Official and Confidential

by Anthony Summers

  The report, which originated with disgruntled Illinois policemen and a student basketball player, was secondhand. Stevenson’s biographers make no mention of any homosexual tendency. At the FBI, however, the Governor’s name went into a special file marked ‘Stevenson, Adlai Ewing – Governor of Illinois – Sex Deviate.’

  In July, on the same day Stevenson announced his candidacy, a senior FBI official prepared a nineteen-page memorandum – including the homosexual smear and suggestions that Stevenson had once harbored Communist sympathies. Edgar had also ordered the writing of a ‘blind memorandum,’ on paper without a letterhead, summarizing the homosexual allegation. The rumor was spread that summer, Democratic officials believed, by Edgar’s close associate Guy Hottel.

  In October, a crucial point in the campaign, Senator McCarthy used a nationwide television address to produce the ‘coldly documented background’ on Stevenson. Waving papers in his hand, he branded the Democratic candidate as a wartime Communist collaborator and a covert member of a left-wing organization. The ‘documentation,’ none of which held water when analyzed, was supplied by former FBI agent Donald Surine, the principal liaison between McCarthy and the Bureau.2

  These were the dirtiest blows in one of the nation’s dirtiest campaigns. They left Stevenson deeply dispirited, wondering whether he could continue at all. In November 1952, three months after his California strategy meeting with Murchison and Edgar, a landslide vote sent Dwight Eisenhower to Washington.

  ‘Politics,’ Eisenhower’s friend George Allen wrote in his memoirs, ‘runs on juice – on the kind of influence by which the proper man can get a ticket fixed.’ Allen, mutual friend to the new President, Murchison, Richardson and Edgar, plumbed the Eisenhower administration for political juice with the dedication his friends applied to oil.

  By a secret agreement, even before the inaugural, Allen and Billy Byars – another oilman friend of Edgar’s – arranged to finance Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm. They also funneled money to him ‘for his share of the farming operation.’ Byars subsidized Mamie Eisenhower’s brother-in-law Gordon Moore, by establishing a racing stable on his land.

  Sid Richardson, for his part, made secret payments to Robert Anderson, shortly to become Secretary of the Treasury, and poised to influence presidential policy in favor of domestic oil producers. The Eisenhower administration issued sixty oil leases on government reserves during its first term, compared to only sixteen in the previous fifty-five years.

  Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a Texan who knew the ways of oilmen, watched in despair as Eisenhower doled out key federal posts to the barons of commerce. ‘This fellow Hoover,’ the Speaker growled, ‘helped him do it. This fellow Hoover is the worst curse that has come to government in years.’

  ‘I was close with General Eisenhower,’ Edgar would recall. ‘He was a great man and a great President.’ According to former Attorney General William Rogers, Edgar thought the eight Eisenhower years ‘the best and happiest’ of his career. So they were, in the sense that he had absolute security of tenure. Sugary notes sped regularly from FBI headquarters to the White House. Edgar used Seattle Agent in Charge Richard Auerbach, who had once been secretary to a Republican senator, to cultivate the President’s elder brother.

  Eisenhower gave Edgar the National Security Medal, and Edgar gave the President the first ever ‘gold badge of honorary membership of the FBI.’ ‘I wish,’ Eisenhower would tell Edgar after he left the White House, ‘there were about a thousand J. Edgar Hoovers in key spots in the government.’

  Behind the courtesies, however, there was disagreement. Eisenhower’s papers reveal his concern that loyal Americans should not be persecuted for alleged Communism. He loathed McCarthyism, which Edgar supported to the very end. Later, Edgar would deplore Eisenhower’s decision to welcome the Soviet leader Khrushchev to the United States. He thought it created an ‘atmosphere favorable to Communism among Americans.’

  Eisenhower compromised himself less than his Democratic predecessors in the use of the FBI for personal political intelligence. He may not have done so at all. ‘With Eisenhower,’ recalled Ralph de Toledano, a correspondent in whom Edgar confided, ‘Hoover never knew whether he would receive praise or blame … He didn’t really like Eisenhower very much.’ In fact, predatory as ever, Edgar pried into the President’s private life as he had into that of President Roosevelt.

