by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
Hoover was masterful at preparing such charts to demonstrate the FBI’s ever-greater success. If the FBI were to clash with segregationists and their supporters in the South, it would only ensure a decline in federal arrests and convictions.
How could he, Hoover asked with absolute puzzlement, expect his men to enforce orders that required southern cops to stop saying “Boy, come here” and instead address black men as “Mr.”? The very idea seemed ludicrous to him. Hoover loved coming to Congress and showing off the FBI’s astonishing and ever-improving record of success — how many crimes it had solved, how often cases it brought resulted in convictions. If the FBI started to bring white people accused of resisting integration before the largely white southern juries they would surely face, his conviction rate would plummet. Instead of being seen as an elite authority, the FBI would come across as both alien and ineffectual. He hated that thought. But Hoover was ultimately a Washington bureaucrat. His men would follow orders. After 1944, when the Supreme Court overruled all-white primary elections in the South, FBI agents were assigned to investigate voting rights cases. Indeed, pressed by a black congressman, Hoover began to make sure that more of his agents in the South were northerners so that, at least on paper, they would have some distance from local attitudes.
Hoover always did what he was required to do. But his resistance to the struggle for black rights runs like a thread through his entire life, from his campaign against Marcus Garvey to his obsession with the Communist Party role in the Scottsboro defense. There was something about the move toward integration that shook him on an emotional level, below thought. Analyzing southern white resistance to integration, he said that “colored parents are not as careful in looking after the health and cleanliness of their children.” And those parents might well be living immoral lives, having children without being married. Thus the fear haunting whites was “the specter of racial intermarriage.”
Hoover’s world had always been neatly divided into the categories his mother had taught him: law and lawlessness, purity and immorality, and as he grew up, he folded Christian America and Communist Russia into the pattern. He often said that Communism itself was not the problem, as it was merely “the latest form of the eternal rebellion against authority.” If blacks were not kept down, they would rise up and flood the white world of law, morals, and faithful marriage. Black Americans were like the beast inside Hoover himself, which he said would be let loose if he ever loved a woman and she betrayed him. If he had grown up in a home haunted by the “specter” of its own African-American ancestry, the question of black rights was not one of law but of his own essence. Something was rising in the country — something strange, large, and terrifying — and it was threatening the walls of Hoover’s carefully constructed world.
In 1954, the FBI was not required to take an active role in monitoring the civil rights struggle. None of the branches of government — executive, legislative, or judicial — was eager to tangle with segregation, so Hoover’s reluctance was fully within the law. And yet, when Hoover felt it was right for his Bureau to act, he found his own way around the rules. And the change in the national mood was not just in the area of civil rights.
Three years after overturning segregation in schools, the Supreme Court made a second decision that challenged Hoover’s world. In 1957, the court ruled against the idea that Communist Party members could be jailed for merely believing in revolution. Though World War II was long over, Hoover had kept up and modified his secret list of people to sweep away and hold in “custodial detention.” The Security Index, now termed the Registry List, was his latest plan for protection by separation: knowing whom to jail in order to keep the rest of America safe.
FBI leaders gathered and decided that if they could no longer arrest Party members based on their beliefs, they would have to do something new. Instead of spying on revolutionaries, the director would pay informers to enter Communist cells and secret meetings and sow dissention from within. For forty years, FBI men had gathered intelligence. In 1956, they began a Counter-Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was Hoover’s triumph and his final fall.
Josephine Baker was an African-American singer and dancer who was better known and more popular in France than in America. She was a true international star and a visible, outspoken opponent of racial segregation. On October 16, 1951, she came to the place any celebrity would visit in New York: the Stork Club. Just then one of the biggest hits on Broadway was the musical South Pacific, which took its own pathbreaking stand against racism in both its storyline and its popular songs. Baker was accompanied to the club by a group that included Roger Rico, a French singer who was one of the leading men in the show. They arrived after eleven p.m., normal enough for a club that served stars after they finished their performances. But she got the distinct impression that she was not welcome. The club’s owner, Sherman Billingsley, had built his reputation on recognizing his guests and anticipating their needs. He ignored her, and for an hour Baker’s party watched waiters whiz by — without ever being served. Baker claimed that Walter Winchell was seated nearby and seemed equally determined to pretend she was not there.
Baker and the NAACP sued the club for discrimination, and Winchell became the object of a barrage of criticism. He was Mr. Stork Club, as well as the voice of the nation. Shouldn’t he stand up for Baker, for integration, for principle? Winchell did just the opposite. Angry at being criticized, he became increasingly outraged at Baker, at the NAACP, and at the causes they supported. Winchell, like Hoover, chose to fight for the world he knew, not the world that was taking shape. He became more and more a difficult, even obnoxious, figure of the past. Though he continued to write his column, speak on radio, and even occasionally host a TV show, he seemed bitter, dated, and out of step with his times. (For a brilliant portrait of the worst of Winchell — based on reality but with some fictional touches — see the movie The Sweet Smell of Success.)
