The Burglary (43 page)

In one Media file, a high FBI official discussed facial hair standards when hiring clerical employees:

The reference to “pear-shaped heads,” strange as it might seem, was not casual advice. Nor was it a joke. It was well known in the bureau that Hoover would not tolerate people with such heads. One had suffered a terrible fate when he met the director. One day, as new agents who had recently graduated from the FBI Academy were paraded into the director's office one by one for a quick handshake with the director—a ceremony that took place after each class of new agents graduated—Hoover promptly ordered that one of them be dismissed from the bureau immediately.
The young agent had passed the sweaty palm test—any agent who shook Hoover's hand with a sweaty palm was fired on the spot—but he had failed the pear-shaped head test.

Weight requirements were strictly enforced. This is evident in a
January 4, 1971, memo to all Philadelphia-area agents from Philadelphia SAC Jamieson. He reminded agents and other employees in the Philadelphia field office of their responsibility to follow the demands made by the director in a 1965 order: that every July, October, January, and April “each Special Agent must be weighed and the Bureau advised of the results by the last day of such months.” He reminded them their weight must be recorded in the office of Mrs. Lee Landsburg, the nurse in the FBI field office. Reverting to capital letters, he wrote, “ANY MAN FOUND TO BE OVERWEIGHT WILL BE REQUIRED TO LOSE THE WEIGHT, AND WILL BE WEIGHED WEEKLY BY HIS SUPERVISOR UNTIL HIS WEIGHT IS BROUGHT WITHIN BUREAU STANDARDS.” Heads of resident agency offices, such as Media, were to be weighed every time they came to the Philadelphia field office, but not more than once a month. Jamieson concluded by noting, “I expect every agent and male clerical employee to maintain his weight within the desirable limits at all times.”

Read today, Jamieson's memo sounds like it might have been written for a segment on Jon Stewart's
Daily Show
on Comedy Central. Actually, weight gain, even slight weight gain, was treated as a serious issue in the bureau. Some agents were fired for being only a few pounds overweight. Some were clever in how they deceived the director about weight gain. One agent, who had to meet with Hoover not long after he had been found to be overweight, bought a suit for the occasion that was too large in order to make it appear that he had recently lost, not gained, weight.

FEW PEOPLE LAUGHED
when they discovered in news reports about the Media files that they had been monitored by the FBI. The members of one group managed to do so. When it was reported that Media files revealed the FBI was intercepting the mail of the Friends Peace Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the Quaker organization publicly announced that it would put the FBI on its mailing list and make the interception of its mail unnecessary. There was no response from the FBI—unless breaking down Quaker employee Anne Flitcraft's front door with a sledgehammer, invading her apartment, and removing her personal and professional papers, books, and typewriter should be regarded as a response.

Another organization, the Philadelphia-based
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, also responded publicly to reports that the FBI had surveilled the league's fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1965. Dr. Martin Luther King was the keynote speaker at the event. The
heading on the file about the event was “COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM.” In addition to clandestinely covering the gathering, the bureau distributed biographical sketches of the candidates for the national board of the organization to FBI offices in thirty-seven cities.

After the bureau's file on the group became public, the group released “An Open Letter to the FBI.” In it,
Naomi Marcus, the chair of the league's policy committee, wrote, “We neither appreciate nor need the FBI's snooping on us or our members. We have always operated in an open manner. We welcome as members all who believe in working by nonviolent means to create the conditions which will make peace and freedom possible. We do not inquire into the political affiliations of those who wish to join us.…We … recognize that there are merits as well as imperfections in all existing forms of political and socio-economic systems. We do not believe in ‘devil' theories.…We call for a curb on Big Brother, and resolve that we will not be intimidated by those who seek to discredit us or to distract us from our goals.”

In the large Philadelphia FBI office, the Media files revealed, monitoring antiwar activists and black people dominated the FBI's workload throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. That was true until 1975 when Neil Welch, as the new special agent in charge brought an approach different from Hoover's, shifting the emphasis of investigations at the Philadelphia office to organized crime and government corruption, areas that had been of little interest to Hoover but were ones most Americans probably assumed had always been at the top of the FBI's agenda at all times.

AFTER I RECEIVED
the first two sets of Media files, I was eager to see all the files that had been stolen. I wanted evidence of whether the burglars were distorting the overall nature of the files by distributing only files that matched a biased goal. FBI and Department of Justice officials had claimed that was the case. I called a source in the Catholic peace movement, someone I thought might have been involved in some of the clandestine draft board raids. At a coffee shop near the
Washington Post
offices, I asked if she knew anyone who could help me get access to all of the Media files. She agreed to explore the possibility. A few days later she called and we met again. She had talked to someone who said he thought he would be able to arrange for me to go to a place where I would have access to all of the Media files. Someone would be in touch with me about arrangements.

