Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [185]
MALNIK: That’s right …
Just weeks after that conversation, Robert Kennedy complained to his brother about the FBI’s failure to bring pressure on Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. It was an issue that became moot when the President was assassinated.
‘The minute that bullet hit Jack Kennedy’s head,’ said Justice Department aide William Hundley, ‘it was all over. Right then. The organized crime program just stopped, and Hoover took control back.’ ‘Those people,’ Robert Kennedy said bitterly of the FBI a fortnight later, ‘don’t work for us anymore.’ In the months that followed, stunned by grief, he faltered in his drive against the mob. Edgar took full advantage.
‘Pursuit of organized crime did continue,’ recalled veteran Chicago agent Bill Roemer, ‘but not with the same intensity.’ Field agents soon found they had less money to spend and fewer clearances to install bugs against organized crime figures. ‘The whole Mafia effort,’ said William Sullivan, ‘slacked off again.’
The figures confirm it. At the end of the Kennedy administration, members of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section were working 6,699 man-days in the field each year. Three years later the figure had dropped by half. Days spent prosecuting mobsters before grand juries dropped 72 percent, days in court 56 percent, court briefs prepared 82 percent.
The President was dead, his brother a lame duck Attorney General. Edgar, by contrast, was back on top. On May 7, 1964, even while Edgar was secretly frustrating the work of the Warren Commission, Congress honored his fortieth year at the FBI with Resolution Number 706. It praised ‘one of the most remarkable records of service to God and country in our Nation’s history.’ It referred to Edgar’s ‘strong moral determination’ and his ‘unrelenting battle’ against America’s criminal underworld.
The next day, in a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House, President Johnson unveiled Executive Order 10682. With Edgar beside him, he announced he was waiving the compulsory retirement rule, due to take effect when Edgar turned seventy, seven months later. He praised Edgar as ‘quiet, humble … an anathema to evil men,’ and promised he could stay in office ‘for an indefinite period of time.’
‘The Roman Senate,’ commented Loudon Wainwright in Life, ‘conferred god status on a few emperors while they were still in office, and more or less the same thing has just happened to J. Edgar Hoover. Not that he hasn’t been at least a demi-god for a long time …’
* For the second official’s recollection see the Foreword to this edition.
30
‘You don’t fire God.’
Charles Brennan, former Assistant Director of the FBI
On June 4, 1964, the historian William Manchester was ushered into Edgar’s office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. In the anteroom, aides had pointed out a new life-size bust of the Director, in bronze. Now, seated like all guests on a chair that forced him to gaze upward, he stared in fascination.
‘In the foreground,’ Manchester recalled, ‘there was a miniature of the bust I had seen outside. It was looking at Hoover, and Hoover was looking at the bust. And between me and him there was an American flag, made of a sort of filmy gauze material. I was looking through the gauze at Hoover, and his complexion was red, white and blue.’
Manchester, who was researching his epic work Death of a President, was there to discuss the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. A few weeks earlier, at the White House, the professor had gone through another bizarre experience. Fearful of being interviewed, President Johnson had insisted on listening from another room as Manchester staged a ‘dress rehearsal’ question-and-answer session, with an aide standing in for the President. He never did sit for an interview. Now, closeted with Edgar, Manchester realized