Official and Confidential

by Anthony Summers

  Annie Hoover saw herself as ‘a lady,’ with pretensions to a certain social status. If she ever nursed hopes that her husband would improve himself, rise above his origins, they were gone by the time Edgar was born. They vanished altogether when Dickerson was overwhelmed by serious mental illness. Instead, Annie had great expectations of Edgar, too great perhaps for his emotional well-being.

  Edgar missed a vital stage of normal childhood development: the end of total dependence on the mother, a growing bond to a supportive father and the discovery of himself as an independent personality. Rather than working out a set of moral values for himself, he had little more to work with than the unreasoned rules of behavior imposed in childhood. Pushed by his forceful mother, he came to believe that only greater achieving could make him ‘good.’ His was a childhood that left him prone to lifelong insecurity and lack of self-esteem.

  Studies now suggest that, being especially vulnerable, people with such a background tend to block their feelings and cut themselves off from meaningful relationships. They come to think of life in terms of the Good, represented by themselves, and the Bad, represented by everyone and everything that seems to run counter to their way of thinking. Such people often gravitate to groups or organizations, groups that reflect their own limited view of the world. They surround themselves with acolytes who reinforce the notion that they are always right about everything. Such factors are typical of the state psychologists call paranoia.

  Edgar fit the profile. Annie’s expectations account for his compulsion to perform not just well but perfectly. Edgar’s early obsession with record-keeping, his excessive misery when the school Cadet Corps troop failed to carry off a prize, his insistence on tidiness and his neurotic concern about germs are characteristic of his personality type.

  Early on, at an age when a healthy youngster will have an open, inquiring mind, Edgar had rigid, backward-looking attitudes. Even then there was the rapid-fire speech for which the grown man would become famous, talking rather than listening, defense by way of constant attack, the snuffing out of potential argument by never letting the other side have its say. At the FBI, Edgar achieved the paranoid’s ideal. He not only joined a highly disciplined group, he joined one he could mold and totally control for the rest of his life.

  ‘There is no doubt,’ concluded psychiatrist Dr Harold Lief, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, ‘that Hoover had a personality disorder, a narcissistic disorder with mixed obsessive features. I picked up some paranoid elements, undue suspiciousness and some sadism. A combination of narcissism and paranoia produces what is known as an Authoritarian Personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi.’

  While Dr Lief reached this conclusion spontaneously, on the basis of the information in this book, he was later struck by parallels in the personality of Nazi Germany’s secret police chief Heinrich Himmler. Like Edgar, Lief noted, Himmler had a weak father and was heavily dependent on his mother. He too kept precise records and diaries from an abnormally early age. He was at the top of his class at school, but too frail for sports. He involved himself in his college fraternity and had fixed right-wing ideas from an early age. Though a zealous officer cadet, he tried to avoid military service. He was a chatterbox who dominated all conversations, excessively strict with subordinates and outwardly submissive to superiors. He denounced others at every opportunity. He cut himself off emotionally, distanced himself from women and took an unhealthy interest in the ‘immoral’ behavior of others.

  The psychologist Erich Fromm concluded that Himmler was a classic, sadistic Authoritarian. ‘There are thousands of Himmlers living among us,’ he wrote. ‘One must not underestimate the number of people whom they damage and make thoroughly unhappy. The potential Himmler looks like anyone else, except to those who have learned to read character and who do not have to wait until circumstances permit the “monster” to show his colors.’

  It is the social system in which a person lives, however, that determines the outcome of his Authoritarianism. Happily, Edgar and his crippled psyche existed in a society very different from that of Nazi Germany. While he persecuted innumerable people, there were limits to how far he could go. Medically, nevertheless, he was constantly at risk. ‘Had Hoover been unsuccessful or had the world he created for himself collapsed,’ said Dr Lief, ‘it would have been shattering for him. He would certainly have required treatment. As it was, he was able to use his personality successfully. He attained huge power and managed to stay in the system for many, many years. He was, you might say, a successful narcissist and sociopath.’

  A sociopath is a person who, because of mental illness, lacks a sense of social or moral responsibility. Edgar ran his course as head of the FBI, for half a century, by presenting himself as the precise opposite.

