Official and Confidential (28 page)

Long before the Hiss case, Nichols had become a familiar face in the office of another Republican member of the Un-American Activities Committee, Congressman Karl Mundt of South Dakota.
³
Mundt was also close to Edgar. ‘They had private dinners together,' his former assistant Robert McGaughey recalled, ‘and they belonged to the same poker club. The Senator always said to me, “If there's anything you want brought up, we'll discuss it over the game tonight.”'
⁴

Edgar fed Mundt information on Hiss from 1945 onward, McGaughey revealed. During the intense 1948 phase, he said, ‘Nichols was up in the office, say, twice a day … There was a lot of exchange of suggestions, coming from Mr Hoover more than from Mr Mundt, letting us know where to look for information.'

Was Mundt given access to FBI files? ‘Files? Yeah,' said McGaughey. ‘Let's put it this way. He had access to see information that was in the files Mr Hoover had. This was a personal relationship.'

Edgar found a way to cover himself. If a politician asked to see an FBI file, he would promptly write denying access. McGaughey revealed, however, that the agent who handcarried the negative reply to Capitol Hill would simultaneously pass on the information requested, sometimes verbally, sometimes typed on plain, untraceable paper. The file copy of the denial, meanwhile, would be preserved at headquarters, ‘proof' that the request had been turned down. Other evidence of connivance with conservative politicians was simply destroyed.

From post-Communist Moscow, and from previously unavailable US intelligence files, has come conflicting information. Over the past half-dozen years, some academics – mostly American – have said their analysis of all the evidence convinced them of Hiss' guilt. By contrast, over the past two decades, others – not only former Soviet intelligence officials but US historians – have insisted that the evidence thus far unearthed does no such thing. At a 2007 symposium, two
writers postulated – based on the known movements of American officials – that another diplomat named Wilder Foote, not Hiss, had been the spy.

President Truman, who never believed Hiss was guilty, had no doubt as to what the case had really been about. ‘What they were trying to do, all those birds,' Truman was to say years later, ‘they were trying to get the Democrats. They were trying to get me out of the White House, and they were willing to go to any lengths to do it. [The Republicans] had been out of office a long time, and they'd done everything to get back in. They did do just about anything they could think of, all that witch-hunting … The Constitution has never been in such danger …'

For all the scare-mongering, only four American Communists would be convicted of espionage offenses while Edgar was Director of the FBI.
⁵

Edgar's priority in 1948 was to secure his power base by helping to get Harry Truman out of the White House. That spring, over hot dogs at Yankee Stadium, Edgar talked privately about the coming election with the journalist Walter Winchell. ‘He said he was upset with Truman,' recalled Winchell's assistant Herman Klurfeld. ‘The President had restricted his power, and he resented it. He thought Truman should be replaced by someone else.'

Edgar climbed onto the bandwagon of the candidate most likely to dislodge Truman, that of Republican Thomas Dewey. It was six years now since the FBI had started collecting information on Dewey, and the signals had been mixed. During the last campaign, agents had learned, Dewey had said privately that the right place for Edgar was a jail cell.

Later reports were more positive, and in 1948, according to William Sullivan, Edgar was dreaming of political advancement under a President Dewey. As the primary campaign began, he secretly placed Bureau resources at Dewey's disposal.

‘With the help of the
FBI
,' Sullivan recalled, ‘Hoover believed Dewey couldn't lose … In exchange for his help, the Director believed that when Dewey became President he would name Hoover as his Attorney General and make Nichols Director of the
FBI
. To complete the master plan, Tolson would become Hoover's assistant. It would have been a nice setup, because with Nichols at the helm, Hoover would have had the
FBI
as tightly under his control as if he had never left … Hoover's ambitions didn't stop at the Justice Department. If he couldn't be President, Hoover thought it would be fitting if he were named to the Supreme Court, and he planned to make his term as Attorney General a steppingstone to that end.'

