senate before Watergate engulfed everything. Kelley was more like what the old guard had wanted: he had served under Hoover for twenty-one years, from 1940 through 1961, though mainly in the field offices rather than under Hoover’s thumb in Washington. As the first permanent director since Hoover, Kelley continued and extended many of the reforms initiated by Gray, slowly easing the FBI away from its insular Kappa Alpha culture and toward a more diverse, less hierarchical vision. At the same time, he sought to differentiate himself from Gray by launching an internal review of the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Completed in July 1974, a month before Nixon’s resignation, the report acknowledged certain missteps but mostly blamed “senior associates at the White House” who “conspired with great success for nine months to obstruct our investigation.” Included among them was Gray, whose “naivete (or his villainy, depending on your point of view)” had forever tarnished the FBI’s reputation for independence.[12]
Even as Kelley attempted to put Watergate to rest, other controversies began to crop up, most of them with roots in the bitter struggles of Hoover’s final years. In July 1973, just days after Kelley assumed office, the Socialist Workers Party filed suit against the FBI for harassment and civil rights violations, based in part on the files stolen in Media, Pennsylvania. In December, after winning a judgment under the Freedom of Information Act, NBC reporter Carl Stern went public with an exposé of COINTELPRO—again based on initial clues from the Media burglary. The FBI never managed to find the burglars, an embarrassing failure in a high-profile case. When the conspirators finally revealed themselves in 2014, they were more or less the people Hoover had suspected all along: local anti-war activists committed to calling their government to account, including a professor from Haverford College and another from Temple University.[13]
Congress began its own investigations of the FBI in early 1975, taking advantage of Hoover’s death and the momentum of Watergate to carry out what it had so often threatened but failed to do during his lifetime. In the House, a committee chaired by New York Democrat Otis Pike demanded documentation of the FBI’s domestic surveillance programs and wiretapping policies, subjects that Hoover had long hoped to hide from congressional scrutiny. Toward the end of 1975, another House committee began asking questions about the disposition of Hoover’s files in the hours and days following his death. The next year, the Justice Department itself started looking into corruption within the FBI’s supposedly incorruptible ranks.
