by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
In turn, the liberals of the time were wrong in specific — in trying to defend the Rosenbergs and the American Communist Party. But they were right in general when, like Senator Smith, they defended the right to dissent. Each side had a partial truth, but that was not clear at the time. Instead, the first five years of the 1950s were truly the Age of Fear.
FACT: After World War II, the Soviets made sure that Communist governments ruled in nearby Europe. Communists were in charge in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and in the eastern half of Germany. China had turned Communist, and many of the people seeking to end colonial rule in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean found inspiration in Communist ideas.
FACT: In 1953, riots broke out in East Germany and spread to some four hundred cities until Soviet tanks restored order. Three years later, a nationwide revolt swept through Hungary, only to be crushed by the Soviets.
THE INSIDE STORY: Were the Soviets the allies of common people everywhere, fighting against imperialist nations such as England, France, and America, or were they themselves the worst modern empire builders, crushing free expression anywhere they could? By the mid-’50s, the debates over Stalin and Communism had turned into fights over who would govern throughout the world. And all these clashes were in the shadow of the ever-more-deadly atomic weapons that both America and Russia continued to test by flexing their muscles and showing the death they could spread at the push of a button.
This 1954 film was one of many at the time in which something dark and dangerous welled up from the deep.
J. Edgar Hoover was content. By all accounts, he was enjoying his “best and happiest years.” In 1952, the Republican war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president with Richard M. Nixon as his vice president. No longer did the director have to battle against an administration that mistrusted him and downplayed the Communist threat. All across America, from nursery schools to government offices, the word was out: be careful, watch what you say, note what you see, guard against the infection of Communism. It is easy to imagine that, now that his fears were shared by the entire nation, Hoover experienced a kind of peace.
In the following photo, taken in 1953, Hoover is with, from left to right: Senator McCarthy, Clyde Tolson, and the businessman Royal Miller. The four men, with their high pants set at the slopes of their potbellies, standing at the shuffleboard court, look like an advertisement for a senior cruise or an old-time retirement home. You can imagine they play fierce games of pinochle and look forward to a daily shave at the local barbershop. But when you realize the power Hoover held at just this moment, the photo is chilling. The emotion it conveys is a control so total, it is smug and ugly. In this insulated space there is total safety, complete authority.
The four men are at the Hotel Del Charro, an exclusive resort near San Diego that had strict rules. Jews were almost never allowed in as guests and certainly no blacks, Asians, or Hispanics. The Del Charro was extremely expensive: the bill for Hoover and Tolson’s first visit there came to some $20,000 (which would have about the same purchasing power as $163,000 today). But the director never owed a cent. The resort’s owner, Clint Murchison, a fabulously wealthy Texas oilman, reserved Bungalow A just for them and covered their costs.
Hoover at the Del Charro with his wealthy Texas oilmen hosts
Everything at the resort needed to be precisely as Hoover wanted it. One time he arrived to find that they did not have his favorite ice cream. FBI agents woke up the man who owned the ice-cream company in the middle of the night, got him to open his plant, then sent a secretary from their office to pick it up and rush it to the waiting director.
Murchison co-owned a nearby racetrack with Sid Richardson, another Texas oil tycoon, and Hoover loved to bet on the horses. But his bets carried no risk. Murchison gave him inside tips. It was the same with oil drilling. Most people who invest in an oil well are taking a big gamble; if the well comes up dry, they lose. But Murchison told Hoover where to invest, and he did not collect if a well failed. Hoover was insulated by the limitless Murchison fortune, just as he was protected by the new administration. He lived on an island of wealth and power cordoned off from the concerns of blacks, Jews, union organizers, and social critics.
Hoover enjoyed betting on races (especially at the Del Mar track, where there was little risk), being with guys, and rubbing shoulders with celebrities. This card is from the track’s founders: singer Bing Crosby, actor Pat O’Brien, and businessman Bill Quigley.
Almost all the African Americans he worked with — even if they were officially FBI agents — acted as his domestic help, driving his car, grooming his garden, or cleaning his house. The Jews he knew were allies in anti-Communism (such as McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn) and/or wealthy themselves (such as the liquor magnate Lewis Rosenstiel). Hoover was clean, successful, and supremely powerful. And then there was McCarthy, just at the edge, ready to go back out into the world, to do the dirty work.
During the visit to the Del Charro, Hoover gave an interview with a local newspaper and spoke appreciatively about McCarthy: He “is a former Marine. He was an amateur boxer. He’s Irish. Combine those, and you’re going to have a vigorous individual, who is not going to be pushed around. . . . I view him as a friend and believe he so views me.” McCarthy was the man’s man who would “attack subversives” and take heat for it. “But,” Hoover added, using the formula that defined his own life, “sometimes a knock is a boost.” McCarthy was the young tough who was going to swing away at the nation’s enemies while his proud godfather watched from within his gated compound.
