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 (35 page)
Like the director, Ernst enjoyed the excitement of New York’s nightlife (“They were both of them that kind of fellows,” Roger Baldwin observed),
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although Ernst preferred “21,” where he held court at his own table. While
Hoover attracted celebrities, Ernst was attracted
to
them—and almost pathetically courted them. And J. Edgar Hoover was one of the biggest of them all. Ernst liked to think of himself as a secret mover, a manipulator behind the scenes. He handled a number of confidential matters for FDR. He often prefaced his letters to Hoover with “For your eyes alone.” Hoover and Nichols dropped him just enough little tidbits to make him believe that he was privy to their most private deliberations—and that he, to some degree, influenced them. Ernst took his role so seriously that he frequently lectured the director. Although often irritated—and sometimes enraged—by his presumption, Hoover pretended to give his recommendations serious consideration, but then, more often than not, promptly filed and forgot them. There was one other thing. Without questioning Morris Ernst’s very real concern for the underdog, one could note that his defense of unpopular causes often put him in the spotlight, of which he was inordinately fond. And among the liberal Left, defending the FBI had to be one of the most unpopular causes of all.
When the Ernst-Hoover letters were first made public, in 1977, as the result of Freedom of Information Act suits filed by the ACLU, Aryeh Neier, then executive director of the organization, concluded, “The harshest judgment about Morris Ernst that I can make on the basis of the FBI files is twofold: He valued the company of people such as J. Edgar Hoover, and he helped ward off ACLU criticism of the FBI, not by underhanded methods, but by openly defending bureau practices which to me seem indefensible. Wrongheaded, yes, but a spy, no.”
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Harrison E. Salisbury, in his excellent
Nation
piece “The Strange Correspondence of Morris Ernst and John Edgar Hoover,” summed up Ernst’s role as follows: “On balance, it seems clear that Ernst’s greatest value to the Bureau was as publicist, a sort of
Good Housekeeping
seal of approval.”
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But Morris Ernst was far more important than that. Because of him, for nearly twenty-five years the one organization in the American Left which had the resources, prestige, and independence to investigate and expose the many illegal acts committed by the FBI—thus, by acting as a public watchdog, putting at least some check on J. Edgar Hoover’s ever-growing power—chose not criticism or even silent acquiescence but blind advocacy.
Denied the company and credibility of the ACLU, those remaining few on the left who dared criticize the FBI were easily discredited as “Communists, commie symps and other like-vermin.”
If Hoover was grateful to Ernst, he never showed it. Unknown to Ernst, Hoover never trusted him, as the blue-ink notations on their correspondence abundantly indicate. Nor, though he accepted its support, did he trust the ACLU. His agents never stopped investigating the organization, monitoring everything from its bank accounts to the license plate numbers of those attending its meetings.
Also unknown to Ernst, who set great store by his close personal friendship with the director, he hadn’t even been corresponding with J. Edgar Hoover. Nearly all of the letters which bore Hoover’s signature were written by Lou
Nichols. It was one of Nichols’s tasks, among many, to “handle” Morris Ernst.
Although Roger Baldwin later admitted, “I’m afraid it took me a long time to come to the conclusion that he was really a menace,” Morris Ernst never harbored
any
doubts about Hoover.
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When their correspondence came to an abrupt end in 1964—terminated by Clyde Tolson, in a bizarre fit of jealous rage—Ernst was shattered. He never realized that the “friendship” he so prized had actually ended a decade earlier. With Ernst’s retirement as the ACLU’s general counsel, Hoover no longer needed him. Also, by this time Hoover had developed other contacts within the ACLU who were willing to go even further to please the FBI than Morris Ernst had gone.
In May of 1940 Hoover lost an old adversary and a last battle. Emma Goldman died of a stroke in Toronto. Despite Hoover’s objections, the Immigration and Naturalization Service granted her last request: permitted reentry into the United States, after an exile of twenty-one years, she was buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, near the graves of her Haymarket comrades.
*
During the 1940 presidential campaign, the FBI conducted more than two hundred full or partial investigations of Roosevelt’s political enemies. Given that large number, it was perhaps inevitable that at least one would become public knowledge. When it did, in the final month of the campaign, it cost Roosevelt the support of one of the country’s most powerful labor unions.
On October 17 the United Mine Workers’ president, John L. Lewis, called on the president in the White House. The FBI was investigating him, Lewis angrily charged. They even had his phones tapped. And they were doing this, he’d been told, on orders from the president himself.
