Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [217]
He has nowhere to go but down; and he is going down steadily … With each of these new picayune battles in which he involves himself, his place is being sullied … My strong recommendation would be to retire Hoover now in all the glory and esteem he has merited and deserved; and not let him – for his own sake and ours – wind up his career a dead lion being chewed over by the jackals of the Left.
The memo went to a president preoccupied. At home, Nixon was beset by the highest unemployment figures in a decade. Abroad, he was embroiled in the U.S.-supported Vietnamese invasion of Laos, a public relations disaster, soon to be followed by ugly revelations about the My Lai massacre. Vietnam had become an albatross for Nixon, as it had been for Johnson. While he applied himself to such problems, Edgar piled embarrassment on embarrassment.
In a time of fervent feminism, Edgar was still dithering over whether or not secretaries should be allowed to wear pants. ‘It is absolutely essential,’ he had written a year earlier, ‘that we conduct sufficient investigation to clearly establish the subversive ramifications of the Women’s Liberation Movement.’ Now, in a blaze of publicity, he turned down two female applicants for the job of agent. They sued. Then he fired two female clerks for working with the peace movement in their spare time.
In March 1971, burglars broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, escaping with nearly a thousand documents – including some that exposed Bureau surveillance of students, radicals and blacks for the first time. One, at least, bore the telltale letters COINTELPRO, code word for the Bureau’s most secret dirty-tricks operations. Styling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, the thieves sent copies of the documents to newsmen and politicians. They were never caught – and Edgar had to close down COINTELPRO.
Angry voices were raised in Congress. Senator George McGovern, gearing up to fight Nixon for the presidency in 1972, publicly protested Edgar’s savage treatment of Agent Jack Shaw, forced to resign for venturing criticism of the FBI in a private letter.2 ‘I cannot believe,’ McGovern said, ‘that we want our great nation to become a land where our personal privacy and our personal freedom are jeopardized by the abuse of power by a police official who seems to believe he is a law unto himself.’
Behind the scenes, Edgar rehearsed the old routine. Agents trawled fruitlessly through McGovern’s record seeking something, anything, to discredit the senator. Edgar scribbled a furious note about ‘psychopathic liar McGovern.’ Clyde got twenty-one Bureau officials to fire off letters supporting Edgar, and sent one himself. The file copy bore a spiteful note: ‘The address of this letter has deliberately been phrased to avoid referring to McGovern as “Honorable.”’
Senator Edmund Muskie, meanwhile, discovered the FBI had recently surveilled a series of countrywide rallies by environmentalists – including himself. Congressman Henry Reuss learned – from one of the documents stolen in Pennsylvania – that agents had investigated his daughter, a student at Swarthmore College. ‘The FBI,’ said Reuss, ‘has an important responsibility to investigate crime … not to compile dossiers on millions of Americans, congressmen’s daughters or not, who are accused of no wrongdoing.’
Such protests paled beside the outburst of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, in April, when he made speeches accusing the FBI of wiretapping members of Congress and infiltrating the universities.3 ‘When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo, then it is time – it is way past time, Mr Speaker – that the present Director thereof no longer be the Director … The time has come for the Attorney General of the United States to ask for the resignation of Mr Hoover.’
Edgar learned of Boggs’ attack within minutes, from the congressional