J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (55 page)

Although Hoover maintained the ELSURs (electronic surveillances) and FISURs (physical surveillances) for eight months after Hiss left the government, the intensive two-year investigation had failed to produce
any
evidence supporting Whittaker Chambers’s allegations. It proved
very
useful later, however.

Hoover fared even less well with Harry Dexter White.

In his November 8, 1945, memorandum to the president, the FBI director had identified White as one of fourteen people who had—wittingly or unwittingly—supplied information that was subsequently passed to an agent of the Soviet government. In his November 27 report he’d repeated that charge.

Just two months later, on January 23, 1946, President Truman announced that he was sending the Senate the name of Harry Dexter White as his nominee to be the first American executive director of the International Monetary Fund.

The FBI director’s reaction was stunned disbelief. Truman had simply ignored his reports. Hoover immediately ordered a new report prepared, this one focusing
entirely on White, whom he now characterized as “a valuable adjunct to an underground Soviet espionage organization.” This information, he stated, had come from a total of thirty sources, “the reliability of which had been previously established.”
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Dated February 1, the new report, which ran to twenty-eight pages, was delivered to Vaughan on February 4, and this
may
have been the first time Truman became aware of the charges against White. Truman later stated, “As best as I can now determine, I first learned of the accusation against White early in February 1946,” indicating, if Truman’s memory was correct, that both of the earlier reports had been overlooked.
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It is also possible that Truman saw those reports and, after consulting with Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson, gave them little credence. Truman’s biographer Robert J. Donovan suggests this is probably what occurred. “Piecing the story together from the recollections of persons then in the government,” Donovan states, “what appears to have happened is that Truman looked to Vinson for advice and Vinson did not attach great importance to Hoover’s letter. Neither then did Truman. After all, the letter did not specify what acts White had committed. It even left open the question of whether he had known that information he had supplied was being fed, allegedly, into ‘the Soviet espionage system.’ ”
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25

Then too, Truman may have thought that Hoover was just crying wolf. Like his predecessors (and successors), President Truman was deluged by FBI memorandums, a sizable number of them accusing one or more persons of being Communists.
^†

But probably most important, just months earlier Truman had gone out on a limb to back Hoover in the
Amerasia
affair, only to find that the FBI director had no case.

However, the president simply could not overlook the February memorandum. Secretary of State Byrnes sent him a copy, together with the earlier
reports, emphasizing, “I deem [them] of such importance that I think you should read them.”
²⁷

Truman met with Byrnes the next day, February 6. He was shocked by the contents of the reports, Byrnes told the president, and bluntly asked him what he intended to do about it.

What did he suggest? Truman asked. Byrnes responded that he thought he should immediately contact the Senate and withdraw the nomination. A presidential aide then called Leslie Biffle, secretary of the Senate, to check on the status of the nomination and was told that it had just been favorably acted upon.

There followed a series of meetings, involving, at various times, the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of the treasury, and the attorney general—but not the director of the FBI. (Truman was not about to confer even
token
Cabinet status on J. Edgar Hoover.) It is possible that, had he been directly consulted, the FBI chief could have persuaded the president that there was strong circumstantial evidence supporting the charges against White.

Hoover was convinced that White was an active Soviet agent. True, during the course of the three-month investigation, he had not been observed passing any documents, but from the surveillances, wiretaps, and statements by informants the FBI had learned that White was in frequent close personal contact with nearly every one of the persons named as his associates in the spy ring. More than a few of those persons
had
received their positions in government on White’s recommendation. And several were, even prior to the appearance of Bentley, suspected, at least by the FBI, of having Communist affiliations.

But Hoover wasn’t consulted. And no one, including Hoover’s boss, Attorney General Clark, knew exactly what corroborative evidence the FBI director possessed, if any. (Apparently Hoover didn’t even trust the president: in his initial report to Truman he had disguised even Bentley’s sex, by referring to a “contact man” who carried the rolls of film from Silvermaster to Golos.)

Again, as in the case of Hiss, a number of options were debated, only this time Hoover wasn’t a party to the discussion. The president could ask the Senate to reconsider the nomination; he could refuse to sign White’s commission; he could let the nomination go through, then dismiss White and make no statement; or he could call White in, tell him he’d changed his mind, and ask for his resignation. Truman seemed inclined to adopt the latter proposal, the attorney general reported to the FBI director on February 26. At any rate, Clark said, an effort would be made to “remove” White, although he was skeptical whether it would work. If White did assume the post, Clark told Hoover, he would “be surrounded by persons who were specially selected and were not security risks.”
^*

The president had also stated that he was “interested in continuing the
surveillance,” Clark said, and Hoover responded that if that was his wish, the FBI “would continue the investigation.”
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Truman did not choose to take any of the options. Much to Hoover’s disgust, he let the nomination go through, and on May 1, 1946, White took his post as one of the executive directors of the International Monetary Fund.

This wasn’t the last of the White affair, however. Two years later—and less than three months before the 1948 presidential election—Hoover, in an attempt to embarrass Truman, secretly arranged to have the White case made public before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was not content with that. Suppressing his rage over this and a host of other accumulated grievances, the FBI director waited five more years before exacting his ultimate revenge, when, in a rare, highly publicized personal appearance on the floor of the U.S. Senate, he charged—in much more carefully phrased words but with the same unmistakable meaning—that former president Harry S Truman was a liar.

Beginning in the late 1930s, FBI employees were required to report any contact with a foreign national to their superiors. Effective January 1946, a new policy was inaugurated: any FBI employee who had any contact of whatever kind—official, social, or accidental—with any member of the White House staff was ordered to report it to the director’s office.

