Official and Confidential

by Anthony Summers

  Though Donovan never headed the Agency, Edgar also had to swallow the fact that it was essentially the general’s brainchild. The creation of the CIA, moreover, stripped Edgar even of his wartime windfall, the territories south of the Mexican border. The FBI’s various overseas posts, in London, Paris and Rome, Ottawa and Mexico City, survived only for liaison purposes. Nevertheless, Edgar defiantly continued intelligence-gathering in Mexico, which duplicated CIA operations far into the future.

  ‘So furious’ was Edgar about the creation of the CIA, said William Sullivan, ‘that he gave specific instructions that under no circumstances were we to give any documents or information to the newly established CIA …’ ‘Hoover pursued a scorched-earth policy,’ said future CIA Director Richard Helms. ‘He cleaned out all the files, wouldn’t allow his agents to talk to the new CIA people about sources. We got nothing worth having. He just cleaned the place out and went home in a sulk.’

  Edgar’s standoff with the Agency would last until he died. ‘When requests came in from the CIA,’ said Sullivan, ‘legitimate, authorized requests, Hoover would drag his heels, meet half the request and ignore the other half.’ This pettiness led to a head-on clash with Truman’s second CIA Director, the illustrious General Walter Bedell Smith.

  ‘It is mandatory for you to give the CIA full cooperation,’ Smith told Edgar. ‘If you want to fight this, I’ll fight you all over Washington.’ Edgar backed off, but his file on Smith shows contempt. ‘Smith is a stinker,’ Edgar scrawled on one report, ‘and not a little one either.’ Relations with other Agency heads were even worse. According to CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton, Edgar did not sit down with a CIA Director more than five times in his entire career.

  For a while after the war, Edgar seemed less surefooted, less certain of his direction. He clung to hopes of becoming Attorney General under some future Republican administration, but had put presidential dreams behind him. Some thought he might quit the FBI. There was speculation that he would become Baseball Commissioner.

  On the personal front, this was a time of increased rumormongering about Edgar’s homosexuality. Once, at a dinner attended by the highest law officials in the land, Edgar was overwhelmed with embarrassment when a female entertainer – one of the Duncan Sisters – tried to sit on his lap. According to those present, he actually fled the room, and the story was around Washington within days. When, in a genuine mistake, the American Mothers’ Committee named Edgar one of the nation’s ‘Best Fathers of the Year,’ the newspapers simpered: ‘Oh dear … Mr Hoover is a bachelor.’ Few could have missed the innuendo.

  It was at this time that Edgar’s worry about his homosexuality drove him to consult Dr Ruffin, the Washington psychiatrist. The visits soon ended, however, because Edgar was afraid to trust even the doctor.2 From now on, he merely tried to suppress homosexual rumors whenever possible, using FBI agents to intimidate the press.

  In public as in private, Edgar was forever on the defensive against enemies real or imagined. To remain America’s ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ he needed to be seen to be fighting a clearly identified foe, and with massive public support.

  The enemy of choice – whether it was substance or shadow – had always been Communism. Or, as Edgar pronounced it, ‘Commonism.’ And now, just as his image seemed to be losing its focus, history made him fashionable again. The Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellite states gave Edgar a new lease of life as an American hero. Behind the scenes, his spying on American citizens mirrored some of the excesses of the Communism he decried.

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  ‘The FBI’s war against Americans who were not criminals but who did not measure up to Director Hoover’s idea of an acceptable citizen, is a blot on our claim to be a free society.’

  Congressman Don Edwards, former FBI Agent and

  Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights

  On his fifty-first birthday, New Year’s Day 1946, Edgar opened the door of his home in Rock Creek Park to a Presbyterian pastor, Dr Elson. The two men then prayed together in what Elson called ‘a spiritual act of mutual dedication,’ one they would repeat each New Year’s Day for the rest of Edgar’s life. A week later, at a Club of Champions ceremony in New York, Edgar knelt to kiss the sapphire ring of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, Francis Spellman.

