Official and Confidential (60 page)

Why did Nixon fail to follow through? ‘He was afraid,' said Pitchess. ‘Every goddamn president was afraid of Hoover – Johnson, even Kennedy. All of them, afraid. I was close to Nixon, but he wouldn't be specific. He just said, “I have to handle Hoover with kid gloves.”'

John Connally, who served Nixon as Secretary of the Treasury, saw it, too. ‘Nixon would like to have forced Hoover to retire, but he was not prepared to force it. He didn't trust him. He was fearful …'

Even after Edgar was dead, Nixon would be speaking of his power, in awe, almost as if Edgar were still alive to wield it. ‘He's got files on everybody, goddamnit!' Nixon was to say in 1973, wishing Edgar were there to rescue him from Watergate.

President Johnson had told a friend there was a fat FBI dossier on Nixon. One might have expected it to be bulging with reports of connections to white-collar crime or of dubious business deals. The one item we know about, however, comes as a surprise. It links Richard Nixon with a woman, and an exotic one at that.

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The story began in 1958, when Nixon, then forty-five, married and serving as Vice President, met Marianna Liu, a Hong Kong tour guide in her twenties. This was a chance encounter, but the two met again in Nixon's wilderness years, when he traveled to Hong Kong on business. Liu believes they saw each other each year between 1964 and 1966, when she was working as a hostess at the Den, the cocktail lounge of the local Hilton. The two were photographed together.

By her own account, Liu and a waitress friend visited Nixon and his traveling companion, the controversial businessman Bebe Rebozo, in a suite at the Mandarin Hotel. She – and Nixon – denied any sexual activity. Liu said that when Nixon next came to Hong Kong, she was in the hospital and he sent her flowers and a bottle of her favorite perfume.

The former FBI representative in Hong Kong, however, remembered that the Nixon friendship with Liu caused a security flap. ‘One of my contacts in another U.S. agency,' said Dan Grove, now a security consultant, ‘came to see me one morning and said one of his sources, Marianna Liu, was seeing Nixon. He thought I should be aware of this, because there was a suspicion she was a Chinese agent, that she was seeing U.S. Navy officers. He said he knew Nixon had had a top-secret briefing on the People's Republic of China, and that made his contact with Liu a risk.'

Grove went to the Hilton that lunchtime to talk to Liu. ‘My colleague,' he recalled, just said to her, “You were with a big man last night, weren't you?” And she said, “Yes, how did you know?” He said, “Who was with you?” And she replied, “His friend, Bebe Rebozo.” Marianna and a girlfriend had spent the day and evening with them.

‘It was not FBI jurisdiction, but I decided that I'd report it if I found she had any record of visas for the U.S. It turned out she did have a couple, and her background didn't quite check in the different applications – a classic
indicator of a possible intelligence background. I checked with the British Special Branch, and they came back and said, “She's on record with us.” She'd come to their attention as a possible Chinese Intelligence Service agent. They'd never followed up because all her activities seemed to involve the Americans, rather than British subjects … I reported this to the Bureau, to Assistant Director Sullivan, and I got a reply saying something like, “Mr Nixon's personal life is of no interest to this Bureau … Make your checks and close the file.”'

According to Liu's attorney, FBI records confirmed that her contact with Nixon set alarm bells ringing, that Nixon himself came under surveillance in Hong Kong – to the extent of his being photographed through his bedroom window with infrared cameras. The surveillance, Grove suspected, was carried out by the British, at the request of the CIA.

A 1976 FBI memorandum shows that Grove's memory is accurate:

From: DIRECTOR FBI August 18, 1976

Subject: MARIANNA LIU – ISCH [Internal Security Desk China]

Bureau file concerning caption matter brought to the attention of this Bureau by Legal Attaché Hong Kong letter dated 10.12.67 wherein suspicions of possible Chicom intelligence involvement of subject were inferred but not substantiated by Special Branch, HK Police … and a U.S. [name of agency deleted] representative indicated he had heard … subject [regularly saw] VP Nixon when he visited HK …

‘When Nixon got elected President,' Grove recalled, ‘I was in the office one Sunday morning, and I saw a picture of Liu with Nixon in a newspaper – if my memory serves me right it was at the inaugural ball. I thought, “How did she get in
there?” I'd asked for visa applications to be monitored and was supposed to be notified if she tried to enter the U.S … Since I hadn't been, I sent in an official letter marked “Personal attention of Mr Hoover.” Our instructions were that any possible hostile activities against senior U.S. government officials were to go to the Director personally … But he did not respond to my letter.'

