Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [102]
By a secret agreement, even before the inaugural, Allen and Billy Byars – another oilman friend of Edgar’s – arranged to finance Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm. They also funneled money to him ‘for his share of the farming operation.’ Byars subsidized Mamie Eisenhower’s brother-in-law Gordon Moore, by establishing a racing stable on his land.
Sid Richardson, for his part, made secret payments to Robert Anderson, shortly to become Secretary of the Treasury, and poised to influence presidential policy in favor of domestic oil producers. The Eisenhower administration issued sixty oil leases on government reserves during its first term, compared to only sixteen in the previous fifty-five years.
Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a Texan who knew the ways of oilmen, watched in despair as Eisenhower doled out key federal posts to the barons of commerce. ‘This fellow Hoover,’ the Speaker growled, ‘helped him do it. This fellow Hoover is the worst curse that has come to government in years.’
‘I was close with General Eisenhower,’ Edgar would recall. ‘He was a great man and a great President.’ According to former Attorney General William Rogers, Edgar thought the eight Eisenhower years ‘the best and happiest’ of his career. So they were, in the sense that he had absolute security of tenure. Sugary notes sped regularly from FBI headquarters to the White House. Edgar used Seattle Agent in Charge Richard Auerbach, who had once been secretary to a Republican senator, to cultivate the President’s elder brother.
Eisenhower gave Edgar the National Security Medal, and Edgar gave the President the first ever ‘gold badge of honorary membership of the FBI.’ ‘I wish,’ Eisenhower would tell Edgar after he left the White House, ‘there were about a thousand J. Edgar Hoovers in key spots in the government.’
Behind the courtesies, however, there was disagreement. Eisenhower’s papers reveal his concern that loyal Americans should not be persecuted for alleged Communism. He loathed McCarthyism, which Edgar supported to the very end. Later, Edgar would deplore Eisenhower’s decision to welcome the Soviet leader Khrushchev to the United States. He thought it created an ‘atmosphere favorable to Communism among Americans.’
Eisenhower compromised himself less than his Democratic predecessors in the use of the FBI for personal political intelligence. He may not have done so at all. ‘With Eisenhower,’ recalled Ralph de Toledano, a correspondent in whom Edgar confided, ‘Hoover never knew whether he would receive praise or blame … He didn’t really like Eisenhower very much.’ In fact, predatory as ever, Edgar pried into the President’s private life as he had into that of President Roosevelt.
Eisenhower’s wartime romance with his female chauffeur, the young Irishwoman Kay Summersby, had been a time bomb ticking beneath the 1952 election campaign. Republican leaders considered Summersby’s 1948 memoir, Eisenhower Was My Boss, potentially explosive – even though it said nothing of the couple’s real intimacy. Copies of the book mysteriously vanished from Washington stores and from the New York Public Library.
Three years later, in September 1955, Joe McCarthy’s aide, Donald Surine, would pass along some information to the FBI. For the past six weeks, Surine said, Summersby had been staying at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel under an assumed name. Edgar at once ordered intense investigation. Agents made numerous ‘pretext calls,’ including one to Summersby herself, in an attempt to find out if she had really been staying in Washington.
The only possible explanation is that Edgar wanted to know whether the President had revived his affair with Summersby. It was his custom to let presidents know he knew of their peccadilloes, in the guise of merely keeping them informed. The file does not reveal what Edgar did with the Summersby information, which reached him the day before President Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack.