Years later, long after Chaplin had settled in Switzerland, Edgar kept him on the Security Index, the list of those to be arrested in case of a national emergency. As late as 1972, when the actor was invited to Los Angeles to receive a special Oscar, Edgar was to lobby against granting him an entry visa. Chaplin was admitted, and received a rapturous welcome. His FBI file is 1,900 pages long.
In 1975, three years after Edgar’s death, a congressional committee would order a detailed check on the domestic security files of the ten largest FBI offices. This indicated that no less than 19 percent of the Bureau’s total effort was still devoted to hunting ‘subversives.’ Yet criminal conduct was discovered in only four out of 19,700 investigations – and none of those involved national security, espionage or terrorism.
In the fall of 1947, President Truman watched what Edgar was doing, and worried. ‘Dear Bess,’ he wrote to his wife after a crisis in the Secret Service:
… I am sure glad the Secret Service is doing a better job. I was worried about that situation. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all Congressmen and Senators are afraid of him. I’m not and he knows it. If I can prevent it, there’ll be no NKVD or Gestapo in this country. Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start towards a citizen spy system. Not for me …
Lots of love,
Harry
In 1948, an election year, the Republican Party leadership hoped to return to the White House after fifteen years in the wilderness. Edgar, who so often declared himself above politics, found a way to help them undermine the President – by stirring up new panic about the Red enemy within.
The game this time, which could not have been played without Edgar’s collaboration, was to expose alleged Communists high in the Truman administration.
It started in July 1948, when a woman the press called the ‘blond spy queen’ appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee. This was Elizabeth Bentley, a plump, middle-aged former Communist whose lover, now dead, had been a known tool of the Soviets.
Bentley said she had acted as a courier from 1938 to 1944, passing sensitive information from high-level sources in Washington to superiors in the Communist underground. The high-level sources, Bentley alleged, had included a senior aide to President Roosevelt and two officials in the Truman administration, William Remington at Commerce, and Harry Dexter White, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
Four days later, before that sensation had died down, came the testimony of Time editor Whittaker Chambers. He too was a former Communist, and his startling claim is debated to this day.
Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a distinguished former State Department official, was also a secret Communist, one of several in a cell formed specifically to infiltrate the government. Hiss denied the charge, but Chambers produced a mass of classified documents that, he claimed, Hiss had passed to him.
Whatever the truth of the Bentley-Chambers allegations, the brutal outcome was that many lives were ruined, and four men died. White was felled by a heart attack after defending himself passionately before the committee. William Remington was bludgeoned to death in prison after being convicted of perjury. Laurence Duggan, a former State Department official smeared by Chambers, died in an unexplained fall from the sixteenth floor of a New York office building. Marvin Smith, a Justice Department attorney involved in the Hiss case, committed suicide, and Chambers himself tried to.
Alger Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury – the jury believed he lied when he said he had not passed documents to Chambers. He served three and a half years in prison and protested his innocence until his death, aged 92, in 1996.1
Edgar’s attitude to White and Hiss had been distinctly downbeat – until it became timely to embarrass President Truman. The Director had known about the Hiss allegation as early as 1942, and had dismissed it then as ‘either history, hypothesis, or deduction.’ Elizabeth Bentley’s trips to Washington, supposedly to pick up secrets from traitors, had gone unchallenged for years, in spite of the fact that Jacob Golos, her lover – a long-exposed Communist operative – was a prime target for FBI surveillance.
In 1948, when White’s possible guilt became a public issue, former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau asked Edgar privately whether he thought White was guilty. Morgenthau’s son, the future New York District Attorney, kept his father’s contemporaneous note of Edgar’s response, scribbled on an old envelope. Edgar’s opinion, according to the note, was that there was ‘nothing to it.’
