J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (50 page)

T
he day after Roosevelt’s death, Hoover ordered a Bureau-wide search for any FBI employee who had a personal connection, of any kind, with the new president.

The frantic search turned up Special Agent Morton Chiles, Jr., the son of one of Truman’s childhood friends from Independence, Missouri. Recalled to Washington, Chiles was briefed on his mission by the headquarters supervisor William Sullivan.

Although extremely busy trying to cope with the awesome responsibilities of the immense job he’d inherited but never wanted, President Truman made time to see the son of his lifelong friend. After reminiscing for a few minutes about his Independence boyhood, Truman asked Chiles the purpose of his visit.

He had come as the personal emissary of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Chiles explained, with the message that if there was anything the FBI could do for him…

The president thanked the young agent, whom he’d known from birth, for dropping by. He then asked him to take a reply to Mr. Hoover. It was, in Harry S Truman’s characteristic style, blunt and to the point. He should tell Mr. Hoover, the president said, “Anytime I need the services of the FBI, I will ask for it through my attorney general.”

Chiles had the unpleasant task of carrying the president’s message back to FBI headquarters. “From that time on,” Sullivan recalled, “Hoover’s hatred of Truman knew no bounds.”
¹

But the director had no intention of leaving it at that. On April 23 he made his first personal call on the new president to brief him on a number of the FBI’s
current investigations. Lest the visit become a habit, Truman called in his military aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, and, after introducing the two men, told the FBI director that from now on if any especially important matters came up that needed his immediate attention he should route them through Vaughan.

Hoover and Vaughan then met briefly, the FBI director establishing, none too subtly, their separate and unequal positions, by instructing Vaughan how he could reach
his
office without being spotted by the press. Although the meeting was brief, Hoover, probably aided by his own files, summed up Vaughan well.

That same day Hoover sent Vaughan a memo beginning, “I thought you and the President might be interested to know…” He then went on to report some partisan political intelligence.
²

Vaughan responded by asking for more: “future communications along that line would be of considerable interest whenever, in your opinion, they are necessary.”
³

Hoover also sent confidential reports to other presidential aides, including Matthew Connelly, Sidney Souers, E. D. McKim, and George Allen, the director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, who served as one of Hoover’s spies in the Truman administration.

Within thirty days after Truman became president, the FBI was carrying out secret investigations for the White House.

Within sixty days the FBI was wiretapping and conducting surveillances for the White House. One tap, on the office and home telephones of the attorney—and political fixer—Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, remained in place three years, generated over 175 summary logs and 6,250 pages of transcriptions, and resulted in the monitoring of many of the most prominent people in the government.

Truman was compromised before he knew it.

Six weeks after Roosevelt’s death, Truman fired Francis Biddle. He handled it badly, delegating the task to an aide, who called the attorney general and said the president wanted his immediate written resignation. Reacting more to the manner of his dismissal, which he thought “abrupt and undignified,” than the termination itself—which was not unexpected, since he’d opposed Truman’s nomination as vice-president at the Democratic convention the previous summer—Biddle asked for a personal meeting with the president.

After the patrician Philadelphian had finished lecturing the former Kansas City haberdasher on the proper form for handling such matters, Biddle submitted his resignation. The relationship between the attorney general and the president was a highly personal one, Biddle said, that of a lawyer and his client, and it was important the president should appoint his own man. He had only two questions.

First, was there anything in his record with which the president was not satisfied?

No, Truman responded, he felt he had done a good job.

Second, would the president mind telling him who his replacement would be?

“You’ll be pleased,” Truman said. “He is someone in your department—Tom Clark.”
⁴

Pleased Biddle was not. Just a few months earlier, Biddle had tried to fire Clark, whom he considered totally inept. But Clark had gone to Senator Tom Connally, who in turn had talked to FDR, who then passed down the word to leave Clark alone.

Many years later, after Truman had left office, Merle Miller, the author of
Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman,
asked the ex-president, “What do you consider the biggest mistake you made as President?”

“Tom Clark was my biggest mistake,” Truman replied. “No question about it.” After elaborating at some length on Clark’s shortcomings, Truman observed, “It isn’t so much that he’s a
bad
man. It’s just that he’s such a dumb son of a bitch.”
⁵

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter put it somewhat differently, one of his close friends and former law clerks later recalled. “Felix used to say that [Clark’s] morality was somewhat rancid,” to which Frankfurter’s friend the former FTC chairman Philip Elman appended, “An understatement.”
⁶

Tom Clark was sworn in as attorney general on July 1, 1945. According to one Washington insider, who supposedly witnessed the payoff, a month and a half later Attorney General Tom Clark accepted a huge bribe in return for fixing a war profiteering case.
^*

Hoover and Clark got along so well that the FBI director gave the attorney general one of his used bulletproof limousines (at war’s end, Clark approved Hoover’s budget request for a new model) and even, on rare occasions, asked the AG to join him and Tolson for lunch or dinner.

Before coming to the Justice Department in 1937, Clark had acted as a lobbyist for the Texas oil interests, and he and Hoover had a number of friends in common, among them the oilmen Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, and Billy Byers—all of whom the FBI director “palled around with” during his annual trips to La Jolla—as well as Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had recently moved across the street from Hoover’s home on Thirtieth Place NW.

Even more important, Clark showed no inclination to actually supervise the FBI. He rarely read the reports Hoover sent him. “I got so many copies,” Clark recalled, “that I couldn’t read all of them—it would take me twenty-four hours a day—so I had [Assistant Attorney General James] McInerney read all mine, and he’d give me what he thought I should see, what were important enough for me.” Similarly, he turned over all wiretap requests to an assistant,
because he “didn’t want to know who was tapped or who wasn’t tapped.” Few of the requests were denied. As far as Clark was concerned, the very fact that Hoover had requested them meant they were needed: “It was largely up to Mr. Hoover as to whether he thought there was a necessity for it.”
⁷
Clark’s lack of curiosity even extended to the files.
^*
He had no interest in reading them—with one exception. Shortly after taking office, Clark asked to see his own FBI file. Hoover procrastinated, making various excuses, until Clark finally ordered him to produce the file. Hoover then showed him a carefully expurgated version. Satisfied that it was without derogatory information, Clark never asked to see it again.

