Edgar responded that he ‘deeply appreciated’ this information. The report was followed, on July 7, by a summary of an interview with a photographer for the Democratic National Committee, describing how politicians had suppressed a compromising photograph. There was gossip on a Guggenheim family member – he had attended a masked ball with someone other than his wife – and information on a Washington ‘telephone answering service for homosexuals.’
The report of August 8 ends with smear information on a member of the Senate:
That same month Edgar was told about an aide to Congressman James Morrison of Louisiana who had been conned out of $254 while attempting to attend a live sex show. He learned that a congressional critic of Army security regulations – name censored – was consorting with a person with ‘the morals of an alley cat.’ He was advised that President Eisenhower’s nephew Michael Gill was soon to open a club for politicians, staffed by ‘college girls in low-cut blouses and short, short skirts.’
An October 1958 report told Edgar of a farewell celebration at the Mayflower for Senator William Jenner of Indiana. ‘This party,’ the document reads, ‘was paid for by one of Jenner’s wealthy Texan friends … The party cost an estimated $2500.’ Most of the rest of the report, on former congressman Harold Velde and an aide to Congressman Leslie Arends, remained censored as this was book was written. A November document, on the forthcoming election for Governor of New York, quotes someone with ‘a big file of dirt’ on Nelson Rockefeller.
On June 9, 1959, Edgar received this report:
On May 16, 1960, as the Nixon-Kennedy fight for the presidency intensified, agents rushed to send Edgar information supplied that same day by a Washington prostitute. She spoke of sex with various congressmen at the Mayflower, at home and, in one case, ‘in his office at the Capitol.’ Edgar’s men were especially busy cultivating prostitutes that fall, in the closing stages of the election campaign. Agents were actually present on September 2, when a whore received a call from a Senator to arrange a midmorning appointment. Later, as the report relates:
In gathering such information, agents assumed it would be passed on to Hoover. ‘There was no thought of my taking any undue liberties with anyone’s privacy,’ said Agent in Charge Joseph Purvis, who signed some of the reports in the series. ‘These were things that I thought would be of interest to Hoover, primarily. It was a matter of advising him of things that I thought would be useful.’
Former Agent Conrad Trahern, however, had no illusions. ‘Hoover,’ he declared, ‘treated people wrong. He was a despot. He did everything to impose on people on Capitol Hill who were screwing broads and that sort of thing … But the policy was to make J. Edgar Hoover happy, and I reported what I knew.’
According to Norman Koch, an FBI fingerprint specialist in World War II, scavenging for dirt had long been routine. In the forties, he recalled, colleagues complained of ‘spending all their time investigating public official number so-and-so rather than Public Enemy Number One. They were digging into the background of anyone who might pose the slightest danger to the Director, and the idea was to find anything that could be used as leverage should any of these men dare to challenge his authority.’
Gordon Liddy, best known for his role in the Watergate affair, was an FBI agent in the fifties and early sixties. In Washington, where he worked in the propaganda department known as Crime Records, he learned firsthand exactly how compromising information was handled.
‘Say there was a bank robbery someplace. An informant might tell us the man to look for was holed up in the Skyline Motel, about six blocks south of the Capitol in Washington. Agents search the motel, and in the process they come across Senator X in bed with Miss Lucy Schwartzkopf, age fifteen and a half. They make their apologies and withdraw. But everything has to go into the record. The Supervisor who gets the report may think there’s no need to keep stuff on the peccadilloes of Senator X, but he has no authority to destroy it. The report has to go up to the Director’s office.’
In Edgar’s office, said Liddy, a summary would be prepared for Miss Gardner of Crime Records. Those involved in congressional liaison, like Liddy himself, would come across it sooner or later. ‘Say the Director was expecting to meet Senator X or if the Senator’s name had come up in some way, I would have to prepare a memorandum. I would check out the card held by Miss Gardner, and if there was something noteworthy I would write a note – perhaps a blind memorandum, “For the Director Only.” It would say something like, “The Director may wish to recall that Senator X was involved in such-and-such an incident, and is not very discreet.”’
