Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [235]
Almost certainly, a mass of documents were gone even before Gray took over. ‘I learned later,’ recalled Kleindienst, ‘that certain files were removed even before I called to order that Hoover’s office be locked.’ ‘It was reported to me by my FBI sources,’ said Liddy, ‘that by the time Gray went in to get the files, Miss Gandy had already got rid of them.’
Kleindienst’s instructions to seal Edgar’s office had no effect anyway, because John Mohr placed a literal interpretation on the order. He locked up only Edgar’s personal office, which contained no files at all. The other nine rooms in the office suite, which were bulging with documents, remained unsecured. They housed some of the most secret documents of all, including the Official and Confidential files stored in locked file cabinets under the eagle eye of Helen Gandy.
Three years later a congressional committee would make what it could of the stories told by Gandy, Mohr, Felt and others. It would conclude only one thing for certain: that a mass of documents were trucked to Edgar’s home in the weeks that followed his death. According to Gandy, these were merely Edgar’s personal files, containing private correspondence, investment records and the like. In line with Edgar’s known wishes, she said, she sorted through them, then sent them to be destroyed in the office shredder.
The staff of Congress’ Government Information Subcommittee, which heard Gandy’s testimony, were convinced she was lying. Surviving records indicated that the truckload taken to Edgar’s home had included official records. Gandy, who said the consignment consisted of just four file cabinets and thirty-five cardboard boxes, was contradicted by Raymond Smith, the truck driver who made the delivery. He said he transported at least twenty, possibly twenty-five, cabinets from headquarters to the basement of Edgar’s house. A file drawer came open during the transfer, and he saw that it was crammed with folders, each about an inch thick. Edgar’s housekeeper Annie Fields told neighbors the files were kept under tight security from the moment they arrived.
Finally, it is clear that in Edgar’s office the label ‘Personal’ had a significance quite different from the ordinary sense of the word. Early in his tenure, Edgar had established a procedure designated ‘Personal and Confidential,’ under which senior officials could communicate with him in total secrecy, outside the central records system.
In the opinion of the scholar who has done most to expose FBI secret dossiers, Professor Athan Theoharis of Marquette University, the Personal and Confidential files probably contained material even more explosive than the Official and Confidential dossiers that have since so shocked the public.
It is not certain that all the files removed to Edgar’s home were eventually destroyed. Newsweek reported in 1975 that dossiers ‘very, very damaging to the Nixon White House’ remained in Clyde Tolson’s custody. When he in turn died, Newsweek said, FBI agents descended on the house to cart the documents away. Clyde’s former secretary, Dorothy Skillman, told a story similar to Helen Gandy’s. She destroyed Clyde’s correspondence, she said, and it was ‘mostly birthday cards.’ Anthony Marro, the Newsweek reporter, stood by his story.
‘I find your testimony very difficult to believe,’ Congressman Andrew Maguire told Helen Gandy when she testified in December 1975 about the fate of the files. ‘That,’ she answered haughtily, ‘is your privilege.’
‘You’re beating a dead horse,’ Mark Felt told congressional investigators. ‘So what, you won’t find out what was destroyed. Only Miss Gandy knows that. And what if you do?… There’s no serious problem if we lose some papers. I didn’t see anything wrong, and I still don’t.’
EPILOGUE
‘You know, he was the last reigning monarch in the Western World.’
Tom Huston, former Nixon aide, 1975
At midday Washington time on the day Edgar died, the Stars