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 (70 page)
“Certainly, he is a controversial man. He is earnest and he is honest. He has enemies. Whenever you attack subversives of any kind, Communists, Fascists, even the Ku Klux Klan, you are going to be the victim of the most extremely vicious criticism that can be made. I know. But sometimes a knock is a boost. When certain elements cease their attacks on me, I’ll know I’m slipping.”
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What was most interesting about the FBI director’s defense of the senator
was its timing: McCarthy was currently under investigation by the Justice Department for alleged financial improprieties.
*
Moreover, Hoover was, at the time of the interview, not the only famous person staying at Clint Murchison’s Hotel Del Charro: although registered under an assumed name, Senator McCarthy was also a guest there, having checked in just a few days after Hoover and Tolson.
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Apparently he had been spotted, however, since Hoover, questioned about his presence, said it was just a “coincidence.”
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In reality, like a number of Hoover’s other friends—including Joseph Kennedy, H. L. Hunt, Alfred Kohlberg, and Lewis Rosenstiel—Murchison, who owned the hotel and racetrack in addition to his many oil interests, was one of McCarthy’s chief financial supporters. In a rare, surprisingly frank interview some years later, Murchison observed, “I’ve spoken to J. Edgar Hoover about McCarthy. He said the only trouble with Joe is that he’s not general enough in his accusations. He’ll give some number like ‘274 Communists’ being infiltrated somewhere instead of just saying ‘many Communists.’ And then the FBI has to account for them. It makes the job a whole lot tougher.”
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Joseph McCarthy had several very fat FBI files, but supposedly the most damaging was one of the thinnest: running to fewer than a dozen pages, it was said to contain just two affidavits and one summary memorandum.
The fat folders contained, in addition to the director’s correspondence with the senator and extensive memorandums of their conversations, numerous allegations which would become public knowledge: that the military record of “Tail Gunner Joe” was largely bogus and his “war wound” accidental, that as a Wisconsin judge he’d granted quickie divorces for a price, that he’d used campaign contributions to speculate in soybean futures, that he’d accepted a $20,000 note from a soft-drink lobbyist as security for a loan and then become a strong advocate of the decontrol of sugar rationing (earning him the nickname the Pepsi Cola Kid), that he was a compulsive gambler and heavy drinker, and so on. Included too—and these were never publicized—were the FBI director’s warnings to the senator that certain of his aides were said to be homosexuals.
Also in these folders were accusations that McCarthy himself was homosexual. Hoover was not the only one collecting such materials. As Drew Pearson noted in his diary on January 14, 1952, “[Senator Millard E.] Tydings has an amazing letter which a young Army lieutenant wrote to Senator Bill Benton of Connecticut telling how McCarthy performed an act of sodomy on him after
picking him up in the Wardman Park Bar.” Pearson tried in vain to interview the lieutenant: “When I called Benton as a precautionary measure, he told me that the White House had stepped in and that the lieutenant was being handled by the FBI. I am a little skeptical as to how the FBI interviews certain witnesses, especially with James McInerney, head of the Justice Department Criminal Division, playing cozy with McCarthy for the last two years.”
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January 16: “Benton told me that McGrath and the President both were working on the matter of the young lieutenant involved with McCarthy. This is the third report on McCarthy’s homosexual activity and the most definite of all. Others were circumstantial and not conclusive.”
January 21: “I heard from Benton and Tydings that the FBI’s interview with the young lieutenant in New York had flopped. He denied writing the letter, claiming it was planted by another homo who was jealous.”
Pearson collected many such allegations—that there had been a similar incident with a Young Republican official in Wisconsin, that McCarthy frequented the “bird circuit,” a number of homosexual haunts in the vicinity of Grand Central Station, and so on. But they were just that, allegations; lacking proof, he didn’t publish them. But he did allow Hank Greenspun, editor and publisher of the
Las Vegas Sun,
access to his files, and Greenspun, who hated McCarthy, was not so circumspect. While on a Las Vegas radio program, McCarthy had referred to Greenspun as an “ex-Communist.” He’d later retracted the charge, claiming he’d misspoken, that he had meant to say “exconvict,” which was true, since Greenspun had been convicted and jailed for smuggling arms to Israel during its war for independence (information which Hoover had provided to McCarthy). In his “Where I Stand” column, and in a subsequent memoir, Greenspun repeated the charges in Pearson’s file, together with some of his own, picked up during the senator’s gambling junkets to Vegas, regarding the senator’s alleged fondness for young bellboys and elevator operators.
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However, like McCarthy, Greenspun was a gutter fighter, and words like “alleged” were not in his vocabulary. “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years,” he wrote. “He seldom dates girls and if he does, he laughingly describes it as window dressing…It is common talk among homosexuals who rendezvous at the White Horse Inn [in Milwaukee] that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities. The persons in Nevada who listened to McCarthy’s radio talk thought he had the queerest voice. He has. He is.”
