Fifties (55 page)

In the late forties and fifties, there would be considerable political benefit in going after the radical left, but when Hoover began in the twenties, he was led by pure instinct, for he did not like people who were different, people who opposed the values in which he believed, people whose names were different. Intellectually, it was as if he was a survivor of a simpler America that existed mostly in myth; Richard Gid Powers has described Hoover’s ethos as “a turn-of-the-century vision of America as a small community of like-minded neighbors proud of their achievements, resentful of criticism, fiercely opposed to change. As twentieth-century standards of the mass society swept over traditional America, subverting old values, disrupting old customs and dislodging old leaders, Americans who
were frightened by the loss of their community saw in Hoover a man who understood their concerns and shared their anger, a powerful defender who would guard their America of memory against a world of alien forces, strange people and dangerous ideas.”

It was John Dillinger who made Hoover famous. The FBI gunned down the celebrated bank robber in 1934 in a sensational publicity coup. Thereafter, the anteroom to Hoover’s office was a kind of Dillinger museum. Powerful men waiting to see the director would have ample time to spend among the relics of Hoover’s finest hour: a plaster facsimile of Dillinger’s death mask; the straw hat he was wearing at the time of his death; a partially crumpled photo of a girl that Dillinger had been carrying; the glasses he had been wearing as a disguise; the cigar he had been carrying in his shirt pocket and which he never got to smoke, still wrapped in its cellophane. Thirty years later, talking with strangers in his office, Hoover would always manage somehow to bring the subject around to Dillinger.

The Dillinger case was the crucial link between the public imagination and Hoover and his Bureau. Publicity, Hoover learned, was power. In reality, a talented agent named Melvin Purvis was the key figure in taking Dillinger. Later, he killed Pretty Boy Floyd. But Hoover fought off any attempts by the press to lionize Purvis; his success in wresting the glory himself, noted Powers, “may well have been J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest public relations triumph.”

The lesson from this and similar incidents was not lost on others in the Bureau. The Bureau was to be a gray place, with a vast, dedicated
anonymous
team; only one person at the Bureau had a name. So great was Hoover’s thirst for publicity that by 1940 Senator George Norris called him “the greatest publicity hound on the American continent.” “No organization that I know of meets in Washington,” Norris said, “without having some person appear before it to tell what a great organization the FBI is. The greatest man of all, who stands at the head of it, never made a mistake, never made a blunder. In his hands lie the future and the perpetuity of our institutions and our Government.”

All announcements came from him. All publicity releases from the Bureau began by using his name—and had to mention his name at least twice more. When William Sullivan joined the Bureau as a young man, he was paired with a veteran agent named Charlie Winstead, who advised him: “Never initiate a meeting with Hoover for any reason [because if the director was less than impressed for any reason], your career would end on that very day. If Hoover ever
calls you in, dress like a dandy, carry a notebook, and write in it furiously whenever Hoover opens his mouth. You can throw the notes away afterwards if you like. And flatter him, everyone at headquarters knows Hoover’s an egomaniac, and they all flatter him constantly. If you don’t, you’ll be noticed.”

Those reporters who played ball with him, who took their information dutifully and put the appropriate spin on it, were rewarded with more inside information. The FBI files on criminal cases could, on occasion, give a friendly reporter a beat, and Bureau cooperation could sometimes help with the sale of a movie or a book. In that way, Hoover gradually built up a coterie of favored reporters. They traveled with him and had complete access to Bureau files and personnel. Their work always met with his approval; they knew by instinct how to practice self-censorship.

Hoover worked easily with Franklin Roosevelt, who allowed him to expand his capacity to do illegal surveillance (albeit primarily against pro-German groups). Still, he never entirely trusted Roosevelt, whom he regarded as too liberal and manipulative, and he hated Eleanor Roosevelt and her associations with black people and other left-wingers. When Hoover was asked in later years why he never married, he would answer, “Because God had made a woman like Eleanor Roosevelt.”

