J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Although he was not personally involved, the senior agent heard from the Bureau grapevine that President Roosevelt’s papers had been similarly “sanitized.” According to librarians at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, many FBI reports are missing. And still others have been changed. In 1976 Timothy Ingram, an investigator for a House subcommittee chaired by Bella Abzug, discovered that a number of FBI documents at Hyde Park did not match FBI carbons of the same correspondence which were obtained by committee subpoena or under the Freedom of Information Act; whole paragraphs and pages were missing from the Hyde Park copies, indicating that these, supposedly the originals, had been edited and then retyped and re-signed. At the time this was done, Hoover had no way of knowing that one day the FBI’s own files would be made public, although he knew the Roosevelt papers would be.

  It is possible that other presidential libraries have also been sanitized.

  Since the 1950s the FBI has assigned a permanent staff to the National Archives, to determine what FBI and Justice Department records will be retained, made public, withheld from examination, or destroyed.

  Nor, it would seem, did Hoover overlook his former place of employment, the Library of Congress.

  The Supreme Court justice, and Hoover nemesis, Felix Frankfurter also kept a set of diaries. When Joseph Lash edited them for publication, he noted, “In addition to Frankfurter’s [own] excisions from the Diaries, some sections were stolen after the justice’s papers were turned over to the Library of Congress.” To which Lash, who had his own reasons for distrusting J. Edgar Hoover, couldn’t resist adding, “Some day the Federal Bureau of Investigation may recover them.”22 Among the items missing from the Frankfurter papers was the only copy of a speech the justice had written, but never delivered, criticizing the director of the FBI.

  Hoover did not forget his other old enemies either.

  His files on Eleanor Roosevelt grew even more massive after Truman appointed her U.S. representative to the United Nations.* Whenever he heard her referred to as “First Lady of the World” he flew into a towering rage. He was afraid that she might be given the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that he not so secretly coveted. But while there was a Democratic administration the opportunities to attack her were few. Still, there were some small satisfactions.

  In 1951 Mrs. Roosevelt received a number of particularly virulent letters and telegrams from a hostile critic. Concerned about her safety, her secretary contacted the FBI official Alex Rosen, who in turn suggested to the director that perhaps the Bureau could persuade the writer to stop his harassment. With self-righteous glee, Hoover responded, “No. This is a democracy. The Bureau cannot interfere with a person’s inalienable right to write letters unless there be threats contained therein. Any other position on our part would smack of intolerance and a violation of civil rights and we can never be guilty of this.”23

  After being abruptly fired by Truman, William Donovan had returned to private practice. Soon bored, he had in 1946 decided to seek the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from New York. But his forthright honesty got in the way. When the party leader Thomas Dewey offered to support him, in return for his support of Dewey in the 1948 presidential race, Donovan had bluntly responded, “I don’t think you’re qualified for president now, and you won’t be qualified then.” On hearing this, Ernest Cuneo remarked, “What job would he like other than being the senator from New York?”24

  There was only one job Donovan really wanted, directing the agency which he himself, more than any other person, had created. But, thanks in a large part to the animosity of J. Edgar Hoover, he was forced to sit on the sidelines, while one unqualified man after another attempted to fill it.

  Sidney W. Souers, who headed the Central Intelligence Group from January to June 1946, was a former executive of the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain. An admiral in the naval reserve, his intelligence background was limited to a tour of duty as deputy director of ONI, and he found his new organization so wracked with strife that for a time he considered turning over all its functions to the FBI.

  Souer’s replacement, Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the nephew of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served less than a year, from June 1946 to May 1947, mostly biding his time until his appointment as U.S. Air Force chief of staff. It was during Vandenberg’s tenure that the FBI was forced, by presidential edict, to turn over its South American operations to the CIA.

  Hoover did not do so gladly. Under his direct orders—relayed through William Sullivan, who was supervisor in charge of intelligence operations in Mexico and South America—the FBI/SIS agents burned their files and dismissed their informants, rather than turn them over to their new rival.*

  One CIA officer, assigned to a South American republic, recalled, “The only thing I found when the Bureau left was a row of empty safes and a pair of rubber gloves in what had been an FBI darkroom. But I was able to recontact most of the Bureau’s sources, because I hired the ex-FBI chief’s driver, and he knew where I could find them.”26

  Not only did Hoover lose South America; he also lost a number of his best agents. Capitalizing on their foreign-language skills and native contacts, some of the top people in his specially trained SIS cadre defected to the CIA, where they were soon joined by other agents who had served in the United States. A number of them, including Raymond Leddy, Winston MacKinlay Scott, and William King Harvey, later occupied key positions in the CIA, while others, such as Robert Maheu, found employment on the covert side.

  However, according to William Corson, Hoover did not bemoan these losses: in some cases he secretly arranged them. Even those who were not “witting” spies for the FBI director usually maintained their fraternal old-boynetwork ties with the Bureau and, if the need arose, could be called upon for assistance. Subsequent CIA directors, starting with Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, tried to weed out these “plants,” but by their own admission were not altogether successful.

  Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who followed Vandenberg as CIA director, spent nearly all of his three years in bureaucratic infighting, mostly pitted against the Defense and State Departments and the FBI. He lost the most significant of these battles, while his few intelligence coups were eclipsed by his failure to forecast Russia’s development of the atom and hydrogen bombs and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950.

  It was not until October 1950, and the appointment of General Walter “Beetle” Smith, that Hoover again faced an adversary nearly as formidable as William J. Donovan.

  In July 1949 Associate Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy died. In a move that he’d later regret, Truman replaced Hoover’s former boss with his current boss, naming Tom Clark to the Court and replacing him as attorney general with J. Howard McGrath.

  A former governor and U.S. senator from Rhode Island, McGrath was a pure politician, and the president was indebted to him, McGrath having been democratic national committee chairman during Truman’s 1948 campaign.

  McGrath had a few problems. He was, Robert J. Donovan notes, a dapper, personable man. “On the other hand,” Donovan adds, “he was lazy, and it was well known in Washington that he drank too much…McGrath seems not to have been aware of much that was going on around him.”27

  The FBI director got along very well with the new attorney general. Asked by a friend how he handled Hoover, McGrath replied that he didn’t: “He’s too big to handle.”28 It took no time at all for Hoover to convince McGrath that the biggest problem facing the Department of Justice was communism. McGrath red-stamped most of the FBI director’s requests or turned them over to his deputy, Peyton Ford, who actually ran the department. Emboldened, Hoover decided to test McGrath to see how far he could go, and asked the attorney general to approve the installation of microphone surveillances involving trespass. McGrath responded that he couldn’t give his approval, because to do so might violate the Fourth Amendment, but he didn’t say H
oover couldn’t do it, so the FBI went right on committing break-ins to plant its bugs.

  Seemingly, on departing from Justice, Tom Clark had left more than a trace of his somewhat rancid morality behind, because it wasn’t long before Congress and the press, investigating allegations of corruption in the Truman administration, focused on the department. As early as January 1950 Hoover alerted Matt Connelly,* the president’s appointments secretary and one of the FBI director’s carefully cultivated “friends” in the White House, that a group of newspapers was planning a campaign against organized gambling and that the first story, due for release in mid-February, would “be critical of the attorney general” and “include information relating to his supposed associations and contacts with members of the underworld, particularly in Kansas City, and with the president’s supposed connections with these individuals and their contributions to the presidential campaign.”

  As usual, Hoover got double duty from the warning. The memo concluded, “This information is being made available to you as a matter of interest. It is also being furnished to the attorney general”—thus putting the AG in his debt.29

  During the rest of 1950 and throughout 1951, the scandals proliferated, spreading through the Bureau of Internal Revenue and then coming back to the Justice Department itself, now centering on Theron Lamar Caudle, the assistant attorney general in charge of the JD’s tax division, who was accused of failing to prosecute certain tax cases as well as cheating on his own tax returns.† No evidence was ever developed indicating that McGrath himself was corrupt, but there was abundant evidence that he was less than vigorous in prosecuting others.

  Truman told McGrath to fire Caudle. When the attorney general procrastinated—there were indications that he was on an extended binge—Truman fired him himself. He also decided that McGrath was not up to the job of investigating government corruption, particularly not when it concerned his own department, and secretly decided to replace him.

  The man the president chose as the next attorney general was Justin V. Miller, a former associate justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and an expert on criminal law. It was presumed that Miller would be a tough, independent AG, which was not the kind the FBI director favored. Hoover had other reasons for opposing Miller. Way back in the thirties, Miller had handled press relations for Homer Cummings, touting the attorney general’s—rather than J. Edgar Hoover’s—“War on Crime.” Hoover might have forgiven this had not Miller recently committed a far more serious offense, an unforgivable sin, as it were: he’d stated in a speech that the FBI needed stricter executive control.

  Although Truman had offered the AG’s job to Miller, and Miller had accepted, the president suddenly reversed himself and withdrew the appointment. There was, Donovan observes, “a suspicion that J. Edgar Hoover had somehow gotten wind of what was going on, perhaps through his White House friend Matt Connelly,”30 and in some way persuaded Truman to withdraw the nomination. The only explanation Truman ever gave for his change of mind is, considering the president’s attitude toward the FBI director, almost mindboggling. He told a friend, Charles Murphy, who had first recommended Miller, that he could not appoint an attorney general who had publicly criticized the FBI!

  It is most likely that the president, under fire on the corruption issue, and under even heavier attack from the rabid junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, who was charging that he and his administration were “soft on communism,” had pragmatically decided that his best defense would be to get the FBI director on his side. Otherwise it is impossible to explain what Truman did next. Putting the replacement of Attorney General McGrath on hold, he decided to appoint a respected national figure to head the corruption investigation, a man whose credentials would go unquestioned, and offered the job to J. Edgar Hoover.