  Edgar’s sexuality comes as no surprise to the psychologists. ‘His basic problem,’ said Dr Lief, ‘seems to me to have been that he was both attracted and repelled by women. Because he separated lust and love it’s likely that he idealized mother figures and lusted after the degraded woman, which would explain his reported liking of pornography. If I hadn’t known anything about his alleged homosexual tendencies, my guess would have been that his primary adaptation was to transvestism, which indeed turns out to have been part of the picture.’

  For Edgar, transvestism may have offered a form of release. Like his homosexuality, however, it surely brought terrible inner torment. Studies of transvestism are filled with stories of emotional turmoil. Many transvestites attempt suicide, and almost all live in terror of being exposed. It is surely no coincidence that the earliest report of Edgar’s crossdressing refers to the postwar years, when worries about sex drove him to consult a psychiatrist.

  Edgar’s puritanism seems to have been the hypocrisy of a public man overcompensating for private weaknesses. In 1957, the year before the alleged cross-dressing episodes involving sex with young males at New York’s Plaza Hotel, Edgar had launched a call for the suppression of pornography. ‘If we act now,’ he declared, ‘we can look forward to a new generation of young people with clean minds and healthy bodies living in a better, cleaner America.’

  According to Dr John Money, Professor of Medical Psychology at Johns Hopkins University, Edgar’s sexual conflicts fit a familiar pattern, one seen quite often in policemen. ‘You find this sort of thing in officers who work for the Vice Squad. They may hang out in men’s toilets in order to arrest other men, but they make sure they get themselves serviced first. They may look like knights in shining armor, but they’re undercover agents psychologically as much as by profession.

  ‘Hoover’s whole life,’ observed Dr Money, ‘was one of haunting and hounding people over their sexuality, brutalizing them one way or another because of it. He took on the role of being the paragon, keeping the country morally clean, yet hid his own sexual side. His terrible thing was that he needed constantly to destroy other people in order to maintain himself. Many people like that break down and end up needing medical help. Hoover managed to live with his conflict – by making others pay the price.’

  Noting that some personality types are now universally known by the names of famous case histories – sadism for the Marquis de Sade, masochism for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and so on – Dr Money proposed that Edgar’s name be used in similar fashion. ‘Hoover,’ he believed, ‘is a model to describe those who exhibit a paraphiliac, or perverted, type of sexuality by sacrificing other people to exorcise their own demands. He had what I call “malignant bisexuality,” and I suggest quite seriously that his condition should henceforth be called the “J. Edgar Hoover Syndrome.”’

  On September 30, 1975, a Marine band struck up a specially composed ‘J. Edgar Hoover March’ in the courtyard of the vast concrete complex that Edgar had hoped to see finished, and which is now the FBI headquarters. Hours earlier, workmen had raised a glittering name high on the facade that faces Pennsylvania Avenue. This was to be the J. Edgar Hoover Building, as
decided by Richard Nixon immediately after Edgar’s death.

  The headquarters was inaugurated by Nixon’s successor, President Ford. He chose his words carefully, offering most of his praise not to the memory of Edgar, but to the ‘special agents, legendary symbols of American justice for decades.’ He spoke of Edgar little and with reserve, calling him only ‘a pioneering public servant.’

  By late 1975, caution had become essential. The evils of the Hoover years were beginning to leak out. Appalled senators and congressmen were perusing the documents and listening to the testimony that confirmed Edgar’s abuse of power and of civil liberties.

  The golden name on FBI headquarters became more tarnished, figuratively certainly, with every passing year. ‘Why does society continue to honor someone like Hoover?’ asked Professor Lief. ‘Of course, he thrived in an era when anti-Communism was the unifying theme in the West. Society seems always to need its devils, and Communism was the Devil in this century – though in different circumstances it could have been the Jew or some other “demon.” Hoover seized above all on anti-Communism, so I guess he was honored because he was perceived to be fighting the Devil.

  ‘American society has a strangely polarized attitude toward its heroes. On the one hand people love to discover the idol has clay feet, to find the flaw in the famous man. On the other hand, thousands and thousands of people seem to have a need to identify with a hero, to increase their own sense of strength by believing in someone who presents himself as wiser or more powerful than themselves. And they are reluctant to take the hero off his pedestal, even when they discover that he was not what he seemed. This is a curious contradiction in our society, and sometimes a dangerous one.’

