Official and Confidential (30 page)

In the 1952 presidential race, the Texans put their money – literally – on Dwight Eisenhower. Sid Richardson had flown to the general's Paris headquarters the previous year, armed with a five-page document setting out why he should run for president. From then on the pressure never ceased. Murchison lobbied ceaselessly, little caring whether Eisenhower ran as a Democrat or a Republican, so long as he ran.

In August, at an unpublicized meeting in California, Eisenhower discussed the Democratic front-runner, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, with Edgar and Murchison. They concluded, Murchison wrote to a friend, that Stevenson would be ‘used by radicals to destroy America's proud traditions.' That month, in Washington, someone began spreading a rumor that the Governor was a ‘queer.' The FBI was almost certainly behind it.

Edgar had been hostile to Stevenson since, three years earlier, he had made a mildly critical remark about Bureau efficiency. Agents had gone to work gathering derogatory material, and Edgar supplied Eisenhower with information on Stevenson's 1949 divorce. In the spring of 1952, shortly before Stevenson's selection by the Democrats, Edgar received a report claiming Stevenson and Bradley University president David Owen were ‘the two best-known homosexuals in the state.' Stevenson, supposedly, was known to fellow homosexuals as Adeline.

The report, which originated with disgruntled Illinois policemen and a student basketball player, was secondhand. Stevenson's biographers make no mention of any homosexual tendency. At the FBI, however, the Governor's name went into a special file marked ‘Stevenson, Adlai Ewing – Governor of Illinois – Sex Deviate.'

In July, on the same day Stevenson announced his candidacy, a senior FBI official prepared a nineteen-page memorandum – including the homosexual smear and suggestions that Stevenson had once harbored Communist
sympathies. Edgar had also ordered the writing of a ‘blind memorandum,' on paper without a letterhead, summarizing the homosexual allegation. The rumor was spread that summer, Democratic officials believed, by Edgar's close associate Guy Hottel.

In October, a crucial point in the campaign, Senator McCarthy used a nationwide television address to produce the ‘coldly documented background' on Stevenson. Waving papers in his hand, he branded the Democratic candidate as a wartime Communist collaborator and a covert member of a left-wing organization. The ‘documentation,' none of which held water when analyzed, was supplied by former FBI agent Donald Surine, the principal liaison between McCarthy and the Bureau.
²

These were the dirtiest blows in one of the nation's dirtiest campaigns. They left Stevenson deeply dispirited, wondering whether he could continue at all. In November 1952, three months after his California strategy meeting with Murchison and Edgar, a landslide vote sent Dwight Eisenhower to Washington.

‘Politics,' Eisenhower's friend George Allen wrote in his memoirs, ‘runs on juice – on the kind of influence by which the proper man can get a ticket fixed.' Allen, mutual friend to the new President, Murchison, Richardson and Edgar, plumbed the Eisenhower administration for political juice with the dedication his friends applied to oil.

By a secret agreement, even before the inaugural, Allen and Billy Byars – another oilman friend of Edgar's – arranged to finance Eisenhower's Gettysburg farm. They also funneled money to him ‘for his share of the farming operation.' Byars subsidized Mamie Eisenhower's brother-in-law Gordon Moore, by establishing a racing stable on his land.

Sid Richardson, for his part, made secret payments to Robert Anderson, shortly to become Secretary of the Treasury, and poised to influence presidential policy in favor of
domestic oil producers. The Eisenhower administration issued sixty oil leases on government reserves during its first term, compared to only sixteen in the previous fifty-five years.

Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a Texan who knew the ways of oilmen, watched in despair as Eisenhower doled out key federal posts to the barons of commerce. ‘This fellow Hoover,' the Speaker growled, ‘helped him do it. This fellow Hoover is the worst curse that has come to government in years.'

‘I was close with General Eisenhower,' Edgar would recall. ‘He was a great man and a great President.' According to former Attorney General William Rogers, Edgar thought the eight Eisenhower years ‘the best and happiest' of his career. So they were, in the sense that he had absolute security of tenure. Sugary notes sped regularly from FBI headquarters to the White House. Edgar used Seattle Agent in Charge Richard Auerbach, who had once been secretary to a Republican senator, to cultivate the President's elder brother.

