Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [223]
And so on, in that vein. Nixon may have tried this ploy in late December, when Edgar arrived for a talk at the President’s home in Key Biscayne. Yet Edgar stayed on for dinner on the terrace afterward, stone crabs and Grand Marnier souffle, washed down with red wine.
If Nixon flinched from confrontation that night, he may have considered trying again at New Year’s, when he asked Edgar to fly back to Washington with him on Air Force One. ‘The President,’ Edgar told a colleague before the flight, ‘wants to talk to me about something.’
Yet again, however, Nixon apparently failed to read his script. The White House let it be known that the flight was a sign of presidential favor to celebrate Edgar’s seventy-seventh birthday, and Nixon presented him with a cake.
Far from talk of dismissal, the press now reported that Nixon ‘wants Hoover to remain in office.’ In the last major interview of his life, granted before the Florida trip, Edgar declared himself determined to carry on. ‘Many of our great artists and composers,’ he said, ‘did their best work in their eighties. They were judged on performance, not age … Look at Bernard Baruch; he was brilliant in his nineties – and Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur in their eighties. That is my policy …’ Attorney General Mitchell, who had privately been recommending Edgar’s retirement for months, agreed. Talk about replacing Edgar, he said, was ‘spurious speculation.’
The President of the United States had now gone into at least two meetings assuring his aides he was about to give Edgar his marching orders. Edgar had emerged unscathed, and Nixon’s advisers did not know why.
The first time, in the fall, John Ehrlichman had waited for a few hours, then asked Haldeman what had happened. The President, Haldeman said, was refusing to discuss the matter. Twenty-four hours later Ehrlichman asked again. ‘Don’t ask,’ the Chief of Staff replied. ‘He doesn’t want to talk about it.’ Later, Haldeman told Ehrlichman to forget the breakfast had ever taken place.
Many months later, after Edgar’s death, Nixon would confide a little in Ehrlichman. ‘The meeting was a total strikeout,’ he said. ‘He told me I’d have to force him out.’ ‘It was my conclusion,’ the President was to write in his memoirs, ‘that Hoover’s resignation before the election would raise more problems than it would solve.’
Yet Nixon would continue to deny that Edgar had a hold on him. ‘Hoover,’ he said in 1988, ‘never gave any indication to me of blackmail.’ Specifically, Nixon denied that Edgar threatened to disclose his wiretapping of newsmen. He was less coy at the time with his colleague Henry Kissinger. ‘Nixon thought,’ Kissinger recalled, ‘Hoover was quite capable of using the knowledge he acquired as part of his investigations to blackmail the President.’
Contrary to what Nixon imagined at first, the threat had not evaporated when Sullivan handed over the FBI copies of the wiretap transcripts to Assistant Attorney General Mardian. When Mardian checked the list, he discovered some of the transcripts were missing. They had been retained, all along, by Edgar.
As of New Year’s Day 1972, then, the President still had cause to fear Edgar over the taps. Not least as he prepared for his ground-breaking visit to China – there was the continuing embarrassment of his woman friend from Hong Kong. And there was now something else – something that had to be hidden at all costs.
‘We may have on our hands here,’ Nixon had told Ehrlichman, ‘a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me …’
Six months earlier, Nixon had lost his temper – and fashioned a new trap for himself. In spite of intense legal efforts, he had failed to prevent The New York Times from continuing to publish the Pentagon Papers. He was afraid future installments might reflect badly on him, that the man who had leaked