J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (6 page)

Even had Gray leafed through the folders, looking for information embarrassing to the administration, it is unlikely he would have found it, lacking the index, because a number of the especially sensitive folders were deceptively labeled. One on the current president, for example, appeared not under NIXON, RICHARD but under OBSCENE MATTERS.

The honor guard consisted of five men: a representative of each of the military services and a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Every hour, throughout the night, the guard changed, and every hour another thousand persons, many in tears, quietly filed past the black catafalque.

Most had never met the man, but almost all knew what he’d stood for. They ranged from tourists, for whom this was still another Washington monument, to be seen and talked about when the trip was over, to middle-aged men who as kids had worn Junior G-Men badges and, at least vicariously, become part of the FBI mystique.

And there were others, from the Bureau’s past, though few recognized them as such, this singular man having become the symbol of the entire organization: Charles Appel, who founded the famed FBI Laboratory and proved that Bruno Richard Hauptmann wrote the Lindbergh ransom note; the federal appellate court judge Edward Tamm, Hoover’s top aide during World War II, and the man responsible for the FBI’s motto—Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity; Allen Meehagen, from the Chicago office, who, at eighty-two, was the Bureau’s oldest still-active special agent; and Louis Nichols, the public relations genius who more than any other man created the FBI’s public image, and that of its director.

Leaving the Rotunda, most noticed the rally on the west steps of the Capitol, but few commented and fewer still stopped to listen.

There were no Vietcong flags to tear down, and Ellsberg was too far up the steps to reach, but Barker and his men did the best they could. Periodically they shouted “
Traitors!
” and “
Communists!
”; when that didn’t seem to accomplish anything, they started several one-sided fights, knocking down one nonresisting demonstrator and punching a couple others.

Capitol police grabbed two of the men—Frank Sturgis and Reinaldo Pico—and hustled them off, but an unidentified man in a gray suit, flashing either CIA or FBI credentials, spoke briefly to the officers, assuring them the pair were good Americans, and they were subsequently taken down the street and released.

Though the mission had ended in failure, both the vigil and the name reading going on through the night, Hunt and Liddy were far from disappointed. When they later picked up Barker and drove around Washington, debriefing him, they were almost jubilant.

As they passed the Watergate, Liddy told Barker, “That’s our next job, Macho.”
¹⁵

E
arly that morning, with a dozen police motorcycles and a number of unmarked FBI cars as escort, Hoover’s body was moved to National Presbyterian, a modernistic white stone church on Nebraska Avenue.

Because nearly all of official Washington would be in one place, security was intensive. Metropolitan and park police lined the last two blocks of the route. Although more than two thousand persons attended the funeral, all were invited guests. Millions of others, however, shared the experience, all three networks carrying the hour-long services live.

The funeral had become a political event.

Mark Felt was not alone in his resentment that the service had been transformed into “a television spectacular, designed more to aggrandize the president than to honor the departed director.” The disputes over seating, which had erupted only hours after Hoover’s death, had left a residue of animosity. As late as the previous afternoon, Acting Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had pulled rank, having his seat switched from the second pew on the left, alongside Vice-President Spiro Agnew, to the first seat of the first pew on the right, in the FBI section, so he was directly across the aisle from the president and, “incidentally,” Felt later observed, “directly in front of the television cameras.”
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1

Kleindienst naturally viewed the change in a different light, as just another skirmish in a continuing battle to establish that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not a separate entity but part of the Department of Justice, under the command of the attorney general.

Although J. Edgar Hoover was dead, and presumably resting in peace, all
his old battles raged on, as if having acquired independent lives of their own.

President and Mrs. Nixon arrived at ten-thirty, accompanied by the new acting director and Mrs. Gray. They were seated with Mamie Eisenhower in the front pew on the left, with members of the cabinet and other dignitaries behind them, following the rigid diplomatic protocol for such affairs of state.

Clyde Tolson, Helen Gandy, others from Hoover’s office staff, and his few remaining relatives were seated in a private section of the church, out of public view.

The first two pews on the right were occupied by Acting Attorney General Kleindienst and the fifteen honorary pallbearers: Acting Associate Director Felt (with Tolson’s resignation, Gray had moved Felt up into the number two slot), Assistants to the Director Mohr and Rosen, and the twelve assistant directors. The pews behind them were occupied by former Bureau executives (but only those who had remained in the good graces of the director) and various headquarters personnel, in descending rank, FBI protocol being no less rigid than that of the Department of State.

The special agents in charge were seated in the choir loft, emblematic of the separation between headquarters and “the field.”

James Crawford and Annie Fields were seated toward the back.

