Read J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Online
Authors: Curt Gentry
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #United States, #Political Science, #Law Enforcement, #History, #Fiction, #Historical, #20th Century, #American Government
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (61 page)
The following day Pearson arranged to see a possible source, only to find that an FBI agent had interviewed him just twenty minutes after he’d called for an appointment, leading him to the obvious conclusion that the FBI had tapped his phone.
On July 6 Lou Nichols called Pearson and told him that he was no longer under investigation. That same day HUAC made public testimony revealing that Pearson’s former employee Andrew Older was a Communist; it neglected to mention that when apprised of this fact, by Hoover, the staunchly anti-Communist columnist had promptly fired him.
Although Pearson continued to write favorably about Hoover and his organization, when he felt they deserved it, he now began looking at the activities of the FBI with a much more critical eye.
As for the head of Crime Records, Pearson plotted his revenge carefully. Had he been Winchell or Pegler or George Sokolsky, he probably would have used his column to bury him; instead Pearson, a practicing Quaker, chose the opposite tack: he praised him. And in so doing, item by item, nearly all of them seemingly innocuous, he systematically destroyed the FBI career of Louis B. Nichols.
*
By contrast, Chambers testified that Hiss had supplied the apartment rent-free to his fellow party member and that the old car had been passed on to him for use by a Communist party organizer.
*
Shown photographs of the documents by his attorney, Hiss immediately identified three of the four notes as being in his own handwriting, and said the fourth was probably his also. As for the typed digests, he denied having seen any of them previously; all, however, he stated, after reading their contents, must have been summaries of actual State Department reports. What he couldn’t understand, he said, was how any of these materials came to be in Chambers’s possession.
A search of the State Department files did turn up the original documents on which the summaries were based. Though ranging from “classified” to “secret,” few were particularly sensitive and most consisted of trade agreements which would seem to have been of little importance to the Soviets.
Even more interesting, most had never been routed through sections where either Alger or Donald Hiss worked, leading to the supposition that some other person or persons had passed them to Alger—or, in the opposite scenario, directly to Chambers.
†
This may be in error, as many of the FBI documents relating to HUAC and the Hiss case and, particularly, to Richard Nixon have never been made public. One possibility is that these documents were destroyed when Helen Gandy shredded the late director’s Personal File. There are, however, other possibilities, which will be discussed in later chapters.
*
In his memoirs, Richard Nixon, though hiding Father Cronin’s role, partly confirms the above when he states, “Because of Truman’s executive order we were not able to get any direct help from J. Edgar Hoover or the FBI. However, we had some informal contacts with a lower-level agent that proved helpful in our investigations.”
2
Rephrasing the executive order in the words that President Truman had probably originally used, Attorney General Tom Clark—on learning from HUAC’s chairman, Karl Mundt, that he’d received documents from the FBI—called Assistant Director D. M. Ladd and told him, “Any SOB that gives Congressman Mundt any information gets his ass kicked out of this building…I want you to get the word around that anyone giving information to the Committee is out, O-U-T!”
3
†
The two developed rolls, which contained cables and other State Department documents, some of them in code and all dated during the early months of 1938, were introduced into the legal proceedings which followed. The other three rolls, once they had been developed, were withheld from the grand jury, the court, and the Hiss defense, for reasons of security. According to Richard Nixon, “Some of the documents were relatively unimportant, but the State Department still felt in 1948, ten years after they had been taken from the government files, that publication of the complete ‘pumpkin papers’ would be injurious to the national security.”
5
Not until 1975 was Alger Hiss—as the result of a Freedom of Information Act suit—allowed to examine the three withheld rolls of microfilm. Two were from the U.S. Navy Department and contained instructions on how to use fire extinguishers, life rafts, and chest parachutes; the third roll was blank.
*
“The typewriters are always the key,” President Nixon supposedly told Charles Colson in the presence of John Dean and the White House tapes. “We built one in the Hiss case.”
8
Nixon did not say who “we” referred to.
