Hoover's Political Spying for Presidents

The vast fortress-like building on Pennsylvania Avenue has been criticized as an architectural disaster and a shocking waste of public funds ($126 million). Now the name, cast in bronze, begins to be something of an embarrassment in a democratic capital: the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

The Senate select committee on intelligence activities last week filled out the dismaying record of Hoover's eagerness to curry favor with Presidents by using agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to gather political information. The committee staffs report shows that Hoover willingly complied with improper requests from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He gratuitously offered political intelligence to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, but both seemed unimpressed.

In all these services, offered or actually performed, there was also the implicit signal that Hoover could find out almost anything and even Presidents should handle him with care. He ran the agency for 48 years and was seven years beyond the mandatory federal retirement age when he died in office on May 2,1972.

Based on seven months of staff investigation, the Senate report offers a bit of bitter justice to Richard Nixon. Among the Watergate revelations that undid him were his Administration's use of the FBI to wiretap Administration officials and newsmen, and his forestalling, for a time, the FBI investigation of the bugging of Democratic National Committee headquarters. The Senate committee reports that precedents for abuse of the agency were firmly established by Hoover under Democrats F.D.R., L.B.J. and J.F.K. Some of the examples of improprieties:

ROOSEVELT. After giving a speech on national defense in 1940, F.D.R. had his press secretary, Stephen Early, send Hoover the names of 128 people who had sent telegrams to the White House criticizing the address. "The President thought you might like to look them over," Early's note gently instructed Hoover. The FBI director had each name checked out in the FBI'S Washington files and the appropriate field office. This "name check" process retrieved any material, no matter how flimsy, that the FBI had on a person. If there was none, a file was opened on each such critic. Roosevelt ordered the FBI to put taps on the home telephones of three or four of his closest advisers, including Harry Hopkins. F.D.R. suspected that Hopkins' wife was passing anti-Administration information to the receptive Washington Times-Herald.

TRUMAN. When Truman's military aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, picked up transcripts of some of the Roosevelt wiretaps from the FBI in 1945 and showed them to Truman, the President snapped: "I don't have time for that foolishness!" But Hoover kept sending unsolicited "personal and confidential" memos to the Truman White House on political matters, such as the claim that a Communist sympathizer was helping a certain Senator write a speech, that a sugar scandal might break and embarrass Democratic officials, that Newsweek was planning a foreign espionage story. There was no evidence that Truman was interested.

EISENHOWER. Responding to an invitation from Ike to brief his Cabinet on racial tensions early in 1956, Hoover rambled on about the lobbying efforts of the N.A.A.C.P. and some Communist groups to influence civil rights legislation, and about the anti-integration activities of Southern politicians.

The only such FBI incident of meddling in political affairs cited in the Eisenhower years, this was no more than an un solicited digression by Hoover.

KENNEDY. The report confirmed that Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to trace Defense Department news leaks, in 1961 and 1962 authorized the wiretapping of several Washington journalists. They included Hanson Baldwin, military analyst for the New York Times, Baldwin's secretary, and Lloyd Norman, Newsweek 's Pentagon correspondent. More vaguely, the report says Robert Kennedy signed orders for taps on six other Americans, including "three Executive branch officials, a congressional staff member and two registered lobbying agents for foreign interests."

The aim was to investigate charges of corruption in the U.S. sugar-import quo tas. Presumably, John Kennedy knew of all these actions.

JOHNSON. Sharply stepping up political intrigue via the FBI, Johnson got Hoover to assign a 31 -member "special squad" to the 1964 Democratic Nation al Convention in Atlantic City, ostensibly to detect any violent agitators. The squad, dispatched without Robert Kennedy's knowledge, supplied "hot line" reports to Johnson's political aides on intraparty battles at the convention.

During the 1964 campaign, Johnson had his aide Bill Moyers ask the FBI for checks on Republican Candidate Barry Goldwater's Senate staff. Hoover's men ran name checks on 15 of them, producing derogatory information on two (a traffic violation on one and a love affair on another). Johnson asked for similar checks on at least seven journalists who had displeased him. They included NBC's David Brinkley, Columnist JOseph Kraft, Associated Press's Peter Arnett, the Chicago Daily News' Peter Lisagor and LIFE'S Richard Stolley (now managing editor of PEOPLE). L.B.J. also sought from the FBI, and duly received, information on critics of the Warren Commission's report on the assassination of Jack Kennedy (though Johnson himself doubted its conclusion, suspecting that Castro had had a hand in the murder). The FBI even forwarded a photo of one critic performing a sexual act.

Beyond trying to please Presidents, Hoover also compiled dossiers on his own real and potential enemies. An FBI file was opened on every Senator and Congressman after his election, noting the legislator's probable attitude toward the FBI. When a subcommittee chaired by Democratic Senator Edward Long of Missouri considered investigating the FBI for electronic eavesdropping in the mid-1960s, agents compiled "special memoranda" on each of the six subcommittee members. Similarly, when a Knoxville, Tenn., civil rights council in 1960 urged an investigation of the FBI and other federal agencies for racial discrimination, the FBI ran name checks on all eleven council members. The FBI reported to Attorney General William Rogers that one member had sent flowers and mash notes to a woman other than his wife.* Hoover's vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. (TIME, Dec. 1), of course, was the ultimate FBI harassment of a critic.

The committee report did not belabor Nixon's much-publicized relations with the FBI, but an incidental revelation last week in a Washington federal court showed how much some high officials in his Administration feared Hoover. A disaffected former assistant FBI director, William Sullivan, had warned the Administration in 1971 that Hoover might use records of the secret tapping of newsmen and national-security officials to protect himself against being retired by the Nixon Administration. Sullivan then spirited the logs of the wiretaps out of Hoover's suite of offices and gave them to Robert Mardian, an assistant attorney general.

