THE DECLINE OF J . EDGAR HOOVER

...the intermediary, ironically, was Walter Jenkins...

...Through most of the previous years he had operated with what was essentially a "hot line" to the White House—whether under Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, or Eisenhower...

...At the same rendezvous Hoover explained why the first news conference he had held in anyone's memory was "for ladies only...

...One wonders on reflection why Hoover did not embrace the idea—suggested more than fifteen years ago in the report of the Truman Civil Rights Commission—that the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department be given larger investigative functions...

...Some of the most unkind and vulgar thrusts emanated from the far right, where Hoover had heretofore occupied his most special status...

...indeed, the late President took pains on occasion to soothe his vanities...

...It is rather the general judgment that he was wholly sincere in this strange confessional and that, as one of his aides put it, he was simply "getting off his chest" many things that had been on his mind...

...After Hoover's exercise in intellectual discourse with the Washington newspaperwomen, the question of his retirement became a live one...

...But the other side of the truth is that he is a man singularly unequipped for the role of full-time demagogue...

...The choice of Warren altered that prospect...

...But the bitterness of Hoover's recent thrust against the Kennedy-run actions in Mississippi is unquestionably a large clue to the story...

...Hoover has been on the job for forty years, which covers a large span in the life of most men...

...Looking back, the extraordinary thing is that he was able to maintain his immunity so long and that it required a chain of events set in motion by the assassination of John F. Kennedy to subject him to the kind of critical public discussion which most public officials regard as the usual condition of life...

...The gentleman is assured that every effort has been made to make certain that no publicity will result from this indiscretion...

...moreover, Hoover apparently deferred to the reality of things, and the FBI's agents in the South began to perform with conspicuously increased energy in response to Justice Department orders...

...it scarcely made Hoover the scapegoat of the story...

...Above all, it was President Johnson who persuaded Chief Justice Warren— over the latter's strong personal resistance—to direct the inquiry into the assassination of President Kennedy...

...But none with whom I have spoken believes this is a momentary aberration...

...there was the inevitable speculation that he had been plied with too many martinis at lunch by some devious agent...

...In the annals of our time the year 1964 may be memorable, among other things, as the year in which the legend of J. Edgar Hoover's infallibility—and invulnerability—was finally laid to rest...

...at the worst it inferentially raised the question of the value of all the FBI's dossier-collecting if what turned out to be the most important dossier of our time—that on Lee Oswald—was never available in the right place at the right time...

...Some weeks before the report was issued, the FBI was "leaking" stories hostile to the Commission and putting its own defense on record before any indictment was released...

...He had generally been disposed to use the formal statement, the prepared address, and the "planted" story...

...Unfortunately for Mr...

...He recognized that, at least in his first term, he could not risk challenging the stereotype of Hoover's sanctity...

...It could hardly be said, however, that in their day-to-day operations (as distinct from the widely-publicized atrocities they were called on to investigate) they displayed the dedication or concern of the Peace Corps emissaries operating in far more alien lands...

...After a certain flurry, the same thing will happen if and when Lyndon Johnson decides to proclaim that J. Edgar Hoover has earned the blessings of retirement and a farewell salute from his countrymen...

...One need hardly bestow sainthood on Martin Luther King to perceive that Hoover had committed the fatal blunder of carelessly and truculently condemning the man whose name, perhaps more than any other, was identified by millions with the Freedom Movement...

...He would be a temporary matinee idol for all the old ladies in sneakers...

...but these technicalities did not concern many lawyers...

...It is a matter of record that the initial Hoover build-up rested largely on his role in the cops-and-robbers realm...

...In most of the headlines concerning the Warren report, the Secret Service took the brunt of the condemnation...

...Biddle joined in the laughter...

...As weeks and months passed without any apprehension of the killers, public criticism of the FBI mounted...

...Presumably the only answer is that Hoover was too jealous of any intrusion into his bailiwick...

...He attracted both able men and mediocrities to the agency...

...When you weaken the state authorities, you do a great disservice to law enforcement all over the country . . . We have had difficulty in Mississippi during the last few years...

...In the domain of civil rights, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy—who directed the battle of Mississippi in the Meredith case and other critical movements—was the villain of the drama...

