Official and Confidential:
The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
Anthony Summers
For Robbyn
I thank the close colleagues and friends who made this book possible. A full Acknowledgments section will be found in its closing pages. The project lasted for five years and demanded work on a scale I could not have hoped to achieve alone. Some 850 people were interviewed, and storage of the hundreds of thousands of documents required the addition of an entire new floor to my house.
On the investigative team, I am especially grateful to Dr Kathryn Castle, lecturer in American History at the University of North London, and her husband Paul Sutton, who spent a year in the United States carrying out extensive research. In San Francisco and Washington, Ingrid Young and Glyn Wright were real Sherlocks when it came to tracking down interviewees and obscure documents. In Ireland, with the assistance of Pauline Lombard, Jeanette Woods typed and retyped the manuscript and organized the ever-expanding archive.
The book was conceived by Putnam’s president, Phyllis Grann, who lived up to her reputation as a legendary publisher. Also in New York, Andrea Chambers was a redoubtable editor and Marilyn Ducksworth managed promotion with skill I have never seen equalled. Allison Hargraves, the copy editor, dealt meticulously with a mountain of detail. At Gollancz in London, Liz Knights and Joanna Goldsworthy once again proved to be loyal friends, as well as top-flight publishers. That doyen of Manhattan agents, Sterling Lord, nursed me and the first edition of the book through tough times. This new edition is the result of an initiative by Ebury’s Andrew Goodfellow, helped along as it progressed to reality by my agent and friend at Curtis Brown, Jonathan Lloyd.
I shall never be able to repay the debt of gratitude I owe to Robbyn Swan, the fine Washington journalist who joined the project expecting to conduct a handful of interviews, stayed four years – and captured my heart. We married, had three children and – two decades and three marathon book projects later – she is still working with me.
To Robbyn, much more than thanks.
A. S.
Ireland, 2011
FOREWORD
‘The information in your book made me want to retch. I don’t think I will ever believe anything about our form of government again – nor will I have confidence in anyone in office, ever. They named a building for him and it is still there?’
An American reader of Official and Confidential,
to the author, 1993.
In the autumn of 2011, with the Hollywood movie J. Edgar in the offing, a senior FBI official spoke publicly about an aspect of what the film might – perhaps – portray. During the making of J. Edgar, he said, director Clint Eastwood and star Leonardo DiCaprio had sought information about legendary Director Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson, his longtime aide and companion.
Time was that to have addressed the question of Hoover’s sexuality would have been unthinkable in official Washington. Even now, Assistant Director Mike Kortan said only that ‘vague rumours and fabrications’ on the subject were backed up by ‘no evidence in the historical record …’ The Society of Former Special Agents sniffed that a ‘kissing scene’ said to be in J. Edgar had led it to reassess the ‘tacit approval’ it had given to the movie. The J. Edgar Hoover Foundation was said to have told Eastwood that such portrayal would be ‘monumental distortion … unfounded, spurious.’
In an era when homosexuality is out of the closet, such outrage is perhaps overheated. When this book was first published in 1993, with the impertinence to report not only on the supposed homosexuality but on other exotica, there was not only fury from FBI old-timers but also a resounding national chuckle – shared even by the President.
In March that year, Bill Clinton rose to address the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., traditionally an evening for topical satire. In the audience was FBI Director William Sessions, then fighting a losing battle against accusations of abuse of office, and the President gave him no encouragement. ‘I might have to pick an FBI Director,’ he grinned, ‘and it’s going to be hard to fill J. Edgar Hoover’s … pumps.’