  Eisenhower’s wartime romance with his female chauffeur, the young Irishwoman Kay Summersby, had been a time bomb ticking beneath the 1952 election campaign. Republican leaders considered Summersby’s 1948 memoir, Eisenhower Was My Boss, potentially explosive – even though it said nothing of the couple’s real intimacy. Copies of the book mysteriously vanished from Washington stores and from the New York Public Library.

  Three years later, in September 1955, Joe McCarthy’s aide, Donald Surine, would pass along some information to the FBI. For the past six weeks, Surine said, Summersby had been staying at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel under an assumed name. Edgar at once ordered intense investigation. Agents made numerous ‘pretext calls,’ including one to Summersby herself, in an attempt to find out if she had really been staying in Washington.

  The only possible explanation is that Edgar wanted to know whether the President had revived his affair with Summersby. It was his custom to let presidents know he knew of their peccadilloes, in the guise of merely keeping them informed. The file does not reveal what Edgar did with the Summersby information, which reached him the day before President Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack.

  Since 1953, Edgar and Clyde had spent extended summer vacations as guests of Clint Murchison at the Del Charro, a hotel he owned in La Jolla, in southern California. Edgar had been a regular visitor to the town since the thirties, and told the press it was a place where he ‘felt God was near.’ His annual pilgrimage was dedicated to the horseracing at nearby Del Mar, as was that of Murchison and Sid Richardson, racing refugees from Texas, where betting on horses was illegal.

  Murchison had bought the Del Charro in a fit of pique when another establishment failed to place a complete floor at his disposal. ‘Our father which art in Dallas,’ went the prayer of the hotel staff, ‘Murchison be thy name.’ The Lone Star flag fluttered in the Pacific breeze when the millionaire and his pals were in residence. Celebrities such as John Wayne, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elizabeth Taylor and a couple of her husbands, along with the less famous but much monied, came and went in private planes. The hotel was small, and its astronomical room charges – the equivalent of $1,000 a night at today’s rates – drastically limited the clientele.

  After Murchison took over in 1953, Edgar and Clyde never stayed anywhere else. Their stay in Bungalow A, one of seven reserved for the tycoon’s special friends, became an annual ordeal for local FBI agents. A respectful tap at the door would bring first a delay, then Clyde snapping, ‘What the hell do you want?’ He is remembered as petulant, unreasonable, ‘madder than a scorpion’ over trifles. Even Murchison nicknamed him ‘Killer.’

  Former agent Harry Whidbee long kept the list of Edgar’s vacation requirements: direct phone lines to Washington; three oscillating fans – the Director detested air-conditioning; new light bulbs for every lamp; two 5" x 8" unlined white paper pads; two rolls Scotch tape, with dispenser; six sharpened No. 2 pencils; two bottles Scripps Permanent Royal Blue ink, No. 52 – no one else in the Bureau was allowed to use this brand; a basket of fruit; and whiskey – Jack Daniel’s for Edgar, Haig & Haig for Clyde, gift-wrapped and paid for by the local Agent in Charge, whether he liked it or not.

  There was panic one year when subordinates forgot a vital item – Edgar’s favorite ice cream. When he insisted on having it, late at night, agents persuaded a local manufacturer to open his plant after hours. An FBI stenographer then dressed up as a waitress to serve the boss his precious dessert.

  Even on vacation, the pair were rarely seen in anything but suit and tie. Edgar’s alternative uniform, a staff member recalls, was a �
�loudest of loud, shocking blue Hawaiian shirt, worn with suit pants.’ Edgar never used the hotel’s kidneyshaped pool. Proximity to water, he told the Nixons at La Jolla, made him ‘desperately uneasy.’ ‘The two of them always sat with their backs to the wall, even when they had dinner by the pool,’ recalled longtime hotel official Arthur Forbes. ‘That was for security. It was sad, watching the way those two men lived.’

  Clint Murchison made sure Edgar and Clyde wanted for nothing at the Del Charro. When Edgar mentioned that on Florida vacations he ‘could pick fruit right from the trees at the door,’ he awoke the next morning to find his patio planted with orange, peach and plum trees, and a grapevine. The grapes, the staff recall, had been laboriously wired to the branches during the night.

  The favors Edgar accepted from Murchison made a mockery of his public pose as a man of thrift and incorruptibility. ‘It came to the end of the summer,’ recalled Allan Witwer, the Del Charro’s first manager. ‘Hoover had made no attempt to pay his bill. So I went to Murchison and said, “What do you want me to do?” “Put it on my bill,” he told me. And that’s what I did.’