In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the new head of the Soviet Union, gave a speech in which he detailed Stalin’s crimes. When Howard Fast read a translation of those “twenty thousand words of horror and infamy,” he “exploded with rage.” Fast was finally realizing that he had devoted his life, risked his family, to protect a lie.
Hoover saw that the American Communist Party was teetering, so he set out to push it over. Paid informers signed up to join the Party, then angrily brought up Stalin’s murders. They caused rifts between factions, further splintering the tiny organization. In order to weaken a Party member, people working for the Bureau would “dress him in a snitch jacket”— that is, spread the rumor that he was an FBI agent so that he’d be kicked out of the Party. If the FBI learned that a Party member was a homosexual, they would arrest him in order to embarrass the Party. More and more informers bent on disruption joined the Communist Party until it was like a dead log, hollowed out from within.
Hoover won. The American Communist Party lost. COINTELPRO was so successful, it became a joke. By 1960, it was common knowledge that half the Party members were FBI informants, spying on one another. To be fair, the Soviets were still eager to infiltrate their spies into America, so weakening the Party did make it more difficult for the Soviets to gather information and influence policy. If you judge by results, then, COINTELPRO worked. But Hoover was also leading the FBI deeper and deeper into the darkness. In the name of law, freedom, and democracy, his agents were using the strategies of the Soviet secret police. Officers of the United States government were working to hamper free thought, silence free speech, and prevent social protest. Hoover was becoming exactly what he detested: a force undermining the rule of law. And because of his clever filing system, no one was to ever know.
Hoover hated Robert F. Kennedy, the son of the immensely wealthy Joseph Kennedy and brother of the handsome rising star of the Democratic Party, John F. Kennedy. Hoover saw “Bobby” as an “arrogant whipper-snapper, who pushed around his family’s money and power.” That is not a bad description of Ke
nnedy when Hoover first met him in the early 1950s. He was a rich kid who never had to spend a dime of his own money yet was a scrapper, a “runt,” who battled everyone around him. You either admire a prep-school brawler like that or, like Hoover, you can’t stand him.
In 1957, Kennedy was working for a Senate committee that was investigating crime in unions. Just then, a policeman in the small town of Apalachin, in upstate New York, stumbled on a national meeting of crime bosses. As the men scattered, the police gathered enough information to paint a picture for the public: Italian Americans from New York, Buffalo, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Miami — many with long criminal records — were all in touch, carving up territories, making plans.
Los Angeles crime boss Frank DeSimone (in dark suit) being taken to court for his arraignment after the Apalachin raid
Kennedy stormed into the FBI, demanding information about the extremely suspicious men whose names were now all over the newspapers. The Bureau had nothing for him. Hoover still loved tales of his fight against the gangsters of the 1930s, but Dillinger, Nelson, Floyd, and the other gunmen of the time ran small local gangs. Hoover had little to say about organized crime. As he saw it, criminals cropped up here and there because individuals chose to be lawless and local officials looked the other way. Kennedy was saying just the opposite, that crime was a national problem, that there were syndicates, networks, of criminal bosses stretching across the nation. And why wasn’t the FBI dealing with them?
Why, indeed? To those who believe in conspiracies, Hoover’s resistance to going after what we now call the Mafia is a clue as bright as a blazing sun. One rumor has it that the mob had photos proving that he was a homosexual, a cross-dresser who liked to wear women’s clothing, and used the pictures to blackmail him. Another claims that during his Stork Club days Hoover made a deal with a Mafia boss in which they agreed to stay out of each other’s way. These popular myths are not true. The most likely reason is similar to why he did not want his men having to clash with white police chiefs in the South. Hoover let the local be local.
By law, the FBI was supposed to deal only with national crimes. So long as cities, neighborhoods, and small towns functioned relatively peacefully, Hoover did not feel a need to intervene. But that is not the only reason he had stayed away from mob bosses. On the one hand, Hoover would need tools. How was he going to get information about the Mafia? The organization was overwhelmingly Italian, and Hoover’s agents were almost entirely white Protestants or Irish Catholics. He could use illegal wiretaps or bugs but not if he’d have to share power with other police forces. He would never let outsiders know about the Bureau’s illegal activities. On the other hand, any agents who got in contact with the mob were in danger of being killed, bribed, or blackmailed. There was too much chance of failure and no clear path to success. Hoover would never take on a job like that unless a superior made him do it. In 1957, Robert Kennedy, the most annoying guy in the world, could point to the newspapers and demand action.
The meeting in upstate New York was evidence of precisely the hydra-headed monster Hoover had ignored. Going after the mob would be like challenging white policemen in the South: the FBI would have to be the arm of the nation challenging local power. The Bureau finally decided to get legal permission to use the skill it already had, planting electronic devices to record the mob leaders. Once again Hoover would be master of information. And the Mafia bosses had many interesting things to say — not only about their own plots and plans but also about a certain wealthy and handsome senator with political ambitions: Robert Kennedy’s brother John.