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On September 23, 1953, McCarthy married his secretary and administrative assistant, Jean Kerr. Some speculated that he did so to end the homosexual talk.
“There were
many
files on Senator McCarthy,” recalled a former Hoover aide who served at FBIHQ during this period and who had access to nearly all of them. Although no fan of the senator, he concluded after examining their contents that there was no basis to the homosexual allegations, that they consisted of unverifiable gossip, speculation, and anonymous tips from obvious crackpots. “McCarthy was hitting the State Department pretty hard, and this was one of the ways they tried to get back at him,” he concluded.
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There was supposedly one other file, however, which this aide never saw but, like other FBIHQ employees, had heard about from the Bureau grapevine. Maintained on an unusually strict, need-to-know basis by Miss Gandy, possibly in the director’s Personal File, it allegedly concerned McCarthy’s involvement with young girls. Very young girls.
It was common knowledge in the capital that when drinking heavily McCarthy was given to pawing women, fondling breasts, squeezing buttocks, and so on. The reporter Walter Trohan, for one, had witnessed such exhibitions and recalled that McCarthy “was extremely susceptible to youthful charms in his bachelor days. He just couldn’t keep his hands off young girls. Why the Communist opposition didn’t plant a minor on him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don’t know.”
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Headquarters gossip had it that the file contained a summary memorandum and two affidavits. Former close personal friends of the senator were quoted in the memorandum as cautioning other friends that they should never leave McCarthy alone in a room with young children, that there had been “incidents.” The two affidavits allegedly concerned such incidents, both involving girls under ten years of age.
Nor was this gossip restricted to the upper levels of the FBI. CIA Director Allen Dulles was said to possess similar, if not the same, information, which, even while the CIA was under attack by McCarthy, Dulles was too much a gentleman to use.
What the revelation that Senator Joseph McCarthy was a child molester,
if true,
would have done to the reputation and career of his self-proclaimed friend FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover can only be imagined.
*
Hoover used the law enforcement grapevine to spread the story, Crime Records leaking it to local police, who in turn shared it with favored reporters.
*
Only heavily excised portions of Adlai Stevenson’s Official/Confidential files have been released to date. They mention the alleged forfeiture of bail on a New York morals arrest but not the Illinois and Maryland arrests. They do reveal, however, that Hoover had Stevenson placed on the Sex Deviate index.
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Hoover neglected to tell Eisenhower that he had run name checks on all of his aides, as well as on his closest advisers.
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Hoover was at least partly responsible for Smith’s condition—severe stomach ulcers. The two had battled since Truman appointed Eisenhower’s former chief of staff to the post of DCI in October 1950.
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Rooney was one of the few members of Congress the FBI director frankly confided in—he was said to know more about the real priorities of the FBI than any president or attorney general—and he was the only congressman invited to the graveside services for the late director.
*
Dulles finally managed to get rid of McLeod by persuading President Eisenhower to appoint him ambassador to Ireland.
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There was a story behind that “B.” in Shipley’s name. It stood for Bielaski. Two of her brothers were former Pinkerton operatives who had become BI agents and participated in the A. Mitchell Palmer Red raids. One of them, A. Bruce Bielaski, had even been chief of the Bureau of Investigation before J. Edgar Hoover, from 1912 to 1919, while the other, Frank Brooks Bielaski, had been director of investigations for the OSS and had led the
Amerasia
raid. It was a very securityconscious family.
*
Stanley I. Kutler includes some fascinating speculation regarding Pauling in his book
The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War:
“It has been suggested that by blocking Pauling’s trip to England, the Passport Office may have cost him an unprecedented third Nobel Prize. Pauling was one of the first Americans working on the chemical structure of biological molecules. Others, meanwhile, were studying the function of genes as an approach to the nature of life. Ultimately, these two rather antithetical approaches coalesced in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Had Pauling made his London trip in 1952, he might well have seen the X-ray pictures of DNA from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins’ laboratory. That information possibly could have given him the stimulus and information necessary to retrace his own steps and solve the DNA structure. We will never know, of course.”
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Established in 1935 as the FBI Police Training School, it was renamed the FBI National Police Academy in 1936 and the FBI National Academy in 1945. Charles Appel, Frank Baughman, and Hugh Clegg taught the earliest classes, in a couple of crowded rooms in downtown Washington and a pistol range just outside of town. Eventually the academy, greatly expanded, moved to permanent quarters in Quantico, Virginia.
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Or almost all. The name of anyone who subsequently managed to offend or disappoint the director was dropped “as if he had suddenly died or become a nonperson,” as Sanford Ungar has put it.
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Hoover claimed that persons were deleted from the roster only because of criminal offenses or sexual perversions, thus offering a choice of smears.
*
Parker advocated a national clearinghouse for crime information; Hoover, seeing a threat to the preeminence of the FBI, opposed it. Both men were fond of the spotlight and loath to share it.
*
There was an official liaison between the FBI and the CIA, Cartha DeLoach. However, according to the former agent Robert Lamphere, DeLoach “reflected the director’s negative attitude toward the CIA by working to exacerbate the problems between the two agencies, rather than damp them down.”
