Edgar would arrive accompanied by Clyde, always on time, always fastidiously dressed. Unlike McCarthy, he could never be persuaded to take off his jacket, until the night the Senator jokingly asked whether he had a tape recorder in his pocket. Edgar relented and ate dinner in his shirtsleeves.
Cohn brought an unpaid ‘chief consultant’ to the subcommittee, and Edgar was linked to him, too. This was David Schine, a handsome, blond twenty-six-year-old Harvard graduate who was Cohn’s constant companion – and the target of gossip that they were lovers. His hotelier father, Myer, regularly played host to Edgar and Clyde on their Christmas visits to Miami Beach.
Edgar was not deterred by the darker side of Myer Schine, who admitted to the Kefauver Committee that he had a deal with the mob for gambling operations at his hotels. He and Clyde accepted Schine’s hospitality at the Gulfstream, an exclusive set of beach apartments in Miami Beach, and at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Schine, like Murchison at La Jolla, paid the bills.
McCarthy turned up in La Jolla in 1953 as his popularity was waning. All manner of powerful people, including the President and many right-wingers, felt that enough was enough. The Senator arrived at the Del Charro in a state of disarray. He got drunk, abused hotel employees and threw his fiancée into the pool with her clothes on.
Edgar picked that moment, when other public figures were distancing themselves from McCarthy, to speak out warmly about him. ‘I view him as a friend,’ he told a local reporter. ‘Certainly he is a controversial man. He is earnest and he is honest. He has enemies. Whenever you attack Communists, Fascists, even the Ku Klux Klan, you are going to be the victim of the most extremely vicious criticism … When certain elements cease their attacks on me, I’ll know I’m slipping. McCarthy is an ex-Marine. He was an amateur boxer. He’s Irish. Combine those and you’re going to have a vigorous individual who is not going to be pushed around.’
McCarthy had begun his slide largely thanks to the arrogance of the man Edgar had sent to help him. The following summer, millions watched televised hearings revealing that, during a hunt for Communists in the military, Roy Cohn had abused congressional privilege by trying to prevent his pal Schine from being drafted. When that failed, he tried to pressure the Army to grant Schine special privileges. Cohn was forced to resign in July 1954, and McCarthy’s own ruin seemed inevitable.
He responded, once again, by running to join Edgar and Clint Murchison at La Jolla. Cohn, who came with him, was turned away at the door because he was a Jew. Murchison had a ‘No Jews’ policy at the Del Charro. No blacks were admitted, either, except servants. In between drinking bouts, McCarthy played shuffleboard with Edgar or sat talking, one arm draped around the Director’s shoulders.
If McCarthy was hoping for public support from Edgar, he was to be disappointed. Edgar had been playing a double game all along, emphasizing his role as nonpartisan FBI Director in public while giving the Senator virtually unlimited support in secret.
Meanwhile, knowing that Eisenhower detested McCarthy, Edgar told the President that the Senator’s activity was now impeding the hunt for Communists. In the Senate, he let it be known that, while he valued McCarthy’s work, he was critical of his methods. All along, he maintained the fiction that no FBI documents were being supplied to the McCarthy team.3
McCarthy kept in touch with the FBI long after the Senate set the seal on his disgrace with a formal notion of censure. Even in his last days, when he was in the terminal stages of alcoholism, he was proposing Edgar as the right man to succeed Eisenhower as President. In 1957, when McCarthy died of cirrhosis of the liver, Edgar, Roy Cohn and Richard Nixon were among the vast crowd at the funeral.
Some who knew him said McCarthy never really believed in his own anti-Communist rhetoric, that he was just a cynical opportunist. And astonishingly, given that he made it his lifetime crusade, Edgar’s zeal may have been just as hollow by the fifties. ‘Of course he wasn’t sincere,’ said William Sullivan. ‘He knew the Party didn’t amount to a damn …’
By 1956, in part thanks to unrelenting FBI pressure, membership of the American Communist Party had slipped from its 1944 peak of around 80,000 to a mere 20,000. The figure would continue to plummet, to 8,500 in 1962 and 2,800 by 1971. Edgar would obscure this decline by ceasing to publicize membership figures, and responding to inquiries by saying the figures were secret.
