The Burglary (6 page)

It was just a hunch.

As Davidon framed the problem to himself, he concluded that the question could be answered only by presenting hard evidence to the public. Neither rhetorical condemnation nor unproved assumptions would do. Rhetoric without supporting evidence of actual suppression of dissent could be dismissed easily and likely would lead to deeper cynicism than already existed. A great believer in the potential of average people to make wise decisions if they are armed with information, he was confident that if evidence of official suppression of dissent could be found and be presented to the public, people would demand that such suppression be stopped.

But how could evidence be found? In a life spent as a problem solver, in physics and in activism, this was the most difficult problem Davidon had ever faced. He could not shake the thought that evidence might exist, and if it existed, it should be possible to find it and prove conclusively whether
the destructive rumors were true. But he could think of no lawful way to find evidence.

This perplexing dilemma led Davidon, in late 1970, to think again of burglary. He disliked the idea of using burglary as a resistance tool, just as he had when he reluctantly joined Catholic activists in raiding draft board offices in early 1970. But when he considered the options, there seemed to be no other way to get documentary evidence of FBI operations except by breaking into an FBI office and taking files.

Just as Davidon was ready to ask a few people he deeply trusted what they thought of his idea, two events in late 1970 focused national attention on Hoover and the FBI.

The first event took place November 27, 1970, the day after Thanksgiving, when the director made a rare appearance before the
Supplemental and Deficiencies Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He went to Capitol Hill that day to make the case he made to Congress every year, usually before a House Committe: that a crisis atmosphere made it essential that Congress increase the bureau's budget. But today he had an additional reason for testifying: to disclose highly charged secrets his top aides had urged him not to reveal.

Hoover had little to worry about regarding budget increases. He had long had extraordinary success in getting the increases he wanted. As
Los Angeles Times
reporters
Jack Nelson and
Ronald J. Ostrow wrote in their 1972 book
The FBI and the Berrigans
, “
Only twice since 1950 had the FBI not received the exact amount of its budget requests. On those two occasions, the FBI received
more
than he requested.” With few exceptions in his nearly half century as director, his sessions before Congress were lovefests, not inquiries. Members of Congress would rise, one by one, to praise and thank him. They treated him as though they were there to serve him, not to question him. Years later, the public would learn that Hoover carefully cultivated this sense of intimidation, but at the time only the intimidated had a clue.

By then Hoover had been director of the bureau for forty-six years, since
Calvin Coolidge was president. That made him the longest-serving appointed public official in U.S. history, a record that still stands. Though the attorney general was technically his supervisor—at this time it was
John Mitchell, the future head of President Nixon's reelection campaign, who would later go to prison for his crimes in the
Watergate scandal—Hoover acted as though he was his own boss. With very few exceptions, most attorneys general and presidents treated Hoover as though his perception of his power was correct.

Like most senators and members of Congress, Democratic senator
Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Republican senator
Roman L. Hruska of Nebraska—the only two senators present for his November 1970 presentation—had good working relationships with Hoover. They put this session together hastily. The long mahogany table in the chandeliered room would have accommodated at least two dozen senators, but because it was the day after Thanksgiving most were not available. Senators Byrd and Hruska sat beside each other on a long side of the table facing Hoover. Opposite them, the director's longtime colleague and companion
Clyde Tolson sat on one side of Hoover, and
John P. Mohr, an assistant to the director, sat on his other side as he read aloud to the two senators all of his twenty-seven pages of prepared testimony. He decried the amount of overtime agents had to work because of the “growing menace”—four million hours during fiscal year 1970, he said. That was one of his secret annual budget tricks. Hoover required agents to submit phony overtime records so he could use the contrived data when he made his annual case before Congress for a budget increase. In his testimony this day, he asked for an extra $14.5 million above the annual increase. This extra allocation, he said, was needed because of “terrorist tactics” that made it necessary to hire a thousand additional agents. These hires would bring the total number of agents to 8,350, an unprecedented 14 percent increase in one year.

Hoover always had a story line to justify his request for a budget increase. It usually was about frightening threats. Since the beginning of the
Cold War, he had based his annual pitch on the need to strengthen the bureau's ability to fight the growth of communism in the United States.
He stuck with this story long after communism had nearly disappeared in the country, even long after there were more FBI agents posing as party members than there were genuine party members at Communist Party meetings. Hoover's story line this day in late 1970 was different. The small number of senators present to hear him—two—was no indication of the profound implications of what he would say behind closed doors and then immediately release to journalists. The senators were willing props on a stage Hoover had designed in order to make secrets public.

He had given this same testimony before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations just two weeks earlier. It was not released to the press then. He had made sure it would be released today.

He told the senators about the bureau's increased responsibilities in the investigation of organized crime, an area he had long avoided. He talked about the growing dangers imposed by the New Left, especially the Weathermen,
noting that one member of that radical group,
Bernardine Dohrn, had recently been placed on the FBI's list of the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.”

