Marc Aronson

by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies

  There was indeed an air of revolution and violence in all the groups Hoover sought to undermine: the New Left, the black nationalists, even the most radical feminists. When William Wordsworth wrote about the “bliss” of being young in the midst of a revolution, he was describing a kind of intoxication, being drunk with hope, fear, and rage. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, to be extreme became fashionable and toying with violence was popular. In that mood it was very easy to hate — the government, capitalists, parents, white people, men, straight people. It was as if America were having a national temper tantrum during which destroying everything was much more exciting than stopping and cleaning up the wreckage.

  The Weathermen were a faction of student radicals who turned ever more violent and extreme in their beliefs and actions.

  In that sense, Hoover was right. The FBI did have real enemies to contend with. There were in fact people and groups collecting arms, building bombs, and advocating revolution. Violence — from the murder of the nation’s most famous leaders, to burning buildings in major cities — was in the air. America was in danger of fracturing: black against white, students against adults, prowar against antiwar. In New York City, radical black nationalists were indeed plotting to ignite race war by murdering moderate leaders and then spreading the rumor that the government was responsible. Soviet agents, using tactics similar to those of COINTELPRO, circulated rumors of Hoover’s homosexuality and used fake stationery to link the FBI to extreme right-wing organizations. Some of the fog of confusion over Hoover’s secrets results from deliberate Soviet efforts to undermine him.

  America faced real threats. But all the FBI could do was to turn to ever-more-devious and illegal efforts to undermine groups it feared, disliked, or opposed. The Bureau’s plots relied on illegal tactics that only worsened the divisions in society. The Bureau had become the problem it was designed to investigate and expose. Ironically, the FBI itself was now so filled with secrets that it became a prime target for the very tactics it had used.

  On March 6, 1971, the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI did a black-bag job on an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. That is, they broke in, grabbed pages of documents, and soon published them. The files revealed wiretaps and other surveillance. One suggested that the FBI should come onto campuses and interview students in order create fear and to “get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” The file contained one word no one outside of the Bureau had ever seen before, COINTELPRO. Newsman Carl Stern of NBC-TV was curious what the term meant and began the legal process to force the FBI to explain.

  By breaking into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, critics of the Bureau captured documents that led to the exposure of COINTELPRO. This flyer accompanied the files as they were sent to news agencies.

  There is something almost too perfect about this sequence of events, which seems to fit better in a fantasy novel than in reality. Hoover had used newspapers, comic strips, books, radio, movies, and TV to sell his story of the FBI. But now, in the little town called Media, a one-word clue leaked out, which caught the interest of an alert TV reporter. That first clue would eventually help unravel the whole world of FBI illegality. Instead of repeating Hoover’s story of the heroic FBI defending America from alien enemies, the media was about to begin revealing how the FBI had been the alien undermining the principles of American democracy.

  Hoover was spared having to see that disaster unfold. On May 2, 1972, J. Edgar Hoover died in his sleep — safe in the knowledge that he was still the head of the FBI.

  Hoover’s story ends with his death, yet there is a coda, a twist that had been set in motion four years earlier. Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 and reelected four years later, which was seemingly the best news for his old friend and ally J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was well past retirement age, but he knew his job was safe. His new boss gave him a steady stream of illegal assignments, such as wiretapping newspaper reporters who dared to criticize the president, or tracking down who among them were homosexuals. As usual, this secret work padded Hoover’s own files to use against Nixon, if the need arose. But there was a hint of trouble.

  In 1967, Hollywood returned to the story of Bonnie and Clyde (see Part Two), only this time the audience was encouraged to admire the attractive, youthful rebels. Here, peace activists have pasted the faces of President Johnson and his wife over those of film stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, to portray LBJ as a cold-blooded killer for his role in the Vietnam War.

  Hoover’s caution flags were flying: he saw that courts were leaning toward protecting privacy and against the government. So from 1965 to ’66, he told his agents to stop their black-bag jobs and illegal wiretaps unless they were given explicit orders by the president or the attorney general. He was an old hedgehog burrowing deeper into his cave. But by 1969, Nixon was furious at the growing antiwar protest movement and demanded proof that the college students were the tools of international Communism. He wanted all the arms of government, including the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), to work together to find that evidence, by any means necessary. Tom Huston, an eager aide to Nixon, worked with William Sullivan to draft a plan under which Hoover’s rules limiting the FBI’s illegal activities would be repealed.

  Hoover read the shifting mood of the nation. He saw the danger in using his old tricks. Nixon was in office. But if he lost, if power shifted in Congress, there would be investigations. The risk was too high. He also resisted the idea of working with any other agencies. The director, the master of break-ins, spying, and blackmail, carefully pointed out every action in the plan that would be illegal. Hoover put all the risk in Nixon’s lap, just as he had waited for FDR’s secret nod to go after “subversives.”

  Hoover had the president in a corner, and Nixon knew it. He could not fire the man who had already broken the law for him. And he could not push him to violate more laws unless he made himself directly responsible. Nixon dropped the whole idea.

