The agent who led the break-in, Donald Downes, later recalled how Donovan protested to the White House – to little avail. ‘No President,’ one of his aides commented, ‘dare touch John Edgar Hoover. They are all scared pink of him.’ ‘We had taken all imaginable precautions,’ Downes lamented, ‘all except one – the possibility of betrayal by someone high enough in the American government to know what we were doing.’
Edgar’s relations with William Stephenson, a staunch Donovan supporter, had sunk to an all-time low. Edgar sent an aide to whisper in the ear of Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, a man with little affection for the British, that one of Stephenson’s men was using smear tactics to try to force his removal from office.
Former MI-6 official A. M. Ross-Smith, the controller of the accused agent, said decades later that Edgar’s allegation had been ‘completely untrue – absolute balls. It originated with a paid informant, a German-American who made up the story just to please his FBI paymasters. Hoover was just using it to further his own ambitions.’
False or not, the episode mushroomed into a high-level international row. The British ambassador, Lord Halifax, was summoned to a meeting with Berle and Attorney General Biddle. Edgar was not satisfied even when the ‘offending’ English official hastily left the country. It was impossible, he insisted, to continue working with the British. ‘Does J. Edgar,’ sighed William Stephenson around this time, ‘think he’s fighting on Bunker Hill against us Redcoats? Or has he heard of Pearl Harbor?’
For all their differences, circumstances forced the intelligence warlords to coexist. Donovan turned the OSS into a brilliant success, especially in Europe, and Stephenson labored on in New York.5 With internal security and Latin American intelligence to handle, Edgar had more than enough on his plate. According to one qualified source, however, he found time to dream of a different kind of glory.
J. Edgar Nichols, son of Edgar’s close aide Lou Nichols, was to recall his father reminiscing about a fantastic scheme. ‘Mr Hoover, my father and a third man whose name I don’t know developed a plan to go behind German lines and assassinate Hitler. They actually presented this plan to the White House, and it got bucked to the State Department, and they got taken to task by Secretary of State Hull. What they had in mind was a three-man assassination team, and my father talked as though he and Mr Hoover somehow hoped to take part themselves. My understanding is that this was no joke – they really did hope something would come of it.’
If Edgar was yearning for a new chance to play center stage, he got it. Suddenly, at the height of his squabbles with Donovan and the British, fate delivered a spectacular burst of favorable publicity. At midnight on June 13, 1942, a German submarine surfaced off Amagansett, at the eastern end of Long Island. It disgorged four men laden with arms, explosives and cash – German saboteurs with orders to cause havoc in factories vital to the war effort, and panic in the population. The team might have succeeded had its leader not betrayed the operation almost at once. That inconvenient truth, which would have made nonsense of Edgar’s propaganda, was suppressed.
The leader of the commandos, thirty-nine-year-old George Dasch, had lived in the United States for many years before the war. On his return to Germany, it seems, he quickly lost faith in the Nazi regime. During training for the American mission, he seemed less than zealous and oddly disinterested in sabotage techniques. He saw his role, he was to say in a memoir after the war, as ensuring that the mission misfired.
That nearly happened without his help. The Germans ran into a lone Coast Guardsman on the beach, then let him go after thrusting money into his hand to keep quiet. By the time he raised the alarm, however, the Germans had vanished, leaving equipment and explosives behind in a poorly concealed cache.
The FBI joined the search for the saboteurs within hours, and Edgar rushed to see Attorney General Francis Biddle. ‘His eyes were bright,’ Biddle recalled, ‘his jaw set, excitement flickering around the edge of his nostrils.’ The rest was a great FBI success story – or so it appeared to the public.
Two weeks later, Edgar called a victorious press conference to announce that eight would-be saboteurs, including a second group seized in Florida, had been caught. He appeared regularly at the military tribunal that followed. Lloyd Cutler, a member of the prosecution team and long afterwards counsel to President Jimmy Carter, thought Edgar carried himself ‘like a general, very much in control of his troops, the agents. We were handed the case prepared by the FBI, and Hoover kept us at arm’s length from his men.’
