class="body">This happened on Thursday. Pete spent that night and the next day studying the place to dope out the best time to make our entrance to the O’Brien office. He got a soap impression of the door lock, and Bob Murray [apparently of Naval Intelligence] made us a key.

The following Monday morning, early, Pete and I went in. It was shortly after dawn, and we had been waiting several hours until the building was absolutely quiet.

It was with a beating heart that I inserted the key, turned the lock very quietly, opened the door, let Pete ease in, then slipped in myself, shut the door with care, turned the key in the lock on that side, and then turned to receive one of the greatest surprises of my life.

The room was absolutely empty. There was not a stick of furniture in it. Mind you, Thursday, we had seen past the gentleman being bowed out of this place a handsomely furnished office. We had been keeping an off and on watch on the place since then. And here on Monday morning—four days later—we find the room entirely bare! Pete and I looked at each other with open mouths and then with one accord shook with quiet laughter.

We examined the place. There wasn’t a clue of any nature. And when we left the Salmon Towers half an hour later, we were none the wiser.

Then began an extensive investigation. Certain facts were easily established. The hegira took place Friday morning. That eased my mind, for it proved that my investigation had no connection with the flight. It could not, for not a soul in the world knew my plans except Peterkin. So, it was pure coincidence.

Through the telephone people I traced the lawyer [Justin] Campbell, in whose name the Salmon Towers office had been. He has re-established himself in an office in the Lincoln Building, but it is small and he is now alone.

But what had become of O’Brien remained a mystery until the other day. All we could find out was that on the day of the flight trucks drove up and took everything away during a two hour period when Pete was absent from the building. No, nobody knew what address they moved to. No, there was no forwarding address for their mail. Nothing. Just a blank. They had covered up beautifully. But not quite.

Pete’s persistent though careful questionings finally got results. He found a freight man who had been casually hired for a special trip with a table they had forgotten to put on their trucks and had remembered afterward. Sure he remembered the address. It was so and so Greenwich Avenue.

His memory was correct. We found O’Brien living there in the 4th story, furniture and papers

complete but giving every appearance of having fallen on evil days. We shadowed him for a bit and then I came to the conclusion that no president of the United States need be afraid of a ham-and-egger like this O’Brien.

I told Lewis Strauss that my opinion was that O’Brien has been these many months stringing along Tammany with the tale that he had the goods on Mr. Hoover. I believe that Tammany provided him with office space and facilities for preparing a book. I further believe that Tammany finally called him for a showdown and that the result of this showdown was the throwing out of Salmon Towers of the O’Brien—on his ear.

All these beliefs I duly retailed to Lewis Strauss, who transmitted them to Larry Richey who informed the President who told Larry to tell Lewis to tell me to call off my watch and to consider the case closed.

So closed it is, and that’s that.

Whether or not President Hoover actually authorized Howell’s mission remains unclear. Strauss emphasized the president’s commitment to the venture, but, conceivably, the financier, as Hoover’s loyal friend and political supporter, was acting without his knowledge. There is, however, some strong, indirect evidence that Lawrence Richey, the president’s confidential secretary, not only knew about the venture but even was an instigator. The evidence consists of two letters from Strauss to Richey describing the investigations, one dated June 9, 1930, and the other, undated, from a few days later. This in turn suggests—that is an acceptable inference—that President Hoover himself may have been involved.

Richey apparently had a taste for this kind of thing. He would later be suspected of carrying out other “dirty work” for Hoover and the GOP. At one point, in May 1933, Attorney General Homer Cummings warned the Roosevelt cabinet that Richey was directing an effort to penetrate the New Deal to gather embarrassing material. And, decades later, in 1957, Richey turned over seventy-eight names to the FBI for checking—apparently in connection with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and presumably at the secret behest of Hoover himself.

On June 17, 1930, Strauss was in Washington, D.C., and he met with Richey at the White House. It is likely that they discussed the O’Brien case; the President may have been present. Strauss’s appointment book noted Hoover as being there, but Hoover’s own calender listed a cabinet session at the time. After he had returned to New York, Strauss, acting on White House directions—or so he told Howell—called off the surveillance on O’Brien. The case was officially closed. This early, almost laughable, Republican conspiracy was over, and the evidence about it would not surface for more than five decades.

But O’Brien’s obsession with Herbert Hoover was by no means over. Obviously trying to milk his meager findings for all they were worth, he turned up again in the news in 1932, when he sued a fellow blackmailer, one John Hamill, for publishing The Strange Career

of Mr. Hoover, or Under Two Flags, which used material that both men had gathered, but that only O’Brien had paid for. The book accused Hoover of having defrauded mine-investors (”racketeering in the billions“) and of having failed to save the life of a British nurse from a German firing squad. The litigation dragged on for a year, during which time Hamill, under threat of libel, repudiated his own book and O’Brien published a similar volume, Hoover’s Millions and How He Made Them. Just a few weeks before the defeated Hoover left the White House in 1933, a New York court dismissed the case of O’Brien v. Hamill on the grounds that both “were guilty [through their books] of attempting to deceive the American public,” and therefore, neither merited any legal relief in their bitter dispute.

Although both Howell and Foster pursued successful civilian careers, Lewis Strauss, alone among the clearly implicated participants in the O’Brien break-in, went on to much greater fame and power. By the late 1930s, he had become a well-known philanthropist. Nine months before Pearl Harbor, he took a leave from Kuhn, Loeb to use his business skills on behalf of the Navy. He soon became a rear admiral; after the war he served as a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1954, he helped bring about the downfall of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had opposed the hydrogen bomb, when the physicist was brought before a security hearing. Strauss had tried to pick a “hanging jury” to hear the case, may even have bribed one of the judges, and secretly arranged with the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, to have the agency wiretap Oppenheimer’s and his attorneys’ phones. Strauss passed on the wiretap information to the AEC prosecutor—certainly a, breach of ethics and possibly a violation of law.

The clear evidence on Strauss in this 1930 conspiracy, the strongly suggestive evidence on Richey, and the disturbing implications about Herbert Hoover serve as useful reminders that Watergate had powerful antecedents.

Of course, the biggest difference between Watergate and the James J. O’Brien case, the ineptitude of O’Brien aside, is that Nixon got caught. If, in fact, Hoover was involved in 1930, then both presidents broke the law. Yet what is so ironic is that, if there had been no Watergate burglary, Nixon would have finished out the remainder of his term, and, very likely, the course of history would have been changed. Hoover, on the other hand, didn’t even need to get caught. He was soundly defeated at the polls anyway, and the conspiracy of 1930 became just another footnote to history.