J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (73 page)

The big event of 1956, for both the FBI and its director, wasn’t the reelection of Eisenhower and Nixon, but the publication of Don Whitehead’s authorized history
The FBI Story
in December.

Whitehead, an Associated Press feature writer, had interviewed Hoover in April 1954, a month before his thirtieth anniversary as director, and had
turned the three-hour, nonstop talkathon into a series of highly laudatory articles on the Bureau and its chief. Hoping to expand the material into a book, Whitehead took the idea to Lou Nichols, who was “dubious,” but in early 1955 Nichols called Whitehead in and told him, “You can never tell about the Boss. He said to tell you the Bureau will go with you on the book. All the way.”
²⁹
This was Whitehead’s version. Lou Nichols recalled it differently. The book was his idea, Nichols claimed, and he’d gotten Whitehead to write it. “We [Hoover and I] felt the time had come to have a definitive story written on the Bureau.” Actually the idea predated Whitehead and had first been suggested in 1950, as a rebuttal to Lowenthal’s book. Various writers had been considered, but Whitehead wasn’t chosen until after he’d passed a special-inquiry type of investigation. That he was a double Pulitzer Prize winner may have been the deciding factor. The FBI supplied an office, a research staff, and the materials. Although Whitehead thought he was working with raw FBI files, mostly he was given specially prepared summary memorandums. Despite the FBI’s help, the book was “100 percent Whitehead,” Nichols maintained.

Ovid Demaris: “Did you make men available to talk to and interview?”

Louis Nichols: “It wasn’t necessary.”

Whitehead was thus spared exposure to contrary, and perhaps critical, versions of the director’s favorite stories. Nichols also denied “editing” the book; rather he’d “reviewed the book, the manuscript, as it went along.”
³⁰

Hoover’s friend Bennett Cerf arranged for the book to be published at Random House. Nothing was left to chance. Crime Records literally took over the publisher’s publicity campaign and, with assists from such luminaries as Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan, persuaded the press to treat the book as a national news event. Many of the reviews were prearranged (Nichols supplied canned reviews, and complimentary editorials, to the small-town papers) and, of course, highly favorable. One of Hoover’s old enemies, the former FCC chairman James Lawrence Fly, gave the book a very critical going-over in the
Saturday Review,
but Norman Cousins played it safe and ran three other favorable reviews in the same issue, one by Morris Ernst. The Socialist Norman Thomas reviewed the book for
Commentary,
observing, “Mr. Whitehead’s history bears out my own opinion, formed before I opened the book, that the FBI under Mr. Hoover has been as good or better than one would expect an agency of investigation to be in these tumultuous times in so big a nation as the United States.”
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Thomas might not have been so generous had he known that the FBI had been investigating him for nearly thirty years. To boost the sales, Hoover arranged for the FBI Recreational Association to buy several thousand copies, but it was hardly necessary. A week before the official publication date, Random House had already sold out its 50,000-copy first printing, and new orders were coming in at the rate of 3,000 per day. It peaked at over 200,000 copies, remained on the best-seller lists for thirty-eight weeks, and was serialized in 170 newspapers, brought out in paperback, and made into a Warner Brothers movie starring Jimmy Stewart.

Mervyn LeRoy was picked as producer and director of the movie only after
Hoover determined, from the files and Hollywood gossip, that he had enough on LeRoy to control him. A special squad was sent to Los Angeles to oversee the filming. As LeRoy later admitted, “Everybody on that picture, from the carpenters and electricians right to the top, everybody, had to be okayed by the FBI.”
³²

There were some problems. Jimmy Stewart couldn’t hit the target on the FBI range, so the special agent Don Jacobson, who stood farther along the line, fired bull’s-eyes into Stewart’s target. Then too, LeRoy wanted to staff FBI headquarters with big-bosomed secretaries—”the elevators bulged with them,”
³³
Jacobson later recalled—but, after being reviewed by FBI censors, all of these scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor. When the movie premiered, at Radio City Music Hall on September 24, 1959, the FBI director cried.

