J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (60 page)

Said to know more dirt on more people than any man in Washington excepting only Hoover and Tolson, the man in the printshop was the Bureau’s
unofficial
liaison to Congress
and
the other branches of government. He was also
one of the most hated, and feared, men in the capital. When his name was announced by receptionists, public officials were said to turn pale with fright.

No memorandums were made of such visitations.

Wheeling, West Virginia, was, as far as the Republican National Committee was concerned, a third-rate speech stop, and so a third-string speaker, a freshman junior senator from Wisconsin, was assigned to deliver the Lincoln Day address to the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club on February 9, 1950.

“While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” Joseph R. McCarthy improvised, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were known to the Secretary of State and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”
³⁰

By the time McCarthy reached his next speech stop, Salt Lake City, the number had changed to fifty-seven and the list had been misplaced in his other bag, but it didn’t matter. The charges, carried initially by the AP wire, were already making headlines across the country.

McCarthy’s problem, in addition to his inability to recall figures, was that he had no list and no names.

On his return to Washington, he put in panicked calls to a number of friends, including the journalist Jack Anderson. McCarthy and Anderson had arrived in the capital at about the same time, McCarthy as a freshman senator, Anderson as Drew Pearson’s legman.

Ironically, Anderson owed his job to J. Edgar Hoover. Some months earlier, Hoover had privately informed his friend Drew Pearson that his chief assistant, Andrew Older, was a member of the Communist party, thus enabling Pearson to fire him before one of his rivals picked up the story. As Older’s replacement, Pearson had hired Anderson, a young reporter fresh from the Shanghai
Stars and Stripes.
It was a favor that Hoover would regret, literally until the day he died.

New to Washington, and unaware of how many enemies Pearson had, Anderson found McCarthy’s office “a hospitable oasis in what often seemed a desert of hostility. He knew how to make a footsore reporter feel esteemed.” Moreover, “with his gift for straightforward deviousness McCarthy had made himself available to us as a source, a purveyor of inside information about his colleagues and their secret conclaves.” McCarthy would, with Anderson listening in, even call such high-ranking senators as Robert Taft and William Knowland and ask them questions the reporter had prepared; believing they were talking in confidence to a fellow member of the club, they’d respond with answers Anderson himself could never have received. The relationship flourished. “I became a familiar in the inner sanctum of his office,” Anderson would remember, and “at my wedding in 1949 he was a prominent and engaging ornament.”

After the Wheeling speech, McCarthy called Anderson and told him he had
“hit the jackpot” and had gotten hold of “one hell of an issue.” But he needed help. McCarthy knew next to nothing about communism, foreign or domestic. Earlier, seeking an issue for his 1952 reelection campaign, the senator had consulted several advisers: one had suggested increased pensions for the elderly; another championed the St. Lawrence Seaway; while the third, Father Edmund Walsh, a Georgetown University dean, had recommended the issue McCarthy finally picked, Communist infiltration of the government.

Anderson, feeling he “owed him,” without consulting his boss passed on some information from Pearson’s files, with the warning that these were unverified allegations which needed further checking; those they could prove had already been used in the column. McCarthy would, throughout his brief but spectacular career, ignore such subtle distinctions.
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Using the argument that “the
cause
was on the spot,” McCarthy also appealed to Congressman Richard Nixon, who—riding high after the recent conviction of Alger Hiss—apparently gave him access to some of the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee. But most of his help came from his friend J. Edgar Hoover.

The Hoover-McCarthy friendship also dated back to 1947. Upon arriving in the capital, the freshman senator had been quick to convey his respects to the FBI director, and the pair seemed to hit it off immediately, since it wasn’t long before McCarthy was seen dining with Hoover and Tolson at Harvey’s or accompanying them to the track. As early as February 1948 Hoover extended McCarthy the honor of letting him address the graduating class of the FBI National Academy, even though Hoover already had extensive files on the senator, including allegations which, if made public, could have ended McCarthy’s career.

