J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (111 page)

After that, Gary later said, “Jean became psychotic…She went from one psychiatric clinic to another, from one suicide attempt to another. She tried to kill herself seven times, usually on the anniversary of her little girl’s birth.”
¹³

On August 20, 1979, she succeeded. Jean Seberg had been neutralized.
^*

Meanwhile, Hoover continued to collect information which he could use to assure his continued reign as FBI director.

On March 19, 1970, Attorney General John Mitchell met secretly with the Howard Hughes emissary Richard Danner
^†
and told him that the Justice Department would have no objections to Hughes’s acquiring still another Las Vegas hotel-casino, the Dunes.

Mitchell did this even though his antitrust chief, Assistant Attorney General
Richard McLaren, was strongly opposed to the proposed acquisition (Hughes already owned five hotels and six casinos in Las Vegas).

Ten days after the meeting between Mitchell and Danner, Hoover wrote a short but very interesting memo: “Information was received by the Las Vegas, Nevada, office of this Bureau that on March 19, 1970, a representative of Howard Hughes contacted officials of the Dunes Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, and stated that Hughes had received assurance from the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice that no objection would be interposed to Hughes’ purchasing the Dunes Hotel. The above is furnished for your information.”
¹⁴

On the surface, this appeared to be just another Hoover triple play. With a single memo, he covered himself; notified his superior that his activities were being monitored; and made a record for possible future use.

But there was more to it than that. First, Hoover sent the memo not to Mitchell but to McLaren. Mitchell might suppress the document, claiming to have never received it, but Hoover knew McLaren would make it a permanent part of his Hughes file.
^*
Second, and most important, Hoover didn’t mention Danner’s meeting with Mitchell, although he undoubtedly knew of it and two previous meetings earlier in the year.
^†
By citing the Las Vegas field office as his source, he focused attention away from the Justice Department itself, which was probably the real source of the leak.

The big question was how much more Hoover knew—and whether he was aware that approval of the Dunes’s acquisition was linked to a $100,000 payoff to Richard Nixon from Howard Hughes. All of this may or may not have been discussed by Danner and Mitchell, and may or may not have been overheard by the FBI by electronic means.

That July, Danner met Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo on the patio of the western White House, in San Clemente, California, and handed him a bulky envelope containing $50,000 in $100 bills. The following month, Danner made the second $50,000 payment, in bills of similar denomination, to Rebozo at his Key Biscayne, Florida, bank.

It’s possible that J. Edgar Hoover learned of these payments. (At the very least, he must have strongly suspected that a deal had been struck in return for the Justice Department’s sudden about-face.) It’s also possible that he never learned of them. Ironically, whether he knew or didn’t know made little difference, for Nixon and Mitchell couldn’t be sure he didn’t know. To them it must have seemed that the FBI director, with his March 29, 1970, memo,
possessed the key which could expose the $100,000 Hughes “contribution.”

The
fear
of what J. Edgar Hoover knew was often as potent, and effective, as anything that was actually in his files.

The “something bad” which Hoover had predicted happened, on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, when National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of protesting students, killing four and wounding nine.

As with the John F. Kennedy assassination, J. Edgar Hoover was quick to make up his mind about who was responsible, telling the White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh, in a May 11 telephone call, that “the students invited and got what they deserved.”
¹⁶

Later that same month, after A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the former governor of Kentucky, punched a student in the nose during a demonstration on the University of Kentucky campus, Hoover wrote him a letter of commendation, stating that if such prompt action were taken by others the country wouldn’t be bothered by similar disorders.

Appearing before a Senate subcommittee later that year, the FBI director complained that the investigation of the four Kent State deaths had cost the Bureau $274,100, with the 302 agents assigned to the case having to put in 6,316 hours of overtime. By contrast, although Hoover didn’t mention it, the deaths of the Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had cost the FBI only the usual informant’s fee, plus a $300 bonus.

