G-Man, page 75
The Bay of Pigs debacle fit well with Hoover’s evolving assessment of the Kennedy brothers as young and arrogant and ill-prepared for the hard work of running the country. According to one aide, Hoover received a last-minute briefing in advance of the invasion but played no role in its conception—or in its collapse. “Mr. Hoover listened to Bobby, but we were just strictly sidelined by him on the entire matter,” the aide explained. “I think the director was relieved that he did not have a role.” Even so, Hoover saw the chance to strike a blow on the FBI’s behalf. A few days after the invasion, he delivered a report to the attorney general documenting the many missteps of his old adversaries at the CIA, beginning with the sheer organizational chaos of its early years.[19]
Hoover’s grumbling might have brought an end to the Cuba story if not for an incident that had taken place months earlier in Las Vegas. In late October 1960, just days before the election, a housekeeper at the Riviera hotel had entered the room of comedian Dan Rowan and found it littered with wiretapping and bugging equipment, apparently left behind midway through a surveillance setup. She called the police, who in turn called the FBI on the premise that the situation might involve a violation of federal wiretapping laws. The local field office quickly deduced that Rowan was dating girl-group singer Phyllis McGuire, who also happened to be dating none other than Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, one of Hoover’s “top hoodlums.” Tracking the surveillance equipment led to a former FBI agent named Robert Maheu, who admitted that he had been hired to orchestrate the bugging.
Confronted by his former colleagues, Maheu at first maintained that an anonymous Los Angeles attorney had paid him to contract out the surveillance work, for reasons he refused to specify. Then on April 18, the day after the Bay of Pigs invasion, he suddenly changed his story. In a shocking admission that quickly made its way up to Hoover’s office, Maheu confessed that the CIA had hired him as a liaison to the Chicago underworld, in hopes that the CIA and the Mafia might join forces against Castro in Cuba. According to CIA thinking, the mob was already furious about Castro’s seizure of casinos and crackdown on illicit business in Havana—and would therefore make excellent partners for the U.S. government in its campaign to undermine Castro’s fledgling regime. In this revised version of the story, Maheu said he had orchestrated the Las Vegas surveillance to check up on whether Giancana had been leaking information about the scheme to Phyllis McGuire, the girlfriend he shared with Rowan.[20]
It was an incredible story: the Mafia and the CIA working together, at the very moment that Hoover and Bobby were loudly proclaiming a war on organized crime. It was so incredible, in fact, that Hoover might not have believed it—except that a CIA official soon confirmed that it was true. In early May, confronted with Maheu’s story, CIA director of security Sheffield Edwards admitted that “Maheu was used as an intermediary with Sam Giancana, relative to CIA’s anti-Castro activities.” Gobsmacked by this turn of events, Hoover decided that he wanted to know everything: about the Mafia, about the CIA, about the possible involvement of the attorney general and the White House. “Here was CIA, coddling characters the Bureau was supposed to be investigating,” CIA liaison Samuel Papich recalled. “That irritated the hell out of Hoover—and when J. Edgar got mad, boy, he got mad!”[21]
Over the next several months, Hoover sent agents out to interview (and reinterview) the major players. In one especially fraught incident, a team of FBI men intercepted Giancana at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, in hopes that a surprise confrontation might induce him to talk about his CIA cooperation. Enraged at being trapped near the plane’s gate, Giancana indeed railed about Cuba, warning that “the United States Government is not as smart as it would like to think it is,” according to an FBI report. He also encouraged agents to take his threats “to their ‘boss’, who in turn would report the results to their ‘super boss,’ who would thereupon report to his ‘super super boss’ ”—by whom he apparently meant Hoover, Robert Kennedy, and John Kennedy. “I know all about the KENNEDYs,” he warned, “and one of these days we are going to tell all.”