To the extent it did survive, the Party was crippled by the penetration activities of innumerable FBI informants. ‘If it were not for me,’ Edgar was to tell Abba Schwartz, Assistant Secretary in charge of security at the State Department in 1963, ‘there would not even be a Communist Party of the United States. Because I’ve financed the Communist Party, in order to know what they are doing.’
‘How do you think I’m going to get my Appropriations out of Congress if you keep downplaying the CP?’ Edgar would exclaim angrily to William Sullivan toward the end of his life. Sullivan, who specialized in monitoring the Party’s activities, later declared publicly that the Communist ‘threat’ had long been ‘a lie perpetuated on the American public.’
All this indicates that, by the end of the McCarthy era at any rate, not even Edgar himself was sincere about the anti-Communist effort known at the FBI as The Cause. Above and beyond everything, however, Edgar believed in Edgar. Those in Congress who marched to his tune, like McCarthy, he used. Those who did not, he found ways to crush.
From the early fifties on, in the words of Senator Estes Kefauver, Edgar’s hold on Congress gave him ‘more power than the President.’
19
‘J. Edgar Hoover was like a sewer that collected dirt. I now believe he was the worst public servant in our history.’
Former Acting Attorney General Laurence Silberman, the first person to peruse Hoover’s secret files after his death
Edgar denied time and again that he kept files on the personal lives of politicians and public figures. ‘The supposed secret dossiers,’ he said, ‘do not exist.’ The politicians, however, did not believe him. In 1958, a group of senior U.S. senators held a special meeting to discuss what to do if Edgar should suddenly die. If that happened, they decided, a delegation would rush to FBI headquarters and demand to see the files.
The bottom line was fear, and in some unlikely quarters. Senator Karl Mundt, a Republican of the far Right and a staunch supporter of the Un-American Activities Committee, was ostensibly one of Edgar’s vocal supporters. One night in 1960, however, Mundt poured out his true feelings to his aide Henry Eakins.
‘Hoover,’ he said, ‘is the most dangerous man in the United States. He has misused his office. There are things I know that Hoover has done to congressmen and senators, things that should never have happened. He has things on them.’ Later, worried about having spoken so openly, he implored Eakins not to repeat what he had said while Edgar remained in office.
Thanks to a Senate investigation in 1975, we now know that the FBI also kept files containing ‘information of a personal nature’ on the following famous members of Congress: Carl Albert, Hale Boggs, Edward Kennedy, George McGovern, Mike Mansfield, Wilbur Mills, Abraham Ribicoff, Adlai Stevenson and Lowell Weicker. While Edgar was alive, senators and congressmen could only guess at the nature of such files. Then, a few months after his death, an FBI agent in Ohio was caught investigating a Democratic election candidate. For more than twenty years, it was revealed, the Crime Records Division had run a ‘Congressional Relations Service’ – supposedly with the purpose of gathering public-record information on politicians for ‘internal use.’
FBI officials well knew that the very existence of such an operation was potentially explosive. ‘These matters,’ warned an instruction to field divisions during a primary campaign, ‘should be handled with extreme discretion to avoid the implication that we are checking on candidates.’
Yet that was exactly what Edgar was doing. ‘Hoover,’ said William Sullivan, ‘had a complete file developed on each incoming congressman. He knew their family backgrounds
, where they had gone to school, whether or not they played football, and any other tidbits … Bureau indices were immediately reviewed to see if what we had was good or bad. Could he be looked upon as a person to cultivate and use, to draw into our stable on Capitol Hill? Or should he be looked upon as one who would be unfriendly to the Bureau?’
As an election approached, congratulatory letters from Edgar were prepared for all candidates. When the results came in, winners’ letters were rushed around the country, the notes to the losers trashed. A ‘friendly’ politician found himself courted by the FBI wherever he went. If he traveled to foreign capitals where the Bureau had offices, escorts were there to greet him at the airport. ‘We went out of our way,’ Sullivan recalled, ‘to make it clear, “We are pleased with you.”’