On May 22, 1970, Clyde Tolson reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy. To please Hoover, Attorney General Mitchell arranged to rehire him as an annuitant, meaning the FBI paid the difference between his annuity from the Civil Service Commission and his Bureau salary. However, to qualify, Tolson had to pass a physical examination.

Between 1951 and 1970 Tolson had been hospitalized eleven times. In 1963 and 1965 it was for a duodenal ulcer. In 1964 he’d required heart surgery, repair of an abdominal aneurysm of the grand aorta. In 1966 it was for a hypertensive cerebral vascular accident, that is, a severe stroke, to his right side. In 1967 it was the same, only the stroke was to his left side, with complications of hypertensive arteriosclerotic heart disease and a flare-up of the duodenal ulcer. By 1967 he was down to 135 pounds. He never regained the lost weight.

By 1970 he was gaunt, with a gray pallor, unable to shave himself or write with either hand. He was completely blind in the right eye, although the sight would mysteriously return from time to time. He walked very slowly, sort of dragging the right leg behind him.

The director, by contrast, still walked as fast as ever.

Periodically, the federal appellate court judge Edward Tamm lectured at the FBI Academy. Often, following his talk, the Bureau’s longtime number three man would drop in on the director for a brief chat. On one such occasion, Tamm, Hoover, and Tolson decided to leave the building together. When the elevator to the rear of the director’s office failed to respond, they went down the
hall to another elevator. “I walked in long fast steps, as did the director,” Judge Tamm later recalled. “The two of us just flew down the hall, and poor old Clyde was tottering along behind, just having an awful time. When we got to the elevator, we had to wait for what seemed a long time, I suppose forty seconds or so, for Tolson.”
¹⁷

It was a common sight, and many who witnessed it thought Hoover cruel or insensitive. But those closest to him, his aides, knew he was trying to get Clyde to exert himself to greater effort. However, Emile Coué’s maxim “Every day in every way I am getting better and better” had little effect on a man with brain damage. Hoover was gradually losing Tolson, but he refused to accept that fact. “I can’t let him retire,” the director told Mark Felt. “If he does, he’ll die.”
¹⁸

Clyde Tolson passed the physical.

With Tolson so often incapacitated, many of his duties and much of his authority fell on the shoulders of the Bureau’s number three man, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach. But on June 6, 1970, DeLoach unexpectedly announced his retirement, just two years short of reaching his thirty-year mark. Officially, DeLoach was leaving the bureau to accept an offer he couldn’t refuse: President Nixon’s friend Donald Kendall had offered to make him a vice-president at Pepsico. But Washington gossip credited the
Los Angeles Times
reporter Jack Nelson, rather than Kendall, with DeLoach’s sudden departure.

Nelson had once been one of the Bureau’s favored reporters, the recipient of numerous “leaks.” However, while heading the
Times
Atlanta bureau, Nelson had infuriated Hoover by interviewing witnesses to the slaying of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
before
the FBI could locate them. (Even worse,
Life
had pointed this out in its assassination coverage.) Also, that same year, two Ku Klux Klan terrorists had been shot down while attempting to bomb the home of a Jewish businessman in Meridian, Mississippi. One, the schoolteacher Kathy Ainsworth, had been killed, while her companion, Thomas Tarrants III, had been seriously wounded. At first Nelson, relying on his FBI and police sources, had played the story the way the Bureau told it: “Teacher by Day—Terrorist by Night.” Only later, in digging deeper, did he learn that the FBI and local police had paid two Ku Klux Klan informants $36,500 to set up Ainsworth and Tarrants. Further irritating Hoover, Nelson also proved, in his book
The Orangeburg Massacre,
written with Jack Bass and published in 1970, that three FBI agents had been present and witnessed the shootings on the campus of South Carolina State College at Orangeburg, and had perjured themselves by denying this under oath.

Shortly after his transfer to the Washington bureau of the
Times
in January 1970, Nelson had begun investigating rumors of corruption among the top executives of the FBI. And a number of these rumors concerned DeLoach.