When asked to clarify his comments, Giancana “uttered an obscenity” and refused to say another word. But Hoover took it all as confirmation of what he already believed: that the Kennedys were reckless and arrogant and up to no good, and that they were keeping things from the Bureau.[22]
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Ultimately, it was Bobby Kennedy who came to Hoover on a “highly confidential basis” to reveal what had really happened between the CIA and Giancana. According to the attorney general, the CIA actually employed Maheu—and thus Giancana—not to gather intelligence in Cuba or to assist with the Bay of Pigs invasion, but “to hire some gunmen to go into Cuba and kill Castro” for a fee of $150,000. It was another bout of stunning information: the Mafia and the CIA in cahoots to assassinate a foreign leader. Hoover saw it as all too typical of CIA practices. “I only wish we would eventually realize CIA can never be depended upon to deal forthrightly with us,” he wrote around that time. “Certainly my skepticism isn’t based on prejudice nor suspicion but on specific instances all too many in number.”[23]
Skepticism continued to dominate his relationship with Bobby Kennedy as well. But, as both sides grudgingly acknowledged, they had little choice other than to move forward together. In May 1961, once the Crime Commission question had been settled, Hoover brought the attorney general’s office in on the fact that the FBI had been using “microphone surveillances” in organized crime cases “even though trespass is necessary.” According to FBI liaison Courtney Evans, the attorney general was “pleased” by the news and offered no objection. In August, they conferred on the use of wiretaps in organized crime cases. Once again, the attorney general failed to shrink back in horror. Instead, he threw his support behind the legislative package wending its way through Congress, which granted the FBI new authority to investigate interstate gambling and racketeering—“powerful new weapons to crack down on underworld rackets,” in one newspaper’s description, as well as “the most sweeping legislation of its kind in nearly 30 years.”[24]
Over the next few years, with these new laws at their disposal, the FBI and the Justice Department carried out at least some of the crusade that Kennedy had envisioned during his first heady weeks in office. But Hoover never quite reconciled himself to Bobby’s leadership, and rarely managed to offer his full cooperation. In 1962, the FBI helped to persuade gangster Joseph Valachi to inform on his fellow mob bosses, making him “the greatest song bird ever to flee the cage of La Cosa Nostra,” in one official’s description. At the Justice Department, a “Get Hoffa Squad” did just what its name entailed, pursuing the Teamsters leader relentlessly before winning a conviction for jury tampering in 1964. Humphreys, too, was eventually arrested—though he died that same night, finally brought down by heart problems.[25]
Giancana proved to be more complicated. In August 1961, a few weeks after the confrontation at the airport, Hoover authorized the Chicago field office to plant a microphone at the Armory Lounge in Forest Park, Illinois, Giancana’s favorite hangout and place of business. What he heard there led him into not just the Mafia and the CIA, but also back to the White House.
Chapter 41
The Federal Bureau of Integration
(1957–1961)
Hoover, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and others hung in effigy at a rally of the National States’ Rights Party in Anniston, Alabama, September 5, 1961. Though Hoover investigated civil rights activists and resisted calls to protect them, many segregationists viewed him as an invasive pro-civil-rights force.
Jim Lowry/National Archives and Records Administration
Less than a month after the Bay of Pigs, another crisis erupted. This one was not of John Kennedy’s own making but it would become the moral issue that defined much of his presidency. The story began on May 4, 1961, when a group of thirteen men and women calling themselves Freedom Riders boarded two commercial buses out of Washington, determined to test whether Black and white citizens could ride through the Deep South side by side. Their journey became major news ten days later, when white mobs in Alabama met them with all the fury of massive resistance, setting their first bus on fire and beating the Freedom Riders with pipes, clubs, and fists.[1]
Before this moment, Hoover had approached civil rights as a fraught but still second-rank political issue, with a tendency to flare up and burn out. Beginning with the Freedom Riders, it moved to the center of national politics—and of Hoover’s concerns—and did not leave that position for more than a decade. As one of the opening salvos of this new era, the Freedom Riders episode adopted an increasingly popular method of civil rights agitation: nonviolent direct action. That method, in turn, changed how Hoover understood the FBI’s duties and its relations with Southern law enforcement.
Hoover had long been suspicious of anyone, especially Black activists, who spoke out against racism and Jim Crow. But during the 1940s, he had viewed civil rights work at least in part as a matter of enforcing “law and order.” Lynchings, especially, tapped into his long-standing hostility toward vigilantes and local police officials who claimed the right to take the law into their own hands. With the rise of nonviolent direct action, he began to turn more and more of that hostility on civil rights activists themselves, framing them as provocateurs and agitators stirring up trouble where none was needed. The NAACP of the 1940s and 1950s had pushed for the law to be changed—and then for those changes to be enforced through federal power. The new generation of activists, frustrated at the slow pace of racial transformation, tried to speed things along through more confrontational methods. Hoover viewed these forms of civil disobedience and direct action as tantamount to lawbreaking—even when federal law happened to be on the protesters’ side. In the 1960s, he came to view “law and order” not as a directive that might protect Black Southerners and civil rights organizers, but as something that would have to be imposed upon them.
In this shifting terrain Hoover began to rethink how the FBI would relate to its growing roster of civil rights duties—and to the Southern police departments who were, inevitably, involved in the enforcement process. The 1957 Civil Rights Act had raised expectations about what the FBI could and should do on civil rights. But it had provided little clear guidance about how to do it. So Hoover crafted his own limits, based in part on his ideological animus toward the civil rights movement and in part on his long-standing institutional interests. As during the lynching investigations, he made it known that the FBI would investigate in cases where federal jurisdiction appeared to apply, engaging freely in surveillance and counterintelligence work. But he drew strict lines elsewhere: he would not allow FBI agents to be used as guards or soldiers on behalf of civil rights demonstrators, even in the face of near-certain violence directed their way. Those tasks were better left to local law enforcement, he argued, which had both the manpower and the jurisdiction to carry them out. The problem, of course, was that Southern police departments usually had even less interest in protecting demonstrators and their rights than he did.
