Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [111]
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