J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  †Others, particularly those involved in the domestic-security sections of the FBI, also wanted nothing to do with McCarthy. “Senator McCarthy’s crusade…was always anathema to me,” the spy chaser Robert J. Lamphere would write. “McCarthy’s approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States, particularly in regard to government employment of known Communists.”33

  *In March 1950 the House Appropriations Subcommittee cut $979 million from the federal budget. Although Justice was among the departments whose budgets were cut, the committee gave the FBI the full amount it had requested, enabling the Bureau to hire an additional 700 employees, 325 of them special agents needed, according to Hoover, to combat subversive activities.

  “In tribute to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director,” as the New York Times put it, “the committee also approved a rise in his salary to $20,000. It is $16,000.”37 This meant that in the five years since World War II, Hoover’s salary had doubled.

  25

  Friends, Enemies, and the Investigation of Jesus Christ

  When Helen Gandy shredded and burned the late J. Edgar Hoover’s Personal File, she probably believed that she had obliterated any record of the many special favors with which the former FBI director had rewarded his supporters and friends. But some have since become known.

  When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., needed a security system for his Tarrytown, New York, estate, Hoover provided the experts to help construct it, at no cost to anyone except the taxpayers. Hoover alerted his Del Mar buddies Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson to forthcoming regulatory agency—and Supreme Court—decisions, through their Washington lobbyist Tommy Webb. In return, in addition to picking up the tab for Hoover and Tolson’s annual southern California vacations, the two Texas wheeler-dealers gave the FBI director tips on oil stocks and, on more than a few occasions, complimentary stock. A legat was stationed in Bern for no other reason, William Sullivan believed, than to help the director’s wealthy friends with their Swiss bank accounts. When Hoover’s friend Jack Warner needed the actor Sterling Hayden to complete a picture, but feared he’d be blacklisted (Hayden had joined the Communist party in 1946 but left after a few months), Hoover arranged for Hayden to be cleared, but only after he’d told all to the FBI, publicly repented before HUAC, and named names. Hayden named seven acquaintances, including his former mistress, Bea Winters, who was also his agent’s secretary, and spent the rest of his life regretting having become “a stoolie for J. Edgar Hoover.”*1

  Favored politicians were warned who their opponents would be, what backing they had, and what skeletons might be hidden in their closets. In some cases, they were even elected with the FBI’s help. Impressed with a young Republican congressional hopeful in Michigan, the Bureau in 1946 arranged support for Gerald Ford, who expressed his thanks in his maiden speech by asking for a pay raise for J. Edgar Hoover.

  Among those on Hoover’s Special Correspondents list were radio and TV network presidents (William S. Paley, of CBS, David Sarnoff, of NBC/RCA); financiers (Joseph Kennedy, Jessie Jones); at least one bandleader (Lawrence Welk); clerics (Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale);* congressmen (by the dozens); Supreme Court justices (one would owe his appointment as chief justice to J. Edgar Hoover); executives of Ford, Sears, Warner Brothers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and the presidents or board chairmen of most major American banks.

  Given Hoover’s public persona of strict morality, it was assumed that those he honored with his friendship were models of probity. On the contrary, according to a top aide, “Hoover didn’t associate with people unless he had something on them.” Mervyn LeRoy, for example, was approved as director of the movie version of The FBI Story only after Hoover was satisfied that “we had enough dirt to control him.”3

  Almost every former SAC could, if so inclined, cite criminal charges which were dropped, or never pursued, because they involved persons known to be on the director’s Special Correspondents list.

  If the aging photographs on the walls of his home on Thirtieth Street NW were any indication (there were so many, one neighbor would say, you couldn’t make out the pattern of the wallpaper), the majority of the director’s friends were celebrities, most of them movie stars. Although obviously attracted by the glamour of Hollywood, Hoover was even more interested in its seamy side. Over the years the SACs of the Los Angeles and San Diego field offices—as well as his friends Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons—provided him with thousands of confidential reports, from which he learned which stars supposedly had marital or drug or alcohol problems, or venereal diseases, or were homosexual or involved with prepubescent girls.

