J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Read Free Page A

alone.
    In the hours ahead, there would be many whispered calls and conversations, as if, in an era of scrambler phones and antibugging devices, the whisper were still the only safe way to convey such momentous news. And there would be politicking—the testing of pressure points, attempts to collect on old favors, alerts to key men on the Hill and the real movers in such FBI support groups as the Society of Former Special Agents and the American Legion—yet with no assurance it would accomplish anything.
    If, as Kraft observed, fear was the cement holding the Bureau together, it did not lose its force with the director’s death but rather grew more binding, for now it was not the fear of one old man who, whatever his faults, was one of them, but of outsiders who, for the first time in nearly fifty years, would determine the Bureau’s fate.
    The news spread selectively at first. Assistant directors. Section heads. Their staffs. The fifty-nine field offices, whose territories covered every inch of the United States. The legats in nineteen foreign cities, from Tokyo to London.
    On the fifth floor of the Justice Department Building, the command post of the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation—known in recent years as FBIHQ but still called SOG by old-timers, for Seat of Government—there was little crying, but a tremendous sense of bewilderment and loss.
    For many of the agents, secretaries, typists, file clerks, translators, lab technicians, and fingerprint classifiers it was akin to the loss of a father, albeit one most had never met and seen only in passing. For the Federal Bureau of Investigation was undoubtedly the most paternalistic agency in the U.S. government. Its strict guardian—through innumerable memos and the FBI Manual, a book not only bigger but filled with more thou-shalt-nots than the Bible—told them how to perform every aspect of their jobs; suggested, with the strength of a command, who their friends should or should not be, what organizations they could or could not join; decided where they would live; monitored their morals; even told them what to wear and what they could weigh; and bestowed praise and awards, blame and punishments, when he decided they were due.
    Yet it was even more than that. For longer than most could remember, the director and the FBI had been synonymous. To sever them now seemed a surgical impossibility. The question was, and it was far from rhetorical, Did the death of one mean the demise of the other?
    Some reactions were odd. One agent took a sheaf of correspondence to the director’s office for his signature, totally ignoring those who told him that the director was dead. And one assistant director ordered the whole Department of Justice Building sealed, with guards on every door.
    Before all this occurred, however, a few minutes after nine in the morning, John Mohr dialed the attorney general’s office.
    Ordinarily the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the attorney general of the United States shared the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building—the common corridor between their two offices being in some cases the only thing they had in common. But since his confirmation as AG was hung up in the Senate, Richard Kleindienst was still occupying the deputy AG’s office on the fourth floor, directly below that of the director.
    The arrangement seemed more than a little symbolic to Kleindienst’s staff. It also brought rueful smiles from other Justice Department officials whenever there was talk that the director should be “kicked upstairs,” for he was already up there, hovering over them like some all-knowing deity.
    Such talk had been common of late, and the acting attorney general had secretly participated in much of it. Although publicly Kleindienst spoke of the director with all the fervor of a disciple, privately he’d told William Sullivan, a former assistant to the director but now an FBI outcast, that, unlike most people, he