When Roosevelt died, Hoover, for once, was caught unprepared, for he had no link to the Vice-President. He searched his staff until he found a man named Morris Chiles III, the son of an old friend of Truman’s. Hoover dispatched him to see the new President. Truman greeted Chiles by asking why he was there. To offer Hoover’s and the Bureau’s cooperation, Chiles answered. “Anytime I need the services of the FBI,” said Truman, “I will ask for it through my attorney general.” From that moment on, wrote William C. Sullivan, who eventually rose to be the number-three man under Hoover, the director’s hatred of Truman knew no bounds. He became the one President Hoover did not have a special line to, and Truman’s personal life was spotless.

In the late forties, Hoover challenged Truman on the issue of domestic security and won. Hit by a combination of scandals and a growing anti-Communist mood in the country, the President was under siege on the issue. Believing that the President was not sufficiently vigilant on the issue and sensing that the tide was going the other way, Hoover abandoned his usual nonpartisan stance and joined up with the Republican right. As early as 1947 he went before the House Un-American Activities Committee and gave testimony so
hostile to Truman that it was nothing less than a declaration of war. The Bureau’s files were made available to the new investigators—and, more often than not, were a source of McCarthy’s charges. “We gave McCarthy everything we had,” Sullivan said later, “but all we had were fragments, nothing that could prove his accusations.”

Aiding McCarthy was a natural step: He had always been the defender of the existing order against alien threats. When a reporter from the
San Diego Evening Tribune
asked Hoover what he thought of McCarthy, Hoover was almost paternalistic: “McCarthy is a former Marine. He was an amateur boxer. He’s Irish. Combine those and you’re going to have a vigorous individual who is not going to be pushed around.... The investigating committees do a valuable job. They have subpoena rights without which some vital investigations could not be accomplished.... I view him as a friend and believe he so views me. 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.”

By the time Eisenhower was elected, Hoover was untouchable, based on his length of office, the lack of constitutional limits on his authority, and the fear of the average congressman of what was in his files. Since the fear of his files was such that he rarely, if ever, had to use them, there was an ongoing debate in Washington over whether they were as extensive as some people thought. The House Subcommittee on the Judiciary reported in February 1972 that the bureau held
883
files on senators and
722
on congressmen, this despite Hoover’s official denials that he kept such files.

Washington was a city, after all, where it was true that the more powerful the man, the greater his sense of entitlement. In a city of powerful men whose lives were filled with more than the normal indiscretions of the human species—sexual, alcoholic, and financial—the mere threat of the existence of files was enough. There was, Hoover believed, a certain amount of scandal to almost everyone. He might have fancied himself the guardian of the greatness, strength, and
moral decency
of the American system, but his true power came from the very human deviations from morality on the part of the men who governed the country.

There was a certain symbolic value to Hoover driving through the streets of a democratic society in his armored car, which, because of its immense weight, far too heavy for the poor engine, frequently broke down. His visitors were carefully screened, and to the degree
that his aides could control it, he saw only people who already agreed with him and came to pay homage to him. When he read his mail, it was deliberately arranged so that the letters he saw would be those that most fulsomely praised his activities. He was, in fact, surprisingly like the chief of a totalitarian state. He fit perfectly, Victor Navasky once noted, the authoritarian personality as defined by Fred Greenstein. He was obsequious to superiors, absolutely domineering to subordinates. He was director for life.

In the case of Oppenheimer, Hoover was, as ever, the cautious bureaucrat. He did not like to lose a case, and he was always sensitive to anything that might bring the Bureau criticism. He did not want anyone to know the extent of the FBI’s illegal wiretaps, and he did not want the FBI blamed if this case somehow backfired and drove talented scientists from defense work. However, Strauss was out in front; Hoover was merely supplying the support troops—the files and the taps. Nor were they alone. By 1953 a number of Oppenheimer’s enemies had begun to join forces. Powerful figures on the Hill and in journalism were beginning to single him out as the enemy.

