J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Ford agreed. Sure that Kaufman would ask for them, he requested the FBI prepare its sentencing recommendations.

  The FBI was not a democratic institution. But in this instance, possibly to diffuse blame should the decision later be questioned, Hoover asked for the opinions of his subordinates, including the men who had actually handled the case, Belmont, Lamphere, and the other members of the Espionage Section.

  From all of the FBI memorandums which have been released to date, it is apparent that no one in the hierarchy of the FBI, including its director, favored a death penalty for Ethel. As Mickey Ladd put it in his memorandum, apparently forgetting the typewriter testimony, “Our evidence against her at the trial shows her participation consisted only in assisting in the activation of David Greenglass,” while the director himself viewed Ethel Rosenberg only as an accomplice “presumed to be acting under the influence of her husband.” Thus both Hoover and Ladd tacitly admitted there was no real case against Ethel.

  By now Hoover had begun to have some doubts as to whether his “lever” strategy was going to work—thus far neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg had shown any sign of confessing—but others still believed in it. Assistant U.S. Attorney James B. Kilsheimer, for example, argued, “Whether or not the death penalty is actually carried out, I do not think is the important consideration at this time. However, I do think it should be imposed in an attempt to induce these defendants to reveal the extent of their illegal activities.”55 Kilsheimer favored a triple death sentence.

  In his report to the attorney general, drafted later that same day, Hoover recommended that both Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell be sentenced to death and Ethel Rosenberg and David Greenglass be given prison sentences. He suggested thirty years for Ethel and fifteen for Greenglass.*

  The next day Hoover learned there was some substance to the rumors. His source was the assistant prosecutor Roy Cohn, who had held an ex parte conversation with Judge Kaufman, which Cohn later reported to Ray Barloga of the New York field office. According to Cohn, Judge Kaufman had consulted with two other justices as to what sentence he should impose. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerome M. Frank was against the death penalty for any of the defendants, while District Court Judge Edward Weinfeld reportedly favored the death penalty for all three.

  Judge Kaufman himself, Cohn reported, “personally favored sentencing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death and [said] that he would give a prison term to Morton Sobell.”

  As for himself, Cohn told Kaufman that he thought all three should be given the death sentence, but “at the same time he was of the opinion that if Mrs. Rosenberg was sentenced to a prison term there was a possibility that she would talk and additional prosecutions could be had on the basis of her evidence.”†57

  The following day, April 4, the day before sentencing, Judge Kaufman held another ex parte conversation, this one with the chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol. Asked for his recommendations, Saypol replied that he favored a death sentence for both Rosenbergs and a thirty-year sentence for Sobell but admitted that he hadn’t checked with his Justice Department superiors. Kaufman urged him to do so—he especially wanted the recommendations of J. Edgar Hoover—and on his urging Saypol flew to Washington that same day to confer with McInerney and Ford.

  He found opinions divided, but that “capital punishment for one or both was in not out.”59 Hoping to get a uniformity of opinion, Ford told Saypol to call him that evening, after his return to New York. That night both Saypol and Kaufman attended the same social function, and Saypol made the call in Kaufman’s presence. Learning that opinions were still divided, Kaufman asked Saypol not to make any recommendations for sentencing in court the next day.

  The decision would be solely his.

  Judge Kaufman, in pronouncing sentence, described the defendants’ crime as “worse than murder.” By “putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but what that millions more innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.”60

  There was no evidence, of any kind, that linked the Rosenbergs’ activities to the Communist aggression in Korea, no evidence really that the data Greenglass provided had been instrumental in giving the Russians the “secret” of the atomic bomb. If anyone deserved that credit, it was May and Fuchs. But Kaufman was not concerned with such technicalities. He sentenced both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death, gave Morton Sobell thirty years and David Greenglass fifteen.*

  After meeting with the press, Judge Kaufman placed a call to Edward Scheidt of the New York field office and asked him to pass on his thanks and highest compliments to Director Hoover.

  Kaufman had scheduled the executions for the week of May 21, 1951. The appeals, however, took two years, and not until June of 1953 did the agents make their trek to Ossining. Even then there was another delay, Justice Douglas granting a stay of execution, only to be overruled by the full Court, and the time was rescheduled for 11:00 P.M. on Friday, June 19.

  In a final appeal to Judge Kaufman, Attorney Bloch, hoping for at least a week’s postponement, pointed out that if the executions proceeded as scheduled they would occur on the Jewish Sabbath. Kaufman, himself Jewish, was sympathetic, but he didn’t change the date, only the time, moving up the executions to 8:00 P.M., shortly before sundown.

  But this caused still another problem. The executioner, an electrician who lived in upper New York State, wouldn’t arrive until 9:00 P.M. Furious at the possibility of further delay, Hoover demanded that a helicopter be sent to get the man. He arrived by car, however, escorted by FBI agents and state troopers, with time to spare.

  Eisenhower was waiting in the White House; on learning, from Hoover, that the Rosenbergs had agreed to talk, he would sign the commutation order. Hoover and his staff, including Assistant Director Mickey Ladd and the supervisor Robert Lamphere, were waiting at FBIHQ.

