EHRLICHMAN: If he does, he’ll beat you over the head with it.
NIXON: Oh … you’ve gotta get them out of there.
MITCHELL: Hoover won’t come and talk to me about it. He’s just got his Gestapo all over the place.
NIXON: Yeah … just say [to Mardian] that we want to see them. Put them in a special safe.
As Nixon ordered, so it was done. The telltale wiretap evidence was moved from Mardian’s office to a secure White House strongbox. Sullivan, moreover, told the President’s men that, before leaving, he had ordered the Washington field office to destroy its file on the compromising wiretap operation.
Nixon’s aides had been discussing how to remove Edgar from office for nearly a year. Once it had seemed politically risky to dump him, because he seemed too popular in the country. Now there were polls that showed the enthusiasm had waned, and a constant tattoo of criticism in the press.
Edgar made a speech about ‘journalistic prostitutes’ and issued orders that no one in the Bureau was to speak, ever, with The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CBS or NBC. Such tantrums, though, served only to convince White House advisers that the Director had become an embarrassing liability.
As early as January, the President himself had said Edgar was ‘a question.’ Deputy Attorney General Kleindienst now made a habit of holding the phone away from his ear when Edgar called, grinning hugely and making circular motions in the air. ‘That man has been out of his mind for three years,’ he told Sullivan after one such call. ‘How much longer do we have to put up with him?’
For all his public support of Edgar, Attorney General Mitchell assured colleagues privately that ‘we’ll get rid of him soon.’ According to Henry Kissinger, Nixon himself was ‘determined to get rid of Hoover at the earliest opportunity.’
One morning shortly before Sullivan’s showdown with Edgar, Mardian had called several senior FBI officials, including Sullivan, into his office at the Justice Department. The atmosphere was conspiratorial. At a quarter to ten Mardian pointed to the clock. ‘At ten A.M.,’ he said, ‘our problem with Hoover will be solved. It will all be over. The President has asked Hoover to see him at the White House at ten, and he’s going to ask Hoover to resign.’
The call never came. Anticipation turned to doubt, doubt to frustration, and the men drifted disconsolately away. They soon learned that, back in his office after seeing Nixon, Edgar was triumphantly dictating memos. Far from firing him, the President had cleared Edgar to open a string of new FBI offices around the world, an expansion opposed by the Attorney General, the Secretary of State and several of the Director’s own aides.
In the privacy of his office, Mardian called the White House to find out what had happened. ‘Nothing happened,’ Ehrlichman told him irritably. ‘Nothing. Nixon couldn’t pull the string … He got cold feet.’
‘I’m willing to fight him, but I don’t,’ the President said lamely at the Oval Office meeting on October 8, 1971. ‘We’ve got to avoid the situation where he could leave with a blast … I sorta, I went all around with him … There are some problems. If I fire Hoover, if you think we’ve got an uprising and a riot now … If he does go, he’s got to go of his own volition …’
Two weeks later, Ehrlichman handed the President a special report on Edgar and the FBI. Further delay, it warned, could be disastrous:
The concern with image, the cultism, has finally taken its toll. Virtually any genuine innovation or imaginative approach is stifled … Morale of FBI agents in the field has deteriorated badly … All clandestine activities have been terminated. Liaison with the intelligence community has been disrupted and key men forced out … Hoover has reportedly threatened the President … Years of intense adulation have inured Hoover to self-doubt. He remains realistic, however, and on June 30 his most trusted confidant, Clyde Tolson, stated to a reliable source, ‘Hoover knows that, no matter who wins in ’72, he’s through.’
Sullivan has been ‘keeping book’ on Hoover for some time. He is a skilled writer. His book could be devastating should he choose to expose such matters as the supervisor who handled Hoover’s stock portfolio and tax matters; the painting of Hoover’s house by the FBI Exhibits Section; the ghostwriting of Hoover’s books by FBI employees; the rewriting of FBI history and the ‘donation’ by ‘admiring’ facility owners of accommodations and services which are often in fact underwritten by employee contributions … The situation was probably best stated by Alfred Tennyson in The Idylls of the King:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new;
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
The report recommended that Edgar retire before the end of 1971, and Nixon agreed wholeheartedly. ‘Hoover,’ he told colleagues, ‘has to realize that he can’t stay forever … he’s too old.’ ‘I guess, I guess … I think I could get him to resign, if I put it to him directly that without it he’s going to be hurt politically … But I want this closely held – it’s just got to be.’
