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Edgar’s doctor, Robert Choisser, was at the house within an hour of the discovery of the body. ‘Mr Hoover had been dead for some hours,’ he recalled. ‘I was rather surprised by his sudden death, because he was in good health. I do not recall prescribing him medication for blood pressure or heart disease. There was nothing to lead anyone to expect him to die at that time, except for his age.’

The body was in rigor mortis, suggesting Edgar had been dead for many hours – since about 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., Choisser thought. Later that morning, because deaths at home must be reported to the coroner’s office, he contacted Dr Richard Welton, a former classmate working as a Medical Examiner. Routinely in such cases the coroner takes the doctor’s word for it and simply registers the death. Welton and Coroner James Luke, however, decided the death of a man as prominent as Edgar required their presence at the scene.

The two medical examiners arrived at the house soon after 11:00 A.M., and, except that Dr Welton was to say he thought the body had been moved from the floor to the bed, found the scene as described by Dr Choisser. ‘It was totally normal,’ Welton recalled. ‘There was nothing to suggest trauma. Hoover was in an age group where it could be expected … It is common for such a person to be found dead after apparently trying to get to the bathroom during the night.’5

On the way to the car, Welton wondered aloud whether there should be an autopsy. ‘What if,’ he asked Luke, ‘someone should pop up six months from now and say someone had been feeding Hoover arsenic? We’ll think we should have done an autopsy.’ It was only a passing thought. Back at the office, however, Dr Luke consulted by telephone with the Medical Examiner for New York City, Dr Milton Helpern, perhaps the world’s most renowned forensic detective.

Neither pathologist had any reason to suppose anyone had been feeding Edgar arsenic, or any other poison. No one then knew that the Watergate burglars even existed, let alone that two of them had consulted a CIA expert about ways of killing columnist Jack Anderson, including the option of planting poison in his medicine cabinet. They knew nothing of alleged break-ins at Edgar’s home, nothing of the suggestion that a poison might have been ‘placed on Hoover’s personal toilet articles’ – a poison capable of inducing cardiac arrest, detectable only if an autopsy was speedily performed.

Nor, on the other hand, did the doctors have any notion of the stress Edgar had been under, of the latest threats to his reputation – Jack Anderson’s congressional testimony promising to produce proof of Edgar’s snooping on public figures and Hank Messick’s forthcoming book hinting at his links with organized crime. They knew nothing of the call Nixon had reportedly made to Edgar late the previous night, telling him it was time to step down.

Three days after Edgar’s death, having decided an autopsy was unnecessary, Coroner Luke signed the death certificate:

John Edgar Hoover, male, white.

Occupation: Director, FBI.

Immediate cause: Hypertensive cardiovascular disease.

On May 5, three days after Edgar died, the men who were to break into Democratic Party headquarters moved into Room 419 at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, directly opposite the Watergate building they were to make so famous. Their first break-in attempt, three weeks later, failed. It was followed by one successful entry, then a second – in June – when they were caught. The Watergate saga followed, leading to the resignation of President Nixon and jail terms for most of the burglars and for John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, Charles Colson, Egil Krogh and others.

Krogh, Nixon intimate and chief Plumber, wound up serving time in Allenwood minimum security prison in Pennsylvania. Also in Allenwood in early 1974 was former Congressman Neil Gallagher, once a victim of Edgar’s rage for his failure to cooperate in smearing Robert Kennedy, now serving time for the income-tax conviction that followed.6 According to Gallagher, Krogh had something strange