A Monster Allowed to Grow Up

The Roots of the Surveillance State

“Dan, I think there’s somebody in the house,” Jean whispered.

Upstairs in their 33rd Street home in Washington, DC at 1 a.m. on April 9, 1972, Dan dismissed the possibility of an intruder. “Go back to sleep,” he replied. “There’s nobody in the house.”

Dan quickly fell back asleep. Moments later, Jean was shaking him awake once again. “I’m telling you,” she insisted forcefully, “there’s somebody in the house—My God, the lights just went out!”

They had only been asleep for two hours. Their daughter now entered the bedroom, confused: “Dad, I thought I heard you down in the kitchen.” Now Dan himself heard a noise downstairs. The realization that there was an intruder in their home jolted him out of bed. Dan remembered he had a 12-gauge shotgun in the closet, placed there following a hunting trip with a work colleague in Virginia the previous week. He grabbed the shotgun, reaching around the closet to find three shells. Dan approached the landing of his staircase outside of the bedroom. Downstairs he could hear the intruder open the door to their basement. He loaded a shell into the shotgun, loading the chamber as loudly as he could, hoping the distinctive sound of a shotgun would scare the intruder off.

Dan called out to the trespasser from the upper floor: “I don’t know who you are, but if you don’t get out of here I’m going to blow your ass off!” Soon after his warning, he caught a glimpse of a man walking up the basement stairs, moving to the back of the house. Jean picked up the bedroom phone to call the police. She listened to the receiver: “The phones are dead,” she told her husband. Their son was still asleep in the middle bedroom. Since their bedroom was located at the front of the house, Dan instructed Jean to open the window to find pedestrians who might be able to help. There happened to be two people walking at that moment on the sidewalk. “We’re in some trouble here,” Jean called out, “could you please go to the precinct station and ask the police to come?” The two passers-by began running. The family waited in silence upstairs for an agonizing ten minutes until a police officer knocked on the front door.

Two detectives arrived on the scene soon thereafter. The intruder was gone and he was found to have gained entry to the home through stripping the molding off the window pane on the back door, removing the glass, and reaching in to unlock the door. The power had gone out in the home as he had pulled the electrical fuses out in the basement. Items were stolen, but this was not an ordinary burglary. Left untouched were two TV sets, audio equipment, and Jean’s purse containing $100 ($750 today). The thief had gone through two unlocked filing cabinets in the basement, taking out two file folders with notes and scripts from 1966-1967 on the Johnson administration. The police could only say, “This is very strange,” which they verbalized on three occasions.

A year earlier, Nixon’s Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman had suggested to CBS that they consider transferring their correspondent Dan Rather away from the White House for his perceived negative coverage. Rather later claimed that the Metropolitan Police Department was told: “Don’t investigate this burglary.” Given the nature of the theft, Jean surmised soon after the burglary: “This has something to do with politics.”

Black Box

“It goes without saying that knowledge of this coverage represents a potential source of tremendous embarrassment to the Bureau and political disaster for the Nixon administration. Copies of the material itself could be used for political blackmail and the ruination of Nixon, Mitchell and others of the administration.”

-Edward S. Miller, FBI memo, October 20, 1971

In the basement of the White House in 1970, Anthony Lake, Special Assistant to the President in National Security Affairs, was looking at a special safe in the Situation Room. The safe was monitored 24 hours of day with a duty officer currently sitting next to it, waiting for his shift to end. Inside were the nuclear launch codes of the United States. Only National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and the Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs Alexander Haig had the combination to the safe. Lake stood pondering its contents. The safe, separated from the others in the room, had a wire stuck out it, connected to an alarm. Lake wondered out loud, joking, I wonder if wiretap logs of our conversations are in there. His guess was correct.

One of the presumed rights of Americans is the ability to criticize their bosses in private with impunity. This right was null and void in the Nixon administration. Determined to stop leaks to the press and interested in monitoring employees they suspected were disloyal, 17 wiretaps were established on staff as well as journalists working on national security and foreign affairs topics. Believing that these individuals could not be trusted and given the fact that legal wiretaps required the target to be notified in 30 days, Kissinger asked the FBI to illegally wiretap them without a warrant. At the time, Kissinger explained to the FBI, accompanied by Haig, that “It is clear that I do not have anybody in my office that I can trust except Colonel Haig here.” While delivering their request in one such meeting, according to testimony from Haig in 1974, Hoover gossiped that a foreign female spy “had been very successful here in Washington with a number of highly placed people...a very attractive gal who I guess spread her favors around rather loosely.”

