‘I like a country,’ De Voto had written, ‘where it’s nobody’s damned business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where what we say does not go into the FBI files along with a note from S-17 that I may have another wife in California … We had that kind of country only a little while ago, and I’m for getting it back. It was a lot less scared than the one we’ve got now.’
There was now concern about the FBI on college campuses. At Yale, a student magazine reported, FBI agents were influencing academic appointments by feeding the Provost with derogatory information on teachers. A distinguished physicist, Professor Henry Margenau, had been berated by agents for addressing a youth group of which the Bureau disapproved. He had knuckled under, and now consulted the local FBI office before accepting speech invitations.
William F. Buckley, Jr., future right-wing pundit, then editor of The Yale Daily News, played a leading role in the furor that followed these revelations. In secret, he sent the FBI blind copies of his letters on the subject to fellow student journalists, and suppressed a letter to the News from a student editor at Harvard. Edgar’s master of propaganda, Lou Nichols, promptly identified Buckley as a future ally.
While Edgar denied that his agents had infiltrated Yale, the record shows that there was an FBI ‘liaison officer’ in the university. Today it is known that the Bureau opened files on thousands of teachers, throughout the education system. ‘The entire teaching profession,’ University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins would soon declare, ‘is now intimidated.’
The fear was usually generated, as at Yale, by quiet interrogations of radicals, FBI whisperings to college officials, followed by discreet firings. There was nothing quiet about the fuss a few years later, when Professor Howard Higman, a sociology teacher at the University of Colorado, made the mistake of mocking Edgar personally.
The episode began when one of the professor’s students, a former Miss America named Marilyn Van Derbur, used Edgar’s book Masters of Deceit to contradict the professor’s thesis that the Soviets would have been able to build the Bomb anyway, without help from American Communists. Higman responded by scoffing at Hoover’s book and saying he ‘disapproved of the rise in the United States of a political police …’ Told of this by an informant, Edgar retaliated by triggering a nationwide flood of stories and letters denouncing the professor.
In 1991, when he obtained his partially censored FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, the professor was astounded to find that it totaled some 6,000 pages, covered many years and included investigations not only of him but of his children. ‘Can’t we set a fire under the University of Colorado,’ Edgar had written, ‘for having such a character on its faculty?’ ‘We need to meet some of these academic punks in their own back yard,’ wrote an aide, and an FBI official flew to Colorado to give a ‘forceful’ lecture to Higman’s students and colleagues.
‘I was wrong to have said the FBI was a political police,’ the professor commented. ‘I’ve discovered since it is a church. That you don’t contradict J. Edgar Hoover, because he’s infallible.’
It is now known that, in the fifties and sixties, the FBI penetrated more than fifty colleges and universities. It obtained the collaboration of many senior academics, including at various times the presidents of Yale and Princeton and the dean of students at Harvard, to identify and oust faculty members thought to be Communist or of the extreme Left.
Not even men of religion were safe from Edgar’s punitive hand. In Brooklyn, at the Church of the Holy Trinity, the Reverend William Melish and his father drew heavy rightwing criticism for promoting American–Soviet friendship. The FBI, Melish recalled, soon found an insidious way to chastise him. ‘The headmaster of the Polytechnic Preparatory School, where I had gone as a boy, was the secretary of the parish. A number of “Poly Boys” were in the FBI, and they were deliberately sent to call on the headmaster about me. They tried to persuade him that he should do something about getting rid of me. Almost every member of the vestry at one point or another was pressured by the FBI … One of my sermons at Holy Trinity, in which I accused the FBI of invading religious freedom, was sent to J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had it sent to all his bureaus. He personally thanked the informant …’
Melish and his father were eventually driven out of their church, in spite of the overwhelming support of their parishioners. It would be twenty years before the younger Melish had a kind of consolation, when he was asked to return as assisting priest.
