J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Had it not been for the assistance of J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood hearings—and the resultant blacklist, which soon spread from the movie industry to radio and television; the jailing of the “Hollywood Ten” and numerous others; and the destruction of hundreds of careers, families, friendships, and lives, more than a dozen of them by suicide—might never have happened.

  Having learned the lesson of Martin Dies, HUAC never again sought to be coequal with the FBI but was quite content to assume a sibling relationship, playing Little Brother to the FBI’s Big Brother.

  For its part, the FBI for nearly three decades secretly supplied the committee with its staff, witnesses, victims, and charges.

  Just as the FBI provided accountants to the House Appropriations Subcommittee to investigate its own budget requests, so did the Bureau supply seasoned Red hunters to HUAC, some on loan, others ex-agents seeking employment. In both cases the Bureau’s own interests came first, and probably as much information was channeled back to FBIHQ as was leaked to the committee. Hoover, for example, knew that Thomas was in trouble long before the congressman did.

  When undercover informants such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers had outlived their usefulness, or failed to make their charges stick before grand juries, the FBI permitted them to “surface” or “go public” before the committee, where the burden of proof was on the accused, not the accuser, and even rehearsed them before they testified. In the case of Bentley, the dress rehearsal was literal, “Gandy’s girls” being given the job of helping her buy a wardrobe before her committee appearance, although one later admitted, “It was a wasted effort. Everything she put on turned instant dowdy.”30

  The FBI not only gave HUAC the names of those persons it wanted called; it provided lists of questions to be asked, on the basis of accusations in FBI files. Even the files themselves were not sacrosanct: their contents were selectively leaked to the committee, often through intermediaries such as Father Cronin, either orally or in the form of blind memorandums.

  In return, in addition to giving the FBI open access to its own files (by 1969 they numbered 754,000), HUAC deified J. Edgar Hoover, whose rare appearances before the committee were treated like religious events. Walter Goodman recalls one such 1947 visitation: “Hoover came before the committee like the archbishop paying a call on a group of lay brothers. He patronized them; they fussed over him.”31

  Although Hoover went to some lengths to keep the extent of the FBI’s assistance to HUAC secret, its members were not always as reticent. “The closest relationship exists between this committee and the FBI,” Chairman Thomas bragged. “I can’t say as much as between this committee and the attorney general’s office, but the closest relationship exists between this committee and the FBI. I think there is a very good understanding between us. It is something, however, that we cannot talk too much about.”32 The South Dakota Republican Karl E. Mundt, who served on the committee from 1943 through 1948, when he was elected to the Senate, characterized HUAC as “a valuable supplement to the investigative work of the FBI.” Sometimes, Mundt candidly explained, the FBI would compile evidence of Communist infiltration but not enough to justify indictments. “Often, in such a case, the FBI will tip off a Congressional committee as to a situation where it is convinced American security in endangered. The Committee’s inquiry then makes it possible to bring the case into the open and, with the suspected Communist spy usually taking refuge in the Fifth Amendment’s protection against incriminating himself, it is possible to eliminate that particular threat.”*33 A later chairman, Harold Velde, himself an ex-agent, announced in 1953 that he expected “a new era of good feeling between the Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI.” He elaborated, “There are lots of files that we could make good use of, and I am satisfied that the Eisenhower administration will let us make use of them.”35

  He wasn’t disappointed, although the Bureau cautioned him to keep his mouth shut.

  The year 1947 also saw President Truman attempt to steal the issue of communism from the Republicans, HUAC, and J. Edgar Hoover and make it his own. Reacting to the election defeat, and buckling under to criticism that the government’s security efforts were inadequate, the president on March 21 signed Executive Order 9835, approving what would be described as “the most sweeping inquiry into employee loyalty in the nation’s history.”36 It affected more than two million federal workers.