The FBI in Hong Kong never investigated the allegation and – whatever other agencies may have done – never tried to obtain evidence that Nixon and Liu slept together. Unchecked sexual innuendo had always been grist for Edgar's mill. According to William Sullivan, Edgar read the information on Liu ‘gleefully' and personally showed the report to Nixon before he became President.

Nixon's companion in Hong Kong, Florida real estate millionaire Bebe Rebozo, was his closest confidant. He has since been linked to a string of suspect business deals, including the suspected funneling of campaign funds to Nixon's personal coffers. Edgar told Kenneth Whittaker, his Agent in Charge in Miami, to be especially ‘attentive' to Rebozo – and to watch him carefully.

We cannot know what passed between Edgar and Nixon concerning the trips to Hong Kong or about Marianna Liu. For Nixon, however, there was one certainty. Exposure of the security flap caused by his friendship with Liu – during the election campaign or during his presidency – could have wounded him gravely, even fatally. And Edgar had the file.

Just before Christmas 1968, weeks after their meeting at the Pierre, Nixon announced Edgar's reappointment as Director. He also gave him a raise to $42,500 a year, a fortune at the time.

Nixon's inaugural parade took place under conditions of unprecedented security. Edgar's agents used dirty tricks to thwart anti-Vietnam War protesters – false housing forms to disrupt accommodation arrangements for out-of-town
demonstrators and phony CB radio broadcasts to confuse the organizers.

The office windows on Pennsylvania Avenue were all closed by order of the Secret Service, with one exception. As they had so many times before, Edgar and Clyde stood peering down from their balcony at FBI headquarters, watching the birth of another regime.

Nixon told neither of his key aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, about the Marianna Liu problem. Nor did he mention any other reason he might have to fear Edgar. He simply ordered Ehrlichman to establish himself with Edgar as ‘his friend and White House confidant.'

Ehrlichman's first mission was to reassure Edgar about a project he held dear, the building of a grand new headquarters for the FBI. It had been eight years since Congress had agreed that the FBI should have a new building. It was to be a concrete edifice, eleven stories high at its tallest point, facing onto Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets. And Edgar was already fighting with the planners.

He was worried that open arcades on the new building would give ‘free access to alcoholics, homos and whores.' Columns, he thought, would provide cover for lurking assassins. For public consumption, he let it be known that he did not want the building named after him. In private, he admitted that was exactly what he wanted. ‘It was,' said his friend Walter Trohan, ‘the dearest thing to his heart.'

Ehrlichman assured Edgar that building operations would be expedited, then sat back and listened to one of the Director's monologues. ‘He was doing a selling job on me,' Ehrlichman recalled, ‘telling me what we should look out for. Communism, the Kennedys, the Black Panthers … He spoke of all the black movements with passion and hatred.'

‘I hardly had a chance to say anything,' the aide complained afterward to Nixon. ‘I know,' the President replied, ‘but it's necessary, John. It's necessary.' Nixon went out of his way to humor Edgar. He went along to the FBI
Academy to be made an honorary FBI agent – three decades after trying to become a real one. He brought Edgar to Camp David for the weekend, with the ailing Clyde in tow.

Edgar went on playing the game he knew so well, doing favors, making himself seem indispensable. When Nixon picked John Mitchell, a wealthy lawyer without obvious qualifications, to serve as Attorney General, he reportedly asked that the usual stringent FBI checks be waived. Edgar had no problem with Mitchell, whom he described as ‘honest, sincere and very human … There never has been an Attorney General for whom I've had a higher regard.' Mitchell was to wind up serving nineteen months in jail for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and lying under oath during the Watergate crisis.

