The Administration: Off the Chest & into the Fire

John Edgar Hoover, who almost singlehanded turned a subsidiary department of the U.S. Department of Justice into that internationally famous unit known as the FBI, has long been an enigma within an enigma. His critics have accused him of being a publicity seeker; yet Hoover as a rule will not even pose for a picture unless he has a prepublication look at the story that is to go with it, and in the 40 years that he has headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, his open-forum press conferences have been as scarce as hens' teeth.

But last week, all of a sudden, Hoover agreed to talk over coffee cups with a group of Washington newswomen at the request of that professional presidential-press-conference pest, Sarah. McClendon. The session lasted for 2½ hours, and the enigmatic Mr. Hoover managed, if nothing else, to get a lot of things off his chest.

Most Curious. For one thing, he was smarting under the Warren Commission's criticism that the FBI had failed to inform the Secret Service that Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Hoover's boys had under on-and-off surveillance for months, was a possible threat to the life of President Kennedy. The criticism, said Hoover, was "a classic example of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Since the assassination, Hoover said, the FBI has started turning over to the Secret Service "thousands of names of beatniks and kooks and crackpots." But, he added, he didn't see how all this was going to help the Secret Service, since it was "hopelessly undermanned and ill-equipped to do the job it is supposed to do."

Criticism of the FBI for its failures in the Kennedy case, said Hoover, was "unjust and unfair." That was most curious, since Hoover himself ordered disciplinary action against three FBI agents, including James Hosty Jr., the Dallas agent who had been keeping an eye on Oswald for months, who was suspended for 30 days without pay and transferred to Kansas City.

"All the Same." But in his blasts against the Warren Commission, Hoover was relatively mild. FBI agents in Mississippi, he said, had been rendered all but helpless because the state is "filled with water moccasins, rattlesnakes, and red-neck sheriffs, and they are all in the same category, as far as I am concerned." In even more vitriolic style, the FBI chief attacked the South's most revered integrationist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who, even as Hoover delivered his blast, was in the Bahamas working on his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, to be delivered in Oslo on Dec. 10.

"I remember," said Hoover to the newsladies, "the notorious Martin Luther King making a speech in the South some months ago where he advised the

Negroes not to report any violations to our Albany, Georgia, agents because they were all Southerners." A check of FBI records, said Hoover, had proved that of five agents in racially torn Albany one was from New York, one from Massachusetts, one from Indiana, one from Minnesota, and one from Georgia. Then Hoover delivered the line that rang round the world. Said he of King: "He is the most notorious liar in the country."