  With Spellman at his side, Edgar told the assembled throng that ‘Come what may, when thirty million Catholics assert themselves, the nation must pause and listen. There are only 100,000 Communists who are organized and articulate, but they are motivated by fanatical frenzy.’

  The frenzy came, rather, from Edgar and right-wing zealots like Spellman. American Communists, Edgar told an audience of senior policemen, were ‘panderers of diabolic distrust who are concentrating their efforts to confuse and divide … It behooves us to be on guard for an enemy that brazenly and openly has advocated the corruption of America …’

  Former Assistant Director Charles Brennan, an FBI specialist in hunting subversives, would recall wryly that even Bureau insiders never really knew quite what enemy they were fighting. ‘There was never any substantive understanding of what Communism meant,’ he recalled. ‘The word was just used as a general category for that which was foreign, unfamiliar and undesirable …’

  Edgar, more than any other individual, would be responsible for the long episode of anti-Communist hysteria from which American society has never fully recovered. Edgar’s own figures credited the Party with a mere 80,000 members at the peak of its popularity, in the glow of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. In a population of 150 million, that was a percentage of .0533 – and less than a third of American Communists were industrial workers likely to threaten economic stability.

  President Truman probably had it about right. ‘People,’ he said, ‘are very much wrought up about the Communist “bugaboo” but I am of the opinion that the country is perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned – we have far too many sane people.’ What the President thought in private, however, was submerged by Republican electoral gains and a chorus of right-wing demands for action.

  In 1947, to appease the right, Truman ordered that all new civilian employees of the federal government be investigated for ‘loyalty.’ Serving employees suspected of ‘disloyalty’ could henceforth be brought before loyalty boards – with no right to know or challenge their accusers. Truman had deliberately entrusted much of the work not to the FBI but to the Civil Service Commission – a snub that led Edgar to take a momentous decision.

  He obliged Congressman Parnell Thomas, soon to be jailed for operating a kickback racket, by agreeing to address the House Un-American Activities Committee. Edgar had never made such an appearance before and, by doing so in March 1947, was publicly confronting the administration he served. That he could do so, and get away with it, was a measure of his power in the country.

  ‘This is a big day for me,’ Edgar told a friend as he set off to make his speech. Communism, he told the congressmen, was being spread by ‘the diabolic machinations of sinister figures engaged in un-American activities.’ American liberals, he added pointedly, had been ‘hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the Communists.’

  Edgar stopped short of attacking the liberal President by name, but the effect was the same. Truman was furious. ‘Pres. feels very strongly anti FBI,’ noted an aide. ‘Wants to be sure and hold FBI down, afraid of “Gestapo.”’ Yet Truman was also a realist. ‘J. Edgar,’ he told Clark Clifford, ‘will in all probability get this backward-looking Congress to give him all he wants. It’s dangerous.’

  Edgar did get what he wanted – full control of the loyalty investigations. He had made his declaration of independence, established himself as the standard-bearer of the anti-Red crusade.

  One man needed no conversion. During the HUAC hearing Edgar had taken several questions from a freshman Congressman named Richard Nixon. Leaning across to Edgar, attorney Bradshaw Mintener muttered that Nixon
had faked smear evidence to beat his Democratic opponent in the recent campaign. ‘I know all about that,’ Edgar replied, ‘but, so far as law enforcement is concerned, he looks to me as if he’s going to be a good man for us.’

  A decade earlier, as a young law student, inspired by a recruiting speech given by one of Edgar’s aides, Nixon had applied to become an agent. His appointment had been approved, then canceled, apparently because the FBI deemed him to be ‘lacking in aggressiveness.’ Now that he was a Congressman, Edgar had no doubts about Nixon. The two men met that year, and both would soon be engaged in the protracted effort to ruin State Department official Alger Hiss, the controversy that became Nixon’s first step on the road to the White House.

  Edgar was suddenly the hero of 1947. His face, framed by the Stars and Stripes, stared from the cover of Newsweek, telling the nation ‘How to Fight Communism.’ He was being taken seriously, and taking himself much too seriously.