  Under the provisions of the order, accusations or other negative information regarding a federal employee would be investigated by either the Civil Service Commission or the FBI, which would pass on its findings to a loyalty review board. The board would then decide whether the evidence met the standard for dismissal, which was defined as “reasonable grounds for disbelief in loyalty.” In addition to such well-established grounds as treason, sedition, and sabotage, and the Hatch Act provisions prohibiting advocacy of force and violence, a new and much broader area was added, which would become known as the attorney general’s list. This list consisted of organizations which the attorney general deemed “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive.”37 Any affiliation with any of the organizations on the list could be considered evidence of disloyalty.*

  Although the Justice Department decided which organizations should be on the list, Hoover submitted the candidates, adding significantly to his not inconsiderable power.

  The growth of that power bothered Harry S Truman, who feared that the FBI was becoming another Gestapo. As he memoed an aide, Clark Clifford, “J. Edgar Hoover will probably get this backward looking Congress to give him what he wants. It’s dangerous.”39

  Truman, however, saw a way to reduce some of that power. He asked Congress for $25 million to implement the loyalty program, with two-thirds of the investigative budget to be allotted to the Civil Service Commission and one-third to the FBI.

  But a strange thing happened as the bill made its way through the legislative process. Congress approved the request (although cutting the amount to $11 million) but reversed the allocations, giving the FBI two-thirds of the investigative funding, which automatically gave Hoover control over most of the federal-security investigations.

  Although he fought on for a time, Truman finally capitulated, totally, informing the attorney general, in a November 1947 memorandum, that the FBI would conduct all loyalty investigations.

  Hoover had won that war, but he was far from content with his victory. His new goal was even more ambitious: to replace Harry S Truman.

  Hoover hated Thomas E. Dewey, and had since his racket-busting, headlinegrabbing days as Manhattan district attorney, but he hated Harry S Truman more. He hated him enough to even give up being director of the FBI.

  The plan, as drawn up by Lou Nichols and Dewey’s key aides, with the concurrence of both the FBI director and the Republican presidential hopeful, was simple. The FBI would secretly help Dewey become president. In return, the president-elect would name J. Edgar Hoover attorney general; Clyde Tolson would be made assistant attorney general, retaining essentially his position as Hoover’s chief aide, although joining his boss in moving across the hall; and, once he had been sworn in as AG, Hoover would appoint Louis Nichols director of the FBI, thus keeping the organization under his direct control. Then, after a suitable interval, and whenever there was a convenient vacancy, President Dewey would name Hoover to the U.S. Supreme Court, with the next stage presumably being his elevation to the post of chief justice.

  Hoover didn’t even wait for Dewey to be chosen the Republican standard-bearer to begin fulfilling his part of the agreement. During the primary battle he supplied Dewey with derogatory information on his chief Republican opponent, Harold Stassen. Dewey and Stassen were to debate on national radio on May 17. Sullivan has recalled, “Many agents—I was one—worked for days culling FBI files for any fact which could be of use to Dewey. I remember that there was such a rush to get the material to him once it was collected that it was sent in a private plane to Albany…Armed with everythi
ng the Bureau gave him [Governor Dewey] demolished Stassen when they met…Dewey got the nomination and Hoover started planning his move to the attorney general’s office.”40

  Once Dewey had defeated Stassen, Hoover switched targets and began feeding the Republican candidate information on Truman’s associations with the Pendergast machine. It was old stuff, largely already disproven and therefore not very useful, but Hoover also had abundant material on at least two of Truman’s Cabinet appointees, one of them his boss Tom Clark, as well as several of his aides, including Brigadier General Harry Vaughan. (Hoover was at the same time supplying Truman, via Vaughan, with information on Henry Wallace and his Progressive party bid.) In addition, Crime Records prepared position papers for Dewey, on such subjects as crime, juvenile delinquency, and communism, which were released under the candidate’s name.