Everyone understood the allusion. For the past month, since hardback publication of this book, America had been tittering at the allegation that Hoover liked dressing up in women’s clothes. On television, Jay Leno and David Letterman made cracks, and the Saturday Night Live team performed a skit. The New York Times magazine devoted a serious commentary page to the implications, and John Updike penned a spoof for the New Yorker. In a later edition, in a reference to the transvestite in the movie The Crying Game, the magazine ran a cartoon featuring the ‘Jaye Edgar Hoover Building.’ From left to right, the joke took on a momentum of its own. The Nation ran a mock advertisement for an imaginary movie called The Lying Game, starring Hoover in slinky evening gown and bouffant wig. In the United States and England, the tabloids phonied up photographs of the Director dressed as a woman. The London Times offered a verse of doggerel and, months later, Newsweek waded in with yet another cartoon.
The concept of Hoover in drag seems likely to become a permanent fixture in the public mind. It also made me, very evidently, Public Enemy No. 1 of diehard Hoover loyalists. ‘For your part in the success of Anthony Summers’ book,’ one told my publisher, in a letter from Texas, ‘you should hang your head in shame. You have helped do what the Communists could never do – destroy the character of a man dedicated to the ideals on which this nation is founded.’ From Montana, an ‘outraged’ correspondent castigated the publisher for printing ‘libellous, totally false remarks about a great American.’ A New Yorker sounded off about ‘lurid and ludicrous allegations set forth by unsavory witnesses.’ Another complaint, from Brooklyn, used precisely the same phrase.
The use of identical words was no coincidence. All the letter writers quoted put pen to paper in the space of a few days, two months after the book came out. Three were former FBI agents, and the fourth was an agent’s wife. I have no doubt that their spleen was orchestrated, just as the ‘great American’ himself used to orchestrate an outpouring of complaints to members of Congress, whenever there seemed the shred of a possibility that he might lose his job.
In early February 1993, when my publisher was about to launch Official and Confidential, an irate caller told the promotions department to watch out for an upcoming television show, on which the despicable Anthony Summers would get his come-uppance. On Larry King Live, sure enough, a coldly furious Cartha DeLoach, a surviving Hoover aide who features large in the book, came forth with an attack short on facts but stern as an Iranian fatwa. Not only was the book ‘garbage … innuendo … lies,’ but – and this was the intended coup de grace – I was a discredited journalist. Before the program I had spotted DeLoach hunched over a telephone, writing notes on a scrap of paper. Now, on live television beamed around the world by CNN, he read from a year-old Washington Times column that had accused me of lying and cowardice for my comments about a CIA official. The article was so inaccurate and malicious that, for the first time in my life, I had started libel proceedings.
Meanwhile, Lawrence Heim, of the Society of Former FBI Agents, fired off an enraged letter to the Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which had – like the BBC in England – broadcast a program featuring key allegations made in this book. As a major plank of his broadside, Heim also cited the distortions published in the Washington Times. So did Thomas Weaver, a former agent who protested to Vanity Fair, the magazine which had published a long extract from Official and Confidential. Heim mailed the 8,000 members of the Former Agents’ Society an appeal for concerted action against me and my publishers. Happily, Vanity Fair supported me with courage and integrity, as had Frontline.
&n
bsp; In May, in Esquire magazine, the writer Peter Maas was given three pages – in a feature euphemistically called ‘Setting the Record Straight’ – to try to demolish the parts of the book that deal with Hoover’s sexuality, and the way it may have compromised the FBI’s duty to fight organized crime. In his attack on me, Maas claimed that one person quoted had never been interviewed, and that the handling of another had been superficial. Neither accusation was true, and the ‘never interviewed’ individual had in fact been interviewed five times. The Maas piece was riven with error, yet Esquire denied me equal space for a rebuttal. Instead, it published a letter from me three months later – alongside correspondence from three men who sided with Maas.
The press at large devoted massive coverage to Official and Confidential, for which I am duly grateful. Few reporters or reviewers, however, appeared to have given the book a serious reading. Most concentrated on the passages about sex, which make up a small proportion of the work. The late Stephen Ambrose, then Director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, told Washington Post readers that I devoted an entire chapter to charging Hoover with responsibility for the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor. I made no such blanket charge. He wrote, too, that I imply Hoover had a hand in the death of Marilyn Monroe – something that has never featured in the wildest imaginings of anyone I know, let alone in this book.
