‘The way we were shown the pictures was all rather matter-of-fact. The people in that group knew, or behaved as if they knew, that he was gay. We also met two other guys, through Sergeant Bobak, who said they had been to gay parties Hoover attended. Bobak said he had been to Hoover’s house. The boy with him had glommed on to the pictures somehow, swiped them or got hold of prints.
‘At that tender age, it didn’t occur to us that anyone in the gay crowd intended to use the pictures for blackmail. It was more as if they were a curiosity, to be giggled about in the group. It sounds strange now, but at that age – we were only about twenty then – I don’t think it fully occurred to us what it would mean to attach that kind of stigma to a major public figure. It seemed funny to us, kind of laughable. We just looked at the pictures and handed them back and talked about them once or twice afterwards. And that was all. We soon moved away from that circle of people.’
There is no question of collusion between these two witnesses and Susan Rosenstiel. The men who saw the photographs, moreover, knew nothing of Edgar’s connection with Rosenstiel. It seems likely they did see the pictures, and did think they recognized the grotesque man in female garb as Edgar.
Sexual adventuring was folly for Edgar, and especially in the company of a man like Rosenstiel. Several sources told the New York Crime Committee that Rosenstiel had his Manhattan home wired from roof to basement with hidden microphones, so that he could spy on visitors and staff. The man who installed the system, security consultant Fred Otash, said it was rigged to tape conversations for hours on end. Conversations in the library, where Edgar met with Rosenstiel and his cronies, were recorded as a matter of routine. The millionaire was quite capable of having the sex sessions at the Plaza bugged or arranging for Edgar to be photographed in his female costumes.
Meyer Lansky, who claimed Edgar was no threat, that he had been ‘fixed,’ was Rosenstiel’s close associate. Mrs Rosenstiel quoted her husband as saying that ‘because of Lansky and those people, we can always get Hoover to help us.’ The mobster’s insurance policy, according to associates, was photographic evidence of Edgar’s homosexual activity. The evidence suggests that in the late fifties, at a difficult time for the mob, the episodes at the Plaza may have renewed that insurance.
In July 1958, soon after the first Plaza episode – and in order to be seen to be responding to the uproar about the mobsters’ conference at Apalachin – Edgar asked his Domestic Intelligence Division to produce a study on organized crime. Though the full two-volume report remains classified, its summary conclusion stated:
Central Research has prepared a monograph on the Mafia for the Director’s approval. This monograph includes the following points on the Mafia: The Mafia does exist in the U.S. It exists as a special criminal clique or caste engaged in organized crime activity. The Mafia is composed primarily of individuals of Sicilian/Italian origin and descent …
This, of course, was contrary to Edgar’s stated belief, and his response was perverse. In private he seemed grudgingly to accept that the Mafia existed. He exploded, however, when he heard the report had been sent to other top law enforcement officials, including Attorney General Rogers.
Edgar ordered all the circulated copies to be retrieved within hours of delivery. No one outside the Bureau ever read the report, which Edgar referred to thereafter as ‘baloney.’>2
In 1959, meanwhile, Edgar made public speeches saying he hoped ‘to keep such pressure on hoodlums and racketeers that they can’t light or remain anywhere.’ In September, in Chicago, an FBI surveillance microphone hit the jackpot. Sam Giancana was overheard referring repeatedly to ‘the Commission,’ the cabal that ruled organized crime nationwide. He even ran through the names of its members, ticking them off one by one.
Agents regarded this as a major breakthrough, but it did not move Edgar to change his stance. Three years later he would still be insisting that ‘no single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the nation.’
By late 1959, agents working on the new Top Hoodlum Program realized something was badly wrong. Agent William Turner, on an inspection visit to the Bureau’s Los Angeles office, concluded the program was ‘dead in the water.’ In Chicago, the specialist staff was cut from ten agents to five. ‘Mr Hoover seemed to lose interest,’ recalled Chicago’s Bill Roemer. ‘Organized crime was no longer his top priority.’
