J. EDGAR HOOVER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100210008-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 19
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 13, 2007
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: June 3, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO N REPORTS, ~N~.
FoR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM ABC Closeup STATION WJLA-TV
ABC Network
DATE June 3, 1982 10:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT J. Edgar Hoover
MARSHALL FRADY: May the 4th, 1972. After almost half a
century of power as Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover is dead.
He had served under eight Presidents, 16 Attorneys General,
longer than anyone else holding such high office in government.
During that time the made the FBI into almost a shadow government
unto itself, holding many in Washington in fear. Perhaps more
than any other bureaucrat in our government's history, this one
man, J. Edgar Hoover, imposed his personal vision on Congress, on
Presidents, and on millions of. Americans.
Who was this man who came to command such reverence,
such dread?
PRESIDENT RICHARD NTXON: J. Edgar Hoover was one of the
giants. He became a living legend while still a young man. And
h_e lived up to his legend as the decades passed.
J. EDGAR HOOVER: May I emphasize that the Federal
Bureau of Investigation is as close to you as your nearest
telephone.
FRADY: For almost 50 years, this stern bull-terrier of
a man seemed the defender of all our Main Street rectitudes, of
order, patriotism, discipline. But this is, among other things,
a story of illusion and reality, of the wrong inside the good,
and of the compulsion far power behind the legend of J. Edgar
Hoover.
In the next hour, ABC will examine the consequences of
Hoover's quest for power: national security compromised in a
World War II case, political use of the FBI, attempted
destruction of enemies, intelligence failures in the murder of a
OFFICES IN. WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
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President, a massive surveillance of hundreds of thousands of
innocent Americans.
If ever an institution of American government became the
instrument of one man's will for control, it was the FBI under J.
Edgar Noover. But Hoover's ambition was also fed by the
politicians he served. And it became, finally, an ambition to
control American society itself. In the end, it's a story of how
a secret police power came to grow within our democratic
institutions. And it remains of the highest importance to ask:
Now did it happen?
FRADY: The '20s and '30s: gangsters, machine guns,
murders and bank robberies, what seemed to many Americans a
national riot of crime.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Chief G-man Hoover warns the DAR of
crime dangers.
HOOVER: There are today in America 150,000 murderers
roaming at large.
FRADY: This was not only the Hollywood image of those
times. It was also the public's image.
[Clip of gangster movie]
FRADY: And onto the scene, J. Edgar Hoover and his
G-men burst like clean-cut knights in dark business suits.
[Clip of gangster movie]
FRADY: Hoover had made a swift and impressive rise to
become the nation's top policeman. He climbed in just five years
from Justice Department lawyer to being asked in 1924 to reform a
corrupt and ineffective national law enforcement agency. He was
only 29.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Crime detection expert J. Edgar
Hoover of the Department of Justice has speeded up the wheels in
the newest anti-crime laboratory. Nere in Washington is the
long-dreamed-of American Scotland Yard, a reality at last.
FRADY: Hoover proceeded to remake his bureau into one
of the most sophisticated law enforcement operations in the
world, from 441 agents when he took it over to 8566 when he died.
Those agents would prove virtually incorruptible. He set
unprecedented requirements for them: accounting or law degrees.
Although Hoover virtually ignored organized crime until 1957, his
agents were strikingly efficient in most cases: bank robberies,
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kidnapings, and in combatting foreign agents, Marxist
revolutionary groups, the Ku Klux Klan. There were reasons for
the FBI's mystique of excellence.
BOY: Gee, Mr. Hoover, your G-men sure are good. I'd
like to be one when I grow up.
HOOVER: Well, if you work hard and play hard and live
clean, you'll certainly be one.
BOY: Thank you.
FRADY: But that young man would have found it took a
bit more to satisfy Hoover. From his very beginning, Hoover was
obsessed with two things: absolute control over his agents and
creating a dramatic public image. His compulsion in this was to
keep the FBI a close reflection of himself: neat, serious,
disciplined. During most of his reign it remained virtually all
white, all male, all Christian.
About this man who exercised such power in this country
for so long, these are some of the things we know: Hoover stayed
with his mother until he was 43, when she died. He never
married, never once traveled beyond the United States. He spent
almost all of his time with his associate director Clyde Tolson.
But the rumors Hoover was a homosexual are discounted by friends
and even by enemies. In fact, any deviation from the norm could
cost an agent his job: overweight, baldness, minor indiscretions.