Sometimes, said Liddy, Edgar might send an official to meet with the compromised politician soon after receiving the initial report. ‘The messenger would simply say Mr Hoover apologized for the intrusion into the Senator’s privacy, assure him it came up in the course of legitimate inquiries and tell him not to worry, this had been removed from the file. The whole point was to let the [Senator] know that Hoover knew. That’s why, when Hoover would go before the Appropriations Committee and say he wanted something, they’d give him anything. Anything, because they were afraid of what he had.’
Others corroborated Liddy’s statement. ‘I learned a lot,’ said former CIA Director Richard Helms, ‘from fellows who had worked in Hoover’s office before joining us. I used to hear how certain senators and congressmen would get caught in cathouses over in Virginia. When the report came in, Hoover would put it in his personal safe. If there was any problem with that senator, he would say, “Don’t worry, I’ve got those papers right in my safe. You don’t have a thing to worry about.”… He played a very skillful game.’
Emanuel Geller of Brooklyn, a Democratic Congressman for fifty years, many of them as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff that he was afraid to speak his mind about Edgar’s abuses because the FBI had a hold on him. In public, he continued to speak of Edgar as a ‘most exemplary’ public servant.
‘It was not uncommon,’ said veteran Agent Arthur Murtagh, ‘to learn of some politically damaging information about some leading figure in politics as having been developed by the Bureau; and then, always at a time when it would be most damaging to the individual, the information would in some way show up in the Chicago Tribune or some other friend of the Bureau.’
Walter Trohan, the Chicago Tribune reporter who was close to Edgar, recalled talking with some of the victims of such tactics. ‘Some of Hoover’s overwhelming support on the Hill,’ he said, ‘was due to what I can only call blackmail, polite blackmail.’
Senator Sam Ervin, remembered for his presiding role during the Watergate hearings, behaved differently in 1971 when, as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, he vetoed a probe of FBI abuses. ‘I think,’ he said of Edgar, ‘he has done a very good job in a difficult post.’ According to William Sullivan, Ervin was ‘in our pocket. It was financial, something like the Abe Fortas affair. This is why he came out praising the Bureau.’2
Edgar liked to send dirt on politicians to the White House. ‘I know he had a dossier on me,’ recalled former Florida Senator George Smathers, ‘because Lyndon Johnson read it to me. Johnson called me in the middle of the night – he loved to do that – and said, “These are rumors the FBI have been picking up about you …”3 He also read me the file on Senator Thruston Morton, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and the one on Barry Goldwater. There was a lot about Nixon in there, too. A lot of people were very nervous …’
‘Information,’ President Nixon would reflect after his disgrace, ‘was one of the primary sources of Edgar Hoover’s power. He usually knew something about everything that was going on, and that knowledge made him as valuable to his friends as it made him dangerous to his enemies.’
20
‘The allegation that Mr Hoover used FBI files as a power broker or as blackmail, or something of that nature, is probably one of the greatest distorted allegations in the hi
story of mankind.’
Cartha DeLoach, former FBI Assistant Director, 1982
Politicians were not the only public figures on whom Edgar gathered information. Over a period of thirty years, starting in 1945, FBI wiretappers learned the private thinking of at least twelve Supreme Court justices – Chief Justices Earl Warren and Frederick Vinson, Associate Justices Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William Douglas, Stanley Reed, Robert Jackson, Frank Murphy, John Harlan, Potter Stewart, Harold Burton and Abe Fortas. Some of the justices were overheard holding telephone conversations with other targets of Bureau surveillance. References to justices in yet other surveillances were duly logged and filed. The Constitution protects the Supreme Court from such intrusions, but Edgar did not have the transcripts destroyed. He preserved them, and on occasion used them to advantage.