  Among the “respectables,” Dorothy Lamour, Greer Garson, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple remained lifelong friends, and the recipients of many special considerations. When the former child actress Temple met the businessman Charles Black while vacationing in Hawaii, she asked her old friend J. Edgar Hoover to check him out. Apparently Black passed the FBI director’s scrutiny, for Temple later married him. Regarding a tour of Europe with his wife and four children, James Stewart, star of The FBI Story, later recalled, “As we’d land in Spain or Italy or someplace, a man would just come up to me, just out of the crowd, and say, ‘The Boss asked me to just check with you and see if everything is going all right,’ and would hand me a card and would say, ‘If you need us any time, here’s where we are.’ ”4 When “the rabbit died” after the comedian Lucille Ball took a pregnancy test, a hospital employee, who was also an informant for the Los Angeles field office, reported that fact, enabling Hoover to call Ball’s husband, Desi Arnez, and inform him, before his wife could, that he was going to become a father. When Judy Garland’s fiancé Sid Luft told the singer that he had to fly to Tulsa on business, the ever suspicious Garland made a person-to-person call to Washington and was put right through. In this case, Garland’s suspicions were well founded: Luft had flown to Tulsa, but only to catch a connecting flight to Denver, where he spent the night with his childhood sweetheart. On returning to his hotel room the following morning, he received a telephone call from Garland, who pleasantly reminded him of a Beverly Hills party they had to attend that night. For twenty years Luft couldn’t figure out how Garland had tracked him down, until he was interviewed by two FBI agents on another matter and one remarked, “I know you. The name just struck. Once I had to find you and I found you in the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver at 5 A.M. in the morning.”5

  Sometimes he sought out the celebrities, as in the case of the mystery writer Raymond Chandler. Chandler was dining, and drinking, at a La Jolla restaurant one night when a waiter informed him that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his associate Clyde Tolson wanted him to join them. Chandler told the waiter to tell Hoover he could go to hell. Chandler’s FBI file runs to over 250 pages.

  He had better luck with the comedian W. C. Fields, who was so flustered by the FBI director’s unexpected visit to his Los Felix home that he kept calling him Herbert.

  Finally Hoover got around to the purpose of his visit. “I understand you have some interesting pictures, eh?”

  Fields did. His friend John Decker had painted three miniatures of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Fields despised. Viewed upside down they depicted, in grossly exaggerated anatomical detail, a woman’s sex organs. But, fearing he was in danger of being arrested on a charge of possessing obscene materials, Fields affected a pose of uncomprehending innocence.

  “No ladies’ pictures?” his visitor persisted. “Maybe you can dig up a small one, or maybe even two studies of a certain lady in Washington?”

  Fields pulled one out of a desk drawer and apprehensively handed it to the FBI director. To Fields’s great relief, Hoover’s laughter proved he was obviously no fan of the lady in question. When Hoover asked if he would make him a present of the painting, Fields magnanimously gave him all three, in return for a jocular promise that he wouldn’t display them unless “there’s a change in the
administration.”*6

  His treatment of his enemies differed considerably. As a former administrative assistant noted, “Mr. Hoover was not given to halfway measures. If he didn’t like you, he destroyed you.”7

  In August 1950 Hoover learned, from an advance forecast in Publishers Weekly, that William Sloane Associates intended to publish a critical book entitled The Federal Bureau of Investigation, by Max Lowenthal, an attorney, former congressional aide, and adviser to President Truman. Although Lowenthal had been working on the book for over ten years, this was the first the Bureau had heard of it, and the director blamed the head of Crime Records. According to two assistant directors, who were present, Nichols, reduced to tears, sobbed, “Mr. Hoover, if I had known this book was going to be published, I’d have thrown my body between the presses and stopped it.”8

  Hoover, through Nichols, asked Morris Ernst to try to persuade William Sloane to halt publication of the book on the grounds that it was “filled with distortions, half-truths and incomplete details as well as false statements.”

