J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Speaking of a forthcoming NAACP conference, he closed on a purely political note: “The Communist Party plans to use this conference to embarrass the administration and Dixiecrats who have supported it, by forcing the administration to take a stand on civil rights legislation with the present Congress. The party hopes through a rift to affect the 1956 elections.”

  Sanford Ungar has noted, “The director’s report, bigoted and narrow-minded as it might seem in retrospect, had a powerful impact. It was probably a major factor in President Eisenhower’s decision not to push for the Brownell civil rights program.”

  According to another historian, J. W. Anderson, the FBI director’s Cabinet briefing “reinforced the president’s inclination to passivity” on civil rights legislation.21

  The FBI itself was anything but passive during this period. In August 1956 Hoover authorized the first of what would grow into twelve separate COINTELPROs, counterintelligence programs whose aim was “to disrupt, disorganize and neutralize” specific chosen targets.

  The COINTELPROs were a huge step across the line separating investigations from covert action. Like all counterintelligence, these programs had as their stated goal nothing less than the destruction of enemies, be they individuals or ideologies.

  The tactics weren’t new; agents had been using many of them since the 1940s. The change was that Hoover now felt so secure in his power that he could grant official sanction to actions which went well beyond the law.

  The first target was the Communist party USA.* On August 28 Belmont outlined the program for Boardman. It was to be “an all-out disruptive attack against the CP from within”: “In other words, the Bureau is in a position to initiate, on a broader scale than heretofore attempted, a counterintelligence program against the CP, not as harassment from the outside, which might only serve to bring the various factions together, but by feeding and fostering from within the internal fight currently raging.”22

  By 1956 the Communist party USA was close to moribund. Starting with the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, events had not been kind to the party. Factionalism, purges, the Smith Act trials, deaths, and defections had left its rolls decimated. By all the best estimates, under five thousand members remained, some fifteen hundred of whom were FBI informants.

  Why then a COINTELPRO at this time, when the party was obviously dead or dying? George C. Moore, chief of the bureau’s Racial Intelligence Section, later testified, “The FBI’s counterintelligence program came up because if you have anything in the FBI, you have an action-oriented group of people who see something happening and want to do something to take its place.”23 There was a superfluity of agents, many of them with nothing to do. Extralegal harassment of Communists and other perceived enemies filled not only that void but others as well. As Frank Donner has observed, simple investigation, which was the Bureau’s legal mandate, “denied the action-hungry agent a powerful psychic need, the pleasure of really hurting the enemy.”*24

  Frustrated by the limitations placed on them by the courts—during 1956 and 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned most of the Smith Act convictions—the FBI director and his men found in the COINTELPROs a way to continue the battle against enemies they thought threatened the American way of life.

  Asked whether the question of the legality of the COINTELPROs ever arose, Moore responded, “No, we never gave it a thought.”26 It was enough that the director wanted them.

  Again, the tactics weren’t new, only the director’s official sanction and encouragement (flush with his first successes, Hoover was soon ordering special agents in charge to submit new and more imaginative techniques). They included the following:

  • The planting of stories with “friendly” media contacts. These ranged from the relatively trivial, such as publicizing the CP leader Gus Hall’s purchase of a new automobile, allegedly with party funds, to more serious accusations of embezzlement, bigamy, fraud, and other criminal conduct.

  • The use of anonymous letters or telephone calls to disseminate derogatory information, real or manufactured, such as planting the rumor that a person was a homosexual or “some other kind of sexual deviate.” Sex played an important part in the COINTELPROs. Persons defending themselves against accusations of adultery, for example, weren’t able to give their full attention to party business. Nor did rumors of venereal disease enhance a party leader’s popularity. The straitlaced parents of one young woman were informed that their daughter was living with a Communist without benefit of clergy. On learning from wiretaps that a partner in a liberal law firm was having an affair with another partner’s wife, all the members of the firm were informed, through anonymous letters, as were the spouses.