Even when they had differing opinions, Clark usually gave in to Hoover. Although he was much less concerned with the Communist menace than the FBI director was—“Most of the cases we had I thought were somewhat squeezed oranges,” he recalled—he prosecuted them anyway.
⁹

Tom Clark was, in J. Edgar Hoover’s estimation, a nearly perfect attorney general. He rubber-stamped the FBI director’s every request. He even—unknowingly—greatly broadened Hoover’s powers.

On July 7, 1946, the attorney general wrote the president asking him to renew Roosevelt’s 1940 warrantless wiretapping authorization. Although Clark’s letter quoted from that authorization, it omitted a key sentence: “You are requested furthermore to limit these investigations so conducted to a minimum and to limit them insofar as possible to aliens.”

The elimination of that single sentence, and the restrictions it contained, gave Hoover nearly unlimited authority to place as many wiretaps as he wanted, on whomever he chose.

Truman approved and returned the request, unaware either that anything had been omitted or that the attorney general’s letter had actually been drafted by J. Edgar Hoover.
^†

On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered, bringing much of the work of the Office of Strategic Services to an end, since neither Admiral Chester Nimitz nor General Douglas MacArthur had allowed the OSS to operate in the Pacific theater. On August 14, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan also surrendered, ending World War II. The next month, to Hoover’s immense satisfaction—for he and his allies in State, War, and Navy were largely responsible—President Truman fired William “Wild Bill” Donovan and abolished the OSS.

Unlike Hoover, Donovan had failed to realize that some of the most significant battles were fought on the home front. In addition to having alienated nearly everyone in the intelligence community, the OSS chief had made little effort to obtain congressional or popular support for his organization. Nor had he made any real attempt to win over Roosevelt’s successor: they’d met only once since Truman took office. The imminent demise of the OSS had become apparent earlier in the year when both the FBI and the OSS submitted their 1946 budget requests. The following chart, which Anthony Cave Brown found among Donovan’s papers, tells what happened:
¹¹

OSS

    Requested                 $45 million

    Office of Budget cut to   $42 million

    Congress cut to           $38 million

    President cut to          $24 million

FBI

    Requested                 $49 million

    Office of Budget cut to   $46 million

    Congress put back to      $49 million

    President cut to          $43 million

Donovan did make a last-minute effort to win public support, with a blitz publicity campaign. The former OSS official Tom Braden later said, “For weeks a series of sensational stories dominated the newspapers and magazines hailing the exploits of OSS’s secret war. As [John] Shaheen and his assistant scoured the files, had the facts declassified, fed them to writers in OSS who ‘happened to be in Washington,’ and as they fed them to eager journalists, OSS parachutists returning from their hitherto secret war and expecting to hear the usual jibes about ‘Oh So Social’ suddenly found themselves figures of glamour.”
¹²

But it was too late, and in no way matched Crime Records’ long-planned avalanche of stories telling how the FBI had won the war. Nor was Donovan helped by a series of Hoover-inspired leaks regarding the OSS’s lavish use of unvouchered funds; the revelation that the war heroes Nimitz and MacArthur both distrusted the OSS; and the first in a number of damaging disclosures regarding Communists in the upper levels of Donovan’s organization.

Truman still had trouble firing people. On September 20 the president signed Executive Order 9621: Termination of the Office of Strategic Services and Disposition of Its Functions, which Budget Director Harold Smith had prepared at his request. He also gave Smith the task of informing Donovan. Equally loath to confront the OSS chief personally, Smith passed on the job to one of his aides, telling him, “The president doesn’t want to do it and I don’t want to do it, but because I can, I’m ordering you to do it.”
¹³

Truman’s cold, curt letter to Donovan, which accompanied the termination order, read, “I appreciate very much the work which you and your staff undertook
beginning prior to the Japanese surrender, to liquidate those wartime activities of the Office of Strategic Services which will not be needed in time of peace…I want to take this occasion to thank you for the capable leadership you have brought to a vital wartime activity in your capacity as Director of Strategic Services. You may well find satisfaction in the achievements of the Office and take pride in your own contributions to them. These are in themselves large rewards.”
¹⁴

Denied access to most wartime intelligence reports while vice-president, Truman was unaware of the many successes of the Office of Strategic Services. Instead, what little he knew of the OSS he’d learned from its critics, and in particular from the Park report, which had been commissioned by his predecessor. Then too, he had received from Hoover—through Vaughan, to whom he’d transmitted it orally—some extremely derogatory information regarding one of Donovan’s extramarital affairs, information of such a nature that it deeply offended Truman, a devout family man.

With Donovan and the OSS out of the way, Hoover moved quickly to fill the gap. On October 22 he sent the president, through the AG,
his
“Plan for U.S. Secret Worldwide Intelligence Coverage.”

“It is proposed,” Hoover wrote, “that the time-proven program in operation in the Western Hemisphere be extended on a worldwide basis.” Representatives of the FBI, MID, and ONI would be posted to every country in the world. Working out of U.S. embassies, they would collect foreign intelligence, which they would report back through State Department channels. On the Washington end, there would be a committee to set basic policy, chaired by the secretaries of state, war, and navy and the attorney general (Hoover obviously felt sure he could control Clark), while the operational, or working, committee would consist of an assistant secretary of state and the directors of Military Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.