†
“That’s a damn lie,” Roosevelt snapped.
“Nobody calls John L. Lewis a liar,” the labor leader said as he got up and stormed out the door, “and least of all Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
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A few days later, Lewis went on the air to denounce Roosevelt, endorse Willkie, and make public the wiretapping charge.
Choosing his words carefully, Hoover denied the allegations: “The fact of the matter is that this Bureau never has and is not now making any investigation of John L. Lewis. Therefore, the story is entirely untrue as it affects the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
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So stated, this was correct. The FBI had never conducted a “full field investigation” of Lewis himself. But it did have his daughter Kathryn, a secret Communist
party member, under surveillance, and since she lived with her father and worked in his office, it monitored all of the labor leader’s telephone conversations.
Moreover, the FBI was conducting an intensive investigation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which Lewis then headed, as well as each of its member unions.
Even without Lewis’s support, Roosevelt had no trouble defeating Willkie, and on November 6 Hoover sent the president another effusive letter, this one congratulating him on his election victory. In concluding it, he wrote, “As you have expressed, I feel that the greatest single task that lies ahead is to unify all of our people in this period of emergency in order that our national defense may be strong and present an irresistible barrier to any ideas that menacing totalitarian dictators might entertain.”
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Unity was probably the last thing on Hoover’s mind. Fiercely protective of what he conceived to be the FBI’s domain—and ever ready to expand its boundaries—he was currently engaged in heated bureaucratic battles with the Army, the Navy, the State Department, and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
*
According to one published account, supposedly based on the recollections of former special agents, Hoover had Farley tapped and tailed from the moment he started trying to have the director replaced in 1933, and he even tried, unsuccessfully, to entrap him in a New Orleans bordello.
13
As for the man Farley had in mind for Hoover’s job, Val O’Farrell, a New York City private detective, Hoover infiltrated men in his agency and prepared a blind memorandum for Cummings which stated that “O’Farrell had while employed by the New York City Police Department been charged with bribery and with making false affidavit, and that he was last year in the personal bodyguard of Dutch Schultz.”
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*
Initially, in an arrangement that was not at all to Hoover’s liking, the FBI tapped the consulates and the Army the embassies. Before long, however, despite delimitation agreements, everyone got into the act. The Vichy French, for example, were “penetrated” by the FBI, OSS, BSC, MID, and ONI. In addition to the taps and bugs, most of the intelligence services also utilized informants or their own undercover operatives. Allen Dulles enjoyed claiming that while OSS officers were invited guests at diplomatic functions, the FBI agents were there only because they were posing as hired help.
†
One was probably the matter of Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s son and FDR’s cousin, who had disappeared. The president wanted the FBI to locate Kermit, by following his mistress, a masseuse, so he could be hospitalized and treated for his various ailments, which included acute alcoholism and a venereal disease. FDR also asked Hoover to do what he could to sever the relationship.
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*
Lest it fall into wrong hands, Hoover’s April 11, 1940, order did not refer to especially sensitive materials. As was often the case with such highly confidential, in-house instructions, the real purpose of the blue memorandum was communicated
orally
to headquarters personnel, supervisors, inspectors, and SACs. The form itself bore only the notation “This memorandum is for Administrative Purposes—To be Destroyed After Action Is Taken and Not Sent to Files or Information Memorandum—Not to be sent to Files Section.”
20
There was one built-in problem with the “do not file” system, and for this only J. Edgar Hoover was to blame. As the former SAC Neil J. Welch noted, “In the file-conscious Bureau, agents recognized that any paper potent enough for DO NOT FILE status was important and worth keeping.”
21
Thus the assistant directors, as well as the field offices themselves, amassed large secret files which Hoover believed had been destroyed. For example, the New York field office kept a nearcomplete record of surreptitious entries committed by its agents from 1954 to 1973.
*
One reporter to whom the FBI leaked the story was Walter Trohan, Washington bureau chief of the
Chicago Tribune
and a longtime Hoover favorite. In his book
Political Animals,
Trohan observed, “Jackson played a role in the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, where he picked up the free and easy morals of the military. When he died in the apartment of a female secretary in Washington, it was said he had come to the capital from his Virginia home to shop at a Sears Roebuck store, although there was one closer to his home. The explanation went on to say that when he felt himself stricken, he thought of the secretary’s apartment and sped there for shelter and care.”
