J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (64 page)

A
lthough Truman had decided not to seek reelection, he kept his decision secret from all except his family, staff, and closest friends until April 1952. But the FBI director learned of it much earlier, probably from the president’s crony—and Hoover’s spy in the White House—George Allen, for in December 1951 Hoover ordered Crime Records to run name checks on the most likely Democratic candidates. He didn’t get around to doing the same for the Republicans until February, and it was from this latter list that he made his own personal choice. Although he at first favored General Douglas MacArthur, a longtime acquaintance, their friendship dating back to the bonus march days, on whom he already had a sizable dossier and with whom he shared a common enemy, Harry S Truman, when it became obvious that MacArthur’s candidacy wasn’t going anywhere, he switched his allegiance to another general, Dwight David Eisenhower, the former allied commander in Europe. But recalling 1948 all too well, he did nothing to further that candidacy until after the Republican National Convention that July, when Eisenhower defeated Mr. Republican, Senator Robert Taft, on the first ballot.

Hoover was especially pleased when the Republicans chose as Eisenhower’s running mate the junior senator from California, Richard M. Nixon. Nixon was young (just thirty-nine), gave the ticket geographical balance, was a hard campaigner, and had solid anti-Communist credentials. (Since Eisenhower had spent most of his life in the military and had declared his party affiliation only months earlier, no one was sure where he stood on anything.) Nixon had arrived in Washington with those credentials already well established, having in 1946 smeared his Democratic opponent, Jerry Voorhis, with a red brush, a tactic that worked so well he’d repeated it in his 1950 Senate
campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he’d labeled the “pink lady.” And, of course, topping it off was HUAC and the conviction of Alger Hiss.

As for the Democrats, who’d held their convention two weeks later, the crime hearings had made Senator Estes Kefauver a popular hero and the leading contender in the polls. But the incumbent president not only disliked Kefauver personally; the televised linkage of crime bosses and local politicians, most of them Democrats, had, he felt, hurt the party badly. Truman’s nod and the convention’s nomination—on the third ballot, Kefauver having led on the first and second—went to a reluctant candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson, the governor of Illinois. Witty, urbane, the author of brilliant speeches even better when read than when spoken, Stevenson became known as the “egghead” candidate. His campaign supporters joked that his running mate, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, provided not only geographical but intellectual balance. As for Alger Hiss, Stevenson too had made his opinion known: although he knew him only slightly, from his work with the UN, he had testified as a character witness for Hiss in his first trial and was, like most liberal Democrats, still stunned by Hiss’s later conviction.

The 1952 election campaign was, in the opinion of the columnist Marquis Childs, perhaps the dirtiest in American history up to that time. While Eisenhower took the high road, Senators Nixon, McCarthy, and Jenner handled the smears, innuendos, and distortions. “There was an even lower moment in that schizophrenic campaign,” Childs recalled. “A report reached Democratic headquarters that McCarthy was going to make a nationwide television attack on the Stevenson campaign. He had been boasting he would say it was made up of pinks, punks and pansies. This last was a public reference to the ugly whispering campaign about Stevenson’s personal life.”
¹

Hoover was the source of the whispers. The FBI had supposedly obtained, from local police, statements alleging that Adlai Stevenson had been arrested on two separate occasions, in Illinois and Maryland, for homosexual offenses. In both cases, it was claimed that as soon as the police had learned his identity, Stevenson had been released and the arrests expunged from the records, though not from the recollections of the arresting officers. Through a devious route which hid the Bureau’s complicity, Crime Records had channeled this and other derogatory information to Nixon, McCarthy, and members of the press.
^*
Although most newspaper editors had the story, none used it. But it was widely circulated, as anyone who worked in the campaign could attest.