...President Roosevelt obviously felt that his alliance with this symbol of perennial Boy Scout leadership was a valuable political device...

...Then came dissenting voices—including those of some civil rights leaders—who contended that his dismissal would merely enshrine him as leader of the right-wing battalion and make him a genuinely menacing national figure...

...This is not to say that the Kennedys capriciously solicited conflict with Hoover...

...Subsequently there have been inspired reports (in the ultra-conservative National Review and elsewhere) that some Congressional members of the Commission, notably Representative Gerald R. Ford, Michigan Republican, had valiantly—but vainly—fought to delete any unfavorable mention of the Bureau from the final document...

...The episodes that set the stage for Hoover's crucial act of self-revelation were several and varied...

...Observers groped for an explanation of why Hoover had chosen this moment and this occasion to bare his political soul...

...Then one day, as 1964 drew to a close, the FBI arrested twenty-one men whom it believed shared in the Mississippi crime, and this development abated some of the censure...

...It may also be judged in retrospect that Hoover was himself primarily responsible for the destruction of the myth...

...indeed, my conjecture is that Nichols' retirement in 1957 to the more relaxed spirit of Schenley's, Inc., was perhaps the first premonition of ultimate decline in the Hoover empire...

...Nor is it likely that his experience will be one he will fail to share with a close colleague whose memory of some escapade of his own remains fresh...

...Even in the aftermath of his autumn fiasco, which evoked calls for his retirement from such journals as The New York Times and The Washington Post and harsh condemnation in such citadels as The New York Herald Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, there were conspicuous silences...

...President Eisenhower was then in power...

...This, too, was an unusual exercise in partisan bravado...

...Once again he resumed direct business with the White House...

...Perhaps the more serious question is why the FBI has been so singularly unsuccessful in penetrating the major crime syndicates...

...Yet the result is that he has long retained jurisdiction in an area in which he resented the obligation, and in which he began to move only when he was working for an Attorney General who had a close family connection with the White House...

...J. Edgar Hoover, it is sad to relate, was largely a phenomenon, of the Roosevelt era...

...But the episode inevitably invited uncharitable and even salacious murmurs because it was Hoover, after all, who had long hounded and hunted down sexual deviates and helped to drive them from government office...

...He described the Reverend Martin Luther King as the nation's "most notorious liar...

...such an office was thereupon opened with some fanfare and the FBI director betook himself from Washington to preside over the ceremonies...

...idolatry was nourished throughout the domain over which he ruled, and outside...

...Warren brought more than integrity and independence to the task...

...Apart from his age, he is something less than a fiery public figure...

...The mystery of Hoover's prolonged power and immunity in the pre-Ken-nedy years—and still surviving to some extent at this time—is not entirely explained by Presidential politics or press agentry...

...We are fact finders...

...he has neither the historic pose of MacArthur nor the adventurous cynicism of McCarthy—and what triumphs did they finally win...

...He won't be pushed around...

...The FBI's method of utilizing men's weakness for its own ends was recently described to me by a veteran Justice Department official...

...While the question is arguable, I think these anxieties overstate the whole matter...

...conduct that in other government subordinates would have almost automatically triggered demands for at least some form of Congressional inquiry elicited no such outcry on Capitol Hill on this occasion...

...Indeed, one little-noted aspect of the Mississippi postmortems is that the FBI did not even have a regional office in that state until after the Philadelphia slayings, when Mr...

...One former Justice Department official remarked to me at the time: "If there's a man in the country who isn't afraid of Hoover, it's Earl Warren...

...This was the publicity surrounding his sending of a bouquet of flowers to Walter Jenkins, the White House aide who resigned after disclosure of a reportedly homosexual incident...

...As a former prosecutor, he could also sense the practices of cover-up and diversion in bureaucratic strongholds...

...But now the Attorney General, a tenacious, spirited man in his own right, also happened to be the brother and confidant of the President of the United States...

...FBI men went through many more motions than ever before...

...Hoover, if he had been an ordinary government official, might have concluded that he had received rather light treatment...

...The Commission's rebuke was mildly worded...