In the summer of 1952 there was a
Wall Street Journal
story about the H bomb that seemed to be sourced by high Air Force officials. It divided the
good
scientists, those who wanted to move ahead quickly with nuclear weaponry (Ernest Lawrence and Harold Urey, for instance) from
bad
scientists like Oppenheimer, Conant, and Lee DuBridge. In the fall of 1952, Robert Lovett, the secretary of defense, turned to a colleague and said: “Have you read Oppenheimer’s security file? I’ve just been through it and it’s a nightmare.” Then he added: “The quicker we get Oppenheimer out of the country, the better off we’ll be.” By 1953, McCarthy, McCarran, and Jenner were said to be tracking him. The White House began to fear McCarthy would launch an investigation of the atomic-bomb program. Some of Oppenheimer’s friends were certain the senator was being fed material by Hoover.

In May 1953,
Fortune
magazine published a piece, written by Charles J. V. Murphy, an Air Force reservist: “The Hidden Struggle for the H-Bomb: The Story of Dr. Oppenheimer’s Persistent Campaign to Reverse U.S. Military Strategy.” Reading it, David Lilienthal was sure that it signaled an all-out campaign against Oppenheimer. The drumbeat was getting louder and louder. In August 1953, Strauss met with William Borden to express his doubts about Oppenheimer. Borden assured Strauss that he was not alone.
Oppenheimer, he decided, was clearly the enemy, and something would have to be done about him. Shortly thereafter, Borden hired an old law-school classmate, John Wheeler, whose assignment was to study Oppenheimer’s security file. Wheeler soon decided Oppenheimer was responsible for the lack of enthusiasm among the scientists working on the Super.

The truth was Oppenheimer had become too dovish for the policies of his country, or at least certain institutions within that country. What made Oppenheimer so formidable a figure was not merely his immense intellect but his ability to articulate his knowledge in terms lay people could understand and his standing among his fellow scientists. To his opponents, and to the enthusiasts of the H bomb, he was someone who had to be brought down a few notches. It was not enough to remove him from the government, which had already decided to go after the Super. It was important to discredit him as a voice on public policy. If anything, there was now a race for the honor of taking him on. Some Republican senators, like Karl Mundt, discussed whether or not McCarthy should take a shot at Oppenheimer. McCarthy apparently was interested, but held off after being told by the White House that the matter would be looked into. The middleman between Eisenhower and the Republican right was apparently Richard Nixon.

Soon Strauss and the AEC announced that at the chairman’s request, all classified material would be removed from Oppenheimer’s files. Strauss said it was only a technical matter, but there was an ominous ring to it. In the fall of 1953, William Borden, who was planning to leave the Joint Committee Staff soon, had decided that J. Robert Oppenheimer represented his one unfinished piece of business. He spent long nights in 1953 going over everything he had on Oppenheimer. By the time he finished, he’d compiled over four hundred suspicious questions.

More the trigger man than a central player in the drama, Borden put his material into a letter and on November 7, 1953, he mailed a copy to J. Edgar Hoover and one to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. In the copy to Hoover, he wrote “more probably than not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” Hoover forwarded his copy to the White House. Eisenhower’s position was fairly simple and essentially defensive: He wanted to separate himself from Oppenheimer as quickly as possible. He did not want a major investigation led by someone like McCarthy, and he did not want a scandal that might tear apart the nation’s nuclear-weapon apparatus. Eisenhower ordered that “a ‘blank wall’ should be placed between
Oppenheimer and information of a sensitive or classified nature.” The matter could have ended there. Oppenheimer was no longer a member of the GAC but merely a consultant to the AEC, a consultant with whom the AEC might choose not to consult. But Strauss wanted blood. Jack Lansdale, who had been one of the top security people at Los Alamos and knew Oppie was no security risk, heard that Oppenheimer’s clearance was to be revoked and asked his old colleague Ken Nichols to intervene. “There must be some way to stop this, Ken,” he said. “Oppie’s contract with the commission only has a short time to run, so why not just let it lapse and then not renew it.” “Jack, I’m sorry,” Nichols answered. “There is nothing I can do.”