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
Truman told McGrath to fire Caudle. When the attorney general procrastinated—there were indications that he was on an extended binge—Truman fired him himself. He also decided that McGrath was not up to the job of
investigating government corruption, particularly not when it concerned his own department, and secretly decided to replace him.
The man the president chose as the next attorney general was Justin V. Miller, a former associate justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and an expert on criminal law. It was presumed that Miller would be a tough, independent AG, which was not the kind the FBI director favored. Hoover had other reasons for opposing Miller. Way back in the thirties, Miller had handled press relations for Homer Cummings, touting the attorney general’s—rather than J. Edgar Hoover’s—“War on Crime.” Hoover might have forgiven this had not Miller recently committed a far more serious offense, an unforgivable sin, as it were: he’d stated in a speech that the FBI needed stricter executive control.
Although Truman had offered the AG’s job to Miller, and Miller had accepted, the president suddenly reversed himself and withdrew the appointment. There was, Donovan observes, “a suspicion that J. Edgar Hoover had somehow gotten wind of what was going on, perhaps through his White House friend Matt Connelly,”
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and in some way persuaded Truman to withdraw the nomination. The only explanation Truman ever gave for his change of mind is, considering the president’s attitude toward the FBI director, almost mindboggling. He told a friend, Charles Murphy, who had first recommended Miller, that he could not appoint an attorney general who had publicly criticized the FBI!
It is most likely that the president, under fire on the corruption issue, and under even heavier attack from the rabid junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, who was charging that he and his administration were “soft on communism,” had pragmatically decided that his best defense would be to get the FBI director on his side. Otherwise it is impossible to explain what Truman did next. Putting the replacement of Attorney General McGrath on hold, he decided to appoint a respected national figure to head the corruption investigation, a man whose credentials would go unquestioned, and offered the job to J. Edgar Hoover.
Except for ceremonial occasions such as the awarding of presidential citations, the FBI director was an infrequent visitor to the Truman White House. But this particular visit was memorable for still another reason. It led to one of the strangest investigations ever conducted by the FBI’s Crime Records Division.
Hoover declined the president’s suggested appointment, citing various statutory reasons why he could not head such an inquiry, but privately realizing that it was a no-win situation. Not only would he be investigating his own department, Justice, and his own superior, the attorney general, but a widespread probe into governmental misdeeds would alienate every department and bureau head in Washington. Hoover had a long memory, and it went back to the uproar that followed the Bureau’s investigation of the District of Columbia’s police department. He was not about to repeat that mistake on an
even greater scale. What he collected secretly, for his own use, however, was another matter.
Toward the end of their conversation, the president commented, bitterly, about how disappointed he was in some of his appointments, how men he had known for years had, once in office, betrayed his trust. Commiserating, the FBI director observed that even Christ had been betrayed by one of his disciples. Not one, the president corrected him, three. In addition to Judas, both Thomas and Peter had denied knowing Jesus, and Peter had done so thrice.
J. Edgar Hoover did not like to be corrected, and particularly not on a matter of biblical scholarship (he had, after all,
almost
become a Presbyterian minister, as he was fond of telling interviewers) and especially not by Harry S Truman, who, unbeknownst to him, prided himself on his knowledge of the Bible.
Infuriated, on his return to FBI headquarters Hoover barked out an order. Crime Records was used to odd requests, but this one soon spread from floor to floor: “The boss wants us to investigate Jesus Christ!”
Since research quickly established that the president was right and the director wrong, much effort had to be expended on the wording of the report, so it would appear that the director was, technically, correct. But for days no one dared present it. Finally William Sullivan took it in. To the then supervisor’s surprise, Mr. Hoover did not lose his temper. “He just looked thoughtful,” Sullivan recalled, unaware that a seed had been planted which would, in time, blossom into a full-blown obsession.
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J. Edgar Hoover’s search for the three Judases had begun.
When no one else he’d approached wanted the job, Truman settled on Newbold Morris, the son-in-law of Judge Learned Hand (the judge himself having earlier declined the appointment). A New York estate lawyer and former president of the New York City Council, Morris’s apparent qualifications were that he was a reformer and a nominal Republican, had never served in the federal government, and had never conducted an investigation. He was a sheep ripe for shearing, and Hoover, with the help of almost everyone in Washington, proved obliging.
On arriving in the capital in late January 1952, Morris was appointed a special assistant to the attorney general by McGrath, and promptly announced that the first agency he intended to investigate was the Justice Department. He started by interviewing department and bureau heads. All complied except Hoover, who refused to meet with Morris until ordered to do so by the president.
Citing his busy schedule, the FBI director allotted him ten minutes. Morris arrived promptly at the scheduled time, 2:30
P.M.