When I returned to the newsroom, I did something very stupid. I was delighted—actually, I was very excited—that my search for all of the Media files might be successful. As I passed the desk of Ken Clawson, without thinking I stopped and impulsively said, “Ken, guess what? I think I'm going to get to see all of the Media files.” It was Clawson who had shared a byline with me on the first story about the documents because he had gotten confirmation from the bureau that the files were authentic. When I saw his expression instantly change from relaxed and casual to fierce and hardened, I was surprised and realized I had made a mistake. “I'll go with you,” he said rather sternly. No longer so excited, I told him that wouldn't be possible because I was dealing with confidential sources who would deal only with me. Trying to act as though nothing important had just been discussed, I walked to my office. About thirty minutes later, Clawson appeared beside my desk. “I will go with you,” he said, a heavy emphasis on “will,” as though he was giving an order, something he was not in a position to do. He turned and walked away as though the matter was settled. I knew then that it was settled, but not in the way he intended.

I gave myself a day to think about my strong gut reaction to
Clawson's demand. I could not be certain about why he reacted so strongly. I thought there were two possible explanations. He could have been acting simply from fiercely competitive instincts and thought that if the cache of Media files was going to be found, it would be a significant story, one he was determined to report. Or—and this seemed to be the more likely cause of his reaction—after months of writing about the bureau he had perhaps developed such a close working relationship with the director's staff, or even the director, that he might be willing to notify the FBI that I, or we, as he intended, were going to meet either the burglars or people who might be very closely associated with them. The search for the burglars and the stolen files was at a fever pitch at this time, so I assume that details from Clawson about my plan to travel to the files would have been of keen interest to the FBI, especially because the bureau's search for the burglars and the files had failed so far. I decided I could not take a chance. In order to eliminate the possibility of jeopardizing my anonymous sources, I concluded I had to undo my chance to see all of the Media files. Whoever the burglars were, I was not going to be used to guide the FBI to them.

Two days after Clawson made his demand to me, I met my source and explained my error in judgment and withdrew my request for access. Needless to say, my source agreed that that was necessary under the circumstances. This time, when I returned to the newsroom and stopped at Clawson's desk, I told him there would be no trip to see the Media files. I told him my sources had called it off. He looked very disappointed.

Less than a year later, Clawson quit his job at the
Washington Post
and became deputy director of communications in the Nixon White House and later director of communications. Soon after he moved to the White House post, I got some insight into his relationship with Hoover. Another
Post
colleague, White House correspondent
Don Oberdorfer, told me what he had observed one day as Clawson assembled his new office in the White House.
He unpacked and put on prominent display a framed and warmly inscribed photograph of J. Edgar Hoover.

A special relationship had developed between Hoover and Clawson as a result of an interview Clawson had with him on November 16, 1970. As Curt Gentry wrote in his biography of Hoover, since “his outburst before the women's press club in 1964, when he'd angrily denounced the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover had not held a press conference or given a personal interview” until the one with Clawson.

The interview had come about under circumstances that endeared Clawson to Hoover. Thus the warm inscription. Clawson's efforts to get an interview with the director started in the summer of 1970 when he was transferred from covering the White House to covering the Department of Justice.
Post
executive editor
Ben Bradlee playfully bet Clawson a lunch that he could not get an interview with Hoover. Clawson was determined to win the bet. A written request to the director produced a perfunctory rejection. He tried other approaches. All failed. Then, thanks to a hallway encounter with Hoover in the Department of Justice Building that was set up by Attorney General
John Mitchell, Clawson directly asked him for an interview. Hoover said no then, but he remembered the request a few days later when reviews of a book by
Ramsey Clark were published in Sunday editions of newspapers. The reviews had noted that the book included scathing criticism by Clark of Hoover and the bureau. Clark had written, for example, 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.”

When Clawson arrived at work that Monday morning, the day after the reviews appeared, he had eight urgent messages from the FBI director's office. That interview Clawson wanted? He could have it now. Clawson raced to the director's office. The director said he could have twenty minutes. It seemed as though he couldn't stop talking. Hours passed. Clawson
said later his writing hand got tired. The director missed lunch for the first time in the memory of anyone in his office.

In Hoover's anger over Clark's book, he sputtered to Clawson that Clark was a “jellyfish”—the worst attorney general he had worked with in all his years as director. Clark was even worse, the director told Clawson, than Robert Kennedy. Given how much Hoover disliked Kennedy, that was quite a criticism. With Clark, said Hoover, “you never knew which way he was going to flop on an issue.” About Mitchell, the current attorney general, “There never has been an attorney general for whom I've had a higher regard.”

Hoover expressed his fury regarding Bobby Kennedy urging him to hire black agents, something Hoover automatically assumed meant he would have to “lower the standards.” He said he had told Kennedy he would resign rather than do that. With pride and apparently no shame, Hoover told Clawson he “didn't speak to Bobby Kennedy the last six months he was in office.”
The director could not have been more pleased with Clawson's story. And Bradlee, loser of the bet, took Clawson to lunch at Sans Souci, then a fashionable Washington restaurant.

As it turned out, over a period of about three months the burglars did release all of
the Media files, excluding, of course, routine blank forms and files about criminal investigations they had no interest in hampering, such as organized crime.

In the last set of files sent to journalists by the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, on May 3, 1971, the burglars included a statistical analysis of the files they had removed from the Media office, excluding the 30 percent of the total that were manuals, routing forms, and similar procedural materials. They described the investigative files as follows: