J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  At 4:00 P.M.—he’d been delayed at the airport greeting the visiting Queen Juliana of the Netherlands—President Truman held his own press conference and announced that he had just fired Attorney General McGrath.

  As his replacement, the president named James P. McGranery, a U.S. district judge from Philadelphia, attorney general, stating that he would now head the corruption investigation. A lame-duck AG—1952 was an election year and, since Truman wasn’t running, there would be a new president and presumably a new Cabinet come January—McGranery never got around to it. Hoover, considering McGranery the least of several other evils, told his congressional supporters not to bother opposing his nomination.

  Morris returned to New York, McGrath to Rhode Island, both having learned the same lesson, that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was “too big to handle.”

  Another investigator to whom the FBI director did not offer cooperation was Estes Kefauver, who headed the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. Speaking for Hoover as much as for himself, Attorney General McGrath had declared—on the eve of the hearings—that the Justice Department had no persuasive evidence that a “national crime syndicate” existed.33

  The American public soon learned otherwise. One of the first congressional investigations to be televised, the Kefauver hearings reached a huge audience, an estimated twenty million viewers getting a quick, and often shocking, course in the criminal activities of such mob bosses as Luciano, Colombo, Gambino, Lucchese, Marcello, and Trafficante. For many the most dramatic testimony was that of Frank Costello. When the New York Mafia chieftain refused to allow his face to be photographed, the camera focused on his amazingly expressive hands; time and again when he lied, they didn’t. By contrast, for the chairman himself the high point of the hearings seemed to be the appearance of Virginia Hill. Kefauver, identified in his FBI file as “a notorious womanizer,” had trouble keeping his eyes off the extraordinarily long, silk-clad legs of the late Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s mistress.

  Denied help from the FBI, the committee turned to Hoover’s nemesis Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the heads of the crime commissions in Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles for most of its information on the criminal underground. Hoover would not even help protect the witnesses. When two were murdered just before they were scheduled to testify, Kefauver appealed to the FBI director, who coldly responded, “I regret to advise the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not empowered to perform guard duties.”34

  Among those the testimony linked to organized crime were such friends of the director as Clint Murchison, Joseph Kennedy, Walter Winchell, Sherman Billingsley,* Lewis S. Rosenstiel, and Myer Schine.

  The committee called more than eight hundred witnesses in over fifteen cities and boosted the hitherto unknown Tennessee senator into such national prominence that it was presumed he could have the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination for the asking. But in May 1951, just a year after the hearings had begun, Kefauver unexpectedly resigned as chairman. Although he offered several reasons for stepping down, he said nothing about the arrest, three weeks earlier, of Herbert Brody, a friend, campaign contributor, and Nashville numbers boss. Campaign records later revealed that Brody had donated $100 to Kefauver’s 1948 senate campaign. However, rumor had it that the amount was $5,000 and that Kefauver had pocketed the difference. All this, plus a number of unexplained deposits in the senator’s personal checking account, went into Kefauver’s FBI file for future use. Five years later, when Kefauver ran for vice-president as Adlai Stevenson’s running mate, Hoover would share these tidbits, and others he had since collected, with Richard Nixon.*

  * * *

  *“I was a real daddy longlegs of a worm when it came to crawling,” Hayden wrote in his autobiography, Wanderer.2 But Hayden came nowhere near the record set by the writer Martin Berkeley, who named 155 persons.

  *Prior to a visit by one of his clerical friends, an aide always placed a Bible on the director’s desk.

  *Although male visitors to Hoover’s basement recreation room were invariably shown the cameos—the showing was a highlight of the FBI director’s private tour—they are not listed in the itemized inventory of the late J. Edgar Hoover’s estate. Rumor has it that a certain former assistant director now has them.

  *The Washington Post’s anti-Lowenthal review was by Father Edmund Walsh, the Georgetown University dean who had suggested that McCarthy might want to use Communists in government as his campaign theme.

  †Cook’s book was not published until 1964, six years after large sections of it had appeared in a special issue of the Nation—and then only after Clyde Tolson personally intervened in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Macmillan Company not to release it.

  In addition to The FBI Nobody Knows, Cook also wrote The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss and The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy, earning him a permanent place on Hoover’s enemies list and folders in both Hoover’s Official/Confidential and Personal files.

  *William Turner had to wait seven years before seeing his book, Hoover’s FBI: The Man and the Myth, published in 1970 by Sherbourne Press. Not only was Turner subjected to a vicious campaign of personal vilification and harassment; his editor would be labeled a pornographer, the FBI resurrecting a 1965 indictment for allegedly publishing obscene books, neglecting to mention, when it spread the tale, that the charges had been dismissed.

  Hoover’s treatment of the former SA Turner caused a strong backlash within the Bureau’s rank and file.

  *In an appendix to his book The Age of Surveillance, Frank Donner lists the books, articles, pamphlets, speeches and interviews of J. Edgar Hoover. Although the list is admittedly incomplete, covering only the last three decades of the FBI director’s life, it includes 304 entries and runs to ten pages of small print, leading Donner to conclude, “No government official has ever communicated to a national audience in such volume as J. Edgar Hoover.”18

  †The Morgenthau papers were later transferred to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York.

  ‡Contrary to the agent’s recollections, there were a few oversights, such as an October 2, 1941, conversation between Morgenthau and several of his aides, including Harry Dexter White, in which it was noted that Attorney General Biddle seemed afraid to utter the name of J. Edgar Hoover, always referring to the FBI director as “he” or “him.”

  White: “Capital ‘he’?” (Laughter.)

  Gaston: “He didn’t mention Hoover by name. That would be sacrilegious.”

  During the same conversation Morgenthau and his aides ridiculed Martin Dies’s claim that there were fifty-six Communists in the Treasury Department (“They are no more Communists than we are”). Only White seemed to take the charge seriously, remarking, “Now look, Ed, if there are any Communists…it seems to me the quicker we know it and the quicker we get them out, the better. There is some awfully confidential material floating around here.”

  *In 1948 the third wife of Earl Miller, Eleanor Roosevelt’s oft-married bodyguard-driver, filed suit for divorce, naming Mrs. Roosevelt as correspondent. The suit was settled out of court and the judgment sealed. However, one of Hoover’s sources got a peek at the sealed file, and the FBI director added another entry to the former first lady’s Official/Confidential file.

  *When the CIA complained, Hoover responded, publicly, that the agency could not be trusted with the files, since it was not sufficiently “security conscious”—thus setting the stage for Elizabeth Bentley’s claim, only a few days later, in her appearance before HUAC, that the OSS had been infiltrated by Communists.25

  *Connelly himself was later convicted of accepting gifts and bribes and sentenced to prison.

  †Caudle, too, was later convicted of tax fraud and imprisoned.

  *Billingsley had proven to be something of an embarrassment to the FBI director. Following his involvement in a shooting incident, it was revealed that the Stork Club owne
r and ex-bootlegger had used J. Edgar Hoover as a reference on his gun permit application.

  *Merle Miller, in his book Lyndon, describes Kefauver as “a boozer, a womanizer, and an eager accepter of bribes from any source.”35 According to Bobby Baker, who paid some of those bribes, including one for $25,000 to help get Dallas an NFL football franchise, the senator “didn’t particularly care whether he was paid in coin or women.”36 The journalist Walter Trohan, who may have received his information from Hoover, rated Kefauver as “one of the more active capitol Lotharios…who often made a connubial bed of many a House and Senate committee-room table.”37 When Kefauver died in 1963 and his safe-deposit box was opened, it was found to contain $300,000 in stock from drug companies he was supposed to have been regulating.

  BOOK EIGHT

  Virtually Untouchable

  “J. Edgar Hoover has achieved a status in American life that is almost unique. In law-enforcement circles he is, we suppose, what Knute Rockne was to football, or Babe Ruth to baseball. And like them he is virtually untouchable.”

