Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [194]
The writer Gore Vidal, who grew up in Washington in the thirties, had a similar memory. ‘Hoover was becoming famous, and it was always said of him – in my family and around the city – that he was mulatto. People said he came from a family that had “passed.” It was the word they used for people of black origin who, after generations of interbreeding, have enough white blood to pass themselves off as white. That’s what was always said about Hoover.’ ‘There was a sort of secret admiration among blacks for those who were able to pass,’ said Dufty. ‘Fooling white people was easy, but fooling blacks was next to impossible.’
Early photographs of Edgar do have a negroid look. His hair was noticeably wiry, and a 1939 article refers to his ‘dark skin, almost brown from sunburn. His coloring … gives a striking contrast to the crisp, white linen suit.’ Was there then some truth to the story?
As was often the case in those days, no birth certificate was registered when Edgar was born in 1895. The document that was eventually issued, in 1938, states simply that both his father and mother were ‘white.’ The ancestry of his mother is well documented, a line of solid burghers easily traceable to their ancestral home in Switzerland. His father’s family history, however, amounts to no more than a series of conflicting reports of descent from German, Swiss or British immigrants, settlers who arrived in America 200 years before Edgar’s birth. There had been plenty of time for racial intermingling.
After Edgar’s death, even Helen Gandy would speak of ‘an early story’ that Edgar had black blood. She spoke of the rumor during an interview, then dropped the subject.
‘Hoover himself had to know what people said about him,’ said Gore Vidal. ‘There were two things that were taken for granted in my youth – that he was a faggot and that he was black. Washington was and is a very racist town, and I can tell you that in those days the black blood part was very much the worst. People were known to commit suicide if it was discovered that they had passed. To be thought a black person was an unbelievable slur if you were in white society. That’s what many people flatly believed about Hoover, and he must have been so upset by it …’
Whether or not the rumor was true, it must have caused endless distress to Edgar, whose public posture was that of the white nativist, suspicious of all that seemed alien. Just as he compensated for his secret homosexuality by lashing out at fellow homosexuals, so Edgar’s worry about his racial identity may have shaped his behavior toward blacks. To those who knew their place – servants like Noisette, James Crawford and the rest – he played the decent, paternalistic boss. Those who sought to rise above their station, as perhaps he sensed he himself had done, he had at best no time for.
Born in an era when black men were regularly lynched for rape – if the victim was white – Edgar preferred to shrug off the miseries of black Americans. As with organized crime, he was content to ignore the law enforcement problems that arose, or to claim ‘lack of jurisdiction.’
The attorney Joseph Rauh never forgot the angry non sequitur of an answer Edgar gave when asked to probe the attempted murder of a white labor leader in the forties. ‘Edgar says no,’ Attorney General Tom Clark told Rauh. ‘He’s not going to send the FBI in every time some nigger woman says she’s been raped.’1
Though Edgar mounted some effective operations against the Ku Klux Klan, his priorities became obvious once blacks began to demand their rights. ‘When I was working in the South in the fifties,’ said Arthur Murtagh, ‘there was simply no comparison. The Bureau only investigated the Klan when a murder