Murchison had been one of the secret sponsors when McCarthy used a fake photo against Tydings. H. L. Hunt, another very wealthy Texas oilman, paid for radio and television shows that spread the message of extreme anti-Communism. The Hunt broadcasts were explicitly anti-Semitic and racist — one program defended slavery in America as “benign” compared to “barbaric” practices in Africa. That was the outer fringe of the anti-Communist movement. With McCarthy leading the way, a chill edge of fear influenced the entire nation. The Smith Act of 1940 had made it illegal for Communists to speak about revolution, even if there was no evidence that they were plotting any action. By 1954, 52 percent of Americans felt that all Communists should be put in prison, while an astonishing 80 percent believed Communists should lose their citizenship.
There was no room in the law anymore for John Reed, or Paul Robeson, or the angry Richard Wright. In a strict sense, Communist ideas were legal, but Communist Party leaders were convicted criminals. People who owned copies of books by Marx and Lenin began to cover them with brown paper and hide them on their shelves. This was no idle fear. Indeed, in one case, a government employee was considered unreliable because “you maintained in your library books on Communism, Socialism, and Marxism.”
Hoover no longer gallivanted around with Tolson in eye-catching white suits and expensive leather shoes. Though they still sometimes wore similar suit jackets, the colors were gray, the styling conventional. They were meant to look just like every other office manager. Hoover treasured conformity in thought, in belief, in appearance, in action. He wanted people to behave like orderly notes on file cards. Mark Felt had already been an FBI agent for twelve years when, in 1954, he was invited to meet Hoover. He knew he needed careful instruction in exactly how to perform. His “handshake had to be firm but not too firm. Hoover disliked a ‘bone crusher’ as well as a limp grip. He detested moist palms, and we were told to have a dry handkerchief ready to wipe off any sweat before the crucial handclasp.”
Hoover and Tolson, probably in 1952 — their clothing is similar but no longer identical. They could be any bureaucrats working in any business at the time. In fact, a best-selling novel about businessmen of the day was called The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit — though the man in the book had his own wartime secret to hide. There was something both reassuring and unsettling about the pressure to conform.
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nbsp; Felt noticed Hoover’s “immaculate appearance”; then — and always — he seemed in “complete control.” The director expected exactly the same discipline and self-control from his men. His agents all wore the same white shirts and dark suits and socks and had the same short, neatly cut hair. Like a fanatical schoolteacher, Hoover insisted that FBI memos have precisely the same amount of white space in their borders. Indeed, in order to make sure he was not being followed, Hoover ruled that all his car trips must be mapped out with only right turns.
A woman who had sat across from Hoover once wrote that “his look of supreme confidence — can confidence be evil? — was absolutely frightening,” In this 1952 photo, you can see that complete and immobile certainty. The world was under his control and as he liked it.
The fact that Hoover’s dress code made FBI agents easy to spot did not seem to concern him. He needed the public to see the FBI as the perfect image of order and discipline. That way, he believed, citizens would turn over information to the Bureau — and hesitate to commit crimes. But of course the standard dress made life much easier for the Soviets. A one-time Communist spy later wrote that it was all too easy to spot G-men, with “their clothing style, guilty-thievish glances, and clumsy manners.”
Hoover’s agency of well-trained conformists played a key part in the effort to root anything smacking of Communism out of American life. But the FBI was hardly alone. Eager anti-Communists could be found everywhere, from the smallest town to the largest city. The Bureau echoed, as much as it created, the national mood of fear. By the early 1950s, the loyalty oath system that President Truman had established spread far and wide, and the need to check on a person’s beliefs gave the FBI a perfect excuse to pry into private lives. By 1955, about one in every five American workers was required to take an oath swearing that he or she was not a Communist and was “loyal” to the United States.
How could you spot a Communist? It was as if the whole country were living in the lines of Hoover’s file system — noting down anything strange, anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary. A housewife in Oregon suspected a neighbor of being a Communist because “he was always talking about world peace.” A railroad worker in Michigan caught a hint of danger when he “saw a map of Russia” hanging on a wall in a nearby house. A woman in San Francisco reported a fellow employee because “he would never wear his tie home or his coat home. . . . For a while he wore one of those great big mustaches and I have heard people say that . . . those are indications that he is not a capitalist.”
In ethnic urban neighborhoods, Catholic teenagers fueled by anti-Communist fire clashed with Jewish young people marching for leftist causes. The Cold War between America and the Soviet Union was also fought on city streets.
While busybody neighbors reported on maps and ties, officers of the law found new reasons for suspicion. When the American tanks rolled into Holland at the end of World War II, Trude Guermonprez (my aunt) was starving. She saw her first American soldiers while out in a field digging up tulip bulbs to feed herself. Though she was Jewish, she managed to evade the Nazis throughout the war, while her husband, a gentile, had been one of the leaders of the Dutch Resistance. He was captured and executed by the Nazis, and in honor of his heroism, the postwar Dutch government offered to support her. But she chose to join her parents, who were teaching at a college in America. When the anti-Communist crusade began in earnest, several government men called on the college and argued that Trude should not be allowed to stay in the country. The fact that her husband had been in the Dutch Resistance suggested to them that he might have been a Communist. That was how wide the blanket of fear spread: having fought against the genocidal Nazis implied being a nonconformist, a person opposed to authority, a rebel, perhaps a red. The college stood up for my aunt, who went on to become an American citizen. But most of those who came under suspicion were not as lucky.
