Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [234]
When the undertakers reached Edgar’s house around 12:30 P.M., they walked into a scene out of Orwell’s darkest imaginings. ‘They were virtually tearing the place apart,’ undertaker William Reburn remembered. ‘There were men in suits, fifteen or eighteen of them, swarming all over the place, ransacking it, going through everything he had. I assumed they were government agents. They were going through Hoover’s books, desk, drawers, like they were looking for something …
‘They were methodical. One agent was assigned to a bookcase, going through all the books kind of page by page. They were taking all the books off the shelves and looking under and behind the shelves. There had been this rumor that Hoover had secret files, and that was the thought that entered my mind, that they were hunting for his files.’
Whoever the searchers were, someone may have got there before them. Early that morning two of Edgar’s neighbors had seen something mysterious. ‘It was early in the morning,’ Anthony Calomaris recalled in 1992. ‘I was seventeen then, and I was getting ready for school. And my mother called me into her room, onto the balcony we had then. There were two men carrying something out of Mr Hoover’s kitchen door, and Annie the housekeeper was at the door. What they were carrying was long and obviously heavy, wrapped in something like a quilt. They heaved it into a station wagon parked in the alley and drove away.’
Because of the shape of the bundle, Calomaris and his mother assumed at the time that it contained a body – that Edgar had died in the night and that these were undertakers, working early to avoid the press. The documented record, however, is that Edgar’s body was not removed until much later, around lunchtime. At the hour the neighbors saw the men with a bundle, the body had not, according to all available testimony, even been discovered.
Yet Calomaris and his mother are adamant that they saw something being removed before Anthony left for school. The men were surely not interlopers – had they been, the housekeeper would not have been calmly seeing them to the door. Given the known desire of others to get at Edgar’s secrets, were allies removing something before the death became generally known, to thwart later searchers?
Whatever was or was not found at Edgar’s home, Nixon’s men were worried about the contents of his office. That same morning, after a conversation with the White House, Acting Attorney General Kleindienst ordered that it be sealed – to secure Edgar’s files. That afternoon, the man Nixon had picked as Acting FBI Director, L. Patrick Gray, arrived to ask John Mohr where the ‘secret files’ were. Mohr told him there were none.
Gray was back, asking the same question, before nine o’clock the next morning. ‘Judging from his conversation and his comments,’ Mohr recalled, ‘I thought he was looking for secret files that would embarrass the Nixon administration … I told him in no uncertain terms that there were no secret files.’ There was a stand-up row, with Gray yelling that he was ‘a hardheaded Irishman and nobody pushes me around.’ Mohr said he was a hardheaded Dutchman – no one pushed him around, either. The shouting could be heard several offices away.
Gray, who later narrowly escaped prosecution for destroying documents after Watergate, may in the end have had some success. Joe Diamond, a young file clerk who joined the FBI a week after Edgar’s death, recalled a curious episode.
‘It was my second day on the job, and the Supervisor asked me and three other men to go upstairs to do a job. We went up, and there were four gentlemen in suits there. And they had us take these crates stuffed with papers down to the basement to the shredder. We picked up the crates and it was like we were carrying gold or something the way they acted. It took about two hours to get the stuff shredded, and then they took the sacks