This was, however, not the first time Hoover and Tolson had viewed the film, in which both made cameo appearances. LeRoy had arranged a private screening some weeks earlier, for the FBI’s top executives, in the blue room at FBIHQ. “I was never so nervous in my whole life,” LeRoy admitted. “I perspired…I perspired like you’ve never seen. I was soaking wet. And for this reason, they didn’t laugh in the right places, they didn’t seem to show any emotion, including Mr. Hoover and Mr. Tolson and Deke DeLoach and everybody that were in there. So when the lights went up, I was absolutely worn out. And Edgar stood up and he motioned for me to come over to him and he put his arms around me and he said, ‘Mervyn, that’s one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever seen,’ and they all started to applaud. I guess they were all waiting to see how he liked it.” And then LeRoy himself cried, partly out of relief, partly because “it was a beautiful story, it was the story of the FBI.”
³⁴

Still smarting from the reception of his 1938 book
Persons in Hiding,
J. Edgar Hoover did not publish his second ghostwritten book,
Masters of Deceit,
until 1958.

Although pleased at the public response to the book and movie versions of
The FBI Story,
Hoover was privately very bitter about Don Whitehead’s success. Why should he make a fortune, Hoover complained, when the FBI had done all the work? Why had Nichols agreed to let him keep 100 percent?
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Again, Hoover took no chances as far as the publication and promotion of the new book were concerned. Hoover’s new publisher was Henry Holt and Company, which had recently been purchased by his friend Clint Murchison, whose first order of business, after taking over the firm, had been to make sure it was squeaky-clean of Commie influence.

“Before I got them, they’d published some books that were badly pro-Communist,” Murchison told the
New York Post.
“They had some bad people
there.” Since he couldn’t just go in and “fire anybody and tell him it was because he was a Communist,” Murchison said, “we just cleared them all out and put some good men in. Sure there were casualties but now we’ve got a good operation.”
³⁵

The publication of Hoover’s
Masters of Deceit
was symbolic of the new order at Henry Holt. It was also one of the biggest successes Murchison had, during his brief reign as publisher. Hoover’s account of the Communist menace sold over 250,000 copies in hardbound and over 2,000,000 in paper and was on the best-seller lists for thirty-one weeks, three of them as the number one nonfiction choice.

On February 9, 1958, before the book was even published, the FBI director announced that he intended to give all of his royalties to the FBI Recreational Association.

In their rush to commend the director for his generosity, no reporter thought to ask Hoover exactly what the FBI Recreational Association did with its money. It was, however, a question that a great many FBI agents, who had to make an annual contribution to the fund, had been asking for years, without getting a satisfactory answer.

In reality, the FBIRA was a slush fund, maintained for the use of Hoover, Tolson, and their key aides. It was also a money-laundering operation, so the director would not have to pay taxes on his book royalties. The FBI director’s charity went right back into his and other pockets. According to William Sullivan, who oversaw the writing of
Masters of Deceit
—by FBI agents, on public time, as many as eight agents working full-time on the book for nearly six months—Hoover “put many thousands of dollars of that book…into his own pocket, and so did Tolson, and so did Lou Nichols.”
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36

Hoover published two other books:
A Study of Communism,
with Holt, Rinehart and Winston, in 1962, which sold approximately 125,000 copies and earned the FBI director close to $50,000; and
J. Edgar Hoover on Communism,
with Random House, in 1969, which sold about 40,000 copies and whose total earnings have never been made public. Again, these were written by FBI employees—it was a standing joke among the agents that the director not only didn’t write his own books; he hadn’t even read them—and again, to avoid paying taxes, he laundered the royalties through the FBI Recreational Association.

When ABC contracted to produce the popular television series “The FBI” Hoover made it a condition that the broadcasting company purchase the movie
rights to
Masters of Deceit,
for $75,000. “The FBI” premiered in 1965 and ran for nine years. Hoover received a $500 payment for each episode. Every cent went into the FBI Recreational Association.
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As will be documented in a subsequent chapter, one of the deepest and darkest of all the FBI’s secrets was that America’s number one law enforcement officer was himself a crook.

On June 3, 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 1, reversed the conviction of Clinton Jencks, a New Mexico labor leader who had been convicted of perjury after signing a non-Communist affidavit, the court ruling that defendants in criminal cases had the right to see prior statements of witnesses who testified against them.
^†
The sole dissenting vote was that of the former attorney general Tom Clark, who warned that the decision could result in “fishing expeditions” in the FBI’s files and open up “a veritable Pandora’s box of troubles.”
³⁸

Nothing frightened the FBI more than the
Jencks
decision. It did not mean, as Clark alleged, that anyone could go fishing in the FBI’s files. But it did mean—and this was equally frightening to Hoover—that possibly inconsistent earlier statements of such witnesses and informants as Elizabeth Bentley and David Greenglass would have to be made available if the defense requested them.