  ‘You affect the future,’ Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen observed, ‘by what you do with the past, how you interpret it. All over the world, when regimes change, so do names. Danzig becomes Gdansk. The Moldau becomes Vltava. Images of Lenin come down all over Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union Stalingrad becomes Volgograd. These are all political statements. They say, “There’s a new way of doing things.” But an FBI agent walking into that building looks up and sees J. Edgar Hoover’s name. What’s the lesson to him – that efficiency and bureaucratic success condone abuse of office?’

  That Edgar created an efficient law enforcement bureau should not have been enough to secure him a position as an American hero for half a century. Someone else, more balanced and with more respect for the rights of citizens, could have set up the FBI. To take Edgar at face value was as perilous as tolerating a dictator simply because he ‘makes the trains run on time.’

  When Edgar was alive, a perceptive writer noted that he had entered ‘the realm of the untouchables, a remote roseate country of mind, mood and attitude, beyond the harsh ridges of reality.’ Now that it is clear what the harsh realities were, it is not enough to complain that Edgar fooled America. The survival of a J. Edgar Hoover for so many years, and in such an atmosphere of phony adulation, could have occurred only in a society led by men who condoned his secret abuses and public hypocrisies, while maintaining otherwise. Edgar had many accomplices, including Presidents – Democrats and Republicans alike – who went along with his excesses because it suited their political purposes.

  If there is a moral here, it is perhaps the one drawn by future Vice President Walter Mondale while taking part in a Senate probe of the CIA and FBI in 1975. ‘The lesson we learn from this history,’ he said, ‘is that we cannot keep our liberty secure by relying alone on the good faith of men with great power.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  See List of Abbreviations on pages 575–7.

  Chapter 1

  1. White House tape transcripts, Oct. 8, 25, 1971.

  Chapter 2

  1. As an alert reader of the hardback edition of this book pointed out, January 1, 1895 was in fact a Tuesday. The mistake is in Hoover’s original note, in HC.

  2. Sullivan served with the FBI for thirty years, from 1941 to 1971, by which time he had risen to the number three post in the Bureau – Assistant to the Director. Because he left the FBI after a quarrel with Hoover, described in detail in a later chapter, it has been suggested that his criticisms may have been more sour grapes than hard fact. Yet conversations with the co-author of Sullivan’s book, former NBC journalist Bill Brown, and analysis of his tape-recorded conversations with congressional investigator Robert Fink, indicated that Sullivan was essentially truthful. His comments may sometimes have been self-serving, but the accusations leveled at Hoover are consistent with other information. His comments remain a unique high-level resource for any study of Hoover. Sullivan was shot dead in 1977 in an apparent hunting accident, shortly before a scheduled appearance before the House committee investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. (The Bureau, by William Sullivan, NY, Norton, 1979, transcript of int. by DES investigator Robert Fink, May 2, 1976, notes of Arthur Schlesinger int., July 26, 1976, ints. Ann Barniker, Charles Bates, Bill Brown, Fred Clancy, Mark Felt, Robert Fink, Richard Helms, Harold Leinbaugh, John McGrail, Robert Mardian, 1988, 1990, David Garrow notes of int. with Charles Brennan.)

  Chapter 4

  1. Rauh is best remembered as a cofounder of Americans for Democratic Action.

  2. Hoover never registered to vote, according to the Washington, D.C., Board of Elections. D.C. residents could not vote at all until 1956, but from 1964 on could vote in presidential elections and for a nonvoting House delegate.

  Chapter 5

  1. Herbert Hoover was not related to J. Edgar Hoover.

  2. While these innovations are generally credited to Hoover, his predecessor Bruce Bielaski insisted they were part of a program he drafted years earlier. (1958 int. of Bielaski, reported to author by Wm. Dufty, 1992.)

  3. The best summation of Hoover’s complex file systems is in From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover, edited by Athan Theoharis, Chicago, Ivan Dee, 1991.

