J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (102 page)

At the time of this appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, the FBI was spending about $200 million annually. Hoover’s “testimony” was merely a formality. “I have never cut his budget,” said Congressman Rooney some weeks before this meeting, “and I never expect to.” The Senate committee charged with reviewing the Bureau’s budget would actually
do nothing, relying upon Rooney and Hoover to reach an agreement.

Acclaim was no longer universal. In a mildly critical article, the
Washington Post
’s Richard Harwood quoted an anonymous FBI agent who called Hoover the chief archivist of “other people’s filth.” Many others were quoted in a similar vein, but Tolson, writing a severe letter to the editors, put these remarks in perspective. They were “the actual or alleged carpings of so many nameless detractors and dead men.”
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It has to be remembered that when J. Edgar Hoover spoke about international communism and foreign conspiracies and the seduction of American youth, many experienced, knowledgeable men and women believed that he knew what he was talking about. Among their number was Lyndon Johnson, who was encouraged to continue his doomed Vietnam policies by the FBI director’s misapprehensions of reality.

In late April 1965, when asked by the White House about possible Communist influence in the antiwar movement, Hoover sent Johnson several opinion pieces written by journalists who attacked the growing dissent as Communist inspired, but neglected to tell the president that the articles were actually based on Bureau handouts.

On April 28 Hoover met with the president, who said he had “no doubt” that Communists were “behind the disturbances.” At that time the Students for a Democratic Society had announced plans to stage demonstrations in eighty-five cities across the nation. Eagerly agreeing with Johnson, the director charged that SDS was “largely infiltrated by communists and…woven into the civil rights situation which we know has large communist influence.” Johnson was well pleased. According to Hoover’s memorandum of the meeting, LBJ wanted the FBI to “brief at least two Senators and two Congressmen, preferably one of each Party,”
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so that they could make public speeches denouncing the Communist inspiration of the antiwar movement by chapter and verse.

What started now reinforced Johnson’s blindness. Hoover’s efforts minimized, and for a tragically long time the president entirely missed, the ground swell of public opposition to the war. This error cost LBJ the presidency. It also prolonged the conflict, raised the number of the dead, and profoundly increased the nation’s wrenching agony.

Back in 1964 the FBI’s annual report to the attorney general had cited the Communist party’s “intensive campaign for the withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam.”
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As Hoover knew, the CIA was telling Johnson that China and North Vietnam hoped to encourage the agitation on college campuses and create such public disorder that U.S. troops would have to be brought home in order to calm the country. He had to come up with something equally good, if not better. He wrote subordinates that he wanted a memo to Johnson “prepared immediately,” taking a predetermined slant on SDS: “What I want to get to the President is the background with emphasis upon the
communist influence therein.”
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This slanted memo was also to be distributed to administration officials for use in their speeches. The report, “Communist Activities Relative to United States Policy on Vietnam,” showed that the CP did indeed want to influence the dissenters. And that is all.

Powerful, articulate senators were now beginning to speak out against the administration’s policies. When the Foreign Relations Committee decided to hold televised hearings on the subject, LBJ ordered Hoover to monitor their remarks for a point-by-point comparison with “the Communist Party line.”
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In addition, the FBI passed along a memorandum concluding that various “peace” demonstrations were evidence of the success of Communist designs.
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Student organizations were watched and infiltrated, and the Bureau gathered intelligence about planned antiwar demonstrations with its VIDEM program. Hoover’s emphasis was on the potential for violence raised by the dissenters, whose numbers were growing rapidly. Other observers of the national scene were drawing quite different conclusions from the unprecedented phenomenon, but Hoover missed the point. As late as 1966 he was writing all SACs about the “rising tide of public indignation”—against the demonstrators.
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The FBI’s mischievous memorandums, called “interpretive” by Sullivan, were purposeful exaggerations. They remained influential in the Nixon administration, exacerbating White House misunderstanding of the public mood.

“It is impossible,” the Church committee concluded, “to measure the larger impact on the fortunes of the nation from this distorted perception at the very highest policymaking level.”
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Or to number those who died in vain.

