Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (47 page)

After World War II, FBI intelligence activities actually increased, thanks
to the anticommunist hysteria of the cold war years.

In fact it was the FBI that launched Senator Joseph McCarthy on his
ill-fated anticommunist crusade. In 1950, a one-hundred-page FBI document alleging Communist infiltration of the U.S. government was leaked
to a military intelligence officer with instructions to pass it along to the
Jewish American League Against Communism. The League offered the
document to McCarthy, who was further encouraged to fight communism
by Father Edmund A. Walsh, vice president of Georgetown University and
an anticommunist author.

A top McCarthy assistant, Roy Cohn, later said: "Joe McCarthy bought
Communism in much the same way other people purchase a new
automobile. "

Assistant FBI Director Sullivan wrote: "We gave McCarthy all we had,
but all we had were fragments, nothing could prove his allegations."

While Hoover always claimed that information collected by the Bureau
was never to be released to unauthorized persons, it was a rule that he bent
for friends.

In 1948, when New York Governor Thomas Dewey ran for president,
Hoover secretly agreed to put the resources of the Bureau at his disposal,
hoping that he would be made attorney general upon Dewey's election.

In 1954 Attorney General Herbert Brownell used FBI material to chide
the Truman administration about a questionable employee. That same year
Vice President Richard Nixon was able to obtain information in FBI files
to use in his attack against Representative Robert L. Condon of California.

It is well known now that Hoover deliberately leaked derogatory material on Dr. Martin Luther King during the 1960s as a part of his secret
counterintelligence (COINTELPRO) program.

It was this ability, first to gather information and then to control it, that
gave Hoover his extraordinary power. Former Assistant FBI Director
Sullivan wrote:

Hoover was always gathering damaging material on Jack Kennedy,
which the President, with his active social life, seemed more than
willing to provide. We never put any technical surveillance on JFK, but
whatever came up was automatically funneled directly to Hoover. I was
sure he was saving everything he had on Kennedy, and on Martin
Luther King, Jr., too, until he could unload it all and destroy them both.
He kept this kind of explosive material in his personal files, which filled
four rooms on the fifth floor of headquarters.

Perhaps the presence of these files, which still held information on
Kennedy and Inga Arvad, explains why the reappointment of Hoover was
one of JFK's first actions on becoming president.

It has been reported that Hoover's Personal and Confidential files were
destroyed soon after his death by Tolson and Hoover's faithful secretary
Helen Gandy.

Hoover's reappointment by Kennedy certainly wasn't due to Hoover's
politics. A Republican who liked to boast that he had never voted, Hoover
had quietly helped Nixon as much as possible during the 1960 campaign.
According to Sullivan, Hoover did his best to keep the news media
supplied with anti-Kennedy stories.

Hoover's methods of ingratiating himself both to presidents and attorneys general he served have been well documented. He would send them
letters marked "Top Secret, Eyes Only" filled with juicy tidbits of gossip
about congressmen and political enemies. Most presidents disdained this
practice, but two-Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon-seemed to
enjoy this unusual channel of information.

Nixon and Hoover were GOP Allies from the days when Nixon was a
representative from California. Sullivan wrote: "I spent many days preparing material based on research taken from FBI files that I knew was going
straight from Hoover to Congressman Nixon, material which Nixon used
in speeches, articles and investigations."

Nixon had been rejected as an FBI agent in 1937-he was told later by
Hoover that the Bureau wasn't hiring at the time, but the agent who
rejected him reported that Nixon was "lacking in aggression." Despite
this, Nixon and Hoover remained close friends. Hoover was a regular
dinner guest at the Nixon White House in later years.

In White House tapes transcripts made during the Watergate era, Nixon
said: "Edgar Hoover . . . I have seen socially at least a hundred times. He
and I were very close friends . . . [expletive deleted]-Hoover was my
crony. He was closer to me than [Lyndon] Johnson actually, although
Johnson used him more." Later in the same conversation, Nixon laments
that Hoover's 1972 death prevented the director from aiding his Watergate
defense. He said: "Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That
was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have scared
them to death. He has a file on everybody."