A mass counterattack was mounted, led by Lou Nichols, the head of Crime Records and the Bureau’s congressional liaison. Hoover did not openly denounce the Court, but he dropped broad hints, which Nichols made sure reached the
New York Times
and others, that in order to protect its confidential sources the FBI might be forced to drop out of some espionage cases, such as the forthcoming trial of Colonel Rudolf Abel. President Eisenhower, by now very disappointed in his Court appointees—Brennan had written the decision and Warren had seconded it—spoke of the “incalculable damage”
³⁹
that would follow the opening of the FBI’s files. And the prestigious American Bar Association, in a resolution secretly written by Nichols, severely critized both the Court and its decision.

But the real fight against the Court took place behind the scenes, in the cloakrooms and hallways of Congress. Calling in his due bills and mobilizing his support group, Hoover lobbied through a bipartisan bill—sponsored in the
House by Kenneth Keating, a New York Republican, and in the Senate by Joseph O’Mahoney, a liberal Wyoming Democrat—which supposedly protected the sanctity of the FBI’s files, while at the same time, in the small print, gutting the
Jencks
decision.
^*

Although the bill passed by strong majorities in both houses, it took almost two years before the Supreme Court ruled on its constitutionality. When it did, on June 22, 1959, it was clear that J. Edgar Hoover had won a momentous victory. The FBI director had not only taken on the Supreme Court; he’d forced it to reverse one of its own decisions.

Unfortunately, the man most responsible for that victory wasn’t around to share in the plaudits. Lou Nichols, after almost single-handedly creating the FBI’s vast public relations empire and faithfully serving its director for twenty-three years, had resigned from the Bureau in November 1957 and, is so doing, become the first Judas.

Drew Pearson planted his time bombs carefully, months apart. “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” January 14, 1957: “Lou Nichols has been busy ingratiating himself with key senators, who have the impression he is grooming himself to be Hoover’s heir-apparent. To this Lou modestly replied: ‘My only desire is to serve Mr. Hoover.’ ” September 5, 1957: “The FBI’s amiable press agent, Lou Nichols, is cozying up to Vice President Nixon. Lou has his eye on J. Edgar Hoover’s job, is keeping close to the powers-that-might be.” There were more such items, but these were quite adequate. After each, Hoover stopped speaking to Nichols.

Nichols did have aspirations, and he had discussed them with Nixon, but both agreed that it seemed unlikely that Hoover would step down anytime in the foreseeable future. Although a dozen years the director’s junior, Nichols had already had two nervous breakdowns and one heart attack. He enjoyed the perks of his office—he’d later admit to this author that he had shared in the
Masters of Deceit
royalties—but he was exhausted from his most recent lobbying effort. Then too, as Nichols himself observed, “the closer you were to the director, the more flack you took.”
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And Nichols had been very close, not just physically—his office, 5640 was right across the hall from 5636, the director’s reception room, so Hoover could summon him quickly when he needed him—but also professionally: nearly every major decision Hoover made he first tried out on Nichols, who, like Tolson, sometimes dared to say no. Clyde Tolson was also part of the problem. Once close, they had in recent years become estranged, Tolson resenting Nichols’s end runs to the director, all of which were dutifully reported to him by his loyal aides.

Nichols’s announcement that he intended to retire did not go over well. Hoover had called him a Judas, among other things. Although the director attended his retirement party and presented him with a gold FBI badge, he not so secretly seethed over his defection.
^*
“I never want another man to have such power in this organization again.”
⁴²
Like any other top executive who abandoned ship against the director’s express wishes, Nichols, after leaving the FBI, was tapped, bugged, burgled, and tailed. Since Nichols lived on a farm near Leesburg, Virginia, only “limited physical surveillance” was possible there, but whenever he was working in New York City or on trips to Florida, agents followed him everywhere. Aware of the surveillance—he’d ordered a few such himself—Nichols was careful always to praise and never to criticize the director, sure Hoover would soon lose interest.