J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Given a list of names, the SAs would first check the files, to determine whether any of the subjects had a criminal record or was on one of the security lists; then they would hit the streets and telephones, interviewing former and current employers, teachers, bank managers, doctors, neighbors, acquaintances.

  The FBI Manual contained explicit instructions for conducting such interviews, but each agent had his own style and the mood could shift from inquisitive to chatty to accusatory. For example, it was not uncommon for the agents to ask a neighbor, What kind of automobile does she drive? Any other indications that she’s living beyond her means? Ever see her drunk? Any loud parties or strange-looking visitors? Ever get her mail by mistake? Any foreign magazines? What about the Daily Worker—ever see it? Just between us—this is off the record, of course—do you have any reason to suspect that she might not be, you know, 100 percent American?

  It was a routine inquiry, a typical full field investigation—except that Edith B. Helm was Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary, and had been for nearly a dozen years.

  Learning that the FBI was investigating Mrs. Helm, the first lady complained, vociferously, to both the president and the attorney general. Informed of Mrs. Roosevelt’s “concern,” Hoover wrote her a personal and confidential letter explaining that the FBI had been asked to investigate all employees of the advisory committee to the Council of National Defense, a government board on which Mrs. Helm served. At the time the FBI started its investigation, Hoover stated, it was unaware of “the identity of Edith B. Helm or the fact that she was acting in a secretarial capacity for you.” Had the FBI known, he explained, “the inquiry would not have been initiated.”2

  It might have ended there, had not Mrs. Roosevelt learned that someone was also asking questions about the personal life of another of her aides, Malvina “Tommy” Thompson. Two days after Hoover’s letter the first lady responded:

  “I am very much surprised by your letter about the investigation of Mrs. Helm. I am also surprised to learn that someone had been making inquiries about Miss Thompson at her apartment house as to when she comes and goes, how much company she has, etc.

  “This type of investigation seems to me to smack too much of the Gestapo methods.”

  Whatever their private thoughts, few people in official Washington would have dared say such a thing to the director of the FBI. But Eleanor Roosevelt went beyond that. She placed the blame for the incident directly on J. Edgar Hoover himself.

  “The explanation that the investigation of Mrs. Helm is a mistake, seems to me to show inefficiency on the part of the person who ordered it…Anyone who cared to avoid such a mistake would only have had to look at the questionnaire which Mrs. Helm filled out last summer to realize that she has been attached to the White House ever since we have been here, and incidentally, her father and husband have been admirals in the Navy.

  “I cannot help resenting deeply the action in these two cases and if you have done this type of investigation of other people, I do not wonder that we are beginning to get an extremely jittery population.”3

  It was not in Hoover’s nature to apologize or to admit error—especially not when, as in this case, he felt there was none—but he tried, suppressing his rage long enough to write her still another letter of explanation: “I want to point out that this work was not sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but was assigned to it.” But Mrs. Roosevelt would have none of it.4

  Even though Hoover had hoped to keep the incident “personal and confidential,” the story of the FBI director’s faux pax was too good to contain. Over at Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., interrupted a discussion of the new Federal Reserve recommendations to remark, “I have just got to stop a minute to tell a story which will interest you…It seems that Mrs. Helm—the social secretary—have I told you this story?”

  His aides, including Harry Dexter White, assured him that he had not. Morgenthau then explained that Hoover had been given a list of nationaldefense employees to check out, one of whom was Mrs. Helm. “Whereupon, in his usual way, he can’t see any further than this, he sends his men out to her home town in Illinois…And they interview the whole town…They call up everybody, all of her friends, go down to the farm, people say ‘Well, what is the matter with Mrs. Helm? What crime has she committed?’…and Mrs. Helm is simply outraged. She says she doesn’t know what she is going to tell the people when she goes home. Mind you, at no time did it ever get to these people that Mrs. Helm is social secretary to Mrs. Roosevelt. So they find out who her friends are, they find out one of her friends is Miss Thompson, Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal secretary, so they start to investigate her [laughter] and they go to her hotel and ask the desk clerk who comes, what time of night they come, and so on, and what time they leave, and so forth…

  “What do you suppose Tommy told the desk clerk…‘The next time one of those FBI men asks about me, you just tell him to go to hell.’