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†
When Morris Ernst was interviewed in 1975, the year before his death, his memory was already failing. He admitted to having been Hoover’s personal attorney, but couldn’t remember in exactly what capacity he’d served him. He did recall, however, the “grand and glorious nights at the Stork Club” with Hoover, the man he said he perhaps admired “as much as any other.”
37
When asked specific questions, Ernst referred the author to his correspondence with Hoover and Louis Nichols, which he’d given to the Humanities Center of the University of Texas at Austin. But there are huge gaps in that correspondence (for example, it does not begin until 1947), and those letters and memorandums since released under the Freedom of Information Act are also obviously incomplete, leading one to suspect that many of the Ernst-Hoover-Nichols materials may have been in the Personal File which Helen Gandy allegedly destroyed.
Hoover apparently objected, more than once, to Ernst’s characterizing himself as his “personal attorney.” Yet in 1971 Hoover told David Kraslow, then of the
Los Angeles Times,
that Ernst had been his “personal attorney for many years.”
38
One occasion on which Hoover consulted Ernst in a professional capacity is known—when he was considering a possible libel action against
Time
and sought Ernst’s legal advice.
*
Her longtime friend Alexander Berkman had shot himself four years earlier. “So miscast for the role of violence was this essentially gentle intellectual,” observed Richard Drinnon, “that he bungled his suicide. The bullet he had fired perforated his stomach and lower lungs and lodged in his spinal column. It was sixteen hours before death finally came.”
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†
In his anger, Lewis let slip that the source for his charge was none other than the former attorney general Frank Murphy.
The View from the Balcony
J.
Edgar Hoover watched Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third inaugural parade from the balcony of the Department of Justice Building at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Although the FBI director shared the fifth floor with the attorney general, that portion of the balcony which overlooked Pennsylvania Avenue was on the FBI side, and relations between the director and AG being what they were, no one suggested sharing the view.
With Roosevelt’s reelection, the talk of replacing Hoover abruptly stopped. It was apparent, especially to his enemies, that Hoover had the president’s ear and that unless he made a serious mistake, his Bureau would retain its privileged status for another four years.
Hoover himself was less sanguine. Looking off his balcony, he saw the Seat of Government under siege from all sides. Since the “smear campaign” of the previous year, Hoover had developed an increasing paranoia about “plots” to defame him and/or the FBI. The rumor that German agents were opening bank accounts in the director’s name, which would then be exposed to show he was secretly working for the Nazis, mushroomed into an investigation that lasted six months and, at one time or another, involved almost the entire Bureau, although there was never any evidence supporting the tale.
There is no question that some of his aides, including Lou Nichols, played on Hoover’s fears. Others, such as Ed Tamm, who was in charge of the investigative side of the Bureau, discreetly checked out the allegations and, if finding them baseless, then had to diplomatically convince the director that they were without foundation. One such “plot,” in which a disturbed informant charged that at least twenty-three persons were engaged in a “continuous whispering
campaign against Mr. Hoover,”
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though debunked by Tamm, made its way into the OC files.
So did the rumors of Hoover’s homosexuality. For years Hoover had ignored such talk. Then, in the early 1940s, he reversed himself and insisted that each rumor be investigated. For example, a female FBI employee, while having her hair done in a Washington, D.C., beauty shop, overheard the owner tell another customer that Hoover was “a queer.” Interviewed by two special agents, the beauty shop owner denied having made the remark. Still, she rated a four-page report and her own folder in the OC files.
2
Perhaps the least likely of the plots against Hoover was made public when the FBI director announced that the Communists had instructed two of their writers “to portray me as a Broadway glamour boy and particularly to inquire into my affairs with women in New York.”
This was, the Hoover biographer Ralph de Toledano later commented—with, one suspects, tongue in cheek—“a monumental exercise in futility since Hoover had never been a womanizer.”
3
Paranoia aside, there were real plots against the FBI director, and not all of them were Communist inspired.
Among those most anxious to replace J. Edgar Hoover was the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Congressman Martin Dies of Texas.
Dies was suffering from “great delusions of personal grandeur,” Hoover informed Attorney General Jackson.
