Edgar’s last day alive, by a great irony, was May Day, the workers’ holiday celebrated by the Left, the Left he had struggled all his life to suppress. Edgar arrived at work alone, without the ailing Clyde.
It was not a pleasant day at the office. That morning, in his Washington Post column, Jack Anderson offered revelations about FBI dossiers on the private lives of political figures, black leaders, newsmen and show business people. Hours later, in a carefully timed appearance on Capitol Hill, he promised to prove it.
‘The executive branch,’ the columnist testified to a congressional committee, ‘conducts secret investigations of prominent Americans … FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover has demonstrated an intense interest in who is sleeping with whom in Washington … I should make clear that I am not offering hearsay testimony. I have seen FBI sex reports; I have examined FBI files … I am willing to make some of these documents available to the Committee.’
These were astonishing claims in 1972, and the FBI corridors were abuzz with talk about Anderson that day. This, however, was only one in a salvo of new attacks. Earlier, Edgar had obtained advance copies of two books about himself. Citizen Hoover, by Jay Robert Nash, was a savage attack on Edgar’s entire career. Americans, Nash wrote, no longer knew what to make of Edgar. He was both ‘benefactor and bully, protector and oppressor, truth-giver and liar … The truth is the FBI of our collective memory never really existed outside of the very fertile and imaginative mind of its eternal Director … To him, all high adventure was possible in the cause of Right, all moral victories over obvious evil inevitable, so long as faith in the all-encompassing power of his good office was absolute.’
The second book, which the FBI had obtained by covert means in proof form, was more damaging. In a daring expose called simply John Edgar Hoover, award-winning reporter Hank Messick hinted at the dark truths behind Edgar’s compliant attitude toward organized crime. He highlighted, too, the relationship with Lewis Rosenstiel that placed Edgar close to top mobsters.
‘Besides,’ reads a de Tocqueville quotation on the flyleaf of the Messick book,
what is to be feared is not so much the immorality of the great as the fact that immorality may lead to greatness.
The Nash book would be found on Edgar’s night table after his death, and Messick’s book may have been in the house as well. Secret FBI intervention no longer cowed publishers. These books were going to be published whether Edgar liked it or not.
Edgar stayed at work until nearly six that last day, late by his standards, then went to Clyde’s apartment for dinner. He probably arrived home about 10:15 P.M., to be greeted by the two yapping Cairn terriers. Edgar liked to have a nightcap, a glass of his favorite bourbon, Jack Daniel’s Black Label, poured from a musical decanter. When raised from its rest, the decanter tinkled ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow.’ Edgar was fond of it.
If there was such a quiet moment that night, it was reportedly shattered by an unwelcome telephone call. Later, Helen Gandy would claim that, somewhere between ten and midnight, President Nixon called Edgar at home. His purpose, Gandy said, was to tell Edgar once and for all that he must quit. Afterward, Edgar phoned Clyde to talk about the call. Clyde subsequently told Gandy, and that is how the story survives.
If Gandy’s account is accurate, Edgar must have gone to bed feeling shattered. He would have walked into the hall, past the bust of himself waiting to greet visitors, past the pictures and inscriptions that spoke of fifty-nine years in government service; one showed him with a smiling Richard Nixon. Then he would have climbed the stairs, passing an oil painting of himself on the landing, to the master bedroom with its maplewood four-poster.
May 2, a Tuesday, began as a typical Washington spring day – too hot for comfort even in the early morning. Edgar’s black housekeeper, Annie Fields, always came up from her basement apartment to fix breakfast, and Edgar always came down to eat at 7:30 A. M. But today he did not.
The chauffeur reportedly arrived at 7:45, to be followed by his predecessor in the job, James Crawford. Crawford, one of the blacks Edgar had once elevated to agent rank to avoid accusations of discrimination, still worked on in retirement as handyman and gardener. He was there that morning by appointment with Edgar, to discuss where to plant some new rosebushes.
The Director, however, did not appear. As the servants waited, the dogs scurried about, eager for the morning ritual of scraps from the master’s table. Then it was 8:30, and the old retainers began to worry. There had been no sound from upstairs, not this morning.