  “And, oh gosh, Hoover has apologized to Mrs. Roosevelt and to General Watson and to Mrs. Helm and everybody else…They will never live it down. Have you heard of anything more stupid?”5

  Morgenthau had reason to gloat. On February 14, 1941—less than a month after the “Helm flap”—the attorney general, then Robert Jackson, had ordered the FBI to discontinue all personnel investigations except those relating to the Department of Justice. Henceforth, Jackson directed, all other inquiries of this nature would be conducted by the Civil Service Commission and the Treasury Department.

  That September, however, Jackson was replaced by Biddle, and Hoover, not wasting any time, persuaded the new AG to ask the president for approval to reverse Jackson’s ruling. Roosevelt agreed, the FBI resumed its background investigations, and the incident was forgotten.

  By everyone except J. Edgar Hoover. For her candor, Eleanor Roosevelt paid a high price: with a single letter, she’d made an enemy for life.

  In 1960 a young special agent seeking administrative advancement made an obligatory courtesy call on the director. To his astonishment, Hoover alluded only briefly to the purpose of the meeting. Instead, with no apparent provocation, he launched into a forty-five-minute, nonstop denunciation of that “most dangerous enemy of the Bureau”—Eleanor Roosevelt. Had it not been for his great personal friendship with her husband, Hoover said, Mrs. Roosevelt “might well have succeeded in interfering with the Bureau’s ability to contain the Communist menace in the United States.”*6

  This was two decades after the Helms incident and three years before the former first lady’s death. Hoover neither forgot nor forgave.

  It must have been immensely frustrating to Hoover that, as long as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, there was no way he could retaliate. He could, and did, on more than a few occasions, complain directly to the president, as happened in 1943 when Eleanor accused the FBI and the Dies committee of “hounding” former members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. On his return from the White House, Hoover gleefully told Tolson and Nichols that Roosevelt had responded, “Well, Edgar, don’t get excited. Just think about me. I have to live with her!”†8

  But for the most part, Hoover, denied the satisfaction of a direct attack, was reduced to attacking those persons and causes she was closest to. In memo after memo, Hoover alerted the White House to her questionable associations. When the first lady met with a committee seeking to free the American Communist leader Earl Browder, who had been convicted and imprisoned for passport fraud, Hoover couldn’t wait to report the derogatory comments the committee members had made about her following the meeting. And he kept especially close watch on her activities on behalf of blacks. In a 1944 memo to Harry Hopkins, the FBI director warned that Mrs. Roosevelt’s scheduled appearance at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Detroit might cause a race riot, since the minister was “anti-Roosevelt, anti-administrative [sic], anti-Jewish,” while the crowd would probably “be composed of the irresponsible and the curious and the unstable type of colored persons.”10

  A
ccording to William Sullivan, Hoover blamed Mrs. Roosevelt for fomenting black unrest, writing in the margin of one memo, “If she wasn’t sympathizing with them and encouraging them, they wouldn’t be speaking out like this!”11

  More than most women, Eleanor Roosevelt lived a highly public life. Astonishingly busy, she even chronicled her activities in a newspaper column entitled “My Day.” It was her private life, however, that most interested Hoover.

  “To my knowledge,” Sullivan recalled, “we never had a surveillance on Eleanor Roosevelt. Because it wasn’t necessary. It was not necessary, because we had informants—many informants—in the circles in which she traveled.”12

  Ed Tamm put it another way. Although, to the best of his recollection, Mrs. Roosevelt was never “a subject” of FBI surveillance, she was was picked up a number of times during the surveillance of others.13

  Perhaps because there was so little warmth in her relationship with her husband—the two had not been intimate since 1918, when Eleanor discovered that Franklin was having an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer—Mrs. Roosevelt tended to smother her friends with attention and affection. These “passionate friendships,” as Ted Morgan aptly calls them, were often misunderstood by outsiders, and particularly by J. Edgar Hoover.