On Capitol Hill, politicians were watched by men well placed to serve as Edgar’s spies. From 1943 on, FBI agents were ‘loaned’ to congressional committees as investigators. Others ostensibly ‘left’ their Bureau jobs altogether to work as congressional staffers.
Edgar’s key bridgehead in Congress was the House Appropriations Committee, which holds the purse strings of government agencies. By the seventies, no fewer than twenty-eight FBI agents were attached to that committee alone. John Rooney, the Chairman of the subcommittee that controlled the FBI budget, was the Bureau’s cherished friend. The Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn kept just one signed photograph on his office desk – of Edgar. He lavished praise on the Director at every opportunity. ‘I have never cut his budget,’ Rooney said, ‘and I never expect to.’ Edgar, who turned down requests to testify before the House Committee on Crime, made an annual ritual out of his appearance before the Appropriations Committee, a platform from which to preach his view of the world and to reel off statistics suggesting the Bureau had achieved an extraordinarily high rate of convictions – usually around 96 percent of crimes committed.
These figures were cooked. The superb conviction rate referred only to the number of cases that came to court, not to the number of investigations undertaken. Many of the apparent successes, such as auto theft convictions, were actually achieved by local police. Over the years various public bodies and scholars have cast doubt on Edgar’s statistics. Warren Olney, an Assistant Attorney General in the fifties, thought them ‘hogwash.’ They were never challenged, however, by Rooney’s Appropriations Committee.
Edgar protected Rooney even though the Congressman was, in the words of crime consultant Ralph Salerno, ‘up to his ears in collusion with organized crime.’ Washington lobbyist Robert Winter-Berger, who said he personally saw Rooney accept a cash-filled envelope from a mob emissary, called him the ‘key connection for the underworld’ on Capitol Hill.
An FBI report in 1967 noted that, in spite of allegations that Rooney had accepted a $100,000 bribe, the Bureau had ‘conducted no inquiry.’ The following year, when another candidate contested Rooney’s seat, Edgar obliged when the Congressman asked him to spice his annual testimony with ‘anything timely that would perk up the ears’ of his constituents. Furthermore, he supplied Rooney with the criminal record of an associate of his electoral opponent.
In 1970, when Rooney was challenged again, Edgar sent him details of a police charge against his rival, arising from a long-ago fraternity party, enabling Rooney to claim the candidate was ‘a fugitive from justice.’ Rooney held on to his seat by a narrow margin.
Congressman John McCormack of Massachusetts, Speaker of the House in the sixties, also had a special relationship with Edgar. ‘I met Hoover around 1962,’ Winter-Berger recalled, ‘when McCormack would send me over to the FBI to pick up files for him. If McCormack wanted some information to use against someone – a girlfriend the guy shouldn’t have or some nefarious dealings – Hoover would help him. It might be someone in the House whose arm McCormack wanted to twist on a vote. Or someone in government he wanted to bring pressure on. McCormack couldn’t send an ordinary messenger to pick up that sort of thing, so he used me. I’d go over to Hoover’s office, and he personally would give me the file. He knew what I was coming for, and he’d have it waiting.’
Winter-Berger also recalled something that put him off. ‘When I was leaving, Hoover would pat me on the rear end, sort of the way they do athletes when they’ve had a good game, except that we were alone in his office and I certainly wasn’t an athlete. I was thirty-six then, and he was thirty years older than me. I thought it was out of order for the head of the FBI to do that, and I eventually became uncomfortable and started trying to get out of going over there.’
Edgar dined regularly with Congressman – subsequently Senator – George Bender of Ohio, later widely condemned for his corrupt links with the Teamsters Union. Edgar energetically promoted the congressional career of Senator Thomas Dodd, who regularly made warm speeches about the Bureau. Dodd, a former FBI agent, had once been described in a memo from Edgar’s office as ‘absolutely no good … a scoundrel.’ In the sixties, however, when Dodd was exposed for corruption, the Bureau helped him cover his tracks. ‘Nothing,’ recalled the Senator’s former aide James Boyd, ‘could have been more effective for intimidating potential witnesses into silence … FBI agents had been instructed not to take any information concerning Dodd.’