The FBI director didn’t stop talking until 6:45. “I don’t believe I got the chance to open my mouth more than twice,” Morris later recalled, “and we never got around to the subject I wanted to discuss…He told me about the raids and about the old-time
gangsters that had been shot. He told me of going to the opening night of some play and being called out in the middle of it to lead his forces. He wanted me to come to Quantico to the FBI range for target practice, and what’s more he couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go.” Summing up the experience, which still awed him years later, Morris stated, “Let me say that if I had been my 12-year-old son it would have been the most exciting afternoon of my life.”
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Morris next sent out a questionnaire to all the top officials of the government, including members of congress, asking them to itemize their sources of income. Once they had recovered from the shock, almost no one complied, including Attorney General McGrath, who refused to even pass out the questionnaires.
On March 10 Morris committed his second, and fatal, mistake: he told the press that, in order to maintain impartiality, he wouldn’t use any current or former FBI personnel as investigators.
On March 16 Walter Winchell told his radio audience that the FBI critic and Truman crony Max Lowenthal was behind Morris’s appointment. Representative Dondero indignantly repeated the charge in the House, while on the Senate side Pat McCarran demanded an investigation of the Morris appointment. Back in the House, Patrick J. Hillings complained, on March 18, that Morris still hadn’t been cleared by the FBI.
Considerably less naive about who his real enemy was, and the power he wielded, Morris the following day announced that the one unit of the Justice Department he didn’t intend to investigate was the FBI and that no questionnaires would be sent to Director Hoover or FBI personnel.
Asked by the president why he hadn’t distributed the questionnaires, McGrath stated that they were a violation of personal rights. Truman, now under fire from nearly everyone in the government, decided to take the matter under advisement.
Unaware that his days were already numbered, Morris on March 26 asked the attorney general for his questionnaire, plus all his appointment books, telephone records, correspondence, and diaries.
At exactly noon on April 3, 1952, with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover standing at his side, Attorney General McGrath announced that he had just fired Newbold Morris.
At 4:00 P.M.—he’d been delayed at the airport greeting the visiting Queen Juliana of the Netherlands—President Truman held his own press conference and announced that he had just fired Attorney General McGrath.
As his replacement, the president named James P. McGranery, a U.S. district judge from Philadelphia, attorney general, stating that he would now head the corruption investigation. A lame-duck AG—1952 was an election year and, since Truman wasn’t running, there would be a new president and presumably a new Cabinet come January—McGranery never got around to it. Hoover, considering McGranery the least of several other evils, told his congressional supporters not to bother opposing his nomination.
Morris returned to New York, McGrath to Rhode Island, both having learned the same lesson, that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was “too big to handle.”
Another investigator to whom the FBI director did
not
offer cooperation was Estes Kefauver, who headed the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. Speaking for Hoover as much as for himself, Attorney General McGrath had declared—on the eve of the hearings—that the Justice Department had no persuasive evidence that a “national crime syndicate” existed.
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The American public soon learned otherwise. One of the first congressional investigations to be televised, the Kefauver hearings reached a huge audience, an estimated twenty million viewers getting a quick, and often shocking, course in the criminal activities of such mob bosses as Luciano, Colombo, Gambino, Lucchese, Marcello, and Trafficante. For many the most dramatic testimony was that of Frank Costello. When the New York Mafia chieftain refused to allow his face to be photographed, the camera focused on his amazingly expressive hands; time and again when he lied, they didn’t. By contrast, for the chairman himself the high point of the hearings seemed to be the appearance of Virginia Hill. Kefauver, identified in his FBI file as “a notorious womanizer,” had trouble keeping his eyes off the extraordinarily long, silk-clad legs of the late Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s mistress.
Denied help from the FBI, the committee turned to Hoover’s nemesis Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the heads of the crime commissions in Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles for most of its information on the criminal underground. Hoover would not even help protect the witnesses. When two were murdered just before they were scheduled to testify, Kefauver appealed to the FBI director, who coldly responded, “I regret to advise the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not empowered to perform guard duties.”
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Among those the testimony linked to organized crime were such friends of the director as Clint Murchison, Joseph Kennedy, Walter Winchell, Sherman Billingsley,
*
Lewis S. Rosenstiel, and Myer Schine.
The committee called more than eight hundred witnesses in over fifteen cities and boosted the hitherto unknown Tennessee senator into such national prominence that it was presumed he could have the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination for the asking. But in May 1951, just a year after the hearings had begun, Kefauver unexpectedly resigned as chairman. Although he offered several reasons for stepping down, he said nothing about the arrest, three weeks earlier, of Herbert Brody, a friend, campaign contributor, and Nashville numbers boss. Campaign records later revealed that Brody had donated $100
to Kefauver’s 1948 senate campaign. However, rumor had it that the amount was $5,000 and that Kefauver had pocketed the difference. All this, plus a number of unexplained deposits in the senator’s personal checking account, went into Kefauver’s FBI file for future use. Five years later, when Kefauver ran for vice-president as Adlai Stevenson’s running mate, Hoover would share these tidbits, and others he had since collected, with Richard Nixon.
