Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [207]
Nixon’s inaugural parade took place under conditions of unprecedented security. Edgar’s agents used dirty tricks to thwart anti-Vietnam War protesters – false housing forms to disrupt accommodation arrangements for out-of-town demonstrators and phony CB radio broadcasts to confuse the organizers.
The office windows on Pennsylvania Avenue were all closed by order of the Secret Service, with one exception. As they had so many times before, Edgar and Clyde stood peering down from their balcony at FBI headquarters, watching the birth of another regime.
Nixon told neither of his key aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, about the Marianna Liu problem. Nor did he mention any other reason he might have to fear Edgar. He simply ordered Ehrlichman to establish himself with Edgar as ‘his friend and White House confidant.’
Ehrlichman’s first mission was to reassure Edgar about a project he held dear, the building of a grand new headquarters for the FBI. It had been eight years since Congress had agreed that the FBI should have a new building. It was to be a concrete edifice, eleven stories high at its tallest point, facing onto Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets. And Edgar was already fighting with the planners.
He was worried that open arcades on the new building would give ‘free access to alcoholics, homos and whores.’ Columns, he thought, would provide cover for lurking assassins. For public consumption, he let it be known that he did not want the building named after him. In private, he admitted that was exactly what he wanted. ‘It was,’ said his friend Walter Trohan, ‘the dearest thing to his heart.’
Ehrlichman assured Edgar that building operations would be expedited, then sat back and listened to one of the Director’s monologues. ‘He was doing a selling job on me,’ Ehrlichman recalled, ‘telling me what we should look out for. Communism, the Kennedys, the Black Panthers … He spoke of all the black movements with passion and hatred.’
‘I hardly had a chance to say anything,’ the aide complained afterward to Nixon. ‘I know,’ the President replied, ‘but it’s necessary, John. It’s necessary.’ Nixon went out of his way to humor Edgar. He went along to the FBI Academy to be made an honorary FBI agent – three decades after trying to become a real one. He brought Edgar to Camp David for the weekend, with the ailing Clyde in tow.
Edgar went on playing the game he knew so well, doing favors, making himself seem indispensable. When Nixon picked John Mitchell, a wealthy lawyer without obvious qualifications, to serve as Attorney General, he reportedly asked that the usual stringent FBI checks be waived. Edgar had no problem with Mitchell, whom he described as ‘honest, sincere and very human … There never has been an Attorney General for whom I’ve had a higher regard.’ Mitchell was to wind up serving nineteen months in jail for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and lying under oath during the Watergate crisis.
In the early days, Nixon had Edgar over to the White House almost every month. ‘He’d come in at breakfast,’ the President would recall. ‘He got us information. There were times when I felt the only person in this goddamned government that was standing with me was Edgar Hoover … He was giving me the stuff that he had … little things.’
During the Nixon presidency, the FBI institutionalized the supply of dirt to the White House under the code name ‘Inlet.’ Edgar ordered field offices to look out for six categories of information, including ‘items with an unusual twist or concerning prominent personalities which may be of special interest to the President …’
Nixon’s officials were unimpressed. Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig laughed openly over redundant reports on the late Martin Luther King. ‘The FBI investigative work I saw was of poor quality,’ said John Ehrlichman, ‘rumor, gossip and conjecture … often hearsay, two or three times removed. When FBI work was particularly