  According to Witwer and his successor, Arthur Forbes, Murchison and associates paid Edgar’s huge accommodations charges at the Del Charro every year until his death, nearly two decades later. Witwer preserved a copy of the 1953 bill, covering July 28 to August 28. It was marked simply ‘Murchison,’ and was sent on to the millionaire’s secretary, Ernestine van Buren. In the fifties, Witwer said, most of Edgar’s bills were covered by Delhi-Taylor, a Murchison company.

  The 1953 bill alone amounted to $3,100, or $24,335 at today’s rates. If that was the average charge (and the hotel rate increased over the years), then the eighteen summers that followed brought Edgar hospitality worth about $460,000. That figure may be on the low side, for Edgar’s vacation sometimes lasted nearly two months. In addition, his journeys to California were usually logged as official ‘inspection trips,’ meaning that taxpayers footed the travel expenses. Since 1950, Edgar’s FBI salary had been more than that of a Congressman or a member of the Cabinet.

  Just months before his death, in an off-the-record talk with Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief David Kraslow, Edgar would admit having accepted this largesse. Plaintively, as though it made everything all right, he said he had paid for his own food and drink.

  Nineteen fifty-eight, as few adult Americans could have failed to notice, saw publication of Edgar’s book Masters of Deceit, touted as a manual on ‘Communism in America and How to Fight It.’ Because Edgar was the author, it became a massive best-seller, selling 250,000 copies in hardcover and 2,000,000 in paperback. The book became required reading in many schools. In a formal announcement, the Justice Department said the royalties were to go to the FBI Recreation Fund.

  Masters of Deceit was not written by Edgar, nor was it even his idea. The book grew out of a suggestion by Assistant Director William Sullivan, was written by four or five Bureau agents assigned to the job and was ‘polished up’ by Fern Stukenbroeker, an agent with a Ph.D. who worked in Crime Records. Agents all over the country were required to promote the book and to place ‘reviews’ – written in advance at the Bureau – with friendly newspapers. ‘Masters of Deceit,’ went the in-house joke, ‘written by the Master of Deceit who never even read it.’

  After Edgar’s death, an official inquiry would establish that many thousands of dollars of FBI Recreation Fund money had been diverted to uses other than the ‘athletic and social functions’ for which the fund had been created. Moreover, only a fifth of the income from the book went to the fund at all. Edgar rebuffed suggestions that the remainder should go to a heart or cancer charity, and divided it among himself, Clyde, Lou Nichols and Bill Nichols (no relation), a journalist brought in to help with the final draft.

  ‘I just don’t remember,’ was Lou Nichols’ reply, when asked years later how much he received. Edgar was more forthright – in private. Each of the four men, he admitted, received $72,000 – about $525,000 at today’s rates.

  Edgar’s friend Clint Murchison, who owned a controlling interest in Henry Holt, the publisher of Masters of Deceit, had virtually instructed the company to buy the book, and, his secretary, Ernestine van Buren, recalled, he ‘stressed his desire that Hoover be given an especially favorable contract.’

  Despite dire warnings to FBI recruits never to speculate on the stock market, Edgar and Clyde grew rich thanks to investment tips – and a special ‘no lose’ arrangement provided by their Texas friends. Edgar invested in oil and insurance companies and railroads, areas in which Murchison and Richardson specialized. Some holdings, in Gulf Life, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway and Texas Oil and Gas, coincided directly with the millionaires’ own interests.

  Edgar and Clyde always invested the same amounts in the same oil concerns. As late as 1973, after Edgar, Murchison and Richardson had died, Clyde was making $4,000 a month from one oil investment alone. ‘People who were in the oil business,’ said former FBI Assistant Director John Mohr, ‘would call him on the phone and tell him, “We’ve got a good one going here; do you want to get in on it, Clyde?”’

  When he died in 1975, Clyde would leave $725,000, almost $2,800,000 at today’s rates. Edgar’s published estate, most of which went to Clyde, included $122,000 in oil, gas and mineral leases. Unless he lost a great deal in the years before his death, the real fortune may have been far greater. The following episode reveals that Edgar and Clyde invested huge sums, twice as much as the whole of Edgar’s declared estate, in just one Texas oil project.

