Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [112]
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.’
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‘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 history 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