  That the first lady refused Secret Service protection convinced Hoover that she had something to hide. That she also maintained a secret apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, where she was often visited by her friends but never by the president, served to reinforce the FBI director’s suspicions.

  What she was hiding, Hoover convinced himself, was a hyperactive sex life. Because she numbered among her many friends several lesbians—and in particular Lorena Hickok, a former AP reporter whose sexual orientation was well known in the capital—Hoover concluded that Mrs. Roosevelt was one too. However, Hoover was also convinced, at other times, that she had numerous male lovers, including at least one black; an ex-New York state trooper who served as her driver and bodyguard;* an Army colonel who sometimes escorted her to official functions; her doctor David Gurewitsch; and two left-wing labor leaders, one of whom was an official of the Communist party.

  Joseph Curran was president of the National Maritime Union; Frederick “Blackie” Myers, his second in command. Although Myers was a member of the CP’s national committee, Curran himself was never a Communist. He used—and allowed himself to be used by—the Communists, when he felt it was advantageous to do so, but when it wasn’t, in 1948, he ruthlessly purged them from the union.† During the war years Curran frequently called at the White House, sometimes with a petition, as when advocating a “second front” on behalf of Russia, sometimes as a guest. Like many another supplicant with a cause to push, Curran had found that the first lady provided easy entry to the president. On returning to California from one such White House visit, Curran remarked to Myers—and the FBI agents listening to their bugged conversations—“Goddamn it, Blackie! I’ve made enough sacrifices. Next time you service the old bitch!”16

  It apparently became a standing joke between the two tough old sailors. But Hoover and his agents took it quite seriously. They were convinced that Curran and, in all probability, Myers were sexually “servicing” Eleanor Roosevelt, undoubtedly under orders from the Communist party.

  Hoover sent Roosevelt dozens of reports on Curran and his union—frequently warning the president in advance that Curran and other union leaders would be seeking an appointment to push such and such a matter—but these particular reports he kept to himself.

  It was the curious case of Sergeant Joe Lash which gave Hoover his most effective ammunition against Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt and Joseph Lash had met in November 1939, when Lash, together with other leaders of the American Youth Congress, was called before the Dies committee to answer charges that the organization was Communist directed.

  The congress—composed of representatives of some sixty affiliated groups, ranging from the YWCA to the American League for Peace and Democracy—had as its ostensible goal obtaining federal aid for the education and employment of young people. With this Mrs. Roosevelt agreed wholeheartedly, and to show her support, she not only attended the hearings but even invited the group to the White House for lunch and an overnight stay.

  She also told reporters that she had conducted her own investigation of the organization long before the Dies committee and had found nothing “to indicate any outside control.”17 Actually she’d merely asked the youth leaders if the charges of Communist influence were true and naively accepted their assurances that they were not.

  Joseph Lash, who was one of Eleanor’s White House guests, knew better. Then in his late twenties—Dies would call him a “perennial student”—Lash was national secretary of the American Student Union, another organization which interested both the Dies committee and the FBI.* Although unwilling to admit it at the time, Lash had also, until recently, been a “near-Communist”; he later stated, “I had practically became a member yet was not a member of the party.”18 But with the Nazi-Soviet pact that August, Lash, who had served on the Republican side in Spain, had broken with the Communists and was now trying to lessen their influence in both the AYC and the ASU.

  Joseph Lash became another of Eleanor’s protégés. For his part, he ended her naïveté as far as the American Youth Congress was concerned. For hers, she wrote or saw him often, frequently inviting him to the White House or Hyde Park (Franklin stirred the martinis, while Lash mixed Eleanor’s oldfashioneds), offered unsolicited loans and advice, and involved herself in everything from his politics to his love life. The latter was somewhat complicated since Lash was having an affair with a married woman, Trude Pratt, another student leader who was estranged from her husband but not yet divorced. Ever the romantic—she acted similarly with Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway—Eleanor plotted ways to bring the lovers together, even letting them use Val Kill, her cottage at Hyde Park, as a trysting place.