This time the operation was carefully planned, starting with a phone call from John Mitchell to Edgar’s former aide Cartha DeLoach. ‘I walked into the Attorney General’s office,’ DeLoach recalled, ‘and he told me to close the door. Then right out of a clear blue sky he told me, “We’ve got to get rid of Hoover, but we don’t want him kicking over the traces. Can you suggest a way we might he able to do it without him saying or doing anything?” I said, “Well, if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to allow him to save face. Let him keep his bulletproof car and his chauffeur. That’s a mark of prestige, and he likes that. Let him keep Helen Gandy as his secretary, because she does ordering of groceries for him and paying of bills, all the things he’s never had to do himself. Make him Director Emeritus, or Ambassador of Internal Security. And have the President call him once in a while, to ask for counsel and advice …”’
At the White House, a nervous Nixon worked out a slick compromise. Instead of firing Edgar abruptly he would tell him he could stay until the 1972 election. That way, the FBI would not become a political football during the campaign. To defuse the critics, however, the retirement plan would be announced at once. And, to preserve Edgar’s dignity, he would be allowed to do it himself.
With Ehrlichman taking notes, Nixon rehearsed the little speech he intended to make, still preserved in the archives. ‘Edgar,’ it ran. ‘As you can imagine I’ve been giving your situation a great deal of thought. I am absolutely delighted that you have weathered the attacks upon you and the Bureau so well … Obviously, if I am reelected, your replacement would be someone who would carry on your tradition … I sincerely think this is in our mutual best interests …’
And so on, in that vein. Nixon may have tried this ploy in late December, when Edgar arrived for a talk at the President’s home in Key Biscayne. Yet Edgar stayed on for dinner on the terrace afterward, stone crabs and Grand Marnier souffle, washed down with red wine.
If Nixon flinched from confrontation that night, he may have considered trying again at New Year’s, when he asked Edgar to fly back to Washington with him on Air Force One. ‘The President,’ Edgar told a colleague before the flight, ‘wants to talk to me about something.’
Yet again, however, Nixon apparently failed to read his script. The White House let it be known that the flight was a sign of presidential favor to celebrate Edgar’s seventy-seventh birthday, and Nixon presented him with a cake.
Far from talk of dismissal, the press now reported that Nixon ‘wants Hoover to remain in office.’ In the last major interview of his life, granted before the Florida trip, Edgar declared himself determined to carry on. ‘Many of our great artists and composers,’ he said, ‘did their best work in their eighties. They were judged on performance, not age … Look at Bernard Baruch; he was brilliant in his nineties – and Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur in their eighties. That is my policy …’ Attorney General Mitchell, who had privately been recomm
ending Edgar’s retirement for months, agreed. Talk about replacing Edgar, he said, was ‘spurious speculation.’
The President of the United States had now gone into at least two meetings assuring his aides he was about to give Edgar his marching orders. Edgar had emerged unscathed, and Nixon’s advisers did not know why.
The first time, in the fall, John Ehrlichman had waited for a few hours, then asked Haldeman what had happened. The President, Haldeman said, was refusing to discuss the matter. Twenty-four hours later Ehrlichman asked again. ‘Don’t ask,’ the Chief of Staff replied. ‘He doesn’t want to talk about it.’ Later, Haldeman told Ehrlichman to forget the breakfast had ever taken place.
Many months later, after Edgar’s death, Nixon would confide a little in Ehrlichman. ‘The meeting was a total strikeout,’ he said. ‘He told me I’d have to force him out.’ ‘It was my conclusion,’ the President was to write in his memoirs, ‘that Hoover’s resignation before the election would raise more problems than it would solve.’
