Priceless Anecdote About Bill Moyers

[Corlyss_D]

Hoover's Institution
Anecdotes from the FBI crypt--and lessons on how to win the war.

BY LAURENCE H. SILBERMAN
Wednesday, July 20, 2005 12:01 a.m.

I recently completed a rewarding year as co-chairman of President Bush's commission on intelligence, and I propose to discuss our recommendations regarding the FBI in light of my own unique experience with J. Edgar Hoover.

Our commission recommended that the FBI be reconstructed--to create a separate national security service within the bureau that would combine counterintelligence, counterterrorism and foreign intelligence. We did so because we concluded that the tasks of agents performing these three functions were sufficiently different from traditional work that different training, incentives and career paths should be developed. Some in the bureau appeared to initially resist. They suggested that a separate national security service might induce those FBI personnel in that separate service to engage in questionable behavior. I found this concern especially ironic in light of past history and my own experience.

I became deputy attorney general in early 1974, after the "Saturday night massacre." Having seen printed rumors of the "secret and confidential files" of J. Edgar Hoover (who had died in 1972), I asked Clarence Kelly, the very straight and honorable director of the bureau, whether they existed. He assured me that they did not. If they ever did they must have been destroyed.

I was shocked then, when on Jan. 19, 1975, as acting attorney general, I read a front page story in the Washington Post confirming the existence of the files. The story pointed out that the files contained embarrassing material collected on congressmen. When I confronted Kelly, he was initially mystified. He then realized the Post must be referring to files in his outer office, in plain sight, which he had inherited but never examined. Sure enough, they were the notorious secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover.

The House Judiciary Committee demanded I testify about those files, so I was obliged to read them. Accompanied by only one FBI official, I read virtually all these files in three weekends. It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service. Hoover had indeed tasked his agents with reporting privately to him any bits of dirt on figures such as Martin Luther King, or their families. Hoover sometimes used that information for subtle blackmail to ensure his and the bureau's power.
I intend to take to my grave nasty bits of information on various political figures--some still active. As bad as the dirt collection business was, perhaps even worse was the evidence that he had allowed--even offered--the bureau to be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes. I have always thought that the most heinous act in which a democratic government can engage is to use its law enforcement machinery for political ends.

We attempted, without going into specifics, to explain to the committee the nature of Hoover's secret files. I intend now to be more specific because I see no reason why such matters should not be public. Indeed, from my subsequent vantage point as ambassador to Yugoslavia, I was rather surprised that the Church Committee, which had access to the files, largely ignored the FBI's misdeeds and concentrated instead on rather less objectionable CIA activities.

We told the committee that the bureau had sought, at the direction of a political figure, to gather unfavorable information on his opponent during an election campaign. Rep. Herman Badillo of New York pressed me to admit that it was an investigation of Allard Lowenstein, an antiwar candidate running against Rep. John Rooney, the powerful chairman of an appropriations panel with jurisdiction over the FBI. I repeatedly denied that and finally said it involved the presidential campaign of 1964. Shortly thereafter, Don Edwards, the chairman, terminated the hearing. But reporters dug out more facts.

Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men's room in Washington. Evidently, the president was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election. Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files.

When the press reported this, I received a call in my office from Mr. Moyers. Several of my assistants were with me. He was outraged; he claimed that this was another example of the Bureau salting its files with phony CIA memos. I was taken aback. I offered to conduct an investigation, which if his contention was correct, would lead me to publicly exonerate him. There was a pause on the line and then he said, "I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?" And then he rang off. I thought to myself that a number of the Watergate figures, some of whom the department was prosecuting, were very young, too.

Other presidents, according to those files, misused the bureau, although never Truman and Eisenhower. But Johnson clearly was the most demanding. This discovery was particularly painful for me. Although I was a life-long Republican, I had not only voted for LBJ, I had signed an ad supporting him, which got me ejected from the Hawaii Young Republicans.