  Hoover sitting comfortably with President Nixon in December 1971. By this time, Hoover had ensured that he would have his FBI job for life but refused to involve the agency in the crimes that would lead to the president’s resignation.

  On June 17, six weeks after Hoover’s death, a shadowy group of men tried to break in and plant bugging devices in the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. A night watchman saw the bumbling men, and the story exploded in the press. Presidents back to at least Herbert Hoover had requested illegal political invasions like this, but what could be swept under the rug in 1930 made headlines in 1972. When the FBI began to investigate, the Justice Department kept dragging its heels, blocking the Bureau from following its own leads. As two reporters from the Washington Post set out to learn what had really happened, they began to get tips from an extremely cautious but clearly well-informed source they code named Deep Throat.

  Someone who knew how to disguise himself and keep a step ahead of anyone on his tail was giving clues to the reporters so that they could figure out who was behind the break-in. The trail Deep Throat mapped out led to the very top, to President Nixon himself, who was forced to resign. (The action-packed story of how reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward followed Deep Throat’s clues is played out in the 1976 Oscar-winning film All the President’s Men.)

  This image mimics the FBI’s wanted posters but depicts those involved in Watergate-related illegal activities. Only the president has not been “apprehended.” Hoover had been canny enough to keep the FBI out of this scandal, but it was too late to guard all the secrets in his carefully managed files.

  Hoover had nothing to do with the break-in. In fact, some believe Nixon turned to amateurs because Hoover was so reluctant to be part of the Huston plan. But in a sense, Watergate, as the scandal came to be called, destroyed everything Hoover had spent a lifetime building and hiding. We now know that Deep Throat was Mark Felt, the lifetime agent who had
rehearsed his handshake with Hoover so carefully back in 1954. Felt believed in the Bureau and was upset that it was being prevented from doing its job by the White House. He also personally felt snubbed that he was not named to head the FBI after Hoover died. Hoover had built an agency that was entirely focused on him — how he wanted hair parted, shoes tied, memos written, cases investigated, and results reported. William Sullivan and Mark Felt both hoped to become the new director; neither was given the job. But no one would ever be The Director again. Once Hoover was gone, the Lie Machine was at war with itself, and the secrets began to come out.

  In the aftermath of Watergate, the media and Congress demanded to find hidden FBI files and make them available to the public. A crime Hoover refused to commit opened the door to revealing the nearly fifty years of criminal activity that was his legacy.

  The American public learned about COINTELPRO in 1973 and ’74; the House and Senate investigated the Bureau in 1975 and ’76. “The United States,” the final Senate committee report concluded, “must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends.” By the end of the 1970s, Hoover’s reputation had changed completely. The public was far more interested in whether he was a cross-dresser and/or a homosexual than in honoring him as a guardian against Communism. In recent years, popular culture — so often Hoover’s ally — has turned against him. Documentaries — some serious, some retelling rumors — have dug into his secrets. The film Public Enemies finally made Melvin Purvis a hero, while the Clint Eastwood biopic J. Edgar centers on the supposed love between Hoover and Clyde Tolson.

  Hoover’s life goal was to live up to his mother’s standards while avoiding his father’s fate: to uphold law, oppose disorder, show no weakness, and never be in danger of losing his job. He succeeded. But in doing so, he failed. The bureau he built around himself as a perfect defense cracked and crumbled after he died. And yet, because he worked so hard, lived so long, and left such a mark on American history, his life matters. He showed us the price of feeling safe.

  In 1958, a book publisher owned by Hoover’s Del Charro host Clint Murchison released Masters of Deceit, a book warning of the dangers of Communism and purportedly written by Hoover. In fact it had been crafted by a team of writers at the FBI, and yet when the book sold millions of copies, the earnings went to Hoover and a few close associates. That book gives this one its title.

  As we have seen, Hoover was masterful at hiding his illegal activities while convincing Americans that he was the guardian of the law. But he also mastered the deceits of others. Through crime waves, war, and Cold War, he did protect the country by helping to expose its hidden enemies. He was both a deceiver himself and a relentless investigator of the deceptions of others. But this book is not and should not be just about Hoover.

  Hoover drew his strength from the lies others needed to tell. His story, then, is a portrait of the beliefs and attitudes of the times in which he lived. If, like Dr. King, you weren’t scared, Hoover’s taps were useless. The more silent the press was about an important person’s private life, the more rumors, gossip, and secrets there were for Hoover to collect. In a sense, then, this whole story is not about lies people tried to hide but rather what the media was willing to expose. We as a nation were the Masters of Deceit.

  Today, gossip and exposure have won. The Internet is crammed with sites detailing the affairs and imperfections of every possible public figure. That is normal: we are curious about one another, and especially about what goes on in private, behind closed doors. And yet the din of rumor and gossip can also take over, drowning out serious discussions and debates. The media is no longer controlled by people who could decide what to hide and what to reveal; it is controlled by us, all the time. And that leads back to Hoover.