Edgar knew, but did not mention publicly, that the key source in the entire espionage investigation, Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, had specifically said White was not one of the American traitors. Yet it was reportedly Edgar who leaked the White allegations in the first place, by feeding information to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He did so through his aide Lou Nichols, a man so adept at passing information for Edgar that he became known as ‘the cleanest leak in Washington.’
Alger Hiss was sent to jail on the basis of only one piece of hard evidence: a Woodstock typewriter said to produce type that matched both the copies of official documents produced by Chambers and letters known to have been typed on the Hiss family typewriter. Hiss, backed by some of the expert witnesses, claimed the machine was doctored specifically in order to frame him.
We may never know whether Edgar did stoop to such tactics to set up an innocent man. But documents now available show that, in 1960, he was open to the notion of using forgery to neutralize a Communist Party member by ‘exposing’ him to colleagues, fraudulently, as an FBI informer. His only admonition to his agents was to make certain the deception ‘insures success and avoids embarrassment to the Bureau.’
Told that the scheme involved typewriter forgery, Edgar raised only a mild objection, but not to the idea itself. ‘To alter a typewriter to match a known model,’ he advised, ‘would take a large amount of typewriter specimens and weeks of laboratory work.’
Whether the FBI framed Hiss or not, it is clear that milking the affair for political purposes meant more to Edgar than seeing justice done. He had been working covertly to leak the accusations as early as 1945, long before Chambers went public. The word was spread first by William Sullivan, then one of Edgar’s favored officials, in briefings to a right-wing Catholic priest, Father John Cronin.
Sullivan, significantly, was the man to whom Edgar would one day entrust COINTELPRO, a program specifically designed to discredit and harass targeted groups by all means available, including forgery of documents.2
Father Cronin, for his part, reportedly passed on the Hiss allegations, first in a report to America’s Catholic bishops, and, in 1947, to Congressman Richard Nixon. Nixon said in a recent interview that ‘the FBI and Hoover played no role whatsoever in the Hiss case thing. Hoover was loyal to Truman … There was no way that he was going to have his boys running about helping the Committee.’
According to Father Cronin, however, Nixon got constant feedback, thanks to FBI agent Ed Hummer. Hummer ‘would call me every day,’ Cronin recalled. ‘I told Dick [Nixon], who then knew where to look for things …’ The FBI file, meanwhile, confirms out of Nixon’s own mouth what he denied forty years later. In December 1948, at a secret meeting in his hotel room, he told agents he had ‘worked very closely with the Bureau and with Mr Nichols during the last year’ on the Hiss case.
Long before the Hiss case, Nichols had become a familiar face in the office of another Republican member of the Un-American Activities Committee, Congressman Karl Mundt of South Dakota.3 Mundt was also close to Edgar. ‘They had private dinners together,’ his former assistant Robert McGaughey recalled, ‘and they belonged to the same poker club. The Senator always said to me, “If there’s anything you want brought up, we’ll discuss it over the game tonight.”’4
Edgar fed Mundt information on Hiss from 1945 onward, McGaughey revealed. During the intense 1948 phase, he said, ‘Nichols was up in the office, say, twice a day … There was a lot of exchange o
f suggestions, coming from Mr Hoover more than from Mr Mundt, letting us know where to look for information.’
Was Mundt given access to FBI files? ‘Files? Yeah,’ said McGaughey. ‘Let’s put it this way. He had access to see information that was in the files Mr Hoover had. This was a personal relationship.’
Edgar found a way to cover himself. If a politician asked to see an FBI file, he would promptly write denying access. McGaughey revealed, however, that the agent who handcarried the negative reply to Capitol Hill would simultaneously pass on the information requested, sometimes verbally, sometimes typed on plain, untraceable paper. The file copy of the denial, meanwhile, would be preserved at headquarters, ‘proof’ that the request had been turned down. Other evidence of connivance with conservative politicians was simply destroyed.
