I myself witnessed Hoover successfully manipulate Attorney General John Mitchell, during one of my own more memorable meetings with the director. We had gathered in the attorney general’s conference room following the death of four students and the wounding of nine others at Kent State University, when Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire during a noontime antiwar demonstration on May 4, 1970. Our agenda that day was to assess whether the Department of Justice should investigate aggressively what had happened at Kent State and why, but it became clear quickly that Hoover wanted to keep the FBI out of it, for reasons that were astounding. Hoover held forth at some length about how one of the young girls who had been killed was a “slut,” and indeed he seemed to know more about her sex life than the events that had transpired during the shootings. His harangue was so disturbing that after the meeting I spoke with an attorney friend in the Civil Rights Division, which had jurisdiction over the situation. Hoover, he said, did not know what he was talking about, and many in the FBI were aware that he was trying to give President Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell a way of avoiding a federal investigation.[*] Without Hoover’s approval nothing happened at the bureau. His associate director, William Sullivan, later reported that Hoover was the only person “who could make decisions in the FBI.” Sullivan added, “All the well-meaning people in the bureau did exactly what he told them, for if they didn’t, they’d be pounding the pavement. They had to carry out his orders if they didn’t want to sell their homes and take their children out of school.”[19] After studying Hoover’s behavior and activities, Dr. Harold Lief, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded he was “what is known as an Authoritarian Personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi.”[20]
For decades, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, Hoover was a public presence to be reckoned with in America. Presidents, who came and went, protected the nation from foreign invasion; Hoover, who held his post for almost a half century, protected the nation’s “internal security” from mobsters, Nazis, communists, hippies, and antiwar protesters. He intimidated (and blackmailed) members of Congress and presidents (about whom he gathered information); and he helped foster McCarthyism by feeding often dubious information to the maniacal red-hunting senator. Hoover influenced the Supreme Court by using background investigations to disparage potential nominees he did not like and to promote those he did. He also aided Nixon’s efforts to remove Justice Abe Fortas from the Court, and hoped to do the same (but failed) with Justice William O. Douglas. Hoover trained his FBI agents in the black arts of burglary and other surreptitious skills, and had them employed at his whim. He was a racist who sought to disable the civil rights movement; he refused to hire black FBI agents; and he tried to get Martin Luther King, Jr., to commit suicide. He rigged the Warren Commission investigation in a manner that still colors the nation’s understanding of President Kennedy’s assassination. How many innocent people were framed by Hoover’s FBI—a prototype of authoritarian government—will never be known.
The peak of Hoover’s career—the period when conservatives almost genuflected at the mention of his name—was during his crusade against communism. Conservative historian Paul Johnson describes McCarthyism, in which Hoover was deeply involved, as a time “when the hysterical pressure on the American people to conform came from the right of the political spectrum, and when the witch hunt was organized by conservative elements.”[21] It was a time when Hoover preached a terrifying gospel about communism. His FBI hacks cranked out endless articles (regularly placed in national as well as local publications) and speeches (for FBI agents, members of Congress, Justice Department lawyers, and other government officials) explaining how communists, if they managed to infiltrate, would destroy the American family—its lifestyle, its homes, its ability to provide food for the table, and even the time parents had to dote on their children. And because the godless communists sought to destroy America’s religions, Hoover warned that no American dare lose faith in God, for should they do so, communism would fill the void, and this would place them in hands worse than those of the devil. But luckily for his beleaguered countrymen, Hoover had solutions. For example, his ghost-written Masters of Deceit; The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, published in 1958, offered a six-point defense for defeating communism.[*] Hoover called for “[t]he sanctity of the individual, the need for mutual responsibility among Americans, a life transcending materialism, responsibility to future generations, that humans and not political parties should establish moral values, and that love triumph over hate,” which all should be “part of a larger value system that guided the thoughts and actions of upstanding, moral Americans.”[22] So loyal were Hoover’s conservative followers that neither John F. Kennedy nor Richard Nixon dared to fire him, fearing conservative wrath.[23]
Now, however, Hoover has become so tarnished that both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to remove his name from the FBI headquarters in Washington, the most visible remnant of his legacy.[24] Hoover’s true legacy, however, is more subtle and insidious, for it was he with his fanaticism who planted the seeds from which contemporary social and cultural conservatism has grown. Hoover’s focus on the American family and Christianity attracted an earlier generation of adamant anticommunists, who have become today’s zealous social conservatives.
SPIRO T. AGNEW
One particularly enthusiastic Hoover admirer was Nixon’s vice president, Spiro T. Agnew. His charismatic style and high office gave him a certain marquee appeal, and he was an early leader of the cultural war.[25] As governor of Maryland, Agnew had been a moderate, but by the time he became vice president he had moved toward the hard right. He appears to have been a solid right-wing authoritarian with social domination tendencies.[*] He certainly was not a Double High authoritarian like Hoover. At the Nixon White House Agnew had the job of currying conservative favor. Employing the rabble-rousing rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Nixon dispatched Agnew to fight the cultural war, and the vice president delighted in unloading depth charges and assorted munitions assembled by Buchanan and others. In the fall of 1969, the war was escalated, and Agnew became the first high-profile conservative to go after the mainstream news media. For a half hour the vice president tore into the unaccountable power of the unelected newspeople, who decided what forty to fifty million Americans would learn of the day’s events.[26] Nixon later wrote in his memoirs, with some delight, that “at the networks, there was pandemonium; all three decided to carry the speech live.”
Agnew loved his work. “My mission is to awaken Americans to the need for sensible authority, to jolt good minds out of the lethargy of habitual acquiescence, to mobilize a silent majority that cherishes the right values but has been bulldozed for years into thinking those values are embarrassingly out of style.”[27] His recurring themes and targets were “avowed anarchists and communists,” “elitists,” the “garbage of society,” “thieves, traitors, and perverts,” “radical liberals,” and, of course the news media, whom he called “an effete corps of impudent snobs, a tiny fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government. They are nattering nabobs of negativism.” (They were also, for Agnew, the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”) Agnew’s avowed aim was “dividing the American people,” which he called “positive polarization.” He was delighted when he caused a ruckus. “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”[28] Conservative media loved Agnew’s authoritarian aggression as well. A Wall Street Journal editorial approvingly noted that “Mr. Agnew’s targets—the media, war protesters, and rebellious youth—are representative of a class that has enjoyed unusual moral and cultural authority through the 1960s.” (The editors proceeded to detail the failings of these authorities, the “highbrows, the intellectual—the beautiful people—Eastern liberal elite.”)[29] Thus, with Nixon in charge and taking the high road, the early skirmishes of the cultural war were launched by Agnew taking the low one. But the forced resignations of both men put the cultural war on hold. Others, meanwhile, quietly went about the work of building an army and drawing up future plans.
*
While there have been several excellent books, not to mention a President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, addressing the Kent State shootings, the facts remain contested as to exactly what happened that spring day. Hoover’s slanders reveal a great deal about the man who should have sorted the facts out when memories where fresh by undertaking a full investigation.
*
Given what is known about Hoover it is difficult to believe that he actually believed much of what he preached.
*
The Eastern liberal establishment is not an “established authority” for an authoritarian conservative like Agnew, so his attacks were not against what he believed acceptable authority.