*
*
“I was a real daddy longlegs of a worm when it came to crawling,” Hayden wrote in his autobiography,
Wanderer.
2
But Hayden came nowhere near the record set by the writer Martin Berkeley, who named 155 persons.
*
Prior to a visit by one of his clerical friends, an aide always placed a Bible on the director’s desk.
*
Although male visitors to Hoover’s basement recreation room were invariably shown the cameos—the showing was a highlight of the FBI director’s private tour—they are not listed in the itemized inventory of the late J. Edgar Hoover’s estate. Rumor has it that a certain former assistant director now has them.
*
The
Washington Post
’s anti-Lowenthal review was by Father Edmund Walsh, the Georgetown University dean who had suggested that McCarthy might want to use Communists in government as his campaign theme.
†
Cook’s book was not published until 1964, six years after large sections of it had appeared in a special issue of the
Nation
—and then only after Clyde Tolson personally intervened in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Macmillan Company not to release it.
In addition to
The FBI Nobody Knows,
Cook also wrote
The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss
and
The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy,
earning him a permanent place on Hoover’s enemies list and folders in both Hoover’s Official/Confidential and Personal files.
*
William Turner had to wait seven years before seeing his book,
Hoover’s FBI: The Man and the Myth,
published in 1970 by Sherbourne Press. Not only was Turner subjected to a vicious campaign of personal vilification and harassment; his editor would be labeled a pornographer, the FBI resurrecting a 1965 indictment for allegedly publishing obscene books, neglecting to mention, when it spread the tale, that the charges had been dismissed.
Hoover’s treatment of the former SA Turner caused a strong backlash within the Bureau’s rank and file.
*
In an appendix to his book
The Age of Surveillance,
Frank Donner lists the books, articles, pamphlets, speeches and interviews of J. Edgar Hoover. Although the list is admittedly incomplete, covering only the last three decades of the FBI director’s life, it includes 304 entries and runs to ten pages of small print, leading Donner to conclude, “No government official has ever communicated to a national audience in such volume as J. Edgar Hoover.”
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†
The Morgenthau papers were later transferred to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York.
‡
Contrary to the agent’s recollections, there were a few oversights, such as an October 2, 1941, conversation between Morgenthau and several of his aides, including Harry Dexter White, in which it was noted that Attorney General Biddle seemed afraid to utter the name of J. Edgar Hoover, always referring to the FBI director as “he” or “him.”
White: “Capital ‘he’?” (Laughter.)
Gaston: “He didn’t mention Hoover by name. That would be sacrilegious.”
During the same conversation Morgenthau and his aides ridiculed Martin Dies’s claim that there were fifty-six Communists in the Treasury Department (“They are no more Communists than we are”). Only White seemed to take the charge seriously, remarking, “Now look, Ed, if there are any Communists…it seems to me the quicker we know it and the quicker we get them out, the better. There is some awfully confidential material floating around here.”
*
In 1948 the third wife of Earl Miller, Eleanor Roosevelt’s oft-married bodyguard-driver, filed suit for divorce, naming Mrs. Roosevelt as correspondent. The suit was settled out of court and the judgment sealed. However, one of Hoover’s sources got a peek at the sealed file, and the FBI director added another entry to the former first lady’s Official/Confidential file.
*
When the CIA complained, Hoover responded, publicly, that the agency could not be trusted with the files, since it was not sufficiently “security conscious”—thus setting the stage for Elizabeth Bentley’s claim, only a few days later, in her appearance before HUAC, that the OSS had been infiltrated by Communists.
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*
Connelly himself was later convicted of accepting gifts and bribes and sentenced to prison.
†
Caudle, too, was later convicted of tax fraud and imprisoned.
*
Billingsley had proven to be something of an embarrassment to the FBI director. Following his involvement in a shooting incident, it was revealed that the Stork Club owner and ex-bootlegger had used J. Edgar Hoover as a reference on his gun permit application.
*
Merle Miller, in his book
Lyndon,
describes Kefauver as “a boozer, a womanizer, and an eager accepter of bribes from any source.”
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According to Bobby Baker, who paid some of those bribes, including one for $25,000 to help get Dallas an NFL football franchise, the senator “didn’t particularly care whether he was paid in coin or women.”
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The journalist Walter Trohan, who may have received his information from Hoover, rated Kefauver as “one of the more active capitol Lotharios…who often made a connubial bed of many a House and Senate committee-room table.”
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When Kefauver died in 1963 and his safe-deposit box was opened, it was found to contain $300,000 in stock from drug companies he was supposed to have been regulating.