In 1968 the FBI, at the president's direction, actually surveilled Spiro Agnew, the Republican vice-presidential candidate. To be sure, as subsequent events revealed, Agnew might well have been under surveillance when, as governor of Maryland, he was taking bribes; but in 1968 it was for the purpose of determining whether he was in contact with South Vietnamese leaders. It was not for law-enforcement purposes. Incidentally, the FBI never determined that he was in contact with the South Vietnamese.

It was not only Republicans that Johnson targeted with the FBI. He must have been obsessed with the Kennedy political threat because he used the bureau to determine whether officials in his administration were too close to Robert Kennedy after Kennedy left the administration. Ironically, one of his White House assistants, whom he inherited from JFK and was a particular subject of this sort of surveillance, is now married to LBJ's biographer. I refer to Richard Goodwin, the husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Some of Johnson's suspicions of the Kennedys were rather amusing. He became convinced that the Washington Star was secretly owned by the Kennedy family and that is why he received less favorable coverage from the Star than from the Post. He insisted that Hoover unearth those connections. Hoover plaintively tried to explain that the Star was owned by the Kauffmann family and that they were Republicans.

But surely the most bizarre episode that I discovered (and can reveal) involves the investigation and trial of Bobby Baker, who had been LBJ's top Senate aide. To say that the president was apprehensive about this episode would be a dramatic understatement. The investigation and trial took place when Bobby Kennedy was attorney general and Jack Miller the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division. During the investigation of Baker's Senate activities, Miller asked the FBI to wire a potential witness. To his astonishment Hoover responded with the ridiculous assertion that it would be improper.

Of course, Hoover promptly reported this to LBJ as he had many activities of the Kennedy Justice Department. However, Miller was not to be deterred. With Kennedy's approval he called a special assistant to Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler to gain help from Treasury agents. The assistant arranged the help and Baker was convicted. Much later, toward the end of the Johnson administration, Hoover discovered Miller's end-around and duly reported it to LBJ, who, furious, demanded that Fowler fire the assistant. Fowler refused. That assistant was Robert Jordan, my Harvard Law School classmate, subsequently general counsel of the Army and later my partner at Steptoe & Johnson.

Hoover's shenanigans may well be the genesis of Watergate. I noted in the files that he had an early private meeting with the new President Nixon. I surmised that he must have let Nixon know something of what he had done for prior presidents; it would have been too dangerous not to. I further suspect that Nixon, whose ethical standards were quite relative, would have concluded he should have the same services that were available to his predecessors. But he didn't trust Hoover totally, so he set up his own political intelligence gathering network outside the FBI--the plumbers. During Watergate, Nixon would occasionally mutter that prior presidents were culpable of secret political intelligence investigations. He even suggested that the Justice Department should substantiate that claim. We ignored him, but I am sure he would have seized on the Post's revelations of the secret files--if they had appeared earlier.
The notion that the FBI's purity would be endangered if its counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations were a more integrated part of the intelligence community seems laughable. If the FBI were to be corrupt, as it surely was under Hoover, no organizational structure would solve that problem. And if it is honorable, as it surely is under Bob Mueller (and has been for many years), then a separate national security service with a close relationship with the new director of national intelligence promises only benefits to the country's security.

Former Director Louis Freeh initiated the practice of taking new FBI recruits through the Holocaust Museum to show what can happen when the law enforcement apparatus of a country becomes corrupted. I have always thought that sort of extreme example was a bit farfetched for our country, but there is an episode closer to home. I think it would be appropriate to introduce all new recruits to the nature of the secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover. And in that connection this country--and the bureau--would be well served if his name were removed from the bureau's building. It is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr. Liberals and conservatives should unite to support legislation to accomplish this repudiation of a very sad chapter in American history. Mr. Silberman was co-chairman of President Bush's Commission on Intelligence Capabilities. This is adapted from a speech he delivered recently to the First Circuit Judicial Conference.


Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

[Ralph]

In 1967-68 when I was, for all practical purposes, the Army's chief domestic intelligence analyst (or desk officer) I received regular FBI reports on the private lives of both public and private figures. I don't have time to match the length of the above article but I can tell you (and I've testifed to this before a Senate committee and in numerous lectures and media appearances) that I was disgusted - revolted - when a "hot", hand-delivered, classified as SECRET FBI audiotape turned out to be recordings of Ralph David Abernathy having sex with various women in motels.

For those who don't remember, Abernathy succeeded Martin Luther King (about whom I received scads of Bureau surveillance tapes, photos and reports).

[Barry]

Thanks for posting that, Corlyss.

Very interesting, disappointing, but unfortunately, not surprising. LBJ and Nixon both seemed to have suffered from similar paranoia and were willing to do whatever they had to in order to protect themselves politically and personally.

I certainly agree that Hoover's name shouldn't be on the FBI building, and have felt that way for years.

[John Bleau]

Well, Barry, (I know I've posted this quote before, but it's worth repeating) LBJ famously said about why he wouldn't fire Hoover, "I'd rather have him in the tent pissing out than out of the tent pissing in."

I'd vote for removal of his name from the FBI building, too. Hell, I have his name on my vacuum cleaner, and I think that sucks!

[Werner]

Nocely said, John.

[Corlyss_D]

For those who don't remember, Abernathy succeeded Martin Luther King (about whom I received scads of Bureau surveillance tapes, photos and reports).

I always had a soft spot for Abernathy. He had an impossible task, succeeding the martyred King and wasn't up to the charismatic task. His debut on the activist scene was the farsical pathetic Poor Peoples' March on Washington during a wet spring in which all they did was look bedraggled and derilict. When he died a few years ago I was very moved by the simplicity of his epitaph: "I tried."

Barry:

Remember that during Johnson's administration, Moyers was his Ron Zigler. Moyers has always been pretty much what he is now: a thinly disguised political operative.

I think Hoover's name should be taken off the building too, because I don't want people thinking it was named after Herbert Hoover. They should name if after some stalwart FBI agent who died in the line of duty, or maybe John O'Neill who turned out to be right about the terrorist threat and died at the WTC 9/11. That would be more fitting than naming it after a controversial figure like Hoover. Then I think they ought to follow it up with an executive order or law that prohibits the naming of any government buildings after politicians who have been dead for less than 50 years. I am so weary of JFKs this and MLKs that.

[Ralph]

Well, Barry, (I know I've posted this quote before, but it's worth repeating) LBJ famously said about why he wouldn't fire Hoover, "I'd rather have him in the tent pissing out than out of the tent pissing in."

I'd vote for removal of his name from the FBI building, too. Hell, I have his name on my vacuum cleaner, and I think that sucks!

*****

Literally.

I'm tempted to spring for the very expensive Dyson vacuum cleaner which seems to be genuinely original technology.

[Haydnseek]

Wasn’t Moyers behind the first really vicious television presidential campaign ad? I mean the one that suggested there would be nuclear war if Barry Goldwater was elected in 1964.

[John Bleau]

Ralph, you don't fool me. You didn't take the vacuum cleaner because it didn't come with a free Mexican.

[Ralph]

Ralph, you don't fool me. You didn't take the vacuum cleaner because it didn't come with a free Mexican.

*****

Wow, you've been away from the board for a long time but you still know ME!

[jbuck919]

Then I think they ought to follow it up with an executive order or law that prohibits the naming of any government buildings after politicians who have been dead for less than 50 years. I am so weary of JFKs this and MLKs that.

You could do what I do. Keep calling it National Airport (in case you didn't notice, Ronald Reagan didn't even have to die) no matter what other people think it's supposed to be.

[Corlyss_D]

Wasn’t Moyers behind the first really vicious television presidential campaign ad? I mean the one that suggested there would be nuclear war if Barry Goldwater was elected in 1964.

Probably. Funny how it has such a rep and it was shown only once as part of the campaign. It's rep is legendary.