In the London Sunday Times, Anthony Howard assailed me for ascribing President Nixon’s inability to remove Hoover to the Director’s knowledge of the President’s relationship with a woman he met in Hong Kong. Not so. I also report the many other factors that led Nixon to fear, as he himself said in a recently released Watergate tape, that – if dismissed – Hoover might ‘bring down the temple with him, including me.’
By far the loudest hoo-ha, however, was over the passage indicating that Hoover was homosexual, the information suggesting that he liked to wear female clothing on occasion and – far more important – the possibility that knowledge of such peccadilloes gave Mafia bosses a hold over the Director.
Detractors said that my sources on Hoover’s sexuality were unreliable. They sniped at me for reporting the claims of Susan Rosenstiel, who said she had seen Hoover dressed as a woman, on the grounds that she was herself disreputable. They dismissed the comments of mafiosi, simply because they were mafiosi.
My sources on Hoover’s sexuality include a well-authenticated eye-witness, a longtime personal friend of Hoover and his principal lover Clyde Tolson, and Hoover’s psychiatrist’s widow. After hardback publication, I heard from Marie Gladhill, whose father Vilhelm Buch was a Danish newspaperman based in Washington, D.C. ‘Many Danes used to contact my father when they came to Washington,’ Mrs Gladhill told me. ‘I was present, in the early thirties, when he received a visit from a young Danish sailor about nineteen years old, who had recently been arrested – for some homosexual offense, I think. My father asked him how he had got out of jail. And the young fellow laughed and said, “Mr Hoover got me out.” And he told how Hoover had taken him home with him. As if to explain, he said, “Mr Hoover is homosexual”…’
In a speech to a writers’ conference in the eighties, the novelist William Styron said that Hoover had once been spotted with his companion, Clyde Tolson, on the patio of a beach house in Malibu, California. ‘There was the head of the FBI,’ said Styron, ‘painting the toenails of his longtime male friend.’ Styron told me in 1993 that he received this information from a source he considered reliable. He believes the story to be ‘absolutely true.’
Following publication of Official and Confidential, the New York Post reported that Hoover and Tolson were drawn into a 1966 probe of a nationwide extortion racket. A member of the U.S. Congress, two deans of Eastern universities, and William Church, the admiral in charge of the New York naval yards, were among the many victims of a blackmail ring that systematically entrapped homosexuals. Although not publicly named at the time, Clyde Tolson was one of the ring’s targets, according to the Post story. A photograph of Hoover with one of the extortionists, according to the report, surfaced during the police inquiry – then vanished. While independent research has failed to confirm the account, Post reporter Murray Weiss said: ‘I stand 100% behind everything I wrote’.
There has been a fresh development on the subject of the claim that a sex photograph of Hoover and Tolson was in the possession of James Angleton, the CIA Counter-Intelligence chief. Former intelligence officer John Weitz, like Angleton a veteran of the wartime intelligence organization OSS, revealed that it was Angleton who – years earlier – showed him a similar picture of the two men. Whether or not they were authentic, there can be little doubt that such photographs did exist, and that Angleton believed they could be used to intimidate Hoover.*
The most persistent criticism of Official and Confidential, however, has centered on the passage – just three pages long – in which I report the allegation by Susan Rosenstiel, a former wife of liquor millionaire Lewis Rosenstiel, that Hoover dressed in female clothes to take part in group sex with attorney Roy Cohn, her husband, and young male prostitutes. Hoover defenders maintained that Mrs Rosenstiel was not a credible source because she pleaded guilty to an attempted perjury charge in 1971. I told readers this but, unlike the critics, also explained the context. The very week the charge was brought, the New York State Legislative Committee on Crime had planned to produce Mrs Rosenstiel as a witness to her husband’s links to the Mafia. The Committee’s Chairman and Chief Counsel were outraged at the perjury development. The perjury charge was brought in connection with a 1969 civil suit – a move lawyers considered unprecedented and bizarre. Committee officials believed it was instigated by Rosenstiel himself, using his vast wealth and influence to obstruct the official inquiry by discrediting his former wife. Court records show the tycoon had used similar tactics in the recent past, to pervert the course of justice.