Dewey accepted Edgar's help, Sullivan claimed, and agents assembled briefing papers to help Dewey prepare for his broadcast debate with his primary opponent, Harold Stassen. ‘There was such a rush to get the material to him,' said Sullivan, ‘that it was sent in a private plane to Albany, New York … The
FBI
helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman … We resurrected the President's former association with Tom Pendergast, political czar of Kansas City, and tried to create the impression that Truman was too ignorant to deal with the emerging Communist threat. We even prepared studies for Dewey which were released under his name, as if he and his staff had done the work.
I
worked on some of these projects myself.'

Edgar became seriously ill with pneumonia that fall and was in Miami Beach recuperating on Election Day, November 2, 1948. Clyde and Lou Nichols had been telling him what most people believed, that Dewey was sure to win. The next day the
Chicago Tribune
ran its famous headline,
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
, only to be confounded by news that the opposite had happened. Truman was back in the White House.
⁶

‘A heavy gloom settled over the Bureau,' Sullivan recalled. From Florida, Edgar sent a furious memorandum blaming
Nichols for having ‘pushed me out on a limb.' Edgar, said Sullivan, ‘never could admit that he had made a mistake.'

Yet on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1949, Edgar was still Director of the FBI. He invited the twenty-one-year-old actress Shirley Temple, whom he had known since her days as a child star, to join him on his office balcony to watch the parade pass along Pennsylvania Avenue. Wearing what Temple recalls as ‘his best Santa Claus smile,' Edgar gave her a present – a tear-gas gun disguised as a fountain pen.

Edgar had survived, but he could never feel safe. Always, whatever his other worries might be, there loomed the threat of his own sexuality.

17

‘It is almost impossible to overestimate Mr Hoover's sensitivity to criticism of himself or the FBI. It went far beyond the bounds of natural resentment to criticism one feels unfair. The most casual statement, the most strained implication, was sufficient cause for Mr Hoover to write a memorandum to the Attorney General complaining, and impugning the integrity of its author.'

Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General

R
ecords now available show that in March 1949 details of Edgar's private life reached President Truman. A high Democratic official – his name is censored out of the document – noted in his journal that a colleague (name also deleted):

gave me some very bad news about J. Edgar Hoover. I hope it is only gossip. Geo. [
perhaps Truman's confidant George Allen
] suggests I see the President alone.

The ‘bad news' was very probably about Edgar's homosexuality. ‘One time,' Truman confided to the author Merle Miller, ‘they brought me a lot of stuff about his personal life, and I told them I didn't give a damn about that … That wasn't my business … I said to him, “Edgar, I don't care what a man does in his free time: all that interests me is what he does while he's on his job.”'

The President was justifiably angry, three months later, when he received an FBI report on the heterosexual adventures of two of his own aides. Charlie Ross, his Press
Secretary and friend, had supposedly ‘chased a couple of gals around the deck' during a boat trip. The same report raked up a youthful love affair of Dave Niles', his trusted Administrative Assistant. ‘Being a victim of Cupid,' Truman snorted at a Cabinet meeting, ‘is not being a victim of Moscow propaganda.'

Here was the President of the United States being bothered with FBI gossip about his aides' dalliances with women, when he had just been briefed on Edgar's own behavior. In Edgar's case, by comparison, there was at least cause for concern. A homosexual FBI Director, in charge of the nation's internal security, was a classic target for any hostile intelligence service – especially that of the Soviet Union.

That same month, June 1949, saw Edgar publicly humiliated over the case of Judith Coplon, a young Justice Department employee accused of giving information to the Soviets. Coplon had been caught meeting a Soviet diplomat while carrying a purse stuffed full of summaries of FBI reports. Then, to Edgar's horror, the judge at her trial ruled that, to establish the authenticity of the material found in her purse, the FBI would have to release the originals of the documents.