4
He wanted nothing less than to be named head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
What Dies actually wanted, according to the historian Michael Wreszin, was “to transform the committee from a congressional investigative unit into a law enforcement body coequal with the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
5
Hoover, not about to share the spotlight as the nation’s foremost hunter of subversives—he’d worked too hard to maneuver the president into giving him that authority to lose it to an upstart politician from Texas—launched an intensive behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Dies. FBI agents were sent to spy on the committee; its findings were ridiculed, sometimes even before they saw print. Lists were made of Dies’s anti-administration remarks; rumors (such as the one that Dies would bolt the Democratic party and run as the Republican vice-presidential candidate) were reported as fact. Derogatory information on Dies was leaked to the president, the attorney general, other congressmen, and favored press contacts.
On November 22, 1940, Attorney General Jackson brought the battle out into the open by charging that Dies and his committee were interfering with the work of the FBI.
A week later Dies met with the president and voiced his complaints against the Justice Department and, in particular, FBI Director Hoover. Dies subsequently claimed that Roosevelt had refused to take his charges seriously, that
he’d praised Stalin and even jocularly remarked that some of his best friends were Communists. However, knowing Dies, Roosevelt had prepared for just such an eventuality, by secretly having a stenographer listen in on and transcribe their conversation. There were no such statements. What the transcript did show, however, was the basic philosophical difference between the two men, when it came to labeling people Communists or Fascists, and FDR’s willingness to compromise.
In recent years perhaps a half million Americans had voted for Communist candidates, Roosevelt noted, adding, “Now, I would not bar from patriotic defense efforts every one of those people who have voted for a Communist in 1936 or 1937-8-9 or 40; neither would you.”
Mr. Dies: “I would be suspicious of them.”
The president: “Oh, I would check them out—absolutely; but the mere fact that they voted for a Communist when voting for a Communist was legal doesn’t automatically entitle us to say to the public ‘Those people are disloyal.’ They may be loyal.”
Mr. Dies: “But there is one thing, Mr. President, exposure does get the innocent ones out. It separates the wheat from the chaff. When they are apprised of the practical purposes of the organization, they get out, without any harm being done.”
The president: “If the defense catches up with the charge…I think education is very necessary, Martin, just so long as you don’t hurt human lives, because it is awfully hard, as I say, for the word of acquittal to catch up with the charge which is not proved.”
Mr. Dies: “In other words, the greatest care should be taken to safeguard innocent people, provided they are willing to cooperate with you.”
Not until near the end of the conversation was Dies able to get in his complaints against Hoover: “I have carried on under great pressure. I have been ridiculed. I have been denounced. I have had to pay a pretty high price for what I have done. I want to work with you. I don’t want to be at cross purposes with the Executive Department. The only thing I ask is that the Department of Justice show some degree of cooperation in return. Here is a case. Mr. Hoover is a very excellent man, but he syndicated an article that was widely printed in nearly every newspaper in the country, that was construed everywhere against us. He said he didn’t mean it as against us, but the public understood it as an attack on us. And then we say something and he construes it as an attack on him.”
6
Roosevelt suggested Dies meet with Bob Jackson to see if something could be done to eliminate such misunderstandings. Dies did meet with Jackson, and a deal was struck. The committee agreed not to publicize any information it might obtain until after it had been cleared by the Department of Justice, so as not to interfere with any secret FBI investigations. In return, the Department of Justice agreed to furnish the committee with information on cases which it felt could not be successfully prosecuted.
Thus FDR, and his liberal attorney general Robert Jackson, set up the
machinery which would be used, in the coming years, to smear thousands upon thousands of Americans.
Hoover, however, was unwilling to leave it at that.
For Martin Dies, Pearl Harbor came four days early. On December 3, 1941, Ed Tamm met privately with the congressman and informed him that he had evidence that Dies had accepted a $2,000 bribe to sponsor legislation permitting a Jewish refugee to obtain entry to the United States from Cuba. Dies had no choice but to admit the charge and throw himself on J. Edgar Hoover’s mercy. No charges were brought, and Tamm’s one-page memorandum of the conversation was buried in the director’s Official/Confidential file.
Although Dies continued to issue press releases attacking Roosevelt (and, even more rabidly, his wife, Eleanor) until his term as committee chairman expired in 1944, he never attended another public hearing of the committee. Nor, perhaps needless to say, did he ever again attack the Federal Bureau of Investigation or its director.
Martin Dies had been “neutralized.” As for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it became, under Dies’s successors, almost an adjunct of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover dominated it, and used it, for his own purposes, throughout the three decades it remained in existence.