But Nelson didn’t stop at that. He began asking very knowledgeable questions about the director himself: Was it true that the FBI Laboratory had designed and constructed a porch for J. Edgar Hoover’s home at 4936 Thirtieth
Place NW, even building a scale model in the lab? How often did the FBI director replace his bulletproof limousines and how did the cost compare to that paid by the president, who rented his? What had happened to the income from Hoover’s books, in particular the best-selling
Masters of Deceit,
and had they actually been ghostwritten by FBI employees on public time? How much was the Bureau paid per installment for the TV series “The FBI,” and exactly what was the mysterious “FBI Recreational Fund,” which supposedly shared in the revenues from the books and TV series? Who controlled the no-contact list? When the fugitive Angela Davis was captured, all the major newspapers were alerted in advance that the arrest was about to be made except the
Los Angeles Times.

Although Nelson continued to ask questions about the FBI, his DeLoach story never appeared. Although no one concerned is inclined to talk about it, apparently a deal was struck between the
Los Angeles Times
management and the FBI: an end to the
Times’s
investigation of DeLoach, in return for DeLoach’s leaving the government.

According to Cartha DeLoach, when he told Hoover that he was resigning to take the Pepsico job, the director plaintively responded, “I thought you were the one who would never leave me.”
¹⁹

However, according to William Sullivan, the director was “very anxious” that DeLoach resign. “DeLoach left under a big cloud.” The best evidence of Hoover’s anger at DeLoach was the choice of his replacement: William Sullivan. “DeLoach and I were bitter enemies,” Sullivan recalled, “and frankly, [Hoover] appointed me in order to humiliate DeLoach, because the worst thing he could do to DeLoach was to appoint his number one enemy in that spot. By doing that, he degraded DeLoach…”
²⁰

Cartha “Deke” DeLoach was the second Judas. Hoover’s new assistant to the director would become the third.

The
Los Angeles Times
reporter Jack Nelson moved to the top of Hoover’s current enemies list, the FBI director ordering him smeared as an irresponsible drunk. As Nelson observed years later, after reading his own FBI file, “What they didn’t realize is that you can’t ruin a newspaper man by branding him a drunk.”
²¹

On June 5, 1970, President Nixon met in the Oval Office with his four intelligence chiefs: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Vice-Admiral Noel Gayler, director of the National Security Agency; and Lieutenant General Donald V. Bennett, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He was disappointed in the quality of intelligence he had been receiving on dissidents, Nixon told them. The nation was undergoing an “epidemic of unprecedented domestic terrorism,” yet too little was known about it. “Certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans—mostly under 30—are determined
to destroy our society,” the president claimed. To meet this threat, the government needed “hard intelligence” and “a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.”
²²

To this end, he’d decided to appoint an ad hoc committee consisting of the four intelligence chiefs, naming J. Edgar Hoover its chairman. His own liaison would be Tom Charles Huston.

A former national chairman of the arch-conservative Young Americans for Freedom and a recently appointed White House aide, the twenty-nine-year-old Huston was a novice in the domestic-security field—his only experience being a brief hitch with Army intelligence—but he tried to make up for it with determination and an arrogance befitting the personal representative of the president. Hoover’s dislike for him was instantaneous. “That snot-nosed kid,” is what Hoover referred to him as in conversations with William Sullivan; “that hippie intellectual.”
²³

Before the meeting broke up, the president asked Hoover and Helms if there were any problems in coordination between their two agencies. Both assured him there were not.

The ad hoc committee met three days later, in the FBI director’s conference room, and immediately ran into problems. The president, chairman Hoover said, wanted them to prepare a historical summary of unrest in the country up to the present.

This wasn’t at all what the president wanted, Huston interjected. Hoover had misunderstood the president’s intent. “We’re not talking about the dead past,” the young presidential assistant told the aging FBI director; “we’re talking about the living present.”
²⁴
The report was not to be a historical summary but a current and future threat assessment, a review of intelligence gaps, and a summary of options for operational changes.