by Curt Gentry
27
An “Incident”
For a time the Hoover-McCarthy relationship seemed to be a genuine love fest, McCarthy constantly playing on the director’s vanity. In a typical letter the senator could write, “No one need erect a monument to you. You have built your own monument in the form of the FBI—for the FBI is J. Edgar Hoover and I think we can rest assured that it always will be,”1 to which Hoover replied, “Any success the FBI has had is due in no small measure to the wholehearted support and cooperation we have always received from such fine friends as you.”2
But that was in 1952. By the start of 1954, Hoover had decided he had no choice but to sever ties with McCarthy, for the senator, in attacking the president, was putting the FBI director’s own position in jeopardy. Besides, Hoover had amassed a number of grievances, which, though small, had a cumulatively great effect. Time and again McCarthy and Cohn had quoted from confidential FBI reports, and though everyone denied they came from the Bureau, not everyone believed the denials, Senator Fulbright for one announcing that he would no longer supply information to the FBI, since it invariably seemed to find its way into the hands of the junior senator from Wisconsin. Nor did McCarthy consult with Hoover when he hired away two of his top agents, Francis Carr, supervisor of the New York field office Red squad, and Jim Juliana, his assistant. And last, but by no means least, there were the embarrassingly public antics of the McCarthy aides Cohn and Schine, both of whom used every possible occasion to brag about their close personal friendship with the FBI director.
For the better part of four years, Hoover had, to a certain extent, been able to contain McCarthy. He’d persuaded him not to investigate the Atomic Energy Commission, for example, or to involve himself in the Oppenheimer case, which the FBI was handling. And prior to the confirmation hearings of Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen, Eisenhower’s choice as ambassador to Russia, Hoover, aware that the president was anxious for the nomination to go through, had declined to share certain highly personal information regarding Bohlen, though he did admit that the FBI check on the candidate had revealed a number of homosexual associates. Asked by McCarthy whether Bohlen was a homosexual, Hoover responded that he “did not know,” that he “had no evidence to show any overt act,” but that “Bohlen had certainly used bad judgment in associating with homosexuals.”3 McCarthy went ahead and attacked Bohlen, but lacking specifics the speech had little impact, and Bohlen was confirmed.*
By the spring of 1954 Hoover, realizing that he, too, could be charged with having questionable associations, as he had accused so many others of having, was complaining to the president that “McCarthy had reached a point where he was actually impeding the investigation of Communists,” according to Vice-President Richard Nixon.4 Nor was this the first time Hoover had seen fit to caution the president about McCarthy. The previous July, Hoover had warned the president, through the attorney general, that he had learned from a confidential informant that there was a “conspiracy” to undermine the Eisenhower administration and elect McCarthy president. The ringleaders, according to his informant, whom he deemed “reliable,” were none other than Cardinal Spellman and Joseph Kennedy, assisted by other wealthy Catholics.6 (Since the cardinal was out of favor with the pope at the time, apparently the pontiff wasn’t part of the plot.) Just how seriously Eisenhower and Brownell took this sensational charge is not known, but Hoover himself, from the tone of his memorandum, seemed to give it more than passing credence.
It is not known whether Hoover chose this time to share his homosexual files on Spellman and Cohn with his superiors, but it would seem to have been an appropriate occasion.
The timing of Hoover’s decision to sever relations with McCarthy was fatal to the senator. The FBI director’s order not to extend further aid or assistance came just before the start of the Army-McCarthy hearings, when he needed the FBI’s help the most. The hearings, which began on March 16, 1954, and ended two months later, brought McCarthy’s downfall. Through the medium of television, millions of Americans saw McCarthy for what he actually was: a bully and pathological liar who had no compunctions about slandering innocent people. Nor did the snickering asides of Roy Cohn help.
Sharply defined as the opposing viewpoints were, they had at least one thing in common, a reporter for Commonweal observed, “the embarrassingly obvious desire of the principals on both sides to drape themselves in the Hoover mantle.”7
Although the FBI director emerged unscathed, the junior senator from Wisconsin didn’t. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn McCarthy, making him only the fourth such member to be sanctioned by his peers.
Following his censure, McCarthy was finished. He still had his Senate seat and his committee assignments, but when he rose to speak most of the senators left the chambers and reporters no longer attended his press conferences. Although he’d never been a Dapper Dan, Jean Kerr had cleaned him up for a time, but now he slipped back into his old ways. It wasn’t that he drank more, according to Richard Rovere, at least not at first, but that he seemed less able to handle it. Those who couldn’t avoid him noticed that his breath was always bad and that he frequently smelled of vomit.
