Enemies: A History of the FBI (40 page)

But Hoover would be damned if he would let the American public think so.

30

“YOU GOT THIS PHONE TAPPED?”

“
E
DGAR
, I don’t hear you well. What’s the matter? You got this phone tapped?” asked the president of the United States.

“No, I should say not,” said Hoover, with a chuckle. “I can hear you perfectly, sir,” he said to Lyndon B. Johnson, who himself was taping the call.

On that evening, February 27, 1964, Johnson had been president for ninety-seven days. Every sunrise brought a fresh series of crises, landing like the morning paper on the front porch. Tonight’s hot spot was the fountain-of-youth tourist town of St. Augustine, Florida, racked by racist murders and the dynamiting of the Florida East Coast Railroad. LBJ ordered Hoover to get on the railroad case. “I’m not going to tolerate blowing up people with bombs,” he said.

Johnson leaned on Hoover harder than any president ever had. He relied on him in matters of national security, foreign policy, and political intrigue. He praised Hoover to the skies and to his face. Some of his flattery was silver-tongued sweet talk, but some was plain truth. He wanted to believe in Hoover as a matter of faith.

The new president pledged his allegiance to Hoover. “
You’re my brother,” Johnson told Hoover a week after John Kennedy was killed. “You have been for twenty-five, thirty years.… I’ve got more confidence in you than in anybody in town.”

Their political relationship was cultivated as carefully as the White House Rose Garden, where the two stood side by side on Friday, May 8, 1964, at a ceremony in the director’s honor. The coming Sunday would mark Hoover’s fortieth year in power. The new year would bring his seventieth birthday and his mandatory retirement under federal law. Johnson signed an executive order that day waiving the law. Hoover would be the director till he died.

“
J. Edgar Hoover is a household word,” the president said that sunny afternoon. “He is a hero to millions of decent citizens and an anathema to evil … that would subvert our way of life and men who would harm and destroy our persons. Edgar Hoover has been my close personal friend for thirty years, and he was my close personal neighbor for nineteen years. I know he loved my dog, and I think he thought a little bit of me as a neighbor, and I am proud and happy to join the rest of the nation this afternoon in honoring this quiet and humble and magnificent public servant.”

“T
HAT GODDAMNED SEWER
J. E
DGAR
H
OOVER
”

Hoover stoked the president’s fear that Robert F. Kennedy and his loyalists wanted to retake the White House. Johnson could not bear the thought. He collaborated with Hoover to excommunicate the attorney general from power, shunning him with silences and lies.

“
One of the troubles with dealing with the President was that he had that goddamned sewer J. Edgar Hoover flowing across his desk,” said the national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, a Kennedy man who served and suffered under LBJ. “Like many extremely skillful politicians, he had a weakness for under-the-rug information.”

LBJ recorded several anguished conversations with RFK shortly before Kennedy resigned to run for the U.S. Senate in New York.

“
Mr. Hoover’s going down to Jackson, Mississippi. I understand they have a press conference scheduled there,” RFK told LBJ. “If he’s asked some of the questions about this communist situation in connection with the civil-rights movement, and answers some of them in the way that some of the memos have indicated he might, it could cause a good number of difficulties around the country.”

LBJ answered: “All right. You want me to talk to him?”

RFK hesitated and stumbled. His chagrin was audible: “As I’ve said before, it’s quite difficult for me.…”

A few days later: “Martin Luther King is going down to Greenwood, Mississippi, tonight and he’s going to address a mass rally there,” RFK told the president. “If he gets killed, it creates all kinds of problems—just being dead, but a lot of other kinds of problems.”

LBJ suggested that Kennedy order Hoover to shadow King.

The attorney general said he had no power to tell Hoover to do anything. “
I have no dealings with the FBI anymore,” Kennedy said. “It’s a very difficult situation.”

“He sends all kinds of reports over to you … about me planning and plotting things,” Kennedy told LBJ, “plotting the overthrow of the government by force and violence … leading a coup.”

Johnson professed shock and ignorance about these reports. It was not the last lie he would tell Kennedy about his relationship with Hoover.

“
Mr. Johnson at all times recognized strength and knew how to use strength,” said Deke DeLoach, Hoover’s newly appointed liaison to LBJ’s White House. “Hoover was riding the crest of the wave at the time and Mr. Johnson knew how to use him. They were not deep personal friends by any stretch of the imagination. There was political distrust between the two of them, but they both needed each other.”

“W
E’RE FIXIN’ TO DECLARE WAR
”

Lyndon Johnson concentrated information and power in the Oval Office better than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. He admired the way Hoover used secret intelligence. He used the FBI as a political weapon in ways no president ever had done.

He needed Hoover’s help to use every ounce of his presidential power—to wield his political clout as freely and as secretly as possible; to contain the Communist menace, foreign and domestic; to snoop on his friends and enemies in Congress and on the Supreme Court, to keep the lickspittles of the liberal left in check, and to slay the dragons of the far right.

LBJ never used power more effectively than when he ordered Hoover to destroy the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, a red-white-and-blue war against the Klan’s church-burning terrorists.

Burke Marshall, the chief of the civil rights division at the Justice Department, remembered LBJ saying that “
three sovereignties” were involved in the battle: “There’s the United States and there’s the State of Mississippi and there’s J. Edgar Hoover.” To handle all three required a combination of brute force and great finesse. LBJ made it work.

On Sunday, June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared after fleeing a jailhouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in their station wagon, with
Klansmen hot on their trail. Once they went missing they were presumed dead. Mississippi saw, on average, twenty-five civil-rights-connected shootings, beatings, bombings, and arsons every month during 1964. But a triple murder—and one that involved two white men from the North—was out of the ordinary.

