Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [203]
Now someone had, and Edgar was roused from sleep by President Johnson to be told that, as in 1963, he would rely on the FBI for the best information. Yet, as in the case of the Dallas assassination, the murder of Robert Kennedy was to remain a historical muddle. The notion that only Sirhan Sirhan was responsible was doubted. The initial FBI report on the crime, released only after Edgar’s death, indicated that twelve or more bullets were fired. Sirhan’s gun was capable of firing only eight. Other evidence, meanwhile, suggested to some that two gunmen were involved.
The first autopsy pictures of Kennedy were rushed to Edgar personally, to be joined in his Official and Confidential files by gruesome color pictures and medical reports. Of all the famous deaths in the Director’s long career, they are the only death pictures thus preserved.
Edward Kennedy, too, was a victim of Edgar’s spite. In 1962, when he first ran for the Senate, the youngest of the brothers was embarrassed by the revelation that he had been suspended from Harvard for getting a friend to take an exam in his place. It was Edgar, according to FBI sources, who ensured the story got into the newspapers.
By 1967 Edgar had written Edward Kennedy off as ‘irresponsible,’ a judgment vindicated two years later when the Senator abandoned a female companion in the wreckage of his sunken car at Chappaquiddick. The accident was a local police matter, but Edgar would readily oblige when the Nixon White House asked him to send agents looking for additional dirt. He loved to gossip about the tragedy, sometimes for hours on end.
In the summer of 1968, with Robert Kennedy gone, Edgar’s horizon seemed free of serious opposition. It was an illusion.
32
‘Mr Hoover served with distinction, but he served too long … Those who had recent contact with him knew that age increasingly impacted his judgment. We all – the Presidents, the Congress, the Attorneys General, the press – knew that, and yet he stayed on struggling against change and the future.’
Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General, 1975
‘The greatest enemy,’ Edgar had said, ‘is time,’ but he acted as though he could hold the clock back. In 1968, when he turned seventy-three, the familiar bulldog profile seemed little changed. Edgar’s doctors pronounced him fit, and aides passed on the reassuring news to the press. They said as little as possible about Clyde Tolson.
Though five years Edgar’s junior, Clyde had undergone open-heart surgery and suffered the first of several strokes. So feeble was his eyesight that he would soon need help to read his mail, and sometimes he did not make it into the office at all. Edgar could not stand to see his friend show his weaknesses in public. When Clyde stumbled and fell at the track in California, Edgar ordered an accompanying agent not to help him. ‘Leave him alone,’ he snapped. ‘Let the dumb asshole get up by himself.’
Clyde ‘retired’ when he reached the automatic retirement age of seventy, but only for a day. By dint of some bureaucratic sleight of hand, Edgar promptly rehired him. Clyde continued to get ‘outstanding’ performance reports and, in spite of his failing eyesight, was issued a new service revolver. FBI propaganda insisted that the Director and his right-hand man were hale and hearty, as indomitable as ever.
Increasingly, however, people who mattered were unconvinced. A group of Los Angeles agents wrote to the Attorney General complaining of the Director’s ‘rapidly advancing senility and increasing megalomania.’ Two former agents dared to write books criticizing him, and Edgar found that old suppression techniques no longer worked. Even the conservative