Annie Fields, it is said, went upstairs to investigate. She knocked timorously at the bedroom door, then – answered only by silence – tried the door. It was unlocked, which was highly unusual.
The housekeeper saw Edgar’s body the moment she stepped into the room. It was dressed in pajama trousers, naked from the waist up, and lying beside the bed. She went no farther and ran downstairs to find Crawford, the longestserving member of the household staff. Crouched on the bedroom floor, holding the rigid, cold hand in his, Crawford knew at once that his boss was dead.
Crawford rushed to telephone first the doctor and then Clyde, the one other person he knew should be alerted at once. Clyde nearly missed the call. He was already out of the apartment, on his slow way to the limousine he assumed was about to arrive, when he realized he had forgotten something. So he came limping back, one leg dragging because of the strokes he had suffered, to hear the phone that was ringing and ringing.
Edgar’s doctor, Robert Choisser, was at the house within an hour of the discovery of the body. ‘Mr Hoover had been dead for some hours,’ he recalled. ‘I was rather surprised by his sudden death, because he was in good health. I do not recall prescribing him medication for blood pressure or heart disease. There was nothing to lead anyone to expect him to die at that time, except for his age.’
The body was in rigor mortis, suggesting Edgar had been dead for many hours – since about 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., Choisser thought. Later that morning, because deaths at home must be reported to the coroner’s office, he contacted Dr Richard Welton, a former classmate working as a Medical Examiner. Routinely in such cases the coroner takes the doctor’s word for it and simply registers the death. Welton and Coroner James Luke, however, decided the death of a man as prominent as Edgar required their presence at the scene.
The two medical examiners arrived at the house soon after 11:00 A.M., and, except that Dr Welton was to say he thought the body had been moved from the floor to the bed, found the scene as described by Dr Choisser. ‘It was totally normal,’ Welton recalled. ‘There was nothing to suggest trauma. Hoover was in an age group where it could be expected … It is common for such a person to be found dead after apparently trying to get to the bathroom during the night.’5
On the way to the car, Welton wondered aloud whether there should be an autopsy. ‘What if,’ he asked Luke, ‘someone should pop up six months from now and say someone had been feeding Hoover arsenic? We’ll think we should have done an autopsy.’ It was only a passing thought. Back at the office, however, Dr Luke consulted by telephone with the Medical Examiner for New York City, Dr Milton Helpern, perhaps the world’s most renowned forensic detective.
Neither pathologist had any reason to suppose anyone had been feeding Edgar arsenic, or any other poison. No one then knew that the Watergate burglars even existed, let alone that two of them had consulted a CIA expert about ways of killing columnist Jack Anderson, including the option of planting poison in his medicine cabinet. They knew nothing of alleged break-ins at Edgar’s home, nothing of the suggestion that a poison might have been ‘placed on Hoover’s personal toilet articles’ – a poison capable of inducing cardiac arrest, detectable only if an autopsy was speedily performed.
Nor, on the other hand, did the doctors have any notion of the stress Edgar had been under, of the latest threats to his reputation – Jack Anderson’s congressional testimony promising to produce proof of Edgar’s snooping on public figures and Hank Messi
ck’s forthcoming book hinting at his links with organized crime. They knew nothing of the call Nixon had reportedly made to Edgar late the previous night, telling him it was time to step down.
Three days after Edgar’s death, having decided an autopsy was unnecessary, Coroner Luke signed the death certificate:
John Edgar Hoover, male, white.
Occupation: Director, FBI.
Immediate cause: Hypertensive cardiovascular disease.
On May 5, three days after Edgar died, the men who were to break into Democratic Party headquarters moved into Room 419 at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, directly opposite the Watergate building they were to make so famous. Their first break-in attempt, three weeks later, failed. It was followed by one successful entry, then a second – in June – when they were caught. The Watergate saga followed, leading to the resignation of President Nixon and jail terms for most of the burglars and for John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, Charles Colson, Egil Krogh and others.
