J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (113 page)

Still unaware that he had lost the battle, Huston continued writing “Eyes Only for Haldeman” memos. “At some point Hoover has to be told who is President…It makes me fighting mad…what Hoover is doing here is putting himself above the President.”
³⁸

Only much later could Huston admit, “I was, for all intents and purposes, writing memos to myself.”
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Shunted off to the side, Huston nevertheless stuck around until June 13, 1971, long after John Dean had taken over responsibility for domestic intelligence.

J. Edgar Hoover had killed the Huston Plan. In its place, the president and his aides would create their own intelligence unit, the White House “Plumbers.”

Hoover had triumphed, taking on and beating the president, his representative, and all three of the other intelligence chiefs. But at a tremendous cost. Now even the president agreed that Hoover would probably have to be replaced.

Following Hoover’s victory, he and Tolson flew to California for their annual three-week nonvacation at La Jolla. It was a familiar, comfortable routine: the visits to Scripps Clinic, which Hoover got out of the way during the first few days, before Del Mar opened; leisurely mornings around the pool, studying Annenberg’s
Daily Racing Form;
afternoons at the races, Jesse Strider driving them back and forth in the FBI limousine; followed by a nap, then bourbon and sizzling steaks (the latter flown in from Texas) by the cabanas in the evening, with all the “good old boys” in attendance. Those who were still
living, that is. Joe McCarthy was gone, as were Clint Murchison, Sr., and Sid Richardson. Then a couple days, toward the end of the trip, at Dorothy Lamour and Bill Howard’s place in Beverly Hills, just the four of them sitting around the barbecue, with the director mixing his G-man cocktails.

It was exactly the same, and yet it wasn’t. There was an air of finality to many things these days. Hoover disliked change, yet, despite his displeasure, and all of his power, he couldn’t prevent or postpone it. Even Harvey’s had changed, Julius Lully having sold it to Jesse Brinkman, who had the effrontery to bill them for their meals and drinks. They never went back.

Had Hoover been told that this would be his and Tolson’s last trip to La Jolla, he probably wouldn’t have been surprised. It was not that Hoover sensed his own mortality, but rather that Clyde’s health was failing at an alarming rate. Many days he simply stayed in bed. As for the director’s own health, he later claimed, “I was in better shape at my August 1970 physical than I was in 1938.”
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Still, Hoover returned to SOG tired and in a bad mood. In the absence of the director and associate director, William Sullivan had been in charge. Upon their return, Sullivan’s enemies had mounted a full-scale attack on the new assistant to the director. Although DeLoach was gone, most of his people remained, albeit with their power greatly reduced, and, in collusion with John Mohr, who bitterly resented Sullivan’s promotion to the number three spot, they fed Hoover and Tolson a steady stream of gossip and criticism.

Although rarely witnessed outside the FBI hierarchy, the director’s temper tantrums were legendary. According to his aides, they increased dramatically in the fall of 1970. It wasn’t that the boss was senile—no one thought that—but rather that in his old age he’d grown querulous, petulant, easily riled. Counting the days until his December trip to Miami, everyone at FBIHQ trod carefully.

Except William Sullivan.

On October 12 the assistant to the director, a popular speaker on the FBI lecture circuit, gave a speech to a group of UPI editors at Williamsburg, Virginia. All went well until the question period, when someone asked, “Isn’t it true that the American Communist party is responsible for the racial riots and all the academic violence and upheaval?”
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Sullivan knew the answer by rote. But he was tired of lying, tired of wasting badly needed manpower and funds on a long-extinct menace, while real Soviet spies were roaming all over the country undetected. For example, the Washington field office had a whole squad assigned to nothing else but CPUSA members, although there were only four in the Washington, D.C., area.

