J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (72 page)

Although the FBI director had established an excellent working relationship with the president, he was not averse to collecting any derogatory information regarding him if their present situation deteriorated. In September 1955 Don Surine, McCarthy’s chief investigator, and a former FBI agent who had been booted out of the Bureau for fraternizing with a prostitute, passed on some interesting information to his friend Lou Nichols: according to one of his own sources, Surine said, Kay Summersby, Ike’s former WAC driver and reputed wartime mistress, was staying at the Shoreham Hotel, and had been for some thirty to forty-five days, “under an assumed name.”

The FBI director already had a file on Summersby. He knew, for example, that she’d been divorced by her first husband, in 1943, on grounds of adultery, and that she was at present married to a Wall Street stockbroker. That she was using an assumed name and staying at a hotel conveniently near the White House raised the distinct possibility that she and the president had secretly resumed their relationship. “See if we can discreetly get the name,” the director ordered. But though Hoover’s agents tried to locate her, both by staking out the hotel and by examining its register for variations of her maiden and married names, they were unsuccessful. A pretext call to her New York residence, however, was answered by Summersby herself, which proved only that she was not currently at the Shoreham. Nor did the Bureau do any better in tracking down another rumor regarding the president’s alleged sexual infidelities. In 1954 the agents had overheard, on a St. Louis wiretap of “an Italian hoodlum” named John Vitale, a discussion between Vitale and an associate in
Detroit, in which Vitale, who needed a good lawyer, was advised to try a particular attorney in the General Services Administration. Ordinarily such a conversation would have been of little interest to the director, but the log of this one was rushed to Hoover, because of the comment that followed. Not only was the man a good lawyer, the associate said, he also had “a good looking wife—he says that Ike has been trying to get into her pants.”
²⁰
Although the subsequent investigation produced a ten-page memorandum on the couple—which, to date, has not been released—it apparently didn’t establish whether the president had or had not succeeded in his intentions.
^*

The FBI director’s one major disagreement with Attorney General Brownell erupted during a Cabinet meeting in the White House, and the FBI director won at least a temporary victory, one that lasted for some years.

The date was March 9, 1956, and the subject civil rights. Brownell wanted to ask Congress for a new civil rights law (there hadn’t been one since Reconstruction), for the establishment of an independent Civil Rights Commission, for granting the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department full status as a division, and for the power to bring suits in federal courts to enforce voting rights.

His subordinate, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had accompanied Brownell to the meeting at the request of the the president and the Cabinet, pulled the rug right out from under him.

“The South is in a state of explosive resentment over what they consider an unfair portrayal of their way of life, and what they consider intermeddling,” Hoover warned his rapt audience. And for this he blamed the 1954 and 1956 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decisions. Behind the tension over “mixed education,” he cautioned, “stalks the specter of racial intermarriage.” The NAACP and the other civil rights groups were exacerbating the already tense situation by preaching “racial hatred,” he claimed. Moreover, they had been targeted for infiltration by the Communist party.
^†
On the other hand, the White Citizens Councils which had recently sprung up throughout the South to oppose desegregation included among their members “bankers, lawyers, doctors, state legislators and industrialists…some of the leading citizens of the South.” It was clear with which group Hoover chose to take his stand. As for the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI director airily dismissed it as “pretty much defunct.” Accompanied as always with charts and graphs, Hoover used one of the latter to show that the number of lynchings was down; hence there was certainly no need for legislation giving the FBI formal responsibility for such cases.

Speaking of a forthcoming NAACP conference, he closed on a purely political note: “The Communist Party plans to use this conference to embarrass the administration and Dixiecrats who have supported it, by forcing the administration to take a stand on civil rights legislation with the present Congress. The party hopes through a rift to affect the 1956 elections.”

Sanford Ungar has noted, “The director’s report, bigoted and narrow-minded as it might seem in retrospect, had a powerful impact. It was probably a major factor in President Eisenhower’s decision not to push for the Brownell civil rights program.”

According to another historian, J. W. Anderson, the FBI director’s Cabinet briefing “reinforced the president’s inclination to passivity” on civil rights legislation.
²¹

The FBI itself was anything but passive during this period. In August 1956 Hoover authorized the first of what would grow into twelve separate COINTELPROs, counterintelligence programs whose aim was “to disrupt, disorganize and neutralize” specific chosen targets.

The COINTELPROs were a huge step across the line separating investigations from covert action. Like all counterintelligence, these programs had as their stated goal nothing less than the destruction of enemies, be they individuals or ideologies.

The tactics weren’t new; agents had been using many of them since the 1940s. The change was that Hoover now felt so secure in his power that he could grant official sanction to actions which went well beyond the law.

The first target was the Communist party USA.
^*
On August 28 Belmont outlined the program for Boardman. It was to be “an all-out disruptive attack against the CP from within”: “In other words, the Bureau is in a position to initiate, on a broader scale than heretofore attempted, a counterintelligence program against the CP, not as harassment from the outside, which might only serve to bring the various factions together, but by feeding and fostering from within the internal fight currently raging.”
²²

By 1956 the Communist party USA was close to moribund. Starting with the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, events had not been kind to the party. Factionalism, purges, the Smith Act trials, deaths, and defections had left its rolls decimated. By all the best estimates, under five thousand members remained, some fifteen hundred of whom were FBI informants.

Why then a COINTELPRO at this time, when the party was obviously dead or dying? George C. Moore, chief of the bureau’s Racial Intelligence Section,
later testified, “The FBI’s counterintelligence program came up because if you have anything in the FBI, you have an action-oriented group of people who see something happening and want to do something to take its place.”
²³
There was a superfluity of agents, many of them with nothing to do. Extralegal harassment of Communists and other perceived enemies filled not only that void but others as well. As Frank Donner has observed, simple investigation, which was the Bureau’s legal mandate, “denied the action-hungry agent a powerful psychic need, the pleasure of really hurting the enemy.”
^*
24

Frustrated by the limitations placed on them by the courts—during 1956 and 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned most of the Smith Act convictions—the FBI director and his men found in the COINTELPROs a way to continue the battle against enemies they thought threatened the American way of life.

