Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [113]
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