J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (47 page)

Joseph Lash became another of Eleanor’s protégés. For his part, he ended her naïveté as far as the American Youth Congress was concerned. For hers, she wrote or saw him often, frequently inviting him to the White House or Hyde Park (Franklin stirred the martinis, while Lash mixed Eleanor’s oldfashioneds), offered unsolicited loans and advice, and involved herself in everything from his politics to his love life. The latter was somewhat complicated since Lash was having an affair with a married woman, Trude Pratt, another student leader who was estranged from her husband but not yet divorced. Ever the romantic—she acted similarly with Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway—Eleanor plotted ways to bring the lovers together, even letting them use Val Kill, her cottage at Hyde Park, as a trysting place.

She also intervened on Lash’s behalf with the Dies committee, arranging for
a second, more exculpatory hearing in secret session (it was leaked to the columnist Westbrook Pegler the next day), and, after the United States entered the war, with a naïveté that was astonishing even for her, pulled strings in an attempt to get him a commission in Naval Intelligence. But, given his “suspected Communist affiliations,” the Navy didn’t want him, in any capacity, and in April 1942 Lash was drafted into the Army.

Because of both his background and his close ties to the president and first lady—well publicized by Pegler and other anti-New Deal columnists—it is probable that Lash was of special interest to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) from the start. (The CIC was the “FBI of the Army” and conducted its own security investigations.) He clearly was after his assignment to weather observers school at Chanute Field, in Illinois, in early 1943, for the regional CIC officer, a Lieutenant Colonel P. F. Boyer, probably acting on orders from the Pentagon, had Sergeant Joe Lash investigated.

On instructions from Boyer, the Chanute CIC put a mail cover on Lash; intercepted, and copied, a telegram from Mrs. Roosevelt;
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listened in on one of their telephone conversations; and did a bag job on Lash’s footlocker, finding and photographing a number of letters from both Trude Pratt and the president’s wife (the latter, according to the surveillance report, “closed in an affectionate tone”) and thus learned that Mrs. Roosevelt would be in the area the weekend of March 5-7 and hoped to see Lash.
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On March 5 Mrs. Roosevelt, accompanied by her personal secretary, Tommy Thompson, checked into the Hotel Lincoln in Urbana. According to an informant, after expressing the wish that no publicity be given to her arrival, Mrs. Roosevelt requested two rooms, stating that she was expecting “a young friend from Chanute Field.” She was assigned two connecting rooms, 330 and 332, each of which had twin beds.
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Unknown to Lash, he was tailed from the time he left the base. On arriving at the hotel, he was asked to register and given room 330. A few minutes later Miss Thompson called the desk and had her luggage transferred from 330 into Mrs. Roosevelt’s room. Mrs. Roosevelt then ordered dinner for three. The surveillance was terminated at 10:15
P.M.
, then resumed the following day, when the three had lunch in the hotel dining room. Dinner that night, again for three, was in Mrs. Roosevelt’s room. Surveillance was terminated at 10:35
P.M.
The next morning the subject, Lash, returned to Chanute and Mrs. Roosevelt checked out, paying the bill for both rooms.

The following weekend Trude Pratt visited Lash. Again reservations were made at the Hotel Lincoln in Urbana, Lash being assigned room 202 and Mrs.
Pratt 206. And again Lash was under physical surveillance from the time he left Chanute until his return. According to the CIC report, except for meals and walks, the pair spent the whole weekend in 206, Mrs. Pratt’s room, Lash returning to his own room, 202, on only two occasions, “during which he disarranged the bed clothes.”

This time, however, Lash and his companion were also bugged. The surveillance report noted, “Subject and Mrs. Pratt appeared to be greatly endeared to each other and engaged in sexual intercourse a number of times.”
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All this was recorded on tape. As soon as the tape had been transcribed, Lieutenant Colonel Boyer sent the transcription, together with the surveillance reports and photocopies of the Roosevelt-Pratt-Lash letters, to Colonel John T. Bissell at the Pentagon. “The inferences which can be drawn from the evidence of these five enclosures are staggering,” Boyer wrote Bissell. “They indicate a gigantic conspiracy participated in by not only Subject and Trude Pratt but also by E.R., Wallace, Morgenthau, etc.” Just how he reached this staggering conclusion is unknown.