In the early days, Nixon had Edgar over to the White House almost every month. ‘He'd come in at breakfast,' the President would recall. ‘He got us information. There were times when I felt the only person in this goddamned government that was standing with me was Edgar Hoover … He was giving me the stuff that he had … little things.'

During the Nixon presidency, the FBI institutionalized the supply of dirt to the White House under the code name ‘Inlet.' Edgar ordered field offices to look out for six categories of information, including ‘items with an unusual twist or concerning prominent personalities which may be of special interest to the President …'

Nixon's officials were unimpressed. Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig laughed openly over redundant reports on the late Martin Luther King. ‘The FBI investigative work I saw was of poor quality,' said John Ehrlichman, ‘rumor, gossip and conjecture … often hearsay, two or three times removed. When FBI work was particularly bad I sent it back to Hoover, but the rework was seldom an improvement.'

At the White House, Haldeman leafed through information on U.S. politicians, picked up while surveilling filmgoers. Edgar, he thought, was just ‘lobbying … trying to pique the
President's curiosity.' Haldeman was uneasy, too, about Edgar's access to the Oval Office through Rose Mary Woods, the presidential secretary later to become celebrated for her ‘accidental' erasure of one of the Watergate tapes. She had worked for Nixon since the early fifties, and Edgar was on first-name terms with her.
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Under pressure from Haldeman, the President agreed to try to ‘minimize the connection.' It was a turning point in his relationship with Edgar.

‘FBI Director Hoover,'
Newsweek
reported in May 1969, ‘no longer enjoys direct access to the White House …' Realizing Nixon's advisers were responsible for the change, Edgar struck back in characteristic fashion. That month, using Rose Mary Woods to ensure the message got through, he passed on an astonishing allegation – that Haldeman, Ehrlichman and a third aide, Dwight Chapin, were homosexual lovers.

‘We found out,' said Haldeman, ‘one night when Mitchell and Ehrlichman and I had been out with the President for a dinner cruise on the
Sequoia
, the presidential yacht. When we came back, Mitchell's limo dropped Ehrlichman and me off. Mitchell got out of the car, walked us away so the driver wouldn't hear and told us Hoover had come up with this homosexual report. It came from a bartender who was a source for the FBI on stuff like this. We were supposed to have attended homosexual parties at the Watergate complex. There were dates, places, everything. Well, every factual allegation he made was totally false and easily disproven. Mitchell advised us to give depositions to the FBI, that it would be useful for us to have in our records. We did as he suggested.

‘Mitchell's conclusion,' said Haldeman, ‘was that this was an attempt by Hoover to lay a threat across our path, to keep us in line, remind us of his potential.' ‘I came to think,' said Ehrlichman, ‘that Hoover did this to show his claws, or ingratiate himself to Nixon – probably both. It was my early introduction to the way the game was played.'

This was just the start of the game. In midsummer, after more bizarre statements by Edgar about Robert Kennedy and Dr King, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark – and
The Washington Post
in an editorial – called for his resignation. The President, it was reported, was looking for a way to dump him.

Nixon denied the rumors. In October, to the astonishment of aides, he left the White House to dine at Edgar's home – a compliment he had not paid even to cabinet members. He made sure photographers were there to see him bid Edgar an affable good night on the doorstep. Yet, Ehrlichman said, ‘the President seemed uncomfortable that evening. He left as early as he decently could.'

After the first calls for his resignation, probably in July, Edgar had quietly visited Nixon to discuss a new report from one of his agents. Marianna Liu, the President's Chinese friend, was shortly to be granted permanent residence in the United States. One of her sponsors was listed as William Allman, a businessman with whom Nixon had stayed in Hong Kong. Another was Raymond Warren, a Nixon-era immigration official who lived in Whittier, California, Nixon's hometown.

Nixon has since denied having used his influence to help Liu obtain U.S. residence. According to William Sullivan, however, the FBI's information was that the woman had been given ‘top priority.' Marianna Liu was admitted to the United States, went to live in Whittier and reportedly saw Nixon again after her arrival.

Years later, asked about reports that she visited the White House, Liu became upset. ‘I'm not saying anything else about me and Mr Nixon,' she cried. ‘Are you trying to get me killed?'