FBI Supervisor Ernest Belter thought the White House was onto “a big spy ring” with these wiretaps requests on their employees and journalists. In typical wiretaps on known spies, the Belter explained how the interest in the subjects extended beyond espionage into personal affairs: “we want to know if he gets along with his wife, or if he doesn’t. We particularly want to know if he has some extramarital affair going.” It was first important to establish the identities of those on the phone calls, the names of friends, family, and work associates. Despite the possibility for excitement in listening in on private phone calls, the work could get boring. If the subject was on hold, the FBI agent listening was on hold with them. Days could go by and Belter would be handed blank pages. “I would prefer to have three or four what we call, you know, no-value calls in there rather than a blank page,” Belter explained. It was important for him to know that his agents were actual listening to the calls rather than simply reading the paper and letting time pass by.

Kissinger and Morton Halperin, one of his National Security Council hires, were walking along a beach in Key Biscayne, Flordia. They had been colleagues at Harvard, teaching a course jointly on government. It was May 9, 1969 and the New York Times had broken a story on the secret bombing of Cambodia. During their walk, Kissinger let Halperin know the administration suspected that he had leaked the story. Halperin denied this, explaining to Kissinger how he was unaware of key details present in the news story. Halperin had, however, been in Kissinger’s office when “Haig rushed in with the first report of the bombings,” he recalled. Kissinger proposed to Halperin that he be kept away from secret documents to demonstrate his fidelity and Halperin agreed. He would never again gain access to highly classified matieral. As Halperin returned home and called his wife, a red light began blinking in the Old Post Office Building in Washington, DC ten miles away. An FBI agent plugged in a cord connected to a tape recorder and placed a set of headphones on his head. He began taking notes of the conversation between Mort and Ina Halperin. Belter was excited. He had personally connected the line to the FBI’s switchboard and was told by the phone company that Halperin’s calls were on the line, but an eavesdropper could never be sure until the moment the phone calls started. William Sullivan, the Assistant Director of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the FBI had told him: “Let me know the instant you have them.” The confirmation came early that evening, an agent signaling the success to Belter.

The wiretap on Halperin’s home phone lasted for 21 months. While working with Haig and Kissinger, they became aware of his private thoughts about them through reports delivered through FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. These views included Halperin referring to Haig in a private conversation with a colleague as “that Goddamn gossip.” Halperin was recorded as calling U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell “an ignoramus.” His wife Ina boasted to a friend that “he has Henry Kissinger’s ear.” Another friend claimed that Halperin was “about three times as good as Henry.” Halperin’s perceived disloyalty, though never proven, landed him on Nixon’s enemies list. In a handwritten note next to his name, Nixon’s Special Counsel Charles Colson wrote: “A scandal would be helpful here.”

While he had assisted in helping Nixon secure his nomination as presidential candidate at the 1968 Republican National Convention, John Sears, Deputy Counsel to the President, was wiretapped likely due to his friendships with journalists, including Joseph Kraft, a Washington columnist. Not finding any evidence of leaks, Nixon wanted him Sears for the discoveries related to his personal life alone. The reports Nixon received, a U.S. House investigation later learned, dealt “entirely with the question of him having social engagements with a woman other than his wife, visiting female dancer establishments, some of his drinking habits, and his contacts with Republican Party officials.” White House Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman looked over Sears’ surveillance log that had been ongoing for some time and recalled receiving notes from Nixon that were of an urgent nature: “Sears is still here. What are you doing about Sears? I want him out of here. Quickly.” It was difficult to fire an employee when there was no way of explaining how the administration had discovered the purported derogatory information on Sears. Ehrlichman saw himself as being in a “buffer” role and “took a lot of heat. It went on and on.” Hoover informed Mitchell of the heavy cost involved: the surveillance of Sears alone required the work of 10 men per day. Hoover recommended that “consideration…be given to the discontinuation of these surveillances at this time.” Ehrlichman was relieved when Sears “finally left” two weeks later, moving on to a job with a law firm, and the tap was finally removed from his home the next day.