Those trying to discredit Mrs Rosenstiel claimed that she was ‘reputedly an alcoholic with mental problems,’ known as ‘Snow White’ in (unnamed) circles. During six years’ work on Official and Confidential, including extended interviews with the woman, I found not a jot of evidence to support such accusations. Nor were such weaknesses even rumored until after publication of my book. On the contrary, the former Chief Counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and Committee investigator William Gallinaro, found Mrs Rosenstiel an exceptionally good witness. ‘I thought her absolutely truthful,’ Judge McLaughlin told me. ‘The woman’s power of recall was phenomenal. Everything she said was checked and double checked, and everything that was checkable turned out to be true.’ Although this assessment of Mrs Rosenstiel is in this book, it was not quoted in a single newspaper.
Critic after critic, on the other hand, asserted scornfully that Mrs Rosenstiel was the only witness to speak of Hoover’s alleged cross-dressing. In fact, the passage immediately following the Rosenstiel account consists of a similar report, by two witnesses who said they learned of Hoover’s penchant for women’s clothes at a different time and place from those described by Mrs Rosenstiel. The second two witnesses had never heard of Susan Rosenstiel, and their story was unknown to her.
Since publication, I have received FBI files on both Lewis and Susan Rosenstiel – files withheld during the years I worked on the book in spite of an early application under the Freedom of Information Act. They contain nothing to diminish belief in Mrs Rosenstiel. They do show that Hoover was interested in, and concerned about, the FBI handling of Lewis Rosenstiel, as early as 1939. They contain what appears to be the record of a first meeting between the two men in 1956, although other evidence suggests they met earlier. That year, when Rosenstiel asked to see Hoover, the Director saw him within hours. Mrs Rosenstiel alleged that Hoover brought pressure on politicians to help further her husband’s business interests – and the file shows that the millionaire did lobby the Director’s office about his business problems. In 1957, the unctuous Rosenstiel was assuring Hoover that ?
??your wish is my command.’ Later, when Rosenstiel was sick, Hoover sent him flowers.
Susan Rosenstiel mentioned to me that she had once possessed a photograph of Hoover in the company of her husband’s mobster friends. That she did have such evidence was confirmed following publication of this book by Mary Nichols of The Philadelphia Enquirer, who met Mrs Rosenstiel years ago. ‘She did have suitcases of photographs that she had hauled away from her marriage to Lewis Rosenstiel,’ Nichols recalled. ‘The ones I saw showed Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn and Rosenstiel, at all sorts of social events with mobsters.’
As late as 2002, the journalist and author Ronald Kessler tried over several pages of a book on the Bureau to discredit both Susan Rosenstiel and the notion that Hoover’s sexuality may have influenced his long failure to pursue organized crime. While striving to persuade readers that Susan Rosenstiel was a hopelessly unreliable witness, Kessler ignored statements of law enforcement professionals and others to the contrary that had appeared in the original text of this book and in an earlier version of this foreword. He quoted me as having written that another source was ‘a former CIA counterintelligence chief,’ an assertion that made me seem ludicrously careless, when I had in fact written accurately that the man had been ‘linked to the CIA’.
When this book was first published, Hoover loyalists even attempted to contest the undoubted fact that Hoover failed to tackle organized crime until forced to do so late in his career. For those who need further convincing, I offer comments by three authorities, two of them senior FBI veterans.
Thomas Sheer, a Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s criminal division in New York in 1983, after Hoover’s death, spoke of the daunting side of the Mafia threat at that time. ‘We had to take a different approach,’ he said, ‘because of the enormous strength of organized crime in this area. I candidly believe the end result will be devastating for the five families, but it also raises questions about what the FBI has been doing for sixty years …’