His onetime friendship with J. Edgar Hoover was all he had left: he mentioned it in speech after speech, giving the impression that they remained bosom buddies and fellow battlers in the fight against the subversive menace, but in reality, and what seemingly hurt him most, was that when he called FBIHQ the director was either “in conference” or “out of town,” and even Lou Nichols referred his calls to an assistant. He tried to get back in the director’s good graces—the 1956 “Hoover for President” boomlet was mostly his idea—but his efforts rated not even a thank-you note. In Bethesda more often than out, as a result of a variety of mysterious ailments which were apparently alcohol-related or mental or both, he died on May 2, 1957, at the age of forty-seven, exactly fifteen years before Hoover, who was fourteen years his senior.*
Although he hadn’t spoken to him for three years, Hoover did attend his funeral. However, as far as the FBI was concerned, McCarthy, for all his assistance in publicizing the Communist menace, and thus significantly increasing the Bureau’s appropriations, had become a nonperson: there is no mention of his name in the index of Don Whitehead’s Bureau-approved history The FBI Story.
J. Edgar Hoover could have stopped the phenomenon known as McCarthyism before it ever started; Senator Robert Taft could have denied it respectable Republican support, early on, when it really mattered; and most decidedly so could have President Dwight David Eisenhower, had he not refused to “get in the gutter” with McCarthy. It is also possible that one organization might have made a significant difference, or at least provided a reasoned, responsible voice of dissent, had it had a different leadership. Instead the American Civil Liberties Union chose to collaborate, not directly with the witch-hunters (although there were scattered instances of that), but with their mentor, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Morris Ernst, the ACLU’s general counsel, did express some alarm about McCarthy, but only out of concern for the sanctity of the FBI’s files. “I know you are realistic enough to know that a high proportion of the respectable members of our Republic believe that McCarthy and others got inside tips, if not a look at the files,” he wrote Lou Nichols. “If this feeling develops, it can do much more harm to our FBI than a hundred Lowenthal books might have done. I am worried and I only hope that you and Edgar are not too complacent.”9
Ernst might be accused of many things, but complacency wasn’t one of them. He worried about “our FBI.” So much so that he sometimes infuriated Hoover.
“…with respect to the loyalty oath situation, if you don’t mind my being impertinent,” Ernst wrote Hoover, “may I suggest that I think you are getting a little thin-skinned, and I think you are probably writing too many letters making corrections of attacks on the FBI. I don’t blame you for being sore, but I think that there must be some better strategy than having you answer these at
tacks.”10 “Tell Edgar that I am worried about him for the first time,” Ernst wrote Nichols. “His letter to me about Fly [James Lawrence Fly, former FCC chairman and a longtime Hoover enemy] indicates a height of temperature inside of him which is not only unnecessary but dangerous since it bespeaks some degree of insecurity.”11
Hoover had never reacted well to Morris Ernst’s propensity toward offering gratuitous advice or to the patronizing tone in which he often delivered it, but while Ernst was still general counsel of the ACLU, the FBI director had put up with it. But Ernst retired in 1954, and in a December 22, 1955, letter he finally went too far. In his wanderings around Washington, he reported to Hoover, he had heard “some silly Republicans,” and even some random Democrats, “talking about ‘Hoover for President’ in the event that Ike doesn’t run.” Such “nonsense” could prove embarrassing to him, Ernst advised, and he’d done his best to stop it.* Ernst concluded, “I hope you will not deem it unkind for me to say that I like you as head of the FBI, but not as President or even a candidate for that office.”
After that, a definite chill became evident in Hoover’s (that is, Nichols’s) replies. But Ernst apparently failed to notice it.
In August 1957 Ernst telephoned Nichols about some matter, only to be told that he had a great deal of nerve calling after he’d accused the FBI of rigging the typewriter in the Hiss case. Ernst tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Nichols that he’d said no such thing. He’d merely stated, after reading Alger Hiss’s In the Court of Public Opinion,* that he was “now inclined to believe that Hiss was not guilty” and that he had a hunch that “the validity of the court processes in the Hiss case one day may be profoundly re-examined.”12
Quoting the director, Nichols told Ernst, “If Hiss was innocent, then the FBI lied.”13
“My dear Lou,” Ernst wrote Nichols. “I was bewildered and shocked by the message you sent me from Edgar. I have never found any persuasiveness in the manufactured typewriter story. In any event, you must know by now, if you ever will learn, my profound and publicly stated admiration and faith in the FBI.”14
But Hoover would have none of it. “He is a liar,” the director wrote on Nichols’s memorandum of his conversation with Ernst, “and I want no explanations from him. I will not allow any FBI contact with him.”15
Although they had been “friends” for twenty-five years, Hoover ordered a full review of Ernst’s FBI file. Well aware that the wind that changed, one of his aides reported back that Ernst had been connected with a number of cited Communist fronts. Hoover also ordered Ernst purged from his Special Correspondent list. This meant no more personally signed letters from “Edgar.” It also meant no more birthday, anniversary, or Christmas cards.
Deeply hurt, Ernst wrote a number of letters to Hoover, trying to “clarify” what seemed to him to be “an odd kind of disturbance”16 in his relations with the FBI, but though Nichols and his successors in Crime Records responded, coolly, the long affair between the FBI director and the ACLU’s general counsel was over.