  Chapter 6

  1. Amos aside, it seems three other blacks may have worked as genuine agents. Even that is not certain; they served in New York and Chicago and may also have been used as chauffeurs when Hoover was in town.

  2. This alleged surveillance of Farley is distinct from a later operation Roosevelt ordered for political reasons in 1940. In 1933, relations between Roosevelt and Farley were still cordial.

  Chapter 7

  1. A reader points out that, in Ireland, plainclothesmen of the old G. Division of the Dublin police were long known as GMen. Given that so many FBI agents were of Irish extraction, it seems possible that the appellation was originated not by criminals but within the FBI itself. (corr. Peter McDermott, 1993).

  2. Dr Rubye Johnson, Associate Professor of Social Work at Tulane University, suggests that Hoover derived his notions about women and crime from the idea of women as intrinsically evil that circulated around 1900. The notion has long since been refuted, not least by FBI statistics. The ‘red hair’ thesis is ridiculous. (Int. Dr Rubye Johnson, 1992.)

  3. It seems three agents fired: Charles Winstead, Clarence Hurt and perhaps Purvis. Winstead is generally credited with firing the shots that killed Dillinger. (FBI HQ 67-3900, et al.)

  Chapter 8

  1. The woman with the toy gun has been wrongly identified in picture captions as Cobina Wright. Interviews with Wright and Stuart established that this was an error. Stuart had original copies of the photographs, supplied to her by the Stork Club photographer. The pictures were taken at New Year’s 1936, not 1935, as cited elsewhere.

  Chapter 9

  1. Examples of similar behavior by homosexual officials include President Reagan’s adviser Terry Dolan and Rep. Robert Bauman. (WP, May 11, 1987, Advocate, Apr. 15, 1982, NYT, Oct. 4, 1980, Playboy, Aug. 1990.)

  Chapter 10

  1. The only serious attempt at independent reporting on Hoover between 1937 and the sixties was a New York Post series in the fall of 1959. Writer William Dufty and David Gelman, now a senior editor at Newsweek, remember the palpable fear
they encountered and the countermeasures taken by Hoover. The series was denounced in Congress, and by the National Association of Manufacturers, before it had even been written. Hoover falsely told Joseph Eckhouse, a top Gimbels executive (and thus a vital Post advertiser) that Post editor James Wechsler’s wife had been fired from a previous post for being a Communist. Hoover also ordered the bugging of Wechsler’s Washington hotel room, and a Post reporter’s room was searched. (NYP, Oct. 5-20, 1959, Dorothy Schiff to author, Mar. 30, 1988, ints. Wm. Dufty, David Gelman, Ed Kosner, Joseph Barry, Carl Pelleck, Nancy Wechsler, Cartha DeLoach, 1988, Sullivan to Belmont, Dec. 1, 1958, FBI 94-8-173, H to Hoffman, Jan. 27, 1960, FBI 94-8-180, Wechsler/H corr., Wechsler Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Time, Oct. 19, 1959, NAM News, Feb. 20, 1959, The FBI Nobody Knows, by Fred Cook, NY, Macmillan, 1964, p. 416, Robert Spivack file, FBI 10018954, NYT, Jul. 22, 1975, int. John Crewdson, 1988, Nichols to H, Oct. 17, 1957, Private Collection.)

  Chapter 11

  1. Harry Vaughan, President Truman’s aide, years later said flatly that Corcoran had been tapped during the Roosevelt era – as he was to be during the Truman presidency. No records survive of such a tap during the Roosevelt period, but that does not necessarily mean it did not happen. Not all such records survived. (D, p. 109, and see B, pp. 163ff.)

  Chapter 12

  1. Britain did not fully share the secret with the U.S. until 1943.

  2. Some scholars have questioned whether Stephenson really had access to Roosevelt. The President’s appointment records do not reflect such visits, but the Roosevelt Library Archivist notes that he often had ‘off the record’ meetings, which went unrecorded. Stephenson’s secretary, Grace Garner, said he ‘certainly’ saw the President, and repeatedly. She personally handled much of the relevant cable traffic. (Raymond Teichman, FDR Library Supervisory Archivist, in letter to author, June 16, 1992, int. Garner, 1992.)