J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (125 page)

Altogether, many thousands of dollars were missing, misused, misappropriated, and/or unaccounted for.

Another question or two would have led to the United States Recording Company of Washington, D.C.; the close relationship between its president, Joseph Tait, and Assistant to the Director John P. Mohr; and the weekend poker games at the Blue Ridge Club.

One of the special agents who handled Hoover’s and Tolson’s taxes once told William Sullivan that if the truth about the director’s stock purchases, oil well leases, and income tax returns ever came out, Mr. Hoover would spend the rest of his life on Alcatraz. He said it in such a way, Sullivan recalled, as to indicate that he feared he’d probably be occupying an adjoining cell.

No, it was better to let Annie Fields find the body.

Yet the whole cover-up nearly came unraveled within days after J. Edgar Hoover’s death, with the anonymous letter to the new acting director, L. Patrick Gray III. In addition to charging that J. P. Mohr had lied about there being no secret files, and informing Gray that they had already been moved to 4936 Thirtieth Place NW, the letter writer claimed that still other things were being “systematically hidden from” Gray, citing, as two examples, the misuse of the Exhibits Section and Hoover and Tolson’s use of FBI employees to prepare their taxes and handle their investments.

However, following in the footsteps of the late director, Gray didn’t investigate the charges but rather ordered an investigation to try to determine the anonymous letter writer’s identity.
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Murder or old age?

The facts seemed simple enough; he was an old man—seventy-seven years old—and old men die. Yet given his prominence, and the times, it was perhaps inevitable that there would be rumors that J. Edgar Hoover had been murdered.

Acting Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had tried to squelch such
speculation in his official announcement of the FBI director’s death, when he stated, “His personal physician informed me that his death was due to natural causes.”
¹

Lending support, if not substance, to the rumors were the three-hour delay before Hoover’s death was announced, the failure to conduct an autopsy, and certain discrepancies regarding both the time and the cause of death.

But the delay was due to the Bureau’s insistence that its personnel be notified before there was a public announcement, and autopsies were performed in the District of Columbia, as in most other jurisdictions, only when (1) requested by the family, (2) the cause of death was unknown, or (3) there was suspicion that the death had occurred from other than natural causes. None of the three applied in this case.

John Edgar Hoover’s official certificate of death, as prepared by the District of Columbia Department of Public Health, gave the date of death as “5-2-72” and the hour of death as “9
A.M.
” Since the body had been found twenty-five to thirty minutes earlier, and Hoover had died sometime after 10:15 the previous night, this seemed to be clearly in error. However, according to a spokesman for the coroner’s office, if the exact time of death was not known, the time the deceased was pronounced dead was often used, and nine in the morning would have been about the time Hoover’s physician, Dr. Robert Choisser, arrived and examined the body.

Less easily explained was another discrepancy. In filling out the death certificate, Dr. James L. Luke, the district’s medical examiner, listed the cause of death as “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,” giving as his source “Dr. Robert Choisser.”
²
Yet Dr. Choisser told the press, the following day, that Hoover had had very mild hypertension—that is, slightly elevated blood pressure—for over twenty years; that he was what was called a “borderline hypertensive”; and that “he never had any evidence of heart disease,” as far as he, Dr. Choisser, knew. He said nothing about the 1957 “incident.”
³

In the absence of an autopsy (which would also have revealed whether Hoover was using amphetamines), the confusion remains, but it is far from evidence of homicide.

With the revelations of Watergate and the activities of the White House Plumbers, the murder talk resurfaced. To the shock of the Ervin committee investigators, Arthur Egan, a reporter for William Loeb’s
Manchester Union Leader,
who was being quizzed about Teamsters payments to Nixon’s 1972 campaign, referred, almost in passing, to “the murder of J. Edgar Hoover.” Questioned behind closed doors in a secret session, Egan stated, “Everyone on hearing that says I am nuts, but somebody in the Watergate thing murdered…J. Edgar Hoover.” Egan admitted, however, that he had no proof of this, that it was just his “own hunch.”
^*
4

Another witness supposedly told the Ervin committee, according
to
the
Harvard Crimson,
that he had heard that some of the men later involved in the Watergate burglary, led by a man familiar with the security of the FBI director’s home, had burglarized Hoover’s residence and that a poison of the thiophosphate genre was placed on Hoover’s personal toilet articles, inducing a fatal heart attack.