Eisenhower gave Edgar the National Security Medal, and Edgar gave the President the first ever ‘gold badge of honorary membership of the FBI.' ‘I wish,' Eisenhower would tell Edgar after he left the White House, ‘there were about a thousand J. Edgar Hoovers in key spots in the government.'

Behind the courtesies, however, there was disagreement. Eisenhower's papers reveal his concern that loyal Americans should not be persecuted for alleged Communism. He loathed McCarthyism, which Edgar supported to the very end. Later, Edgar would deplore Eisenhower's decision to welcome the Soviet leader Khrushchev to the United States. He thought it created an ‘atmosphere favorable to Communism among Americans.'

Eisenhower compromised himself less than his Democratic predecessors in the use of the FBI for personal political intelligence. He may not have done so at all. ‘With Eisenhower,' recalled Ralph de Toledano, a correspondent in whom Edgar confided, ‘Hoover never knew whether he would receive praise
or blame … He didn't really like Eisenhower very much.' In fact, predatory as ever, Edgar pried into the President's private life as he had into that of President Roosevelt.

Eisenhower's wartime romance with his female chauffeur, the young Irishwoman Kay Summersby, had been a time bomb ticking beneath the 1952 election campaign. Republican leaders considered Summersby's 1948 memoir,
Eisenhower Was My Boss
, potentially explosive – even though it said nothing of the couple's real intimacy. Copies of the book mysteriously vanished from Washington stores and from the New York Public Library.

Three years later, in September 1955, Joe McCarthy's aide, Donald Surine, would pass along some information to the FBI. For the past six weeks, Surine said, Summersby had been staying at Washington's Shoreham Hotel under an assumed name. Edgar at once ordered intense investigation. Agents made numerous ‘pretext calls,' including one to Summersby herself, in an attempt to find out if she had really been staying in Washington.

The only possible explanation is that Edgar wanted to know whether the President had revived his affair with Summersby. It was his custom to let presidents know he knew of their peccadilloes, in the guise of merely keeping them informed. The file does not reveal what Edgar did with the Summersby information, which reached him the day before President Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack.

Since 1953, Edgar and Clyde had spent extended summer vacations as guests of Clint Murchison at the Del Charro, a hotel he owned in La Jolla, in southern California. Edgar had been a regular visitor to the town since the thirties, and told the press it was a place where he ‘felt God was near.' His annual pilgrimage was dedicated to the horseracing at nearby Del Mar, as was that of Murchison and Sid Richardson, racing refugees from Texas, where betting on horses was illegal.

Murchison had bought the Del Charro in a fit of pique when another establishment failed to place a complete floor at his disposal. ‘Our father which art in Dallas,' went the prayer of the hotel staff, ‘Murchison be thy name.' The Lone Star flag fluttered in the Pacific breeze when the millionaire and his pals were in residence. Celebrities such as John Wayne, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elizabeth Taylor and a couple of her husbands, along with the less famous but much monied, came and went in private planes. The hotel was small, and its astronomical room charges – the equivalent of $1,000 a night at today's rates – drastically limited the clientele.

After Murchison took over in 1953, Edgar and Clyde never stayed anywhere else. Their stay in Bungalow A, one of seven reserved for the tycoon's special friends, became an annual ordeal for local FBI agents. A respectful tap at the door would bring first a delay, then Clyde snapping, ‘What the hell do you want?' He is remembered as petulant, unreasonable, ‘madder than a scorpion' over trifles. Even Murchison nicknamed him ‘Killer.'

Former agent Harry Whidbee long kept the list of Edgar's vacation requirements: direct phone lines to Washington; three oscillating fans – the Director detested air-conditioning; new light bulbs for every lamp; two 5" x 8" unlined white paper pads; two rolls Scotch tape, with dispenser; six sharpened No. 2 pencils; two bottles Scripps Permanent Royal Blue ink, No. 52 – no one else in the Bureau was allowed to use this brand; a basket of fruit; and whiskey – Jack Daniel's for Edgar, Haig & Haig for Clyde, gift-wrapped and paid for by the local Agent in Charge, whether he liked it or not.

There was panic one year when subordinates forgot a vital item – Edgar's favorite ice cream. When he insisted on having it, late at night, agents persuaded a local manufacturer to open his plant after hours. An FBI stenographer then dressed up as a waitress to serve the boss his precious dessert.

