Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [215]
In the midst of the Huston furor, DeLoach decided there was no longer any point in waiting for Edgar to retire. He decided to take up a longstanding offer and go to work for one of the President’s close friends, Donald Kendall, as a vice president of Pepsico. ‘I went in to see the old man,’ DeLoach recalled, ‘and we talked for two hours and forty-seven minutes, him doing ninety-eight percent of the talking. And when I got up to leave he said, “If you decide to leave, come back and let me know.” I said, “That’s what I came in to tell you,” and he said, “Well, I thought you were one who would never leave me.”’
In the two weeks that followed, Edgar refused to speak to DeLoach and cut him off from top-level mail. Then he did something that upset not only DeLoach, but Clyde and Miss Gandy, too. He appointed William Sullivan to step into DeLoach’s place, to become Assistant to the Director, number three man in the Bureau, right behind the ailing Clyde. Not that it made any difference to Edgar. ‘I will never,’ he told DeLoach, ‘leave the directorship of the FBI.’
‘Whatever you say,’ Edgar insisted that day, ‘I think Sullivan’s loyal to me.’ Sullivan had been loyal for the past thirty years. But now, with his newfound friends in the Nixon administration, with one eye on the directorship and the other on his deep differences with Edgar, he was not trustworthy at all. Sullivan became a Judas, waiting for the moment to betray.
At the White House, Huston was replaced by a young man named John Dean, and he soon reached the conclusion now shared by many in the Nixon hierarchy. ‘Hoover,’ he was to recall, had ‘lost his guts.’ Quietly, in the months that followed, Dean worked behind the scenes to further the domestic intelligence plans Edgar had snuffed out. Frustrated by Edgar’s intransigence, the brash young men at the White House now began to work around him.
It was a trend that would lead everyone involved down a trail of treachery.
34
‘I know Nixon was afraid of him … Knowledge is powerful, and he had knowledge of the most damaging kind.’
William Sullivan, former Assistant to the Director, 1975
On certain wintry mornings in 1970, while Edgar was still sleeping at his home on Thirtieth Place, a young man with a Pancho Villa mustache would park outside, walk rapidly down the alley beside the house and pick up the garbage. This was not, however, the garbageman. He was Charles Elliott, a rookie reporter for Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson.
An hour or so later, as Edgar climbed into his limousine to go to work, Elliott would be watching. During the day, when he knew his quarry was away, he stood on the doormat emblazoned with the initials J.E.H., beside the mailbox topped with a roosting eagle. He peered through the glass of the front door at the bronze life-size bust of Edgar, dominating a foyer crammed with mementos. Then he interrogated the neighbors.
The Post published the results of the snooping on New Year’s 1971, as Edgar began the last full year of his life. ‘We decided,’ Anderson wrote, ‘to turn the tables on J. Edgar Hoover and conduct an FBI-style investigation into his private life.’ In fact, the garbage was less than revelatory. It produced some handwritten dinner menus, on stationery headed ‘From the Desk of the Director,’ one of them featuring crab bisque soup, spaghetti and meatballs with asparagus, peppermint ice cream and strawberries. There was evidence that the great man drank Black Label whiskey and Irish Mist, Coca-Cola and club soda, took Gelusil for indigestion and cleaned his teeth with Ultrabrite.
An enraged Edgar called Anderson, accurately enough on this occasion, ‘the top scavenger of all