Some people, it is said, pull the blinds down over their minds when they reach their fifties. Edgar fitted the stereotype, with the difference that he institutionalized the failing. Those who criticized the Bureau were subject to investigation. Those who found fault with Edgar himself suffered his fury, the fury of a man with 3,000 agents and huge financial resources at his disposal.
In the summer and fall of 1950, Edgar abused his power in an outrageous attempt to stifle free speech. It began when he learned that William Sloane Associates, the New York publishing house, was shortly to publish a book on the FBI by Max Lowenthal, a personal friend of President Truman’s. Lowenthal had been squirreling away documentation on the FBI and its Director since the late twenties, when he had been Secretary of the National Commission on Law Enforcement. What he had learned worried him, and now he was bringing forth a 500-page critique.
Edgar’s machinations to crush the book began the moment he learned of its existence. He asked his friend Morris Ernst, a prominent New York attorney, to sabotage the book by approaching the publisher behind the scenes. Correspondence shows the FBI was assailing the book’s ‘distortions, half-truths and incomplete details’ long before publication.
Lowenthal’s son, John, believed he knew how Edgar knew of his father’s book before it came out. The family home, he said, was raided by burglars who ‘seemed more interested in going through my father’s papers than in his possessions.’
In September, as if spontaneously, Republican Congressman George Dondero delivered a ten-minute diatribe against Lowenthal in the House. Dondero was one of Edgar’s stable of tame congressmen, a man who could be relied upon to do the Director’s bidding – in this case to smear Lowenthal for alleged Communist connections. Next came a sudden summons for the author to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The record of the hearing was leaked to the FBI’s friends in the press in November, the day before the Lowenthal book was published. When the book received a favorable review, another of Edgar’s political friends, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, rose in the Senate to lambaste the reviewer.
The personal files of Edgar’s propaganda chief Louis Nichols, long locked away in steel file cabinets in the Nichols family garage, demolish Edgar’s denials that he spoon-fed confidential information to members of Congress. On occasion, Edgar even wrote their speeches for them.
The Nichols files contain an original draft of Congressman Dondero’s denunciation of Lowenthal. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, the speech made by the Congressman merely parroted a diatribe prepared at the FBI on plain paper, without signature. It is the cover note, apparently from Nichols to Edgar, that gives the game away:
I am attaching a documentation to the details on Max Lowenthal … I checked every reference to Lowenthal in the Bureau. You will observe that several items were obtained from technicals. I feel safe in using these because of the phraseology used in each instance. In many instances, it is the only way we can tie Lowenthal in with some of these buzzards … If you approve the matter as it now stands, you could just tell Miss Gandy to pass the word to me that the project is O.K. … You may destroy the old copy I sent you …
‘Technicals’ was current Bureau jargon to describe wiretaps. Lowenthal’s FBI file shows that agents had been collecting information on him for nearly thirty years, and had tapped his phone for extended periods. Other material now being used to smear Lowenthal, Nichols told Edgar, had been obtained thanks to a ‘black bag job’
– an illegal burglary. Handwritten notes indicate that Edgar himself edited and approved the final FBI draft that was given to Dondero to read.
Lowenthal’s book sold badly, though not necessarily because of the attacks in Congress. Such criticism can boost sales rather than limit them. ‘One of our objectives was to kill the sale,’ William Sullivan revealed years later. ‘We even went to some stores and asked them not to stock it … We spent an enormous amount of time and taxpayers’ money.’
At the White House, President Truman had ignored a long and plaintive letter from Edgar about Lowenthal – a letter in which he craftily avoided mentioning that the offending book was all about the FBI. Truman, who had already seen the book in manuscript, merely sent Edgar’s letter on to Lowenthal for his entertainment. The President said he ‘got a great kick’ out of reading the book, and praised the author for his ‘wonderful service to the country.’