By 1968, other politicians, if not the president, had caught on. Robert Kennedy was one of the first to sense the winds of change, and on March 16 he announced his intention to run against Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president. This was no surprise to many, and certainly not to LBJ. Hoover had informed him that Kennedy had tried to call Dr. King to apprise him of the decision.

A mere twelve days later, the newly announced candidate made political history, in a bleak way. In the Oregon primary he became the first Kennedy to lose an election.

Still, it was clear that the Democratic party, like the country, was deeply divided. After agonizing over the decision for months and discussing it with
many people, Johnson startled the nation on March 31 by announcing that he would not run for reelection. Therefore, he avoided certain defeat in the Wisconsin primary two days later. Besides, “the thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true,” he later recalled. “Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets.”
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Hoover was not in their midst. After the epic battle in public between two proud men, each implying that the other was a liar, there would be no place in the Kennedy administration for the current director of the FBI. It would not have been Hoover’s way to advise LBJ on his decision. It does seem likely that he would have reminded the president that Kennedy was very close to the Communist-inspired Dr. Martin Luther King, who had angered Johnson by coming out against the war.

But that concern was mooted on April 4.

“They got Zorro! They finally got the SOB!”
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These shouts echoed through the FBI’s Atlanta field office when news first came over the radio that Dr. King had been shot in Memphis. The Atlanta office had the primary responsibility for surveillance of the civil rights leader. When word came a few minutes later that King was dead, one agent literally jumped up and down with joy.

Ramsey Clark had noted earlier that Hoover had never given evidence of any sense of compassion for the sorrows of the Kennedy family after JFK’s murder. King’s death was the occasion for a show of even greater insensitivity. Two days after the murder, as rioters tore through Washington neighborhoods, the attorney general could not find the director of the FBI. It was Saturday, and Hoover had gone to the horse races in Baltimore.

Tolson, according to Clark, “could talk with compassion.”
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In an FBI executive conference early in 1968, as Kennedy’s chances for the nomination seemed to grow stronger, Hoover’s friend said, “I hope that someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.”
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On June 6 he got his wish when Sirhan Sirhan fired in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

About 150,000 mourners lined up to pay their respects on June 7 and 8 as the body lay in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Once again, the eyes of the nation and much of the world were riveted on the somber spectacle of a funeral for a young Kennedy cut down by an assassin’s bullets.

Suddenly, as the coffin was carried down the steps of the church in full view of the TV cameras, there was a slight disturbance among the honorary pallbearers following close behind. An FBI agent was drawing Ramsey Clark aside and whispering that he must call DeLoach: “It’s urgent that you call him immediately!”

When Clark got to a telephone, DeLoach reported that James Earl Ray, suspected assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, had been arrested in London. The FBI had not wanted to interrupt the funeral service, of course, but Scotland
Yard had refused to hold the story. Naturally, national attention was redirected to the news coverage of the FBI’s coup.

Later, Clark found out the truth. DeLoach had told one of the Bureau’s favored journalists about the arrest the evening before. A lengthy, detailed press release had appeared on desks in the Justice Department either that night or early the morning of the funeral. Clark called DeLoach in a cold fury. He refused to use the agent as a liaison with the Bureau again. “The thing I couldn’t take was that I’d been lied to,” he would explain. “You can’t function that way.”
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On July 21 a bomb exploded at the Tucson ranch owned by the Detroit mobster Peter “Horseface” Licavoli. Two bombs set off the next evening blasted away a patio wall at the home of the local Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno (Joe Bananas). Over the next year fifteen more explosions occurred as mob warfare rocked the southwestern desert town.

Joe Bananas’s son went to the police. He wanted to help them find the “punks who are hurting my family’s image here.”