Lyndon Johnson had no such problem. With Hoover very much alive
during his presidency, Johnson had a strong right-hand man. According to
Sullivan, Johnson-worried that Robert Kennedy might make a grab for
the Democratic presidential nomination in 1964-asked Hoover for a
special security team of FBI men, headed by Cartha D. DeLoach. Sullivan
wrote:

Ostensibly, the agents would be there to guard against threats to the
President, but this security force was actually a surveillance team, a
continuation of the FBI's surveillance on Martin Luther King in Atlantic
City. By keeping track of King, LBJ could also keep track of RFK.

Johnson and Hoover had much in common, according to Sullivan. He
wrote:

Johnson and Hoover had their mutual fear and hatred of the Kennedys
in common-and more. As neighbors in Washington since the days
when Johnson was a senator from Texas, they had been frequent dinner
guests in each other's homes.

The Hoover-Johnson friendship dated back to 1945 when young Senator
Johnson and his family moved onto the same block of Washington's
Thirtieth Place where Hoover lived. In later years Hoover relished telling
how he helped raise the two Johnson daughters and how he would help
Johnson hunt for the family dog. The nearly two decades of closeness
between Johnson and Hoover led Johnson's last attorney general, Ramsey
Clark, to comment that their friendship "almost disqualified" Johnson
from being able to properly supervise the dour Bureau director.

Hoover biographer Richard Gid Powers said Johnson would telephone
Hoover regularly to chat about the issues of the day and noted that
Johnson's diary listed some sixty such conversations during the Johnson
administration.

Johnson cemented his friendship-and perhaps his power-over Hoover
in January 1964, less than two months after Kennedy's assassination. In a
ceremony conducted in the White House Rose Garden, Johnson praised his
friend Hoover as "a hero to millions of decent citizens, and an anathema
to evil men."

After noting Hoover's accomplishments through the years, Johnson said:

Edgar, the law says that you must retire next January when you reach
your 70th birthday, and I know you wouldn't want to break the law. But
the nation cannot afford to lose you. Therefore, by virtue of and
pursuant to the authority vested in the President, I have today signed an
Executive Order exempting you from compulsory retirement for an
indefinite period of time.

It was tantamount to installing Hoover as FBI director for life since it
would have required a subsequent executive order to rescind this action.

This extraordinary action coupled with the timing-with both the Warren Commission and the FBI's assassination investigation just getting into
full swing-has led more suspicious assassination researchers to suspect
that this presidential exemption was a partial payment to Hoover for his
lack of a penetrating probe of Kennedy's death.

Shortly after this event, Hoover replaced Courtney Evans as the Bureau's White House liaison man with Cartha DeLoach, who had been quite
intimate with Johnson since his early days in the Senate. DeLoach figured
prominently in the assassination investigation and revealed in the 1970s
that Johnson had begun to suspect that the CIA may have had something to
do with Kennedy's death.

According to Sullivan, once Johnson assumed the powers of the presidency, his relationship with the trusty Hoover began to change. He wrote:

They remained close when Johnson served as Vice President, but
there was a change in their relationship when Johnson became President. The Director was over 65 by that time, past retirement age for
federal employees, and he stayed in office only because of a special
waiver which required the President's signature each year. That waiver
put Hoover right in Johnson's pocket. With that leverage, Johnson
began to take advantage of Hoover, using the Bureau as his personal
investigative arm. His never-ending requests were usually political, and
sometimes illegal . . . And Hoover hot-footed it to Johnson's demands
... he found himself very much in the back seat, almost a captive of
the President .. .

There is also the possibility that Hoover actually liked and respected the
lanky Texas politician. Speaking to newspaper editors in 1965, Hoover
said: "Texans (like Johnson] don't like to be told what to do. This is
characteristic of Texans. They are a separate breed of man. I admire the
intelligence and fearlessness of a man of that kind."