This would be the first time that raw FBI files had ever been made public, and Edgar was worried not because they contained super-secret data, but because they were a mishmash of unchecked tittle-tattle. Edgar protested, right up to the President, but in vain. The documents were produced in court, and proved as embarrassing as Edgar had feared.

It emerged that, even during the trial, the FBI had been bugging privileged conversations between Coplon and her attorney. Agents had then hastily destroyed the resulting records and disks, in a cover-up that could only have happened with Edgar's approval. During those weeks, which Edgar would recall as ‘pretty rough going,' Truman came as close as he ever would to firing his FBI Director.

Edgar was not used to taking knocks, and certainly not in
the glare of national publicity. The Coplon debacle came just weeks after he and Clyde, resplendent in white suits and waist-deep in gladioli, had held court at celebrations marking his silver anniversary as Director. Now, brought down a peg or two by a blast of criticism, Edgar felt deeply insecure. At fifty-four, the paranoia in him had long since excluded the possibility that he himself could be wrong about anything.

Edgar's list of perceived enemies was expanding. Now he would take on liberals, the Church, even the publishing industry, with a venom. He was enraged by an article in
Harper's Magazine
that fall, in which the historian Bernard De Voto said the FBI reports uncovered by the Coplon case were ‘as irresponsible as the chatter of somewhat retarded children.' A furious Edgar called for information on De Voto, and his aides knew how to please him. They solemnly reported a flaw in the Pulitzer winner's personality. De Voto, they declared, exhibited the ‘Harvard intellectual liberal attitude, devoid of practicality …'

‘I like a country,' De Voto had written, ‘where it's nobody's damned business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where what we say does not go into the FBI files along with a note from S-17 that I may have another wife in California … We had that kind of country only a little while ago, and I'm for getting it back. It was a lot less scared than the one we've got now.'

There was now concern about the FBI on college campuses. At Yale, a student magazine reported, FBI agents were influencing academic appointments by feeding the Provost with derogatory information on teachers. A distinguished physicist, Professor Henry Margenau, had been berated by agents for addressing a youth group of which the Bureau disapproved. He had knuckled under, and now consulted the local FBI office before accepting speech invitations.

William F. Buckley, Jr., future right-wing pundit, then editor of
The Yale Daily News
, played a leading role in the
furor that followed these revelations. In secret, he sent the FBI blind copies of his letters on the subject to fellow student journalists, and suppressed a letter to the News from a student editor at Harvard. Edgar's master of propaganda, Lou Nichols, promptly identified Buckley as a future ally.

While Edgar denied that his agents had infiltrated Yale, the record shows that there was an FBI ‘liaison officer' in the university. Today it is known that the Bureau opened files on thousands of teachers, throughout the education system. ‘The entire teaching profession,' University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins would soon declare, ‘is now intimidated.'

The fear was usually generated, as at Yale, by quiet interrogations of radicals, FBI whisperings to college officials, followed by discreet firings. There was nothing quiet about the fuss a few years later, when Professor Howard Higman, a sociology teacher at the University of Colorado, made the mistake of mocking Edgar personally.

The episode began when one of the professor's students, a former Miss America named Marilyn Van Derbur, used Edgar's book
Masters of Deceit
to contradict the professor's thesis that the Soviets would have been able to build the Bomb anyway, without help from American Communists. Higman responded by scoffing at Hoover's book and saying he ‘disapproved of the rise in the United States of a political police …' Told of this by an informant, Edgar retaliated by triggering a nationwide flood of stories and letters denouncing the professor.

In 1991, when he obtained his partially censored FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, the professor was astounded to find that it totaled some 6,000 pages, covered many years and included investigations not only of him but of his children. ‘Can't we set a fire under the University of Colorado,' Edgar had written, ‘for having such a character on its faculty?' ‘We need to meet some of these academic punks in their own back yard,' wrote an aide, and an FBI official
flew to Colorado to give a ‘forceful' lecture to Higman's students and colleagues.