  There had been an earlier argument over protocol. Should Ethel or Julius go first? Precedent said the man should (though there hadn’t been that many husband-wife executions), but Warden Denno, who had studied the pair, believed that Ethel was the more strong willed. If she went first, and was led past her husband’s cell, Dunno suspected Julius would break. But Hoover flatly rejected the idea. Nothing would embarrass the Bureau more than to have the wife, and mother of two children, die and the husband survive. It would, Lou Nichols agreed, be a public relations nightmare.

  The procedure had been defined and redefined. Both Julius and Ethel would be asked, separately, by a rabbi, if they were willing to confess. If they were, their lives would be spared. Even if one was strapped in the chair, and suddenly indicated a willingness to talk, the execution would be halted. A signal system had been set up for the benefit of the FBI agents, who would be waiting in their office-cells at the end of death row. When an execution had been completed, the chief of guards would step out into the corridor and wave his arm.

  When he did so, shortly after Julius Rosenberg was taken into the chamber, the young special agent Anthony Villano was surprised. Believing an old Sing Sing myth, popularized in dozens of motion pictures, he’d thought the lights would dim, unaware the electric chair had its own power source.

  “Mr. Hoover,” Assistant Director Belmont spoke into the telephone. “I have just gotten word that Julius has been pronounced dead.”

  Villano couldn’t hear the director’s reply, if there was one.

  Now came the culmination of Hoover’s gamble. He had been betting that even if Julius didn’t break, Ethel would, that no mother would willingly desert her two children. And, as the minutes passed, and sweat dripped down Belmont’s face, it seemed the director had won. Instead, as Villano realized, when the guard stepped back into the corridor and again signaled, “it took an abnorma
lly long time for her to die.”

  “Mr. Hoover,” Belmont said, “Ethel’s had it.” Although Villano couldn’t hear the director’s reply, he was obviously upset with Belmont’s choice of words, for the assistant director now said, “You know—she’s gone,” and, after another hesitation, during which the director apparently read him out, he stated formally, “Ethel was just pronounced dead.”61

  Although Hoover had a direct line, the rest of the world had to wait for the announcement from the radio and TV reporters gathered outside the prison. Among them was the columnist Bob Considine, who broadcast that while it had taken only two minutes for Julius Rosenberg to die, they had trouble with Ethel, her heart was still beating, so they had to use more juice, and it had taken five minutes altogether. Considine concluded his broadcast by saying, “Ethel Rosenberg met her maker and will have a lot of explaining to do.”62

  At FBIHQ someone made a grisly joke, and Lamphere, who had hoped against hope that the Rosenbergs would confess, started to swing at him, but Ladd pushed him out into the hall. “We didn’t want them to die,” Lamphere later stated. “We wanted them to talk.”63

  In the thirteen pages of questions Belmont and Branigan had intended to ask Julius Rosenberg, only one concerned Ethel. Yet nothing more chillingly sums up the Bureau’s whole case than that single query: “Was your wife cognizant of your activities?”64

  Villano was sickened by what happened. As the agents drove back to New York, Assistant Director Belmont, himself shaken beyond caring whether his remarks were repeated, talked about what a narrow, rigid mind Hoover had. “It was one of my first glimpses of weakness in a man whom I idolized,” Villano would recall. There were many more in the years ahead. “We were a different group of people on the ride home.”65

  By that fall it was back to politics as usual. Speaking before a group of Chicago businessmen on November 6, the eve of the California election, Attorney General Brownell charged that President Truman had promoted the late Harry Dexter White to the International Monetary Fund even though he had learned, from two FBI reports, that White was a “Communist spy.”

  “I can now announce officially, for the first time in public,” Brownell said, “that the records in my department show that White’s spying activities for the Soviet government were reported in detail by the FBI to the White House…in December of 1945.”66

  Brownell was exaggerating, more than a bit. Hoover had never said that White was a spy, only that he had received allegations—which he admitted were unsubstantiated—that White was “a valuable adjunct to an underground Soviet espionage organization.” But former President Truman, convinced that his loyalty had been impugned, as indeed it had, immediately shot back with a couple of misstatements of his own, saying first that he couldn’t remember seeing any FBI reports mentioning White, then, after a few minutes reflection, adding, “As soon as we learned he was disloyal we fired him.”67 White, of course, had resigned because of ill health.

  Nor did he leave it at that. In a nationwide television address he corrected these errors and made some new ones, stating that he had first learned of the charges against White in February 1946, that he had tried to stop White’s appointment but found that the Senate had already confirmed it, and that he had let it go through on the understanding that to do otherwise would alert White and others and thus impede the FBI’s ongoing investigation.

  The ex-president was relying on his memory—Truman having been out of office less than a year, his presidential papers were still boxed up, awaiting the completion of a library in which to house them—and his memory was faulty. It is also possible that Tom Clark, acting as a go-between in the 1946 discussions, had gotten the messages garbled.

  Hoover corrected these misstatements in an unprecedented appearance on the floor of the U.S. Senate. On November 17, accompanied by Attorney General Brownell, Hoover appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, chaired by his friend William Jenner. Except for his annual appearances before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, the FBI director declined to appear before congressional committees, despite numerous invitations to do so. But this time he made an exception.