At first glance, 1960 might seem to have been the worst year in Hoover’s life. The America he had done so much to shape was slipping away. The Democrat John F. (Jack) Kennedy, the youngest elected president in American history, defeated Hoover’s old ally Richard Nixon. College students in San Francisco began protesting against HUAC, a demonstration that Hoover termed a “Communist-inspired riot” but that was actually just the first hint of a decade of campus unrest. Frank Kameny, an openly gay man, made the case to the Supreme Court that firing a person for his or her sexual orientation was “no less illegal than discrimination based on religious or racial grounds.” He lost but raised a legal issue that would become increasingly important.
Frank Kameny organized the Mattachine Society of Washington to help gays and lesbians organize and speak out.
Perhaps the biggest shift came in the arena where Hoover had done so much to shape public opinion: film. Hollywood decided to make a movie out of Spartacus, the Howard Fast novel Hoover had tried to suppress nine years earlier. Worse yet, Dalton Trumbo, a writer who had been officially banned from the movies after he defied HUAC, was hired to write the script. The film was a full-color spectacular that went on to win four Academy Awards.
The blacklisting of Dalton Trumbo ended with his visible work on the Academy Award–winning film version of Spartacus. Trumbo actually felt that Howard Fast was too pro-Communist, but he was a skilled writer who knew how to craft a compelling script.
The incoming president aimed to bring a new spirit to Washington, and many were sure he would begin by replacing Hoover. The Harvard-educated Kennedy and his French-speaking wife were sophisticated, cultured, and eager for intellectual debate. It was as if, now that Hoover had reached retirement age, the grandchildren of John Reed had taken power and would usher him out the door. And by the end of 1960, word was out that Jack was going to appoint Bobby as attorney general, which is to say, as Hoover’s boss. Wouldn’t Bobby, who had clashed with Hoover over the mob three years earlier, want to bring in his own man as head of the FBI?
No. Hoover’s meticulous files made sure of that. Throughout his adult life, Jack Kennedy had pursued women. Being married, a senator, and then a presidential candidate had done nothing to stop him. Not only had he been unfaithful, but he was also extremely reckless. One of his mistresses had been photographed with leading Nazis. Another, it would turn out, was a Communist spy. The FBI bug listening to mob bosses in Chicago turned up evidence that yet a third woman was involved with both Kennedy and a prominent Mafia don. The press heard rumors of many of these affairs but kept silent. Hoover gathered evidence of every single one of Jack’s infidelities and made sure Bobby knew he had it. To protect his brother, Bobby would have to keep Hoover in office for as long as the director wanted the job.
One side of Hoover’s lifelong quest succeeded: he had job protection even under a hostile administration. But his success was also his undoing. For it meant he would still be in office when enforcing the law would mean protecting the growing nonviolent movement for civil rights. His job would be to guard peaceful protesters such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against people like himself.
Dr. King is the balance point in this book, in Hoover’s life, and in our history. Throughout his career, Hoover had broken laws, violated rights, and misled those assigned to supervise him. But during much of that time, he had also protected the nation against potent and far more ruthless enemies. Though Hoover was deeply prejudiced and extremely devious, he was nothing like Stalin, who was a mass murderer. Both Hoover and Robert Kennedy came to believe that Dr. King was touched, tainted, perhaps controlled by those same deadly Communists. That is where Hoover went blind. He could not see in front of his own eyes; he could not understand the nation he was sworn to serve. He became lost in his own plots and schemes.
In 1962, the Kennedy brothers were slowly and carefully supporting King and the civil rights movement — not enough to please liberals, too much for conservatives. On January 8, the FBI informed Robert Kennedy that Stanley Levison, one of King’s closest aides, was an important Communist. If that came out to the public, the Kennedys were doomed. They would lose, the civil rights bill they were planning to bring to Congress would lose, and King himself would lose. Several of Bobby Kennedy’s assistants warned King that he must split from Levison. King listened, was polite, and politely refused.
The Kennedy brother
s map out their civil rights strategy. Just after this June 1963 talk, the president proposed a bill outlawing discrimination in public places. They were both terrified that Hoover was right — that Dr. King really did have a Communist as a close adviser — which would have doomed the bill, and probably the president’s chances of being reelected.
The FBI’s suspicion of Levison is a portrait of how Hoover’s men saw the world. They had real evidence, but they were misled by deeply held beliefs and prejudices. They could no longer separate one from the other.
From the early 1950s on, two brothers intimately involved in bringing millions of dollars from the Soviets to the American Communist Party had been secretly feeding information to the Bureau. They reported that Levison, a wealthy businessman, was running the Party’s most top-secret funds. But after 1955, Levison faded from the Party files, and in 1960 the Bureau even tried to recruit him to spy on his old Communist allies. Two years later, the FBI suddenly realized that Levison was back on the scene, working closely with Dr. King. Not only had he helped channel money to the civil rights movement, but he also played a key role in editing and even helping to write Stride Toward Freedom, the book Dr. King wrote about the Montgomery bus boycott. To the Bureau, this was both terribly alarming and crystal clear. The Party surely had sent Levison undercover — off their records but out into the world. King was a Communist pawn, being handled by their carefully whitewashed agent.