Yet Nixon would continue to deny that Edgar had a hold on him. ‘Hoover,’ he said in 1988, ‘never gave any indication to me of blackmail.’ Specifically, Nixon denied that Edgar threatened to disclose his wiretapping of newsmen. He was less coy at the time with his colleague Henry Kissinger. ‘Nixon thought,’ Kissinger recalled, ‘Hoover was quite capable of using the knowledge he acquired as part of his investigations to blackmail the President.’
Contrary to what Nixon imagined at first, the threat had not evaporated when Sullivan handed over the FBI copies of the wiretap transcripts to Assistant Attorney General Mardian. When Mardian checked the list, he discovered some of the transcripts were missing. They had been retained, all along, by Edgar.
As of New Year’s Day 1972, then, the President still had cause to fear Edgar over the taps. Not least as he prepared for his ground-breaking visit to China – there was the continuing embarrassment of his woman friend from Hong Kong. And there was now something else – something that had to be hidden at all costs.
‘We may have on our hands here,’ Nixon had told Ehrlichman, ‘a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me …’
Six months earlier, Nixon had lost his temper – and fashioned a new trap for himself. In spite of intense legal efforts, he had failed to prevent The New York Times from continuing to publish the Pentagon Papers. He was afraid future installments might reflect badly on him, that the man who had leaked the Papers – Daniel Ellsberg – was part of some sinister radical conspiracy. The President was angry at stories that Edgar was, as Nixon put it in his memoirs, ‘dragging his feet’ on the Ellsberg investigation. ‘If the FBI was not going to pursue the case,’ he decided, ‘then we would have to do it ourselves.’
Nixon had railed about this in late June 1971, seated in the Oval Office at the mahogany desk that had once been Woodrow Wilson’s. With him was his aide Charles Colson. ‘I don’t give a damn how it is done,’ Colson recalled the President saying, ‘do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures; I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done … I want to know who is behind this … I want results. I want it done, whatever the cost.’
They did do it, and the cost, when it all came out two years later, would be monstrous. Nixon’s frustration over Edgar’s failings, or what the President saw as failings, was the first step on the road that led to the loss of his presidency.
Two young men, Egil Krogh and David Young, were installed in a warren of underground offices in the Executive Office Building next to the White House. They had a conference room, a special alarm system, a three-way combination safe and ‘sterile’ phones. And since their job was to plug leaks, Young indulged a whimsical impulse. He fixed a sign on the door that read ‘Mr Young – Plumber.’ As Plumbers they were to be remembered.
The cast of characters is now well known. The chain of command went from Nixon to Ehrlichman to Krogh and Young, with Colson and the President’s Counsel, John Dean, putting in their nickel’s worth. In the field, assigned to do the White House’s dirty work, were Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy. Hunt was a fifty-two-year-old career CIA officer who had, technically, retired from the Agency and gone freelance. Liddy had served as an Assistant District Attorney in New York, then as a special assistant in the Nixon Treasury Department, since leaving the FBI in 1962.
Liddy was obsessed, by his own account, with guns, violence and the elemental power of the human will. He liked to discuss the more exotic ways of killing, and reportedly claimed he had killed a man while serving in the FBI. A former FBI official described Liddy as both ‘wild man’ and ‘superklutz,’ qualities that made him well suited for work in the Nixon White House in 1971. Krogh took him on board, at $26,000 a year, to coordinate field operations for the President’s Plumbers. Liddy had entered a world of conspiracies.
His predecessor, John Caulfield, had worked on such projects as setting up an apartment rigged with bugging devices, for the seduction of a woman who might provide seamy information on Senator Edward Kennedy. Charles Colson had recently urged Caulfield to set fire to the Brookings Institution, as a cover for the theft of documents related to the Ellsberg case.
While that scheme was abandoned, an equally crazy one was not. On the night of September 4, 1971, under the command of Liddy and Hunt, three Cuban exiles broke into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. His files, the Plumbers hoped, would produce evidence of conspiracy in the Pentagon Papers case along with sex material with which to smear Ellsberg. According to Ehrlichman, the President knew of the planned break-in in advance, as he had known of the plot to firebomb the Brookings Institution.