On returning home from his speaking tour, McCarthy called Hoover and told him he was getting a lot of attention on the Communist issue. But, he frankly admitted, he had made up the numbers as he talked (Hoover, the master statistician, advised him against using specific figures), and he asked if the FBI could give him the information to back them up.

Hoover set down the conversation in a memo, which Alan Belmont showed to William Sullivan. Since McCarthy had already proven himself irresponsible, Sullivan felt the Bureau should distance itself from the senator;
^†
Belmont,
though concerned, observed, “I don’t think there is any need in trying, and Senator McCarthy can be very useful to us.”
³⁴

Belmont was right on both counts. There was no changing the director’s mind—“Review the files and get anything you can for him,” Hoover had already ordered—and McCarthy would prove
very
useful. “McCarthy was never anything more than a tool of Mr. Hoover’s,” a former aide recalled. “He used him when he was useful and then, later, dumped him when he wasn’t.”
³⁵

Although Sullivan would protest, “We didn’t have enough evidence to show there was a single Communist in the State Department, let alone fifty-seven cases,”
³⁶
FBI agents spent hundreds of hours poring over Bureau security files and abstracting them for the senator and his staff. But Hoover’s help went far beyond that. Crime Records supplied speechwriters for McCarthy and two of his aides, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine. Lou Nichols personally took McCarthy in hand and instructed him in how to release a story just before press deadlines, so that reporters wouldn’t have time to ask for rebuttals. Even more important, he advised him to avoid the phrase “card-carrying Communist,” which usually couldn’t be proven, substituting instead “Communist sympathizer” or “loyalty risk,” which required only some affiliation, however slight—the signing of a petition or subscribing to a newspaper or magazine would do—with an organization on the attorney general’s list. (Usually McCarthy didn’t even bother with that. That a person had worked for the State Department or the government or the Army was enough to make him suspect.) When McCarthy won reelection and became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, Hoover lent him ex-Communist witnesses (Chambers, Louis Budenz, John Lautner), together with summaries of what they could testify to. He also helped him pick his staff (at one point there were so many ex-agents working for McCarthy that his office was dubbed “the little FBI”), okaying the former agent Don A. Surine as his chief investigator. Although Surine had been fired from the Bureau for fraternizing with a prostitute in a Baltimore white-slave case, Hoover liked him personally and Surine, working closely, albeit secretly, with Assistant Director Mickey Ladd, could be counted on to advance the Bureau’s interests. Hoover also warned McCarthy that a number of his aides, including Roy Cohn, were said to be homosexuals, and that one, Charles Davis, had been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Navy for homosexuality, but McCarthy treated the matter lightly even after Ed Babcock, a Wisconsin Young Republican leader who was serving on the senator’s staff, was picked up for, and pled guilty to, homosexual solicitation in Lafayette Park. To afford deniability, confidential FBI reports were reworded, then laundered, usually with military intelligence acting as the go-between. There were also name checks, hundreds of them, and, presumably, in at least some cases, mail openings, bugs, and taps.

“McCarthyism” was, from start to finish, the creation of one man, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

There was, of course, a quid pro quo. In return—in addition to giving the FBI director a new witch-hunt, which resulted in more agents, more money, and more power
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—Hoover’s enemies became McCarthy’s own. Hoover supplied McCarthy with the ammunition to attack both individuals—Harry S Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, “Ad-lie” Stevenson, as the senator was fond of referring to the governor of Illinois, and James Wechsler of the
New York Post,
among others—and organizations, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency.

According to Lyman Kirkpatrick, “McCarthy never lost an opportunity to make a public statement attacking the CIA.”
³⁸
Although Kirkpatrick was the agency’s inspector general during the Eisenhower era, he was unofficially referred to as “McCarthy’s Case Officer.” One of his jobs was to make sure that none of the McCarthyites penetrated the agency, another that no current employees were blackmailed into cooperating with the senator. The CIA director at the time, Allen Dulles—unlike his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who buckled under whenever McCarthy attacked—had a standard response to each McCarthy charge of Communists in the CIA, one which indicated that Dulles had a definite sense of humor: tell it to the FBI, he challenged, and let them investigate. Instead McCarthy moved on to other targets, following the advice of Senator Robert A. Taft, who’d once advised McCarthy, “If one case doesn’t work, bring up another.”
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One of the many victims of McCarthyism was the twenty-year friendship between Hoover and the columnist Drew Pearson. Even had McCarthy not come along, it was perhaps inevitable that the two would eventually clash, Pearson being a muckraking journalist intent on exposing government misdeeds, Hoover a bureaucrat who felt it a part of his job to suppress such disclosures, unless they were in his best interests. What was surprising was that the split hadn’t occurred earlier and that the cause itself was so relatively minor: the case of the woman who came to dinner.