On July 1, 1941, Charles Evans Hughes retired. As his replacement, Roosevelt named Harlan Fiske Stone, Hoover’s old mentor, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. To fill the resulting vacancy, FDR appointed Robert Jackson an associate justice.
Asked who he’d like to succeed him as attorney general, Jackson recommended his friend Francis Biddle, then solicitor general. There is no better indication of how well established the FBI director’s position now was than Roosevelt’s immediate query: “How does Francis get along with Hoover?”
7
By all rights they shouldn’t have gotten along. Paris-born, Harvard-educated, an aristocratic Philadelphian of liberal bent, Biddle was exactly the sort of person Hoover usually despised. Yet get along they did, and very well, perhaps because Biddle was the first attorney general who seriously attempted to “analyze” J. Edgar Hoover.
Biddle was also, as he later admitted, somewhat naive when it came to the politics of the capital: “Washington was then, as it always is, full of intrigue, and I suppose I was rather innocent. I found it difficult to be suspicious, and did not recognize disloyalty until it slapped me in the face.”
8
While Biddle was still under consideration for the job, a
New York Herald Tribune
reporter asked him if he intended to fire J. Edgar Hoover. It was a familiar trick, and Biddle fell for it, quickly denying he had any such intention. That one of Hoover’s aides might have planted the question apparently never occurred to him.
Biddle not only didn’t have any intention of firing Hoover but didn’t even believe it possible. Realizing that the FBI director’s “appointment was by the Attorney General, not for a term of years but during good behavior; and no
Attorney General would have thought of discharging him,” Biddle made a serious effort to understand Hoover’s “complex character.” Among those he consulted was Chief Justice Stone, who provided an important key: “if Hoover trusted you he would be absolutely loyal; if he did not, you had better look out.” Stone also cautioned Biddle that Hoover “had to get used to his new chief every time.”
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“Temperamentally,” Biddle found, “Hoover was a conservative, although such an easy classification hardly describes a temperament which is clearly not reflective or philosophic. Edgar Hoover was primarily a man of immediate action.” And “like all men of action,” Biddle decided, “he cares for power and more power; but unlike many men it is power bent to the purpose of his life’s work—the success of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
10
Hoover had certain weaknesses, Biddle quickly realized, among them “his passion for the limelight, his obsession with Communists that tends to include in his net fish that are hardly worth catching, his hypersensitivity to any criticism of his beloved Bureau.” However, “weighed against his concrete achievements,” Biddle finally decided, “they do not tip the scales.”
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Biddle also sensed a side which the FBI director, in most of their dealings, carefully suppressed. Behind Hoover’s “absolute self control” was, Biddle suspected, “a temper which might show great violence if he did not hold it on a leash.”
12
It seemed to the new attorney general that the FBI director’s abilities were not being fully utilized. For the record, Hoover eschewed policy decisions, taking the position that he was an investigator, that his job was establishing facts and preparing cases for trial, not drawing conclusions from the evidence. As Biddle put it, “This constituted a broad and safe defense against criticism.” However, feeling “he was too valuable a man not to use in discussing and determining departmental policy,” the attorney general set up weekly policy conferences with a small group of Justice’s top men and insisted that Hoover attend.
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The meetings were, Biddle admitted, often acrimonious, but at least they forced Hoover to take a stand and perhaps decreased some of the behind-the-scenes plotting.
He also tried to reach Hoover on a more personal level, with very interesting results. “I sought to invite his confidence; and before long, lunching alone with me in a room adjoining my office, he began to reciprocate by sharing some of his extraordinarily broad knowledge of the intimate details of what my associates in the Cabinet did and said, of their likes and dislikes, their weaknesses and their associations…
“Edgar was not above relishing a story derogatory to an occupant of one of the seats of the mighty, particularly if the little great man was pompous or stuffy. And I must confess that, within limits, I enjoyed hearing it. His reading of human nature was shrewd, if perhaps colored by the eye of an observer to whom the less admirable aspects of behavior were being constantly revealed.”
Hoover, for his part, “knew how to flatter his superior, and had the means of making him comfortable,” Biddle realized. When traveling, the attorney general
could count on an agent’s meeting him at the train station and providing him with an armload of newspapers to read on his trip, while another agent would meet him at his destination and take him in an FBI car wherever he wished to go.
Such niceties, Biddle believed, showed a “human side of Edgar Hoover with which he was not always credited.”
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It did not occur to Biddle that such niceties also constituted a form of surveillance.