In New York, agent Anthony Villano was told by his superior that recent operations against the Mafia were probably ‘only a temporary operation designed to satisfy criticism and would be disbanded after the heat died down.’ In New York, where 400 agents were working on Communism that year, just four were assigned to organized crime.
Edgar’s much-trumpeted onslaught on the mob had turned out to be a phony war. It would become real enough, however, just two years later. In Attorney General Robert Kennedy the mob chieftains – and Edgar – would meet real opposition at last.
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‘Hoover passed along gossip to the President he served, and that practice could raise questions in a President’s mind. What did Hoover know about him? In theoretical terms, that put Hoover in the position of a veiled blackmailer.’
Dean Rusk, former Secretary of State
In October 1955, Joseph Kennedy had returned from a foreign vacation to an America in turmoil. President Eisenhower had just survived a near-fatal heart attack, and many doubted whether he would be fit enough to run in 1956. Would the Democratic candidate be Adlai Stevenson? If so, would Kennedy’s thirty-eight-year-old son John be on the ticket for Vice President?
The Kennedy political machine was beginning to roll. The prize that had eluded the father was now on the horizon for the son. That fall day, however, Joseph Kennedy enthused about a very different possibility – that within twelve months America might elect President J. Edgar Hoover. At home in Hyannis Port, the family headquarters in Massachusetts, he dictated this letter:
Dear Edgar,
I think I have become too cynical in my old age, but the only two men I know in public life today for whose opinion I give one continental both happen to be named Hoover – one John Edgar and one Herbert – and I am proud to think that both of them hold me in some esteem … I listened to Walter Winchell mention your name as a candidate for President. If that should come to pass, it would be the most wonderful thing for the United States, and whether you were on a Republican or Democratic ticket, I would guarantee you the largest contribution that you would ever get from anybody and the hardest work by either a Democrat or Republican. I think the United States deserves you. I only hope it gets you.
My best to you always.
Sincerely,
Joe
The notion that Edgar might yet run for the White House was merely a flattering gesture by his old congressional allies. Yet Edgar framed Joe Kennedy’s letter and kept it on his office wall for the rest of his life. It was part of a vast correspondence of mutual admiration.
The FBI file on the elder Kennedy suggests a man taking out political insurance. At sixty-seven, he was a figure of immense power but dubious history. Biographers agree that, like Lewis Rosenstiel’s fortune, a great part of the Kennedy fortune derived from Prohibition bootlegging in league with organized crime. Frank Costello liked to say he had ‘helped Joe Kennedy get rich,’ that they had been partners.
Kennedy’s years as Ambassador to London, at the start of World War II, had sealed his personal political fate. He thought the Germans were the right leaders for Europe, opposed America’s entering the war and believed Hitler was bluffing. He said he would cheerfully ‘sell Poland down the river,’ and that influential American Jews threatened the peace of the world. Learning that Kennedy was also scheming against him politically, President Roosevelt summoned him home, persuaded him not to withdraw his support during the 1940 election, then fired him.
Roosevelt thought Kennedy a ‘thief,’ ‘one of the most evil, disgusting men I have ever known.’ Harry Truman said he was �
�as big a crook as we’ve got anywhere in this country.’ Kennedy and Edgar, however, had an enduring relationship.
They had met, some say, as long ago as the twenties, when Kennedy was financing movies in Hollywood. He introduced Edgar to a clutch of movie stars – decorative females who looked good at his side and belied the rumors about his homosexuality. A quarter of a century later, Edgar and Clyde had become occasional guests at the Kennedy winter retreat in Florida. When there were first discussions about setting up a J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, Kennedy promised a large contribution. He once offered Edgar a princely salary to join the Kennedy organization as ‘security chief.’
From 1943, for his part, Kennedy was a Special Service contact for the FBI, complete with Bureau symbol and running file, ready to use his influence in industry and the diplomatic world ‘for any advantage the Bureau might desire.’ Years later, knowing Edgar’s jealousy of the CIA, he leaked to Edgar what he learned as a member of Eisenhower’s board on Foreign Intelligence.
