Back home, an annoyance cleared up for Richard Nixon. J. Edgar Hoover, the man who wished to claim all power of intimidation in Washington for his very own, who began compiling his files on five hundred thousand “subversives” during the 1919 Red Scare, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since its founding, who kept columnist Joseph Alsop on a string by retaining photographs of him in flagrante delicto with male KGB agents in Moscow, was dead. “Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!” was the president’s private response. Publicly, Nixon arranged for Hoover’s half-ton, lead-lined
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