  Even more important, Hoover made sure the spotlight remained on the “Communists in government” issue. In June the FBI director arranged for both Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers to appear before a federal grand jury. When that body declined to vote indictments against those they had named, Lou Nichols, with the FBI director’s blessings, leaked the Elizabeth Bentley disclosures to Senator Homer Ferguson, who called the dowdy ex-Communist before his investigating committee on July 30.* The following day it was HUAC’s turn, Bentley testifying that in her role as a secret Communist party courier she had received classified information from dozens of persons, including President Truman’s appointee to the International Monetary Fund, Harry Dexter White. The next week HUAC called Whittaker Chambers, who made still more headlines by claiming that the former State Department official Alger Hiss had been a member of the CP underground in the 1930s. (Chambers’s appearance was orchestrated by the freshman congressman and HUAC committee member Richard Nixon, with Father John Cronin acting as the FBI’s go-between. Nixon and Cronin established an especially close friendship: from 1948 to 1960 the Catholic priest served as one of Nixon’s chief speech writers.) The subsequent denials of White and his death of a heart attack, three days after he testified before the committee, and the face-to-face confrontation of Hiss and Chambers assured that the issue would remain in the headlines almost up to election day.

  HUAC Chairman Thomas later admitted that the hearings were politically inspired, that the Republican National Committee chairman, Hugh Scott, was urging him “to set up the spy hearings” and “to stay in Washington to keep the heat on Harry Truman.”42

  Truman’s election chances were, almost everyone agreed, somewhere between very slim and nonexistent. First and foremost, he wasn’t FDR. Second, his party was fractured. During the Democratic National Convention that July a number of the southern delegates had bolted over the civil rights platform and had formed the Dixiecrat party, led by Strom Thurmond, while many liberals had also defected, to the Progressive party and its candidate, Henry Wallace.

  In September, Truman embarked on a nationwide whistle-stop tour. That the crowds at each station where the Presidential Special stopped were surprisingly large signified nothing, the pundits said, except that the voters wanted to see Truman for the last time. Editorially, 65 percent of the daily newspapers supported Dewey, only 15 percent the incumbent, while Dewey led in nearly all of the polls.

  Election day was Tuesday, November 2. At one-thirty the following morning Dewey’s campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, announced, “We now know that Governor Dewey will carry New York State by at least 50,000 votes and is the next president of the United States.”43 Truman missed this pronouncement, as well as the early edition of the Chicago Tribune which bore the banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Having returned to Independence to vote, the president had downed a couple stiff shots of bourbon and gone to bed early.

  When Truman awoke, he found that he would be president for another four years. The final tabulation gave Truman 49.5 percent of the popular vote to Dewey’s 45.1 percent, with most of the balance going to Wallace and Thurmond. Not only had Dewey lost; the Republicans no longer had a majority in either house of Congress.

  “The morning after the election, a heavy gloom settled over the Bureau, heavier than at any other time I can remember,” Sullivan later recalled. Everyone hoped that the director wouldn’t come in, but he did, long enough to respond to an apologetic memo from Lou Nichols with one of his own.

  Hoover’s blamed Truman’s victory not on the electorate but on the head of Crime Records. “Nichols pushed me out on a limb which got sawed off,” he wrote in his angriest blue ink. “I wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for Nichols.”

  “You could see Hoover’s anger in his handwriting,” Sullivan remembered; “the blue penstrokes were thick, as if he had been bearing down especially hard.”44

  Truman returned to the capital on November 5. At what was in effect an early inaugural parade, hundreds of thousands cheered as the president rode up Pennsylvania Avenue from Union Station to the White House.

  J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t among them. His balcony was empty. The FBI director did not go to work that day, or on the ones that followed. Not until November 17 did he reappear at SOG, at which time the Associated Press reported, “J. Edgar Hoover returned to active duty at FBI headquarters today, fully recovered from a recent bout of pneumonia.”45

  There had been no such attack, but Hoover was sick, from the prospect of having to face another four years of Harry S Truman. There was even talk that he might resign, but such talk was, as it always would be, premature.