Helen Gandy wasn’t the only one busily destroying documents in the hours after the director died. With the activation of the “D,” or destruct, list—which was then itself apparently destroyed—shredders were churning out confetti on every floor at SOG, from FBIHQ on five to the printshop in the basement. Similarly hectic activity was underway in the Old Post Office Building, where the Washington field office was located, as well as in every field office and legat in the FBI’s widespread empire.

With the announcement on May 3 that the new FBI director would be an “outsider” and not “one of us,” the activity became even more frenetic. It was CYA time. There wasn’t an assistant director, or a special agent in charge, who didn’t have some documents that he didn’t want to have to explain.

But there were oversights. “Do not file” memos that
were
filed, or put in special folders and forgotten. Part of Tolson’s own Personal File, as well as some fifty folders in Lou Nichols’s Official/Confidential file, were overlooked. A nearly complete record of “surreptitious entries” committed by the New York field office between 1954 and 1972 remained, unshredded and unburned. John “Stonehead” Malone had been a pack rat.

Hoover’s FBI had generated so much incriminating paper that it was impossible to destroy it all.

On May 4, 1972, two days after Hoover’s death, Helen Gandy gave Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt the FBI director’s Official/Confidential file. Felt moved the file, which filled twelve cardboard boxes, into his own office, where he transferred it into six two-drawer, combination-lock filing cabinets.

The OC file consisted of 167 separate folders. At some time unknown, except to those involved, 3 of these folders disappeared. Each bore the name of a current or former FBI executive: one had, rather innocently, stumbled into a security breach; the second had, less innocently, been involved in various financial improprieties; while the third was suspected of, among other things, having links with organized crime.

On being told, three years later, that the Official/Confidential file still existed, and that Attorney General Edward Levi had possession of it, William Sullivan told the writer David Wise, “Yeah, but he didn’t locate the gold.” John Mohr had removed the real gold, Sullivan maintained, which consisted of
some “very mysterious files…documents that were in Hoover’s office, very sensitive and explosive files, containing political information, derogatory information on key figures in the country.”
⁵

Presumably Sullivan was referring to Hoover’s Personal File, though he told a House investigator that trying to understand the difference between the various files, was “a bucket of worms.”
⁶

The destruction of J. Edgar Hoover’s Personal File—if indeed it was destroyed in its entirety—took two and a half months. According to Helen Gandy’s sworn testimony, taken three years after these events, she destroyed about half of the file while still working at FBIHQ (between May 2 and May 12, 1972) and the other half while working in the basement of Hoover’s former residence (between May 13 and July 17).

Miss Gandy never specified how large this file was. She did state, however, that some thirty-five file cabinet drawers were emptied and their contents placed in cardboard boxes, for transfer to 4936 Thirtieth Place NW. In addition, she also testified, six filing cabinets were moved, four containing information relating to the late director’s “personal business affairs” and two relating to the associate director’s.

The Washington field office handled both stages of the move: hauling the materials from FBIHQ to Thirtieth Place NW; then—after Gandy had carefully examined them, page by page, and finding nothing of an official nature, or so she testified—taking them back across town to the Old Post Office Building for shredding and burning. No records were kept of these transfers. But there were recollections.

Raymond Smith was one of the truck drivers involved in the first stage of the move. In a signed deposition, Smith stated that, in addition to the cardboard boxes, he personally hauled not six but twenty to twenty-five file cabinets to Mr. Hoover’s home. Since the cabinets were full, and he’d helped lug them down the stairs, he remembered the incident well. Moreover, he recalled, during the move one of the drawers had come open and he’d noticed it was filled with light-colored folders, each roughly about one inch thick.