All the commandos were sentenced to death, and six of them went to the electric chair. Edgar recommended the sentences be carried out, and personally organized the executions. Only two of the Germans, George Dasch and a comrade named Ernst Burger, had their sentences commuted to long jail terms.
Thirty years later, Edgar would still be talking of the case as one of his ‘most important accomplishments.’ As late as 1979, a bronze marker commemorating the capture was placed in a Justice Department hallway. In fact, as Edgar well knew, the FBI’s role had been negligible.
Far from being tracked down by intrepid Bureau agents, Dasch had deliberately betrayed his fellow saboteurs. He began by phoning the FBI in New York and identifying himself as ‘Franz Daniel Pastorius,’ the German code name for the operation. He said he had just arrived from Germany, would shortly have valuable information to deliver to J. Edgar Hoover and asked that Washington be informed.
Even then, the Bureau nearly blew it. The agent who took Dasch’s call responded by exclaiming, ‘Yesterday, Napoleon called!’ and slamming down the telephone. No one passed the word to Washington as Dasch had requested.
He did, however, give himself up to the FBI in Washington, and provided the Bureau with all the information necessary to locate his fellow saboteurs. He was acting, he explained, with the full knowledge of his comrade Ernst Burger. Later, he recalled, FBI agents asked him to plead guilty but keep quiet about his dealings with the Bureau, on the assurance of a presidential pardon within months. Instead, he languished in jail for five years, and was deported after the war.
U.S. Army Intelligence, meanwhile, believed Edgar’s arrest of the saboteurs had been premature and had wrecked plans to intercept other raiders expected to land a few weeks later. ‘Secretary of War Stimson was absolutely furious,’ recalled Lloyd Cutler. ‘Hoover grabbed all the glory. He just wanted headlines.’
He got them, and the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended that he be awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, normally awarded only to those who had performed valiantly in battle. Although Edgar sent a stream of fawning notes of thanks to his supporters on Capitol Hill, the idea was dropped. On July 25, however, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his arrival at the Justice Department, he was celebrating anyway. Edgar posed beside a giant postcard of congratulations and sat for color photographs – still a novelty in those days – with Clyde at his elbow.
Then Edgar went off on yet another vacation with Clyde, cheered by anniversary congratulations from the President himself. Edgar responded with a gushing letter, telling Roosevelt the years under his leadership had been ‘some of the happiest years of my life.’ ‘You may rest assured,’ he wrote, ‘that you may continue to count upon all of us at the FBI …’
The truth behind the formal flattery was very different. For a long time now, Edgar had been snooping on the President’s wife.
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‘If there had been a Mr Hoover in the first half of the first century, A.D., can you imagine what he would have put into his files about a certain trouble-maker from Nazareth, his moral attitudes and the people he consorted with?’
New York Times reader’s letter, 1970
Edgar and Clyde loathed Eleanor Roosevelt. One of the reasons he never married, Edgar liked to say, was that ‘God made a woman like Eleanor Roosevelt.’ He called her the ‘old hoot owl’ and mimicked her high voice in front of senior colleagues. Mrs Roosevelt was in her late fifties in World War II, and she wa
s not physically attractive. While her husband sought solace with other women, contemporaries wondered about Eleanor’s passionate friendships outside the White House – some with women known to be lesbians. Edgar sniggered about these things behind the First Lady’s back.
‘The President,’ he told an aide on his return from a White House meeting, ‘says the old bitch is going through the change of life … we’ll just have to put up with her.’ He once descended unexpectedly on W. C. Fields, the comedian, asking to see certain ‘interesting pictures.’ Fields did, indeed, have three trompe l’oeil miniatures of the President’s wife. The right way up, they were ordinary pictures. Upside down, they were grotesque anatomical views of a woman’s vagina. Edgar thought them hilariously funny, and took them away with him.