Sullivan decided to answer honestly. “No, it’s absolutely untrue,” he responded. There is no evidence that any one group of people or any single nationwide conspiracy is behind the disorders on the campus or in the ghettos, he said. As for the CPUSA, it is not nearly as extensive or effective as it used to be, and it is “not in any way causing or directing or controlling the unrest we
suffer today.” There would still be problems with student dissent and racial tension even if the Communist party no longer existed, Sullivan declared.
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This was major heresy, and Sullivan knew he was in trouble even before he returned to SOG. The director was furious: “How do you expect me to get my appropriations if you keep downgrading the Party?” he screamed.
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William Sullivan had made his last speech for the FBI.

Sullivan was not the only target of Hoover’s rage.

While doing graduate work at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City, Special Agent John Shaw disagreed with some critical remarks that one of his professors, Dr. Abraham S. Blumberg, had made about the FBI and its director. In rebuttal, Shaw wrote Blumberg a fifteen-page letter, admitting that the FBI had some faults but for the most part defending the organization. Shaw’s effort was sincere, albeit naive. Especially the latter. Shaw had the FBI secretarial pool type the letter. Rough drafts of eight of the fifteen pages were found during a routine wastepaper basket inspection.

Ordered by his superiors to provide the complete text, Shaw refused. Within hours, he received a telegram from the director accusing him of “atrocious judgment” in not immediately reporting the professor’s adverse criticism to his superiors, and placing him on probation. His gun, badge, and credentials were confiscated.

Hoover then ordered him transferred to Butte, Montana. Shaw requested a postponement of the transfer, explaining that his wife was dying of cancer and that he had to care for their four children. With a total lack of sympathy for his situation, Hoover ordered Shaw dismissed, “with prejudice.”

The FBI director did not stop with Shaw. When John Jay College officials refused to fire Professor Blumberg, Hoover ordered the fifteen remaining FBI agents enrolled there to resign. When a teacher at American University, in Washington, D.C., criticized the director’s actions at John Jay, eleven FBI clerical employees were yanked from AU.

Since his outburst before the women’s press club in 1964, when he’d angrily denounced the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover had not held an open press conference or given a personal interview.
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On November 16, 1970, the FBI director did something totally unexpected: he granted an exclusive interview to a reporter from a newspaper that was at the very top of the FBI’s no-contact list: the
Washington Post.

It began with a bet: lunch at the Sans Souci. During the summer of 1970 the
Post
’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, decided to try something new. Traditionally, the major newspapers assigned the same reporter to both the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice, someone who was either a lawyer or well
versed in the law—in short, a legal reporter. But Richard Nixon’s Justice Department was different. Because he was the president’s closest adviser, John Mitchell was first and foremost a politician, and only secondarily the attorney general of the United States. So Bradlee reassigned the political reporter Ken Clawson, who had been on the White House detail, to Justice.

Clawson had been on his new assignment only about a month when Bradlee asked him to try to get some major stories out of the FBI, which had not only blacklisted the
Post
(although Bradlee did not know of the Bureau’s no-contact list, he felt its effect) but greatly favored its local competitor, the
Washington Star.

Possessed of more than a little gall, Clawson thought he might start with an interview with the director, and he wrote Hoover a letter, on
Washington Post
stationery, asking for an appointment. The director’s reply was succinct: “I received your letter. I can see no opportunity in the foreseeable future for you and me to get together.”

“And this pissed me off,” Clawson recalled. But Bradlee only laughed at the letter; it was exactly what he’d expected. Doubly irritated, Clawson bet Bradlee that he would interview Hoover within thirty days. The bet was lunch at the Sans Souci, one of Washington’s more expensive “in” spots.

Having just come off the White House beat, Clawson had very good connections there.
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He asked the president’s two top aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, if they’d ask the president to write a personal letter to the FBI director, requesting that he see him. But neither wanted to get involved. Clawson also had good contacts on the Hill, among them the director’s close friend Senator James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. How about intimating that you’ll cut his appropriations if he doesn’t see me? Clawson suggested. “Ken, I love you like a son,” Eastland responded, “but I wouldn’t any more write a letter like that than I would jump off the balcony.” His thirty days nearly up, Clawson finally tried Hoover’s “boss,” John Mitchell. “You’re my last hope,” he told the attorney general. “I want you to order J. Edgar Hoover to see me.” Mitchell thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard, although, once he’d stopped laughing, he turned serious and said, as if to himself, “God knows what the ramifications would be.”

