by Curt Gentry
†On another occasion, according to William Sullivan, a headquarters supervisor at the time, Hoover returned from a meeting with the president looking upset. “The president says the old bitch is going through the change of life and we’ll just have to put up with her,” Hoover explained.9
*Interviewed shortly before his death, Earl Miller, the former state trooper, denied the gossip about his relationship with the first lady. “You don’t sleep with someone you call Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said, adding, with characteristic bluntness, “Anyway my taste was for young and pretty things.”14
†As Walter Goodman put it, “Curran was innocent of Marxism-Leninism. He found in the Communist Party a ladder by which he could ascend, and when it had served its purpose, he kicked it over.”15
*The FBI had, in fact, done bag jobs on both the AYC and the ASU, netting, among other things, copies of correspondence with the first lady.
*The telegram, which was copied before being given to Lash, read, “WILL CALL YOU FROM COLUMBIA MISSOURI BETWEEN THIRTY-SEVEN AND FOUR. LOVE. E.R.” Ever vigilant to possible subversive connotations, the officer who intercepted it wrote in his report, “The above is the original telegram…Whether it was mixed up in transit, or is in code, remains to be seen. It could have meant: ‘WILL CALL YOU FROM COLUMBIA MISSOURI BETWEEN FOUR AND SEVEN-THIRTY. LOVE. E.R.’ ”19
*On his return from overseas, Lash married Trude Pratt; became a reporter for the New York Post; and later wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Eleanor and Franklin (1971), which was followed by the companion volume Eleanor: The Years Alone (1972). Among his other books, two deal with the former first lady: Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir (1964) and Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends (1982).
†Director Hoover’s Official/Confidential file on Joseph Lash, which runs to some two hundred pages, includes photocopies of all of the documents Lieutenant Colonel Boyer sent to Colonel Bissell, but it does not include the actual tape recordings, or the tapes and transcriptions of the Blackstone Hotel bugging. If these still exist, they have not yet surfaced.
*How significant a part Hoover’s reports played in FDR’s decision to drop Wallace as his running mate in 1944 is unknown. Probably much more important were the predictions of Roosevelt’s advisers that Wallace’s presence on the ballot would cost the president between one and three million votes.
*Mrs. Welles apparently had her own problems. Friends claimed that each night she would turn down her mother’s bed covers, though her mother was long dead.
*In his book FDR: A Biography, Ted Morgan writes, “The Welles resignation had a devastating effect on the State Department. In Latin American affairs, Welles’s special preserve, it marked the end of Pan-American solidarity and the Good Neighbor policy. Welles was one of the rare career men in the higher echelons who was sympathetic to the Jews, and his continued presence might have made a difference on the refugee question.”42
Welles lived another eighteen years, a pathetically sad and broken man. Although he would write several books on American foreign policy, in 1952 his lecture agency dropped him, reputedly because of his drunkenness and homosexuality.
As for William Bullitt, Roosevelt did offer him an ambassadorship, to Saudi Arabia, the leastdesirable posting he could think of, knowing Bullitt would refuse it, which he did.
*Patterson’s dislike of FDR bordered on the pathological, while Roosevelt’s attitude toward her was little better. In a much told Washington tale, the lawyer Morris Ernst wrote the president that he had subpoenaed Patterson to testify in a libel suit filed by his client Walter Winchell, at which time he planned to “examine Cissy down to her undies.” Roosevelt begged off attending, claiming, “I have a weak stomach.”44
†According to Harold Ickes, prior to marrying Hopkins, Louise Macy had been the mistress of a number of wealthy men, including Bernard Baruch and Jock Whitney, both of whom had allegedly rewarded her with large financial settlements.
*The documents ranged from a top-secret memorandum detailing the American strategic-bombing program for Japan to a report on “the intimate relations between Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang,” to quote Bielaski, who went on, “And that document I assure you was very intimate, and there were about three pages of it.”58
BOOK SEVEN
The Man from Independence
Sept. 27, 1947
Dear Bess:
Received your Thursday letter yesterday afternoon…I am sure glad the Secret Service is doing a better job. I was worried about that situation. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over and all Congressmen and Senators are afraid of him. I’m not and he knows it. If I can prevent [it] there’ll be no NKVD or Gestapo in this country. Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me.
I am glad Aunt Ella is improving…
Love,
Harry
22
A Case of Somewhat Rancid Morals
The day after Roosevelt’s death, Hoover ordered a Bureau-wide search for any FBI employee who had a personal connection, of any kind, with the new president.
The frantic search turned up Special Agent Morton Chiles, Jr., the son of one of Truman’s childhood friends from Independence, Missouri. Recalled to Washington, Chiles was briefed on his mission by the headquarters supervisor William Sullivan.
Although extremely busy trying to cope with the awesome responsibilities of the immense job he’d inherited but never wanted, President Truman made time to see the son of his lifelong friend. After reminiscing for a few minutes about his Independence boyhood, Truman asked Chiles the purpose of his visit.