The way Edgar secured a man’s allegiance, and by contrast silenced potential enemies, was ruthless. FBI agents were forever on the alert to record human failings. ‘We had a general instruction,’ said former senior agent Curtis Lynum, ‘to record anything we might need in the future, in what we called a “Zero file.” I was skiing with my wife once when I was serving in Nevada, and we saw a man in a homosexual embrace with a teenage boy outside a chalet. We both recognized the guy, a big name in the business circles of Las Vegas. I wished I hadn’t seen it, but I had. I figured it might be important later on, so I reported it to my Special Agent in Charge. I probably put a recommendation “File for future reference.” But the SAC could look at that thing and say, “This is a prominent guy. I guess I’d better send that back to Washington for indexing.” It was a wellestablished procedure. I made those decisions myself when I became an SAC. I’d think, “Maybe I’d better send that to Mr Hoover.”’
Long before a new member of Congress boarded his plane for Washington, said William Sullivan, FBI files had been scoured for any references: a criminal record perhaps, an occasion the name had come up in any investigation, however incidentally, any mention of a sexual or ethical lapse. ‘The leadership of the Bureau knew exactly what he wanted,’ Sullivan said, ‘every bit of derogatory information on every congressman, every senator … and on anybody else in Washington. He didn’t have to make any requests – they’d feed it to him.’
After Edgar’s death, by one official count, the Bureau was holding 883 files on senators, 722 on congressmen. Some were still withheld, as this book was written, others had been shredded. Many, as former Assistant Director Nicholas Callahan claimed, no doubt contained nothing sinister, just ‘informative material.’ A scattering of surviving documents, however, prove that politicians’ fears were well founded. Many come from the files designated ‘Official and Confidential,’ which were closely held in locked file cabinets in Edgar’s office suite. His secretary, Helen Gandy, reportedly took the keys home with her each evening.
The dirt in Edgar’s files was often sexual in nature. In 1948, when Senator Vandenberg of Michigan was a darkhorse Republican presidential candidate, aides kept Edgar up to date on gossip about him. OC file 50 shows that the Senator expressed himself ‘deeply indebted’ to the FBI for passing on information about his relationship with a woman not his wife. This was a direct clash of interest. Edgar was poking around in the private affairs of a potential presidential candidate at the very time he himself was dreaming of advancement under the man he wanted in the White House, Thomas Dewey.
In the late thirties, Clyde’s woman friend Edna Daulyton had listened in horror as Edgar and Clyde discussed Congressman Harold Knutson, a Republican from Minnesota, over dinner at the M
ayflower. ‘It was clear to me,’ Daulyton recalled, ‘that they’d done something awful, something very detrimental to that congressman. I didn’t exactly understand what they’d done, or why. I was very young and I didn’t ask questions.’
Knutson, who served in Congress from 1917 until 1948, was a bachelor who lived with a male Mexican companion. A rumor, never published, suggested he was involved in a homosexual scandal – successfully hushed up. ‘I heard,’ said his fellow congressman George MacKinnon, now a federal judge, ‘that someone had allegedly caught him buggering a younger man. It was put about by someone who didn’t like him.’ The word in Washington police circles was that Edgar was somehow involved. Some even whispered that he was himself involved in the homosexual scandal. Whatever the truth, Edna Daulyton remembered something Edgar said that evening at the Mayflower. It stuck in her mind, she said, because it was so cold and vicious. Congressman Knutson, Edgar remarked, would ‘always be in our pocket now …’
The Official and Confidential files show that between 1958 and 1965 Washington Agents in Charge systematically collected scandal on politicians. Politically damaging tidbits were culled from the reports of agents engaged in other investigations, from human eavesdroppers on the Hill and from electronic devices, and hand-delivered to Edgar.
An FBI roundup of information dated June 13, 1958, and including a passage headed ‘Government Circles,’ tells Edgar what Agent Conrad Trahern overheard ‘in the cafeteria of the Senate Office Building.’ Parts of the document, reproduced below, were censored by FBI officials before its release under the Freedom of Information Act in 1989.