Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [219]
If he was to be pilloried for illegal bugging, Edgar had no intention of suffering alone. He angrily called Kleindienst and rambled on at length. The Deputy Attorney General, weary of such calls, held the phone at arm’s length – allowing a colleague, Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, to listen in. ‘You understand,’ Mardian heard Edgar say, ‘that if I am called upon to testify before the Congress, I will have to tell all that I know about this matter.’
The threat was lost on Kleindienst, who knew nothing of the buggings Nixon had ordered. Mardian, who did, thought Edgar had ‘threatened the President of the United States.’ He reported the conversation to the White House – and, two years later, to Watergate investigators.
Edgar went further, according to a note by William Sullivan found among Mardian’s private papers. On April 10, still furious that Kleindienst had welcomed an inquiry, the Director called the President himself at Camp David. Should he be called before Congress to discuss bugging, Edgar said, he ‘would have to lay bare the FBI’s sensitive operations, and this would be very undesirable and damaging.’
There was no inquiry into Boggs’ allegations. In May, celebrating his forty-seventh year in office, Edgar said he had no thought of retiring. ‘I intend to remain as Director of the FBI as long as I can be of service to my country.’ On June 12 he appeared at the wedding of Nixon’s daughter Tricia, smiling and waving for photographers as though all were well between him and the President.
All was not well, and events the next day made things immeasurably worse. That morning, a Sunday, New York Times readers across the country were regaled with seven pages of revelatory material on the escalation of the Vietnam War. These were the Pentagon Papers, secret documents supplied to the Times – as the FBI quickly established – by former government analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The Times continued to pump out the information, in spite of frantic government litigation. It was the most blatant leak of all, and it led Nixon an irreversible step closer to the follies of Watergate. For Edgar, it brought fateful clashes with both Nixon and William Sullivan.
These shifts were set in motion by a comedy of errors involving Louis Marx, the elderly millionaire who happened to be both Ellsberg’s father-in-law and a longstanding friend of Edgar’s. Nixon, convinced Ellsberg was part of a Communist conspiracy, wanted every scrap of information on the man. He was enraged to hear that, because Marx was a friend, Edgar had ordered agents not to question him.
Edgar had issued such an order, and for the very reason reported to Nixon, that he was ‘sorry for Louis.’ Ironically, however, the order was not carried out. Charles Brennan, the head of Domestic Intelligence at the FBI, is said to have misread Edgar’s scribbled ‘No H’ as ‘OK H.’ By the time he realized his mistake, Marx had been interviewed. Edgar flew into a tantrum and ordered Brennan demoted and transferred to Ohio. This in turn upset William Sullivan, Brennan’s superior and longtime friend, triggering extraordinary events.
Sullivan had reached boiling point. Given free rein to run the COINTELPRO program, he had put up with Edgar’s ways like everyone else. Now he was frustrated, by Edgar’s stonewalling over domestic intelligence, and by the ending of COINTELPRO. He was angry, too, about Edgar’s latest empire building abroad. This included a new office in Bern, Switzerland, which seemed to exist mainly to provide hospitality to Edgar’s cronies during their travels, and a totally useless one in La Paz, Bolivia. Edgar seemed to think that, since Cuban Communist Che Guevara had been killed in Bolivia, it must be a useful place for the FBI to be.
Unlike submissive colleagues, Sullivan had argued openly