This is the late William Sullivan, Hoover's longtime
assistant director. ABC News Closeup reporter Pat Lynch has
obtained from the Sullivan estate exclusive tapes of a series of
interviews Sullivan gave shortly before his death.
WILLIAM SULLIVAN: One day this young fellow got into
the elevator with Hoover. The young fellow had a bright red vest
on. You know, he was an adolescent and his face was broken out a
little bit in pimples.
And so the order went out: Find out who's wearing a red
vest today, and his face is pimply. And, of course, we found out
after a while. We submitted the name to Mr. Hoover. And he
said, "Fire him. And also discipline and punish whoever
recommended him for employment. We're not going to have anybody
working for us who wears a red vest and has a pimply face."
FRADY: Quinn Tamm, another assistant director, who was
rumored to be Hoover's successor.
QUINN TAMM: I thought some of the punishment which was
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given to FBI personnel for what I considered minor violations was
extreme. I don't think there's any question about that.
Transfers, transfers for punishment reasons, especially with
agents who had large families, whose children were in school, was
sometimes, I thought, needless and thoughtless.
FRADY: Hoover's grim ways of punishing agents who
disappointed him or criticized the Bureau were a matter of deep
concern, even among Hoover loyalists. A famous example, Jack
Schaul (?), an agent for seven years, wrote a letter to his grad
school professor mildly complaining about some aspects of
Hoover's rule. Hoover found out about it. And Schaul, father of
four, his wife dying with cancer, was suspended without pay and
transferred to Butte, Montana. He resigned.
And when Hoover's own nephew complained about such
measures, Hoover told im to get out of the Bureau.
Along with the harsh discipline over his agents, Hoover
showed a nimbleness in taking credit for the work of other law
agencies.
MAN: Bureau agents always had their ears open to get
valuable information from police departments, but rarely ever
gave information back that would have been helpful to those
police departments in solving cases. The result was that the FBI
got credit for solving many cases on which the local police had
done most of the work.
FRADY: But Hoover had learned one elemental principle:
publicity, image meant power and a further increase of his
institution. Everything he did was to serve that purpose.
Congressman Don Edwards, a former FBI agent.
REP. DON EDWARDS: Mr. Hoover would go to the
Appropriations Committee every year and show the Appropriations
Committee that for every dollar spent on the FBI, the FBI got
back $1.15 or $1.20, or whatever the figure might be, And the
subcommittee started to wonder about those figures. And so we
asked the General Accounting Office to audit those statistics.
And the General Accounting Office found out that the statistics
really didn't hold water.
HOOVER: Today, all law enforcement presents a united
front against so-called Fifth Column activities.
FRADY: In 1939, with war looming closer, President
Roosevelt gave Hoover an expanded jurisdiction: espionage and
sabotage. But in one famous case, Hoover's eagerness to convert
this new authority into yet more celebrity for his FBI wound up
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seriously damaging a security operation.
In this secret document, now declassified, a major
general complains to Secretary of War Henry Stinson that Hoover's
premature breaking of a story about the capture of eight Nazi
saboteurs had wrecked our plans for seizing other Nazis in the
country.
Lloyd Cutler was one of the government prosecutors in
that case.
LLOYD CUTLER: The War Department would have preferred
to let the saboteurs make those contacts, those who were still at
large, and round up the entire group. That opportunity was never
available because Mr. Hoover chose to take the instant publicity
that could be gotten for the arrests.
HOOVER: The recent landings of saboteurs from Nazi
submarines sounds a new alert for all Americans. These saboteurs
were apprehended before they could carry out their plans of
destruction.
FRADY: But the fact is, the Nazis were not apprehended
by the FBI. Instead, George Dash, one of the leaders of the
saboteurs, had to struggle to get himself and the others
apprehended.
Seth Kantor (?), journalist and author.
SETH KANTOR: And when he did get in to meet with FBI
officials, they didn't believe his story. And when he finally
told them where they could find the other saboteurs, well, it
dawned on them that he knew what he was talking about.
FRADY: Six weeks later, six of the saboteurs were
executed after a secret trial. Dash, despite Hoover's promise of
a presidential pardon for cooperating, was jailed until 1948.
Hoover's play to the press had outraged many in the
intelligence community, but he was already so formidable a
figure, none would criticize him in public. And Hoover's
announcement was of value to President Roosevelt. It reassured
an uneasy nation that the Nazi threat here was being dealt with.