Boyer also informed Bissell that initially they had planned to arrest Lash sometime during the weekend, on a morals charge, “because sexual intercourse was entered into,” but on learning from their bugged conversations that the two were planning to meet again in Chicago on the weekend of April 3, they had decided to wait and arrange for the Chicago police—rather than the military—to make the arrest, in hopes of generating “sufficient publicity that E.R. would not care to intervene in the matter.”
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The April 3 tryst never happened. On the prior weekend Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss Thompson, en route to a speaking engagement in Seattle, stopped over in Chicago, checking into the Blackstone Hotel. Late that same night, Lash arrived by bus from Chanute, and the three talked and played gin rummy until Lash, exhausted, impolitely fell asleep.

Again Lash was under surveillance. But this time Mrs. Roosevelt was too. In addition to following her whenever she left the hotel, the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps bugged her rooms.

On Sunday, before Lash’s departure, hotel employees informed the first lady that the Army had her under surveillance and was even listening in on her conversations, including her telephone calls to the president. Although she said nothing to Lash, on her return to Washington she protested strongly to both Harry Hopkins and General George Marshall, the Army chief of staff.

The president’s reaction on learning that the Army had his wife under surveillance can be glimpsed in what followed. Perhaps, like Colonel Boyer, the commander in chief sensed a conspiracy, only this one directed by right-wing elements in the Army, for in a matter of weeks Colonel Bissel was relieved of his duties and passed over for promotion; Lieutenant Colonel Boyer, who’d ordered the surveillance, was transferred to an obscure post in Louisiana; and, to quote a CIC historian, “a lot of other butts were roasted.”
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In addition, the
CIC’s files on subversives were ordered burned; and Sergeant Joe Lash was sent to the South Pacific.
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Hoover learned of the CIC’s surveillance of Eleanor Roosevelt from sources in Army intelligence, who reported that a recording made from the bug hidden in the hotel room “indicated quite clearly that Mrs. Roosevelt and Lash engaged in sexual intercourse.”
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Apparently, at some point in the telling, someone—either intentionally or inadvertently—mixed up Lash’s weekend visits with Mrs. Roosevelt and Trudy Pratt.

Hoover and his aides continued to believe this version even after receiving copies of the supposedly burned CIC files on the surveillance in 1946.
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And it was this version, together with the other “derogatory” materials in his massive files on Eleanor Roosevelt, that Hoover would use against her—once her husband was no longer president.

Eleanor Roosevelt was not the only prominent member of the administration to attract the special attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Though he’d once refused to investigate Willkie or tap Farley, during FDR’s last two terms in office the FBI director, with the chief executive’s approval, conducted highly confidential investigations of the vice-president of the United States, the under secretary of state, and the wife of the president’s closest adviser.

By the time Henry Agard Wallace became vice-president, in 1941, the FBI had thoroughly infiltrated the American Communist party. Through the use of informants, bugs, and taps—the FBI even monitored the conversations of Earl Browder and Robert Minor in Atlanta penitentiary—Hoover had ample evidence that the party leadership considered the highly idealistic Wallace a quite easily manipulated pawn. As in the case of Eleanor Roosevelt, Hoover took it upon himself to warn Wallace of the allegedly subversive backgrounds of his visitors and associates. On October 10, 1942, for example, the FBI director informed the vice-president that a women’s group he had agreed to see had actually been sent by the waterfront section of the Communist party. Later that same month Hoover wrote Wallace, “It has come to my attention that you may have possibly been extended an invitation to address a dinner to be held under the auspices of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee at the Astor Hotel, New York City, on Tuesday, October 27, 1942,” adding, just in case the
vice-president was unaware of it, that the committee was a Communist-front organization.
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What Hoover
didn’t
tell Wallace was that he was sending the same reports to the president, via Harry Hopkins; that he was monitoring many of the vice-president’s telephone conversations, by tapping the wires of his closest friends and associates, including his secretary; that he was also opening their mail and photographing letters Wallace himself had written; or that, even while on official trips, the vice-president was kept under surveillance. Following a 1943 Latin-American tour, Hoover memoed Attorney General Biddle, “I want to advise you of information which has reached me from a confidential source [a special agent] which indicates the possibility that Vice President Wallace is being unknowingly influenced by Bolivian Communists.
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On another occasion, when Wallace was the speaker at a Los Angeles Union gathering, another of Hoover’s agents informed the director that “many well known Communists were in the audience” and that the meeting itself was under their “complete control.”
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When Hoover suggested to Biddle that Wallace was being “unknowingly influenced,” he was hiding his real feelings. Although he had his doubts about Eleanor Roosevelt’s loyalty (one blue-penned notation read, “I often wonder whether she is as naive as she professes or whether it is just a blind to lull the unsuspecting”),
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Hoover was convinced that Henry Wallace was a knowing agent of the Communist conspiracy, with secret “pro-Soviet ties.”
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Equally sensitive was the Sumner Welles case.