  In the midst of the wrangle with President Truman, Edgar learned that Love for Three Oranges, the theme tune for two films and a radio show about the FBI, had been written by the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev. ‘We ought to be able to utilize music by someone other than a well-known Communist,’ Edgar scrawled on a memorandum. ‘Please get together on this, and quickly.’ Aides scrambled to oblige, solemnly probing Prokofiev’s background and holding highlevel conferences. There is not a glimmer of a sign that anyone realized how silly it all was.

  Nationally, the purge began in Hollywood, when the House Un-American Activities Committee staged its assault on the film industry. Edgar, who thought Hollywood smelled of the ‘dank air of Communism,’ played a leading role from the start – in secret. ‘I want to extend every assistance to the Committee,’ he told aides months before the hearings began. His Los Angeles Agent in Charge, Richard Hood, passed on FBI file information on suspect members of the film community. The committee’s team of investigators was led by Allen Smith, a Bureau veteran with close links to Edgar, and heavily weighted with other former agents.

  The hearings were a circus, with throngs of giggling women mobbing ‘friendly’ witnesses, such as Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor and Walt Disney, who testified that Communists at his studio were trying to use Mickey Mouse to spread Communist propaganda. A 1993 biography revealed that in secret Disney had previously provided the FBI with information on political activity in Hollywood.

  Edgar’s former girlfriend, Lela Rogers, made a memorable appearance. In her opinion, None but the Lonely Heart, directed by Clifford Odets, was highly suspect – the more so because of a scene in which a son tells his mother: ‘You are not going to work here and squeeze pennies from people poorer than we are.’ The committee concluded Rogers was ‘one of the outstanding experts on Communism in the United States.’

  ‘Unfriendly’ witnesses and those who opposed the hearings, such as John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, were vilified. The Hollywood Ten, a group of artists who refused on principle to say whether they had ever been members of the Communist Party, were jailed for contempt of Congress. They would emerge to find their careers ruined, because, to butter up the committee, Hollywood’s film bosses had declared them ‘blacklisted.’

  The Un-American Activities Committee’s assault on Hollywood lasted until 1953, with Edgar playing a punitive role in the wings – as the actor Sterling Hayden discovered. Hayden had briefly been a member of the Communist Party, and, worried about his past, he wrote through his attorney asking Edgar for advice. ‘Get it on the record,’ Edgar advised, promising to help Hayden ‘if anything comes up.’ The actor promptly confessed his past folly in a formal statement to FBI agents.

  For Edgar, this was an opportunity for fresh persecution. Far from protecting Hayden, he forwarded his confession to the Un-American Activities Committee. The actor was summoned to testify, panicked and named many friends and colleagues who had also joined the Party. He regretted having been ‘a stoolie for J. Edgar Hoover’ for the rest of his life.

  FBI file 100-382196 contains the lowdown on a minor Hollywood actor – ‘6’1” tall, weight 175 lbs, blue eyes and brown hair’ – named Ronald Reagan. The future president, who was spending as much time on union activity as on acting, was on the board of HICCASP, the Citizens’ Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions, which the FBI considered a Communist front. His brother Neil, however, was spying on HICCASP meetings for the Bureau, and warned Ronald it would be wise to resign. Instead, Ronald acted as an FBI informant too.

  Soon he was phoning his brother at midnight from a pay phone at the Nutburger stand on Sunset Boulevard, to pass on information about the latest HICCASP meeting. As the Bureau’s Confidential Informant, code number T-10, Reagan took to calling FBI agents to his house under cover of darkness, to tell of ‘cliques’ in the Screen Actors Guild that ‘follow the Communist Party line.’ He supplied the names of actors and actresses and, in an appearance arranged at Edgar’s personal suggestion, did so again during a secret appearance before the Un-American Activities Committee.

