Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [237]
In New York, at the Aqueduct Racetrack, three mobsters in the Gambino family spotted the news in the paper. ‘You know what I feel about this,’ shrugged the senior man in the group. ‘Absolutely nothing. This guy meant nothing to us, one way or the other.’
At the tracks Edgar had frequented, people felt differently. His regular table at Pimlico was dressed out in black cloth. At Bowie, his table was adorned with his name card. Edgar’s lunch table at the Mayflower, where he had eaten the previous day, was draped with red, white and blue sashes.
‘The shock of Brother Hoover’s loss,’ a speaker told fellow Masons in Washington, ‘was felt far beyond the boundaries of our great nation … When Brother Hoover died, a giant fell and the gods wept.’
The undertakers who handled Edgar’s body, from Gawler’s on Wisconsin Avenue, were used to the deaths of the famous. The company had looked after the remains of many of Edgar’s friends and enemies: Joseph McCarthy and Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Estes Kefauver – a long list of prominent Americans. Even so, the half hour spent at Edgar’s house left them shaken.
‘The place was like a museum,’ recalled undertaker William Reburn, ‘like a shrine the man had made to himself. He must’ve had some ego. The picture of him at the top of the stairs was almost like the one of Napoleon with the hand inside the jacket.’ A colleague, John van Hoesen, remembered the statuary: ‘Busts, like Roman busts of Caesar, but of J. Edgar Hoover.’
Edgar’s corpse was obese, a heavy burden to maneuver downstairs, onto a mortuary cot and out a side entrance into an old sedan – a subterfuge designed to conceal the operation from the press. At Gawler’s the body was embalmed, dressed in a suit and tie chosen by Clyde and laid out in a $3,000 casket.
‘He looked very good,’ said Edgar’s niece Margaret Fennell, ‘but smaller than I remembered. I guess death does that to you.’ For the first time in years Edgar was without the various devices – the built-up shoes, the raised desk – that he had used to make himself appear taller than he really was. ‘My former colleagues,’ said DeLoach, ‘couldn’t stand to see that great dissipation of power in a man that should be revered. Miss Gandy talked to Mr Tolson and John Mohr, and they decided to have the casket closed.’
Mohr and Gandy gave up plans for a quiet Masonic ceremony, which Edgar had said he wanted, when President Nixon decided to treat him like a national hero. The next morning, in heavy rain, a hearse brought the remains to lie in the Rotunda of the Capitol. The entire Supreme Court, the Cabinet and members of the Congress were on hand to receive the casket. It was laid, wrapped in the flag, on Lincoln’s catafalque – an honor that had previously been extended to only twenty-one people. Edgar was the first civil servant to be so honored, and 25,000 people flocked to the Capitol to pay homage.’
It was Nixon, the following day, who delivered the eulogy at the funeral service in the National Presbyterian Church. ‘America,’ he intoned, ‘has revered this man, not only as the Director of an institution, but as an institution in his own right. For nearly half a century, nearly one fourth of the whole history of this Republic, J. Edgar Hoover has exerted a great influence for good in our national life. While eight Presidents came and went, while other leaders of morals and manners and opinion rose and fell, the Director stayed at his post … Each of us stand forever in his debt … His death only heightens the respect and admiration felt for him across this land and in every land where men cherish freedom.’
The Watergate tapes show that ten months later, at the height of the crisis that was to bring him down, Nixon discussed Edgar with John Dean. The transcript runs as follows:
DEAN: Now, the other thing is … everything is cast that we’re the political people and they’re not – that Hoover was above reproach …
NIXON: Bullshit! Bullshit!