That was in private. Asked at a press conference whether he had read the book, Truman said he had not. He dared not show his true feelings about Edgar in public, let alone fire him. In the country at large, Edgar’s popularity was now at a new high. For a generation frightened by Soviet possession of the atom bomb, the start of the Korean war, the Rosenberg espionage affair and the recent indictments of American Communist leaders, it was easy to believe Edgar’s claims that the nation was riddled with subversives.
In the words of the then Attorney General, Howard McGrath, Edgar had ‘gotten too big to handle.’ And in the world of power politics, he had become one of the handlers.
18
‘We don’t have free speech in this country … This is grown-up politics, and it’s stupid and dangerous.’
Hubble Gardner, character in the movie The Way We Were, set in the McCarthy era
‘Listen, you bastards,’ the drunkard shouted at a group of reporters. ‘I just want you to know I’ve got a pailful of shit, and I’m going to use it where it does me the most good.’
It was February 1950, and Joseph McCarthy had just made his sensational claim that the Truman State Department was knowingly harboring more than 200 members of the Communist Party. The claim was bogus but, in an America awash with fear of Communism, the Senator from Wisconsin was about to become a hero.
Over the four years that followed, and as Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy was to play grand inquisitor, hurling wild charges at two presidents, dozens of decent officials and a parade of mostly innocent citizens. Today ‘McCarthyism’ is a word in the dictionary: ‘the use of indiscriminate, often unfounded accusations, sensationalism, inquisitorial investigative methods.’ Yet Edgar cultivated the Senator, fed him information and persisted in helping him when he ran amok.
Ten months before the fantastic accusation about the Truman State Department, Edgar had gone to the Senate Radio Room to join the forty-one-year-old McCarthy in a fifteen-minute broadcast to the people of his home state. This was a rare gesture of support for a junior politician, irreconcilable with Edgar’s supposedly nonpartisan status, and it was not publicized in Washington. Later, in the Wisconsin newspapers, Edgar endorsed McCarthy for reelection.
Edgar had been briefed on McCarthy, as he was briefed on every member of Congress. Yet when he recorded the broadcast, he praised the Senator’s previous service as a judge – praise that had to be edited out of the tape. McCarthy had recently been censured by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and came close to being disbarred as an attorney.
Edgar knew McCarthy was disreputable, yet he took him under his wing long before he became a national figure. The Senator dined with Edgar and Clyde at Harvey’s and visited the track with them on weekends. He was reportedly the only elected official allowed to use Edgar’s private box at Charles Town in West Virginia, in his absence. Edgar was ‘crazy about McCarthy,’ according to a race-going companion, former Secretary of the Democratic National Committee, George Allen.
When McCarthy was challenged to produce proof of his charges about the State Department, he phoned Edgar to ask for help. Edgar at first chided him, not because of what he had said but for the tiresomely specific way he said it. False allegations were best left rather general. Then the Director ordered a search of the files for anything that might support the Senator.
‘We were the ones,’ William Sullivan recalled, ‘who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using. I knew what we were doing. I worked on it myself. At the same time, we were telling the public we had nothing to do with it.’
Other sources, with no ax to grind, confirm it. ‘He did feed stuff to McCarthy, a great deal of it,’ said Edgar’s journalist friend Walter Trohan. ‘Joe would tell me himself that he’d got this or that from the FBI.’ Ruth Watt, chief clerk to McCarthy’s committee, later admitted having received ‘a lot of FBI reports.’
McCarthy’s first chief investigator, Donald Surine, was a former FBI agent, and so were other key staff members. The Senator’s future wife, Jean Kerr, turned to Edgar for help when McCarthy was pursuing a secretary married to an FBI agent. The agent found himself transferred, along with his wife, to Alaska.
‘Any success the FBI has had,’ Edgar was to tell the Senator in a letter, ‘is due in no small measure to the wholehearted support and cooperation we have always received from such fine friends as you.’