  • Harassment techniques like intrusive photography, lockstep surveillance, and hang-up calls. They caused disruption when others, such as business associates, became aware the person was under investigation.

  • The informing of employers, neighbors, merchants, and friends that a target was a suspected Communist was one of the most widely used techniques of the COINTELPROs, since the result was often loss of employment, emotional upset, and/or social ostracism.* On-the-job-site questioning was particularly effective, as it caused the target’s coworkers to talk. If the targets had children, their teachers would be questioned by agents, as would the parents of their children’s friends.

  • The use of “selective law enforcement,” which ranged from requesting IRS audits to planting evidence which, when discovered by cooperative local police, would result in arrests.

  • The placement of a “snitch jacket” on someone. William Albertson was a New York Communist party functionary. A dedicated Marxist since his youth, he was also a hardworking, effective party leader and as such became a prime target for the CPUSA COINTELPRO. The Bureau “neutralized” Albertson by planting what appeared to be an FBI informant’s report in his automobile. As a result, Albertson was expelled from the party, denounced in the Daily Worker as a “stool pigeon,” fired from his job, and shunned by his friends. Although Albertson died in an accident, a number of others so labeled committed suicide or died of heart attacks or other stress-related causes.

  The COINTELPROs began slowly and then, like a virus feeding upon itself, grew rapidly and monstrously. Each new perceived threat—whether the civil rights movement, the New Left, or black nationalism—brought forth a new COINTELPRO.

  There was, as yet, no talk of poisoning children, of suggesting that a prominent civil rights leader commit suicide, or of sanctioning and encouraging assassinations. The murders were yet to come.

  Although his subordinates—Alan Belmont, William Sullivan, William Branigan, George C. Moore, and the SACs—suggested the “dirty tricks,” Hoover approved each and every one of the COINTELPRO actions, including placing a snitch jacket on Albertson. The blue-inked words “I concur” or “O.K. H.” appeared on dozens of memos. Although every special agent who served between 1956 and 1972 knew of the COINTELPROs, and most participated in some capacity in at least one of them, they remained one of the Bureau’s deepest and darkest secrets. Not until 1958 did the FBI director find it expedient to inform his superiors that such a program was in existence. That January, Hoover told the House Appropriations Subcommittee, during the off-the-record portion of his testimony, that the Bureau had an “intensive program” to “disorganize and and disrupt” the Communist party, that the program had existed “for years,” and that informants were used “as a disruptive tactic.”26

  Congress not having raised any objections, he then informed the executive branch, in a carefully worded memorandum to the president and the attorney general: “In August of 1956, the Bureau initiated a program to promote disruption within the ranks of the Communist Party (CP) USA…Several techniques have been utilized to accomplish our objectives.” As examples, Hoover mentioned only the use of informants to cause “acrimonious debates” and the anonymous mailing of anti-Communist material, hardly enough to excite a civil libertarian, much less Rogers or Ike. Nor could t
hey complain when he cited as “tangible accomplishments…disillusion and defection among party members and increased factionalism at all levels.”27

  J. Edgar Hoover had covered his rear.

  Hoover didn’t need to exert himself during the 1956 election campaign—the Republican slogan was still “I like Ike,” and the electorate clearly agreed—although his newly resurrected homosexual smear of Stevenson found one taker, his friend Walter Winchell, who remarked on his Mutual radio show, “A vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen.” Jorgensen was one of the first publicized recipients of a sex change operation. It was Winchell’s television sponsors, however, who took offense and dropped him, forcing cancellation of the show. Winchell hadn’t translated well to the little screen. Nor were his radio broadcasts attracting as many listeners as they used to. As his biographer Lately Thomas noted, Winchell hadn’t aged well. He “sounded more strident. His prejudices overshadowed everything. He seemed less like the breathless reporter of old and more like a garrulous, opinionated eccentric.”28 Some had begun to say much the same thing about J. Edgar Hoover.

  Stevenson’s running mate was Estes Kefauver. It was a perfect pairing, the FBI director told his aides: a notorious homosexual and a notorious womanizer. “Notorious” was one of Hoover’s favorite words.