Indeed, Hoover was never to forget whom he served, the
highest keepers of powerin the nation. But before he was
through, his areas of authority had increased from 32 to 185.
Operating out of his office here in the Justice Department,
Hoover finally served no interest more faithfully than the
further consolidation of his authority, an obsession that he
would carry into the coming Cold War.
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FRADY: First it had been the gangsters of the '20s and
'30s. Then it was the Nazi menace. Now, with the end of World
War II, Hoover found his next great public adversary.
HOOVER: I think that the best antidote to communism is
vigorous, intelligent, old-fashioned Americanism with eternal
vigilance.
FRADY: The Cold War offered Hoover yet wider prospects
for consolidating the power of this Bureau, and was to lead to
his first serious extension into the political life of the nation
itself. But for all his popular campaigning now against the
communist peril, Hoover not only fumbled one of the most notable
spy cases of those years, but posed problems for a sensitive
investigation of Soviet espionage.
Here at the old Army Security Agency outside Washington,
a code expert working with the charred remains of a Soviet code
book found on a World War II Finnish battlefield at last cracked
the Soviet spy code. This code-breaking has never been
acknowledged by the government, and is finally confirmed to ABC
News by the man who supervised its use by the FBI.
Using law data like this supplied to it by the Army
Security Agency, Hoover's FBI did succeed in apprehending over
200 Soviet spies. The Security Agency's secret code breakthrough
opened to Hoover the chance for a virtually unlimited bounty hunt
of communist spies. He wanted a broad assault everywhere. This
unsettled some of Hoover's own agents with memories of how
Hoover's instinct for quick headlines had compromised the Nazi
saboteur case.
Robert Lamphere was the FBI's supervisor responsible for
the liaison with the National Security Agency. He oversaw the
code investigations. Lamphere talks about Hoover with ABC News
reporter Pat Lynch.
ROBERT LAMPHERE: I was not always in total agreement
with some of the decisions he made.
LAMPHERE: On occasion, I would have been less
interested in prosecuting a case than I would have been on
working the case as a carefully controlled counterintelligence
operation, rather than going for the publicity of a major trial
and a major exposing of Soviet operations.
FRADY: Only now, in fact, is it fully coming to light
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what Hoover's eagerness for quick arrests would have jeopardized.
And for the first time, Robert Lampehre publicly discloses what
that code breakthrough meant.
LAMPHERE: The deciphered messages gave us the greatest
opportunity the FBI will probably ever have to each in and be on
the inside of KGB operations in the United States. And not only
to be on the inside and to identify their people, but to
understand exactly what it is they're trying to do and how
they're trying to do it.
FRADY: The deciphered code led to what was hailed as a
major catch for the FBI, the arrest of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were convicted of passing U.S. atomic
secrets to the Soviets, and executed. But the question of their
actual guilt provoked a controversy that has continued to this
day.
Now Lamphere speaks out on the Rosenberg evidence for
the first time and tells ABC News that it was the decoded
messages that confirmed for the government the guilt of the
Rosenbergs, and that that proof was not introduced at their trial
to keep the Soviets from learning their code had been broken.
LAMPHERE: We knew of the Rosenbergs' involvement with
the Soviets through KGB messages, through the testimony of
numerous people. So there can be no question about their guilt.
FRADY: But despite his image as an anti-communist
dragonslayer, Hoover mismanaged one of the most celebrated cases
of the Cold War years. Alger Hiss, a former high official in the
State Department,-was accused in 1948 of being a Soviet agent,
largely on the testimony of this man, Whitaker Chambers. Hoover
was furious when he learned the case was developing outside his
own hands, due to lapses by his own Bureau. And as in the Nazi
saboteur case, again his effort became to construct an appearance
of having closely tended the ease all along.
ALAN WEINSTEIN: The FBI has rewritten history in
connection with this case. For one thing, they did not find the
major pieces of evidence in the case. It was the House Committee
on Un-American Activities that turned up Chambers and called im s
its first witness. He named Hiss. The FBI had known about
Chambers for a decade. It was the Chambers defense lawyers who
turned up the famous incriminating pumping papers, actually
microfilms and a few papers, which were then submitted to the
Justice Department and which proved to be the most damaging
pieces of evidence against Hiss.
At each and every stage of this case, J. Edgar Hoover
found himself, somehow, the last to know when key pieces of
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evidence turned up. It did not make him happy.