From post-Communist Moscow, and from previously unavailable US intelligence files, has come conflicting information. Over the past half-dozen years, some academics – mostly American – have said their analysis of all the evidence convinced them of Hiss’ guilt. By contrast, over the past two decades, others – not only former Soviet intelligence officials but US historians – have insisted that the evidence thus far unearthed does no such thing. At a 2007 symposium, two writers postulated – based on the known movements of American officials – that another diplomat named Wilder Foote, not Hiss, had been the spy.
President Truman, who never believed Hiss was guilty, had no doubt as to what the case had really been about. ‘What they were trying to do, all those birds,’ Truman was to say years later, ‘they were trying to get the Democrats. They were trying to get me out of the White House, and they were willing to go to any lengths to do it. [The Republicans] had been out of office a long time, and they’d done everything to get back in. They did do just about anything they could think of, all that witch-hunting … The Constitution has never been in such danger …’
For all the scare-mongering, only four American Communists would be convicted of espionage offenses while Edgar was Director of the FBI.5
Edgar’s priority in 1948 was to secure his power base by helping to get Harry Truman out of the White House. That spring, over hot dogs at Yankee Stadium, Edgar talked privately about the coming election with the journalist Walter Winchell. ‘He said he was upset with Truman,’ recalled Winchell’s assistant Herman Klurfeld. ‘The President had restricted his power, and he resented it. He thought Truman should be replaced by someone else.’
Edgar climbed onto the bandwagon of the candidate most likely to dislodge Truman, that of Republican Thomas Dewey. It was six years now since the FBI had started collecting information on Dewey, and the signals had been mixed. During the last campaign, agents had learned, Dewey had said privately that the right place for Edgar was a jail cell.
Later reports were more positive, and in 1948, according to William Sullivan, Edgar was dreaming of political advancement under a President Dewey. As the primary campaign began, he secretly placed Bureau resources at Dewey’s disposal.
‘With the help of the FBI,’ Sullivan recalled, ‘Hoover believed Dewey couldn’t lose … In exchange for his help, the Director believed that when Dewey became President he would name Hoover as his Attorney General and make Nichols Director of the FBI. To complete the master plan, Tolson would become Hoover’s assistant. It would have been a nice setup, because with Nichols at the helm, Hoover would have had the FBI as tightly under his control as if he had never left … Hoover’s ambitions didn’t stop at the Justice Department. If he couldn’t be President, Hoover thought it would be fitting if he were named to the Supreme Court, and he planned to make his term as Attorney General a steppingstone to that end.’
Dewey accepted Edgar’s help, Sullivan claimed, and agents assembled briefing papers to help Dewey prepare for his broadcast debate with his primary opponent, Harold Stassen. ‘There was such a rush to get the material to him,’ said Sullivan, ‘that it was sent in a private plane to Albany, New York … The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman … We resurrected the President’s former association with Tom Pendergast, political czar of Kansas City, and tried to create the impression that Truman was too ignorant to deal with the emerging Communist threat. We even prepared studies for Dewey which were released under his name, as if he and his staff had done the work. I worked on some of these projects myself.’
Edgar became seriously ill with pneumonia that fall and was in Miami Beach recuperating on Election Day, November 2, 1948. Clyde and Lou Nichols had been telling him what most people believed, that Dewey was sure to win. The next day the Chicago Tribune ran its famous headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, only to be confounded by news that the opposite had happened. Truman was back in the White House.6
‘A heavy gloom settled over the Bureau,’ Sullivan recalled. From Florida, Edgar sent a furious memorandum blaming Nichols for having ‘pushed me out on a limb.’ Edgar, said Sullivan, ‘never could admit that he had made a mistake.’
Yet on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1949, Edgar was still Director of the FBI. He invited the twenty-one-year-old actress Shirley Temple, whom he had known since her days as a child star, to join him on his office balcony to watch the parade pass along Pennsylvania Avenue. Wearing what Temple recalls as ‘his best Santa Claus smile,’ Edgar gave her a present – a tear-gas gun disguised as a fountain pen.