The question of whether “forgery by typewriters” was committed is, many feel, the key to the enigma of the Hiss case. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and previously suppressed by the FBI, seem to prove that the typewriter introduced into evidence wasn’t the same one the Hisses had once owned, for it was manufactured two years after the initial purchase of the Hiss Woodstock. Also suppressed was an early report from the FBI Laboratory which concluded that the comparison did not show that Priscilla Hiss had typed the documents (the FBI documents “expert” Ramos Feehan later testified otherwise). For articles dealing with this complex issue, see John Lowenthal, “Woodstock No. 230099: What the FBI Knew But Hid from Hiss and the Court,”
Nation,
June 26, 1976; and Fred J. Cook, “The Typewriters Are Always the Key,”
New Times,
October 14, 1977. Morton and Michael Levitt devote most of a chapter to the issue in their book
A Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 184-209, as does Alger Hiss in his most recent book,
Recollections of a Life
(New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 212-24. For other books which treat this, and other aspects of the Hiss case, see the bibliographical listings for: David Caute, Whittaker Chambers, Fred J. Cook, Alistair Cooke, Alger Hiss, Tony Hiss, Earl Jowitt, John Chabot Smith, Edith Tiger, Allen Weinstein, and Meyer A. Zeligs.
*
The J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, supported initially by large donations from two former bootleggers, Lewis Rosenstiel and Joseph Kennedy, with Roy Cohn and Louis Nichols acting as the go-betweens, would have a long and checkered history.
*
Interviewed in 1976, shortly before his death, Alan Belmont was asked, “Do you have any doubts about the Hiss case?” He responded, “No…I do not have any doubts about this case,” adding the qualification “I always considered
privately
that Mrs. Hiss was stronger than Alger Hiss was.”
12
Other former agents made similar remarks, stating that they were convinced that Priscilla Hiss was really the guiding force behind her husband’s “disloyal acts.” However, this was standard Hoover mythology: Emma Goldman was more culpable than Alexander Berkman, Katherine than George “Machine Gun” Kelley, Priscilla than Alger Hiss, Ethel than Julius Rosenberg.
Behind every bad man, J. Edgar Hoover seemed convinced, was an even worse woman.
*
A former special agent remarked, “It was an ideal way to spend an afternoon or evening. We enjoyed the hell out of it.”
13
†
The uncertain status of the Hiss case was certainly a factor in Hoover’s reluctance to proceed with still another espionage case, the director just having learned that his chief witness, Chambers, not only was waffling as to what he would testify to but had also confessed to being an ex-homosexual.
*
This was a 115-page summary of all known information about the KGB and GRU’s activities in the United States during the past fifteen years. It also included sections on the intelligence activities of the satellite countries.
*
Between the two trials, on July 26 and October 13, 1949, Ladd sent Hoover two reports on “possible vulnerable points in our activities” regarding the National Lawyers Guild and the Coplon case. Copies released under the Freedom of Information Act are so heavily censored—in one a page and a half has been blacked out—as to make them unreadable.
One can presume, with some safety, that the excised portions contain references to even more illegal acts than are now known.
*
As an employee of the United Nations, Gubitchev did not possess diplomatic immunity. However, at the request of the State Department, he was deported immediately after sentencing.
As a postscript, it may be added that Amtorg, not knowing whom to believe, fired its attorney, Isadore Gibby Needleman.
†
The court, however, noted in regard to the New York case that Miss Coplon’s “guilt was plain.”
*
Following her second trial, Judith Coplon married one of Leonard Boudin’s law associates.
†
The code name for JUNE MAIL was later changed, according to the former assistant to the director William Sullivan, though some of the older agents continued to use it. “As I remember, all these electronic matters were kept in what we called the JUNE file. They were kept out of the general indices. I seem to recall that they were given special protection, I’m not sure of this, but I think maybe twenty-four hours a day there was always someone present where these files were.”
22
*
Such information was also conveyed to SACs and ASACs during field office inspection tours or when they were periodically recalled to the Seat of Government for “retraining.”
*
It was a practice that was much refined in later years: Alan Belmont testifying before the Warren Commission, rather than the men who actually conducted the investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination; James Adams appearing before the Church committee instead of John Mohr; and so on.
†
The functions of MI-5 (pronounced “M-eye-5”), domestic security, most closely resembled those of the FBI, while those of MI-6 (“M-eye-6”), which was charged with security outside the country, were more like those of the CIA. Although a confirmed Anglophobe, Hoover, when forced to make a choice, preferred to deal with MI-5 rather than MI-6. Philby, however, though attached to MI-6 (and well on the way to heading the organization, many felt), in his liaison capacity represented both organizations.
*
Presumably, the Inga Arvad sex tapes which John F. Kennedy so feared were among the items stored here, although less potentially useful recordings from MISURs and TELSURs were usually kept only a few weeks, then erased.