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When DeLoach became head of Crime Records, Sam Papich became CIA liaison. Papich, who held the heretical notion that the FBI and CIA should work together against their common enemies, was frequently the object of the director’s displeasure, but he remained in the post until 1971, when Hoover, in a fit of pique, abolished all the liaison offices.
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One of them, Morton Sobell, was located in Mexico, kidnapped by the secret police, and, after being beaten, dumped across the border at Laredo, where he was immediately arrested by FBI agents, in time for him to be tried with the Rosenbergs.
*
As Sol Stern and Ronald Radosh observe, in “The Hidden Rosenberg Case: How the FBI Framed Ethel to Break Julius,”
New Republic,
June 23, 1979, “In that room full of lawyers, no one seemed disturbed that the government wanted a 20-to-30 year jail sentence for an individual against whom the case was weak.”
Radosh and Joyce Milton later expanded on these findings in
The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth,
undoubtedly the best-documented book yet to appear on the case.
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Kaufman, however, was an old family friend of the Cohns, and Roy’s father, Judge Al Cohn, had helped get Kaufman his federal judgeship. According to Cohn—as related to Sidney Zion in
The Autobiography of Roy Cohn,
published two years after Cohn’s death—Kaufman was “dying” to preside over “the trial of the century” and, learning this, Cohn had gone straight to the clerk in charge of assigning judges to criminal cases and pulled the right strings. Cohn also said that he and Judge Kaufman had secretly communicated throughout the trial. He claimed, “Kaufman told me
before
the trial started that he was going to sentence Julius Rosenberg to death.”
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Although the deal was never formally committed to paper, it was understood that Ruth Greenglass wouldn’t be indicted if she would testify against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Both Greenglasses were well aware, however, that Ruth could be indicted at any time if either failed to cooperate.
Like the Rosenbergs, the Greenglasses had two small children.
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Both Gold and Greenglass were housed on the eleventh floor of the Tombs, which was known as the “singing section” since so many “songbirds” were held there.
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In his letter to the attorney general, the FBI director made some startling observations regarding Sobell, who was not involved in the theft of atomic data. “Although the evidence was not as great on Sobell as it was on some of the other defendants,” Hoover admitted, “it was sufficient for the jury to convict him.” He added, “He has not cooperated with the government and has undoubtedly furnished high classified information to the Russians although we cannot prove it.”
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Cohn later claimed that he persuaded Kaufman to give Ethel Rosenberg the death sentence. In
The Autobiography of Roy Cohn,
written with Sidney Zion, Cohn states, “Judge Kaufman has said that he sought divine guidance in his synagogue before deciding upon the sentences. I can’t confirm or deny this. So far as I know, the closest he got to prayer was the phone booth next to the Park Avenue Synagogue. He called from that booth to a phone I used, behind the bench in the courtroom, to ask my advice on whether he ought to give the death penalty to Ethel Rosenberg. We often communicated during the Rosenberg case in this manner.”
According to Cohn, he suggested Kaufman give Ethel the death sentence, explaining, “The way I see it is she’s worse than Julius. She’s the older one, she’s the one with the brains…She inaugurated this whole thing, she was the mastermind of this conspiracy…I don’t see how you can justify sparing her.”
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Harry Gold, who had pled guilty, had received a thirty-year sentence some months earlier.
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Hoover later justified his sensational appearance before the committee to the writer Ralph de Toledano: “Neither I nor the Attorney General implied that President Truman was disloyal or pro-Communist,” he said. “He was blind to the Communist menace and used very poor judgment. But I would never have testified before the Senate had he not drawn me and the FBI into the controversy. By explaining the promotion of Harry Dexter White—and by having others say that he had acted on my advice—he made the FBI look ridiculous and inefficient. Only my appearance could have set the record straight completely. I knew I would be attacked for it, but I could not shirk my responsibility to the Bureau or allow the world to believe that we had been duped.”
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Confronted with his subordinate’s remarks, Attorney General Brownell told the press, “I have full confidence and admiration for Mr. Hoover. I like to stress that whenever possible.”
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Although McCarthy had arrived with Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, neither was allowed to stay, since the Hotel Del Charro was “restricted.” The only exceptions Murchison permitted were Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and certain Jewish gangsters.
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Hoover alerted McCarthy that the FBI was investigating the allegation, emphasizing that it was doing so under the orders of Attorney General McGrath. McCarthy asked only that the investigation be circumspect so that there would be no leak to Drew Pearson.
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On March 3, 1954, Puerto Rican terrorists shot up the House of Representatives, seriously wounding a number of congressmen. Several days later, Hoover told McCarthy that an informant had learned from one of the terrorists that there was also a plan to assassinate McCarthy: “You were to be killed in Washington by an individual posing as a Western Union messenger who would appear at your hotel room,” but “if this plan fails an individual is to go to your room dressed in a bell boy’s uniform and kill you.”
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