  Hoover provided the security Americans wanted. Our beliefs about what was acceptable or not acceptable — what could be shown in public and what had to be guarded in private — shaped the secrets he could gather. Hoover talked about the “specter” of racial intermarriage, and in his day many families — including perhaps his own — did keep their ancestry secret. Only in recent years have we looked back at our long heritage of racial mixing and realized that blending is something to celebrate rather than hide. The alert reader may have noticed another “specter” that haunted the Age of Lies: homosexuality.

  The America in which Hoover rose to power treated homosexuality as a secret muttered in private. Yet, as the Kinsey Report showed, it was a common part of human experience. The pressure between what was half known and what could be said led to many, many rumors. For example, those on the left insisted that McCarthy picked up men (which was probably not true), while those on the right spread questionable rumors about the Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who twice ran against Dwight Eisenhower for president. Of course people endlessly gossiped about Hoover and Tolson.

  Starting in the 1960s, homosexuality itself began to come out of the closet. Individuals stated openly whom they loved, a more general recognition of the fact that many American men and women wanted to live with, love, and build families with people of their own sex. That was no longer a rumor, a suspicion, a source of shame; it was announced as a fact of human life. Key court rulings in 1965 and 1969 said government agencies could not fire employees just because of their sexual orientation, challenging the entire “security risk” argument. As homosexuality became more accepted, one more secret lost some of its power; it was no longer quite the same source of fear and blackmail.

  Most probably, Hoover could not accept his own feelings toward men; he could not even admit those yearnings to himself. He lived in a world of good and evil, purity and degeneracy. Stanley Levison could only be a Communist, not an idealist. Dr. King could only be a fraud, not a flawed leader. Communism itself could only be an incitement to lawlessness, violence, and corruption, not a useful critique of inequalities in society. For many Americans in Hoover’s day, that kind of firm line was reassuring. We as a nation wanted our heroes and villains, our manly men and feminine women, our bright public face and invisible private lives. Hoover gave us the security we wanted.

  What secrets do we have today? What kind of security do we want now?

  In your lifetime, we will again face terrible threats and even perhaps experience unthinkable crimes. What will make us safe? How can we preserve Louis Post’s careful attention to fair play, Senator Smith’s sense of conscience, the ability to see a full human being, which Dr. King preached, when we feel rage and terror? Hoover’s story teaches us two lessons: Fear allows secrecy in the name of defense. And that which is hidden grows malignant. When the people we rely on to defend us are permitted to hide their actions, it is all too easy for them to cover up their own crimes and breed a culture of fear. Personal emotions — fear of homosexual desire, prejudice against African Americans — are given the name of national security. Strength does not require silence.

  But we must also remember that some threats are real. The Venona decryption showed a larger web of Soviet spying than liberals wanted to admit. The Communists murdered millions in the Soviet Union, and even more in China. In America, the Communist Party demanded obedience from its members, telling them how to write, act, and even think. Radicals in the 1960s did preach violent revolution, and some waved the flag of liberation only to take advantage of their followers. And of course Al Qaeda did attack us on September 11, 2001. Silence in the face of real threats is cowardice.

  Mitchell Palmer and the young J. Edgar Hoover rounded up immigrants in order to deport them. Immediately after the September 11 attacks, some 762 individuals with apparently Arabic names were arrested without charges made against them. Some were placed in twenty-three-hour-a-day solitary confinement. Every one of them was eventually released, since they had no ties to terrorism. The Patriot Act extended the roundup. It allowed the government to sweep up and question immigrants, and especially those from Muslim nations. Many immigrants who had come here to find work and had outdated or inadequate documents were su
ddenly in danger of being kicked out of the country. This was so even if they had been here nearly their whole lives, spoke only English, had married here and had children or grandchildren here. Colleges were pressured to give the government personal information about their foreign students even if there was no specific reason to be concerned about those individuals. Librarians were asked to report on who took out which books (they refused). To Hoover and Palmer, being Russian and Jewish was cause for suspicion; after 2001, to be a Muslim immigrant in America was equally suspect. Ten years later, Congress held hearings on radical Islam in America that reminded critics of the HUAC sessions on Communism.

  In 2001, our government believed that protecting America was so important that we could do nearly anything in order to catch a suspected terrorist. In fact, the government went further than Hoover ever dared. For he never used torture.

  This map shows the destinations to which the U.S. government secretly flew terrorist suspects. In these places, they could be questioned and tortured without having any recourse to legal protection.

  America was the first nation in the world to oppose torture and has signed many international treaties spelling out the rights of our enemies. In 2001, our government swept those rights away. In the face of the new threat, our leaders believed, there were no limits. If we needed to get someone to spill his secrets, we could nearly drown him until, gasping for breath, fighting for life, he would speak. That practice is called waterboarding. As the prize-winning reporter Jane Mayer explained, “The President could argue that torture was legal because he had authorized it.” The president was no longer checked and balanced by Congress, the courts, or by treaties his predecessors had signed. He was above the law. That is precisely the authorization that Hoover claimed he received from FDR and that opened the door to so many FBI crimes and cover-ups.