*
On returning to the office after giving the materials to McCarthy, Anderson found Pearson writing a column denouncing the senator. Pearson was the first, and for a long time the only, reporter to question McCarthy’s allegations and accounting.
“He is one of our best sources on the Hill,” Anderson argued.
“He may be a good source, Jack, but he’s a bad man,” Pearson replied.
Anderson’s disillusionment with McCarthy came shortly thereafter, when the senator presented the information he’d given him not as speculation but as fact, destroying the career of a quite possibly innocent person.
32
†
Others, particularly those involved in the domestic-security sections of the FBI, also wanted nothing to do with McCarthy. “Senator McCarthy’s crusade…was always anathema to me,” the spy chaser Robert J. Lamphere would write. “McCarthy’s approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States, particularly in regard to government employment of known Communists.”
33
*
In March 1950 the House Appropriations Subcommittee cut $979 million from the federal budget. Although Justice was among the departments whose budgets were cut, the committee gave the FBI the full amount it had requested, enabling the Bureau to hire an additional 700 employees, 325 of them special agents needed, according to Hoover, to combat subversive activities.
“In tribute to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director,” as the
New York Times
put it, “the committee also approved a rise in his salary to $20,000. It is $16,000.”
37
This meant that in the five years since World War II, Hoover’s salary had doubled.
Friends, Enemies, and the Investigation of Jesus Christ
W
hen Helen Gandy shredded and burned the late J. Edgar Hoover’s Personal File, she probably believed that she had obliterated any record of the many special favors with which the former FBI director had rewarded his supporters and friends. But some have since become known.
When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., needed a security system for his Tarrytown, New York, estate, Hoover provided the experts to help construct it, at no cost to anyone except the taxpayers. Hoover alerted his Del Mar buddies Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson to forthcoming regulatory agency—and Supreme Court—decisions, through their Washington lobbyist Tommy Webb. In return, in addition to picking up the tab for Hoover and Tolson’s annual southern California vacations, the two Texas wheeler-dealers gave the FBI director tips on oil stocks and, on more than a few occasions, complimentary stock. A legat was stationed in Bern for no other reason, William Sullivan believed, than to help the director’s wealthy friends with their Swiss bank accounts. When Hoover’s friend Jack Warner needed the actor Sterling Hayden to complete a picture, but feared he’d be blacklisted (Hayden had joined the Communist party in 1946 but left after a few months), Hoover arranged for Hayden to be cleared, but only after he’d told all to the FBI, publicly repented before HUAC, and named names. Hayden named seven acquaintances, including his former mistress, Bea Winters, who was also his agent’s secretary, and spent the rest of his life regretting having become “a stoolie for J. Edgar Hoover.”
*
1
Favored politicians were warned who their opponents would be, what backing they had, and what skeletons might be hidden in their closets. In some cases, they were even elected with the FBI’s help. Impressed with a young Republican congressional hopeful in Michigan, the Bureau in 1946 arranged support for Gerald Ford, who expressed his thanks in his maiden speech by asking for a pay raise for J. Edgar Hoover.
Among those on Hoover’s Special Correspondents list were radio and TV network presidents (William S. Paley, of CBS, David Sarnoff, of NBC/RCA); financiers (Joseph Kennedy, Jessie Jones); at least one bandleader (Lawrence Welk); clerics (Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale);
*
congressmen (by the dozens); Supreme Court justices (one would owe his appointment as chief justice to J. Edgar Hoover); executives of Ford, Sears, Warner Brothers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and the presidents or board chairmen of most major American banks.
Given Hoover’s public persona of strict morality, it was assumed that those he honored with his friendship were models of probity. On the contrary, according to a top aide, “Hoover didn’t associate with people unless he had something on them.” Mervyn LeRoy, for example, was approved as director of the movie version of
The FBI Story
only after Hoover was satisfied that “we had enough dirt to control him.”
3
Almost every former SAC could, if so inclined, cite criminal charges which were dropped, or never pursued, because they involved persons known to be on the director’s Special Correspondents list.
If the aging photographs on the walls of his home on Thirtieth Street NW were any indication (there were so many, one neighbor would say, you couldn’t make out the pattern of the wallpaper), the majority of the director’s friends were celebrities, most of them movie stars. Although obviously attracted by the glamour of Hollywood, Hoover was even more interested in its seamy side. Over the years the SACs of the Los Angeles and San Diego field offices—as well as his friends Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons—provided him with
thousands
of confidential reports, from which he learned which stars supposedly had marital or drug or alcohol problems, or venereal diseases, or were homosexual or involved with prepubescent girls.