FRADY: Despite his failure on the Hiss case, Hoover
flourished in the headlines. The Cold War tempted him to venture
now into the political course of the nation.
HOOVER: The FBI has been in the front lines of the
fight against the communist menace for many years. Its
effectiveness can be measured by the intensity with which the
communists, their sympathizers, the bleeding hearts, the pygmy
politicians, and respectably-cloaked apologists have advanced
their attacks on the FBI.
FRADY: The question is, did Hoover supply FBI data to
this man, the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy,
whose evangelisms then about the Red Menace enfevered the nation.
Perhaps inevitably, a special understanding developed between
McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover.
SENATOR JOSEPH MCCARTHY: I think there's only one man
that the communists hate more than Roy Cohn. And that's J. Edgar
Hoover.
Roy, you might like to add something to this. I don't
ROY CORN: Hoover knew that he was basically -- that
McCarthy was basically right, that communism was the threat it
has proved to be. And that created something of an ideological
affinity between the two of them.
On top of that, McCarthy was a very charming, pleasant
individual. He was very good company. He was a fun guy.
[Clip of Army-McCarthy hearings]
FRADY: A backfire of public outrage did overtake
McCarthy. But the question remains: What part did J. Edgar
Hoover play in the crusades of Joseph McCarthy?
JACK ANDERSON: I personally heard Senator McCarthy call
J. Edgar Hoover for help. And I gathered from my end of the
conversation -- I did not hear Hoover's responses, but it was
quite clear from the way the Senator was reacting, the pleasure
he showed over the answers, that he was getting help from J.
Edgar Hoover.
FRADY: The voice of Hoover's onetime assistant
director, William Sullivan.
SULLIVAN: We did give Joe McCarthy a great deal of
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information. Joe McCarthy could not have carried on his
anti-communist campaign without the assistance given him by the
FBI.
Mr. Hoover always spoke very well of Joe McCarthy; and
as a matter of fact, defended Joe McCarthy right at the time when
McCarthy was a red-hot issue.
FRADY: Along with that collaboration with Joe McCarthy,
Hoover used the Cold War years to secure the power and prestige
of his Bureau. But, in fact, there still lay ahead of Hoover
what would prove a mortal threat to that authority he had spent
his career building. It would come on a November noon in 1963 in
Dallas.
[Clip of President John Kennedy's Assassination]
FRADY: There was a sense that anything could happen to
us now. The assassination of John Kennedy also became a very
particular trauma for J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI. For the
nation's chief investigative agency, there could be no greater
intelligence disaster. But what Hoover had known before that day
in Dallas, intelligence not passed on to the Secret Service or
even his own field agents, now placed his name and authority in
their greatest jeopardy ever. And to protect against that
danger, Hoover pulled out all the stops, even withholding
information from the Warren Commission.
It was all to achieve two things: first, to cover
himself against any possible later criticisms. Toward that, he
quietly administered punishments to 17 agents for negligence.
The second imperative was to establish Lee Harvey Oswald as a
lone assassin for whose actions no one could be held responsible.
James Hosty, the Dallas agent in charge of Oswald's file
before the assassination, was one of those 17 agents disciplined.
He talks here for the first time on television about the
assassination with Closeup reporter Pat Lynch.
JAMES HOSTY: It was to the advantage of the upper
echelons of the FBI to show that Oswald was a sole assassin.
This would reduce the culpability of the FBI for not having,
supposedly, kept track of Oswald. And it would also benefit the
United States Government as a whole, who did not want to inflame
the American public, and thus possibly cause World War III.
FRADY: Lee Harvey Oswald four weeks before the
assassination. Already, he had been under FBI investigation for
three years. An obscure political drifter. He had defected for
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a time to the Soviet Union. Here, in New Orleans, he was handing
out leaflets in support of Fidel Castro.
REPORTER: Are you a Marxist? Do you consider yourself
a Marxist.
LEE HARVEY OSWALD: Well, I would very definitely say
that I am a Marxist. That is correct. But that does not mean,
however, that I'm a communist.
FRADY: While FBI agents in New Orleans were aware of
Oswald's sympathies for Castro's Cuba, Hoover himself knew much
more, intelligence he did not share with his agents. Even before
the Bay of Pigs invasion, Hoover knew from informants that the
Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, had contracted with the
Mafia in plots to assassinate Castro. Castro had delivered a
public warning that he would retaliate against U.S. leaders if
these plots did not cease.