Actually the gang war was a COINTELPRO created and operated by one FBI agent, acting on his own. So three witnesses testified in 1970. A Mafia specialist described as having “a lot of brass,” SA David Olin Hale supposedly told the two men who placed the bombs that they were part of an FBI operation designed to start a feud between the Tucson Mafiosi. When one was wounded by a shotgun during his escape after an explosion, the agent allegedly suggested that his partner use a crossbow to kill a Mafia bodyguard as vengeance. According to courtroom testimony, the agent visited the wounded man in the hospital and asked if he could “crimp a cap onto a fuse” under the sheets of his bed. The patient explained that one hand was still incapacitated and could not perform the task with only one good hand.

Later, an attractive blond anthropology student who had told a friend that she and Hale had tried to bomb Joe Bananas’s car was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. Her death was ruled a suicide by police.

When the trial began, Hale was suspended. When his name was mentioned in court by the girlfriend of the brother of one of the bombers, he resigned from the Bureau. Although FBI officials were described by government sources to be “mad as hell,” one of them claimed that Hale was about to be let go because he had accepted loans and gifts from a private person. The judge in the trial, deciding to fine the bombers $260 each, believed that they had been “taken in, misled, led down that primrose path pointed out” by the FBI agent. He characterized Hale’s alleged schemes as “a frolic of his own that has brought embarrassment to all concerned.”
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Hale was never charged in the case, which was suppressed by the Justice Department. The state of Arizona chose not to prosecute him. He was hired in an executive position after resigning from the FBI; this suggests that he had not been given an unfavorable recommendation from his former employers.

Legal observers pointed out that, to indict Hale, Attorney General John
Mitchell, who had promised to stamp out the mob, would have to charge the former FBI agent with conspiring to deprive the gangster Joe Bananas of his civil rights.

Because of the possibility that the Democrats might win, Hoover’s aid and comfort to the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, had to be covert. This time, however, he didn’t need Father Cronin as go-between. Lou Nichols was in charge of the former vice-president’s campaign security. The first Judas, long since forgiven if not still fully trusted, had mounted “Operation Eagle Eye,” a nationwide network of ex-FBI agents and attorneys given the task of making sure the theft of 1960 was not repeated. The FBI director could just sit back, feed helpful information to Nichols, and feign uninvolvement.

He hadn’t counted on LBJ.

Less than two weeks before the election, President Johnson called a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and proposed resumption of the Paris peace talks. It was both an adroit political move, to help Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, and a highly personal one, for above all else Johnson wanted to end the war before he left office. Unfortunately, South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu, balked, refusing to sending a delegation to Paris. From NSA-intercepted cable traffic and CIA reports (the agency had Thieu’s office bugged), Johnson learned that Thieu was attempting to sabotage the talks in the hope that if Nixon was elected he would demand much tougher terms. Johnson, not too surprisingly, suspected that Nixon’s people were orchestrating the stall. Suspicion focused on “the Dragon Lady,” Madame Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of the World War II Flying Tigers commander. A leader in the Republican Party, and head of a group called Concerned Asians for Nixon, Madame Chennault was known to be a close confidante of the South Vietnamese ambassador Bui Diem. Through DeLoach, Johnson requested that Madame Chennault, Bui Diem, and the embassy of Vietnam be placed under physical and electronic surveillance.

Coming so close to the election, the request caused consternation among Hoover and his aides. Because of Chennault’s prominence in the Republican party, DeLoach memoed Tolson, “If it became known that the FBI was surveilling her this would put us in a most untenable and embarrassing position.”
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However, even though Johnson was a lame-duck president, he was still commander in chief, as he reminded DeLoach in one of his late-night telephone calls, and round-the-clock surveillances were approved. Johnson’s suspicions were confirmed on November 2 when the FBI intercepted a call from Madame Chennault to the embassy in which she urged Saigon to stay firm: they’d get a better deal with Nixon, she said. When the embassy official asked if Nixon knew about the call, Madame Chennault replied, “No, but our friend in New Mexico does.”
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The vice-presidential candidate Spiro Agnew’s campaign plane had stopped briefly in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that day, and
Johnson had the FBI check telephone toll records to see if Agnew or his staff had called Chennault. No such call was found, and, although LBJ strongly suspected that the Republicans had delayed the end of the war for purely political reasons, he couldn’t prove it and reluctantly dropped the matter.