THE ADMINISTRATION: Bugging J. Edgar Hoover

A top Senate aide used to begin his first telephone conversation of each week with a hearty "F— J. Edgar Hoover." To the startled listener on the other end of the line, he explained: "Just clearing the lines." During the debate over G. Harrold Carswell's nomination to the Supreme Court, Indiana Senator Birch Bayh became so disturbed over an inexplicable strategy and information leak that he called in an expert to examine his office for listening devices. The expert "swept" Bayh's office—the same suite occupied by Richard Nixon when he was a Senator—with a detector and picked up blips from beneath the floor. The floor was pounded until the blips ceased, but Bayh decided against bringing in jackhammers to tear up the concrete to retrieve the dead bug. During his years in the White House, Lyndon Johnson spiced his private conversations with such intimate disclosures about the personal and political operations of his enemies on Capitol Hill that it seemed to many that he had them under FBI surveillance.

Gestapo Tactics. Against this background, House Democratic Leader Hale Boggs turned to a colleague on the floor of the House last week and said: "I'm going to make a speech that's going to get national headlines." In a one-minute address, Boggs broke the desultory parliamentary doings with a harsh challenge to the reputation of one of Washington's most powerful institutions—J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Boggs: "When the FBI taps the telephones of members of this body and members of the Senate, when the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, then it is time that the present director no longer be the director."

Two weeks earlier, Democratic Senator Joseph Montoya of New Mexico had made the same wiretapping charge at a little-reported political dinner in Denver. But this time the accusation came in the House chamber from a top Democratic leader, and the Administration responded quickly and categorically. Attorney General John Mitchell took time during a Florida vacation to deny charges of wiretapping. Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst followed with a slightly veiled attack on Boggs' drinking problem and emotional instability in the past. Kleindienst said Boggs was "sick, or not in possession of his faculties." But reporters who questioned Boggs after the speech found him motivated only by sober and sensible outrage.

No Knowledge. Kleindienst at first offered to let Congress investigate the FBI. Then he qualified the offer, saying that any investigation would have to be limited to the congressional phone-tapping charge, rather than become a wide-ranging look at the FBI that could jeopardize its mission and sources.* As the feud progressed, Boggs, too, did some retrenching, admitting that Mitchell might be "technically correct" about the absence of taps. But he continued to insist that the FBI had Congressmen under "surveillance"—perhaps using other electronic devices to monitor their offices. Boggs further blunted his attack by the specious argument that whatever the facts, a number of his colleagues believe their phones are tapped and that "if everyone thinks his phone is tapped, it's as bad as their being tapped. You're sure not going to carry on any business."