But Hoover also knew that despite that warning, the CIA
was planning with a Cuban operative still another attempt on
Castro's life.
The Bureau also knew eight weeks before Kennedy's
assassination that Oswald had traveled to Mexico City and visited
the Soviet Embassy, where he met with a key KGB operative named
Valery Kostikov.
HOSTY: I have since learned that the FBT Headquarters
was aware of Kostikov's full identity prior to the assassination.
But in keeping with instructions that had been given to
Headquarters, this information was not furnished to me.
HOSTY: He was in charge for the Western Hemisphere.
FRADY: All of this -- Oswald's contact with Kostikov,
his Cuban Marxist sympathies, the CIA's continuing campaign to
kill Castro, despite Castro's threat of retaliation -- were only
possible connections, but would have made up a complex of alarms.
Those pieces of information would emerge in later
investigations, but at the time were never all put together by
the FBI. For whatever reasons, Hoover did not pass on what the
Bureau knew to FBI field offices charged with alerting the Secret
Service to dangers to the President. Otherwise they may have
acted on what they did know.
Three weeks before the assassination, agent Hosty in the
Dallas field office had paid a call on Oswald's Russian wife
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Marina, whose uncle, it was later learned, was a colonel in
Soviet internal security. Hosty's visit prompted Oswald to
personally deliver a note to the FBI office threatening action if
he were not left alone.
Shortly after the shots in Dallas, Hoover was granted by
the new President, Lyndon Johnson, exclusive responsibility for
investigating Kennedy's death. Only 17 days, then, after the
assassination, Hoover delivered his report to the Warren
Commission. Its conclusion: Oswald was the lone assassin, and
there was no evidence of a foreign conspiracy.
His task now became to protect that conclusion from any
criticisms by the Warren Commission, headed by an old antagonist
of his, Chief Justice Earl Warren.
This is how he went about that: To avoid any suspicion
that there could have been a lapse by the FBI, he kept secet from
the Commission his reprimand of 17 agents. He also withheld from
the Commission what he had known about Mafia threats to get rid
of the Kennedys. More, he withheld any mention of the
threatening note that Oswald had hand-delivered to the FBI's
Dallas office. Instead, the note was destroyed, Hosty says, by
order of his boss, J. Gordon Shanklin.
HOSTY: I was called in to Shanklin's office and was
given the note. And he told me, "Here. I don't want to ever see
this again."
LYNCH: What did you do?
HOSTY: I took this as an instruction to get rid of it
which I did.
FRADY: At the same time, Hoover was directly in
touch with someone on the Warren Commission itself,
then-Congressman Gerald R. Ford. Ford has since minimized his
role. But this is the recollection of William Sullivan.
SULLIVAN: He kept us apprised regularly of what went
on. He was expected to do it because he was in our stable, in
our political stable on Capitol Hill.
FRADY: Not only did Hoover withhold evidence from the
Warren Commission, but James Hosty says that information about
Oswald's contact in Mexico City with the Soviet official,
Kostikov, was removed from his office. Hosty also says he later
learned that his answers to the Bureau's own internal
investigation of the assassination were changed to make it appear
that he was guilty of negligence.
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In addition, Hoover withheld from the Commission what he
knew of Mafia threats against the Kennedys, Mafia figures closely
connected to Jack Ruby, threats Hoover learned about through
illegal bugs. Hoover also never vigorously pursued Ruby's
connections to the Mafia.
Even though Hoover's hasty report on the assassination
insisted that there was no suggestion of a conspiracy, ABC News
has learned that Hoover, early in 1964, dispatched one of his
most trusted informants, former communist Morris Childs,
code-named Solo, to ask Castro what he knew about Oswald. Hosty
confirms that trip for the first time, and other sources confirm
Hosty's story.
HOSTY: We know that the so-called Solo source made a
trip to Cuba and talked to Castro sometime after the
assassination, at which time Castro advised the Solo source that
Oswald had told his people in Mexico City, some weeks before the
assassination, that he wanted to kill Kennedy for them.