Justice Douglas’ conversations were picked up during the wiretapping of political maverick Thomas Corcoran, on behalf of the Truman White House. Truman, who read the transcripts himself, decided in 1946 not to nominate Douglas as Chief Justice, a choice that determined the shape of the Supreme Court for many years to come. What he learned about Douglas from Edgar’s wiretaps may well have influenced his decision.
Douglas’ liberal views infuriated Edgar, and he kept a running dossier on him. The Justice had been married four times, and three of his wives were much younger than he; Bureau summaries kept Edgar up to date. ‘Information has been received,’ read one entry, ‘that Douglas frequently becomes intoxicated at parties and has a habit of pawing women …’ The Bureau also checked up on Douglas’ friends, noting that some were ‘of doubtful loyalty.’ The Justice himself suspected that his chambers were bugged.
In 1957, while investigating an allegation about a ‘ring of left-wing law clerks,’ the FBI collated information on the political attitudes of the justices themselves. Edgar’s files show, too, that he had three sources on the Supreme Court during the Rosenberg spy case in 1953. Not even talk in a car was safe. When Justice Burton discussed a case in an FBI limousine, the accompanying agent reported straight back to Edgar.
While 20,000 pages of records on the Supreme Court and federal judiciary had been released as this book was being written, the FBI insisted that others, notably electronic surveillance transcripts, ‘must be kept secret in the interests of national defense or foreign policy.’ It was impossible to know just what intelligence Edgar obtained on the nation’s justices.
Judge Laurence Silberman, who examined the Official and Confidential files while serving as Acting Attorney General in 1974, concluded that Edgar ‘did not have one ounce of scruple’ about using wiretaps and hidden microphones. Today it seems certain he used them against members of Congress, as the politicians themselves long suspected.
In 1956, at the height of an election campaign, Senator Wayne Morse found himself on hands and knees in his living room, peering up the chimney and poking about under the furniture, hunting for hidden microphones. A Secret Service agent had warned him that both his office and his home were bugged, and quoted some of Morse’s conversations to him to prove it. Though he never found a bug, Morse believed the FBI was responsible.
In 1965, when the Judiciary Committee called in experts to ‘sweep’ Senate corridors, they reported a ‘strong indication of bugs’ in the offices of Senators Maurine Neuberger and Ralph Yarborough, the liberal Democrat from Texas. A bug was later found in Yarborough’s desk intercom, and he believed it had been installed by the FBI on behalf of President Johnson. Johnson boasted at the time that he was privy to every call that went in or out of the Senate offices.
Members of Congress wondered and worried and held meetings in the Speaker’s office, but felt impotent to do anything. The issue was not aired publicly until the year before Edgar died, when Senator Joseph Montoya and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs claimed the FBI had been bugging congressional phones. Boggs accused Edgar of using ‘the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo.’ Edgar issued a flat denial and circulated derogatory information on Boggs, typed on the usual untraceable paper, to influential people. The row blew over.1
According to Boggs’ son Thomas, however, the Congressman had proof of his charge – transcripts of bugged conversations, supplied to him by Bureau officials with uneasy consciences. An investigator for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, moreover, told Boggs that his own home telephone had been tapped by the FBI.
In his denial, Edgar insisted that agents had longstanding orders to abort operations rather than follow a suspect into a building on Capitol Hill. Court testimony, however, later established that an agent working a corruption case had taped a conversation in the office of Senator Hiram Fong using concealed equipment. Others had sent an informant into Congressman John Dowdy’s office on a similar mission, and the FBI had tapped several calls between Dowdy and the informant, with Edgar’s approval.2
According to Bernard Spindel, an electronics specialist, FBI bugging of Capitol Hill was routine in the mid-sixties. In 1965, while checking a congressman’s phone, he found a bugging device wired into Congress’ telephone frame room. Then, using a detector, he tracked a multi-line Alpeth cable that was spliced into the one serving both houses of Congress and their hearing rooms. The cable terminated at the old Esso Building at 261 Constitution Avenue, in a room rented by the Justice Department.