The operation against Ellsberg failed. The Cuban hired hands ransacked the psychiatrist’s records only to emerge empty-handed. Their fruitless crime would one day become a major part of the Watergate scandal and lead to jail sentences for almost everyone involved. In the fall of 1971, however, it remained a dark secret. Any outsider who learned it would gain extraordinary power over the President. And Edgar had the secret.
He knew because, in his anger about Edgar’s ‘foot-dragging’ over Ellsberg, Nixon had told him. ‘It was obvious,’ Ehrlichman told the Senate Watergate Committee, ‘that the President had, at Mr Krogh’s request, shaken up the Director … told the Director that he was having to resort to sending two people out there from the White House …’
Quite apart from what Nixon volunteered, Edgar may have known presidential secrets thanks to electronic surveillance. In August 1970, according to reporter Tad Szulc, a specialist on intelligence matters, the Secret Service had discovered a minute bugging device concealed in the wall of the Oval Office. It had been planted there during routine repainting by an interior decorator employed by the General Services Administration. ‘My sources believed it was Hoover’s operation,’ Szulc said recently. ‘And if you are getting that kind of seed information you have a total mastery of what’s going on in the mind of the President.’
Edgar may not have needed a bug to learn about some of the President’s most secret conversations, including those about himself. He reportedly had access to the tapes Nixon himself made for posterity, the recordings we now know as the Watergate Tapes. For although the taping system had been installed by the Secret Service, it was reportedly insecure from the moment of its inception in early 1971.
In 1977, shortly before his death, William Sullivan talked with the film producer Larry Cohen, then embarking on a movie about Edgar’s life. ‘He told me,’ said Cohen, ‘that Hoover was aware Nixon was taping his own conversations. He knew about it because several of the Secret Service agents involved were former FBI agents. He said FBI officials knew where the tapes were kept – room 175½ of the Executive Office Building, a place other people had access to. Hoover aides had been able to go in there on more than one occasion and borrow tapes, and even played them at parties – particularly tapes where Nixon made embarrassing faux pas. They would play them and people woul
d laugh, and then they’d put the tapes back again. It was a slipshod affair; it wasn’t like they were locked up in a safe or anything. How Nixon could’ve allowed this to happen is beyond our ken. I guess he thought he was immune.’
In fact, Nixon became more vulnerable with every passing month. If, as Ehrlichman testified, he confided in Edgar about the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, he presumably did so on the assumption Edgar would never tell. Yet in October 1971 the President did something guaranteed to infuriate Edgar, should he find out.
It was then that, as reported earlier, Nixon approved the internal White House report on Edgar’s incompetence, urging that Edgar be eased out as soon as possible. Its author was Gordon Liddy, who was still in regular contact with former FBI colleagues. Within weeks, moreover, Liddy became general counsel for CREEP (the Committee to Re-elect the President) and there worked alongside another former FBI – and CIA – agent, James McCord. McCord, unlike most of Nixon’s henchmen, thought Edgar ‘the finest law enforcement officer the world has ever seen.’
Then there was Fred LaRue, a White House political operative also about to join CREEP. He was the son of Ike LaRue, an oilman friend of Clint Murchison’s who had been friendly with Edgar at the Del Charro. John Caulfield, up to his neck in White House dirty tricks, was close to Joseph Woods, former FBI agent and brother of the President’s secretary, Rose Mary. Woods was intensely loyal to Edgar.
With potential sources like that, and with his other intelligence pipelines out of the White House, it is likely that Edgar knew a great deal about the plotting against him. By New Year’s 1972, in spite of the public show of trust, the trip with the President on Air Force One, the birthday cake and the smiles, Edgar’s relations with Nixon were threadbare.
During a delay before the flight that day, Edgar spent forty-five minutes in the back of a limousine talking gloomily with his Special Agent in Charge in Miami, Kenneth Whittaker. ‘He was upset,’ Whittaker recalled. ‘He told me about his problems with Sullivan, and he talked about Nixon. He wasn’t high on Nixon. “Let me tell you, Whittaker,” he said, “Pat Nixon would make a better president than him.” It was the last time I saw Mr Hoover alive.’