  In 1961, while sorting out his late father’s affairs, the Massachusetts businessman Peter Sprague came across correspondence showing that Edgar and Clyde were major investors in Santiago Oil and Gas, a Texas oil drilling company. The former president of Santiago, Leland Redline, confirms it, and documents show Edgar continued to invest in Texas oil. ‘I know we made them a profit,’ said Redline, ‘but the amounts varied from year to year. Their profits were no business of mine.’

  As Sprague recalls it, documents showed Edgar and Clyde put huge sums into Santiago Oil – more than a million dollars in today’s figures. ‘The question struck me,’ he said, ‘where did they get all that money? Certainly not from saving their FBI salaries …’ Sprague passed the records to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

  ‘Basically,’ Morgenthau said in 1988, ‘these were wires sent to Hoover telling him of his drilling ventures. What caught my eye was these were federal leases – and Hoover was an official of the federal government. Had he helped his principal to get those leases? Was the investment income in effect a finder’s fee? This could have been what they call in the trade a “carried” interest, a reward for bringing the lease or oil prospect to the principal’s attention. That would have been improper for someone in a federal agency, like Hoover.’

  Some information on the links between Edgar’s oil ventures and Clint Murchison, evidence that could have destroyed him, reached federal officials over the years. Telltale business records were sent to the desk of William Hundley, head of the Organized Crime Section at the Justice Department during the Kennedy administration. ‘There wasn’t enough to make a criminal case,’ Hundley recalled. ‘But it was wrong. He shouldn’t have done it.’

  John Dowd, who headed a Justice Department probe into FBI corruption after Edgar’s death, was appalled by what he learned of the oil investments. ‘Hoover did have oil ventures with Clint Murchison,’ Dowd confirmed in 1988. ‘If the drilling company hit a dry hole he’d get his money back. Everything was a sure thing. It had to be a sure thing. If not, he’d get his money back, be it stocks, bonds or oil ventures. It was extraordinary.’

  According to William Sullivan, Edgar ‘had a deal with Murchison where he invested in oil wells and if they hit oil, he got his share of the profits, but if they didn’t hit oil, he didn’t share in the costs … One time, he got into serious trouble on his income tax manipulations, and we had to send an accountant from New York to Houston,
Texas, where apparently the operations existed. He told me afterwards, “Good God Almighty. If the truth were known, Hoover would be in serious trouble …’’’ Apparently he did straighten it out. But he did say that Hoover had done something that was a serious violation of the law.’

  The Bureau’s Chief Clerk, Albert Gunsser, looked after tax matters for Edgar and Clyde in later years – and a grateful Clyde was to leave Gunsser $27,000 in his will.

  In the late summer of 1953, as Edgar was enjoying Murchison’s hospitality at the Del Charro for the first time, Joe McCarthy turned up unexpectedly at the hotel. Edgar told reporters it was just a coincidence, but the evidence suggests it was a crisis meeting between protégé and patron.

  The start of the Eisenhower presidency, the previous year, had given the Senator the chairmanship of the Sub-committee on Investigations, his opportunity to hold the repellent hearings for which he would become infamous. And his Chief Counsel during that season of political terror was one of Edgar’s most favored acolytes, Roy Cohn.

  The gifted son of a New York Supreme Court judge, Cohn had a good deal in common with Edgar. He was already identified with the far Right when he arrived in Washington, at the age of twenty-five, and – although he denied it until his death from AIDS in 1986 – he was homosexual. Like Edgar, he made a point of attacking fellow homosexuals and campaigners for homosexual rights.

  Cohn obtained a job at the Justice Department thanks to George ‘Sok’ Sokolsky, a columnist close to Edgar who checked in with the FBI each day for advice on what to write. He was also close to Walter Winchell and got his first audience with Edgar within minutes of requesting it. Edgar urged him to defy his superiors, press ahead with a planned prosecution of alleged American Communists at the United Nations and keep in touch. ‘It was obvious,’ Cohn recalled, ‘that I was trusted.’

  It was Edgar who recommended Cohn to Joe McCarthy, and Edgar attended the celebrations when the Senator appointed him Chief Counsel. McCarthy and his mentor were becoming closer by the month, as Cohn discovered when he attended a series of private dinners at the apartment of the Senator’s fiancée, Jean Kerr.