...Among his books are "The Age of Suspicion" and "Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor...

...The Commission's findings could hardly be called a devastating assault on the FBI or its director...

...President Johnson many months ago issued an executive order waiving the seventy-year-retirement provision in Hoover's case (his seventieth birthday is January 1 of the new year...

...Naturally I get more and more irritated when I see Congress passing along to us matters which should be handled at the state level...

...Hoover, spoiled by a press and a Congress that so long accepted his word as not only law but scripture, may plausibly have concluded that all the forces of deliberate evil and gullible innocence were now aligned in conspiracy against him...

...The story is told that, some months after his retirement as Attorney General, Francis Biddle was expressing at a dinner party his discomfort over some aspects of his relationships with Hoover...

...If Hoover had been destined to lead a rightist rampage, one doubts that he would have waited until the age of retirement, or that he possesses the capacities to do so in the twilight years...

...The fact of the conference was in itself a remarkable event because the FBI director had long shunned this type of conventional communication with the press...

...Hoover clumsily compounded his misadventure a few days later...

...But the FBI was not spared and its director, so long habituated to eulogy, was aggrieved...

...He would probably receive invitations to more breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners than any modern orator...

...For many years the best way to read the FBI director's mind was to follow the columns of Walter Winchell...

...Hoover unquestionably enjoyed the spreading of the word that he was above and beyond reproach...

...But it can be said with reasonable confidence that, whatever happens, Hoover's power and glory will never be fully resurrected...

...there could usually be found the clues to most of his current moods and feuds...

...In any case, whatever the merits of these arguments, the country—adults as well as small children—many years ago accepted the gang-busters portrait of our number-one G-man...

...In the circumstances, Mr...

...But participants in the conference solemnly testify to his sobriety and solemnity...

...That the FBI was aware of some failure in its own operation was tacitly conceded when its Dallas agent who had been keeping his eye on Oswald for months was suspended shortly after the inquiry began...

...Moreover, there was the more pragmatic point that Hoover should rationally have realized that his office would eventually be involved in any investigation of the Jenkins case...

...two or three" which, he explained, "were probably from racist groups associated with Martin Luther King...

...There were occasional flare-ups in the long years of Hoover's eminence...

...Indeed, now that the legend is at last deflated, it may even be appropriate to say that, as in the cases of MacArthur and McCarthy, much of Hoover's strength has derived from the weakness of other men...

...But, unaccustomed as he was to criticism of any sort, Hoover was outraged by what he described as "Monday morning quarterbacking...

...A final inadvertence may have contributed to the mood which produced his intemperate outburst...

...The problem of effectively presenting a Federal civil rights case before white supremacist Southern juries has been recurrently demonstrated, and the failure to achieve a successful record of prosecution cannot be simple-mindedly ascribed to the FBI...

...The first was probably the designation of Chief Justice Earl Warren as chairman of the Commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy...

...they essentially criticized the lack of coordination between the FBI and the Secret Service which left the latter agency unaware of Lee Oswald's employment in a building along the parade route...

...His opinions on criminal law were backward and unoriginal...

...Thus he said aloud what many had long feared were his intimate beliefs...

...From a reporter's notes transcribed at J. Edgar Hoover's news conference on November 18, as subsequently quoted in Newsweek magazine and undisputed by the FBI director...

...One of them privately observed: "It's better to keep him where he can be kept under some control...

...it seemed to reflect Hoover's conviction that the Republicans would be around for a long time...

...What basically happened cannot be doubted: Robert F. Kennedy let it be known that the FBI was to be regarded as a unit of the Department of Justice, and that the FBI director would carry out his orders...

...One of his former associates in the Justice Department is said to have commented whimsically: "General, some of us sure wish we'd heard you say that while you were running the Department...

...As reported by The Washington Post, he said "with men journalists, the questions are loaded and they are always trying to trip you up...

...The notion that he was a deputy to the Attorney General was viewed as an amiable Washington fiction...

...Unquestionably his appointment was greeted with cordial distaste by Hoover, who had probably visualized himself in his traditional role of inquisitor rather than one of those whose performance was under investigation...

