J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Read Online Free PDF

1924, died in Washington at the age of 77.” 23
    Confirmation reached the Hill just before noon.
    From the balconies you could see the whispered news traveling up the aisles of both houses of Congress, long before the official word reached the speakers’ platforms.
    In the House of Representatives and the Senate the announcement was followed by a minute of silent prayer, then eulogies, which continued not only throughout that day but for more than a week to come. They were delivered by friends and foes alike, although it was difficult to tell them apart now. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, who only a few months earlier had accused the FBI of tapping his phones, was no less fulsome in his praise than Representative John Rooney, who took inordinate pride in the fact that while chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee he had never cut a single nickel from the FBI budget, that sometimes he’d even given Hoover more money than he’d requested.
    Though absent campaigning—the Democratic and Republican conventions being only months away—the leading presidential candidates also sent solemn tributes, although two, Senators George S. McGovern and Edmund S. Muskie, had already vowed to replace the aging director if they were elected.
    Undoubtedly many of the remarks were sincere. There was no mistaking the grief of Representative H. Allen Smith of California, himself a former special agent, when he said, “Outside of my father, J. Edgar Hoover was the finest man I have ever known.” 24 Or the gratitude of Representative Spark M. Matsunaga of Hawaii when he recalled that, following Pearl Harbor, it was Hoover who courageously opposed the mass incarceration of one-third of Hawaii’s population, its Americans of Japanese ancestry. 25
    So accustomed were several to praising him that out of habit they referred to him as “our greatest living American.”
    Yet, though it is not to be found in the printed pages of the Congressional Record, in many the news evoked still another emotion: a sense of relief.
    It was followed, almost as quickly, by the realization that although Hoover was gone, he would have a successor. And the files remained.
    Some had reason for concern. The file of one representative, who lavishly praised the crime-fighting abilities of the FBI, was heavy with memos bearing the Mafia classification number 92-6054, while on the Senate side, even more effusive in his praise was a liberal critic turned Bureau friend whose file contained, among other things, the police report of his 1964 arrest in a Greenwich Village homosexual bar.
    Even those whose files contained little or no derogatory material were uneasy, for they didn’t know this was true.
    Amid the eulogies, the Senate voted to name the still-uncompleted new FBI building for the late director; while both houses of Congress voted permission for Hoover’s body to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
    It was a remarkable honor, accorded to only twenty-one other Americans—presidents, statesmen, and war heroes—and never before to a civil servant, or a cop.
    At 12:15 P.M. an inconspicuous sedan edged slowly out of the alley behind 4936 Thirtieth Place NW. Inside, where the backseat would ordinarily have been, strapped to a stretcher and covered with a gold cloth, was the body of J. Edgar Hoover.
    Although the street out front was crowded with reporters, camera crews, and FBI agents, removal of the body had been delayed nearly four hours after its discovery on orders from the White House, so that the news would not leak out before the official announcement. Apparently the funeral directors, Joseph Gawler’s Sons, Inc., had used the sedan, rather than a regular hearse, for the same reason.
    While Dr. James L. Luke, the District of Columbia’s coroner, attributed the death to “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,” 26 basing his conclusion on the medical history furnished him by Hoover’s personal physician, Dr. Robert V.Choisser, Dr. Choisser