It was Mrs Roosevelt’s politics, though, that Edgar could not abide. She was deeply committed to a host of liberal causes, more deeply – many thought – than a woman of her era should have been. Above all, she campaigned persistently for decent housing and fair treatment of America’s black citizens – and that really rankled Edgar. He once watched, glowering, at the Mayflower Hotel when she attempted to bring two black men into the restaurant. Told of rumors that black women in the South were joining ‘Eleanor Roosevelt Clubs,’ he ordered agents to investigate.
‘Whenever a black would speak out,’ said William Sullivan, ‘he attributed it to Mrs Roosevelt.’ ‘Hoover called her a nigger lover, and worse,’ recalled Clyde’s friend Edna Daulyton. ‘Clyde felt the same. He said she should mind her own business and not stick her nose into her husband’s affairs. He said the White House was wide open to the wrong kind of people.’
Mrs Roosevelt sometimes invited potential embarrassment because, as her husband’s biographer Ted Morgan put it, she was ‘a soft touch.’ In her pursuit of liberal causes she bumped up against Communists and radicals, and plain oddballs, and seemed to think the President’s wife could do so with impunity.
Edgar, who had long since infiltrated the Communist Party, was told what Mrs Roosevelt had supposedly said about him to a Communist friend. ‘Now you see what a bastard Hoover is,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘That’s how he covers up his Fascist attitude. You should have seen Franklin … He said this was just another proof of the duplicity of that smug would-be-Himmler.’
Such reports made Edgar even angrier. As late as 1960, he would still be speaking of the widowed Eleanor as ‘really dangerous.’ According to former agent G. Gordon Liddy, ‘He attributed a lot of the leftish positions that President Roosevelt took to her malevolent influence. He said he was often able to solve problems he had with Communists only after he learned they originated with Eleanor Roosevelt. Then he would go to her husband – and Roosevelt would overrule Eleanor in Hoover’s favor.’
What survives of Edgar’s file on the First Lady is 449 pages long. While Edgar was alive it sat in one of two large file cabinets behind Miss Gandy’s desk, one of the supersensitive files that were kept separate from the main system. Some former aides say they were so placed to restrict access to a handful of senior staff – thus protecting the subjects of the files, many of them prominent public figures. Many, however, believe the files were a storehouse of human foibles, ammunition for actual or potential blackmail.
Mrs Roosevelt got wind of Edgar’s temerity in January 1941, when she learned FBI agents had investigated both her social secretary, Edith Helm, and a second aide, Malvina Thompson. The agents had probed deep into the private lives of the women, asking questions of Thompson’s neighbors, interrogating desk clerks about comings and goings at her hotel room. They even grilled people in Helm’s hometown in Illinois.
When Mrs Roosevelt protested, Edgar tried to brush her off with a smooth reply. The check on Mrs Helm was a routine one, he insisted, undertaken because the woman worked for a committee linked to the Council for National Defense. There would have been no investigation, he said, had the FBI known the women worked for the President’s wife. Unimpressed, for both women were well known in Washington, the First Lady fired off another letter.
‘I do not wonder,’ she wrote this time, ‘that we are beginning to get an extremely jittery population … This type of investigation seems to me to smack too much of the Gestapo methods.’ Edgar had to apologize, but the long-term effect was probably to inflame him even more against Mrs Roosevelt. Word of the episode had flashed around Washington – and to humiliate Edgar was to make him more dangerous.
Scholarship in later years gave some credence to the notion that the President’s wife had a secret sex life. Her 1992 biographer, Blanche Cook, suggested she may have had physical relationships with Earl Miller, the state trooper who served as her bodyguard, and with Lorena Hickok, the lesbian reporter who covered the White House for the Associated Press. No one has gone so far as Edgar, who suspected Mrs Roosevelt of having affairs with several men, including her black driver, an Army colonel, her doctor and two leaders of the National Maritime Union.
The two labor leaders, both former sailors, used to joke about cultivating the First Lady to gain access to the President. ‘Goddamn it, Blackie,’ one was overheard saying to the other on an FBI bug, ‘I’ve made enough sacrifices. Next time you service the old bitch!’
