J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (123 page)

Nervously, Dean plunged right in. “Mr. Hoover, we, the White House that is, Mr. Ehrlichman and others, have good reason to believe the so-called Dita Beard memorandum is a phony, and we’d like to have your lab test it because we are sure that your lab will confirm that it is a forgery.”

Hoover sat back and thought about this for a minute, then responded, “Of course I’ll examine it. I’ll be happy to.”

Hoover then told Dean to give the original memorandum to Mark Felt (Anderson had turned it over to Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which was conducting the Kleindienst confirmation hearings), together with typing samples and any dated documents from Mrs. Beard’s machine which could be used for comparison purposes.

“This will be most helpful,” Dean observed, “because Dick Kleindienst is taking a terrible beating over that document. His confirmation hearing has nothing to do with him anymore. It’s a political attack on the administration now. Jack Anderson started it all with the memo, and if we can show it’s a forgery—”

“I understand exactly, Mr. Dean, what you need,” Hoover interrupted, “and I’m delighted to be of service. Jack Anderson is the lowest form of human being to walk the earth. He’s a muckraker who lies, steals and let me tell you this, Mr. Dean, he’ll go lower than dog shit for a story.”

“Lower than dog shit,” the director emphasized.

“Mr. Dean, let me tell you a story. My housekeeper puts paper down in the hall, every night, for my dogs, and every morning she picks up the paper and puts it in the trashcans in the back of the house. Well, one day Anderson and his boys came out to my house to fish in my trashcans for a story. To look at my
trash,
can you believe that? Anyway, they fished all through that trash and all the way to the bottom, underneath the dog shit, to see what they could find. So when you’re talking about Anderson I know you’re talking about a man that’ll go lower than dog shit to find his stories. Isn’t that something, Mr. Dean?”

The president’s counsel started to laugh, then, realizing that this was not the response the FBI director expected, instead mumbled, “It certainly is some story, Mr. Hoover, some story indeed.”

In showing Dean out, the director offered, “If you’d like some material from our files on Jack Anderson, I’d be pleased to send it over.” Dean happily accepted.

Colson reported Dean’s progress to the president. The mention of the typewriter set Nixon to reminiscing about one of his six crises. “The typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case.”
⁹

In the meantime, ITT had hired its own documents expert, Pearl Tytell, to examine the Dita Beard memorandum. Provided with a photocopy, she declared that it was probably a forgery, but she wanted to withhold judgment until she’d examined the original, which was retrieved from the FBI. Tytell then tested it and stated that she would stake her reputation on her findings: the document was a forgery and had been typed as late as January 1972, rather than in June 1971, when it was supposedly written.

Ivan Conrad, head of the FBI Laboratory, concluded otherwise. After retrieving the document and submitting it and the typing samples to scientific analysis, Ivan told Felt that there was strong—though not entirely conclusive—evidence that the memorandum had been typed “at or about the time it was dated” and that it was probably authentic, although, in his official report, Conrad phrased this with greater care, stating that the laboratory was unable to make a definite finding.
¹⁰

Felt reported this to Hoover and then to Dean, who carried the bad news into the Oval Office. According to Dean, the president was furious. “I don’t understand Edgar sometimes,” he complained. “He hates Anderson.” Adding to Nixon’s astonishment was the discovery that the promised file on Anderson which Hoover finally sent Dean contained nothing but newspaper and magazine clippings.

Pressure was put on the FBI—by Ehrlichman, Dean, Mardian, and even L. Patrick Gray III
^*
—to “modify” the wording of the final report so that it wouldn’t conflict with the findings of the ITT analysts. The president himself even wrote Hoover a personal note, asking him to “cooperate.”
¹¹

It would have been easy for him to do so, and certainly personally advantageous. If the FBI Laboratory, with its tremendous public prestige, had agreed with the Tytell findings, the issue would probably have died there; the president might well have reconsidered his decision to fire Hoover if he was re-elected, deciding he was still far too valuable to replace; it would have put the new attorney general even more deeply in his debt (Hoover had already confronted Kleindienst with evidence that he had failed to report a $100,000 bribe offer in the Carson case); ITT and the other large corporations which Hoover had favored so frequently over the years would have been properly grateful, probably providing Hoover behind-the-scenes support if ever needed; and he would have delivered a devastating blow to his old adversary Jack Anderson.

