J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (62 page)

On learning that one magazine publisher was considering an exposé of the FBI and its long-tenured director, Hoover struck first, viciously. Favored newspaper contacts all over the country received a plain brown envelope with no return address. Inside was a packet of photographs showing the publisher’s wife engaged in fellatio with her black chauffeur while parked in Rock Creek Park. There was no mistaking either the identity of the woman or the limousine with its distinctive license plates. The photos were never published, of course (although they became dog-eared from examination): their purpose was to inflict maximum embarrassement. Quickly capitulating, the publisher sent his personal representative to grovel at Lou Nichols’s feet. Nichols, who denied the FBI’s complicity, although he admitted having “heard about” the pictures, adroitly switched the subject to the proposed exposé. Not only was the article never written; as long as the publisher was still living, no criticism of the director or the Bureau ever appeared in any of his publications. It took even longer for Hoover to forgive the magazines themselves. They remained on the no-contact list until a few years before the director’s own death, when he needed them to leak stories about his enemies.

By contrast, Hoover extended special treatment to his friends DeWitt Wallace and Fulton Oursler, the publisher and editor of
Reader’s Digest,
and to the Cowles brothers, who published
Look.
Between 1940 and 1972 the
Digest
printed more than a dozen of the FBI director’s ghosted articles—bettered only by
American Magazine,
which published eighteen, and
U.S. News &
World Report,
which published twenty-five.
^*
Look’s
preferential treatment often included exclusive access to FBI reports on ongoing investigations, thus enabling the magazine to scoop its leading rival,
Life.
The Cowleses rated so highly in Hoover’s favor that their magazine was allowed to publish a laudatory two-part series on the director, as well as the “official picture history” of the FBI.

Hoover was not only determined to manipulate the news, deciding what the public should or should not know; he also altered history, in the process exacting revenge against one of his most hated enemies, “that Jew in the Treasury,” Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
¹⁹

During his nearly dozen years as secretary of the treasury (1934-45), Morgenthau kept a daily diary, which included not only his own recollections of events but also verbatim transcriptions of his meetings and telephone calls. Moreover, as a member of FDR’s “inner cabinet,” he was privy to the behind-the-scenes activities of most of the rest of the government. According to the historian Jason Berger, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Morgenthau diaries to scholars of the New Deal era. As “the only source of daily happenings in Washington,” Berger notes, “they are a researcher’s dream.” For writers ranging from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., to Ted Morgan, they have been an indispensable source of raw history.
²⁰

On leaving office, Morgenthau had given his papers to the National Archives for safekeeping until such time as he decided to make them public.
^†
On learning, in 1951, that Morgenthau was discussing publication of the diaries, Hoover struck.

“It was a very covert operation,” a senior agent who headed the raiding party has recalled, “damn covert. There were five of us, and we were all sworn to absolute secrecy. We even left the Washington field office by various devious routes. And we’d go in [an out-of-the-way room at the National Archives] at different times so no one would know five agents were in that room. And we were the only ones who had a key.”

Their only equipment, which they carried in their briefcases, was scissors. “We literally went through [the diary] with scissors, cutting out any references which would be unfavorable to Mr. Hoover or the FBI.
^‡
They were just physically
excerpted right out of the diary itself. Our job was to cut out everything which, even by innuendo, might indicate that Mr. Hoover had feet of clay.”
²¹
The pages were then retyped and renumbered so that there would be no indication that anything was missing. The whole operation took several weeks. What they left behind for the historians who followed was a history of the New Deal years as approved by J. Edgar Hoover.

Although he was not personally involved, the senior agent heard from the Bureau grapevine that President Roosevelt’s papers had been similarly “sanitized.” According to librarians at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, many FBI reports
are
missing. And still others have been changed. In 1976 Timothy Ingram, an investigator for a House subcommittee chaired by Bella Abzug, discovered that a number of FBI documents at Hyde Park did not match FBI carbons of the same correspondence which were obtained by committee subpoena or under the Freedom of Information Act; whole paragraphs and pages were missing from the Hyde Park copies, indicating that these, supposedly the originals, had been edited and then retyped and re-signed. At the time this was done, Hoover had no way of knowing that one day the FBI’s own files would be made public, although he knew the Roosevelt papers would be.

