Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [19]
On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Edgar was visited at his office by a friend named Sidney Kaufman. Kaufman was bursting to tell his news – he and his girlfriend planned to announce their engagement that very evening at Harvey’s Restaurant, the Washington watering hole Edgar would patronize all his life. Edgar and Alice were invited to celebrate with them.
According to Gandy, Edgar decided he and Alice would also get engaged that evening. He sent her a note, asking her to meet him en route to the restaurant, at the Lafayette Hotel. Alice, however, did not turn up. She soon became engaged to another man, a young officer who – unlike Edgar – had gone to war.
Helen Gandy did not divulge the full name of Edgar’s lost love. There is no reason, though, to doubt the story. Gandy talked about aspects of that evening in 1918 with two FBI officials, and she was a firsthand witness to Edgar’s humiliation. She herself had been present at Harvey’s that night, as the partner of one of the men at the party, and it was then that Edgar, in his loneliness, first took notice of her.
‘Miss Gandy told me they had several dates,’ Edgar’s future aide Cartha DeLoach recalled. ‘They had a good time, but they weren’t attracted to each other in that way. It cooled off, but later – when he needed a secretary – he called her.’ Gandy, who was already working at the Bureau as a messenger, became a confidential clerk in Edgar’s office just months later – and remained at his side from then on.
‘The shock never really wore off,’ Gandy said of the Alice episode. The hurt was the greater because, Edgar discovered, the girl he hoped to marry had been romancing her army officer through the mail – while he was away at the front – all the time she was seeing Edgar. ‘This,’ Gandy said, ‘may have been part of why Mr Hoover never really trusted women in that way, why he never married.’
Edgar must have been thinking of Alice when, in 1955, he made a rare comment on his relations with women: ‘I was in love once when I was young,’ he told reporter Fletcher Knebel. ‘I guess you’d call it puppy love …’ He told another interviewer that, in his experience, women he wanted to marry were always involved with someone else.
‘Here is something I will confess,’ Edgar said in an unusually frank interview in 1939. ‘If I ever marry and the girl fails me, ceases to love me, and our marriage is dissolved, it would ruin me. My mental status couldn’t take it, and I would not be responsible for my actions.’ The phrase about ‘mental status’ was deleted in reprints of the interview.
In the same conversation, Edgar gave away more about his attitude. ‘I have always held girls and women on a pedestal,’ he said. ‘They are something men should look up to, to honor and worship. If men would remember this and keep them there, married life would be better. I have had that idea about women all my life.’
Edgar’s niece Margaret, who saw a lot of her uncle in the decade that followed the Alice fiasco, never saw him with a woman his own age. She laid the blame on his mother. ‘Edgar would never have been able to get married,’ she said. ‘Nanny was truly the matriarch … she would have stopped anything rumored.’
Edgar’s mother had once tried to do just that. She had tried to prevent her elder son marrying, on the grounds that his intended was not good enough for him. On that occasion she failed, but she would never lose her grip on Edgar.
After the ‘puppy love’ experience, Edgar would say years later, his work took the place of women. ‘I became attached to the Bureau, and I don’t think any wife would have put up with me.’
For a decade after the setback with Alice – throughout his twenties – Edgar had no emotional connection with anyone except Annie. He would come home each night to Seward Square, first