Betty Medsger - The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoovers Secret FBI

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2014 by Betty Medsger

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Medsger, Betty.
The burglary : the discovery of J. Edgar Hoovers secret FBI / by Betty
Medsger.First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-96295-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-307-96296-6 (eBook)
1. United States. Federal Bureau of InvestigationCorrupt practicesHistory. 2. Hoover, J. Edgar (John Edgar), 18951972. 3. Intelligence serviceMoral and ethical aspectsUnited States. 4. Leaks (Disclosure of information)United StatesCase studies. 5. Whistle blowingUnited StatesCase studies. 6. BurglaryUnited StatesCase studies. I. Title.
HV 8144. F 43 M 43 2014
363.2509730904dc23

2013024540

Jacket image: J. Edgar Hoover, February 1, 1950 (detail). Bettmann / Corbis
Jacket design by Joan Wong

v3.1

For John
With love and gratitude

Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral? We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning because we were just naturally pragmatic. The one thing we were concerned about, will this course of action work, will it get us what we want, the objective we desire to reach.

WILLIAM SULLIVAN , head of the FBIs Domestic Intelligence Division under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover

It was a matter of keeping alive a sense of purpose and accomplishment when the forces seemed so overwhelming.Sometimes we accomplished more than we had reason to expect, as in Media. It was a long shot. We didnt know if we would find anything important. Other times, we never knew if we accomplished anything.But it gave voice and a sense of purpose and built little pockets of life that made sense at a terrible time.

WILLIAM DAVIDON , leader of the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI

During most of my tenure as director of the FBI, I have been compelled to devote much of my time attempting to reconstruct and then to explain activities that occurred years ago. Some of those activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible. We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated.

CLARENCE M. KELLEY , FBI director, apologizing to the American people in 1976 for the actions of his predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

MARGARET MEAD , anthropologist

1

I N LATE 1970, William Davidon, a mild-mannered physics professor at Haverford College, privately asked a few people this question:

What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?

Even in that time of passionate resistance against the war in Vietnam that included break-ins at draft boards, his question was startling. What, besides arrests and lengthy prison sentences, could result from breaking into an FBI office? The bureau and its legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, had been revered by Americans and considered paragons of integrity for the nearly half century he had been director.

Who would dare to think they could break into an FBI office? Surely the offices of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country would be as secure as Fort Knox. Just talking about the possibility seemed dangerous.

But Davidon, with great reluctance, had decided that burglarizing an FBI office might be the only way to confront what he considered an emergency: the likelihood that the government, through the FBI, was spying on Americans and suppressing their cherished constitutional right to dissent. If that was true, he thought, it was a crime against democracya crime that must be stopped.

The odds were very low that such an act of resistance could possibly succeed against the law enforcement agency headed by this man who held so much power. Nicholas Katzenbach, who as attorney general was Hoovers boss, had resigned in 1966 because of Hoovers resentment over being told by Katzenbach to manage the bureau within the law. The directors power was unique among all national officials, said Katzenbach. He ruled the FBI with a combination of discipline and fear and was capable of acting in an excessively arbitrary way. No one dared object.The FBI was a principality with absolutely secure borders, in Hoovers view. At the same time, he said, There was no man better known or more admired by the general public than J. Edgar Hoover.

Such was the power and reputation of the official whose borders and files Davidon was considering invading. He knew Hoover was very powerful, but he didnt knownor could anyone outside the bureau have knownhow harshly he ruled it and how he protected the bureau from having its illegal practices exposed. Katzenbach believed that Hoover or one of the directors top aides had even forged Katzenbachs signature in order to make it appear that the attorney general had given permission for the FBI to plant an electronic surveillance device, a bug, in civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.s New York hotel room. Despite what appeared to be his signature on the memorandum, Katzenbach was certain he never approved such a procedure, which he considered the worst possible invasion of privacy.

Hoovers sensitivity to criticism, Katzenbach said when he testified in December 1975 before the committee then conducting the first congressional investigation of the FBI, is almost impossible to overestimate.It went far beyond the bounds of natural resentment.The most casual statement, the most strained implication, was sufficient cause for Mr. Hoover to write a memorandum to the attorney general complaining about the criticism, explaining why it was unjustified, and impugning the integrity of its author.

In a very real sense, Katzenbach testified, there was no greater crime in Mr. Hoovers eyes than public criticism of the bureau.

A congressional investigation of the FBI during Mr. Hoovers lifetime, Katzenbach said, would have been utterly impossible. Mr. Hoover would have vigorously resisted.He would have asserted that the investigation was unnecessary, unwise and politically motivated. At worst, he would have denounced the investigation as undermining law and order and inspired by Communist ideology. No one [in Congress] risked that confrontation during his lifetime.

Said Katzenbach, Absent strong and unequivocal proof of the greatest impropriety on the part of the director, no attorney general could have conceived that he could possibly win a fight with Mr. Hoover in the eyes of the public, the Congress or the President. Moreover, to the extent proof of any such impropriety existed, it would almost by definition have been in the Bureaus possession and control, unreachable except with Bureau cooperation.

Five years before Katzenbach made that public assertion, Davidon was planning to do something that had never been doneobtain official FBI information that was otherwise unreachable. Davidon had given a lot of thought to the question before he asked itWhat do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?