Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [101]
Murchison’s political instincts were of the far, far Right. He was a fervent supporter of states’ rights, reportedly funded the anti-Semitic press and was a primary source of money for the American Nazi Party and its leader, Lincoln Rockwell, who considered Edgar ‘our kind of people.’1
During the Truman years, musing in private about the perfect political lineup, Edgar had named Murchison and Richardson as ideal candidates for high office – or at least as financial backers for politicians to his liking. Murchison had been obliging ever since. He threw money at Edgar’s friend Joe McCarthy, placed airplanes at the Senator’s disposal and promised him support ‘to the bitter end.’
In the 1952 presidential race, the Texans put their money – literally – on Dwight Eisenhower. Sid Richardson had flown to the general’s Paris headquarters the previous year, armed with a five-page document setting out why he should run for president. From then on the pressure never ceased. Murchison lobbied ceaselessly, little caring whether Eisenhower ran as a Democrat or a Republican, so long as he ran.
In August, at an unpublicized meeting in California, Eisenhower discussed the Democratic front-runner, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, with Edgar and Murchison. They concluded, Murchison wrote to a friend, that Stevenson would be ‘used by radicals to destroy America’s proud traditions.’ That month, in Washington, someone began spreading a rumor that the Governor was a ‘queer.’ The FBI was almost certainly behind it.
Edgar had been hostile to Stevenson since, three years earlier, he had made a mildly critical remark about Bureau efficiency. Agents had gone to work gathering derogatory material, and Edgar supplied Eisenhower with information on Stevenson’s 1949 divorce. In the spring of 1952, shortly before Stevenson’s selection by the Democrats, Edgar received a report claiming Stevenson and Bradley University president David Owen were ‘the two best-known homosexuals in the state.’ Stevenson, supposedly, was known to fellow homosexuals as Adeline.
The report, which originated with disgruntled Illinois policemen and a student basketball player, was secondhand. Stevenson’s biographers make no mention of any homosexual tendency. At the FBI, however, the Governor’s name went into a special file marked ‘Stevenson, Adlai Ewing – Governor of Illinois – Sex Deviate.’
In July, on the same day Stevenson announced his candidacy, a senior FBI official prepared a nineteen-page memorandum – including the homosexual smear and suggestions that Stevenson had once harbored Communist sympathies. Edgar had also ordered the writing of a ‘blind memorandum,’ on paper without a letterhead, summarizing the homosexual allegation. The rumor was spread that summer, Democratic officials believed, by Edgar’s close associate Guy Hottel.
In October, a crucial point in the campaign, Senator McCarthy used a nationwide television address to produce the ‘coldly documented background’ on Stevenson. Waving papers in his hand, he branded the Democratic candidate as a wartime Communist collaborator and a covert member of a left-wing organization. The ‘documentation,’ none of which held water when analyzed, was supplied by former FBI agent Donald Surine, the principal liaison between McCarthy and the Bureau.2
These were the dirtiest blows in one of the nation’s dirtiest campaigns. They left Stevenson deeply dispirited, wondering whether he could continue at all. In November 1952, three months after his California strategy meeting with Murchison and Edgar, a landslide vote sent Dwight Eisenhower to Washington.
‘Politics,’ Eisenhower’s friend George Allen wrote in his memoirs, ‘runs on juice – on the kind of influence by which the proper man can get a ticket fixed.’ Allen, mutual friend to the new President,