From 1951 the FBI maintained a Resident Agency, staffed by four agents, at Hyannis Port. Since it had no other discernible purpose, unkind observers said it existed ‘solely to appease and serve the Kennedys.’ Bureau agents buttered up ‘the Ambassador,’ extended courtesies to the family – and kept Edgar briefed on what its members were doing.
Edgar’s career seemed assured as the fifties drew to a close. He was already laden with honors, and President Eisenhower doled out a new one, the President’s Award for Distinguished Civilian Service. Officials in Indiana declared a J. Edgar Hoover Day in 1959, and another was planned for Illinois.
Above all, Edgar remained close to the seat of power and to the man he hoped would be the next president. As politicians geared up for the 1960 election, Edgar was seen a good deal with his protégé of the McCarthy era, Vice President Richard Nixon. It was, rather, a matter of Nixon making sure he was seen with Edgar. They went to the races together and, when Edgar celebrated his thirty-fifth year as Director, Nixon came to his office to pay obeisance.
Nixon was the clear Republican favorite, but the Party’s popularity was at its lowest ebb in twenty years. Edgar, like many others, covered his bets. He ordered agents to supply Nixon with research material for his speeches and kept a weather eye on the Democrats.
The Democrats were juggling Joseph Kennedy’s son John, now forty-two, the senator from Massachusetts; veteran contender Adlai Stevenson; Senator Hubert Humphrey; and Lyndon Johnson. For all his father’s blandishments, John Kennedy was not the candidate Edgar preferred. If there was to be a Democrat in office, he favored Johnson.
Edgar had known Johnson since the thirties, when he had first come to Washington, and they had been close neighbors since the forties. Edgar sometimes visited the Johnsons for dinner or Sunday brunch and – he told colleagues – filled in as babysitter for their daughters. They came to think of him as an uncle and helped look for his dogs when they strayed. The Johnson home, Edgar said, ‘was a place where you could get the best chili con carne and the best mint julep in Washington.’
Lyndon Johnson, one of Washington’s craftiest manipulators of men, understood early on the importance of making Edgar his friend or – more important – ensuring he never gave him cause to become an enemy. Johnson’s political closet was bulging with skeletons. There were corrupt business deals, and women, and above all there were the allegations of ballot-rigging in 1948, when Johnson won election to the Senate by just eighty-seven votes.1
During the outcry following that election, Edgar had made a personal visit to Austin, the Texas state capital, and was seen closeted with Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, who had backed Johnson. The FBI’s probe of the vote fraud was conducted, observers recalled, with ‘a notable lack of investigative and prosecutorial vigor.’ According to the definitive study of the case, it soon ‘disappeared without trace.’
Johnson referred to Edgar privately as ‘that queer bastard.’ He fawned over him, however, in a steady stream of complimentary letters. ‘I think you and all your men are tops,’ he scrawled on one. ‘I see them under all circumstances and when I do I’m proud that I am a public servant.’ In the last weeks of the Eisenhower administration, Clyde Tolson lobbied frantically for a special law to ensure that, should Edgar retire he would continue to receive his full salary. This was achieved, not least thanks to pressure from Majority Leader Johnson.
Edgar reciprocated. He was observed visiting Room S-208, the hideaway Senate office known as the Johnson Ranch East, to proffer advice. He even flew to Texas in November 1959 to make speeches extolling Johnson’s virtues. During a whistle-stop tour, including a visit to the Johnson ranch, the Senator bear-hugged Edgar for the cameras. Edgar then returned to Washington after a meeting with oil millionaire Billy Byars, a regular vacation companion in California and – like Murchison – one of Johnson’s financial backers. Disregarding all the proprieties, the Director of the FBI had been making a campaign appearance on behalf of a presidential candidate.
Clint Murchison, the kingmaker who had played a key role in bringing Eisenhower to power, had something on all the political horses. The big money went to Nixon, as it had in the past and would in the future. He also sent an aide to deliver $25,000 in cash to the Kennedys. This, though, as Bobby Baker put it, was ‘just betcopping.’ Edgar’s friend Murchison was really rooting for Lyndon Johnson, a candidate sure to protect the interests of the big oil companies.
