Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [110]
After Edgar’s death, by one official count, the Bureau was holding 883 files on senators, 722 on congressmen. Some were still withheld, as this book was written, others had been shredded. Many, as former Assistant Director Nicholas Callahan claimed, no doubt contained nothing sinister, just ‘informative material.’ A scattering of surviving documents, however, prove that politicians’ fears were well founded. Many come from the files designated ‘Official and Confidential,’ which were closely held in locked file cabinets in Edgar’s office suite. His secretary, Helen Gandy, reportedly took the keys home with her each evening.
The dirt in Edgar’s files was often sexual in nature. In 1948, when Senator Vandenberg of Michigan was a darkhorse Republican presidential candidate, aides kept Edgar up to date on gossip about him. OC file 50 shows that the Senator expressed himself ‘deeply indebted’ to the FBI for passing on information about his relationship with a woman not his wife. This was a direct clash of interest. Edgar was poking around in the private affairs of a potential presidential candidate at the very time he himself was dreaming of advancement under the man he wanted in the White House, Thomas Dewey.
In the late thirties, Clyde’s woman friend Edna Daulyton had listened in horror as Edgar and Clyde discussed Congressman Harold Knutson, a Republican from Minnesota, over dinner at the Mayflower. ‘It was clear to me,’ Daulyton recalled, ‘that they’d done something awful, something very detrimental to that congressman. I didn’t exactly understand what they’d done, or why. I was very young and I didn’t ask questions.’
Knutson, who served in Congress from 1917 until 1948, was a bachelor who lived with a male Mexican companion. A rumor, never published, suggested he was involved in a homosexual scandal – successfully hushed up. ‘I heard,’ said his fellow congressman George MacKinnon, now a federal judge, ‘that someone had allegedly caught him buggering a younger man. It was put about by someone who didn’t like him.’ The word in Washington police circles was that Edgar was somehow involved. Some even whispered that he was himself involved in the homosexual scandal. Whatever the truth, Edna Daulyton remembered something Edgar said that evening at the Mayflower. It stuck in her mind, she said, because it was so cold and vicious. Congressman Knutson, Edgar remarked, would ‘always be in our pocket now …’
The Official and Confidential files show that between 1958 and 1965 Washington Agents in Charge systematically collected scandal on politicians. Politically damaging tidbits were culled from the reports of agents engaged in other investigations, from human eavesdroppers on the Hill and from electronic devices, and hand-delivered to Edgar.
An FBI roundup of information dated June 13, 1958, and including a passage headed ‘Government Circles,’ tells Edgar what Agent Conrad Trahern overheard ‘in the cafeteria of the Senate Office Building.’ Parts of the document, reproduced below, were censored by FBI officials before its release under the Freedom of Information Act in 1989.
Edgar responded that he ‘deeply appreciated’ this information. The report was followed, on July 7, by a summary of an interview with a photographer for the Democratic National Committee, describing how politicians had suppressed a compromising photograph. There was gossip on a Guggenheim family member – he had attended a masked ball with someone other than his wife – and information on a Washington ‘telephone answering service for homosexuals.’
The report of August 8 ends with smear information on a member of the Senate:
That same month Edgar was told about an aide to Congressman James Morrison of Louisiana who had been conned out of $254 while attempting to attend a live sex show. He learned that a congressional critic of Army security regulations – name censored – was consorting with a person with ‘the morals of an alley cat.’ He was