FRADY: But instead of pursuing this astonishing report,
Hoover turned to another source, a KGB double agent code-named
Fedora. Fedora, ABC News has been told, reassured Hoover,
through FBI agents, that there was no Soviet-Cuban connection to
Oswald in the assassination. And two months after the
assassination, a KGB defector turned up, Yuri Nosenko, who was
vouched for by Fedora. Nosenko further reassured Hoover about
Oswald. Even though Oswald had been a Marine radar specialist
familiar with U-2 spy flights, Nosenko declared that Oswald had
been of no interest to the KGB during his three years in the
Soviet Union.
But last fall, the FBI officially declared that Fedora,
who had vouched for Nosenko, was himself a Soviet disinformation
agent who had duped the FBI for 20 years. -Some high CIA
officials, though not all, say the same was true of Nosenko.
Newton Miler headed CIA counterintelligence operations
worldwide for 5 1/2 years. This interview with Pat Lynch is the
first time he has ever spoken publicly about his CIA experience
and Nosenko's story about Oswald.
NEWTON MILER: He claimed that Oswald had had no
connection with the KGB, that the KGB and Soviet intelligence
authorities had not interviewed him. He said that they had paid
no attention to him. He told the FBI and the CIA that there had
been no surveillance, that he was not an agent of the KGB, that
they had had no interest in him whatsoever. He maintained this
from 1964 until, I believe, 1978, at which time he apparently
changed his story, because he told the House Assassination
Committee that there were seven or eight huge volumes of
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Nosenko, in my opinion, was a disinformation agent, and
he was deliberately sent to make contact with the United States
to defuse leads which the United States intelligence, in the
period '62 and subsequent -- in all subsequent years, was
pursuing.
FRADY: But from the beginning, Hoover dismissed all
doubts raised about his sources Fedora and Nosenko. Their
stories were essential, of course, to Hoover's no-conspiracy
theory. And he never sent out agents to follow through on the
possibilities of a Soviet-Cuban role in the assassination. Nor
did he vigorously explore the possible underworld plot to kill
Kennedy.
But the intelligence community's reliance on Fedora and
Nosenko has, says Miler, worked great harm.
MILER: It has completely warped many of the U.S.
intelligence community's views of Soviet intelligence. It has
distorted the lens through which we are supposed to be looking at
the threat to the United States by Soviet intelligence.
FRADY: It was not to be until 1979, after Hoover
himself had died, .that a special House Assassination Committee
wold criticize the FBI for a seriously flawed investigation that
ignored substantial evidence of a conspiracy. Instead, said the
committee, Hoover seemed more concerned with protecting the
reputation of the Bureau.
Hoover's Bureau survived. And as the nation passed on
into the trubulence of the '60s, it became Hoover's compulsion
now to keep the country itself a reflection of his own values.
MARTIN LUTHER KING: Eventually, segregation in public
transportation will pass away. Eventually. And I think we
should start now preparing for the inevitable.
FRADY: The black awakening in America during the 'S0s
and '60s, a struggle against the structures of racial oppression
still left from that old time of racism that had been with us
from our beginning. Seldom in our country's experience have the
moralities, the right and the wrong, seemed so passionately
clear.
To many, Martin Luther King, Jr. seemed the national
prophet raised up for this moment. But not to J. Edgar Hoover.
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RAMSEY CLARK: At a subjective level, at least, Mr.
Hoover had deep racial prejudices. You know, his role in the
investigation of Martin Luther King speaks volumes. Here was the
non-violent prophet of social change -- what more could a country
ask for, you know? -- and subjected to the most vicious sort of
investigation, in large part because the man deeply offended Mr.
Hoover at a personal level.
FRADY: Hoover's distaste for King turned into darker
suspicions when reports were brought to him in 1961 about one of
King's close advisers, Stanley Levison.
MAN: Hoover's decision to put wiretaps on Dr. King was
based on allegations that Stanley Levison had communist
affiliations. The Bureau believed that Levison had these
communist affiliations becauses of information furnished by
two extremely important FBI informants, who were code-named Solo.
FRADY: As Garro (?) was the first to reveal, Solo was,
in fact, Morris Childs and his brother Jack. Hoover took the
information they gave him about Levison. But Garro talks about
how it was presented to President Kennedy and Attorney General
Robert Kennedy.
GARRO: Hoover's version, as it was given to the
Kennedy brothers, did not contain the very important
qualification that the Bureau had only a hypothesis that Levison
still had these ties, but that the Bureau had no direct evidence
to back up these claims.
LYNCN: So Mr. Hoover did not tell the Kennedy brothers
the truth.