‘I was able to monitor senators’ and congressmen’s conversations on that cable,’ recalled Spindel’s partner Earl Jaycox, ‘and it was one that shouldn’t have been carrying their calls. We understood from our conversations with telephone company employees that the cable had been put in at the direction of the FBI.’3
Spindel was to have testified about all this to the Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy, chaired by Senator Edward Long, the Democratic senator from Missouri. Then, on the eve of the hearing, he was told Senator Long had reached an ‘understanding’ with the FBI, that he was not to discuss FBI operations on the stand. When Spindel tried to do so anyway, Long silenced him. ‘We will not,’ he said, ‘go into this area.’ The reason, according to Long’s Chief Counsel Bernard Fensterwald, was that the Senator had been blackmailed into submission by the FBI.
For eight years in the sixties, Long did battle with what he called ‘the snooping monster,’ the invasion of citizens’ privacy by the tappers, microphone planters and mail openers of modern life. He also wanted something that was then just a pious hope, a Freedom of Information Act to give citizens access to government records.
In 1963, as chairman of a judiciary subcommittee, Long began to probe government efficiency. Fired by the discovery that state agencies spent $20 million on eavesdropping equipment each year, he ordered an inquiry. The resulting hearings ground on for more than three years, and spelled the Senator’s ruin.
When Long decided to hold hearings specifically on the FBI, Edgar was furious. ‘Pressure,’ an aide had earlier advised, ‘would have to be applied so that the personal interest of Senator Long became involved, rather than any ideological basis.’ Years later, in a sworn affidavit, Fensterwald gave this account of what followed in 1966.
‘The FBI,’ Fensterwald said, ‘knew they were going to be the next subject of the committee hearings. Hoover’s man [Assistant Director] Cartha DeLoach made an appointment and came to Long’s office with another agent. They never come alone. Long had me sit in on it, probably because he expected it to be about our FBI investigation. I doubt that he knew it was going to be “This Is Your Life, Senator Long.” They had a file folder with them, and DeLoach said something like, “Senator, I think you ought to read this file that we have on you. You know we would never use it, because you’re a friend of ours, but you never know what unscrupulous people will do. And we just thought you ought to know the type of stuff that might get around and might be harmful to you.”’
‘They handed him the folder, a fairly thin one, as I recall. And Long just sat there and read it for a few minutes. Then he closed the file, he thanked them and they went on the
ir way. The next thing I knew we had orders to skip over the FBI inquiries and go on to whatever other agency was next. I think there were some perfunctory face-saving hearings, but we never got into the heavy stuff – the wire-tapping and so on.’
DeLoach, who has denied the Fensterwald allegation, was Edgar’s principal go-between with Senator Long. He wrote of one visit to Long: ‘I asked him point-blank whether or not he intended to hold hearings concerning the FBI at any time. He stated he did not. I asked him if he would be willing to give us a commitment that he would in no way embarrass the FBI. He said he would agree to do this … I told Senator Long that, to sum up, it was our understanding that we had a commitment from him that he would not bother the FBI. He stated this was true and that we could have his word in this regard … He stated that at the conclusion of his hearings he intended to use the FBI as a shining example for other agencies to follow.
‘It is important,’ DeLoach wrote, ‘that we stay in touch with Senator Long in view of his changeable personality. While we have neutralized the threat [author’s emphasis] of being embarrassed by the Long Committee, we have not yet eliminated certain dangers … We therefore must keep on top of this situation at all times.’
A year later Long was the subject of an expose in Life magazine. It reported that Long had received payments from Morris Shenker, chief counsel to Jimmy Hoffa, the crooked leader of the Teamsters Union. His probe of federal snooping, Life claimed, was inspired by Teamsters cronies and had blunted government efforts to fight organized crime.
A Senate ethics committee inquiry found no facts to support these allegations. Long had focused on privacy before the suspect payments were made, and he and Shenker also shared clients who had nothing to do with Hoffa. The Life article and the ensuing furor, however, wrecked Long’s political career. He failed to win reelection in 1968.