  Ernst, whose reputation as a great civil libertarian rested in no small part on his successful battle against the suppression of James Joyce’s Ulysses, begged off, arguing that the publisher might try to capitalize on the FBI director’s using “his attorney” to approach him.9

  That Hoover knew what the book contained and was able to order the preparation of a detailed rebuttal in September 1950, two months before the book was published, was interesting. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, about this same time the page proofs of the book vanished from the motorcycle sidecar of a messenger en route from the printer to the publisher.

  Hoover did not wait for the book’s publication to discredit its author. Lowenthal—a Harvard graduate who had clerked for Frankfurter, knew the Hiss brothers, and had been a close personal friend of Harry S Truman since serving as an aide on one of his Senate subcommittees—was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and questioned about his membership in the National Lawyers Guild and various New Deal connections. (HUAC was so bereft of incriminating links that the publisher, William Sloane, was quizzed about the associations of his wife’s brother, leading Sloane to inquire, “Am I supposed to be my brother-in-law’s keeper?”)10

  Iowa’s Bourke B. Hickenlooper was given the job of discrediting the book in the Senate (“an utterly biased piece of propaganda”),11 with an assist from Michigan’s Homer Ferguson (“At bottom, the book is evil, a monstrous libel”),12 while one of Michigan’s representatives, George A. Dondero, led the attack in the House (“Lowenthal’s book is serving the cause of Moscow. Stalin must be well pleased with Lowenthal”).13 In addition to planted editorials (“Smearing the FBI”—New York Herald Tribune; “Harry Gunning for Hoover?”—New York Daily News), the press favorites Walter Winchell, Fulton Lewis, Jr., George Sokolsky, Rex Collier, and Walter Trohan were unleashed, as were all of the special agents in charge, who were instructed to discourage booksellers from stocking the book. (One SAC suggested agents steal copies from libraries; SOG rejected the suggestion after an assistant director pointed out they would probably replace them, thus increasing the sales.) A use was finally found for Morris Ernst, Hoover’s attorney and the ACLU’s head. In collaboration with Lou Nichols and the editor Fulton Oursler, Ernst penned the article “Why I No Longer Fear the FBI,” which appeared in the December 1950 issue of Reader’s Digest—and was reprinted and distributed for years afterward.

  Amid all the controversy, both the Washington Post and the Saturday Review of Literature opted to play it safe, each running two reviews, one pro and one con.* Among the few voices of sanity was that of John Keats of the Washington Daily News, who commented, “No evil can come from the public’s critical examination of the country’s Federal police, if it is done thoughtfully and objectively. This book starts the discussion.”14 For his efforts, both Keats and his newspaper were placed on the no-contact list. As for the author, Lowenthal was kept under surveillance and publicly and privately smeared—he’d never write another book or work again for the government—and his wife was subjected to an intimidating 3 A.M. FBI visit while her husband was out of town.

  What most of the book’s reviewers failed to point out, but its few readers were quick to discover, was that The Federal Bureau of Investigation was basically a dull legal brief. It sold fewer than 7,500 copies—possibly as few as 6,000—and, according to its editor, Eric P. Swenson, probably wouldn’t have sold that well had the FBI not spotlighted it.

  It was, however, a pioneering effort—the first book to examine critically the myths of J. Edgar Hoover and his fabled FBI.

  The director was also determined that it would be the last. “After this,” William Sullivan has noted, “we developed informants in the publishing houses.”15 These were not necessarily lower-level employees. They included at least two publishers, Henry Holt and Bennett Cerf. Cerf, the publisher of Random House, sent the FBI a copy of the manuscript of Fred Cook’s book The FBI Nobody Knows and may have been instrumental in delaying its publication.†

  When the ex-agent William Turner mentioned, on a 1962 radio talk show, that he was writing a book on his FBI experiences, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Nichols’s successor as head of Crime Records, queried his sources in the New York publishing world—including, according to DeLoach’s handwritten notation, “Random House, Holt Co., Harpers, et al”—but, at that time, “none [had] heard of it.”16 Shortly after Turner completed and began submitting the manuscript, some three months later, at least one publisher sent a copy to the Bureau, which was able to prepare a chapter-by-chapter “rebuttal” long before the book ever saw print.*17

  Nor did the Bureau limit its penetrations to book publishing. Determined to know the news even before it was published—and, if critical of the FBI, to circumvent its appearance—Crime Records, utilizing in-house sources at such major magazines as Time, Life, Fortune, Newsweek, Business Week, Reader’s Digest, U.S. News & World Report, and Look, regularly obtained notes on the editorial conferences where forthcoming articles were proposed and discussed.