In September 1940 William Bankhead of Alabama, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, died of a heart attack. A presidential train was dispatched to Alabama for the funeral, Vice-President Henry Wallace and other administration officials filling in for the president, who was too busy to attend. On the return trip there was considerable drinking, and Wallace and others noticed that Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was putting away more than his share. On returning to his stateroom late that night, Welles repeatedly rang the bell for the porter. When several responded, Welles exposed himself and made “certain lewd homosexual suggestions.”
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Sumner Welles was FDR’s man in the State Department. Frequently bypassing the secretary of state, Cordell Hull—whom he considered narrow-minded and unimaginative—Roosevelt relied heavily on Welles in his foreign-policy decisions. Although Welles’s specialty was Latin America, where he’d served for several years, there were few state secrets he wasn’t privy to. Moreover, coming from an aristocratic background similar to that of the president, Welles had practically grown up with the Roosevelt clan. He’d served as a page
boy at Eleanor and Franklin’s wedding, had been in the same class at Harvard with Eleanor’s brother Hall. He and his wife, Mathilde, were especially close to the first lady.
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After the train trip, one of the porters filed a complaint with his employer, the Southern Railway Company, and gossip about the incident quickly spread, helped greatly by the efforts of William Christian Bullitt, who’d obtained a copy of the complaint.

Bullitt, whom the columnist Marquis Childs once described as “an Iago of Iagos,”
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was a self-promoting opportunist, with a greatly inflated sense of his own importance. According to Ted Morgan, whose source was Dorothy Rosenman, Bullitt had even seduced FDR’s secretary, Marguerite “Missy” Le-Hand, “whose friendship greatly facilitated access to the president.”
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Appointed ambassador to Russia in 1933, Bullitt had been unable to get along with the Russians and, convinced the post was beneath him, had persuaded Roosevelt to appoint him ambassador to France. Though no happier there, he’d remained until the German invasion. At present he was seeking another ambassadorship, and it was likely he saw in the Welles incident a means to get it. Moreover, he hated Welles, who had the job he felt a friend should have had.

On January 3, 1941, the FBI director was summoned to the White House by Harry Hopkins, who, on the instructions of the president, entrusted him with an especially delicate task: the investigation of the allegations concerning Sumner Welles.

Hoover placed Ed Tamm in charge of the investigation, and the FBI obtained statements from the porters and others on the train. They also learned that there had been prior incidents—even one on another presidential train, en route to Chicago—and that, when drunk, Welles was given to roaming Washington’s public rest rooms and parks, seeking homosexual partners, preferably “coloreds.” It was supposedly because of such activities, in this case with young boys, that Welles had been recalled from Cuba some years earlier.
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While the investigation was still under way, a reporter asked the under secretary of state if he had heard the story that was going around. Professing to be greatly shocked, Welles called on Attorney General Biddle and gave his version of what had happened on the train. Admitting he had been drinking “rather heavily” that night, he stated that he had become ill and, after taking a sleeping pill, had ordered coffee from the dining car. After that, he presumed he’d fallen asleep. He couldn’t recall anything else happening.
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