Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [100]
When McCarthy was challenged to produce proof of his charges about the State Department, he phoned Edgar to ask for help. Edgar at first chided him, not because of what he had said but for the tiresomely specific way he said it. False allegations were best left rather general. Then the Director ordered a search of the files for anything that might support the Senator.
‘We were the ones,’ William Sullivan recalled, ‘who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using. I knew what we were doing. I worked on it myself. At the same time, we were telling the public we had nothing to do with it.’
Other sources, with no ax to grind, confirm it. ‘He did feed stuff to McCarthy, a great deal of it,’ said Edgar’s journalist friend Walter Trohan. ‘Joe would tell me himself that he’d got this or that from the FBI.’ Ruth Watt, chief clerk to McCarthy’s committee, later admitted having received ‘a lot of FBI reports.’
McCarthy’s first chief investigator, Donald Surine, was a former FBI agent, and so were other key staff members. The Senator’s future wife, Jean Kerr, turned to Edgar for help when McCarthy was pursuing a secretary married to an FBI agent. The agent found himself transferred, along with his wife, to Alaska.
‘Any success the FBI has had,’ Edgar was to tell the Senator in a letter, ‘is due in no small measure to the wholehearted support and cooperation we have always received from such fine friends as you.’
In 1951, as the country prepared for an election, a Republican Congressman floated the idea of Edgar as a ‘favorite son’ candidate for president. ‘What an inspiration to the youth of America!’ a Chicago citizen responded. ‘The truly great statesmen are those men with ability and leadership, combined with honesty and ideals, and to me J. Edgar Hoover is synonymous with all these attributes.’ ‘If he will run,’ wrote a Missouri businessman, ‘he will be elected by the greatest majority any President ever received.’
Instead of running for the White House, the man who claimed he was above politics became one of the kingmakers. Edgar joined himself to the clique of fabulously wealthy Americans now pushing Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon toward the White House.
On an August night, around the pool of an exclusive California hotel, Edgar discreetly circulated among the guests at a Nixon fundraiser. Though he was the host, Edgar’s role went unmentioned in the press. There were few guests, and few were necessary. ‘I think there were about twenty of us,’ recalled Barbara Coffman, one of the ‘poorer’ guests, ‘and some gal came up to us and said, “I only got a million dollars. How about you?” It was a fun party, very casual.’
Among the millionaires present were two of the wealthiest men in the world: Texan oil moguls Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson. Richardson, then aged sixty-one, was the wildcatter stereotype, a rough-tongued bachelor with a limp and a penchant for bourbon and late-night poker games. Murchison, at fifty-seven, a powerhouse of energy, was married to Virginia, his second wife, after whom he named his flagship airplane. Between them the two men had assets in excess of $700 million, not counting as much again in untapped oil reserves.
Recognizing Edgar’s influence as a national figure, the oilmen had started cultivating him in the late forties – inviting him to Texas as a houseguest, taking him on hunting expeditions. Edgar’s relations with them were to go far beyond what was proper for a Director of the FBI. And although the Murchison milieu was infested with organized crime figures, Edgar considered him ‘one of my closest friends.’
‘Money,’ the millionaire used to say, ‘is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good.’ Murchison and his Texas friends spread a great deal of dollar manure on the political terrain. They had traditionally been conservative supporters of the Democratic