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The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

Anthony Summers

For Robbyn

I thank the close colleagues and friends who made this book possible. A full Acknowledgments section will be found in its closing pages. The project lasted for five years and demanded work on a scale I could not have hoped to achieve alone. Some 850 people were interviewed, and storage of the hundreds of thousands of documents required the addition of an entire new floor to my house.

On the investigative team, I am especially grateful to Dr Kathryn Castle, lecturer in American History at the University of North London, and her husband Paul Sutton, who spent a year in the United States carrying out extensive research. In San Francisco and Washington, Ingrid Young and Glyn Wright were real Sherlocks when it came to tracking down interviewees and obscure documents. In Ireland, with the assistance of Pauline Lombard, Jeanette Woods typed and retyped the manuscript and organized the ever-expanding archive.

The book was conceived by Putnam’s president, Phyllis Grann, who lived up to her reputation as a legendary publisher. Also in New York, Andrea Chambers was a redoubtable editor and Marilyn Ducksworth managed promotion with skill I have never seen equalled. Allison Hargraves, the copy editor, dealt meticulously with a mountain of detail. At Gollancz in London, Liz Knights and Joanna Goldsworthy once again proved to be loyal friends, as well as top-flight publishers. That doyen of Manhattan agents, Sterling Lord, nursed me and the first edition of the book through tough times. This new edition is the result of an initiative by Ebury’s Andrew Goodfellow, helped along as it progressed to reality by my agent and friend at Curtis Brown, Jonathan Lloyd.

I shall never be able to repay the debt of gratitude I owe to Robbyn Swan, the fine Washington journalist who joined the project expecting to conduct a handful of interviews, stayed four years – and captured my heart. We married, had three children and – two decades and three marathon book projects later – she is still working with me.

To Robbyn, much more than thanks.

A. S.

Ireland, 2011

FOREWORD

‘The information in your book made me want to retch. I don’t think I will ever believe anything about our form of government again – nor will I have confidence in anyone in office, ever. They named a building for him and it is still there?’

An American reader of Official and Confidential,

to the author, 1993.

In the autumn of 2011, with the Hollywood movie J. Edgar in the offing, a senior FBI official spoke publicly about an aspect of what the film might – perhaps – portray. During the making of J. Edgar, he said, director Clint Eastwood and star Leonardo DiCaprio had sought information about legendary Director Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson, his longtime aide and companion.

Time was that to have addressed the question of Hoover’s sexuality would have been unthinkable in official Washington. Even now, Assistant Director Mike Kortan said only that ‘vague rumours and fabrications’ on the subject were backed up by ‘no evidence in the historical record …’ The Society of Former Special Agents sniffed that a ‘kissing scene’ said to be in J. Edgar had led it to reassess the ‘tacit approval’ it had given to the movie. The J. Edgar Hoover Foundation was said to have told Eastwood that such portrayal would be ‘monumental distortion … unfounded, spurious.’

In an era when homosexuality is out of the closet, such outrage is perhaps overheated. When this book was first published in 1993, with the impertinence to report not only on the supposed homosexuality but on other exotica, there was not only fury from FBI old-timers but also a resounding national chuckle – shared even by the President.

In March that year, Bill Clinton rose to address the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., traditionally an evening for topical satire. In the audience was FBI Director William Sessions, then fighting a losing battle against accusations of abuse of office, and the President