One person in the Bureau pews was not a current or former agent, although perhaps millions of people thought of him as such. He was Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., star of the television series “The FBI,” whose image had so impressed the late director that he had instructed his agents to emulate the actor.

Following a brief Masonic ceremony, Dr. Elson offered the opening remarks, recalling the many years the director had been his friend and revealing that it was “not commonly known that there was a time in Mr. Hoover’s young manhood when he struggled in the depths of his being over a call to enter the ministry or to give his life to the legal profession. The loss to the church of a great prophet and spiritual leader has been the great gain of the legal profession.”
²

Following prayers, two hymns by the Army chorus and readings from Psalms and the New Testament, the president of the United States walked to the lectern to deliver the eulogy.

J. Edgar Hoover was buried just thirteen blocks from the row house where he had been born, in Congressional Cemetery, the oldest and least fashionable of the capital’s burial plots, alongside his parents and a sister who had died in infancy.

The gathering at the graveside was even more select, fewer than a hundred persons being present, not all of whom, however, were invited guests. While various FBI officials clustered in little groups, discussing such subjects as the security of Hoover’s files, and plans for bringing to a quick end the reign of the outsider chosen to be his successor, little black children perched on nearby tombstones, waiting for the service to end so that they could snatch the giant mums and other flowers.

After the final prayer, Dr. Elson removed the American flag from the coffin, folded it, and handed it to Clyde Tolson, who softly said, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
³
Tolson appeared, according to one observer, more bewildered than sad. As he was being helped into his limousine, most of those present saw him for the last time. He never returned to the FBI.

Infrequently, however, he returned to this spot, Crawford driving him in his own car. But he never got out. He’d let Crawford put flowers on the grave while he sat in the backseat, saying nothing, his face expressionless. Then, after a time, he’d shake his head, as if to clear it of a jumble of thoughts, and motion impatiently for Crawford to drive him home.

Sometimes they’d go by way of Gifford’s, in Silver Springs, and Crawford would go in for two ice cream cones, for which he’d usually have to pay. Most times Crawford paid for the gasoline too. But he never complained. It was Tolson who’d given him his job in the first place.

In his last years Clyde Tolson was old, sick, more than a little senile and—as the scandals involving the revised codicils of his will would seem to indicate—perhaps easily manipulated. He was also probably very lonely.

For over four decades he’d lived in the director’s shadow. Although in private he’d often disagreed with the Boss, and more than occasionally his own view had prevailed, in public he’d personified Washington’s ultimate yesman—supporting Hoover’s every decision, defending him against his critics, implementing even his most outrageous whims.

Yet in his last, solitary years he did a curious thing. He did it secretly and, one suspects, probably in great fear, aware that if others learned of it he would undoubtedly be committed.

With smuggled messages, and hasty telephone calls, sometimes identifying himself but sometimes apparently not, he tried, in his own way, to correct or remedy certain injustices which he believed had been perpetrated by the organization he’d so long served.

Sometime that day Helen Gandy turned over to Mark Felt the second of two large batches of file folders, for safekeeping in his own office. Altogether, Felt later stated, there were enough to fill twelve cardboard boxes.

Perhaps mindful of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story “The Purloined Letter,” Felt “hid” them in plain view: in six two-drawer combination-lock cabinets in his outer office.

A list of the folders prepared by Mrs. Erma Metcalf, one of Miss Gandy’s assistants, dated October 20, 1971, seven months prior to Hoover’s death, placed the number of individual file folders at 167.

Three, dealing with high Bureau officials, subsequently disappeared. Whether this occurred before or after they were entrusted to Mark Felt is unknown, although, in an interview with the author, Felt indicated familiarity with their subjects and their contents.

Of the 164 remaining, some contained only a single page, others several hundred, while the total number of pages in all was in excess of 17,750. In time
they spanned five decades, covering events that had occurred as early as the 1920s and as late as the current year.

Of the 164 folders, at least 84, or just over half, contained derogatory information: some of it criminal; much of it in that less easily defined zone of the dishonest, disreputable, unethical, and immoral; but most of it sexual.

In common with much else concerning this file, even the number “164” was deceptive. A single folder, for example, consisting of letters sent to the director over a seven-year period by the Washington field office (whose territory included the capital and its environs) contained gossip and scandal involving hundreds of persons.

Few of the folders were “dossiers,” as a dictionary would define that term. Rather, for the most part, they contained highlights: especially selected bits and pieces of information; long-missing parts from unsolved puzzles; individual incidents taken out of the context of whole lives. They were literally the essence of innumerable FBI investigations, legal and otherwise, distilled into 164 separate subject groupings and packed into a dozen cabinet drawers.

