Word: hooverness
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...Senate confirmation hearings for L. Patrick Gray III, President Nixon's choice to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI, assumed new and dark dimensions last week. They not only demonstrated that Gray, the acting director since last May, might well be Nixon's least defensible appointment so far. They also revealed among high officials of the Nixon Administration and the President's re-election committee a disturbing callousness toward the law, toward proper investigative procedure and toward the truth...
...what the Senate Judiciary Committee wanted to know was whether Gray, like J. Edgar Hoover before him, would guard against partisan political tampering with the FBI. Last week the committee opened hearings on Gray's nomination. In two wearying days of testimony, Gray, wearing an American flag pin in his lapel, sought to convince the committee that his personal loyalties to his longtime friend, President Nixon, would not interfere with his even-handed guidance of the FBI. Said Gray: "I am not a partisan guy." But the committee's vote was still uncertain, and the hearings were...
Under questioning, Gray did not convincingly refute the report in TIME a week ago that the FBI, under Hoover and later under himself as acting director, had tapped the phones of six or seven Washington newsmen. He said that he had checked all records of authorized security taps and had found no orders or indications that any such taps had been placed. He also questioned a Justice Department information officer and got a negative response. Asked Senator Edward Kennedy "That is the sole extent of your investigation...
...wiretapping operation actually helped to keep Hoover on the job until his death last year. According to the same sources, Richard Kleindienst, then Deputy Attorney General, tried to force Hoover to step down, and in 1971 even gave his support to a proposed congressional investigation of the FBI. Enraged Hoover indicated to Kleindienst that it he was called to testify on Capitol Hill he might disclose the wiretaps. (Kleindienst denies this exchange ever took place.) The scuttle-Hoover maneuver was quickly forgotten...
...dangerous foe in West Virginia Conservative Democrat Robert Byrd. "In the nine months that Mr. Gray has held the post of acting director, there has been increasing criticism of that bureau as becoming more and more a political arm of the Administration," Byrd told the Senate. "Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI had always been a nonpolitical bureau, and Mr. Hoover meticulously avoided partisanship in campaigns." Confirmation of Gray, the Senator added, "would be damaging to the proficiency and morale of the agency...