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chapter two 12 c h a p t e r t w o The “War of the FBI Succession” 1969–1972 Anybody who wanted to be director of the FBI was willing to do some mighty strange things. It was interesting to see the lengths to which an otherwise decent human being would go. —Anonymous FBI official, quoted in Sanford Ungar’s FBI Long before the dénouement, several observers remarked that Watergate might have played out very differently had J. Edgar Hoover not chosen an inopportune time to die: May 2, 1972, just seven weeks before the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters. The profundity of that observation was never sufficiently appreciated. If Nixon had managed a dignified exit for Hoover and installed a new permanent director before the break-in, he just might have saved his presidency. Alternately, Hoover was the kind of director with enough gumption to walk into the Oval Office and tell the president face-to-face that some of his most trusted advisers had been implicated in a crime and had to be fired.1 In 1969, when Nixon took office, he expected that his administration would be entirely in sync with Hoover’s Bureau. Although Hoover had initially been wary of Nixon when he first came to Washington, the two men began to be friendly after then-Representative Nixon went out of his way to praise the FBI’s investigation of Alger Hiss, whom Nixon exposed in 1948 as a Soviet spy while serving on the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. After Nixon became vice president in 1953, Hoover became not only a source of invaluable information to the up-and-coming politician, but also a trusted adviser. He cultivated Nixon even during Nixon’s “wilderness years,” 1963 to 1966, when he was out of electoral politics altogether. Of all the people Nixon had met in public life, he considered Hoover one of his closest friends.2 Initially the relationship between the president and the director was seamless. Nixon extended the special presidential order that had allowed Hoover to remain in office past the mandatory retirement age of sixty- 13 The “War of the FBI Succession” five, and he gave Hoover direct access to the Oval Office. The director responded with a program code-named inlet, under which the FBI regularly forwarded reports about the personal and political associations of the president’s critics. The Bureau also provided, upon request, information about illicit sexual activity by members of the Washington press corps.3 By February 1971, however, relations between the White House and the FBI had soured, largely unbeknownst to the press. The president had come to believe that Hoover—whom Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman considered a “real character out of [the] days of yore”—was being singularly uncooperative. The White House perceived itself and the nation as under siege from a motley collection of home-grown white radicals , militant black nationalists, and antiwar protesters. Yet Hoover was still fixated on the Communist menace and prone to taking two-hour afternoon naps in his office. His FBI seemed stuck in time, unwilling or unable to take effective countermeasures.4 Nothing had eroded Hoover’s standing more than his objections to the so-called “Huston plan” in July 1970. The proposal for a White House– coordinated counterintelligence effort against radical and antiwar elements went down in flames because of his opposition. “At some point, Hoover has to be told who is president,” noted the proposal’s frustrated author, White House aide Tom Charles Huston. “He has become totally unreasonable and his conduct is detrimental to our domestic intelligence operations.”5 By 1971 Nixon had decided that a dignified way for Hoover to step down had to be found before the November 1972 elections. He didn’t want to run the risk of having a Democratic president appoint a new director , for Nixon considered the appointment equivalent to nominating a new chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nonetheless, the president could not bring himself to force Hoover to step aside. The situation became much more complicated in the spring of 1971, when Hoover came under unprecedented attack—not only from his usual foes, but from quarters that normally provided unflinching support. The precipitating event was a March 8 raid by antiwar activists on the FBI’s office in Media, Pennsylvania. In one fell swoop FBI surveillance of dissidents was exposed and the Bureau’s carefully nurtured mystique destroyed. Far...

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