GARRO: Mr. Hoover did not tell the Kennedy brothers the
whole truth, and what he told them was, in its essence, very
misleading.
FRADY: Despite the evidence, Hoover supporters still
blame the Kennedys for the wiretaps and bugs.
CARTHA DELOACH: Let's understand the reason why
electronic surveillance was put on Dr. King. First, the Attorney
General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, insisted this be
done. Mr. Hoover and the men of the FBI have felt that it was
wrong to do that.
FRADY: Though the wiretaps and bugs produced no direct
evidence of any communist influence on King, they did provide
Hoover with a different possibility, to sabotage King personally.
The tapes from that FBI surveillance indicated a highly active
sex life by King, which all the more scandalized Hoover.
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On this confidential memorandum about King recently
released under the Freedom of Information Act, Hoover scrawled,
"King is a tom cat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges."
Mark Felt was with the FBI for 31 years.
MARK FELT: I think that Mr. Hoover was so shocked at
King's personal life and his personal conduct that he felt that
the man was a hypocrite and was not the right man to lead the
black movement.
FRADY: Hoover now had to decide how he might use the
sex tapes against King.
DELOACH: The allegation has been made from time to
time, and this came out during the hearings held by the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence, that a tape on Dr. King
concerning his sexual exploits was given to newspaper reporters.
Produce a reporter.
LYNCH: Did anyone from the FBI ever approach you with
any transcripts related to Martin Luther King?
BEN BRADLEE: Yes. But I was working for Newsweek
magazine at that time. Newsweek was running a cover story of
Hoover, and we were trying desperately to see him. And finally
Hoover agreed to see us. And when I was leaving that interview
at the Justice Department, his -- one of his deputies started
talking about Dr. King and the existence of some transcripts of
tapes, and offered me a look at those tapes. And I turned him
down.
FRADY: In spite of Hoover's campaign against him,
King's fame continued to grow. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize. Within days of that announcement, the FBI mailed an
unmarked package of the sex tapes to King's home in Atlanta with
a letter which King thought suggested suicide. And FBI
surveillance of Martin Luther King continued right up to that
April dusk of 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
But what King had begun was now loose in America, a
spreading tide of protest: the student movement, the poor
people's march, women's liberation. Everywhere around Hoover, it
seemed the world of his values was in uproar. His vision of
America, orderly, pious, patriotic, was under siege. And he
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became now a man at war with his times.
In 1971, in Media, Pennsylvania, a dissident group broke
into a local FBI office and brought out files which would reveal
a massive nationwide covert operation called COINTELPRO,
counterintelligence programs. It was a campaign against elements
Hoover considered subversive in American society conducted
through illegal surveillance, burglaries, harassment, political
sabotage, and directed, the best authorities say, against many
thousands of innocent citizens.
FRANK CHURCH: They were targeted and they were harassed
and they were discredited. And that is very dangerous,
particularly when conducted secetly. Because there is nothing
more ominous to freedom than a secret police.
FELT: Some of the criticism of the FBI is predicated
upon the thinking of today, without any regard at all to what was
the tenor of the times in the '60s, when bombs were exploding and
when we were in the midst of a very serious war over in Vietnam.
MORTON HALPERIN: In the 1960s you had, really for the
first time in a long time in American society, an outpouring of
political activity: the civil rights movement, the antiwar
movement, the beginnings of a New Left movement within the United
States. Mr. Hoover decided that all of those things were
inconsistent with his notion of what the United States should be
like. But he also knew that the activity was lawful and that
there was no way that it could legally. be stopped. And so he set
about secretly to seek to destroy those activities. And to a
large extent, he succeeded.
LETTY POGREBIN: When I was looking at the 1377 pages in
the women's liberation movement file, I found astounding evidence
that they were there when there was four of us and five of us and
six of us, whether it was in a Blimpy restaurant or in a person's
apartment on East Sixth Street or in a Baltimore day-care center.
They were everywhere.
FRADY: Hoover even used COINTELPRO methods on many
individuals.
WILLIAM TURNER: After I left the FBI and became
publicly critical of some of the policies of J. Edgar Hoover, at
that point the FBI kept very diligent watch on me. I know that
because I have now obtained, under the Freedom of Information
Act, my file, and it consists of some 17 volumes of 200 pages
each, a total of almost 4000 pages. And it is very clear that
the FBI tried to wreck my career and that Hoover overrode this
whole campaign against me, because his scrawlings are very
apparent throughout the files.