Krogh, Nixon intimate and chief Plumber, wound up serving time in Allenwood minimum security prison in Pennsylvania. Also in Allenwood in early 1974 was former Congressman Neil Gallagher, once a victim of Edgar’s rage for his failure to cooperate in smearing Robert Kennedy, now serving time for the income-tax conviction that followed.6 According to Gallagher, Krogh had something strange to say about Edgar’s death.
‘I was the prison librarian,’ Gallagher recalled in 1991, ‘and Krogh would come in with his two Bibles. He was very religious, a Christian Scientist. He’d sit writing letters at the big table in the library, and sometimes we’d talk. One night, when I was about to close the place and there were only the two of us there, we talked about Hoover.
‘I said I thought the circumstances of Hoover’s death were a bit strange. Because of my war with Hoover, I’d followed everything about him closely. I said to Krogh, “Hoover knew everything that was going on in Washington. He must surely have known about the Plumbers and everything. Do you think Hoover was blackmailing the President?” And then I said, and it surprises me now, “Did you guys knock Hoover off? You had the troops to do it, and the reason …”’
‘It took several seconds for it to sink in. Then Krogh literally jumped out of his chair. And in a highly charged voice he sort of screamed, “We didn’t knock off Hoover. He knocked himself off.” And I said, “My God, that explains a lot about the bastard’s death coming the way it did.” And with that Krogh jumped up, gathered his papers and his Bibles and rushed out of the library. We never had another conversation the rest of the time we were in Allenwood.’
Interviewed in 1991, Krogh recalled knowing Gallagher in the prison. Told what Gallagher had said of their discussion about Edgar’s death, he replied, ‘I might have had a conversation like that, but it was a long time ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. I don’t remember it.’ Gallagher, for his part, signed an affidavit swearing to the truth of his account.
There is no way, now, to know why Nixon’s adviser should have said Edgar committed suicide – nor why the subject upset him so much. If evidence along those lines was known to the White House, it has vanished along with so many other mysteries of the Watergate period. Nor is it possible, today, to make a judgment on the allegation that Watergate investigators were unable to track further – that there were break-ins at Edgar’s home before he died. The most troubling claim, that the second break-in involved planting a poison chemical designed to cause death by simulated heart attack, cannot be further assessed outside the judicial system.
After he heard the news of Edgar’s death, Clyde Tolson made two telephone calls. The first was to Helen Gandy, the secretary who had served the Director since 1919. The second was to the office of the Attorney General, and from there the word passed to H. R. Haldeman at the White House. He in turn informed the President – at 9:15 A.M., according to his handwritten notes.
As Haldeman recalled it, the news ‘wasn’t a great surprise’ to Nixon. He said nothing that reflected his reported exchange with Edgar on the phone the previous night. He wrote in his diary, or so we are told in his memoirs:
Hoover … died at the right time; fortunately, he died in office. It would have killed him had he been forced out of office or had he resigned even voluntarily. I remember the last conversation I had with him about two weeks ago when I called him and mentioned the fine job the Bureau had done on the hijacking cases …
Ehrlichman and Haldeman did not recall any reaction by the President to Edgar’s death, aside from his concern for the files. John Mitchell, who had left the post of Attorney General in order to run Nixon’s reelection campaign, had the same worry. His orders that morning, Haldeman noted at the time, were to hunt down ‘the skeletons.’ It was decided not to announce Edgar’s death publicly until eleven o’clock.
Gordon Liddy, Nixon’s dirty-tricks specialist, thought it was vital to find the skeletons. As an FBI veteran, he had once worked with some of Edgar’s most sensitive political files. ‘I called the White House at once,’ Liddy recalled. ‘I said, “You’ve got to get those files. They are a source of enormous power. You don’t have much time. There’s going to be a race on. Get those files.”’
Liddy said he thought he spoke to Ehrlichman, who could speak directly to the President, and to Howard Hunt to get him to talk with Charles Colson. Ehrlichman confirmed he did discuss the danger with Nixon, and someone that morning took drastic action.
