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Beyond trying to please Presidents, Hoover also compiled dossiers on his own real and potential enemies. An FBI file was opened on every Senator and Congressman after his election, noting the legislator's probable attitude toward the FBI. When a subcommittee chaired by Democratic Senator Edward Long of Missouri considered investigating the FBI for electronic eavesdropping in the mid-1960s, agents compiled "special memoranda" on each of the six subcommittee members. Similarly, when a Knoxville, Tenn., civil rights council in 1960 urged an investigation of the FBI and other federal agencies for racial discrimination, the FBI ran name checks on all eleven council members. The FBI reported to Attorney General William Rogers that one member had sent flowers and mash notes to a woman other than his wife.* Hoover's vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. (TIME, Dec. 1), of course, was the ultimate FBI harassment of a critic.
The committee report did not belabor Nixon's much-publicized relations with the FBI, but an incidental revelation last week in a Washington federal court showed how much some high officials in his Administration feared Hoover. A disaffected former assistant FBI director, William Sullivan, had warned the Administration in 1971 that Hoover might use records of the secret tapping of newsmen and national-security officials to protect himself against being retired by the Nixon Administration. Sullivan then spirited the logs of the wiretaps out of Hoover's suite of offices and gave them to Robert Mardian, an assistant attorney general.
Very Afraid. Responding last week to a civil suit filed by one of the victims of this wiretapping, John Ehrlichman, Nixon's top domestic adviser, explained: "Since journalists had been tapped, it would be politically embarrassing for the Administration potentially, and Hoover was not above blackmailing the President with this information." Mardian, Ehrlichman said, feared Hoover would do anything to get the files back. Ehrlichman testified that Mardian told him he was "very afraid of not only the integrity of these files but also of his own personal safety, that he felt he was being surveilled by Hoover through his agents, and it was only a matter of time before Hoover caused agents of the FBI to break into his files and recover the various records of this activity which Sullivan had turned over to him." On Nixon's instructions, Ehrlichman got the records from Mardian and put them in a White House safe.
Another congressional subcommittee last week tried to trace the disposal of Hoover's collection of personal information on his critics and public figures after his death in 1972. John P. Mohr, the third-ranking FBI official in Hoover's last days, told a House subcommittee chaired by New York Democrat Bella Abzug that there were no "secret files." He said that just after Hoover died, he had been instructed by Attorney General Richard Kleindienst to lock up the director's private office to make sure all important papers were retained for Hoover's successor. The two men agreed that the other eight rooms in Hoover's suite need not be sealed off. After Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray was appointed, he permitted some 30 drawers of the deceased director's personal files to be transferred from the unsealed rooms to Hoover's home.