“There were a lot of us who were absolutely appalled by it [the smear],” recalls a former agent who was working in Crime Records at the time, “but Mr. Hoover was determined to elect Nixon and Ike, and when he made up his mind to do something there was no changing it.”
²

The FBI also kept close watch on Ellen Borden Stevenson, the candidate’s ex-wife. Mrs. Stevenson, who had been diagnosed as suffering from “persecutory paranoia,”
³
told numerous people—including James “Scotty” Reston, Arthur Krock, and complete strangers at dinner parties—that her former husband was a homosexual. She also said that he’d murdered someone, was having affairs with numerous women, and was mentally and morally unfit for the presidency.

The Democrats, however, had their own ammunition: a copy of General Marshall’s angry letter to General Eisenhower, regarding the latter’s postwar plans to divorce his wife, Mamie, and marry his WAC driver, Kay Summersby—a letter they had somehow obtained from the Pentagon’s files. According to Childs, “Notice was privately served that if McCarthy used the gutter language the letter would be released. The resulting McCarthy broadcast was, for McCarthy, comparatively innocuous.”
⁴

The homosexual allegations resurfaced in the 1956 presidential campaign, with unforeseen repercussions: they ended Walter Winchell’s brief career in television.

Hoover also passed on the Stevenson materials to John and Robert Kennedy when they took office, in an attempt to keep Stevenson from being appointed ambassador to the United Nations. To their credit, the Kennedys, long aware of the allegations, chose to ignore them.
^*

“There had come to my ears,” Eisenhower later wrote of the period immediately following his November 1952 election—which he won with 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89—“a story to the effect that J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, had been out of favor in Washington. Such was my respect for him that I invited him to a meeting, my only purpose being to assure him that I wanted him in government as long as I might be there and that in the performance of his duties he would have the complete support of my office.”
⁵

Hoover was quick to show his appreciation, and usefulness, informing the president-elect that one of his aides, the son of a powerful Republican senator, was a homosexual. Eisenhower was thus able to replace him quietly, without embarrassment to either the administration or his father.
^†

Hoover also passed on to Eisenhower, or his various assistants, derogatory information on Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas, Bernard Baruch, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, Bertrand
Russell, the United Auto Workers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a host of other enemies, including, of course, William J. Donovan, just in case Eisenhower was considering him as a possible new CIA director to replace the ailing General Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith.
^*
(Instead Ike appointed Donovan ambassador to Thailand, a banishment that both Hoover and Thomas E. Dewey heartily approved, although the FBI director couldn’t resist subjecting Donovan, his family, and his friends to the indignity of a full field investigation—agents asked who his parents were and whether they were born in the United States.)

Nor did he overlook Eleanor. Following Eisenhower’s election, Mrs. Roosevelt had resigned her position as U.S. delegate to the United Nations so that the president-elect would be free to designate whomever he chose for the post. But she made no secret of her desire to be reappointed. While the matter was still under consideration, Hoover arranged to have Lou Nichols brief two White House aides on the Lash-Roosevelt “affair,” as well as some of her other “questionable associations.” What effect this had on the president’s decision is unknown—probably the former first lady’s active support for Ike’s recent opponent, Adlai Stevenson, as well as her stinging criticism of Eisenhower himself, for failing to defend his mentor General George Marshall when the latter was under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy, counted more—but Mrs. Roosevelt was not reappointed.

Convinced that Eisenhower was ill informed on the subject of internal security, Hoover took it upon himself to educate him, with briefings and memos. “Unlike Truman,” William Sullivan recalled, “who was skeptical of anything Hoover offered…Eisenhower blindly believed everything the director told him, never questioned a word…He may have been a great general but he was a very gullible man, and Hoover soon had him wrapped right around his finger.”
⁶
Eisenhower so trusted Hoover that even before he took the oath of office, according to Ed Tamm, “the director advised him on matters, about the people he would select for his cabinet, the different policies.” He was in so tight with the current administration, the director bragged to Judge Tamm, whom he had by now forgiven, that the White House had installed a direct line to his residence. Not only did the president call him; the vice-president called twice a day. “Right before the director left for the office,” Tamm recalls Hoover telling him, “Mr. Nixon called him, every morning,” and then again “every night, and told him what was going to happen tomorrow and who he was going to see.”
⁷