  Edgar investigated citizens who were not Communists and who had broken no law. Concerned about articles that, in his view, were ‘severely and unfairly discrediting our American way of life,’ he was to order an FBI study to look for ‘subversive factors’ in the backgrounds of prominent writers and editors. Out of a hundred people picked at random, agents identified ‘pertinent factors’ that might account for the way forty of them were writing. Reports on them were turned into unlabeled blind memoranda, untraceable to the FBI, for Edgar to circulate ‘on an informal and confidential basis.’

  Over the years, Edgar’s literary targets would include America’s most honored writers. Some, like Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett and playwright Lillian Hellman, were indeed involved with Marxist causes. They were trailed, surveilled and had their mail opened. When Hammett died – a veteran of both wars – the FBI schemed to prevent his burial at Arlington Cemetery.

  Numerous other famous writers had no links to Marxism but were investigated all the same. There is a 400-page file on Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck. Agents opened her mail, too, even though she did nothing more subversive than write about racism and join the ACLU.

  We now know Edgar kept files on Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, Erskine Caldwell, Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan and Carl Sandburg. The FBI tagged Ernest Hemingway ‘leftist’ and ‘phony,’ and kept a file on his wife Mary as well. It reported on John Steinbeck, who alarmed the FBI because he ‘portrayed an extremely sordid and povertystricken side of American life,’ as well as Irwin Shaw, Aldous Huxley, John O’Hara, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Rex Stout, creator of investigator Nero Wolfe, was deemed to be ‘under Communist influence,’ and there was even a file on E. B. White, author of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web.

  Files were also kept on painters and sculptors, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore – even on Picasso, who never set foot in the United States. Great scientists were also targeted. Edgar thought Dr Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine, suspect enough to merit a four-page warning letter to the White House, because he was a member of the American-Soviet Medical Society. Salk was said to be ‘far left of center,’ and had a brother in the Communist Party.

  Edgar had started collecting information on Albert Einstein in 1940 because he attended pacifist meetings alongside Communists, and because he had supported the Republican cause in Spain. After the war, when the physicist realized he was being watched, he grew deeply disillusioned. ‘I came to America,’ he said in 1947, ‘because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.’ At the time of his death, the FBI dossier on him had grown to thousands of pages. They contain no evidence that he was ever disloyal.

  The actor Charlie Chaplin, one of Einstein’s friends, embodied all that triggered fear and anger in Edgar. Foreignb
orn, in England, he lived a rich heterosexual life, and he was a utopian ‘internationalist’ who cheerfully hobnobbed with Communists. He was also one of the most famous men on earth, more famous than the Director of the FBI, and universally adored.

  The Bureau had considered Chaplin dangerous even before Edgar became Director, when officials worried that his ‘Communistic’ movies would infect ‘the minds of the people.’ They were still worrying in 1942, when he made speeches calling on the United States to help the Soviet Union against the Nazis. Edgar’s chance to persecute Chaplin, however, came when a deranged young actress, Joan Barry, claimed he was the father of her unborn child.

  Edgar thought Chaplin could be prosecuted under the Mann Act (the law with which he threatened wartime agent Dusko Popov), because the actor had paid for Barry’s train trips across the country. Under his personal supervision, FBI agents were soon sifting through Chaplin’s financial records, interrogating friends and business colleagues and asking his servants whether the actor had ‘wild parties and naked women.’

  Chaplin was cleared in the Barry case when blood tests showed he could not be the father of the child. Edgar’s harassment, however, continued. He sent information about the actor to Hollywood gossip columnists, even dispatched men to the Library of Congress to hunt down a report that, a quarter of a century earlier, Pravda had called Chaplin ‘a Communist and a friend of humanity.’

  Thousands of man-hours of research turned up nothing, but Edgar did eventually succeed in hounding Chaplin from the United States. It was his advice to the Attorney General that was to lead to the actor being banished from the country in 1952, on the grounds that he was an ‘unsavory character.’ Edgar also told immigration officials of Chaplin’s alleged ‘moral turpitude’ and his security background – on notepaper that could not be tracked back to the FBI. References to the Bureau’s use of bugging and anonymous sources were carefully deleted from the relevant reports.