The author Howard Fast was a public member of the Communist Party, and the FBI continually buzzed around him. He and his wife, Bette, were followed on the streets, their phones were tapped, and a babysitter hired to watch their children tried to place electronic bugs in their house. In 1950, he was sentenced to three months in prison for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. While he was away, his wife later told their daughter, Rachel, only one person called to check in on the family. “They were afraid. Everyone was afraid.” Old friends walked by the Fast family in restaurants and pretended not to see them. “There were agents watching, everywhere,” Bette Fast recalled, “noting who knew whom, who talked to whom. We understood it. You can’t image how it was. It was a terrible time. Terrible.”
In the 1930s, the Chicago Communists threw Richard Wright out of a May Day parade and marched past him with blank faces. In 1950, people were so afraid of being seen as Communists that they averted their eyes from the Fast family. The flags had changed, but the pressure to conform was just as strong.
Fast decided to use his skill as a writer to deal with his jailing. But he did not write a memoir. Instead, he wrote a novel about Spartacus, the gladiator-slave who led a massive revolt in Rome in 73 BCE. Spartacus was a great hero to many on the left, from Marx on, because he seemed to be an early, strong example of the downtrodden fighting back and battling to take control of society.
The original cover of Howard Fast’s Spartacus
The first editor to read Fast’s book was Angus Cameron, then vice president and editor in chief at Little, Brown, a major publishing house. Cameron loved it. But, as he later told Fast, “J. Edgar Hoover had sent his personal emissary, a federal agent, to Boston, where he met with the president of Little, Brown. He told him that he was not to publish any more books by Howard Fast, that those were the express instructions of J. Edgar Hoover.” Even though Fast was a popular author who had been publishing for twenty years, not one publisher would take his book. He had to publish it himself. The book sold nearly fifty thousand copies in hardcover, but, Fast later said, when a major paperback house printed another hundred thousand, the FBI insisted that the publisher destroy the copies. Fast had to buy them and sell them himself.
One government official who tested employees to see if they had any dangerous ideas revealed a telltale sign: “Of course the fact that a person believes in racial equality doesn’t prove that he’s a Communist, but it certainly makes you look twice, doesn’t it?” A witness in another loyalty case used the same standard: “My impression was that he thought the colored should be entitled to as much as anybody else, and naturally I differed on that.” Speaking up for equality and, worse, integration did make FBI men and loyalty board officers “look twice.” The army made that explicit when it published a helpful guide titled How to Spot a Communist. Keen observers were told to keep an eye out for people who talked about civil rights, or discrimination, or anti-union legislation.
By 1953, the purifiers were not satisfied with the loyalty system, because too many people were being cleared. So the standard for working in government was tightened; in addition to loyalty oaths, there were now staff clearances. Now you could be fired for whom you might love, not just for a cause you once supported or a petition you signed twenty years earlier. If it was rumored that you were homosexual, for example, you could be let go as a “security risk.” The government did not have to prove that you were a homosexual or that enemy agents were actually blackmailing you. Security officers claimed they needed to fire employees if a lie detector test showed that they had kissed, desired, or had fantasies about someone of the same sex at any point in their lives. Of the 654 people who were forced to leave the State Department between 1947 and 1953, during the height of the Age of Fear, 402 were alleged or suspected to have been homosexual.
This entire program of prying and suspicion was based on a false premise. There was not a single proven instance in which a person was coerced into giving up secrets to the Soviets because of his or her homosexual orientation. Not one. In fact, it was Washington politicians’ many heterosexual affairs that filled blackmail
ers’ files. Still, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Security insisted that the firing of suspected homosexuals must continue. “There can be no proof, since future events are not susceptible to proof.” (For a film that captures the effect of the homosexual fear on Washington, see Advise and Consent, the first Hollywood feature film to deal with homosexuality.)
The FBI was not the only organization interested in who attended a May Day rally or came to pay respects at the funeral of old Communist Party members. Hoover’s elaborate file system was echoed by anti-Communist watchdog groups, which claimed to be combining a public service with good business. The American Security Council (ASC), for example, employed ex–FBI agents to piece together a list of some one million supposedly radical Americans, which it then offered for sale to concerned employers. The lists did not have to be perfect; organizations like ASC were not holding trials with rules of evidence. They merely made available the names of Americans they had reason to suspect. But since the company itself decided on the criteria for suspicion, criminals saw a golden opportunity. On some of these lists, if you saw your name, you could pay a fee to be “cleared.” Blackmailers learned to play a similar game with charges of homosexuality. They would stage a seemingly compromising encounter between one of their team and an unsuspecting man, then offer to keep quiet for a price.