Anthony Lake, who had pondered over there being wiretap transcripts next to the United States’ nuclear secrets in the Situation Room safe, phoned Alexander Haig, whom he personally liked, years later when he discovered he had been wiretapped. It was 1973, Lake was out of government and Haig was now White House Chief of Staff. They met in person and spoke for ten minutes. “I was hoping that someone would say that it was wrong,” Lake said. He received no such consolation from Haig. His loyalty to authority had been a permanent feature for decades. Haig once spoke fondly of a bathtub he had put together during the Korean War for General Edward Almond made “out of tile by local North Korean labor…That damn thing was a labor of love.” When Chinese troops invaded the villa, Haig was horrified by the thought: A Chinese general might take a bath in General Almond's tile tub! He risked his life to return to the villa, throwing a grenade in the tub and blowing it up to ensure “no commissar would have an opportunity to wallow in it.”

Overall, the wiretaps on White House staff and private citizens had a practical reason for why they came to an end: Hoover was set to testify before Congress and did not want to have to explain the numerous illegal wiretaps underway. Nixon was unimpressed with the results from these efforts, mentioning in February 1973 his awareness of Kissinger’s role: “I know that he asked that it be done. And I assumed that it was. Lake and Halperin. They’re both bad. But the taps were, too. They never helped us. Just gobs and gobs of material: gossip and bullshitting—the tapping was a very, very unproductive thing.” Perhaps the least productive tap involved Winston Lord, another National Security Council staffer. His wife Bette spoke to her mother in Chinese almost every morning, discussing recipes, and the FBI agents listened for nine months. The special agents took the transcripts, had them translated into English and handed them over to cryptographers. “Had there been a code,” Nixon speechwriter William Safire wrote, “it would surely have been broken, but all the computer ever ground out was Moo Goo Gai Pan.”

The Book Is Verboten

In 1971, a team of Newsday reporters led by Robert Greene looked into the business dealings of President Nixon and his best friend, Florida businessman Bebe Robozo. The piece revealed a series of exchanges designed to profit each another. Nixon sold 185,891 shares in a land company majority owned by Rebozo, selling them at twice the going the rate, making Nixon the only person to realize a sizeable profit from the venture. “He was President, and we thought we ought to give him a fair price,” a minority owner in the company was quoted as saying. In 1969, Nixon had secured his Key Biscayne, Florida White House by having the Secret Service arrange a sale of a house to a friend, Robert Abplanalp. Nixon’s friend then leased it back to the Secret Service, cutting the original family who owned the home out of the deal.

Rebozo had been previously turned down for a loan from the Small Business Administration. However, in 1967 with the assistance of Senator George Smathers, he was selected by the SBA to build a shopping center to develop business opportunities for Cuban refugees, making a profit of $200,000 along with a business partner. Smathers was first elected to the U.S. House in 1946 along with Nixon; the two had become friends and it was Smathers who had first introduced Nixon to Rebozo. Smathers had sold Nixon the first of his three waterfront homes in the Florida White House compound. Smathers received tax breaks from the Nixon administration for two Winn-Dixie stores he owned in Florida.

The Florida State Division of Banking agreed to provide records to the Newsday reporting team until the organization discovered they were looking for information related to Rebozo’s Key Biscayne Bank. “We’re not looking for criminals,” Newsday’s associate editor Arthur Perfall claimed, “we are trying to produce a detailed, factual account to tell people how their Government really works.” Once it caught wind of the article, the Nixon administration had the FBI monitor Greene and the Bureau attempted to discover the contents of the Newsday series in advance of publication. The FBI was able to take “a discreet look at the newspaper’s publication calendar,” but failed in the endeavor of discovering the series’ contents. The Secret Service monitored the whereabouts of the reporting team in Key Biscayne. White House Counsel John Dean was told that Greene “should have some [tax] problems” and an IRS audit of Greene was put into motion. After the Rebozo series ran, the editor and publisher of Newsday were also audited by the IRS.