This was almost certainly no more than a coarse joke, but Edgar took it seriously. Here was promising material – information suggesting that the President’s wife was sleeping with two labor leaders, one of them a leading member of the Communist Party. Edgar sent the President a cascade of reports on the two men, but kept the sex angle to himself. Then, at the height of the war, he began to concentrate on one of Eleanor’s left-wing male friends – Joseph Lash.
Lash was thirty when he met Eleanor, then fifty-five, at a 1939 session of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Lash was not a Communist, but a fervent anti-Fascist who had visited the Soviet Union and Spain during the Civil War, then returned to become a radical student leader. To Edgar he was a subversive who deserved investigation. Eleanor, however, took Lash under her wing, invited him to meet the President at the White House, lent him money and tried to further his career.
On Edgar’s orders, FBI officials prepared an eleven-page memorandum on Lash in 1941. The following January, agents broke into the New York headquarters of the American Youth Congress, of which Lash was a leader, and photographed the First Lady’s correspondence with the group’s officials. The same month, when Lash’s application to join the Navy was turned down, Mrs Roosevelt wrote to Attorney General Biddle.
‘I wonder,’ she asked, ‘if it would be possible for you to run down for me through the Federal Bureau of Investigation … what they really have on Joe Lash.’ Biddle referred the inquiry to Edgar, who replied smoothly that ‘the FBI is conducting no investigation.’ This was a common Bureau circumlocution. In Bureauspeak, the collection of information was different from a full inquiry. In fact, Edgar’s closest aides had been discussing Lash with the naval authorities.
Drafted instead into the Army, Lash spent the weeks that followed with Mrs Roosevelt clucking solicitously around him. She paid for champagne and the band at Lash’s farewell party in New York. Edgar took note of all this, and of the fact that Lash stayed in White House accommodations when on leave from his base near Washington.
By November 1942, Edgar was sending ‘extremely confidential’ information – its nature still censored in a document released by the FBI in 1990 – to a general in Army Intelligence. The next month, following an FBI burglary at the offices of the International Student Service, an FBI report referred to Lash and Eleanor Roosevelt and their ‘unusual friendship.’ ‘This,’ one of Edgar’s aides wrote, ‘is nauseating.’
In April 1943, when Lash had been posted to Illinois, Edgar sent more information to the military authorities, specifically to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. Then, three months later, on instructions from the White House, the corps was drastically reduced in numbers and merged with another unit. By 1944, it had been virtually dismantled. Why?
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The answer lies in a two-page report sent to Edgar’s office on December 31, 1943, and stored ever since in his files. It was from Agent George Burton, reporting on contacts with two counterintelligence colonels. The unit’s surveillance of Lash, Burton reported, had covered his meeting with Mrs Roosevelt at a hotel in Chicago. The President himself had found out and summoned General Strong of Army Intelligence to the White House with the relevant records. ‘The material,’ Agent Burton reported,
contained a recording of the entire proceedings between Lash and Mrs Roosevelt which had been obtained through a microphone which had been planted in the hotel room. This recording indicated quite clearly that Mrs Roosevelt and Lash engaged in sexual intercourse during their stay in the hotel room … After this record was played Mrs Roosevelt was called into the conference and was confronted with the information and this resulted in a terrific fight between the President and Mrs Roosevelt. At approximately 5:00 A.M. the next morning the President called for General Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, and … ordered him to have Lash outside the United States and on his way to a combat post within ten hours … It was learned that the President had ordered that anybody who knew anything about this case should be immediately relieved of his duties and sent to the South Pacific for action against the laps until they were killed …
Today it is difficult, if not impossible, to ferret out the truth behind this astonishing document. It is peppered with inaccuracies, and other surviving documents fall short of establishing for sure whether or not Eleanor Roosevelt had an affair with Joe Lash. The file shows that the Army’s sleuths, who regularly opened Lash’s mail, discovered he was receiving a stream of letters from both Mrs Roosevelt and a fellow radical, Trude Pratt. Pratt, then still married to another man, was going through a complicated courtship with Lash, with intimate encouragement from the President’s wife.