Murchison cared about power, not party labels, and one man – Edgar – remained a fixture on his political agenda. Two years before the election, when right-wing senator William Knowland had presidential hopes, the millionaire offered this advice in a letter to Johnson: ‘If you can work Knowland, Nixon and Hoover together,’ he told his fellow Texan, ‘you can control the United States.’
In 1960, with Johnson’s name replacing Knowland’s, the same formula applied. And as the campaign got under way, Edgar began considering the strengths – and weaknesses – of the young man who did not fit any agenda but his own, John Kennedy.
‘When John Kennedy was making a strong challenge for the presidency,’ recalled Cartha DeLoach, ‘Mr Hoover asked Clyde Tolson, and Tolson told me, to make a thorough review of the files. They knew all about Kennedy’s desires for sex, and the fact that he would sleep with almost anything that wore a skirt. “Joe Kennedy told me,” Mr Hoover said, “that he should have gelded Jack when he was a small boy.”’
The FBI file of dirt on John Kennedy had been opened at the start of World War II, based on British MI-5 reports on his social life while visiting his father, then Ambassador to Britain. He was just twenty years old, and the reports were merely random intelligence filed by a foreign ally. Then, in 1940, Edgar began receiving reports about a twenty-eight-year-old beauty named Inga Arvad, currently living in Washington.
Arvad was a journalist and socialite, Danish-born but with associations in Nazi Germany. She had interviewed Hermann Goring and Adolf Hitler, and by one report went to bed with the latter. She described Hitler in print as ‘very kind, very charming … not evil as he is depicted … an idealist.’
At first Arvad rang no alarm bells at the FBI. Ironically, as a reporter for the Washington Times Herald, she charmed her way to meetings with the Bureau’s top brass. She wrote flatteringly of Edgar’s secretary, Helen Gandy, with her ‘masculine intelligence and womanly intuition,’ and of Clyde, with his ‘intelligent eyes’ and a smile ‘like a good boy expecting the promised candy bar.’ Clyde even introduced Arvad to Edgar at a party.
In late 1941, however, officials scurried for cover. Arvad’s interviews were suddenly declared to have been ‘unsatisfactory.’ Edgar himself had ordered a probe that revealed that ‘a young Ensign of the U.S. Navy known as Jack … has apparently been spending the night with Miss Arvad in her apartment.’
Kennedy, then serving with Naval Intelligence, had been introduced to Arvad by his sister Kathleen. By January 1942, FBI surveillance records confirm, they were having a pass
ionate affair. Kennedy called her ‘Inga-Binga.’ She called him ‘Honeysuckle’ and ‘Honey Child Wilder.’ They talked of marriage, a match – friends recalled – that his father violently opposed.
To separate the lovers, the Navy transferred Kennedy out of Washington, a move that only increased their ardor. Edgar’s agents listened to hidden microphones as the couple made love, ‘on numerous occasions,’ in Room 132 of the Fort Sumter Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. The surveillance was dropped for a while when Arvad began to suspect she was being bugged, then resumed in the summer of 1942. By that time Kennedy’s meddlesome father had arranged for his son’s transfer to the Pacific, where his heroism after the sinking of PT-109 would bring lasting fame.
Like a million wartime romances, the affair with Arvad lasted only months. The FBI’s surveillance had been a legitimate way of handling a potential security risk, and the lovers had done nothing disloyal. It was, however, the start of lasting bitterness between Kennedy and Edgar.
In March 1942, when Arvad realized she was being surveilled, she was overheard telling Kennedy she intended protesting directly to Edgar. She was going to say, ‘Now, look here, Edgar J., I don’t like everybody listening in on my phone …’ In fact, Arvad told Ronald McCoy, her son by a subsequent marriage, Kennedy went with her to confront Edgar. As McCoy recalled it, ‘Jack was furious. Through his father or through Arthur Krock, he knew everybody, so he and Mother went to see J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover told them his investigation showed she was not a Nazi spy or did anything for them. So Jack asked Hoover if he would give them a letter saying she wasn’t a Nazi spy. Hoover said he couldn’t, because if he gave her a letter and then she went out and started working for them tomorrow, his ass was on the line.’
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