Excerpt from Betty Medsger's The Burglary

An excerpt from The Burglary by Betty Medsger, a very good book devoted to the events surrounding the burglary of confidential files in the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. This excerpt is relevant to a reference to J. Edgar Hoover's blackmail in a conversation between Richard Nixon and Alexander Haig on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIlTuKpA11Q

The excerpt:

<blockquote>There were other frustrations inside the FBI. Just two weeks after the first Media documents became public, Hoover even offered to “step aside” if at any time the president or the attorney general felt that he might be “a burden or handicap to the re-election” of Nixon. The director described his offer to resign in a memorandum in which he summarized an April 6 phone conversation with Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. The conversation took place the day after Representative Hale Boggs, Democrat from Louisiana, claimed on the floor of the House that the FBI had tapped his phone. Boggs’s public accusation, never proven, led to an announcement from the attorney general that the FBI had never wiretapped the phone of any member of the House or Senate.

Kleindienst reassured Hoover in their conversation that he was “a good American” and that “the thing is going to subside.” But Kleindienst infuriated Hoover the next day when he announced, in an interview the deputy attorney general had sought on the CBS morning television news, that the Department of Justice would welcome an investigation of the FBI. He said he thought “the only way public confidence in the FBI can be restored is through a congressional investigation.” To Hoover this was extraordinary. No member of any administration had ever called for an investigation of the FBI.

The impact was explosive, especially to Kleindienst’s ears. Shortly after he returned to his office after the interview, he took a call from Hoover. The director denounced Kleindienst’s public call for an investigation of the bureau so loudly that Kleindienst had to hold the phone away from his ear. Colleagues in his office could hear every word across the room as the director issued a threat:

“If I am called upon to testify before Congress, I will have to tell all that I know about this matter.”

Kleindienst did not fully grasp what Hoover meant. He soon would. The director was alluding to the illegal wiretapping of phones that Henry Kissinger, supported by President Nixon, had asked Hoover to conduct beginning in May 1969.

It had all started when Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser, was beside himself the morning of May 9, 1969, when he read a story in the New York Times that revealed that the United States was secretly conducting bombing raids in Cambodia. He called Hoover immediately that morning to ask what could be done to discover who had leaked the secret. FBI records indicate he called the director two more times that day, pressing him urgently. By the end of the afternoon, a tap had been placed on the home phone of Morton Halperin, a senior staff member with responsibility for national security in Kissinger’s office, and would remain on it for a year and a half, long after he stopped working for Kissinger.</blockquote>
<blockquote>To Hoover, this project was fire, and he was determined it would not burn him. In his time of crisis in early April 1971, provoked first by the Media burglary revelations and then by Kleindienst’s public call for an investigation of the FBI, he immediately realized he could use the Kissinger taps as blackmail against the White House. If there was an investigation of the FBI, he told the president, as he repeated to him the threat he had just made to Kleindienst: “I will have to tell all that I know about this matter.” Unlike Kleindienst, the president knew exactly what Hoover was talking about.

Within two hours, Kleindienst was interviewed again on television—at his request, as before. This time he withdrew his call for an investigation of the FBI.</blockquote>