In addressing the relationship between Hoover and Johnson, author
Richard Gid Powers stated: "Because of the extraordinary rapport between
them, there was no service Hoover would refuse Johnson, no matter how
far removed it might be from his law enforcement or domestic intelligence
responsibilities.'.'

Some researchers have darkly hinted that LBJ may have had more
leverage on Hoover than simply securing his job as director-that it may
have had something to do with the JFK assassination.

There can be no doubt that Hoover had an abiding and intense hatred for
both John and Robert Kennedy, because of their politics, their associates,
their personal lives, and their style. Sullivan recalled hearing Clyde Tolson,
Hoover's associate director, confidant, and roommate, once say: "God damn the Kennedys. First there was Jack, now there is Bobby, and then
Teddy. We'll have them on our necks until the year 2000." Hoover
reportedly nodded in agreement.

This hatred for the Kennedys makes the Bureau's numerous contacts
with Lee Harvey Oswald all the more suspicious. The FBI was involved
with Oswald from the time he went to Russia. Recall Hoover's 1960
memo to the State Department warning ". . . there is a possibility that an
impostor is using Oswald's birth certificate." Very much aware of Oswald
and even suspecting that someone may have been posing as the ex-Marine,
the FBI attempted to keep tabs on Oswald after his attempted defection to
Russia.

On April 27, 1960, John W. Fain, a resident FBI agent in Fort Worth,
interviewed Robert Oswald concerning his brother's activities in the Soviet
Union. The older Oswald said his whole family was shocked at his
brother's behavior and that Lee had never had any sympathy for or
connection with communism before his trip to Russia. Fain also interviewed Marguerite Oswald the next day concerning a twenty-five-dollar
money order she tried to send to her son.

Apparently the FBI was not the only U.S. agency with an active interest
in Oswald. On July 3, 1961, more than a year before Oswald arrived back
home from Russia, Fain prepared another report on Oswald. This report is
rich in detail of Oswald's life history as well as his activities in the Soviet
Union. According to this document, much of the information on Oswald
came from the district office of the Office of Naval Intelligence in New
Orleans.

Armed with this Naval Intelligence information, Fain and FBI Special
Agent Tom Carter requested a meeting with Oswald at the Fort Worth FBI
office on June 25, 1962, less than two weeks after the Oswalds arrived
back in Fort Worth from Russia. According to their report, Oswald told of
flying home with Marina and their child, but he failed to mention the
stopover in Atlanta. He also told of borrowing $435 to get home, but he
declined to talk about why he went to Russia, saying only that he didn't
want to relive the past.

The agents said Oswald "exhibited an impatient and arrogant attitude"
during the interview. He also denied that he had attempted to renounce his
American citizenship and that he had offered the Russians any military
information.

Interestingly, Oswald did tell the FBI agents that "in the event he is
contacted by Soviet Intelligence under suspicious circumstances or otherwise, he will promptly communicate with the FBI."

Could this agreement have been the beginning of a special relationship
between Oswald and the Bureau?

Oswald's next recorded contact with the Bureau was on August 16, 1962,
when Fain and Special Agent Arnold Brown approached him near his
home at 2703 Mercedes Street in Fort Worth, where he and Marina had lived for about a month. Believing that Oswald had been "evasive" during
his first interview, Fain had decided to contact him again, only this time
the agents sat with Oswald in a parked car near his home. Fain explained
that they didn't want to embarrass Oswald in front of his wife, so they
declined his offer to come into the house.

The more suspicious researchers view this unusual meeting in a car as a
time when the FBI may have begun to recruit Oswald as an informant. But
according to the agents, Oswald once again denied any misconduct in
Russia, denied that he had tried to defect, and denied that any Soviet
intelligence personnel had ever tried to contact him or offer any "deals."
Once again, Oswald agreed to contact the FBI if anyone connected with
Soviet intelligence tried to meet with him.

After satisfying themselves that Oswald was not a member of the
American Communist Party, Fain and Brown marked the Oswald file
"closed." Fain retired from the Bureau on October 29, 1962.