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

himself was denying to reporters that his patient had ever shown any evidence of heart disease. While Hoover had had very mild hypertension, that is, slightly elevated blood pressure, for some twenty years, Dr. Choisser said, it had never affected his work and he took no medication for it. 27
    In this, a time of assassinations and conspiracies, it was perhaps inevitable that Hoover’s death would cause rumors. Yet, lacking any evidentiary support, they died quickly, for although the exact cause of death remained in dispute—Dr. Luke having decided an autopsy was “not warranted”—the facts seemed simple enough: he was an old man, and old men die.
    Few apparently noticed, until much later, that there were a number of other discrepancies in various accounts of the death.
    Not until a year later would the rumor again surface, this time dramatically, behind the closed doors of the Watergate hearings, when, to the shock of the assembled senators and aides, a witness matter-of-factly, as if it were common knowledge, referred to “the murder of J. Edgar Hoover.” 28
    Coincidentally, at the same time Hoover’s body was to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, another event was scheduled to occur on the steps outside: an antiwar demonstration, beginning late the following afternoon, during which congressional aides would read the names of American Vietnam War dead. The announced speakers included the actress Jane Fonda, the lawyer William Kunstler, and the administration’s current number one enemy, Daniel Ellsberg.
    Someone thought the opportunity too good to miss. Just who suggested the plan is unclear, but when the White House counsel Charles Colson called Jeb Magruder and told him about it, Colson said the orders came directly from President Nixon.
    To avenge this slur on Hoover’s memory, Colson wanted Magruder to arrange a counterdemonstration, its real purpose to disrupt the rally and tear down any Vietcong flags. When Magruder raised objections (specifically to sending innocent young Republicans into such a battle), Colson accused him of being disloyal to the president. Magruder then checked with his boss at CREEP, the former attorney general John Mitchell, and the pair decided to turn the assignment over to G. Gordon Liddy.
    Liddy, a former FBI agent who was working as CREEP’s intelligence chief, apparently embellished the plot a little, for when he later discussed it with the White House consultant and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, he said that the demonstrators planned to overturn the catafalque on which Hoover’s coffin would lie.
    Hunt placed a call to Miami, to an old comrade-in-arms, Bernard Barker. Under the code name Macho, Barker had served as Hunt’s assistant during the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. Even earlier, Barker had been an FBI informant while serving with Batista’s secret police.
    Again, in the retelling, the plot thickened. Barker recruited nine other men,mostly Cubans, all anti-Castroites, telling them that “hippies, traitors and communists” intended to “perpetuate an outrage on Hoover.” 29
    Supplied with airline tickets and expense money, the group made arrangements to fly to Washington, D.C., the following day, their objective to disrupt the antiwar demonstration and, specifically, to totally incapacitate Ellsberg.
    Perhaps there was a leak. Or maybe someone simply realized that the files might not be in the securely locked office of the former director. For early that afternoon Assistant to the Director John Mohr had a visitor—Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray III.
    Mohr was busy making arrangements for Hoover’s funeral, and he told him so. Speaking for the Justice Department, Gray had a few suggestions about seating and protocol. Always a somewhat brusque man, Mohr was unusually so that day and he informed him the funeral would be handled by the FBI, in its own way.
    Eventually Gray got around to the real point of his visit: “Where are the secret