  On learning that one magazine publisher was considering an exposé of the FBI and its long-tenured director, Hoover struck first, viciously. Favored newspaper contacts all over the country received a plain brown envelope with no return address. Inside was a packet of photographs showing the publisher’s wife engaged in fellatio with her black chauffeur while parked in Rock Creek Park. There was no mistaking either the identity of the woman or the limousine with its distinctive license plates. The photos were never published, of course (although they became dog-eared from examination): their purpose was to inflict maximum embarrassement. Quickly capitulating, the publisher sent his personal representative to grovel at Lou Nichols’s feet. Nichols, who denied the FBI’s complicity, although he admitted having “heard about” the pictures, adroitly switched the subject to the proposed exposé. Not only was the article never written; as long as the publisher was still living, no criticism of the director or the Bureau ever appeared in any of his publications. It took even longer for Hoover to forgive the magazines themselves. They remained on the no-contact list until a few years before the director’s own death, when he needed them to leak stories about his enemies.

  By contrast, Hoover extended special treatment to his friends DeWitt Wallace and Fulton Oursler, the publisher and editor of Reader’s Digest, and to the Cowles brothers, who published Look. Between 1940 and 1972 the Digest printed more than a dozen of the FBI director’s ghosted articles—bettered only by American Magazine, which published eighteen, and U.S. News & World Report, which published twenty-five.* Look’s preferential treatment often included exclusive access to FBI reports on ongoing investigations, thus enabling the magazine to scoop its leading rival, Life. The Cowleses rated so highly in Hoover’s favor that their magazine was allowed to publish a laudatory two-part series on the director, as well as the “official picture history” of the FBI.

  Hoover was not only determine
d to manipulate the news, deciding what the public should or should not know; he also altered history, in the process exacting revenge against one of his most hated enemies, “that Jew in the Treasury,” Henry Morgenthau, Jr.19

  During his nearly dozen years as secretary of the treasury (1934-45), Morgenthau kept a daily diary, which included not only his own recollections of events but also verbatim transcriptions of his meetings and telephone calls. Moreover, as a member of FDR’s “inner cabinet,” he was privy to the behind-the-scenes activities of most of the rest of the government. According to the historian Jason Berger, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Morgenthau diaries to scholars of the New Deal era. As “the only source of daily happenings in Washington,” Berger notes, “they are a researcher’s dream.” For writers ranging from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., to Ted Morgan, they have been an indispensable source of raw history.20

  On leaving office, Morgenthau had given his papers to the National Archives for safekeeping until such time as he decided to make them public.† On learning, in 1951, that Morgenthau was discussing publication of the diaries, Hoover struck.

  “It was a very covert operation,” a senior agent who headed the raiding party has recalled, “damn covert. There were five of us, and we were all sworn to absolute secrecy. We even left the Washington field office by various devious routes. And we’d go in [an out-of-the-way room at the National Archives] at different times so no one would know five agents were in that room. And we were the only ones who had a key.”

  Their only equipment, which they carried in their briefcases, was scissors. “We literally went through [the diary] with scissors, cutting out any references which would be unfavorable to Mr. Hoover or the FBI.‡ They were just physically excerpted right out of the diary itself. Our job was to cut out everything which, even by innuendo, might indicate that Mr. Hoover had feet of clay.”21 The pages were then retyped and renumbered so that there would be no indication that anything was missing. The whole operation took several weeks. What they left behind for the historians who followed was a history of the New Deal years as approved by J. Edgar Hoover.