Foreign nationals were no longer the FBI’s only enemies.

In the November 1946 elections the Republicans gained control of both houses for the first time since 1928. Among the new faces were three “war heroes” (or so claimed their campaign brochures): Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, and Representatives Richard M. Nixon, Republican of California, and John F. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.

In common with all freshmen legislators, each rated a new FBI file, which was maintained in the office of Lou Nichols, who handled congressional liaison. Hoover, however, already had files on each. The most potentially damaging—and the fattest, containing over 250 documents and more than 600 pages—was initially kept in Nichols’s office and later transferred to the office of the director, where it became a part of Hoover’s own Official/Confidential file.

Although much of it dealt with the sexual activities of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, it was not filed under his name but was instead captioned FEJOS, MRS. PAUL, NEE INGA ARVAD-IS-ESP-G, the initials being Bureau shorthand for INTERNAL SECURITY-ESPIONAGE-GERMAN.

The Republican sweep also brought a change in the leadership of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was now headed by J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. Although Thomas’s tenure was brief—in 1949 he was
convicted of padding his office payroll and sentenced to three years in prison
^*
—1947, his first year as chairman, saw the real beginning of the secret relationship between HUAC and the FBI, and set the pattern for all the years that followed.

In March 1947 Representative John Rankin announced that the committee intended to look into Communist subversion of American movies—a headline grabber if ever there was one.

In May, however, just a month before the inquiry was initially scheduled to start, Chairman Thomas admitted to the Los Angeles SAC Richard Hood that the committee didn’t have enough information to conduct the hearings. The committee, Thomas complained, was “severely handicapped by lack of any information” to use in questioning prospective witnesses. For example, the committee intended to subpoena nine Hollywood personalities but didn’t have the background data needed to question them. As for the stated purpose of the hearings—to expose Communist infiltration of the film industry—the committee had so little proof of this that it couldn’t decide whether it was worthwhile to send an investigator to the West Coast for a month to develop possible leads.

In short, Rankin, in announcing the probe, had gone off half-cocked, and Thomas was literally begging the FBI for help. Not unaware of J. Edgar Hoover’s legendary ego, Thomas appealed to it, arguing that the background information they needed—the sources of which he promised to keep confidential—“would further Mr. Hoover’s premise that the best way to fight Communists was to expose them.”

SAC Hood discussed the request with Lou Nichols, and, both being sympathetic to Thomas’s plea, together they came up with several suggestions they felt the director might be willing to accept, once assured that nothing would be done to “embarrass the Bureau.”

Nichols knew his boss. On receiving their recommendations, Hoover wrote in the margin, “Expedite. I want Hood to extend
every
assistance to the committee.”

Every assistance, in this case, meant giving HUAC not only what it had asked for—the background data on the nine persons which Thomas had requested, together with a blind memorandum summarizing “Communist activities in Hollywood,” thus belatedly providing the justification for the hearings—but also two all-important lists. The first contained the names and affiliations of persons in the motion picture and radio industries who, allegedly, at some point in the past or at present, belonged either to the Communist party or to one of the “fronts,” those organizations which the FBI deemed to be Communist controlled or Communist influenced. The second consisted of the
names and profiles of thirty-two individuals whom the Bureau described as potentially “cooperative or friendly witnesses.”
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(Included on this list was the actor Ronald Reagan, who later voluntarily testified before the committee. A confidential informant for the FBI since 1943, Reagan had spied on the activities of members of the Screen Actors Guild while serving as the union’s president.)

The hearings, which finally took place that October, garnered all the publicity the committee had hoped for, and more.

Had it not been for the assistance of J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood hearings—and the resultant blacklist, which soon spread from the movie industry to radio and television; the jailing of the “Hollywood Ten” and numerous others; and the destruction of hundreds of careers, families, friendships, and lives, more than a dozen of them by suicide—might never have happened.

Having learned the lesson of Martin Dies, HUAC never again sought to be coequal with the FBI but was quite content to assume a sibling relationship, playing Little Brother to the FBI’s Big Brother.

For its part, the FBI for nearly three decades secretly supplied the committee with its staff, witnesses, victims, and charges.

Just as the FBI provided accountants to the House Appropriations Subcommittee to investigate its own budget requests, so did the Bureau supply seasoned Red hunters to HUAC, some on loan, others ex-agents seeking employment. In both cases the Bureau’s own interests came first, and probably as much information was channeled back to FBIHQ as was leaked to the committee. Hoover, for example, knew that Thomas was in trouble long before the congressman did.

When undercover informants such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers had outlived their usefulness, or failed to make their charges stick before grand juries, the FBI permitted them to “surface” or “go public” before the committee, where the burden of proof was on the accused, not the accuser, and even rehearsed them before they testified. In the case of Bentley, the dress rehearsal was literal, “Gandy’s girls” being given the job of helping her buy a wardrobe before her committee appearance, although one later admitted, “It was a wasted effort. Everything she put on turned instant dowdy.”
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The FBI not only gave HUAC the names of those persons it wanted called; it provided lists of questions to be asked, on the basis of accusations in FBI files. Even the files themselves were not sacrosanct: their contents were selectively leaked to the committee, often through intermediaries such as Father Cronin, either orally or in the form of blind memorandums.

In return, in addition to giving the FBI open access to its own files (by 1969 they numbered 754,000), HUAC deified J. Edgar Hoover, whose rare appearances before the committee were treated like religious events. Walter Goodman recalls one such 1947 visitation: “Hoover came before the committee like the archbishop paying a call on a group of lay brothers. He patronized them; they fussed over him.”
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