He had come as the personal emissary of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Chiles explained, with the message that if there was anything the FBI could do for him…
The president thanked the young agent, whom he’d known from birth, for dropping by. He then asked him to take a reply to Mr. Hoover. It was, in Harry S Truman’s characteristic style, blunt and to the point. He should tell Mr. Hoover, the president said, “Anytime I need the services of the FBI, I will ask for it through my attorney general.”
Chiles had the unpleasant task of carrying the president’s message back to FBI headquarters. “From that time on,” Sullivan recalled, “Hoover’s hatred of Truman knew no bounds.”1
But the director had no intention of leaving it at that. On April 23 he made his first personal call on the new president to brief him on a number of the FBI’s current investigations. Lest the visit become a habit, Truman called in his military aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, and, after introducing the two men, told the FBI director that from now on if any especially important matters came up that needed his immediate attention he should route them through Vaughan.
Hoover and Vaughan then met briefly, the FBI director establishing, none too subtly, their separate and unequal positions, by instructing Vaughan how he could reach his office without being spotted by the press. Although the meeting was brief, Hoover, probably aided by his own files, summed up Vaughan well.
That same day Hoover sent Vaughan a memo beginning, “I thought you and the President might be interested to know…” He then went on to report some partisan political intelligence.2
Vaughan responded by asking for more: “future communications along that line would be of considerable interest whenever, in your opinion, they are necessary.”3
Hoover also sent confidential reports to other presidential aides, including Matthew Connelly, Sidney Souers, E. D. McKim, and George Allen, the director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, who served as one of Hoover’s spies in the Truman administration.
Within thirty days after Truman became president, the FBI was carrying out secret investigations for the White House.
Within sixty days the FBI was wiretapping and conducting surveillances for the White House. One tap, on the office and home telephones of the attorney—and political fixer—Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, remained in place three ye
ars, generated over 175 summary logs and 6,250 pages of transcriptions, and resulted in the monitoring of many of the most prominent people in the government.
Truman was compromised before he knew it.
Six weeks after Roosevelt’s death, Truman fired Francis Biddle. He handled it badly, delegating the task to an aide, who called the attorney general and said the president wanted his immediate written resignation. Reacting more to the manner of his dismissal, which he thought “abrupt and undignified,” than the termination itself—which was not unexpected, since he’d opposed Truman’s nomination as vice-president at the Democratic convention the previous summer—Biddle asked for a personal meeting with the president.
After the patrician Philadelphian had finished lecturing the former Kansas City haberdasher on the proper form for handling such matters, Biddle submitted his resignation. The relationship between the attorney general and the president was a highly personal one, Biddle said, that of a lawyer and his client, and it was important the president should appoint his own man. He had only two questions.
First, was there anything in his record with which the president was not satisfied?
No, Truman responded, he felt he had done a good job.
Second, would the president mind telling him who his replacement would be?
“You’ll be pleased,” Truman said. “He is someone in your department—Tom Clark.”4
Pleased Biddle was not. Just a few months earlier, Biddle had tried to fire Clark, whom he considered totally inept. But Clark had gone to Senator Tom Connally, who in turn had talked to FDR, who then passed down the word to leave Clark alone.
Many years later, after Truman had left office, Merle Miller, the author of Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman, asked the ex-president, “What do you consider the biggest mistake you made as President?”
“Tom Clark was my biggest mistake,” Truman replied. “No question about it.” After elaborating at some length on Clark’s shortcomings, Truman observed, “It isn’t so much that he’s a bad man. It’s just that he’s such a dumb son of a bitch.”5
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter put it somewhat differently, one of his close friends and former law clerks later recalled. “Felix used to say that [Clark’s] morality was somewhat rancid,” to which Frankfurter’s friend the former FTC chairman Philip Elman appended, “An understatement.”6
Tom Clark was sworn in as attorney general on July 1, 1945. According to one Washington insider, who supposedly witnessed the payoff, a month and a half later Attorney General Tom Clark accepted a huge bribe in return for fixing a war profiteering case.*
Hoover and Clark got along so well that the FBI director gave the attorney general one of his used bulletproof limousines (at war’s end, Clark approved Hoover’s budget request for a new model) and even, on rare occasions, asked the AG to join him and Tolson for lunch or dinner.
Before coming to the Justice Department in 1937, Clark had acted as a lobbyist for the Texas oil interests, and he and Hoover had a number of friends in common, among them the oilmen Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, and Billy Byers—all of whom the FBI director “palled around with” during his annual trips to La Jolla—as well as Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had recently moved across the street from Hoover’s home on Thirtieth Place NW.