An official later described them as “twelve drawers full of political cancer.”
⁴

It was not an exaggeration, for their contents included blackmail material on the patriarch of an American political dynasty, his sons, their wives, and other women; allegations of two homosexual arrests which Hoover leaked to help defeat a witty, urbane Democratic presidential candidate; the surveillance reports on one of America’s best-known first ladies and her alleged lovers, both male and female, white and black; the child-molestation documentation the director used to control and manipulate one of his Red-baiting protégés; a list of the Bureau’s spies in the White House during the eight administrations when Hoover was FBI director; the forbidden fruit of hundreds of illegal wiretaps and bugs, containing, for example, evidence that an attorney general (and later Supreme Court justice) had received payoffs from the Chicago syndicate; as well as the celebrity files, with all the unsavory gossip Hoover could amass on some of the biggest names in show business.

Widely disparate as their contents were, all 164 folders had one thing in common: each bore—often in the blue ink which only one person in the Bureau could use—the letters “OC.”

That afternoon, in his first press conference since becoming acting director—in itself a major break from Hoover tradition—L. Patrick Gray III told reporters, “None of you guys are going to believe this, and I don’t know how to make you believe it, but there are no dossiers or secret files. There are just general files, and I took steps to keep their integrity.”
⁵

Perhaps Gray should have had someone watch the freight elevator.

During the next week, before the acting director moved upstairs, Helen Gandy transferred the contents of at least thirty-two more file drawers into cardboard boxes. But unlike those containing the OC file, these were not given to Mark Felt. Instead, by means of Bureau trucks and drivers, they were
moved all the way across Washington, to the basement recreation room of 4936 Thirtieth Place NW, the former home of J. Edgar Hoover and now the residence of Clyde Tolson.

In addition to the boxes, at least six—and possibly as many as twenty-five—file cabinets were also moved to Hoover’s home during this same period.

Later—much later—Miss Gandy testified that the boxes contained “Mr. Hoover’s personal correspondence” and the cabinets his tax returns, oil and stock purchases, and like items, and that she had arranged for their removal so that the office would be clear for Mr. Gray’s arrival.

She further stated that neither the boxes nor the cabinets contained anything of an official nature, Bureau files or otherwise, “not even his badge.”

According to Miss Gandy’s version of these events, after setting aside those folders concerning Mr. Hoover’s estate, she “systematically” and “very carefully” went through all the rest, examining “every single page” of “every single personal file” and—finding not even one memo or letter or folder which pertained to Bureau matters—“tore them up and put them in cartons, and they were taken to the Washington field office,” where they were shredded, thus finishing—although it had taken two full months—the job she had begun only hours after her employer’s death, the complete and total destruction of J. Edgar Hoover’s Personal File.
⁶

Helen Gandy must have felt quite safe in testifying as she did, for who could contradict her? Only one other person knew exactly what the files contained, and he was dead.

If, as some suspected, not everything was destroyed—certain folders having been extracted and given to others, as insurance that the Bureau’s interests would be protected—would those persons ever admit it? Not likely.

If, as some also believed, the Personal File contained far more than Mr. Hoover’s personal correspondence—much of it official in nature—what proof was there?

The Personal File no longer existed, at least not as a file. One could examine all 55 million cards in the General Indices without finding even one coded reference to the designations PF or OC.

Unlike most other Bureau records, many of the documents in these two files had never been “serialized,” so checking the sequential numbers wouldn’t betray their absence.

There were indexes to both files, her own: the white cards for the Personal File, the pink cards for the Official/Confidential. She’d given the latter to Mark Felt, along with the OC file itself. But she’d destroyed the white cards, thus eradicating the last, and only, record of what the Personal File contained. Or so she must have believed.

And there was the matter of timing. The congressional “Inquiry into the Destruction of Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s Files,” in which she gave this testimony, did not take place until 1975, three years after these events occurred. If evidence disproving her statements hadn’t surfaced by then, would it ever?

When faced with various contradictions and discrepancies in her story, Helen Gandy replied testily, “As I say, you just have my word,” knowing full well that that, believe her or not, was all they had.
⁷

In the three days following Hoover’s death there had been a number of cover-ups, many merely continuations of deceptions that had gone on for years. The motives behind them varied. Some were simply habit, such as suppressing anything which might “embarrass the Bureau,” while others were truly Byzantine. When certain FBI executives decided not to mention that it was Crawford who had found Hoover’s body, it had nothing to do with either Crawford or Hoover’s death. They sought to forestall certain other questions which might follow, fearing a domino effect, which could eventually lead to questions concerning their personal involvement in such seemingly unrelated matters as the misappropriation of thousands of dollars in both government and private funds, or secret purchasing agreements for which the Bureau paid markups as high as 70 percent.