  —Commonweal,

  November 21, 1955

  26

  “We Didn’t Want Them to Die.”

  Although Truman had decided not to seek reelection, he kept his decision secret from all except his family, staff, and closest friends until April 1952. But the FBI director learned of it much earlier, probably from the president’s crony—and Hoover’s spy in the White House—George Allen, for in December 1951 Hoover ordered Crime Records to run name checks on the most likely Democratic candidates. He didn’t get around to doing the same for the Republicans until February, and it was from this latter list that he made his own personal choice. Although he at first favored General Douglas MacArthur, a longtime acquaintance, their friendship dating back to the bonus march days, on whom he already had a sizable dossier and with whom he shared a common enemy, Harry S Truman, when it became obvious that MacArthur’s candidacy wasn’t going anywhere, he switched his allegiance to another general, Dwight David Eisenhower, the former allied commander in Europe. But recalling 1948 all too well, he did nothing to further that candidacy until after the Republican National Convention that July, when Eisenhower defeated Mr. Republican, Senator Robert Taft, on the first ballot.

  Hoover was especially pleased when the Republicans chose as Eisenhower’s running mate the junior senator from California, Richard M. Nixon. Nixon was young (just thirty-nine), gave the ticket geographical balance, was a hard campaigner, and had solid anti-Communist credentials. (Since Eisenhower had spent most of his life in the military and had declared his party affiliation only months earlier, no one was sure where he stood on anything.) Nixon had arrived in Washington with those credentials already well established, having in 1946 smeared his Democratic opponent, Jerry Voorhis, with a red brush, a tactic that worked so well he’d repeated it in his 1950 Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he’d labeled the “pink lady.” And, of course, topping it off was HUAC and the conviction of Alger Hiss.

  As for the Democrats, who’d held their convention two weeks later, the crime hearings had made Senator Estes Kefauver a popular hero and the leading contender in the polls. But the incumbent president not only disliked Kefauver personally; the televised linkage of crime bosses and local politicians, most of them Democrats, had, he felt, hurt the party badly. Truman’s nod and the convention’s nomination—on the third ballot, Kefauver having led on the first and second—went to a reluctant candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson, the governor of Illinois. Witty, urbane, the author of brilliant speeches even better when read than when spoken, Stevenson became known as the “egghead” candidate. His campaign supporters joked that his running mate, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, provided not only geographical but intellectual balance. As for Alger Hiss, Stevenson too had made his opinion known: although he knew him only slightly, from his work with the UN, he had testified as a character witness for Hiss in his first trial and was, like most liberal Democrats, still stunned by Hiss’s later conviction.

  The 1952 election campaign was, in the opinion of the columnist Marquis Childs, perhaps the dirtiest in American history up to that time. While Eisenhower took the high road, Senators Nixon, McCarthy, and Jenner handled the smears, innuendos, and distortions. “There was an even lower moment in that schizophrenic campaign,” Childs recalled. “A report reached Democratic headquarters that McCarthy was going to make a nationwide television attack on the Stevenson campaign. He had been boasting he would say it was made up of pinks, punks and pansies. This last was a public reference to the ugly whispering campaign about Stevenson’s personal life.”1

  Hoover was the source of the whispers. The FBI had supposedly obtained, from local police, statements alleging that Adlai Stevenson had been arrested on two separate occasions, in Illinois and Maryland, for homosexual offenses. In both cases, it was claimed that as soon as the police had learned his identity, Stevenson had been released and the arrests expunged from the records, though not from the recollections of the arresting officers. Through a devious route which hid the Bureau’s complicity, Crime Records had channeled this and other derogatory information to Nixon, McCarthy, and members of the press.* Although most newspaper editors had the story, none used it. But it was widely circulated, as anyone who worked in the campaign could attest.