In 1951, as the country prepared for an election, a Republican Congressman floated the idea of Edgar as a ‘favorite son’ candidate for president. ‘What an inspiration to the youth of America!’ a Chicago citizen responded. ‘The truly great statesmen are those men with ability and leadership, combined with honesty and ideals, and to me J. Edgar Hoover is synonymous with all these attributes.’ ‘If he will run,’ wrote a Missouri businessman, ‘he will be elected by the greatest majority any President ever received.’
Instead of running for the White House, the man who claimed he was above politics became one of the kingmakers. Edgar joined himself to the clique of fabulously wealthy Americans now pushing Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon toward the White House.
On an August night, around the pool of an exclusive California hotel, Edgar discreetly circulated among the guests at a Nixon fundraiser. Though he was the host, Edgar’s role went unmentioned in the press. There were few guests, and few were necessary. ‘I think there were about twenty of us,’ recalled Barbara Coffman, one of the ‘poorer’ guests, ‘and some gal came up to us and said, “I only got a million dollars. How about you?” It was a fun party, very casual.’
Among the millionaires present were two of the wealthiest men in the world: Texan oil moguls Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson. Richardson, then aged sixty-one, was the wildcatter stereotype, a rough-tongued bachelor with a limp and a penchant for bourbon and late-night poker games. Murchison, at fifty-seven, a powerhouse of energy, was married to Virginia, his second wife, after whom he named his flagship airplane. Between them the two men had assets in excess of $700 million, not counting as much again in untapped oil reserves.
Recognizing Edgar’s influence as a national figure, the oilmen had started cultivating him in the late forties – inviting him to Texas as a houseguest, taking him on hunting expeditions. Edgar’s relations with them were to go far beyond what was proper for a Director of the FBI. And although the Murchison milieu was infested with organized crime figures, Edgar considered him ‘one of my closest friends.’
‘Money,’ the millionaire used to say, ‘is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good.’ Murchison and his Texas friends spread a great deal of dollar manure on the political terrain. They had traditionally been conservative supporters of the Democratic Party – until the presidency of Harry Truman. He enraged oilmen by publicly denouncing their tax privileges, and by vetoing bills that would have brought them even greater wealth. Murchison habitually spelled Truman’s name with a small t, to show how little he thought of him.
Murchison’s political instincts were of the far, far Right. He was a fervent
supporter of states’ rights, reportedly funded the anti-Semitic press and was a primary source of money for the American Nazi Party and its leader, Lincoln Rockwell, who considered Edgar ‘our kind of people.’1
During the Truman years, musing in private about the perfect political lineup, Edgar had named Murchison and Richardson as ideal candidates for high office – or at least as financial backers for politicians to his liking. Murchison had been obliging ever since. He threw money at Edgar’s friend Joe McCarthy, placed airplanes at the Senator’s disposal and promised him support ‘to the bitter end.’
In the 1952 presidential race, the Texans put their money – literally – on Dwight Eisenhower. Sid Richardson had flown to the general’s Paris headquarters the previous year, armed with a five-page document setting out why he should run for president. From then on the pressure never ceased. Murchison lobbied ceaselessly, little caring whether Eisenhower ran as a Democrat or a Republican, so long as he ran.
In August, at an unpublicized meeting in California, Eisenhower discussed the Democratic front-runner, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, with Edgar and Murchison. They concluded, Murchison wrote to a friend, that Stevenson would be ‘used by radicals to destroy America’s proud traditions.’ That month, in Washington, someone began spreading a rumor that the Governor was a ‘queer.’ The FBI was almost certainly behind it.
Edgar had been hostile to Stevenson since, three years earlier, he had made a mildly critical remark about Bureau efficiency. Agents had gone to work gathering derogatory material, and Edgar supplied Eisenhower with information on Stevenson’s 1949 divorce. In the spring of 1952, shortly before Stevenson’s selection by the Democrats, Edgar received a report claiming Stevenson and Bradley University president David Owen were ‘the two best-known homosexuals in the state.’ Stevenson, supposedly, was known to fellow homosexuals as Adeline.