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 (76 page)
Then there were the phobias, at first known only to those at SOG but by now common gossip in the field: the director’s compulsive washing of his hands (Sam Noisette once estimated that half of his twenty-five years in the Bureau had been spent handing Mr. Hoover towels); his fear of germs (his home was equipped with an air-filtration system which allegedly “electrocuted” poisonous particles, and he would become almost demented on seeing an unswatted fly); and his insistence that agents not step on his shadow.
A favorite tale among the agents was that the director, realizing that he and his constant companion were getting along in years, had sent his associate director out to price two adjoining burial plots. The prices were all too high, Edgar had complained upon Clyde’s return. “After all,” he added, “I’ll only need mine for three days.”
It was only a tale, a fiction. J. Edgar Hoover had no intention of dying. It was at about this same time that Hoover entrusted William Sullivan with an especially sensitive assignment. No matter how farfetched the claim, Research and Analysis was given the task of investigating any formula or treatment which allegedly prolonged life. Any articles on these subjects were to be deposited on the director’s desk as soon after publication as possible.
This odd bit of information never left headquarters. But even agents in the field were beginning to hear stories about the director’s growing paranoia.
In October 1959 the
New York Post
ran a fifteen-part series entitled “J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.” The Bureau had learned about the series nearly a year earlier, when it was first proposed, and had tried to discourage its publication, with not so veiled threats and calls on advertisers. When this failed, derogatory information was leaked about the paper’s publisher, Dorothy Schiff, as well as its editor, James Wechsler;
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reporters for the paper were tailed; and a bag job was done on the hotel room of one, Edward Kosner, the agents being instructed not only to photograph his notes and try to determine his sources but also to look for “signs that he might have a female in the room or was drinking heavily.” No such signs were found.
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The agents considered planting narcotics in the room and then notifying the WDC police drug squad, but SOG deemed the plan too risky, so it was aborted.
Although it was easily the most ambitious series yet to appear on Hoover and the FBI—six reporters worked on it for the better part of a year—it suffered from a serious defect: almost no one in government, whether in the
White House, Congress, the Justice Department, or the Bureau itself, was willing to speak on the record. As the
Post
put it in the final article, “It is another commentary on the FBI’s inhibiting influence that so many potential sources of information about Hoover and his work—favorable and critical alike—dried up in terror at the approach of our reporters. It was as hard to get the case for him as against him.”
The
Post
concluded that Hoover was neither a Fascist nor a devil nor the hero of the century but rather “an ordinary mortal.”
Hoover was convinced the series was nothing less than a carefully orchestrated plot to give the new president—1960 was an election year, and Ike was barred from running for a third term—justification not to reappoint him.
The FBI director observed the 1960 nominating conventions, including activities not shown on TV, with keen interest. When the Democrats chose John F. Kennedy as their standard-bearer, Hoover had his files on Kennedy, and his family and friends, moved to his own office, both for safekeeping and for convenience. The files on the Republican candidate, and current vice-president, Richard M. Nixon, were already there, under the watchful eye of Helen Gandy.
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The agents conducting the background investigation of Bohlen were less than subtle. Drew Pearson wrote in his diary on March 5, 1953, “The FBI came to see me regarding Chip Bohlen. He’s up for appointment as Ambassador to Russia. I was amazed when they asked me whether he was a homo…” Pearson told them he had never heard or suspected any such thing. “Actually,” his diary entry continues, “I have known Bohlen only slightly, he having highhatted me every time I have asked for an appointment in recent years.”
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Hoover was certainly aware that by having his agents question Pearson he was also helping spread the accusation.
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Officially the cause of McCarthy’s death was given as acute hepatitis. “There was no mention of cirrhosis or delirium tremens,” the biographer David M. Oshinsky observes, “though the press hinted, correctly, that he drank himself to death.”