  “There were a lot of us who were absolutely appalled by it [the smear],” recalls a former agent who was working in Crime Records at the time, “but Mr. Hoover was determined to elect Nixon and Ike, and when he made up his mind to do something there was no changing it.”2

  The FBI also kept close watch on Ellen Borden Stevenson, the candidate’s ex-wife. Mrs. Stevenson, who had been diagnosed as suffering from “persecutory paranoia,”3 told numerous people—including James “Scotty” Reston, Arthur Krock, and complete strangers at dinner parties—that her former husband was a homosexual. She also said that he’d murdered someone, was having affairs with numerous women, and was mentally and morally unfit for the presidency.

  The Democrats, however, had their own ammunition: a copy of General Marshall’s angry letter to General Eisenhower, regarding the latter’s postwar plans to divorce his wife, Mamie, and marry his WAC driver, Kay Summersby—a letter they had somehow obtained from the Pentagon’s files. According to Childs, “Notice was privately served that if McCarthy used the gutter language the letter would be released. The resulting McCarthy broadcast was, for McCarthy, comparatively innocuous.”4

  The homosexual allegations resurfaced in the 1956 presidential campaign, with unforeseen repercussions: they ended Walter Winchell’s brief career in television.

  Hoover also passed on the Stevenson materials to John and Robert Kennedy when they took office, in an attempt to keep Stevenson from being appointed ambassador to the United Nations. To their credit, the Kennedys, long aware of the allegations, chose to ignore them.*

  “There had come to my ears,” Eisenhower later wrote of the period immediately following his November 1952 election—which he won with 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89—“a story to the effect that J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, had been out of favor in Washington. Such was my respect for him that I invited him to a meeting, my only purpose being to assure him that I wanted him in government as long as I might be there and that in the performance of his duties he would have the complete support of my office.”5

  Hoover was quick to show his appreciation, and usefulness, informing the president-elect that one of his aides, the son of a powerful Republican senator, was a homosexual. Eisenhower was thus able to replace him quietly, without embarrassment to either the administration or his father.†

  Hoover also passed on to Eisenhower, or his various assistants, derogatory information on Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas, Bernard Baruch, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, the United Auto Workers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a host of other enemies, including, of course,
William J. Donovan, just in case Eisenhower was considering him as a possible new CIA director to replace the ailing General Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith.* (Instead Ike appointed Donovan ambassador to Thailand, a banishment that both Hoover and Thomas E. Dewey heartily approved, although the FBI director couldn’t resist subjecting Donovan, his family, and his friends to the indignity of a full field investigation—agents asked who his parents were and whether they were born in the United States.)

  Nor did he overlook Eleanor. Following Eisenhower’s election, Mrs. Roosevelt had resigned her position as U.S. delegate to the United Nations so that the president-elect would be free to designate whomever he chose for the post. But she made no secret of her desire to be reappointed. While the matter was still under consideration, Hoover arranged to have Lou Nichols brief two White House aides on the Lash-Roosevelt “affair,” as well as some of her other “questionable associations.” What effect this had on the president’s decision is unknown—probably the former first lady’s active support for Ike’s recent opponent, Adlai Stevenson, as well as her stinging criticism of Eisenhower himself, for failing to defend his mentor General George Marshall when the latter was under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy, counted more—but Mrs. Roosevelt was not reappointed.

  Convinced that Eisenhower was ill informed on the subject of internal security, Hoover took it upon himself to educate him, with briefings and memos. “Unlike Truman,” William Sullivan recalled, “who was skeptical of anything Hoover offered…Eisenhower blindly believed everything the director told him, never questioned a word…He may have been a great general but he was a very gullible man, and Hoover soon had him wrapped right around his finger.”6 Eisenhower so trusted Hoover that even before he took the oath of office, according to Ed Tamm, “the director advised him on matters, about the people he would select for his cabinet, the different policies.” He was in so tight with the current administration, the director bragged to Judge Tamm, whom he had by now forgiven, that the White House had installed a direct line to his residence. Not only did the president call him; the vice-president called twice a day. “Right before the director left for the office,” Tamm recalls Hoover telling him, “Mr. Nixon called him, every morning,” and then again “every night, and told him what was going to happen tomorrow and who he was going to see.”7