Who knew that all those years we were watching men in gray felt
hats on The FBI catching the bad guys, their agency was
really a house divided between, as it turns out, Mr. Gray and Mr.
Felt?
Now we are being treated to the spectacle of a public joust
between these two gentlemen. Mr. Gray is saying that he was never
really a louse but that louse Felt was leaking to make him look
like a louse. Mr. Felt says that he may have been a louse but only
because that louse Gray was lousing things up and to prevent the
whole thing from going lousy he had to leak like a louse, so
therefore he is not a real louse. This sort of slow-motion table
tennis between nonagenarians is a big hit in Boca Raton. But where
I live, closer to South Beach, we prefer hardier bouts of
excitement than watching two old bureaucrats lie through their
dentures. What’s good for the geezers is not good for a gander.
Especially with theme music by the Doors: “Come on, baby, fight my
liar.”
My “first initial” response to L. Patrick Gray and W. Mark Felt
squabbling is to blame J. Edgar Hoover. It was Hoover who created
the moral vacuum that these two guys filled. They imitated not only
his cognomen but also key elements of his cognition.
It was fairly well known during Mr. Hoover’s later years that he
retained his position through presidential administrations of both
parties by using blackmail and intimidation. No President was
prepared to risk the exposure of dirty laundry by Mr. Hoover. One
story that was widely circulated among the press corps was that he
controlled a powerful Senator through photographs of the man’s wife
committing an indiscretion with her chauffeur.
Here are two stories that are told by another Hoover acolyte and
Watergate veteran, G. Gordon Liddy. One concerns Martin Luther King
Jr., who once started a campaign of criticizing the FBI for
assigning white agents to black communities as part of a racist
strategy. The truth was that the FBI was not racist at all and had
always hired and promoted fairly. King received a message that if
he did not desist from spreading this falsehood, Hoover would be
compelled to publicize some photographs and tapes that would show
King’s black followers that he was partial to white women.
The second story does not involve the pattern of blackmail but
it conveys a sense of the atmosphere of intimidation Hoover
fostered. A report had come into Hoover’s office from one of the
regional branches and the agent who authored it had typed too close
to the margins. Hoover liked a lot of space on either side of
interoffice memos so that he could jot his comments. Annoyed, he
scribbled: “Let’s watch the borders.” When he returned the document
for immediate action, the various border outposts were all ordered
to be on high alert. For weeks, extra agents were being assigned to
the tense border patrol that resulted from that misunderstanding. A
comment about foolscap turned into a travesty that left everyone
wearing a fool’s cap.
There is no question that Hoover performed a great service for
this country in building a powerful agency for major law
enforcement. His name is on the building and we do not begrudge him
the tribute. Nor can a reasonable person deny that some breaking of
eggs is a prerequisite for making omelets. Still, there had to be a
way to get Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker and Dillinger without an
eccentric reign of terror. Call me Pollyanna but I don’t want the
FBI controlling all the branches of government by threatening their
privacy.
Well, Watergate has always puzzled me. The plumbers came first
and then the leaks. There was a burglary with no discernible
purpose and a cover-up with no discernible plan. There was Cox and
Haig and Bork, Sam Ervin was drawling something or other
incomprehensible and Martha Mitchell was out cavorting. Nixon
talked too much and then erased too much. There were dirty tricks
and a clean sweep and a general muddle.
But the new insight that I gleaned from the events of the last
few weeks is that Hoover’s poisonous legacy infected the entire
atmosphere. It was he who taught his men the ethic of covering up
for the big bosses if they play ball and blabbing about them to the
press if they don’t. Sure enough, his two inheritors divided the
duties. One covered up and the other blabbed.
The moral of the story is that government in general and law
enforcement in particular needs to operate with moral clarity,
rules that are fairly well defined in the realm of black and white.
For too long the FBI was allowed to conduct its business in a field
of gray, and the impact of that was definitely felt.