Then he came to the heart of what he said that day, what dominated national news that evening and the next day. He told his audience of two:

It was a bombshell.

Hoover had arranged to have a member of his staff call selected journalists and tell them that the director's testimony from the closed hearing would be available when the hearing ended. The FBI staffer assured reporters they were going to get a big story. As Hoover concluded his remarks, Mohr gave copies of Hoover's twenty-seven-page prepared statement to the clerk of the Senate committee and asked him to distribute them to the reporters who were waiting outside the closed hearing room door.

The director was so eager for the claims he made to have the widest possible public exposure that two weeks later, on December 11, he published a booklet containing his by then well-known “secret” testimony and had it
mailed to journalists, public officials, business leaders, and other influential people throughout the country. In a cover letter sent with the booklet, Hoover wrote, “It is my hope that through this document a better understanding will result of the work and problems facing the FBI.” The distribution of his testimony—first to journalists that day and later in the widely mailed booklet—marked the first time in the bureau's history that the director had made public unproven allegations about criminal acts by specific people who had not been charged.

It was not known at the time that Hoover's plan to make these accusations public had alarmed his top aides so much that they had tried to convince him not to include the accusations against the Berrigans in his testimony. By taking this step, his aides risked the possibility of being transferred to unacceptable posts or, worse, being fired and blackballed from future work in any law enforcement agency. That had recently happened to one agent in retaliation for rather gentle criticism. But because his top aides thought that what Hoover was about to do was a serious mistake, they took the extraordinary step of violating his complete lack of tolerance of criticism.

They knew Hoover had been told a few weeks earlier that the FBI and the
Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice had investigated these allegations against the Berrigans and others and had decided that there was insufficient evidence to support them.
Charles D. Brennan, assistant to the director, was so upset when he saw the accusations in an advance copy of the director's testimony that he wrote a memo to Hoover urging that his remarks about the Berrigans be deleted. In his memo, Brennan told Hoover that his plea that the accusations not be made public had been endorsed by all agents in the Domestic Intelligence Division, the largest division in the bureau and the division that had investigated the allegations. William C. Sullivan, assistant director, third in command at the bureau, and in the bureau for thirty years by this time, also sent Hoover a memo advising him not to make the accusations against the Berrigans.

It was an unprecedented instance of FBI officials banding together to oppose an action by Hoover. Instead of following their advice, he violated basic principles of due process and made sweeping public charges about accusations he knew had been determined to be without merit. In addition to whatever concerns his aides had about the unfairness of the accusations becoming public, they were concerned that by making these allegations the director would be violating the rule he considered most important and that he always had required adherence to by all FBI employees: Don't embarrass the bureau.

To many Americans, Hoover's testimony probably seemed like just one more ominous indication that the antiwar movement was becoming more violent, a claim frequently made by the Nixon White House, even in the aftermath of the killing of students on the Kent State campus the previous May. That, plus the fact that the public did not know the unusual circumstances under which Hoover's testimony was given, made it possible for Hoover to effectively recast the image of the Catholic peace movement that day from the nonviolent, pacifist organization it had claimed to be to a group of violent extremists who planned to kidnap and bomb. The very unusual image of priests and nuns engaged in bombing and kidnapping was the kind of sensational image that latched on to psyches.

Hoover's efforts that day were successful. In addition to creating a new public image of Catholic antiwar activists, he also received the money he wanted, $14.5 million, and a congressional authorization to hire a thousand extra agents to meet the new crisis caused by antiwar activists.
Hoover probably never knew that among some people in the bureau these new agents quickly became known as “the Berrigan 1,000” in honor of the false story about the Berrigans the director had used to scare Congress into approving the special funding to hire them. Ironically, as a group they were resistant to spying on political dissidents and made it known that they were more interested in working on organized crime and other criminal cases.

That Hoover's testimony that day suddenly placed the FBI in a bright spotlight did not stop Davidon or even cause him to pause. In a strange twist of fate, the actions Hoover set in motion that day eventually threatened Davidon but later led to him being protected from the reach of the FBI.

The second event that drew attention to the FBI at that time took place in reaction to Hoover's congressional testimony. On December 9, 1970, less than two weeks after Hoover made his remarks to the two senators, he was criticized on the floor of the House of Representatives by Representative
William R. Anderson, a World War II hero who had been much honored for his participation in eleven submarine combat patrol missions. Anderson was also celebrated for his role in 1958 as commander of the first underwater voyage under the North Pole, 8,000 nautical miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. In that pre–space travel era, Anderson and his crew on the USS
Nautilus,
the first atomic-powered submarine, were regarded as heroes throughout the world. Their accomplishment seemed like the stuff of science fiction. Grand parades were held in their honor in London and in New York, and Anderson was honored at a special ceremony at the White House by President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had chosen him to make the historic voyage.