He’d help this much, Mitchell ventured. The FBI director was due to attend a meeting in his office in exactly fifteen minutes. And he’d have to cross the hall to get there.

When Hoover emerged from his office, Clawson was waiting. Standing directly in his path, the reporter introduced himself, said he’d written to request an interview and had instead received “the most negative, ill-mannered” response that he’d ever had from any public official.

Startled that anyone would
dare
approach or speak to him in this manner, the director looked around for his aides, but he was alone. He then gave Clawson a withering gaze that seemed to say, “You’ve done a very nasty thing,” hastily promised to look into the matter, and hurried across the hall to the safety of Mitchell’s office.
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This encounter occurred on Thursday, November 12.

On Monday, November 16, Clawson arrived at the
Post
to find there had been eight urgent calls from the FBI. Returning them, he was told that if he would come over immediately, “the boss” would allow him twenty-five minutes.

What had happened in the interim was that on Sunday, November 15, the press had reviewed Ramsey Clark’s new book,
Crime in America.
Although he’d credited the FBI with a number of accomplishments, the former attorney general had also said that the Bureau suffered from “the excessive domination of a single person, J. Edgar Hoover, and his self-centered concern for his reputation and that of the FBI.”
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Little time was wasted on preliminaries. Clawson’s first question was “The reviews of the Ramsey Clark book came out yesterday and they were very detrimental to you. Is there anything you want to tell me about it?”

Ramsey Clark was a “jellyfish,” Hoover sputtered, “a softie.” He was the worst attorney general he had encountered during his forty-five years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was even worse than Bobby Kennedy, Hoover said. With Clark “you never knew which way he was going to flop on an issue.”

This was the same attorney general who had stood up against the FBI director and refused him permission to wiretap Martin Luther King, Jr., and innumerable others; the same AG whose devotion to civil liberties was so great that Hoover, fearful of what Clark would do if he found out about such illegal “intelligence collecting” techniques as tapping, bugging, mail opening, and bag jobs, had found it expedient to ban them.

“At least Kennedy stuck to his guns,” the director continued, “even when he was wrong.”

By contrast, John Mitchell was an “honest, sincere and very human man.” Hoover added, “There has never been an attorney general for whom I’ve had higher regard.”

This was the same attorney general on whom he was collecting blackmail material.

What about his troubles with Robert Kennedy? Clawson asked.

The trouble with Kennedy, Hoover told Clawson, “was that Kennedy wanted to loosen up our standards and qualifications; to discard the requirement that agents hold degrees in law or accounting. He even wanted to discard the bachelor’s degree as a requirement.

“In short, he wanted more Negro agents.”

He’d told Robert Kennedy, Hoover said, that before he’d lower the standards
of the FBI he’d resign. Immediately after their conversation, he’d gone to the White House and told President Johnson about the confrontation. The president had told him, “Stand by your guns.” He had, Hoover said. “I didn’t speak to Bobby Kennedy the last six months he was in office.”

Clawson knew he had his exclusive in the first ten minutes, but the director was so obviously enjoying himself that he didn’t want to interrupt.

Campus disruptions would stop, Hoover said, “if college presidents had the courage and guts to expel and make it stick.” He praised S. I. Hayakawa for his handling of disruptions at San Francisco State College. Most college administrators are soft, Hoover said. “They come up through the academic process, and there is nothing worse than an intolerant intellectual. They’re soft, and they never want to accept responsibility.”
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An hour had passed. Clawson tried to extricate himself, but Hoover had trotted out the Karpis stories. Finally, after nearly two hours, the reporter pleaded writer’s cramp and the director told him that if he ever needed any assistance from the Bureau, he shouldn’t hesitate to ask.