It is possible that other presidential libraries have also been sanitized.

Since the 1950s the FBI has assigned a permanent staff to the National Archives, to determine what FBI and Justice Department records will be retained, made public, withheld from examination, or destroyed.

Nor, it would seem, did Hoover overlook his former place of employment, the Library of Congress.

The Supreme Court justice, and Hoover nemesis, Felix Frankfurter also kept a set of diaries. When Joseph Lash edited them for publication, he noted, “In addition to Frankfurter’s [own] excisions from the Diaries, some sections were stolen after the justice’s papers were turned over to the Library of Congress.” To which Lash, who had his own reasons for distrusting J. Edgar Hoover, couldn’t resist adding, “Some day the Federal Bureau of Investigation may recover them.”
²²
Among the items missing from the Frankfurter papers was the only copy of a speech the justice had written, but never delivered, criticizing the director of the FBI.

Hoover did not forget his other old enemies either.

His files on Eleanor Roosevelt grew even more massive after Truman appointed
her U.S. representative to the United Nations.
^*
Whenever he heard her referred to as “First Lady of the World” he flew into a towering rage. He was afraid that she might be given the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that he not so secretly coveted. But while there was a Democratic administration the opportunities to attack her were few. Still, there were some small satisfactions.

In 1951 Mrs. Roosevelt received a number of particularly virulent letters and telegrams from a hostile critic. Concerned about her safety, her secretary contacted the FBI official Alex Rosen, who in turn suggested to the director that perhaps the Bureau could persuade the writer to stop his harassment. With self-righteous glee, Hoover responded, “No. This is a democracy. The Bureau cannot interfere with a person’s inalienable right to write letters unless there be threats contained therein. Any other position on our part would smack of intolerance and a violation of civil rights and we can never be guilty of this.”
²³

After being abruptly fired by Truman, William Donovan had returned to private practice. Soon bored, he had in 1946 decided to seek the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from New York. But his forthright honesty got in the way. When the party leader Thomas Dewey offered to support him, in return for his support of Dewey in the 1948 presidential race, Donovan had bluntly responded, “I don’t think you’re qualified for president now, and you won’t be qualified then.” On hearing this, Ernest Cuneo remarked, “What job would he like
other
than being the senator from New York?”
²⁴

There was only one job Donovan really wanted, directing the agency which he himself, more than any other person, had created. But, thanks in a large part to the animosity of J. Edgar Hoover, he was forced to sit on the sidelines, while one unqualified man after another attempted to fill it.

Sidney W. Souers, who headed the Central Intelligence Group from January to June 1946, was a former executive of the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain. An admiral in the naval reserve, his intelligence background was limited to a tour of duty as deputy director of ONI, and he found his new organization so wracked with strife that for a time he considered turning over all its functions to the FBI.

Souer’s replacement, Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the nephew of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served less than a year, from June 1946 to May 1947, mostly biding his time until his appointment as U.S. Air Force chief of staff. It was during Vandenberg’s tenure that the FBI was forced, by presidential edict, to turn over its South American operations to the CIA.

Hoover did not do so gladly. Under his direct orders—relayed through
William Sullivan, who was supervisor in charge of intelligence operations in Mexico and South America—the FBI/SIS agents burned their files and dismissed their informants, rather than turn them over to their new rival.
^*

One CIA officer, assigned to a South American republic, recalled, “The only thing I found when the Bureau left was a row of empty safes and a pair of rubber gloves in what had been an FBI darkroom. But I was able to recontact most of the Bureau’s sources, because I hired the ex-FBI chief’s driver, and he knew where I could find them.”
²⁶

Not only did Hoover lose South America; he also lost a number of his best agents. Capitalizing on their foreign-language skills and native contacts, some of the top people in his specially trained SIS cadre defected to the CIA, where they were soon joined by other agents who had served in the United States. A number of them, including Raymond Leddy, Winston MacKinlay Scott, and William King Harvey, later occupied key positions in the CIA, while others, such as Robert Maheu, found employment on the covert side.