Very Afraid. Responding last week to a civil suit filed by one of the victims of this wiretapping, John Ehrlichman, Nixon's top domestic adviser, explained: "Since journalists had been tapped, it would be politically embarrassing for the Administration potentially, and Hoover was not above blackmailing the President with this information." Mardian, Ehrlichman said, feared Hoover would do anything to get the files back. Ehrlichman testified that Mardian told him he was "very afraid of not only the integrity of these files but also of his own personal safety, that he felt he was being surveilled by Hoover through his agents, and it was only a matter of time before Hoover caused agents of the FBI to break into his files and recover the various records of this activity which Sullivan had turned over to him." On Nixon's instructions, Ehrlichman got the records from Mardian and put them in a White House safe.

Another congressional subcommittee last week tried to trace the disposal of Hoover's collection of personal information on his critics and public figures after his death in 1972. John P. Mohr, the third-ranking FBI official in Hoover's last days, told a House subcommittee chaired by New York Democrat Bella Abzug that there were no "secret files." He said that just after Hoover died, he had been instructed by Attorney General Richard Kleindienst to lock up the director's private office to make sure all important papers were retained for Hoover's successor. The two men agreed that the other eight rooms in Hoover's suite need not be sealed off. After Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray was appointed, he permitted some 30 drawers of the deceased director's personal files to be transferred from the unsealed rooms to Hoover's home.

Hoover's personal secretary (for 54 years) Helen Gandy, 78, testified before the subcommittee that her boss had told her that upon his death all such personal papers should be destroyed. She said she and another secretary then went through every piece of paper at Hoover's house and found nothing involving official bureau business; there were mostly personal letters. She said she had them all burned or shredded.

TIME has learned that FBI sources are certain that Hoover kept many highly sensitive files about newsmen, former White House aides and possibly even about Nixon. The records also included information on the drinking habits and personal lives of several Supreme Court Justices. But technically they were not called "secret files," so Mohr's denial of their existence is not perjurious. They were kept not in Hoover's private office but elsewhere in his suite, these sources believe.

Before Secretary Gandy could look at them in Hoover's house, the most sensitive papers were carried off in an FBI truck to West Virginia's Blue Ridge Club, a Shenandoah Mountain hideaway used by innermost FBI officials for regular poker games with CIA and other cronies (TIME, Nov. 3). There the papers were burned in the club's large fireplace. Precisely who ordered this destruction and carried it out has not been disclosed. The three-story club, valued at up to $200,000, burned to the ground in a fire of undetermined cause on Nov. 23. No evidence of arson has been discovered.

Waves of Shock. TIME has also learned that FBI Director Clarence Kelley has ordered an investigation of his agency's business relations with one of the frequent poker players at the club: Joseph Tait, president of Washington's U.S. Recording Co., which buys bugging and wiretapping equipment and sells it to the FBI. In the spy business (he also sells to the CIA), Tait is known as a "cutout," whose role is to prevent victims of electronic snooping from knowing what type of equipment the agencies are using against them. Kelley is pursuing reports that Tait may have been charging the FBI as much as 30% more than he paid the manufacturers for this equipment.

Such a rare internal investigation is sending waves of shock and rumor through the FBI. Morale was further jolted by the testimony last week of a former FBI informer. Appearing before the Senate committee wearing a cloth mask to preserve a new identity adopted for self-protection, an informer once known as Gary Rowe Jr. testified that he had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan for the FBI in the early 1960s. He said he was told to do everything possible to sow dissension within the Klan. Rowe said of Klan families: "I was told to sleep with as many wives as I could, to break up marriages." (He slept with some.) He claimed that he warned the FBI that the Klan planned to attack Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Ala., in 1961 and that the FBI did nothing to stop the beatings.

Another disenchanted FBI informer, Mary Jo Cook, told how she had infiltrated the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War in Buffalo in 1973. Paid some $5,000 for her work, she mainly befriended the veterans and kept the FBI posted on their antiwar activities. Though she found the spying "more exciting than working as a teller in a bank," she soured on it when she discovered that the veterans were sincere in their opposition to the war, not under any foreign-propaganda influence and not bent on violence.

Falling Esteem. The continuing revelations are not only eroding J. Edgar Hoover's once impregnable reputation as the world's most efficient and incorruptible cop. They tend to obscure the fact that the FBI organization Hoover developed was a highly disciplined investigative agency, compiling a remarkable record of arrests for such major crimes as bank robbery, kidnaping and espionage. The disclosures, moreover, have sent public esteem for the agency plummeting. While 84% of Americans gave a "highly favorable" rating to the FBI in a Gallup poll in 1965, only 71% did so in 1970, and a mere 37% now feel that way. Nevertheless, the disclosures have served a valuable purpose. They should discourage any future director--or President --from tolerating any use of the bureau as a secret political spying agency.

* Hoover's outrage at sexual transgressions by public figures was not shared by all Presidents. President Kennedy's appointments secretary, Kenneth O'Donnell, is quoted as saying in a new biography of Hoover (The Director by Ovid Demaris) that Hoover repeatedly tried to interest J.F.K. in the fact that a U.S. Ambassador had been caught leaving a woman's bedroom by her angry husband. When Hoover persisted in seeking Kennedy's reaction, O'Donnell passed it along: "The President said that from now on he's going to hire faster Ambassadors."

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