There was a final chapter, in 1964. Testifying in a closed hearing before a Senate subcommittee, Ernst referred to J. Edgar Hoover as “a treasured friend.” Reacting in what can only be described as a fit of jealous rage—Hoover had only one “treasured friend,” and his name certainly wasn’t Morris Ernst—Clyde Tolson had Ernst placed on the “in absence of” list. This meant that whenever Ernst tried to contact Hoover, an aide informed him that the director was “out of town.”17
Irving Ferman served as director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office from 1952 to 1959. Ernst had suggested that Nichols and Ferman get together in 1953—”I think it would be mutually valuable if you both met”—unaware that the two men were already well acquainted.18
Ferman regularly sent Lou Nichols the names of persons active in the state affiliates of the ACLU, asking him to determine whether they were Communist party members or were otherwise engaged in subversive activities. The FBI opened files on each. Ferman issued a statement declaring that no civil liberties issues were involved in the Rosenberg case. Ferman advised Nichols, on an irregular but continuing basis, of activities the ACLU was planning. He sent him numerous ACLU documents, including the minutes of meetings, often accompanied by such comments as “There is no question in my mind this is a product of Communist coercion” and “another indication of how much this gang really believes in free speech. I will enjoy knocking heads together one of these days.” Ferman informed on persons critical of the FBI, as well as on those who were trying to form a committee to oppose the House Un-American Activities Committee. He also sent the FBI the names of ACLU members whose only crime, apparently, was that they didn’t agree with Irving Ferman.
Many years later, in justifying his secret relationship with the FBI, Ferman claimed that Nichols had helped kill an “exceedingly irresponsible” report on the ACLU by HUAC, that his efforts had kept the ACLU off the attorney general’s list, and that he’d successfully helped keep such anti-ACLU groups as the American Legion “at bay.” He’d acted as he had, Ferman said, so that the ACLU could spend its time defending civil liberties rather than itself.19
Had he known of Ferman’s actions, even Morris Ernst would have been appalled.
Although the FBI director had established an excellent working relationship with the president, he was not averse to collecting any derogatory information regarding him if their present situation deteriorated. In September 1955 Don Surine, McCarthy’s chief investigator, and a former FBI agent who had been booted out of the Bureau for fraternizing with a prostitute, passed on some interesting information to his friend Lou Nichols: according to one of his own sources, Surine said, Kay Summersby, Ike’s former WAC driver and reputed wartime mistress, was staying at the Shoreham Hotel, and had been for some thirty to forty-five days, “under an assumed name.”
The FBI director already had a file on Summersby. He knew, for example, that she’d been divorced by her first husband, in 1943, on grounds of adultery, and that she was at present married to a Wall Street stockbroker. That she was using an assumed name and staying at a hotel conveniently near the White House raised the distinct possibility that she and the president had secretly resumed their relationship. “See if we can discreetly get the name,” the director ordered. But though Hoover’s agents tried to locate her, both by staking out the hotel and by examining its register for variations of her maiden and married names, they were unsuccessful. A pretext call to her New York residence, however, was answered by Summersby herself, which proved only that she was not currently at the Shoreham. Nor did the Bureau do any better in tracking down another rumor regarding the president’s alleged sexual infidelities. In 1954 the agents had overheard, on a St. Louis wiretap of “an Italian hoodlum” named John Vitale, a discussion between Vitale and an associate in Detroit, in which Vitale, who needed a good lawyer, was advised to try a particular attorney in the General Services Administration. Ordinarily such a conversation would have been of little interest to the director, but the log of this one was rushed to Hoover, because of the comment that followed. Not only was the man a good lawyer, the associate said, he also had “a good looking wife—he says that Ike has been trying to get into her pants.”20 Although the subsequent investigation produced a ten-page memorandum on the couple—which, to date, has not been released—it apparently didn’t establish whether the president had or had not succeeded in his intentions.*
The FBI director’s one major disagreement with Attorney General Brownell erupted during a Cabinet meeting in the White House, and the FBI director won at least a temporary victory, one that lasted for some years.
The date was March 9, 1956, and the subject civil rights. Brownell wanted to ask Congress for a new civil rights law (there hadn’t been one since Reconstruction), for the establishment of an independent Civil Rights Commission, for granting the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department full status as a division, and for the power to bring suits in federal cou
rts to enforce voting rights.
His subordinate, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had accompanied Brownell to the meeting at the request of the the president and the Cabinet, pulled the rug right out from under him.
“The South is in a state of explosive resentment over what they consider an unfair portrayal of their way of life, and what they consider intermeddling,” Hoover warned his rapt audience. And for this he blamed the 1954 and 1956 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decisions. Behind the tension over “mixed education,” he cautioned, “stalks the specter of racial intermarriage.” The NAACP and the other civil rights groups were exacerbating the already tense situation by preaching “racial hatred,” he claimed. Moreover, they had been targeted for infiltration by the Communist party.† On the other hand, the White Citizens Councils which had recently sprung up throughout the South to oppose desegregation included among their members “bankers, lawyers, doctors, state legislators and industrialists…some of the leading citizens of the South.” It was clear with which group Hoover chose to take his stand. As for the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI director airily dismissed it as “pretty much defunct.” Accompanied as always with charts and graphs, Hoover used one of the latter to show that the number of lynchings was down; hence there was certainly no need for legislation giving the FBI formal responsibility for such cases.