  She also intervened on Lash’s behalf with the Dies committee, arranging for a second, more exculpatory hearing in secret session (it was leaked to the columnist Westbrook Pegler the next day), and, after the United States entered the war, with a naïveté that was astonishing even for her, pulled strings in an attempt to get him a commission in Naval Intelligence. But, given his “suspected Communist affiliations,” the Navy didn’t want him, in any capacity, and in April 1942 Lash was drafted into the Army.

  Because of both his background and his close ties to the president and first lady—well publicized by Pegler and other anti-New Deal columnists—it is probable that Lash was of special interest to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) from the start. (The CIC was the “FBI of the Army” and conducted its own security investigations.) He clearly was after his assignment to weather observers school at Chanute Field, in Illinois, in early 1943, for the regional CIC officer, a Lieutenant Colonel P. F. Boyer, probably acting on orders from the Pentagon, had Sergeant Joe Lash investigated.

  On instructions from Boyer, the Chanute CIC put a mail cover on Lash; intercepted, and copied, a telegram from Mrs. Roosevelt;* listened in on one of their telephone conversations; and did a bag job on Lash’s footlocker, finding and photographing a number of letters from both Trude Pratt and the president’s wife (the latter, according to the surveillance report, “closed in an affectionate tone”) and thus learned that Mrs. Roosevelt would be in the area the weekend of March 5-7 and hoped to see Lash.20

  On March 5 Mrs. Roosevelt, accompanied by her personal secretary, Tommy Thompson, checked into the Hotel Lincoln in Urbana. According to an informant, after expressing the wish that no publicity be given to her arrival, Mrs. Roosevelt requested two rooms, stating that she was expecting “a young friend from Chanute Field.” She was assigned two connecting rooms, 330 and 332, each of which had twin beds.21

  Unknown to Lash, he was tailed from the time he left the base. On arriving at the hotel, he was asked to register and given room 330. A few minutes later Mi
ss Thompson called the desk and had her luggage transferred from 330 into Mrs. Roosevelt’s room. Mrs. Roosevelt then ordered dinner for three. The surveillance was terminated at 10:15 P.M., then resumed the following day, when the three had lunch in the hotel dining room. Dinner that night, again for three, was in Mrs. Roosevelt’s room. Surveillance was terminated at 10:35 P.M. The next morning the subject, Lash, returned to Chanute and Mrs. Roosevelt checked out, paying the bill for both rooms.

  The following weekend Trude Pratt visited Lash. Again reservations were made at the Hotel Lincoln in Urbana, Lash being assigned room 202 and Mrs. Pratt 206. And again Lash was under physical surveillance from the time he left Chanute until his return. According to the CIC report, except for meals and walks, the pair spent the whole weekend in 206, Mrs. Pratt’s room, Lash returning to his own room, 202, on only two occasions, “during which he disarranged the bed clothes.”

  This time, however, Lash and his companion were also bugged. The surveillance report noted, “Subject and Mrs. Pratt appeared to be greatly endeared to each other and engaged in sexual intercourse a number of times.”22

  All this was recorded on tape. As soon as the tape had been transcribed, Lieutenant Colonel Boyer sent the transcription, together with the surveillance reports and photocopies of the Roosevelt-Pratt-Lash letters, to Colonel John T. Bissell at the Pentagon. “The inferences which can be drawn from the evidence of these five enclosures are staggering,” Boyer wrote Bissell. “They indicate a gigantic conspiracy participated in by not only Subject and Trude Pratt but also by E.R., Wallace, Morgenthau, etc.” Just how he reached this staggering conclusion is unknown.

  Boyer also informed Bissell that initially they had planned to arrest Lash sometime during the weekend, on a morals charge, “because sexual intercourse was entered into,” but on learning from their bugged conversations that the two were planning to meet again in Chicago on the weekend of April 3, they had decided to wait and arrange for the Chicago police—rather than the military—to make the arrest, in hopes of generating “sufficient publicity that E.R. would not care to intervene in the matter.”23