The Freedom Riders presented the first major test of these limits, and of Hoover’s attempt to persuade Southern police departments to do the guarding and protecting in the FBI’s stead. By the time it was all over, his refusal to intervene in the face of serious violence would make him a target of criticism from civil rights supporters, who argued that the FBI had a duty to provide protection and keep the peace. At the FBI, Hoover would narrate the Freedom Rides differently, as a saga of trust and betrayal, in which local police deserved most of the blame.
The White House often backed Hoover in these exchanges. Despite their growing tensions in other realms, Hoover and the Kennedy administration initially agreed when it came to federal intervention in civil rights matters, choosing caution over any bold new moves. Each hoped to preserve his ties to the white South: Kennedy because he wanted to hold the Democratic coalition together; Hoover because he relied upon the cooperation of local law enforcement as well as the sympathy of Southern Democrats. Though Kennedy and Hoover would later be depicted as polar opposites on the civil rights question, in 1961 they faced the emerging Southern crisis with common concerns. Neither one expressed much enthusiasm for making civil rights a federal issue.
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Hoover once believed that he had solved the problem of Southern law enforcement. “In the late twenties and early thirties there was great reluctance upon the part of the local authorities to cooperate with the FBI,” he explained to Bobby Kennedy, “and it took us several years before we could break down this reluctance, but we finally did so.” His ace in the hole had been the FBI National Academy, where local officers came to train and then carry the FBI’s methods back to their hometowns. Through the academy, Hoover had built up a network of sympathetic policemen throughout the South, widely known as the least modernized and least professional of the nation’s law enforcement regions. Some of their sympathy came from a shared racial outlook: Hoover had built the FBI on the model of Kappa Alpha, where white Southern men were prized. But academy men also learned new things from Hoover during their time in Washington. Many left as true believers in his style of law enforcement professionalism, with its emphasis on statistics and index cards and forensic science. More often than not, they remained willing to work with the FBI once they returned home.[2]
Civil rights cases were the great exception. During the lynching investigations of the 1940s, Hoover had often found himself at odds with local police; indeed, the police were often in cahoots with the lynch mobs under investigation. Brown and the desegregation challenges of the 1950s heightened those tensions, casting the FBI as an unwelcome interloper in a states-rights region. Then came the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which thrust the Bureau definitively into civil rights and voting rights issues but only added to its jurisdictional confusion. According to the logic of massive resistance, to be a segregationist increasingly meant to oppose all forms of federal power, including the presence of FBI men on Southern soil. For the legions of academy graduates working in the South—as for Hoover himself—that created a set of unwelcome contradictions. None of them wanted segregation dismantled. But their professional duties regularly found them locked in conflict. By the late 1950s, it seemed impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to express loyalty both to the Southern racial order and to the FBI.
Plenty of men tried. Pick almost any major city or state in the South and somewhere in the law enforcement picture, most likely near the top, there was probably an academy graduate or former Bureau agent. In North Carolina, where lunch-counter sit-ins captured the nation’s attention, the commissioner of motor vehicles and public safety was Edward Scheidt, former head of the Bureau’s powerful New York office. In New Orleans, Guy Banister, formerly in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office, worked as the assistant superintendent of police before founding his own private investigative agency. In Mississippi, ostensibly so hostile to federal authority, FBI men could be found in a variety of key positions. Hugh Clegg, one of Hoover’s earliest Kappa Alpha recruits and his right-hand man in building the academy, was now on the chancellor’s staff at the University of Mississippi, in the thick of a desegregation struggle. Zack Van Landingham, a twenty-seven-year Bureau veteran, worked as chief investigator for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a statewide agency founded in 1956 to track and disrupt civil rights activity.
In theory, the Sovereignty Commission was supposed to embody the distinction between federal and local authority, with a founding mission “to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi and her sister states from encroachment thereon by the Federal government or any branch, department, or agency thereof.” In reality, it showed just how complicated that relationship could be. Among its first members was a state senator and former FBI agent named Earl Evans. Two years after its founding, the commission hired Van Landingham to modernize its files and keep it up to speed on the latest investigative techniques. He modeled the commission’s internal structures on what he had seen at the FBI, setting up a Bureau-style index card file to track civil rights activists and touring the state to deliver Hooveresque lectures on juvenile delinquency. The commission also established a lending library to promote approved conservative ideas and made Masters of Deceit one of the first books available.[3]
In his original vision, Hoover counted upon his former employees, like the academy graduates, to smooth the FBI’s relationship with Southern law enforcement. He often came away disappointed. Take what had happened in Poplarville, Mississippi, in April 1959, when a Black man named Mack Charles Parker had been snatched from jail and murdered by a mob of white citizens. With the encouragement of both Eisenhower and the state’s reform-minded governor, Hoover had sent some sixty agents into town to question residents and track the available evidence. Within weeks, they produced a 370-page report describing the lynching in detail and naming the men involved in the conspiracy.