However, according to William Corson, Hoover did not bemoan these losses: in some cases he secretly arranged them. Even those who were not “witting” spies for the FBI director usually maintained their fraternal old-boynetwork ties with the Bureau and, if the need arose, could be called upon for assistance. Subsequent CIA directors, starting with Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, tried to weed out these “plants,” but by their own admission were not altogether successful.

Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who followed Vandenberg as CIA director, spent nearly all of his three years in bureaucratic infighting, mostly pitted against the Defense and State Departments and the FBI. He lost the most significant of these battles, while his few intelligence coups were eclipsed by his failure to forecast Russia’s development of the atom and hydrogen bombs and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950.

It was not until October 1950, and the appointment of General Walter “Beetle” Smith, that Hoover again faced an adversary nearly as formidable as William J. Donovan.

In July 1949 Associate Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy died. In a move that he’d later regret, Truman replaced Hoover’s former boss with his current boss, naming Tom Clark to the Court and replacing him as attorney general with J. Howard McGrath.

A former governor and U.S. senator from Rhode Island, McGrath was a pure politician, and the president was indebted to him, McGrath having been democratic national committee chairman during Truman’s 1948 campaign.

McGrath had a few problems. He was, Robert J. Donovan notes, a dapper,
personable man. “On the other hand,” Donovan adds, “he was lazy, and it was well known in Washington that he drank too much…McGrath seems not to have been aware of much that was going on around him.”
²⁷

The FBI director got along very well with the new attorney general. Asked by a friend how he handled Hoover, McGrath replied that he didn’t: “He’s too big to handle.”
²⁸
It took no time at all for Hoover to convince McGrath that the biggest problem facing the Department of Justice was communism. McGrath red-stamped most of the FBI director’s requests or turned them over to his deputy, Peyton Ford, who actually ran the department. Emboldened, Hoover decided to test McGrath to see how far he could go, and asked the attorney general to approve the installation of microphone surveillances involving trespass. McGrath responded that he couldn’t give his approval, because to do so might violate the Fourth Amendment, but he didn’t say Hoover couldn’t do it, so the FBI went right on committing break-ins to plant its bugs.

Seemingly, on departing from Justice, Tom Clark had left more than a trace of his somewhat rancid morality behind, because it wasn’t long before Congress and the press, investigating allegations of corruption in the Truman administration, focused on the department. As early as January 1950 Hoover alerted Matt Connelly,
^*
the president’s appointments secretary and one of the FBI director’s carefully cultivated “friends” in the White House, that a group of newspapers was planning a campaign against organized gambling and that the first story, due for release in mid-February, would “be critical of the attorney general” and “include information relating to his supposed associations and contacts with members of the underworld, particularly in Kansas City, and with the president’s supposed connections with these individuals and their contributions to the presidential campaign.”

As usual, Hoover got double duty from the warning. The memo concluded, “This information is being made available to you as a matter of interest. It is also being furnished to the attorney general”—thus putting the AG in his debt.
²⁹

During the rest of 1950 and throughout 1951, the scandals proliferated, spreading through the Bureau of Internal Revenue and then coming back to the Justice Department itself, now centering on Theron Lamar Caudle, the assistant attorney general in charge of the JD’s tax division, who was accused of failing to prosecute certain tax cases as well as cheating on his own tax returns.
^†
No evidence was ever developed indicating that McGrath himself was corrupt, but there was abundant evidence that he was less than vigorous in prosecuting others.