Among the “respectables,” Dorothy Lamour, Greer Garson, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple remained lifelong friends, and the recipients of many special considerations. When the former child actress Temple met the businessman Charles Black while vacationing in Hawaii, she asked her old friend J. Edgar Hoover to check him out. Apparently Black passed the FBI director’s scrutiny, for Temple later married him. Regarding a tour of Europe with his wife and four children, James Stewart, star of
The FBI Story,
later recalled, “As we’d land in Spain or Italy or someplace, a man would just come up to me, just out of the crowd, and say, ‘The Boss asked me to just check with you and
see if everything is going all right,’ and would hand me a card and would say, ‘If you need us any time, here’s where we are.’ ”
4
When “the rabbit died” after the comedian Lucille Ball took a pregnancy test, a hospital employee, who was also an informant for the Los Angeles field office, reported that fact, enabling Hoover to call Ball’s husband, Desi Arnez, and inform him, before his wife could, that he was going to become a father. When Judy Garland’s fiancé Sid Luft told the singer that he had to fly to Tulsa on business, the ever suspicious Garland made a person-to-person call to Washington and was put right through. In this case, Garland’s suspicions were well founded: Luft
had
flown to Tulsa, but only to catch a connecting flight to Denver, where he spent the night with his childhood sweetheart. On returning to his hotel room the following morning, he received a telephone call from Garland, who pleasantly reminded him of a Beverly Hills party they had to attend that night. For twenty years Luft couldn’t figure out how Garland had tracked him down, until he was interviewed by two FBI agents on another matter and one remarked, “I know you. The name just struck. Once I had to find you and I found you in the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver at 5
A.M.
in the morning.”
5
Sometimes he sought out the celebrities, as in the case of the mystery writer Raymond Chandler. Chandler was dining, and drinking, at a La Jolla restaurant one night when a waiter informed him that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his associate Clyde Tolson wanted him to join them. Chandler told the waiter to tell Hoover he could go to hell. Chandler’s FBI file runs to over 250 pages.
He had better luck with the comedian W. C. Fields, who was so flustered by the FBI director’s unexpected visit to his Los Felix home that he kept calling him Herbert.
Finally Hoover got around to the purpose of his visit. “I understand you have some interesting pictures, eh?”
Fields did. His friend John Decker had painted three miniatures of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Fields despised. Viewed upside down they depicted, in grossly exaggerated anatomical detail, a woman’s sex organs. But, fearing he was in danger of being arrested on a charge of possessing obscene materials, Fields affected a pose of uncomprehending innocence.
“No ladies’ pictures?” his visitor persisted. “Maybe you can dig up a
small
one, or maybe even
two
studies of a certain lady in Washington?”
Fields pulled one out of a desk drawer and apprehensively handed it to the FBI director. To Fields’s great relief, Hoover’s laughter proved he was obviously no fan of the lady in question. When Hoover asked if he would make him a present of the painting, Fields magnanimously gave him all three, in return for a jocular promise that he wouldn’t display them unless “there’s a change in the administration.”
*
6
His treatment of his enemies differed considerably. As a former administrative assistant noted, “Mr. Hoover was not given to halfway measures. If he didn’t like you, he destroyed you.”
7
In August 1950 Hoover learned, from an advance forecast in
Publishers Weekly,
that William Sloane Associates intended to publish a critical book entitled
The Federal Bureau of Investigation,
by Max Lowenthal, an attorney, former congressional aide, and adviser to President Truman. Although Lowenthal had been working on the book for over ten years, this was the first the Bureau had heard of it, and the director blamed the head of Crime Records. According to two assistant directors, who were present, Nichols, reduced to tears, sobbed, “Mr. Hoover, if I had known this book was going to be published, I’d have thrown my body between the presses and stopped it.”
8
Hoover, through Nichols, asked Morris Ernst to try to persuade William Sloane to halt publication of the book on the grounds that it was “filled with distortions, half-truths and incomplete details as well as false statements.”
Ernst, whose reputation as a great civil libertarian rested in no small part on his successful battle against the suppression of James Joyce’s
Ulysses,
begged off, arguing that the publisher might try to capitalize on the FBI director’s using “his attorney” to approach him.
