Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [205]
‘When you get into the White House,’ the Director warned, ‘don’t make any calls through the switchboard … Little men you don’t know will be listening.’ Edgar claimed that presidential communications, run by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, were insecure – that ‘the President should know that if he talked on those lines he would probably be monitored.’
‘We were to find that Hoover always came in with a little bag of goodies,’ Haldeman recalled, ‘tidbits of information that he doled out, alarums and excursions on which your imagination would feed. He would roll his eyes skywards, without offering a firm conclusion – all to create an impression of how useful the Bureau could be to the President.’
Edgar must have hoped for a smooth run, a return to the power and privilege he had exercised during the last Republican administration, when Nixon had been Vice President. Haldeman, watching him with Nixon at the Pierre, thought they greeted each other ‘like old pals.’ ‘Edgar,’ Nixon said, ‘you are one of the few people who is to have direct access to me at all times.’
Yet Nixon’s counsel John Ehrlichman, also present, thought his boss said this ‘ostentatiously, for effect.’ Haldeman thought Nixon doubted Edgar’s competence and was secretly considering firing him. Even as he was making promises to Edgar, Nixon was approaching others to fill the post.
At a meeting in Palm Springs, Nixon dangled the job in front of Pete Pitchess, Sheriff of Los Angeles County, a Goldwater conservative and a former FBI agent. Pitchess responded with care. ‘Hoover,’ he noted, ‘hasn’t yet said he’s retiring.’ ‘No,’ said Nixon, ‘but he’s told me he’s preparing to, on his birthday.’ ‘Ah,’ Pitchess responded, ‘but which birthday?’ Nixon changed the subject.
Why did Nixon fail to follow through? ‘He was afraid,’ said Pitchess. ‘Every goddamn president was afraid of Hoover – Johnson, even Kennedy. All of them, afraid. I was close to Nixon, but he wouldn’t be specific. He just said, “I have to handle Hoover with kid gloves.”’
John Connally, who served Nixon as Secretary of the Treasury, saw it, too. ‘Nixon would like to have forced Hoover to retire, but he was not prepared to force it. He didn’t trust him. He was fearful …’
Even after Edgar was dead, Nixon would be speaking of his power, in awe, almost as if Edgar were still alive to wield it. ‘He’s got files on everybody, goddamnit!’ Nixon was to say in 1973, wishing Edgar were there to rescue him from Watergate.
President Johnson had told a friend there was a fat FBI dossier on Nixon. One might have expected it to be bulging with reports of connections to white-collar crime or of dubious business deals. The one item we know about, however, comes as a surprise. It links Richard Nixon with a woman, and an exotic one at that.
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The story began in 1958, when Nixon, then forty-five, married and serving as Vice President, met Marianna Liu, a Hong Kong tour guide in her twenties. This was a chance encounter, but the two met again in Nixon’s wilderness years, when he traveled to Hong Kong on business. Liu believes they saw each other each year between 1964 and 1966, when she was working as a hostess at the Den, the cocktail lounge of the local Hilton. The two were photographed together.
By her own account, Liu and a waitress friend visited Nixon and his traveling companion, the controversial businessman Bebe Rebozo, in a suite at the Mandarin Hotel. She – and Nixon – denied any sexual activity. Liu said that when Nixon next came to Hong Kong, she was in the hospital and he sent her flowers and a bottle of her favorite perfume.
The former FBI representative in Hong Kong, however, remembered that the Nixon friendship with Liu caused a security flap. ‘One of my contacts in another U.S. agency,’ said Dan Grove, now a security consultant, ‘came to see me one morning and said one of his sources,