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Hoover, by contrast, was taking such talk with a great deal of seriousness, even querying his SACs about sentiment in the field, which put them in something of a spot as they had to reply, as diplomatically as possible, that there wasn’t any.
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Alger Hiss’s post-prison book had been published earlier that year by Alfred A. Knopf. Hoover not only did his best to discredit the book; he had files opened on both Knopf and his wife, Blanche, the contents of which even contained references to times when the pair weren’t speaking. This didn’t necessarily indicate that the two were bugged, for this was apparently a not uncommon event. This author, for one, spent a whole, very bizarre evening relating the remarks of one to the other across a dinner table.
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Kay Summersby later claimed, in her memoir
Past Remembering: My Love Affair with Dwight David Eisenhower,
that although she and the general were deeply in love, and wanted to marry, the three times they tried to consummate the relationship Ike was impotent.
†
An initial finding that the NAACP was opposed to communism did not keep the FBI from investigating the organization for another twenty-five years.
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The second COINTELPRO, against the Socialist Worker’s party, was almost as extensive, resulting in hundreds of surreptitious entries and thousands of other illegal acts. During the 1960s, one out of every ten SWP members was a paid FBI informant (three ran for public office on the party platform). Between 1960 and 1976, some thirteen hundred informants received an estimated $1.7 million, although a federal judge later found no evidence that any FBI informant ever reported an instance of planned or actual violence, terrorism, or any efforts to subvert the governmental structure of the United States.
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The informants were also restless. They wanted to do something more than merely steal membership lists or report the passage of dull resolutions, the lack of party funds, or the anger of one member at another. Encouraged by the Bureau to do whatever damage they could, with no mention of restrictions, they would play a key role in the COINTELPROs. As Belmont memoed Boardman, “certain informants,” operating under the control of twelve major field offices, would be “briefed and instructed to embark on a disruptive program, within their own clubs, sections, districts or even on the national level.” They would “seize every opportunity to carry out the disruptive activity not only at meetings, conventions, et cetera, but also during social and other contacts with CP members and leaders.”
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Such techniques sometimes backfired. When two FBI agents informed Enrico Banducci—owner of the Hungry i nightclub in San Francisco and the discoverer of some of the country’s biggest talent, including Bill Cosby, Barbra Streisand, Mort Sahl, and the Kingston Trio—that his lighting man, Alvah Bessie, was one of the Hollywood Ten who had served time in prison, Banducci, a man of mercurial moods, bodily threw them out, his only regret being that since his was a basement club he couldn’t kick them down the stairs. George Gutekunst, owner of the famed Ondine Restaurant in nearly Sausalito, and an unrepentant radical, did have an upstairs location, and when two agents informed him that one of his busboys had signed a peace petition, he had the satisfaction denied Banducci.
But the appearance of two serious-faced, blue-suited FBI agents was, in all too many cases, sufficient cause for an employer to reevaluate an employee’s suitability.
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Whitehead earned enough money from
The FBI Story
to retire from his job as Washington bureau chief of the
New York Herald Tribune
and devote himself to free-lance writing. He wrote one other book with the FBI’s cooperation,
Attack on Terror: The FBI against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi
(1970).
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In a October 1971 meeting with David Kraslow, the Washington bureau chief of the
Los Angeles Times,
who was accompanied by a
Times
executive, Hoover himself made the startling admission that the
Masters of Deceit
royalties had been split five ways, with 20 percent each going to himself, Tolson, Lou Nichols, Bill Nichols (no relation, a writer for
Parade
magazine who apparently polished the book), and the FBI Recreational Association. Just as unnaturally candid, Hoover also said that to date each had earned about $71,000.
The meeting was entirely off the record. Still, it was a strange confession, for in making it Hoover was admitting in effect that he had committed tax fraud.
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There is at least one recorded instance where Hoover refused money for his literary endeavors.