In late November 1950 Jean Kerr, McCarthy’s secretary, had gone to Hawaii on vacation and Hoover had instructed the Honolulu SAC Joseph Logue to “contact her and extend every possible courtesy during her visit.”
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It was no more and no less than the normal consideration the FBI director extended visiting dignitaries, according to Logue, except for an unfortunate accident. While sightseeing with the SAC and several other agents, Kerr fell and broke
her hip. Rushed to the hospital, she was operated on by a prominent bone specialist, and the agents kept track of her progress, visited her regularly, passed on the director’s Christmas and New Year’s greetings, and in late January—nearly two months and twenty-five confidential radiograms later—finally, probably with a big sigh of relief, arranged that her flight home be met with a wheelchair and an ambulance.

It took Jack Anderson a couple of months to pick up the story, at which point he called Lou Nichols and asked why an FBI agent was chauffeuring Joe McCarthy’s secretary around Hawaii. Nichols said the Honolulu office had merely extended the usual courtesies shown members of Congress and their administrative assistants, that the tour had occurred after office hours and on the agents’ own time and that this in no way implied a connection between Senator McCarthy and the FBI. Infuriated by the inquiry, Hoover blue-penned, “This fellow Anderson & his ilk have minds that are lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.” Also labeling Anderson “a flea ridden dog,” Hoover decreed that any one in any way associated with him—which of course included his boss, Drew Pearson—was to be considered “infected.”
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Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson had just made the dreaded no-contact list.

This was in April 1951. On June 14 Pearson noted, in his diary, that one of his friends had been visited by an FBI agent who’d naively asked, “What is it that Pearson has on J. Edgar Hoover?” This was, Pearson observed, “the second or third time the FBI has been prying into me this year.” Some two months earlier, he recalled, SAs Maurice Taylor and Charles Lyons had interviewed some thirty persons, trying “to find out the names of my servants, whether I had a night watchman, when I went away to the farm, whether the house was unguarded during trips to the farm, where I kept my files, what my files were like, to say nothing of whom I talked to…

“This is the kind of Gestapo tactic which they had in Germany and Russia. But the FBI has built itself up—partly with my help—to an impregnable position where it can do no wrong. Apparently, civil liberties and the sanctity of a man’s home or office now mean nothing.”
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Pearson was underrating his role. Since 1932, when his first “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column appeared, he had constantly praised the Bureau and its director, even letting Hoover write guest columns while he was on vacation. Pearson had been the one, during the Homer Cummings era, who had suggested that the Bureau needed a good publicist. Next to Winchell, he was, or so he believed, the director’s favorite columnist. An older agent recalls that one of his duties every Friday night was to place a bulky envelope on Pearson’s front steps, ring the bell, and then disappear, providing Pearson with one or more exclusives for his half-hour Sunday broadcast, as well as material for his daily columns.

Oddly enough, the day after Pearson’s June 14 diary entry, Lou Nichols called and asked him to come down and see him. “Half apologetically he said that he supposed I knew the FBI had been investigating me and he wanted me to know the circumstances. He said that he was afraid that I was getting sore at
Hoover and he wanted me to know that it wasn’t Hoover’s fault.”
⁴³
He had been investigated—not two or three times, as Pearson had suspected, but five times thus far that year—on orders from Attorney General McGrath and the Truman administration. While Pearson thought this might be true—the nicest thing that Truman had ever called him was “that SOB”—he also blamed Hoover and, even more, his press lord.