Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [7]
Yet someone in Washington – someone powerful – felt threatened by Hoover even in death. The undertakers, arriving at the house to remove the corpse, were met with an extraordinary sight. At the foot of the stairs, in a straightbacked chair, an elderly man sat staring blankly into space. Coming and going around him, moving in and out of the rooms, were a number of younger men – intent on a mysterious task.
Just four hours after the discovery of the body, the men were searching the house from top to bottom. They were rifling through drawers, taking books off the shelves one by one, leafing through the pages, then moving on. The old man in the chair, the dead man’s closest male friend – his lover, according to some – seemed oblivious to what they were doing.
The next day, J. Edgar Hoover’s body was carried with great ceremony to the U.S. Capitol, where it lay in state on the black bier that once had borne Abraham Lincoln and eight other presidents. Inside, citizens filed past to pay their last respects, at a rate of a thousand an hour. Outside, a few hundred protesters were listening to a ‘war liturgy’ – a reading of the names of the 48,000 Americans who had been killed in Vietnam.
Mingling with the protesters were ten men from the Nixon White House, on a mission to provoke fights and disrupt the rally. They included several Cuban exiles who had been involved in previous illegal break-ins, and who were soon to be caught red-handed at the Watergate. As they stood waiting that night, just yards from the Capitol where the dead man lay, two of the men talked about Hoover.
What one of them said astonished his comrade. Hoover’s home, he confided, had been the target of a recent burglary inspired by the White House. Then he clammed up. To reveal more, he said, would be ‘dangerous.’
The previous day, in the Oval Office, President Nixon is said to have greeted the news of Hoover’s death with prolonged silence, then: ‘Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!’ Other than that, an aide recalled, he showed no emotion at all.
For public consumption, Nixon treated the death of J. Edgar Hoover as the passing of an American hero. It was he who ordered that Hoover should lie in state at the Capitol – the first civil servant ever to be so honored. He eulogized Hoover as ‘one of the giants … a national symbol of courage, patriotism, and granite-like honesty and integrity.’
To millions of Americans, Hoover was a hero. Long ago, in the twenties, he had virtually created the FBI. He had rebuilt and expanded it, in a brilliant reorganization that left him poised for fame as the ‘Number One G-Man,’ nemesis of the bandits of the Midwest – Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin ‘Creepy’ Karpis and Baby Face Nelson.
Later, Hoover became much more than the nation’s top lawman. Charged by President Roosevelt with protecting the internal security of the United States, he emerged as the nation’s champion against its most insidious foes: first the Nazis, then his enemies of choice, the Communists, and all who dared voice political dissent.
Endless publicity had made Hoover a living icon, showered with honors in his own time. President Truman awarded him the Medal for Merit for ‘outstanding service to the United States.’ President Eisenhower chose him as the firstever recipient of the Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor a civil servant could receive.
The very name Hoover became synonymous with the safety of the nation, with the core values of American society, and – though few dared say so publicly – with fear. Like many of the eight presidents Hoover served, Richard Nixon had known that fear. His relationship with the Director had been long