Even on vacation, the pair were rarely seen in anything but suit and tie. Edgar's alternative uniform, a staff member
recalls, was a ‘loudest of loud, shocking blue Hawaiian shirt, worn with suit pants.' Edgar never used the hotel's kidneyshaped pool. Proximity to water, he told the Nixons at La Jolla, made him ‘desperately uneasy.' ‘The two of them always sat with their backs to the wall, even when they had dinner by the pool,' recalled longtime hotel official Arthur Forbes. ‘That was for security. It was sad, watching the way those two men lived.'

Clint Murchison made sure Edgar and Clyde wanted for nothing at the Del Charro. When Edgar mentioned that on Florida vacations he ‘could pick fruit right from the trees at the door,' he awoke the next morning to find his patio planted with orange, peach and plum trees, and a grapevine. The grapes, the staff recall, had been laboriously wired to the branches during the night.

The favors Edgar accepted from Murchison made a mockery of his public pose as a man of thrift and incorruptibility. ‘It came to the end of the summer,' recalled Allan Witwer, the Del Charro's first manager. ‘Hoover had made no attempt to pay his bill. So I went to Murchison and said, “What do you want me to do?” “Put it on my bill,” he told me. And that's what I did.'

According to Witwer and his successor, Arthur Forbes, Murchison and associates paid Edgar's huge accommodations charges at the Del Charro every year until his death, nearly two decades later. Witwer preserved a copy of the 1953 bill, covering July 28 to August 28. It was marked simply ‘Murchison,' and was sent on to the millionaire's secretary, Ernestine van Buren. In the fifties, Witwer said, most of Edgar's bills were covered by Delhi-Taylor, a Murchison company.

The 1953 bill alone amounted to $3,100, or $24,335 at today's rates. If that was the average charge (and the hotel rate increased over the years), then the eighteen summers that followed brought Edgar hospitality worth about $460,000. That figure may be on the low side, for Edgar's vacation
sometimes lasted nearly two months. In addition, his journeys to California were usually logged as official ‘inspection trips,' meaning that taxpayers footed the travel expenses. Since 1950, Edgar's FBI salary had been more than that of a Congressman or a member of the Cabinet.

Just months before his death, in an off-the-record talk with
Los Angeles Times
Bureau Chief David Kraslow, Edgar would admit having accepted this largesse. Plaintively, as though it made everything all right, he said he had paid for his own food and drink.

Nineteen fifty-eight, as few adult Americans could have failed to notice, saw publication of Edgar's book
Masters of Deceit
, touted as a manual on ‘Communism in America and How to Fight It.' Because Edgar was the author, it became a massive best-seller, selling 250,000 copies in hardcover and 2,000,000 in paperback. The book became required reading in many schools. In a formal announcement, the Justice Department said the royalties were to go to the FBI Recreation Fund.

Masters of Deceit
was not written by Edgar, nor was it even his idea. The book grew out of a suggestion by Assistant Director William Sullivan, was written by four or five Bureau agents assigned to the job and was ‘polished up' by Fern Stukenbroeker, an agent with a Ph.D. who worked in Crime Records. Agents all over the country were required to promote the book and to place ‘reviews' – written in advance at the Bureau – with friendly newspapers. ‘
Masters of Deceit
,' went the in-house joke, ‘written by the Master of Deceit who never even read it.'

After Edgar's death, an official inquiry would establish that many thousands of dollars of FBI Recreation Fund money had been diverted to uses other than the ‘athletic and social functions' for which the fund had been created. Moreover, only a fifth of the income from the book went to the fund at all. Edgar rebuffed suggestions that the remainder should go to a heart or cancer charity, and divided it among
himself, Clyde, Lou Nichols and Bill Nichols (no relation), a journalist brought in to help with the final draft.

‘I just don't remember,' was Lou Nichols' reply, when asked years later how much he received. Edgar was more forthright – in private. Each of the four men, he admitted, received $72,000 – about $525,000 at today's rates.

Edgar's friend Clint Murchison, who owned a controlling interest in Henry Holt, the publisher of
Masters of Deceit
, had virtually instructed the company to buy the book, and, his secretary, Ernestine van Buren, recalled, he ‘stressed his desire that Hoover be given an especially favorable contract.'