Hoover called LBJ at the White House two days later. “
We have found the car,” Hoover told the president. It had been set ablaze eight miles outside Philadelphia.

“Apparently, these men have been killed,” Hoover continued.

“Or maybe kidnapped and not killed,” said LBJ, with little hope.

“Well, I would doubt whether those people down there would give them even that much of a break,” Hoover said. “The car is so burned and charred with heat …”

“The car is still burning?” LBJ asked.

“The car is still burning,” Hoover said.

“We’re going to have more cases like this down south,” Hoover told the president. “What’s going to complicate matters is the agitators of the Negro movement.”

The search began in the hot and hostile terrain of Neshoba County, Mississippi. The Klan had sworn members working for the Mississippi Highway Patrol (MHP) and the county sheriff. The FBI had a paltry presence in Mississippi; some old-time agents, who had to work and live with state and local law enforcement officers, were unenthusiastic about making a federal case out of the murder of three agitators.

On June 24, LBJ shocked Hoover by sending the retired CIA director Allen Dulles to talk with the governor of Mississippi and the chief of the Mississippi Highway Patrol. The president stroked and reassured Hoover: “
I haven’t got a better friend in this government than you.… Ain’t nobody going to take over anything from you as long as I’m living.… Ain’t nobody going to take our thirty-year friendship and mess it up.”

On June 26, Dulles reported back to LBJ at the White House. The president put him on the phone with Hoover. “
You ought to review the number of agents that you have in that state,” Dulles told the director. The Mississippi Highway Patrol and the county sheriffs were “not really going to enforce this business, I’m afraid, unless they have somebody looking over their shoulders.… There are a half a dozen other situations down there that are full of difficulty and there might be terroristic activities of any kind.”

Hoover was deeply skeptical. “That’s going to be an almost superhuman task, don’t you think, Allen?”

While LBJ listened on a speakerphone, Hoover focused on keeping the integrationists in line. “These people have been trained … and are going to live in the homes of the colored population,” Hoover said. “They will hold meetings in each community to give them the education they’re supposed to have” in order to be registered to vote under Mississippi law. “You’ve got to almost keep a man, keep an agent, with these individuals as they come into the state,” Hoover said. “Because this Klan crowd—members of the MHP are Klansmen, many of the chiefs of police are, the sheriffs are.” Hoover wanted a contingent of U.S. marshals, not the FBI, to deal with the Mississippi Highway Patrol and the National Council of Churches and the black activists alike.

LBJ got back on the line, telling Hoover to beef up the FBI’s manpower in Mississippi: “Maybe we can prevent some of these acts of terror by the very presence of your people.”

The president called Hoover again on the evening of June 29. LBJ had invited the mother of one of the missing men, Andy Schwerner, to the White House. Hoover was unhappy. “She’s a communist, you know,” he told the president. “She and her husband both have been active members of the Communist Party in New York for a number of years.”

LBJ, coughing heavily, straining his voice: “Is she an actual member?”

Hoover, wearily: “Oh, yes, she’s an actual member.”

Hoover, nevertheless, had started to comply with the president’s command. “I’m opening a main office,” he said, “a full-time office at Jackson, Mississippi, with an agent in charge and a full staff as we would have in New York or San Francisco.”

On July 2, 1964, LBJ asked Hoover to go to Mississippi and proclaim the omnipresence of the FBI. The director was dubious. “Whatever you do, you’re going to be damned,” Hoover said. “Can’t satisfy both sides.”

Then he got a direct order from the president of the United States.

“Ain’t
nobody
going to damn
you
,” LBJ said. “Nobody but a few communists and a few crackpots and a few wild people are against you in this country. They’re unanimous. Ain’t anybody in this country has the respect you have.”

“See how many people you can bring in there,” said the president. “You oughta put fifty, a hundred people, after this Klan, and studyin’ this from one county to another. I think their very presence may save us a division of
soldiers.… I think you oughta have the
best
intelligence system,
better
than you got on the communists. I read a dozen of your reports last night here ’til one o’clock on the communists. And they can’t open their mouth without your knowin’ what they’re sayin’.”

“Very true,” Hoover said.

LBJ knew how to twist Hoover’s arm: “Now I don’t want these
Klansmen
to open their mouths without
your knowing what they’re sayin’
. Now nobody needs to know it but you, maybe, but
we ought to have intelligence
on that state.…

“If I have to send in troops … it could be
awfully
dangerous,” LBJ said. “I’m having these demands for 5,000 soldiers.… To send in a bunch of Army people, divisions, is just a mistake. But I’ve got
ample
FBI people.… You figure out where you can borrow them … See how many we can put in next week.”

“I want you to have
the same kind
of intelligence that you have on the
communists
,” the president said.

LBJ was telling Hoover to go after the Klan in language he understood. Hoover obeyed. The FBI would pursue the Klansmen, penetrate their ranks, subvert them, and sabotage them, so long as Lyndon Johnson commanded that it be done.

“
Mr. Hoover never would have changed by himself”—not without LBJ’s forceful command, Burke Marshall said. “The FBI was grudging about doing anything” against the Klan. “Mr. Hoover viewed the civil-rights activists as lawbreakers. The FBI was worse than useless, given his mind-set”—until the president ordered him to change his mind.

Hoover assigned a hard-headed but highly intelligent favorite of his, Joe Sullivan, to run Mississippi. Sullivan chose Roy K. Moore as his special agent in charge. Moore was an old marine. An unusual number of the best young FBI men he sent to Mississippi were combat veterans culled from FBI outposts across America.