  Stevenson conceded even before the California vote came in.

  The big event of 1956, for both the FBI and its director, wasn’t the reelection of Eisenhower and Nixon, but the publication of Don Whitehead’s authorized history The FBI Story in December.

  Whitehead, an Associated Press feature writer, had interviewed Hoover in April 1954, a month before his thirtieth anniversary as director, and had turned the three-hour, nonstop talkathon into a series of highly laudatory articles on the Bureau and its chief. Hoping to expand the material into a book, Whitehead took the idea to Lou Nichols, who was “dubious,” but in early 1955 Nichols called Whitehead in and told him, “You can never tell about the Boss. He said to tell you the Bureau will go with you on the book. All the way.”29 This was Whitehead’s version. Lou Nichols recalled it differently. The book was his idea, Nichols claimed, and he’d gotten Whitehead to write it. “We [Hoover and I] felt the time had come to have a definitive story written on the Bureau.” Actually the idea predated Whitehead and had first been suggested in 1950, as a rebuttal to Lowenthal’s book. Various writers had been considered, but Whitehead wasn’t chosen until after he’d passed a special-inquiry type of investigation. That he was a double Pulitzer Prize winner may have been the deciding factor. The FBI supplied an office, a research staff, and the materials. Although Whitehead thought he was working with raw FBI files, mostly he was given specially prepared summary memorandums. Despite the FBI’s help, the book was “100 percent Whitehead,” Nichols maintained.

  Ovid Demaris: “Did you make men available to talk to and interview?”

  Louis Nichols: “It wasn’t necessary.”

  Whitehead was thus spared exposure to contrary, and perhaps critical, versions of the director’s favorite stories. Nichols also denied “editing” the book; rather he’d “reviewed the book, the manuscript, as it went along.”30

  Hoover’s friend Bennett Cerf arranged for the book to be published at Random House. Nothing was left to chance. Crime Records literally took over the publisher’s publicity campaign and, with assists from such luminaries as Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan, persuaded the press to treat the book as a national news event. Many of the reviews were prearranged (Nichols supplied canned reviews, and complimentary editorials, to the small-town papers) and, of course, highly favorable. One of Hoover’s old enemies, the former FCC chairman James Lawrence Fly, gave the book a very critical going-over in the Saturday Review, but Norman Cousins played it safe and ran three other favorable reviews in the same issue, one by Morris Ernst. The Socialist Norman Thomas reviewed the book for Commentary, observing, “Mr. Whitehead’s history bears out my own opinion, formed before I opened the book, that the FBI under Mr. Hoover has been as good or better than one would expect an agency of investigation to be in these tumultuous times in so big a nation as the United States.”31 Thomas might not have been so generous had he known that the FBI had been investigating him for nearly thirty years. To boost the sales, Hoover arranged for the FBI Recreational Association to buy several thousand copies, but it was hardly necessary. A week before the official publication date, Random House had already sold out its 50,000-copy first printing, and new orders were coming in at the rate of 3,000 per day. It peaked at over 200,000 copies, remained on the best-seller lists for thirty-eight weeks, and was serialized in 170 newspapers, brought out in paperback, and made into a Warner Brothers movie starring Jimmy Stewart.

  Mervyn LeRoy was picked as producer and director of the movie only after Hoover determined, from the files and Hollywood gossip, that he had enough on LeRoy to control him. A special squad was sent to Los Angeles to oversee the filming. As LeRoy later admitted, “Everybody on that picture, from the carpenters and electricians right to the top, everybody, had to be okayed by the FBI.”32

  There were some problems. Jimmy Stewart couldn’t hit the target on the FBI range, so the special agent Don Jacobson, who stood farther along the line, fired bull’s-eyes into Stewart’s target. Then too, LeRoy wanted to staff FBI headquarters with big-bosomed secretaries—”the elevators bulged with them,”33 Jacobson later recalled—but, after being reviewed by FBI censors, all of these scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor. When the movie premiered, at Radio City Music Hall on September 24, 1959, the FBI director cried.