Even more important, Clark showed no inclination to actually supervise the FBI. He rarely read the reports Hoover sent him. “I got so many copies,” Clark recalled, “that I couldn’t read all of them—it would take me twenty-four hours a day—so I had [Assistant Attorney General James] McInerney read all mine, and he’d give me what he thought I should see, what were important enough for me.” Similarly, he turned over all wiretap requests to an assistant, because he “didn’t want to know who was tapped or who wasn’t tapped.” Few of the requests were denied. As far as Clark was concerned, the very fact that Hoover had requested them meant they were needed: “It was largely up to Mr. Hoover as to whether he thought there was a necessity for it.”7 Clark’s lack of curiosity even extended to the files.* He had no interest in reading them—with one exception. Shortly after taking office, Clark asked to see his own FBI file. Hoover procrastinated, making various excuses, until Clark finally ordered him to produce the file. Hoover then showed him a carefully expurgated version. Satisfied that it was without derogatory information, Clark never asked to see it again.
Even when they had differing opinions, Clark usually gave in to Hoover. Although he was much less concerned with the Communist menace than the FBI director was—“Most of the cases we had I thought were somewhat squeezed oranges,” he recalled—he prosecuted them anyway.9
Tom Clark was, in J. Edgar Hoover’s estimation, a nearly perfect attorney general. He rubber-stamped the FBI director’s every request. He even—unknowingly—greatly broadened Hoover’s powers.
On July 7, 1946, the attorney general wrote the president asking him to renew Roosevelt’s 1940 warrantless wiretapping authorization. Although Clark’s letter quoted from that authorization, it omitted a key sentence: “You are requested furthermore to limit these investigations so conducted to a minimum and to limit them insofar as possible to aliens.”
The elimination of that single sentence, and the restrictions it contained, gave Hoover nearly unlimited authority to place as many wiretaps as he wanted, on whomever he chose.
Truman approved and returned the request, unaware either that anything had been omitted or that the attorney general’s letter had actually been drafted by J. Edgar Hoover.†
On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered, bringing much of the work of the Office of Strategic Services to an end, since neither Admiral Chester Nimitz nor General Douglas MacArthur had allowed the OSS to operate in the Pacific theater. On August 14, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan also surrendered, ending World War II. The next month, to Hoover’s immense satisfaction—for he and his allies in State, War, and Navy were largely responsible—President Truman fired William “Wild Bill” Donovan and abolished the OSS.
Unlike Hoover, Donovan had failed to realize that some of the most significant battles were fought on the home front. In addition to having alienated nearly everyone in the intelligence community, the OSS chief had made little effort to obtain congressional or popular support for his organization. Nor had he made any real attempt to win over Roosevelt’s successor: they’d met only once since Truman took office. The imminent demise of the OSS had become apparent earlier in the year when both the FBI and the OSS submitted their 1946 budget requests. The following chart, which Anthony Cave Brown found among Donovan’s papers, tells what happened:11
OSS
Requested $45 million
Office of Budget cut to $42 million
Congress cut to $38 million
President cut to $24 million
FBI
Requested $49 million
Office of Budget cut to $46 million
Congress put back to $49 million
President cut to $43 million
Donovan did make a last-minute effort to win public support, with a blitz publicity campaign. The former OSS official Tom Braden later said, “For weeks a series of sensational stories dominated the newspapers and magazines hailing the exploits of OSS’s secret war. As [John] Shaheen and his assistant scoured the files, had the facts declassified, fed them to writers in OSS who ‘happened to be in Washington,’ and as they fed them to eager journalists, OSS parachutists returning from their hitherto secret war and expecting to hear the usual jibes about ‘Oh So Social’ suddenly found themselves figures of glamour.”12
But it was too late, and in no way matched Crime Records’ long-planned avalanche of stories telling how the FBI had won the war. Nor was Donovan helped by a series of Hoover-inspired leaks regarding the OSS’s lavish use of unvouchered funds; the revelation that the war heroes Nimitz and MacArthur both distrusted the OSS; and the first in a number of damaging disclosures regarding Communi
sts in the upper levels of Donovan’s organization.
Truman still had trouble firing people. On September 20 the president signed Executive Order 9621: Termination of the Office of Strategic Services and Disposition of Its Functions, which Budget Director Harold Smith had prepared at his request. He also gave Smith the task of informing Donovan. Equally loath to confront the OSS chief personally, Smith passed on the job to one of his aides, telling him, “The president doesn’t want to do it and I don’t want to do it, but because I can, I’m ordering you to do it.”13
Truman’s cold, curt letter to Donovan, which accompanied the termination order, read, “I appreciate very much the work which you and your staff undertook beginning prior to the Japanese surrender, to liquidate those wartime activities of the Office of Strategic Services which will not be needed in time of peace…I want to take this occasion to thank you for the capable leadership you have brought to a vital wartime activity in your capacity as Director of Strategic Services. You may well find satisfaction in the achievements of the Office and take pride in your own contributions to them. These are in themselves large rewards.”14
Denied access to most wartime intelligence reports while vice-president, Truman was unaware of the many successes of the Office of Strategic Services. Instead, what little he knew of the OSS he’d learned from its critics, and in particular from the Park report, which had been commissioned by his predecessor. Then too, he had received from Hoover—through Vaughan, to whom he’d transmitted it orally—some extremely derogatory information regarding one of Donovan’s extramarital affairs, information of such a nature that it deeply offended Truman, a devout family man.