  The attorney general testified first, reading into the record the FBI reports on White, which he’d declassified for the occasion. The fact that Brownell was making them public for partisan political purposes brought not a word of protest from the FBI director, who, amid fervent applause, and after being introduced by Jenner as “the custodian of the nation’s security,” followed Brownell to the stand.

  Hoover’s speech had been carefully scripted, but no one watching his nationally televised appearance missed the real import of his words: not only was the FBI director calling the former president of the United States a liar; he was implying that, when it came to matters of internal security, Truman had been incredibly naive—or worse.

  “There is more here than the charges against one man. This situation has a background of some 35 years of infiltration of an alien way of life into what we have been proud to call our constitutional republic…I did not enter into agreement to shift White from his position in the Treasury Department to the International Monetary Fund. This was not within my purview…At no time was the FBI a party to an agreement to promote Harry Dexter White and at no time did the FBI give its approval to such an agreement…The decision to retain White was made by higher government authority.”

  Hoover further stated that White’s promotion “hampered” the FBI’s investigation, since the premises of the IMF were “extraterritorial, and the FBI does not have any right to follow any employees or any person onto the property of the Commission.” Nor could Hoover bypass the opportunity to get in one of his pet peeves: “We are under the same restrictions in regard to the United Nations.”

  Asked why he hadn’t protested Truman’s action, Hoover responded, “It would have been presumptuous to make a public protest. I am merely a subordinate official of the attorney general. I do not make the policy. I am advised of the policy to be followed.”68

  That mere subordinate official emerged from the Senate hearings “as probably the most powerful man on Capitol Hill,” in the opinion of the New York Times’s James Reston.69 U.S. News & World Report thought the event so noteworthy that it ran the complete texts of the FBI documents and the Brownell and Hoover testimony. Time, for a change, understated: “Hoover’s appearance caused a sensation.”70

  “Hoover has been waiting for a long time for this moment,” Drew Pearson wrote in his diary that night. “He hated Truman and almost everyone around him.”71 But there was more to it than revenge, sweet as it was—more than even proving his usefulness to, and sympathy with, the Republican administration.

  Hoover had, surprisingly enough, come under fire from an unlikely quarter, the American Right, to which he was something of a patron saint; the John Birch Society in particular, though commending him for catching Hiss, White, Fuchs, Gold, and the Rosenbergs, wondered why it had taken him so long to do so. In some cases these insidious Soviet agents had been operating for decades right under the noses of J. Edgar Hoover and his men. Truman provided a convenient scapegoat. Hoover could now say, and had, We warned them, and they did nothing.

  Yet, whatever personal satisfaction he received by settling old scores with Truman, he had taken a terrible risk—the possible alienation of his most powerful congressional supporters, the southern Democrats. They met in conclave, even Senator Eastland agreeing that Hoover would have to go, and there was a definite plan afoot to replace him, if the Democrats won the 1956 election. But the Democrats didn’t win—facing Stevenson again, Ike easily won reelection—and even Eastland in time accepted Hoover’s explanation that Brownell had ordered him to testify (Brownell would recall that the FBI director had “volunteered”) and he forgave him. Not so Sam Rayburn, who told Drew Pearson, “This fellow Hoover is the worst curse that has come to government in years.”72 The extremely powerful house majority leader would be a Hoover enemy for life.

/>   That the FBI director would dare attack a former president was an indication of his power. It was also a measure of his incredible arrogance, and as time passed this began to worry people in high places—including some of his chief aides—even more.*

  The White affair had an odd postscript. In criticizing Brownell on TV, Truman had accused him of “McCarthyism.” McCarthy had demanded and gotten equal time, using the opportunity to accuse both the Truman and the Eisenhower administrations of being soft on communism. With his eye on 1956, McCarthy now began attacking Ike. Which meant that Hoover had to distance himself from the senator, at least publicly. The pair were no longer seen together at Bowie or Harvey’s. But there were other, unpublicized meetings, private dinners at the director’s own home or in the apartment of Jean Kerr, McCarthy’s secretary and future wife. There was an unvarying ritual to the latter events, Roy Cohn would recall. Hoover and Tolson would arrive promptly at 7:00 P.M., not a minute earlier or later, and always bearing a bottle of wine. The senator would then urge the FBI director to take off his coat, and Hoover would demur. Prior to one such visit, McCarthy bet Cohn a quarter that he could get Hoover to shed his jacket. Cohn took the bet. This time McCarthy skipped the usual request and Hoover, noticing the departure from custom, inquired why. McCarthy, looking very serious, responded, “John, to be perfectly frank—because it doesn’t really matter to me at all—someone authoritative told me the reason you won’t take off your coat is that it contains a wire recorder, and that you tape even confidential social occasions like this.” According to Cohn, Hoover, visibly shaken, jumped up and yanked off his coat, angrily demanding, “Now which troublemaker told you that lie?”74 Cohn then paid McCarthy a quarter and explained about the bet, but, although the director was fond of practical jokes when they were at the expense of others, he didn’t strike Cohn as being particularly amused. But after that he always took his coat off.