...Nichols wisely perceived that Hoover possessed unique strength in the capital (for a variety of reasons) and that it could be most adroitly perpetuated by personal non-involvement in public combat...

...anyone who has encountered many FBI men in the line of journalistic duty is struck by the vast disparities...

...Warren and his staff swiftly made it plain that the FBI's position in the case was not considered sacrosanct...

...The civil rights conflict had exploded on a wide front in 1963, climaxed by the bombing of a Birmingham church in which four children died, and in 1964 it reached a new peak of intensity with the slaying of three civil rights workers in Mississippi...

...It also reflected an era in which liberals paid a heavy price for the innocence with which some of them had treated such affairs as the case of Alger Hiss...

...Around the Justice Department there was an unmistakable feeling that his tone of voice had changed in dealing with the Attorney General whose brother had been slain...

...So entrenched was the Hoover legend that, when it first became known that such a Commission would be formed, few dared to speculate that the FBI's role in the tragedy would receive no less exacting examination than that of any other agency involved in the security structure...

...Cynics have observed that there is some inconsistency between the portrait of Hoover as the invincible foe of crime and his annual lamentations over the rise in the crime rate...

...Even in those areas, there was nevertheless an unmistakable sense that Hoover's foot had slipped badly, and that he might conceivably be the object of legitimate scrutiny in his lifetime...

...it is not, as Hoover is fond of saying, a "national police force...

...In effect, he seemed to suggest that in the realm of civil liberties Earl Warren was public enemy number one...

...but it was during FDR's time that he steadily acquired the prestige which made his office so privileged a sanctuary in Washington...

...But when he was forced into the civil rights fight, he had to make enemies—and then everything started to collapse...

...But things never quite reverted to the earlier style...

...It was in that report that the point was made that the FBI's desire for congenial palship with Southern law-enforcement officials was a major obstacle to civil rights action...

...But, by "states' righter" Hoover's own recent on-the-record admission, he did not have his heart in the effort, and perhaps that is the intangible discerned by so many civil rights volunteers...

...while a growing garrulous-ness has been increasingly noted in recent years by Justice Department associates, that would explain the length, not the substance, of his recital...

...Men who have been associated with Hoover at one time or another remain puzzled by the uncharacteristic recklessness of his remarks...

...It is perhaps the majesty or at least the good fortune of a free society that, in the long run, even the most sacred cow will, in a manner of speaking, make an ass of himself...

...No one was contending, of course, that transmission of the dossier would have saved President Kennedy's life...

...When supposedly lesser mortals, like Harry Truman and the late Joseph Welch, faced MacArthur and McCarthy in combat, the supermen were reduced to remarkably human size...

...it was due to the rather harsh approach to the Mississippi situation by authorities here in Washington, by the Department of Justice . . . The bureau is not a police agency...

...In the early years of the Eisenhower era, when McCarthyism was riding high, Hoover perhaps first markedly tipped his political hand by publicly suggesting, before a Senate Committee, that the Truman Administration had tried to suppress certain data dealing with Communist infiltration...

...Little of the secret history of that interval has yet emerged...

...One veteran of the Justice Department wars is convinced that Hoover's real trouble is that the world became too complicated for his essentially conservative mind, and that it was only a matter of time before history caught up with him...

...The conference lasted for about three hours...

...Few men live private lives beyond reproach...

...there have been numerous intimations that it early knew the identity of the Mississippi slayers but could not persuade key witnesses to risk community reprisals by taking the stand...

...Nor did they get the impression that his performance was spontaneous and un-calculated...

...There is, one suspects, a deeper explanation...

...He became FBI chief in 1924...

...nothing could be safer than that," this observer remarked...

...There was a parallel reason for his discontent to reach a boil in 1964...

...but the question, of course, is not that simple since the FBI's jurisdiction is plainly limited...

...Hoover might properly protest that this was a minimum gesture of decency toward a colleague in government who had suffered a grievous personal misfortune...

...When he cautiously took pains to voice parenthetical criticism of racist bombers, someone was moved to remark: "He's very impartial—he's against both the guy who preaches non-violence in church and the people who bomb the church...

...Johnson finally persuaded the FBI chief to remedy that lamentable oversight...