  It is not known whether Truman ever learned the extent of Hoover’s activities on behalf of the Republican presidential candidate, or of his plan to elevate himself first to the attorney generalship and then to the Supreme Court—but Truman didn’t need a loyalty review board to tell him that there was a dangerous subversive in the Department of Justice.

  * * *

  *Although Philip Jaffe has since admitted, in a biography of his friend Earl Browder, “By gradual stages I became a close fellow-traveler of the American Communist Party from 1930 to 1945, though not a party member,” one question remains unanswered: Did the OSS uncover a real spy ring?5

  Fred Cook is skeptical: “In retrospect, few of the sensational Amerasia charges appear to have been valid. This was simply not a genuine spy case. The writers and editors who got the secret information from government files wrote, edited and published the details, certainly not characteristic activity for spies.”6

  But Earl Latham concludes his incisive study of the case by observing, “The Amerasia case is like the Hiss affair in one respect. Although it seems to be virtually impossible to establish espionage by courtroom standards, there is the silent testimony of the documents themselves. There was either espionage in the Amerasia case or the security procedures of the Department of State were so grotesquely lax that the responsible officials should have been disciplined.”7

  Only J. Edgar Hoover had no doubts. While under FBI surveillance, Jaffe had been observed entering the Soviet consulate, CP headquarters, and Browder’s home. To Hoover, if not the courts, this was proof sufficient.

  *Informed of Gouzenko’s decision to defect, Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada even suggested that it might be best to let Gouzenko commit suicide, as he had threatened, and then let one of his agents, posing as a policeman, examine the documents, since official acceptance of them was “certain to create an issue between Russia and Canada, this leading to the severance of diplomatic relations.”8

  †As a result of Gouzenko’s disclosures, twenty-one persons were prosecuted, nine of whom were convicted, including May, who received a ten-year sentence. At least fifty others were transferred to unsensitive positions or allowed to resign.

  In searching the home of one of the suspects, Israel Halperin, the RCMP seized a notebook containing the entry “Klaus Fuchs, 84 George Lane, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.” As was the case with the other documents, a copy was supplied to British intelligence and the FBI. Fuchs would lead to Harry Gold, who would in tu
rn lead to David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—but not until 1949: for four years, neither the RCMP, MI-5, nor the FBI followed up the lead.

  *Bentley later testified that she did so at the suggestion of, and while under surveillance by, the FBI. But on October 17 the FBI was still trying to locate her, Bentley having, since her New Haven appearance, changed her address.

  *Lee later testified, before HUAC, that he and his wife had known Bentley by the name Helen Grant, but that the relationship was purely social and that after a time they had decided to terminate it: “We came to the conclusion that she was a very lonely and neurotic woman, that she was a frustrated woman, that her liking and apparent liking for us was unnaturally intense. We began to feel she was an emotional weight around our necks and that really there was nothing in the acquaintance that justified the intense way she did follow us up.”11 Others whom Bentley accused made similar statements. Lee denied having ever been a Communist or having passed any information to Bentley.

  *Chambers had wanted to talk to the president, but Levine could only arrange for him to see Berle. Berle, who kept a daily diary, later set down his impressions of Chambers: “I thought I was dealing with a man who thought he was telling the truth but was probably afflicted with a neurosis.”12 Berle’s skepticism may explain why he apparently failed to pass on this information to his friend J. Edgar Hoover.

  *Harold Ware was the son of a famous American Communist, Mother (Ella Reeve) Blore. The mention of Ware’s name later caused problems for the noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith, although he never met the man. During a 1946 security investigation, a Princeton professor described the Harvard scholar as being “doctrinaire.” Somehow, in later reports, this was garbled to read that Galbraith was a follower of “Dr. Ware,” an accusation that would be repeated in his FBI file for another twenty years.15