Edgar had survived, but he could never feel safe. Always, whatever his other worries might be, there loomed the threat of his own sexuality.
17
‘It is almost impossible to overestimate Mr Hoover’s sensitivity to criticism of himself or the FBI. It went far beyond the bounds of natural resentment to criticism one feels unfair. The most casual statement, the most strained implication, was sufficient cause for Mr Hoover to write a memorandum to the Attorney General complaining, and impugning the integrity of its author.’
Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General
Records now available show that in March 1949 details of Edgar’s private life reached President Truman. A high Democratic official – his name is censored out of the document – noted in his journal that a colleague (name also deleted):
gave me some very bad news about J. Edgar Hoover. I hope it is only gossip. Geo. [perhaps Truman’s confidant George Allen] suggests I see the President alone.
The ‘bad news’ was very probably about Edgar’s homosexuality. ‘One time,’ Truman confided to the author Merle Miller, ‘they brought me a lot of stuff about his personal life, and I told them I didn’t give a damn about that … That wasn’t my business … I said to him, “Edgar, I don’t care what a man does in his free time: all that interests me is what he does while he’s on his job.”’
The President was justifiably angry, three months later, when he received an FBI report on the heterosexual adventures of two of his own aides. Charlie Ross, his Press Secretary and friend, had supposedly ‘chased a couple of gals around the deck’ during a boat trip. The same report raked up a youthful love affair of Dave Niles’, his trusted Administrative Assistant. ‘Being a victim of Cupid,’ Truman snorted at a Cabinet meeting, ‘is not being a victim of Moscow propaganda.’
Here was the President of the United States being bothered with FBI gossip about his aides’ dalliances with women, when he had just been briefed on Edgar’s own behavior. In Edgar’s case, by comparison, there was at least cause for concern. A homosexual FBI Director, in charge of the nation’s internal security, was a classic target for any hostile intelligence service – especially that of the Soviet Union.
That same month, June 1949, saw Edgar publicly humiliated over the case of Judith Coplon, a young Justice Department employee accused of giving information to the Soviets. Coplon had been caught meeting a Soviet diplomat while carrying a purse stuffed full of summaries of FBI reports. Then, to Edgar’s horror, the judge at her trial ruled that, to establish the authenticity of the material found in her purse, the FBI would have to release th
e originals of the documents.
This would be the first time that raw FBI files had ever been made public, and Edgar was worried not because they contained super-secret data, but because they were a mishmash of unchecked tittle-tattle. Edgar protested, right up to the President, but in vain. The documents were produced in court, and proved as embarrassing as Edgar had feared.
It emerged that, even during the trial, the FBI had been bugging privileged conversations between Coplon and her attorney. Agents had then hastily destroyed the resulting records and disks, in a cover-up that could only have happened with Edgar’s approval. During those weeks, which Edgar would recall as ‘pretty rough going,’ Truman came as close as he ever would to firing his FBI Director.
Edgar was not used to taking knocks, and certainly not in the glare of national publicity. The Coplon debacle came just weeks after he and Clyde, resplendent in white suits and waist-deep in gladioli, had held court at celebrations marking his silver anniversary as Director. Now, brought down a peg or two by a blast of criticism, Edgar felt deeply insecure. At fifty-four, the paranoia in him had long since excluded the possibility that he himself could be wrong about anything.
Edgar’s list of perceived enemies was expanding. Now he would take on liberals, the Church, even the publishing industry, with a venom. He was enraged by an article in Harper’s Magazine that fall, in which the historian Bernard De Voto said the FBI reports uncovered by the Coplon case were ‘as irresponsible as the chatter of somewhat retarded children.’ A furious Edgar called for information on De Voto, and his aides knew how to please him. They solemnly reported a flaw in the Pulitzer winner’s personality. De Voto, they declared, exhibited the ‘Harvard intellectual liberal attitude, devoid of practicality …’