In 1975, author Thomas Kiernan was hard at work on a book on Rebozo, having completed 382 handwritten pages. Kiernan called his typist, saying the manuscript was ready for her to transcribe. The next day, thieves broke into his Manhattan apartment. They took the manuscript, his notes, 13 letters regarding Rebozo and 16 cassettes of interviews he had generated throughout the course of researching the book, as well as his book contracts and royalty statements. Untouched in the apartment were a TV set, stereo, and his wife’s jewelry. Kiernan assumed, giving the timing of the burglary, that his phone had been wiretapped. He estimated the tap had been on for about 10 days, Kiernan recalling: “The phone would ring once, then it would stop. My friends told me they would hear a click and then had to dial again.” Once Kiernan saw the police were not taking fingerprints, he knew “they weren’t going to take it seriously.” He attempted to resume writing the book, anticipating a six-month setback with the loss of materials, but the biography was never completed. While the book’s publication was still planned, a man called the prospective publisher and told him to “drop dead.”

Unlocking FBI Secrets

DEAN: There's one liability in Sullivan here, is that’s his knowledge of the earlier things that occurred, uh—

NIXON: That we did?

DEAN: That we did.

William Sullivan, working in the upper echelons of the FBI, had concerns during the Nixon administration that the amount of wiretap information collected by the Bureau amounted to blackmail material. Hoover could then use these secrets against Presidents, ultimately “for the purpose of preserving his position as Director of the FBI,” according to later Senate testimony from July 1973. All of that had changed on May 2, 1972, when Hoover died and the Attorney General ordered that his office “be locked and secured.” Instead, Hoover’s Personal File was shipped to his home where his secretary of 50 years, Helen Gandy, had the documents destroyed. “I tore them up, put them in boxes,” she later testified, “and they were taken away to be shredded.” Before his death, Hoover had gone through his Personal File, transferring some documents to the Official and Confidential files meant to be maintained in the FBI’s records for posterity. He was only able to finish going through a small portion of documents labelled A through C; the remainder were destroyed through Gandy’s efforts. In 1975, a further 164 folders containing Official and Confidential files were discovered, covering “public figures or prominent persons,” which involved “Presidents, Executive Branch officers and 17 individuals who were members of Congress,” according to February 1975 U.S. House hearings on FBI oversight.

As interesting as the discovery may have been, which included details on how “derogatory information” on a U.S. congressman who had “attacked” Hoover was fed by the FBI to the White House, Sullivan lamented that they ultimately “didn’t locate the gold”; the most sensitive files were gone for good. The contents of Hoover’s destroyed Personal File were said to have included the following, according to Curt Gentry in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets:

“blackmail material on the patriarch of an American political dynasty, his sons, their wives, and other women; allegations of two homosexual arrests which Hoover leaked to help defeat a witty, urbane Democratic presidential candidate; the surveillance reports on one of America’s best-known first ladies and her alleged lovers, both male and female, white and black; the child molestation documentation the director used to control and manipulate one of the Red-baiting proteges; a list of the Bureau’s spies in the White House during the eight administrations when Hoover was FBI director; the forbidden fruit of hundreds of illegal wiretaps and bugs, containing, for example, evidence that an attorney general (and later Supreme Court justice) had received payoffs from the Chicago syndicate; as well as celebrity files, with all the unsavory gossip Hoover could amass on some of the biggest names in show business.”

As Nixon turned off the illegal wiretaps on his employees and journalists, he began secretly recording his own conversations in the White House, ultimately ensuring there was enough evidence later to pursue impeachment charges against him. As the Watergate scandal began to envelop his administration, Nixon turned to the FBI to help prove that illegal wiretaps and burglaries were par for the course; that all administrations had done it. In a conversation with John Dean in February 1973, Nixon fantasized how Hoover would have helped him manage the scandal were he still alive: “Hoover was my crony,” Nixon claimed. “He was closer to me than Johnson, actually although Johnson used him more…I think we would have been a lot better off during this whole Watergate thing if he had been alive. Because he knew how to handle that Bureau…Hoover performed. He would have fought. He would have scared them to death.”

Nixon asked Dean to approach Deke DeLoach, the former Associate Deputy Director of the FBI, the third highest position in the Bureau, who was then working for Nixon’s friend Donald Kendall as chief of public relations at PepsiCo. Dean later testified that the instructions were that DeLoach “had better start telling the truth because the boys are coming out of the woodwork.” John Mitchell instead called DeLoach twice, learning that while Nixon’s plane had not been bugged by the FBI as they hoped during the presidential campaign of 1968, the Bureau had checked the phone calls of his VP candidate Spiro Agnew under orders from Lyndon Johnson. Dean suggested they use William Sullivan, since he had left the FBI over disagreements with Hoover and had “a world of information.” Dean indicated that Sullivan had a desire to return to the FBI to create a domestic intelligence system and that perhaps “we could put him out in the CIA” for a time. “Put him there; we’ll do it,” Nixon replied impatiently. Dean was concerned that Sullivan, in cataloguing FBI misdeeds, could be persuaded by the Attorney General that “you are going to take DeLoach’s name down with it, and DeLoach is a friend of ours.” Nixon replied: “Bullshit…Nobody is a friend of ours. Let’s face it.”