In 1951 the New York producer Louis de Rochement had agreed to pay Hoover $15,000 for the movie rights to “Crime of the Century,” a May 1951
Reader’s Digest
article on the Fuchs-Gold case. However, in December 1952 the FBI director wrote de Rochement, “I do not desire to accept any payment for the said motion picture rights,”
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and their contract was amended to reflect this change. Although the Rosenbergs were not mentioned in the article, the two cases were linked in the public mind, and Hoover, very conscious of the worldwide protests over the death sentence verdicts, apparently feared the reaction if word got out that he was profiting financially from the case. After the Rosenbergs were executed, the film project was dropped.
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The key evidence against Jencks was the testimony of Harvey Matusow, a paid informant for the FBI who later recanted his testimony.
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The key language of the new bill limited inspections of FBI records in court cases to such “reports or statements of the witness in the possession of the United States as are signed by the witness, or otherwise adopted or approved by him as correct relating to the subject matter as to which he has testified.”
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Thus an unsigned statement, or a summary memorandum prepared by the interviewing agents, would be exempt from disclosure.
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FBI personnel, aware of Nichols’s closeness to Nixon, were not at all sure his departure was permanent. As a result, according to William Sullivan, Nichols was given three retirement parties—by FBIHQ and by the Washington and Boston field offices—and received some very expensive gifts, including equipment for his farm and a bull for his herd.
When Sullivan reached his thirtieth anniversary with the Bureau, he notified headquarters personnel that, unlike his predecessors, he did not want a party or gifts. A simple card would do. While this pleased his assistants, it did not endear him to other assistant directors who had anniversaries or retirements coming up.
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Years later, Roy Cohn was disbarred for, among other things, having forged Lewis Rosenstiel’s signature to a bogus codicil of his will, while the philanthropist lay comatose on his deathbed.
‡
Rosenstiel also hired the former rackets buster, governor, and presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey to serve as general counsel of Schenley Industries from the early 1950s to the 1960s.
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Nichols did call, to ask if he could help during the “crisis,” but Hoover refused to take his calls.
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Robert Kennedy later recalled, “After the meeting at Apalachin, which 70 people attended, I asked for files on each of [them] and they didn’t have any information, I think, on 40.” And what information they did have, Kennedy said, consisted mostly of newspaper clippings, in contrast to the FBN, which “had something on every one of them. The FBI didn’t know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States.”
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As the young agents soon learned, no one who belonged to the Mafia ever referred to it as such: it was usually Cosa Nostra, or “Our Thing.” Regional names also differed. In Chicago the local organization was the outfit, the syndicate, or the arm. In Cleveland it was the combination (because Jews and Greeks were allowed in). In Kansas City, it was the combination or the syndicate. In New England, the office. In Philadelphia, the big boys or the Italian club.
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Usually while a break-in was in progress, an agent would sit with the police dispatcher to make sure no prowler calls went out over the radio, but in Chicago they couldn’t trust the police.
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From listening to the bugged conversations, the agents developed a fondness for the Hump, who was often heard to say, “Good morning, gentlemen, and anyone listening. This is the nine o’clock meeting of the Chicago underworld.” Unlike Giancana, whose every other word was profane, Humphreys never swore. In addition to having “perhaps the most brilliant mob mind in Chicago,” as William Brashler has put it, he was also a marvelous raconteur. Although Welsh, not Italian, he played the role of the old-world Sicilian Mustache Pete to perfection.
Murray Humphreys died of a heart attack shortly after being arrested by the same agents.
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In addition to microphones and wiretapping paraphernalia, the equipment included transmitters, receivers, tape recorders, playback units, and, later, closed circuit television systems and videotape machines.
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Conservative journalists were told—for perhaps the hundredth time—that Wechsler was a Communist. Wechsler and his wife joined the party in the 1930s, then broke with it in 1937—facts both openly admitted in testimony before various committees. Hoover also chose to ignore the fact that Wechsler had quit his job as Washington bureau chief for
PM
in 1947 because the paper was Communist dominated.