Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [106]
Cohn obtained a job at the Justice Department thanks to George ‘Sok’ Sokolsky, a columnist close to Edgar who checked in with the FBI each day for advice on what to write. He was also close to Walter Winchell and got his first audience with Edgar within minutes of requesting it. Edgar urged him to defy his superiors, press ahead with a planned prosecution of alleged American Communists at the United Nations and keep in touch. ‘It was obvious,’ Cohn recalled, ‘that I was trusted.’
It was Edgar who recommended Cohn to Joe McCarthy, and Edgar attended the celebrations when the Senator appointed him Chief Counsel. McCarthy and his mentor were becoming closer by the month, as Cohn discovered when he attended a series of private dinners at the apartment of the Senator’s fiancée, Jean Kerr.
Edgar would arrive accompanied by Clyde, always on time, always fastidiously dressed. Unlike McCarthy, he could never be persuaded to take off his jacket, until the night the Senator jokingly asked whether he had a tape recorder in his pocket. Edgar relented and ate dinner in his shirtsleeves.
Cohn brought an unpaid ‘chief consultant’ to the subcommittee, and Edgar was linked to him, too. This was David Schine, a handsome, blond twenty-six-year-old Harvard graduate who was Cohn’s constant companion – and the target of gossip that they were lovers. His hotelier father, Myer, regularly played host to Edgar and Clyde on their Christmas visits to Miami Beach.
Edgar was not deterred by the darker side of Myer Schine, who admitted to the Kefauver Committee that he had a deal with the mob for gambling operations at his hotels. He and Clyde accepted Schine’s hospitality at the Gulfstream, an exclusive set of beach apartments in Miami Beach, and at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Schine, like Murchison at La Jolla, paid the bills.
McCarthy turned up in La Jolla in 1953 as his popularity was waning. All manner of powerful people, including the President and many right-wingers, felt that enough was enough. The Senator arrived at the Del Charro in a state of disarray. He got drunk, abused hotel employees and threw his fiancée into the pool with her clothes on.
Edgar picked that moment, when other public figures were distancing themselves from McCarthy, to speak out warmly about him. ‘I view him as a friend,’ he told a local reporter. ‘Certainly he is a controversial man. He is earnest and he is honest. He has enemies. Whenever you attack Communists, Fascists, even the Ku Klux Klan, you are going to be the victim of the most extremely vicious criticism … When certain elements cease their attacks on me, I’ll know I’m slipping. McCarthy is an ex-Marine. He was an amateur boxer. He’s Irish. Combine those and you’re going to have a vigorous individual who is not going to be pushed around.’
McCarthy had begun his slide largely thanks to the arrogance of the man Edgar had sent to help him. The following summer, millions watched televised hearings revealing that, during a hunt for Communists in the military, Roy Cohn had abused congressional privilege by trying to prevent his pal Schine from being drafted. When that failed, he tried to pressure the Army to grant Schine special privileges. Cohn was forced to resign in July 1954, and McCarthy’s own ruin seemed inevitable.
He responded, once again, by running to join Edgar and Clint Murchison at La Jolla. Cohn, who came with him, was turned away at the door because he was a Jew. Murchison had a ‘No Jews’ policy at the Del Charro. No blacks were admitted, either, except servants. In between drinking bouts, McCarthy played shuffleboard with Edgar or sat talking, one arm draped around the Director’s shoulders.
If McCarthy was hoping for public support from Edgar, he was to be disappointed. Edgar had been playing a double game all along, emphasizing his role as nonpartisan FBI Director in public while giving the Senator virtually