Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [104]
The 1953 bill alone amounted to $3,100, or $24,335 at today’s rates. If that was the average charge (and the hotel rate increased over the years), then the eighteen summers that followed brought Edgar hospitality worth about $460,000. That figure may be on the low side, for Edgar’s vacation sometimes lasted nearly two months. In addition, his journeys to California were usually logged as official ‘inspection trips,’ meaning that taxpayers footed the travel expenses. Since 1950, Edgar’s FBI salary had been more than that of a Congressman or a member of the Cabinet.
Just months before his death, in an off-the-record talk with Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief David Kraslow, Edgar would admit having accepted this largesse. Plaintively, as though it made everything all right, he said he had paid for his own food and drink.
Nineteen fifty-eight, as few adult Americans could have failed to notice, saw publication of Edgar’s book Masters of Deceit, touted as a manual on ‘Communism in America and How to Fight It.’ Because Edgar was the author, it became a massive best-seller, selling 250,000 copies in hardcover and 2,000,000 in paperback. The book became required reading in many schools. In a formal announcement, the Justice Department said the royalties were to go to the FBI Recreation Fund.
Masters of Deceit was not written by Edgar, nor was it even his idea. The book grew out of a suggestion by Assistant Director William Sullivan, was written by four or five Bureau agents assigned to the job and was ‘polished up’ by Fern Stukenbroeker, an agent with a Ph.D. who worked in Crime Records. Agents all over the country were required to promote the book and to place ‘reviews’ – written in advance at the Bureau – with friendly newspapers. ‘Masters of Deceit,’ went the in-house joke, ‘written by the Master of Deceit who never even read it.’
After Edgar’s death, an official inquiry would establish that many thousands of dollars of FBI Recreation Fund money had been diverted to uses other than the ‘athletic and social functions’ for which the fund had been created. Moreover, only a fifth of the income from the book went to the fund at all. Edgar rebuffed suggestions that the remainder should go to a heart or cancer charity, and divided it among himself, Clyde, Lou Nichols and Bill Nichols (no relation), a journalist brought in to help with the final draft.
‘I just don’t remember,’ was Lou Nichols’ reply, when asked years later how much he received. Edgar was more forthright – in private. Each of the four men, he admitted, received $72,000 – about $525,000 at today’s rates.
Edgar’s friend Clint Murchison, who owned a controlling interest in Henry Holt, the publisher of Masters of Deceit, had virtually instructed the company to buy the book, and, his secretary, Ernestine van Buren, recalled, he ‘stressed his desire that Hoover be given an especially favorable contract.’
Despite dire warnings to FBI recruits never to speculate on the stock market, Edgar and Clyde grew rich thanks to investment tips – and a special ‘no lose’ arrangement provided by their Texas friends. Edgar invested in oil and insurance companies and railroads, areas in which Murchison and Richardson specialized. Some holdings, in Gulf Life, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway and Texas Oil and Gas, coincided directly with the millionaires’ own interests.
Edgar and Clyde always invested the same amounts in the same oil concerns. As late as 1973, after Edgar, Murchison and Richardson had died, Clyde was making $4,000 a month from one oil investment alone. ‘People who were in the oil business,’ said former FBI Assistant Director John Mohr, ‘would call him on the phone and tell him, “We’ve got a good one going here; do you want to get in on it, Clyde?”’
When he died in 1975, Clyde would leave $725,000, almost $2,800,000 at today’s rates. Edgar’s published estate, most of which went to Clyde, included $122,000 in oil, gas and mineral leases.