The Burglary by Betty Medsger Read Free Book Online Page A

Congress, Democratic senatorRobert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Republican senatorRoman L. Hruska of Nebraska—the only two senators present for his November 1970 presentation—had good working relationships with Hoover. They put this session together hastily. The long mahogany table in the chandeliered room would have accommodated at least two dozen senators, but because it was the day after Thanksgiving most were not available. Senators Byrd and Hruska sat beside each other on a long side of the table facing Hoover. Opposite them, the director’s longtime colleague and companionClyde Tolson sat on one side of Hoover, andJohn P. Mohr, an assistant to the director, sat on his other side as he read aloud to the two senators all of his twenty-seven pages of prepared testimony. He decried the amount of overtime agents had to work because of the “growing menace”—four million hours during fiscal year 1970, he said. That was one of his secret annual budget tricks. Hoover required agents to submit phony overtime records so he could use the contrived data when he made his annual case before Congress for a budget increase. In his testimony this day, he asked for an extra $14.5 million above the annual increase. This extra allocation, he said, was needed because of “terrorist tactics” that made it necessary to hire a thousand additional agents. These hires would bring the total number of agents to 8,350, an unprecedented 14 percent increase in one year.
    Hoover always had a story line to justify his request for a budget increase. It usually was about frightening threats. Since the beginning of theCold War, he had based his annual pitch on the need to strengthen the bureau’s ability to fight the growth of communism in the United States.He stuck with this story long after communism had nearly disappeared in the country, even long after there were more FBI agents posing as party members than there were genuine party members at Communist Party meetings. Hoover’s story line this day in late 1970 was different. The small number of senators present to hear him—two—was no indication of the profound implications of what he would say behind closed doors and then immediately release to journalists. The senators were willing props on a stage Hoover had designed in order to make secrets public.
    He had given this same testimony before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations just two weeks earlier. It was not released to the press then. He had made sure it would be released today.
    He told the senators about the bureau’s increased responsibilities in the investigation of organized crime, an area he had long avoided. He talked about the growing dangers imposed by the New Left, especially the Weathermen,noting that one member of that radical group,Bernardine Dohrn, had recently been placed on the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.”
    Then he came to the heart of what he said that day, what dominated national news that evening and the next day. He told his audience of two:
    Willingness to employ any type of terrorist tactics is becoming increasingly apparent among extremist elements. One example has recently come to light involving an incipient plot on the part of an anarchist group on the east coast, the so-called “East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives.”
    This is a militant group self-described as being composed of Catholic priests and nuns, teachers, students, and former students who have manifested opposition to the war in Vietnam by acts of violence against Government agencies and private corporations engaged in work relating to U.S. participation in the Vietnam conflict.
    The principal leaders of this group are Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Catholic priests who are currently incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut, for their participation in the destruction of Selective Service Records in Catonsville, Maryland, in