Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [1]
Everyone understood the allusion. For the past month, since hardback publication of this book, America had been tittering at the allegation that Hoover liked dressing up in women’s clothes. On television, Jay Leno and David Letterman made cracks, and the Saturday Night Live team performed a skit. The New York Times magazine devoted a serious commentary page to the implications, and John Updike penned a spoof for the New Yorker. In a later edition, in a reference to the transvestite in the movie The Crying Game, the magazine ran a cartoon featuring the ‘Jaye Edgar Hoover Building.’ From left to right, the joke took on a momentum of its own. The Nation ran a mock advertisement for an imaginary movie called The Lying Game, starring Hoover in slinky evening gown and bouffant wig. In the United States and England, the tabloids phonied up photographs of the Director dressed as a woman. The London Times offered a verse of doggerel and, months later, Newsweek waded in with yet another cartoon.
The concept of Hoover in drag seems likely to become a permanent fixture in the public mind. It also made me, very evidently, Public Enemy No. 1 of diehard Hoover loyalists. ‘For your part in the success of Anthony Summers’ book,’ one told my publisher, in a letter from Texas, ‘you should hang your head in shame. You have helped do what the Communists could never do – destroy the character of a man dedicated to the ideals on which this nation is founded.’ From Montana, an ‘outraged’ correspondent castigated the publisher for printing ‘libellous, totally false remarks about a great American.’ A New Yorker sounded off about ‘lurid and ludicrous allegations set forth by unsavory witnesses.’ Another complaint, from Brooklyn, used precisely the same phrase.
The use of identical words was no coincidence. All the letter writers quoted put pen to paper in the space of a few days, two months after the book came out. Three were former FBI agents, and the fourth was an agent’s wife. I have no doubt that their spleen was orchestrated, just as the ‘great American’ himself used to orchestrate an outpouring of complaints to members of Congress, whenever there seemed the shred of a possibility that he might lose his job.
In early February 1993, when my publisher was about to launch Official and Confidential, an irate caller told the promotions department to watch out for an upcoming television show, on which the despicable Anthony Summers would get his come-uppance. On Larry King Live, sure enough, a coldly furious Cartha DeLoach, a surviving Hoover aide who features large in the book, came forth with an attack short on facts but stern as an Iranian fatwa. Not only was the book ‘garbage … innuendo … lies,’ but – and this was the intended coup de grace – I was a discredited journalist. Before the program I had spotted DeLoach hunched over a telephone, writing notes on a scrap of paper. Now, on live television beamed around the world by CNN, he read from a year-old Washington Times column that had accused me of lying and cowardice for my comments about a CIA official. The article was so inaccurate and malicious that, for the first time in my life, I had started libel proceedings.
Meanwhile, Lawrence Heim, of the Society of Former FBI Agents, fired off an enraged letter to the Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which had – like the BBC in England – broadcast a program featuring key allegations made in this book. As a major plank of his broadside, Heim also cited the distortions published in the Washington Times. So did Thomas Weaver, a former agent who protested to Vanity Fair, the magazine which had published a long extract from Official and Confidential. Heim mailed the 8,000 members of the Former Agents’ Society an appeal for concerted action against me and my publishers. Happily, Vanity Fair supported me with courage and integrity, as had Frontline.
In May, in Esquire magazine, the writer Peter