  Except for ceremonial occasions such as the awarding of presidential citations, the FBI director was an infrequent visitor to the Truman White House. But this particular visit was memorable for still another reason. It led to one of the strangest investigations ever conducted by the FBI’s Crime Records Division.

  Hoover declined the president’s suggested appointment, citing various statutory reasons why he could not head such an inquiry, but privately realizing that it was a no-win situation. Not only would he be investigating his own department, Justice, and his own superior, the attorney general, but a widespread probe into governmental misdeeds would alienate every department and bureau head in Washington. Hoover had a long memory, and it went back to the uproar that followed the Bureau’s investigation of the District of Columbia’s police department. He was not about to repeat that mistake on an even greater scale. What he collected secretly, for his own use, however, was another matter.

  Toward the end of their conversation, the president commented, bitterly, about how disappointed he was in some of his appointments, how men he had known for years had, once in office, betrayed his trust. Commiserating, the FBI director observed that even Christ had been betrayed by one of his disciples. Not one, the president corrected him, three. In addition to Judas, both Thomas and Peter had denied knowing Jesus, and Peter had done so thrice.

  J. Edgar Hoover did not like to be corrected, and particularly not on a matter of biblical scholarship (he had, after all, almost become a Presbyterian minister, as he was fond of telling interviewers) and especially not by Harry S Truman, who, unbeknownst to him, prided himself on his knowledge of the Bible.

  Infuriated, on his return to FBI headquarters Hoover barked out an order. Crime Records was used to odd requests, but this one soon spread from floor to floor: “The boss wants us to investigate Jesus Christ!”

  Since research quickly established that the president was right and the director wrong, much effort had to be expended on the wording of the report, so it would appear that the director was, technically, correct. But for days no one dared present it. Finally William Sullivan took it in. To the then supervisor’s surprise, Mr. Hoover did not lose his temper. “He just looked thoughtful,” Sullivan recalled, unaware that a seed had been planted which would, in time, blossom into a full-blown obsession.31

  J. Edgar Hoover’s search for the three Judases had begun.

  When no one else he’d approached wanted the job, Truman settled on Newbold Morris, the son-in-law of Judge Learned Hand (the judge himself having earlier declined the appointment). A New York estate lawyer and former president of the New York City Council, Morris’s apparent qualifications were that he was a reformer and a nominal Republican, had never served in the federal government, and had never conducted an investigation. He was a sheep ripe for shearing, and Hoover, with the help of almost everyone in Washington, proved obliging.

  On arriving in the capital in late January 1952, Morris was appointed a special assistant to the attorney general by McGrath, and promptly announced that the first agency he intended to investigate was the Justice Department. He started by interviewing department and bureau heads. All complied except Hoover, who refused to meet with Morris until ordered to do so by the president.

  Citing his busy schedule, the FBI director allotted him ten minutes. Morris arrived promptly at the scheduled time, 2:30 P.M. The FBI director didn’t stop talking until 6:45. “I don’t believe I got the chance to open my mouth more than twice,” Morris later recalled, “and we never got around to the subject I wanted to discuss…He told me about the raids and about the old-time gangsters that had been shot. He told me of going to the opening night of some play and being called out in the middle of it to lead his forces. He wanted me to come to Quantico to the FBI range for target practice, and what’s more he couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go.” Summing up the experience, which still awed him years later, Morris stated, “Let me say that if I had been my 12-year-old son it would have been the most exciting afternoon of my life.”32

  Morris next sent out a questionnaire to all the top officials of the government, including members of congress, asking them to itemiz
e their sources of income. Once they had recovered from the shock, almost no one complied, including Attorney General McGrath, who refused to even pass out the questionnaires.

  On March 10 Morris committed his second, and fatal, mistake: he told the press that, in order to maintain impartiality, he wouldn’t use any current or former FBI personnel as investigators.

  On March 16 Walter Winchell told his radio audience that the FBI critic and Truman crony Max Lowenthal was behind Morris’s appointment. Representative Dondero indignantly repeated the charge in the House, while on the Senate side Pat McCarran demanded an investigation of the Morris appointment. Back in the House, Patrick J. Hillings complained, on March 18, that Morris still hadn’t been cleared by the FBI.

  Considerably less naive about who his real enemy was, and the power he wielded, Morris the following day announced that the one unit of the Justice Department he didn’t intend to investigate was the FBI and that no questionnaires would be sent to Director Hoover or FBI personnel.

  Asked by the president why he hadn’t distributed the questionnaires, McGrath stated that they were a violation of personal rights. Truman, now under fire from nearly everyone in the government, decided to take the matter under advisement.

  Unaware that his days were already numbered, Morris on March 26 asked the attorney general for his questionnaire, plus all his appointment books, telephone records, correspondence, and diaries.

  At exactly noon on April 3, 1952, with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover standing at his side, Attorney General McGrath announced that he had just fired Newbold Morris.