Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [218]
According to his memo of record, Edgar offered to resign that afternoon. He called Attorney General Mitchell, who was sunning himself at Key Biscayne, to break the news of the Boggs speech. ‘I wanted him to know and the President to know,’ Edgar wrote afterward, ‘if at any time my presence embarrasses the Administration – if it is felt I may be a burden or handicap to the re-election – I would be glad to step aside.’
If Edgar did offer to resign, neither Mitchell nor anyone else in the Nixon administration remembered the momentous event.4 For men who hoped to be rid of Edgar, moreover, he and the President responded oddly to the Boggs episode. Nixon said he thought Edgar was ‘taking a bad rap,’ and Mitchell demanded that Boggs ‘recant at once and apologize to a great and dedicated American.’ A few weeks later he defended Edgar aggressively when a reporter asked the Director if he planned to retire. ‘You’re so far off base,’ Mitchell snapped, ‘that I’m going to belt you one … Why, he’s the most outstanding individual who has ever had anything to do with law enforcement.’
Nixon and his officials had no choice but to grovel to Edgar. For he now possessed information that strengthened his hold over the President – a hold that, even in the clamor for his resignation, made dismissing him unacceptably risky.
Two years earlier, in the spring of 1969, Nixon and Henry Kissinger had been enraged by a series of news stories that in their view compromised national security, especially on Vietnam. They thought the stories had been leaked by trusted officials, and asked Edgar and the Attorney General how best to track down the culprits. As a result, the FBI began a wiretapping operation that targeted six of Kissinger’s aides, eight other officials and four prominent journalists. The bugging continued until 1971.
It was Edgar, according to Kissinger, who proposed that course. In his memos for the record, however, he made it appear otherwise. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, ‘invariably listed some official outside the FBI hierarchy as requesting each wiretap, even in cases where I had heard Hoover himself specifically recommend them to Nixon.’
What Edgar had done was to lure the administration into danger, while – as Kissinger put it – ‘protecting his flanks.’ He saw to it that the taps were authorized by Attorney General Mitchell, in writing.
The fact that the targets included eminent correspondents – William Beecher and Hedrick Smith of The New York Times, Marvin Kalb of CBS and columnist Joseph Kraft – made the surveillance especially sensitive. The effort produced not an iota of evidence to identify the leaks, but a time bomb of potential trouble for the President.
The fact that Nixon had approved the bugging meant that the buck would stop with him if it were exposed. Such a revelation might wreck his chances of reelection in 1972. Edgar knew the President feared exposure, for Nixon ordered that summaries of the tapped conversations be delivered only to H. R. Haldeman in person, in sealed envelopes.
The man in charge of the wiretap operation was William Sullivan, the highest-ranking official in the Bureau below Edgar and Clyde. He, too, knew that secrecy was essential. On Edgar’s orders, copies were kept to a minimum, one for the White House and one for Edgar. ‘This is a White House operation,’ Edgar told Sullivan. ‘It’s not an FBI operation and we’re not going to put them in the FBI files …’ The transcripts were closely held, first in Edgar’s office, then in Sullivan’s.
Transcripts under Edgar’s control were a potential weapon for use against Nixon. In April 1971,