Smith’s deposition was taken in 1975, during a secret “in-house” investigation ordered by Attorney General Levi and participated in none too enthusiastically by the Bureau. And it posed problems, since it contradicted the statements of Helen Gandy, John Mohr, Annie Fields, and James Crawford, all of whom agreed they had never seen that many filing cabinets in the basement. In an attempt at resolution, the FBI agents reinterviewed Smith, twice, but he adamantly stuck to his story.

The investigating team eventually decided that although Smith’s work records supported his claim to have participated in the move, and although all the other details, including the color of the file folders, were correct, in regard to the number of cabinets, it stated, “We can only conclude that while honest in
his belief Smith has a jumbled recollection of the facts due to the passage of over three years since Mr. Hoover’s death.”
⁷

Perhaps.

J. Edgar Hoover left a simple, one-page will.

He specified that his grave, and those of his mother, father, and sister Marguerite (who died in infancy), all of which were located in Congressional Cemetery, be given perpetual care.

He also requested that Clyde Tolson “keep, or arrange for a good home, or homes, for my two dogs.”
^*

No provisions were made for his heirs-in-law, his two nephews and four nieces, the children of his sister Lillian and of his brother, Dickerson, Jr.

Helen Gandy was left $5,000; Annie Fields $3,000, to be paid over a period of one year; and James Crawford $2,000, to be paid over a period of three years. Crawford was also given half of Hoover’s personal wearing apparel, the other half going to W. Samuel Noisette.
^†

Both George Ruch (Hoover’s first ghostwriter) and Louis Nichols (his longtime publicist) had named a son after the FBI director. The namesake John Edgar Ruch inherited Hoover’s platinum watch, with white gold wristband, and John Edgar Nichols his small star sapphire ring. Each also received two pairs of cuff links.

To Clyde A. Tolson, whom he also named his executor, Hoover gave, devised, and bequeathed “all the rest, residue and remainder of my estate, both real and personal.”
¹⁰

The value of J. Edgar Hoover’s estate was estimated to be approximately $560,000.

There were indications that this was a
very
low estimate. According to Hoover’s next-door neighbor and fellow antiques collector, Anthony Calomaris, who knew the house and its contents well, 4936 Thirtieth Street NW, which had an accessed evaluation of $40,000, was “worth at least $160,000,” while the $70,000 declared value of Hoover’s jewelry, books, antiques, and other household effects could be doubled, “and that would be conservative.”
^‡
11

Hoover also left $160,000 in stocks and bonds (a cautious investor, he rarely purchased more than a hundred shares of any one corporation); $125,000 in oil, gas, and mineral leases in Texas and Louisiana; and $217,000 in cash. Of this, $54,000 was on deposit in Riggs National Bank and American Federal Savings & Loan; $45,000 was in life insurance; $59,000 was due him from his retirement plan; and $18,000 was unpaid salary and unused terminal leave.

His only debt—except for funeral expenses of $5,000—was a bill for $650, for two custom-made suits, which he’d ordered from Salvatori Candido, custom tailor, New York City, the month before he died.

One reason why Hoover’s estate was evaluated so low was that Tolson, or someone representing him, had begun quietly selling the antiques, through C. G. Sloane’s auction house, even before the appraisers arrived, as Maxine Cheshire revealed in the
Washington Post.

Thomas A. Mead and Barry Hagen were the District of Columbia court appraisers assigned to inventory the late FBI director’s estate.
^*
Because of Hoover’s acquisitive nature, it was a mammoth undertaking, resulting in a list fifty-two pages long with some eight hundred separate items (one not untypical entry read, “5 doz. ashtrays with FBI seal”). Experienced appraisers, they finished the job in four days—July 11, 12, and 13, 1972, with an additional appraisal, on September 14, of some jewelry and stocks Hoover had kept in a safe-deposit box at Riggs Bank.

Beginning at the top of the house, the attic, they worked their way down through all the antiques, oriental rugs, and autographed pictures to the basement, where, on the afternoon of the second day, they encountered Helen Gandy and John Mohr. Gandy, who was working at a secretarial desk off to one side of the main room, mostly ignored them, but Mohr showed more interest, sticking around that day and the next, watching them open the boxes containing Hoover’s possessions. Periodically Tolson would wander in and out, but mostly he remained upstairs.