...Secret Service might well have agreed with Hoover's latter-day conclusion that nothing in the reports justified the verdict that Oswald was a potential assassin...

...There are ambiguous and sometimes contradictory reports about the prior relationship between President Johnson and Hoover...

...Whether, in the light of recent events, some graceful arrangement will be made for his voluntary exit remains to be seen...

...But it was a tale that might have been told of others who served as Attorney General...

...but incidents of this kind have occurred with sufficient frequency to create a general apprehension...

...Now Hoover had at last proclaimed himself—one must again refer the reader to the opening quotation—as "one of those states' righters all my life" who blamed "difficulty in Mississippi" on "the rather harsh approach" of the Justice Department...

...To a certain degree, Hoover's resentment over such criticism was understandable...

...Few Senators or Congressmen spoke out vigorously...

...During much of his career Hoover had the guidance of one of the ablest public-relations deputies I have ever encountered in Washington—Louis Nichols...

...Attending a party given by Washington hostess Gwen Cafritz, he told a group of admirers that he had received almost 400 telegrams after his outburst and that all were favorable except for JAMES A. WECHStER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post...

...He clashed sharply with President Harry Truman during the Judy Coplon case when the issue of divulgence of certain embarrassing FBI files arose— and Truman insisted upon their release...

...Senators, Congressmen, and members of the executive branch are no less human than the rest of the breed...

...But Nichols was not around on the day when Hoover met the ladies of the press...

...It has been enormously bulwarked by the major business of the FBI—the collection of dossiers...

...The volume and detail of FBI files may be exaggerated...

...There comes a day when an FBI agent quietly interviews such a dignitary and explains that his hotel-room peccadillo of a recent night was called to the Bureau's attention...

...In the same interview Hoover renewed his assault on "bleeding-heart judges" who display, in his judgment, excessive concern for the rights of the accused...

...his bureaucracy expanded...

...Nevertheless it can be reliably reported that it was Mr...

...Nevertheless the fact remains that all the money and manpower invested in the numerous FBI investigations of Oswald had been utterly squandered through internal mismanagement...

...Thus did Hoover, who had so often in the past refrained from any public attack on the segregationist legions, finally offer his definition of "racist...

...In retirement, Hoover would very likely be a featured speaker on the Goldwater-Birch circuit...

...With the death of President Kennedy, Hoover may well have assumed that he could regain the status symbolism of pre-Kennedy times...

...the Attorney General was watching, and insisting upon reports...

...We simply can't wet-nurse everybody who goes down to try to reform and re-educate the Negro population of the South...

...As these lines are written in mid-December, Hoover remains at his post amid conflicting prophecies about his future...

...Thus a combination of troubles and traumas, from Dallas to Mississippi to Washington, seemingly conspired to shatter the bomb-proof world of J. Edgar Hoover and perhaps to incite his extraordinary November 18 news conference with a group of Washington newspaperwomen...

...Hoover, however, there is a strong background of evidence suggesting his lack of enthusiasm for law enforcement in the civil rights area, and in his November explosion he gave personal documentation to the charge, as suggested in the quotation with which this article began...

...In the age of Roosevelt there was always the question of who was using whom...

...Johnson who pressed the FBI for more intensive effort in Mississippi and especially for infiltration of the right-wing racist groups—a tactic heretofore largely concentrated on the vanishing Communist legions, of which FBI agents may well be a majority of the membership by now...

...His appropriations steadily mounted, with White House and Congressional blessing...

...It is hardly likely that the same gentleman will rise in the halls of Congress—or at a Cabinet meeting—at some future date to challenge any aspect of the works of the FBI...

...Able, amiable, articulate, Nichols had a special genius for preserving the image of his superior as a man who stood above the tawdry battles of Washington, whose dedication and selflessness were beyond reproach, and whose supreme resolve was to keep the FBI "out of politics" on any level...

...There is no evidence that the FBI has failed to act diligently in the search for the perpetrators...

...He made his reputation catching bank robbers, Nazis, and Communists, and...

...But Kennedy won in 1960, and it was in the Kennedy era that Hoover first began to encounter serious challenge to his unique standing in Washington...