  This was, however, not the first time Hoover and Tolson had viewed the film, in which both made cameo appearances. LeRoy had arranged a private screening some weeks earlier, for the FBI’s top executives, in the blue room at FBIHQ. “I was never so nervous in my whole life,” LeRoy admitted. “I perspired…I perspired like you’ve never seen. I was soaking wet. And for this reason, they didn’t laugh in the right places, they didn’t seem to show any emotion, including Mr. Hoover and Mr. Tolson and Deke DeLoach and everybody that were in there. So when the lights went up, I was absolutely worn out. And Edgar stood up and he motioned for me to come over to him and he put his arms around me and he said, ‘Mervyn, that’s one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever seen,’ and they all started to applaud. I guess they were all waiting to see how he liked it.” And then LeRoy himself cried, partly out of relief, partly because “it was a beautiful story, it was the story of the FBI.”34

  Still smarting from the reception of his 1938 book Persons in Hiding, J. Edgar Hoover did not publish his second ghostwritten book, Masters of Deceit, until 1958.

  Although pleased at the public response to the book and movie versions of The FBI Story, Hoover was privately very bitter about Don Whitehead’s success. Why should he make a fortune, Hoover complained, when the FBI had done all the work? Why had Nichols agreed to let him keep 100 percent?*

  Again, Hoover took no chances as far as the publication and promotion of the new book were concerned. Hoover’s new publisher was Henry Holt and Company, which had recently been purchased by his friend Clint Murchison, whose first order of business, after taking over the firm, had been to make sure it was squeaky-clean of Commie influence.

  “Before I got them, they’d published some books that were badly pro-Communist,” Murchison told the New York Post. “They had some bad people there.” Since he couldn’t just go in and “fire anybody and tell him it was because he was a Communist,” Murchison said, “we just cleared them all out and put some good men in. Sure there were casualties but now we’ve got a good operation.”35

  The publication of Hoover’s Masters of Deceit was symbolic of the new order at Henry Holt. It was also one of the biggest successes Murchison had, during his brief reign as publisher. Hoover’s account of the Communist menace sold over 250,000 copies in hardbound and over 2,000,000 in paper and was on the best-seller lists for thirty-one weeks, three of them as the number one nonfic
tion choice.

  On February 9, 1958, before the book was even published, the FBI director announced that he intended to give all of his royalties to the FBI Recreational Association.

  In their rush to commend the director for his generosity, no reporter thought to ask Hoover exactly what the FBI Recreational Association did with its money. It was, however, a question that a great many FBI agents, who had to make an annual contribution to the fund, had been asking for years, without getting a satisfactory answer.

  In reality, the FBIRA was a slush fund, maintained for the use of Hoover, Tolson, and their key aides. It was also a money-laundering operation, so the director would not have to pay taxes on his book royalties. The FBI director’s charity went right back into his and other pockets. According to William Sullivan, who oversaw the writing of Masters of Deceit—by FBI agents, on public time, as many as eight agents working full-time on the book for nearly six months—Hoover “put many thousands of dollars of that book…into his own pocket, and so did Tolson, and so did Lou Nichols.”*36

  Hoover published two other books: A Study of Communism, with Holt, Rinehart and Winston, in 1962, which sold approximately 125,000 copies and earned the FBI director close to $50,000; and J. Edgar Hoover on Communism, with Random House, in 1969, which sold about 40,000 copies and whose total earnings have never been made public. Again, these were written by FBI employees—it was a standing joke among the agents that the director not only didn’t write his own books; he hadn’t even read them—and again, to avoid paying taxes, he laundered the royalties through the FBI Recreational Association.

  When ABC contracted to produce the popular television series “The FBI” Hoover made it a condition that the broadcasting company purchase the movie rights to Masters of Deceit, for $75,000. “The FBI” premiered in 1965 and ran for nine years. Hoover received a $500 payment for each episode. Every cent went into the FBI Recreational Association.*