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FRADY.: Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson. The FBI
also kept a file on him.
JACK NELSON: And J. Edgar Hoover himself met with the
then-general manager of the Los Angeles Times, Robert Nelson, and
spent three hours in him in almost a tirade talking about me and
how I have a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality and how I was a drunk.
It was obvious he not only was trying to discredit me, but, if he
could, ruin my career. And, of course, the Los Angeles Times
stood behind me, and my stories were accurate.
FRADY: But Hoover, an aging figure now within the
mammoth bureaucracy he had created, had another set of files to
insure that nothing would ever likely dislodge him. They were
files on the mighty of Washington themselves: Congressmen,
Senators, even Presidents.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: I have just now signed an
executive order exempting you from compulsory retirement for an
indefinite period of time.
And again, Edgar, congratulations. And accept the
gratitude of a grateful nation.
FRADY: And it might have been added, a grateful Lyndon
Johnson, who had Hoover conduct covert political surveillance
during the 1964 Democratic convention.
From the time of Roosevelt, Hoover's services had always
posed a special temptation to those who ruled Washington. The
powers they steadily fed him they would then use for their own
political convenience. In that sense, Hoover, with all of his
own appetites, also became much the creation of those men he
served. But their watchdog had now turned into their captor.
SULLIVAN: It wasn't very long before all the leadership
of the Bureau in Washington and throughout the country heading
these offices, it wasn't very long before they knew exactly what
he wanted, you know. They knew damn well that he wanted to get
every bit of derogatory information on every Congressman and
every Senator that the Washington people could get, and on
anybody else in Washington. He didn't have to make
[unintelligible]. That passed right on down. They knew what he
wanted, and they'd feed it to him.
FRADY: Congressman Henry Reuss of Wisconsin, one of
the first to denounce the Vietnam War. His children were civil
rights and antiwar activists, but not security risks.
Nevertheless, an agent let Reuss know that the Bureau had
personal files on his son and daughter.
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Another example, Congressman William Anderson of
Tennessee. He criticized Hoover publicly. Hoover's Bureau then
distributed personally damaging information about Anderson in his
district during a reelection campaign. A Congressman for eight
yeas, Anderson was defeated.
REP. JOHN ROONEY: Anybody who is familiar with my
FRADY: In the same way, Hoover protected his patrons.
John Rooney of Brooklyn, long Chairman of the House Subcommittee
on Appropriations vital to FBI funding, Rooney requested and
Hoover supplied FBI data about Rooney's opponent in a 1968
primary, Peter Eichenberry, and Eichenberry lost.
DELOACH: The allegation that Mr. Hoover used
FBI files as a power broker or as blackmail, or something of that
nature, is probably one of the greatest distorted allegations in
the history of mankind.
FELT: COINTELPRO was perfectly proper in 95 or 96
percent of the cases. There were over 2000 instances of
COINTELPRO. The Attorney General reviewed and studied every one
of them, and he found all but a handful to be perfectly
acceptable and proper.
CLARK:. In never heard the word COINTELPRO until, when,
in the mid-'70s or early '70s? I don't know -- years after I
left the Department of Justice.
The idea that you would have, you know, deliberate
activities of disruption, interference with the lives and rights
of people in the United States never occurred to me.
But as far as any illegal activities were concerned, had
I known about illegal activities, somebody would have been
prosecuted for them. I have always believed that the first
responsibility of law enforcement is against law enforcement
which itself violates the law. Because who protects the public
when the police violate the law?
FRADY: We asked the current. Director of the FBI,
William Webster, to comment on the Hoover era. He declined.
Early in the morning of May 2nd, 1972, Hoover died of a
massive heart attack. The Nixon White House ordered Hoover's
office sealed, the locks changed. His secretary collected his
personal files. They were destroyed.
Ironically, one condition Hoover had insisted on when he
took over the FBI in 1924 was no political interference. It was
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an uneasy bargain, a grant of special power to protect us from
the forces of disorder, the most risky power for men obsessed
with control. And what happened with Hoover is a troubling
parable of how the guardians of our safety can come to most
endanger our freedoms.
Perhaps J. Edgar Hoover did no more than he thought we
had asked him to do: to keep America safe. But for Hoover that
became to keep us safe as he thought we ought to be.
In our democracy, those we must always watch most
closely are those we entrust to watch over us.
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