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Meanwhile, knowing that Eisenhower detested McCarthy, Edgar told the President that the Senator’s activity was now impeding the hunt for Communists. In the Senate, he let it be known that, while he valued McCarthy’s work, he was critical of his methods. All along, he maintained the fiction that no FBI documents were being supplied to the McCarthy team.3

McCarthy kept in touch with the FBI long after the Senate set the seal on his disgrace with a formal notion of censure. Even in his last days, when he was in the terminal stages of alcoholism, he was proposing Edgar as the right man to succeed Eisenhower as President. In 1957, when McCarthy died of cirrhosis of the liver, Edgar, Roy Cohn and Richard Nixon were among the vast crowd at the funeral.

Some who knew him said McCarthy never really believed in his own anti-Communist rhetoric, that he was just a cynical opportunist. And astonishingly, given that he made it his lifetime crusade, Edgar’s zeal may have been just as hollow by the fifties. ‘Of course he wasn’t sincere,’ said William Sullivan. ‘He knew the Party didn’t amount to a damn …’

By 1956, in part thanks to unrelenting FBI pressure, membership of the American Communist Party had slipped from its 1944 peak of around 80,000 to a mere 20,000. The figure would continue to plummet, to 8,500 in 1962 and 2,800 by 1971. Edgar would obscure this decline by ceasing to publicize membership figures, and responding to inquiries by saying the figures were secret.

To the extent it did survive, the Party was crippled by the penetration activities of innumerable FBI informants. ‘If it were not for me,’ Edgar was to tell Abba Schwartz, Assistant Secretary in charge of security at the State Department in 1963, ‘there would not even be a Communist Party of the United States. Because I’ve financed the Communist Party, in order to know what they are doing.’

‘How do you think I’m going to get my Appropriations out of Congress if you keep downplaying the CP?’ Edgar would exclaim angrily to William Sullivan toward the end of his life. Sullivan, who specialized in monitoring the Party’s activities, later declared publicly that the Communist ‘threat’ had long been ‘a lie perpetuated on the American public.’

All this indicates that, by the end of the McCarthy era at any rate, not even Edgar himself was sincere about the anti-Communist effort known at the FBI as The Cause. Above and beyond everything, however, Edgar believed in Edgar. Those in Congress who marched to his tune, like McCarthy, he used. Those who did not, he found ways to crush.

From the early fifties on, in the words of Senator Estes Kefauver, Edgar’s hold on Congress gave him ‘more power than the President.’

19

‘J. Edgar Hoover was like a sewer that collected dirt. I now believe he was the worst public servant in our history.’

Former Acting Attorney General Laurence Silberman, the first person to peruse Hoover’s secret files after his death

Edgar denied time and again that he kept files on the personal lives of politicians and public figures. ‘The supposed secret dossiers,’ he said, ‘do not exist.’ The politicians, however, did not believe him. In 1958, a group of senior U.S. senators held a special meeting to discuss what to do if Edgar should suddenly die. If that happened, they decided, a delegation would rush to FBI headquarters and demand to see the files.

The bottom line was fear, and in some unlikely quarters. Senator Karl Mundt, a Republican of the far Right and a staunch supporter of the Un-American Activities Committee, was ostensibly one of Edgar’s vocal supporters. One night in 1960, however, Mundt poured out his true feelings to his aide Henry Eakins.

‘Hoover,’ he said, ‘is the most dangerous man in the United States. He has misused his office. There are things I know that Hoover has done to congressmen and senators, things that should never have happened. He has things on them.’ Later, worried about having spoken so openly, he implored Eakins not to repeat what he had said while Edgar remained in office.

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