On March 20 ITT released the findings of its experts.

On March 21 Dita Beard’s attorneys released her sworn affidavit in which—contrary to her earlier admissions to Anderson’s associate Brit Hume—she denied having written the memorandum.

Everyone now waited for the FBI report.

Senator Eastland, and John Dean, called almost hourly, wanting to know when it would be ready. Mardian set a deadline for its receipt, 10:00
A.M.
on Monday, March 27.

Hoover beat the deadline. He had the report delivered to Eastland late on the afternoon of Thursday, March 23.

Dean called Felt at seven that evening and asked, “Did you change it or was it in its original form?”

“It was in its original form,” Felt replied.

After a long pause, Dean said, “I see,” and hung up.
¹²

Despite all the pressures, and temptations, J. Edgar Hoover had refused to prostitute the reputation of the FBI.

Colson wanted Hoover fired immediately. There was more talk of “elevating” him to the post of director emeritus, election year or not. But a secret poll revealed that the FBI director still retained public support, while there remained the mysterious matter—a subject of considerable speculation among the president’s aides—of exactly what Hoover had in his files on Richard Milhous Nixon.

The FBI director and the president continued to communicate officially—the barrage of FBI reports to the White House, each bearing J. Edgar Hoover’s signature, never abated—but there was no personal communication between them until mid-April.

Sometime on or after May 2, 1972, Nixon wrote in his diary, “I remember the last conversation I had with him about two weeks ago when I called him and mentioned the fine job the Bureau had done on the hijacking cases. He expressed his appreciation for that call and also expressed his total support for what we are doing in Vietnam.”
¹³

It was the last time they spoke.

Ed Tamm saw Hoover for the last time on Wednesday, April 26, following a lecture the judge had given at the National Police Academy. Stopping by the director’s office, Tamm found Hoover just as sharp mentally, and almost as vigorous physically, as when they’d first met. The two went back a long way, over forty years, but Hoover was not in the mood for reminiscing. He was angry about something—Tamm was later unable to remember exactly what—but he recognized a very familiar sign. When the director leaned forward in his chair, the hair bristled on the back of his neck “just like an Airedale’s when it gets mad.” Once upon a time, that signal was capable of frightening the whole Bureau from top to bottom, from headquarters to the field.

“He was just as sharp as ever,” Tamm later recalled. “And just as cold and anti.”
¹⁴

At about nine on Monday morning, May 1, 1972, Tom Moton, who had replaced James Crawford as Hoover’s chauffeur, following the latter’s retirement in January, maneuvered the long black limousine into the basement garage of the Department of Justice Building, stopping just a few feet from the director’s private elevator, and Hoover got out. He was alone. Since Tolson’s last stroke, the pair no longer rode to work together, Tolson’s driver first taking him to his doctor’s office. This morning, however, Tolson had already called Mark Felt and told him he didn’t feel well enough to come in.

As soon as the elevator door opened, Moton went to a special phone and called upstairs. The message was brief—”He’s on the way up”—but, as always, it caused a flurry of activity in the director’s suite, the word quickly spreading to the rest of the building.

“Nothing unusual happened this day,” according to Mark Felt. The deputy associate director saw Hoover and talked to him several times on the intercom. “He was alert, forceful, typically aggressive, and, as far as I could tell, completely normal in every respect.”
¹⁵

Contrary to Felt’s recollections, May 1 was far from an ordinary day. Shortly after the director’s arrival, Helen Gandy brought in an item that was certain to raise the aged Hoover’s blood pressure: Jack Anderson’s syndicated column from that morning’s
Washington Post,
the first in a series of exposés of the FBI.

“FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, the old curmudgeon of law enforcement,” Hoover read, “fiercely resisted a White House suggestion that he spare a few hundred agents to crack down on drug abuses. But he can spare agents to snoop into the sex habits, business affairs and political pursuits of individuals who aren’t even remotely involved in illegal activity.”

Anderson had written such things before. Only this time there was a difference: the column was based on information from the Bureau’s own files.

“Hoover’s gumshoes have loaded FBI files with titillating tidbits about such diverse figures as movie actors Marlon Brando and Harry Belafonte, football
heroes Joe Namath and Lance Rentzel, ex-boxing champs Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali, black leaders Ralph Abernathy and Roy Innis.

“It’s no secret that the FBI hounded the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the apostle of racial brotherhood and nonviolent protest. We have seen FBI reports on his political activities and sex life.”

What wasn’t known, Anderson continued, was that the FBI was now “watching his widow, Coretta King.” Others kept under regular surveillance, the column noted, included “the indefatigable muckraker I. F. Stone.” Anderson then quoted from an FBI surveillance report which read, “On February 11, 1966, at 1:09
P.M.
, the subject was observed to meet Oleg D. Kalugin in front of Harvey’s Restaurant, 1107 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. Together, they subsequently entered Harvey’s Restaurant.”
^*

“Hoover also appears to have a hangup on sex,” the FBI director read. “His gumshoes go out of their way to find out who’s sleeping with whom in Washington and Hollywood.”

Anderson then cited the file of “a famous movie actor.” Even though it contained the statement that the actor “had not been the subject of an FBI investigation,” and further noted that he had no criminal record or fingerprint data, the file “contained nothing but rumors about his sex life.”

Deleting only the actor’s name, Anderson then quoted verbatim from an FBI summary report: “During 1965, a confidential informant reported that several years ago while he was in New York he had an affair with movie star -------. The informant states from personal knowledge he knew that ------- was a homosexual. The belief was expressed that by ‘personal knowledge’ the informant meant he had personally indulged in homosexual acts with ------- or had witnessed or received the information from individuals who had done so.

“On another occasion, information was received by the Los Angeles Office of the FBI that it was common knowledge in the motion picture industry that ------- was suspected of having homosexual tendencies.

“It is to be noted in May, 1961, a confidential source in New York also stated that ------- definitely was a homosexual.”
¹⁷

The name Anderson excised from his column was “Rock Hudson.”

Because of the Anderson column, May Day of 1972 was hardly a typical day. It put a damper on the plans for the special celebration scheduled for the tenth, marking J. Edgar Hoover’s forty-eighth anniversary as director of the FBI; it caused the Bureau’s top executives to jump apprehensively every time there was a call on the intercom; and it was
the
topic of conversation both at SOG and in the field, together with speculation on what tomorrow’s column would reveal and—far more important—how the director would react.

His initial reaction was easily predictable: Hoover ordered a special investigation to determine who was responsible for the leak.
^*

It was probably the last such investigation he ordered.

The director left his office shortly before six, and Moton drove him to Tolson’s apartment, where the two had dinner. It is not known what was discussed, but it can be presumed that one of the subjects was the columnist whom Hoover had, on various occasions, referred to as a “flea ridden dog,” an “odious garbage collector,” “lower than dog shit,” and “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.”

Moton drove Hoover back to 4936 Thirtieth Place NW, arriving there at 10:15
P.M.

On entering the house, Hoover found that the shipment of rosebushes he’d ordered from Jackson & Perkins had arrived, and he called Crawford to ask him to come by at eight-thirty the next morning so that he could show him where he wanted them planted.

Annie Fields did not hear Hoover come in—her apartment was in the basement—but she later presumed that shortly after his arrival he let his two Cairn terriers, G-Boy and Cindy, out in the backyard as was his custom when he arrived home late.
^†

After letting the dogs back in and resetting the alarm—an elaborate system that had been installed years earlier by the FBI Laboratory and that frequently malfunctioned, awakening neighbors with the screeching tires of hastily dispatched FBI vehicles—J. Edgar Hoover went upstairs to his bedroom on the second floor and undressed for bed.