The now-retired Sullivan dutifully prepared two memos for Nixon, claiming that the facts he knew “would put the current Administration in a very favorable light.” Sullivan focused his attention on the administrations of FDR and LBJ, believing their misuse of the FBI to be most beneficial to Nixon as “complete and willing cooperation was given to both.” Roosevelt had employed the FBI to dig up dirt on his political opponents and called off investigations into his friends. “Mrs. Roosevelt would also make some unusual requests,” Sullivan noted.

Johnson went further than the Roosevelts; in “devious and complex ways,” LBJ would “ask the FBI for derogatory information of one type or another on Senators in his own Democratic Party who were opposing him. This information he would give to the Republican Senator [Everett] Dirksen, who would use it with telling effect.” LBJ wanted to know from the FBI if Senator William Fulbright and his committee were receiving information from subversives. “There was no evidence of this,” Sullivan recorded. Johnson requested that the FBI uncover Republican involvement in a New York riot he suspected was done to embarass the White House. When nothing turned up, he further demanded: “Weren’t there at least one or two Republicans involved?” Sullivan noted: “Again the answer had to be no.” LBJ had also set up extensive FBI surveillance in the 1964 and 1968 Democratic National Conventions under the fake cover “that it was a security squad against militants.” The operation included audio surveillance and FBI agents posing as journalists from NBC News at the 1964 convention. “Nothing of this scope had ever been done before or since to my memory,” Sullivan wrote. In advance of the 1968 presidential election, suspecting that the Republicans were attempting to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks in Paris, LBJ had the FBI monitor Anna Chennault, a prominent Republican, placing “physical surveillance on Mrs. Chennault for the purpose of developing political information which could be used against Mr. Nixon.” Sullivan also confirmed what DeLoach had claimed, that Agnew’s phone records were checked as LBJ thought he was in touch with Chennault; Agnew was not, as it turned out. Finally, Sullivan revealed that like Nixon, LBJ had his own paranoia regarding surveillance: “John would call the director from time to time to ask: ‘Did you have a telephone tap on me when I was in the Senate?’ He was always told we did not, which was the truth. But he never seemed to believe it.”

Missing from Sullivan’s memos were a multitude of other misdeeds involving the FBI that spanned across their entire history. After an FBI agent was caught tapping the phone of union leader Harry Bridges, Hoover was brought in to the White House to explain the matter to President Roosevelt. “By God, Edgar,” FDR marveled, “that’s first time you’ve been caught with your pants down!” Back in 1941, Hoover had already amassed an impressive collection of political dirt, which he shared with Attorney General Francis Biddle, who wrote how he learned from Hoover “intimate details of what my associates in the Cabinet did and said, of their likes and dislikes, their weaknesses and their associations…Edgar was not above relishing a story derogatory to an occupant of one of the seats of the mighty, particularly if the little great man was pompous or stuffy. And I confess that, within limits, I enjoyed hearing it.”

U.S. Army intelligence had targets of its own, tapping Eleanor Roosevelt in “Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and a few counties of Indiana” as well as the scientists building the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project in Chicago, wiretapping telephones, in addition to putting “bugs in beds or chairs,” according to Willis R. Adams, an Army intelligence agent.

As part of its investigative work, the FBI develop techniques for what were termed “black bag jobs,” a euphemism for breaking into private properties to steal documents, photograph sensitive information, or install surveillance bugs. “We do not obtain authorization for ‘black bag’ jobs from outside the Bureau,” Sullivan wrote in a 1966 memo. “Such a technique involves trespass and is clearly illegal; therefore, it would be impossible to obtain any legal sanction for it.” Former FBI agent William W. Turner explained how the FBI “would would just tell the police we have an operation in this area, and we want to make sure nothing happens.” Successful thefts were rewarded by employees receiving a “meritorious award. That’s the only way they could pay him.” Some of the black bag jobs were conducted on behalf of the National Security Agency, stealing code books from foreign embassies inside the United States. Once black bag jobs were exposed to the public, Sullivan’s deputy Charles Brennan complained: “I could just see every embassy in town going, ‘Gustav, set the alarm, get some dogs, change the locks.’”

For the FBI, there was a permanence to the wiretapping conducted under the guise of national security and the installation of microphones (or bugging) of private residences that required the Bureau to break in. A total of 8,239 taps and 2,465 were installed by the FBI from 1940 to 1975. One breakdown estimate by administration during this time period of the surreptitious bugging is as follows:

• Roosevelt: 510

• Truman: 692

• Eisenhower: 616

• Kennedy: 268

• Johnson: 192

• Nixon: 163

• Ford: 24 (covering the first ten months of 1975)

Other organizations in the federal government also employed domestic surveillance tactics at the behest of presidents. LBJ ordered the Secret Service to monitor his his alcoholic brother, Sam Houston Johnson, who had leaked confidential information to reporters. Under Nixon, the Secret Service wiretapped Nixon’s brother Donald, whose business activities caused the President political headaches, and monitored his son Donald Jr., who was suspected of living in a commune. The latter case turned out for the better, Ehrlichman reported, when it was discovered that Donald Jr. “got very straight thereafter, and wore a blazer and Gucci loafers.”

The CIA, although its mandate limited the organization to foreign affairs, conducted domestic surveillance activities of its own. This included, up the 1970s, 12 break-ins, 32 wiretapping activities, 32 buggings or microphone installations, surveillance of three journalists, and 96 photographs taken of U.S. citizens. In addition, the CIA pulled the tax returns of 16 individuals from the IRS. In one instance, the CIA investigated one of its own employees, according to the Rockefeller Commission report, by “cutting through the walls from an adjacent apartment so that microphones could be installed” in the employee’s apartment. The report went on: “Seven microphones were placed so that conversations could be overheard in every room of the apartment. A cover was placed on the employee’s mail...Several of the subject’s tax returns were also reviewed. This investigation yielded no evidence of disloyalty.”

Most famously, the Nixon administration used White House employees known as the “Plumbers” to burglarize and install bugs in the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel. Also well known was the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in September 1971, although it is often explained as a failure, with the thieves unable to locate Ellsberg’s file. On the contrary, Dr. Fielding reported that his notes on Ellsberg “were thoroughly rummaged through.” Lesser known was that Ellsberg wife’s psychoanalyst files in a different office were viewed through a break-and-enter operation less than 3 months later in November 1971 and the perpetrators were never found. Dean suggested to Nixon that the Ellsberg break-in at Dr. Fielding’s office be explained away under the guise of national security. “National security,” Nixon replied, letting the idea sink in. “We had to get the information for national security…the whole thing was national security.” Dean added: “I think we could get by on that.” In a press conference in August 1973, Nixon instead proceeded to call the doctor’s office break-in “illegal, unauthorized as far as I was concerned, and completely deplorable.”

Nixon also hired a private detective, Tony Ulasewicz, to dig up political dirt on his opponents and handle random assignments: he once asked Ulasewicz to locate a previous landlady whom Nixon remembered fondly, though he could not recall where exactly he had lived and the investigation was abandoned. He also hired ex-FBI employee John Ragan during his presidential campaign to sweep all of his residences for bugs, including the properties of friends such as Donald Kedall, Bebe Rebozo, and Robert Abplanalp. In 1969, Ragan was tasked with placing a wiretap on the journalist Joseph Kraft and he climbed a telephone pole near Kraft’s home to place the tap. Ragan explained in the mid-1970s there was a different atmosphere and attitude at the time the request was made: “It’s not like today when everybody is distrustful of the White House. It’s a new administration. The top man is concerned and he’s got troubles. What are you going to do, say ‘Go fuck yourself?’”

Killing a Dream

John Jay Iselin and Ben Bradlee, reporters for Newsweek, were attending a party in October 1964 celebrating the opening of the magazine’s offices a block from the White House. In attendance were U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall. In speaking with the two government officials, he berated them, questioning the operation they were running, since he had recently discovered they were peddling smut, in his words. With a knowing leer, Bradlee told Katzenbach the pair of journalists had been offered “interesting tapes.” There were sex orgy tapes that the FBI wanted them to hear.