Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [115]
‘It is important,’ DeLoach wrote, ‘that we stay in touch with Senator Long in view of his changeable personality. While we have neutralized the threat [author’s emphasis] of being embarrassed by the Long Committee, we have not yet eliminated certain dangers … We therefore must keep on top of this situation at all times.’
A year later Long was the subject of an expose in Life magazine. It reported that Long had received payments from Morris Shenker, chief counsel to Jimmy Hoffa, the crooked leader of the Teamsters Union. His probe of federal snooping, Life claimed, was inspired by Teamsters cronies and had blunted government efforts to fight organized crime.
A Senate ethics committee inquiry found no facts to support these allegations. Long had focused on privacy before the suspect payments were made, and he and Shenker also shared clients who had nothing to do with Hoffa. The Life article and the ensuing furor, however, wrecked Long’s political career. He failed to win reelection in 1968.
Another member of Congress, also a prominent campaigner for the privacy rights of American citizens, fell foul of the FBI and Life magazine in circumstances that suggest the Bureau maliciously fed Life false information.
In the mid-sixties, Cornelius Gallagher was regarded as one of the best and brightest of the Democratic Party’s young men. A Korean War hero from Bayonne, New Jersey, he had been in Congress since 1958. Six feet tall, silver-haired in his early forties, he soon became congressional adviser to the Arms Control Agency and a delegate to the Disarmament Conference. He was friendly with the Kennedy brothers and was mentioned as a possible Vice President to Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Like Senator Long, Gallagher’s major domestic interest was what he perceived as the encroachment of the Big Brother mentality. He worried about the thousands of people whose private lives, thanks to modern gadgetry, were no longer private at all. He wondered about data banks and the growing use of lie detectors, about genetic engineering and the psychological testing of children. Who had access to such information? What safeguards did the citizen have?
The result of the Congressman’s worrying was the creation in 1963 of the Subcommittee on Privacy, an out-growth of the House Committee on Government Operations. Private business, educational bodies, even medical institutions, drew much of its fire. Soon, however, in part because the FBI and the IRS pried personal information out of credit bureaus, the committee’s work began to give both those agencies bad press.
It was not what Gallagher was doing so much as what he refused to do that brought the first clash with Edgar. The trouble began when he came under unexpected pressure from the Teamsters Union and from Roy Cohn, Edgar’s protégé from the McCarthy days.
Cohn, who said he was speaking on Edgar’s behalf, astonished the Congressman by urging him to hold hearings on evidence of illegal FBI and IRS surveillance. The purpose, Cohn explained, was to embarrass former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on whose authority the wiretaps had been installed.
When Gallagher refused to hold hearings, saying it was outside his committee’s mandate, Cohn responded with wheedling and threats. ‘Mr Hoover wants to give you a big buildup,’ he said. ‘If you’re their friend, anything you need you get. But if you’re not a friend, and you don’t cooperate, that means you’re an enemy.’
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