9
That Hoover knew what the book contained and was able to order the preparation of a detailed rebuttal in September 1950, two months before the book was published, was interesting. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, about this same time the page proofs of the book vanished from the motorcycle sidecar of a messenger en route from the printer to the publisher.
Hoover did not wait for the book’s publication to discredit its author. Lowenthal—a Harvard graduate who had clerked for Frankfurter, knew the Hiss brothers, and had been a close personal friend of Harry S Truman since serving as an aide on one of his Senate subcommittees—was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and questioned about his membership in the National Lawyers Guild and various New Deal connections. (HUAC was so bereft of incriminating links that the publisher, William Sloane, was quizzed about the associations of his wife’s brother, leading Sloane to inquire, “Am I supposed to be my brother-in-law’s keeper?”)
10
Iowa’s Bourke B. Hickenlooper was given the job of discrediting the book in the Senate (“an utterly biased piece of propaganda”),
11
with an assist from Michigan’s Homer Ferguson (“At bottom, the book is evil, a monstrous libel”),
12
while one of Michigan’s representatives, George A. Dondero, led the attack in the House (“Lowenthal’s book is serving the cause of Moscow. Stalin must be well pleased with Lowenthal”).
13
In addition to planted editorials (“Smearing the FBI”—
New York Herald Tribune;
“Harry Gunning for Hoover?”—
New York Daily News
), the press favorites Walter Winchell, Fulton Lewis, Jr., George Sokolsky, Rex Collier, and Walter Trohan were unleashed,
as were all of the special agents in charge, who were instructed to discourage booksellers from stocking the book. (One SAC suggested agents steal copies from libraries; SOG rejected the suggestion after an assistant director pointed out they would probably replace them, thus increasing the sales.) A use was finally found for Morris Ernst, Hoover’s attorney and the ACLU’s head. In collaboration with Lou Nichols and the editor Fulton Oursler, Ernst penned the article “Why I No Longer Fear the FBI,” which appeared in the December 1950 issue of
Reader’s Digest
—and was reprinted and distributed for years afterward.
Amid all the controversy, both the
Washington Post
and the
Saturday Review of Literature
opted to play it safe, each running two reviews, one pro and one con.
*
Among the few voices of sanity was that of John Keats of the
Washington Daily News,
who commented, “No evil can come from the public’s critical examination of the country’s Federal police, if it is done thoughtfully and objectively. This book starts the discussion.”
14
For his efforts, both Keats and his newspaper were placed on the no-contact list. As for the author, Lowenthal was kept under surveillance and publicly and privately smeared—he’d never write another book or work again for the government—and his wife was subjected to an intimidating 3
A.M.
FBI visit while her husband was out of town.
What most of the book’s reviewers failed to point out, but its few readers were quick to discover, was that
The Federal Bureau of Investigation
was basically a dull legal brief. It sold fewer than 7,500 copies—possibly as few as 6,000—and, according to its editor, Eric P. Swenson, probably wouldn’t have sold that well had the FBI not spotlighted it.
It was, however, a pioneering effort—the first book to examine critically the myths of J. Edgar Hoover and his fabled FBI.
The director was also determined that it would be the last. “After this,” William Sullivan has noted, “we developed informants in the publishing houses.”
15
These were not necessarily lower-level employees. They included at least two publishers, Henry Holt and Bennett Cerf. Cerf, the publisher of Random House, sent the FBI a copy of the manuscript of Fred Cook’s book
The FBI Nobody Knows
and may have been instrumental in delaying its publication.
†
When the ex-agent William Turner mentioned, on a 1962 radio talk show,
that he was writing a book on his FBI experiences, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Nichols’s successor as head of Crime Records, queried his sources in the New York publishing world—including, according to DeLoach’s handwritten notation, “Random House, Holt Co., Harpers, et al”—but, at that time, “none [had] heard of it.”
16
Shortly after Turner completed and began submitting the manuscript, some three months later, at least one publisher sent a copy to the Bureau, which was able to prepare a chapter-by-chapter “rebuttal” long before the book ever saw print.
*
17
Nor did the Bureau limit its penetrations to book publishing. Determined to know the news even before it was published—and, if critical of the FBI, to circumvent its appearance—Crime Records, utilizing in-house sources at such major magazines as
Time, Life, Fortune, Newsweek, Business Week, Reader’s Digest, U.S. News & World Report,
and
Look,
regularly obtained notes on the editorial conferences where forthcoming articles were proposed and discussed.