Asked whether the question of the legality of the COINTELPROs ever arose, Moore responded, “No, we never gave it a thought.”
²⁶
It was enough that the director wanted them.

Again, the tactics weren’t new, only the director’s official sanction and encouragement (flush with his first successes, Hoover was soon ordering special agents in charge to submit new and more imaginative techniques). They included the following:

• The planting of stories with “friendly” media contacts. These ranged from the relatively trivial, such as publicizing the CP leader Gus Hall’s purchase of a new automobile, allegedly with party funds, to more serious accusations of embezzlement, bigamy, fraud, and other criminal conduct.

• The use of anonymous letters or telephone calls to disseminate derogatory information, real or manufactured, such as planting the rumor that a person was a homosexual or “some other kind of sexual deviate.” Sex played an important part in the COINTELPROs. Persons defending themselves against accusations of adultery, for example, weren’t able to give their full attention to party business. Nor did rumors of venereal disease enhance a party leader’s popularity. The straitlaced parents of one young woman were informed that their daughter was living with a Communist without benefit of clergy. On learning from wiretaps that a partner in a liberal law firm was having an affair with another partner’s wife, all the members of the firm were informed, through anonymous letters, as were the spouses.

• Harassment techniques like intrusive photography, lockstep surveillance, and hang-up calls. They caused disruption when others, such as business associates, became aware the person was under investigation.

• The informing of employers, neighbors, merchants, and friends that a target was a suspected Communist was one of the most widely used techniques of the COINTELPROs, since the result was often loss of employment, emotional upset, and/or social ostracism.
^*
On-the-job-site questioning was particularly effective, as it caused the target’s coworkers to talk. If the targets had children, their teachers would be questioned by agents, as would the parents of their children’s friends.

• The use of “selective law enforcement,” which ranged from requesting IRS audits to planting evidence which, when discovered by cooperative local police, would result in arrests.

• The placement of a “snitch jacket” on someone. William Albertson was a New York Communist party functionary. A dedicated Marxist since his youth, he was also a hardworking, effective party leader and as such became a prime target for the CPUSA COINTELPRO. The Bureau “neutralized” Albertson by planting what appeared to be an FBI informant’s report in his automobile. As a result, Albertson was expelled from the party, denounced in the
Daily Worker
as a “stool pigeon,” fired from his job, and shunned by his friends. Although Albertson died in an accident, a number of others so labeled committed suicide or died of heart attacks or other stress-related causes.

The COINTELPROs began slowly and then, like a virus feeding upon itself, grew rapidly and monstrously. Each new perceived threat—whether the civil rights movement, the New Left, or black nationalism—brought forth a new COINTELPRO.

There was, as yet, no talk of poisoning children, of suggesting that a prominent civil rights leader commit suicide, or of sanctioning and encouraging assassinations. The murders were yet to come.

Although his subordinates—Alan Belmont, William Sullivan, William Branigan, George C. Moore, and the SACs—suggested the “dirty tricks,” Hoover approved each and every one of the COINTELPRO actions, including placing a snitch jacket on Albertson. The blue-inked words “I concur” or “O.K. H.”
appeared on dozens of memos. Although every special agent who served between 1956 and 1972 knew of the COINTELPROs, and most participated in some capacity in at least one of them, they remained one of the Bureau’s deepest and darkest secrets. Not until 1958 did the FBI director find it expedient to inform his superiors that such a program was in existence. That January, Hoover told the House Appropriations Subcommittee, during the off-the-record portion of his testimony, that the Bureau had an “intensive program” to “disorganize and and disrupt” the Communist party, that the program had existed “for years,” and that informants were used “as a disruptive tactic.”
²⁶

Congress not having raised any objections, he then informed the executive branch, in a carefully worded memorandum to the president and the attorney general: “In August of 1956, the Bureau initiated a program to promote disruption within the ranks of the Communist Party (CP) USA…Several techniques have been utilized to accomplish our objectives.” As examples, Hoover mentioned only the use of informants to cause “acrimonious debates” and the anonymous mailing of anti-Communist material, hardly enough to excite a civil libertarian, much less Rogers or Ike. Nor could they complain when he cited as “tangible accomplishments…disillusion and defection among party members and increased factionalism at all levels.”
²⁷

J. Edgar Hoover had covered his rear.

Hoover didn’t need to exert himself during the 1956 election campaign—the Republican slogan was still “I like Ike,” and the electorate clearly agreed—although his newly resurrected homosexual smear of Stevenson found one taker, his friend Walter Winchell, who remarked on his Mutual radio show, “A vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen.” Jorgensen was one of the first publicized recipients of a sex change operation. It was Winchell’s television sponsors, however, who took offense and dropped him, forcing cancellation of the show. Winchell hadn’t translated well to the little screen. Nor were his radio broadcasts attracting as many listeners as they used to. As his biographer Lately Thomas noted, Winchell hadn’t aged well. He “sounded more strident. His prejudices overshadowed everything. He seemed less like the breathless reporter of old and more like a garrulous, opinionated eccentric.”
²⁸
Some had begun to say much the same thing about J. Edgar Hoover.

Stevenson’s running mate was Estes Kefauver. It was a perfect pairing, the FBI director told his aides: a notorious homosexual and a notorious womanizer. “Notorious” was one of Hoover’s favorite words.

Stevenson conceded even before the California vote came in.