Well aware that the president did not particularly like his vice-president—Nixon had, at one point, almost cost him the election, when one of his “slush funds” was revealed—the FBI director cultivated the favor of both and didn’t
completely trust either. There were more FBI spies in the Eisenhower White House than during any previous administration. Ike’s presidential style helped make this possible: still a general at heart, he delegated nearly everything to his staff, and this being a Republican rather than a Democratic administration, Hoover found it easier to infiltrate it with sympathetic ears. Although he was not able to persuade Eisenhower to give the FBI the Secret Service’s protective functions (Ike did let one special agent he liked, Orrin Bartlett, travel with him on many of his trips), Hoover had so many informants in place that there was little need for more.

As for the new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, Eisenhower’s former campaign manager, Hoover got along with him very well. But he got along even better with William Rogers, his deputy, who replaced Brownell in 1957. According to Richard Gid Powers, “Rogers got the administration and Hoover off to a good start by letting him know that the FBI’s loyalty reports, which the Truman administration had so often disregarded, now had the force of law. He went so far as to notify Hoover that during the first year of his administration, the attorney general had refused to endorse thirty-three persons for presidential appointment solely on the basis of their FBI reports. ‘There could be no more convincing proof of the value of the FBI investigations,’ he told Hoover.”
⁸

Herbert Brownell was a very guarded, very private person. He had a good working relationship with his FBI director, but a friendship never developed. It was otherwise with his deputy, and successor, William Rogers. To the amazement of almost everyone in the Justice Department, and especially his own aides, Hoover even socialized with the Rogerses, dining with them at their home and joining the family in singing songs around the piano. Hoover was especially fond of Mrs. Rogers and on at least one occasion, according to James Crawford, had her over to dinner while the attorney general was out of town.

Even more important, Rogers succeeded in bringing the FBI director into the Justice Department “family,” something no other AG had tried since Biddle, and then unsuccessfully. “Mr. Brownell and I had him participating all the time,” Rogers recalled. “We had lunches about twice a week with all the people, the top assistants, and we ironed out our problems.”
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It was probably at one of these lunches that Hoover first met and took notice of an upcoming young lawyer in the Civil Division named Warren Burger.

Unlike many another attorney general, Rogers avoided engaging in a paper war with the FBI director, by the simple expedient of consulting with him instead. Rogers told the Justice Department attorneys, “I don’t want anyone to be arguing with Mr. Hoover or with any of the FBI agents on paper. If you have a problem, talk to them about it, and if you can’t resolve it after sensible discussions, come to me and I’ll talk to Edgar Hoover about it.”
¹⁰

As Hoover himself later stated, he and Bill Rogers “were very close. When he was attorney general and President Nixon was vice president, we woul
frequently spend the Christmas holidays in Miami Beach together.”
¹¹
Hoover’s betrayal of his friend Rogers was still some years away.

Ever since McGrath had waffled on the issue, Hoover had been trying to obtain authority to legitimize his use of microphone surveillances. Under Brownell, he finally got his chance, with the case of the bug in the bedroom.

In February 1954 the Supreme Court, in
Irvine
v.
California,
sharply criticized local police for planting a microphone in the home of a suspected gambler. What seemed to enrage the justices most, however, over and above the unconstitutionality of the practice, was that the microphone had been placed in a bedroom.

Seeing his opportunity, Hoover asked Attorney General Brownell for his interpretation of the decision as it affected the FBI, at the same time submitting “an informal draft” of his possible response, as prepared by Assistant Director Alan Belmont.

On May 20, 1954, Brownell responded, “it is clear that in some instances the use of microphone surveillance is the only possible way of uncovering the activities of espionage agents, possible saboteurs, and subversive persons. In such instances I am of the opinion that the national interest requires that microphone surveillances be utilized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Nor did the attorney general restrict such use to obtaining evidence for prosecution. “The FBI has an intelligence function in connection with internal security matters equally as important.” In such instances, “considerations of internal security and the national safety are paramount and, therefore, may compel the unrestricted use of this technique in the national interest.”