When the undertakers reached Edgar’s house around 12:30 P.M., they walked into a scene out of Orwell’s darkest imaginings. ‘They were virtually tearing the place apart,’ undertaker William Reburn remembered. ‘There were men in suits, fifteen or eighteen of them, swarming all over the place, ransacking it, going through everything he had. I assumed they were government agents. They were going through Hoover’s books, desk, drawers, like they were looking for something …
‘They were methodical. One agent was assigned to a bookcase, going through all the books kind of page by page. They were taking all the books off the shelves and looking under and behind the shelves. There had been this rumor that Hoover had secret files, and that was the thought that entered my mind, that they were hunting for his files.’
Whoever the searchers were, someone may have got there before them. Early that morning two of Edgar’s neighbors had seen something mysterious. ‘It was early in the morning,’ Anthony Calomaris recalled in 1992. ‘I was seventeen then, and I was getting ready for school. And my mother called me into her room, onto the balcony we had then. There were two men carrying something out of Mr Hoover’s kitchen door, and Annie the housekeeper was at the door. What they were carrying was long and obviously heavy, wrapped in something like a quilt. They heaved it into a station wagon parked in the alley and drove away.’
Because of the shape of the bundle, Calomaris and his mother assumed at the time that it contained a body – that Edgar had died in the night and that these were undertakers, working early to avoid the press. The documented record, however, is that Edgar’s body was not removed until much later, around lunchtime. At the hour the neighbors saw the men with a bundle, the body had not, according to all available testimony, even been discovered.
Yet Calomaris and his mother are adamant that they saw something being removed before Anthony left for school. The men were surely not interlopers – had they been, the housekeeper would not have been calmly seeing them to the door. Given the known desire of others to get at Edgar’s secrets, were allies removing something before the death became generally known, to thwart later searchers?
Whatever was or was not found at Edgar’s home, Nixon’s men were worried about the contents of his office. That same morning, after a conversation with the White House, Acting Attorney General Kleindienst ordered that it be sealed – to secure Edgar’s files. That afternoon, the man Nixon had picked as Acting FBI Director, L. Patrick Gray, arrived to ask John Mohr where the ‘secret files’ were. Mohr told him there were none.
/> Gray was back, asking the same question, before nine o’clock the next morning. ‘Judging from his conversation and his comments,’ Mohr recalled, ‘I thought he was looking for secret files that would embarrass the Nixon administration … I told him in no uncertain terms that there were no secret files.’ There was a stand-up row, with Gray yelling that he was ‘a hardheaded Irishman and nobody pushes me around.’ Mohr said he was a hardheaded Dutchman – no one pushed him around, either. The shouting could be heard several offices away.
Gray, who later narrowly escaped prosecution for destroying documents after Watergate, may in the end have had some success. Joe Diamond, a young file clerk who joined the FBI a week after Edgar’s death, recalled a curious episode.
‘It was my second day on the job, and the Supervisor asked me and three other men to go upstairs to do a job. We went up, and there were four gentlemen in suits there. And they had us take these crates stuffed with papers down to the basement to the shredder. We picked up the crates and it was like we were carrying gold or something the way they acted. It took about two hours to get the stuff shredded, and then they took the sacks and left … I recognized two of the men in suits. One of them was L. Patrick Gray and the other was [Deputy Associate Director] Mark Felt.’
Almost certainly, a mass of documents were gone even before Gray took over. ‘I learned later,’ recalled Kleindienst, ‘that certain files were removed even before I called to order that Hoover’s office be locked.’ ‘It was reported to me by my FBI sources,’ said Liddy, ‘that by the time Gray went in to get the files, Miss Gandy had already got rid of them.’
Kleindienst’s instructions to seal Edgar’s office had no effect anyway, because John Mohr placed a literal interpretation on the order. He locked up only Edgar’s personal office, which contained no files at all. The other nine rooms in the office suite, which were bulging with documents, remained unsecured. They housed some of the most secret documents of all, including the Official and Confidential files stored in locked file cabinets under the eagle eye of Helen Gandy.