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By Root 939 0

Maas was given three pages – in a feature euphemistically called ‘Setting the Record Straight’ – to try to demolish the parts of the book that deal with Hoover’s sexuality, and the way it may have compromised the FBI’s duty to fight organized crime. In his attack on me, Maas claimed that one person quoted had never been interviewed, and that the handling of another had been superficial. Neither accusation was true, and the ‘never interviewed’ individual had in fact been interviewed five times. The Maas piece was riven with error, yet Esquire denied me equal space for a rebuttal. Instead, it published a letter from me three months later – alongside correspondence from three men who sided with Maas.

The press at large devoted massive coverage to Official and Confidential, for which I am duly grateful. Few reporters or reviewers, however, appeared to have given the book a serious reading. Most concentrated on the passages about sex, which make up a small proportion of the work. The late Stephen Ambrose, then Director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, told Washington Post readers that I devoted an entire chapter to charging Hoover with responsibility for the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor. I made no such blanket charge. He wrote, too, that I imply Hoover had a hand in the death of Marilyn Monroe – something that has never featured in the wildest imaginings of anyone I know, let alone in this book.

In the London Sunday Times, Anthony Howard assailed me for ascribing President Nixon’s inability to remove Hoover to the Director’s knowledge of the President’s relationship with a woman he met in Hong Kong. Not so. I also report the many other factors that led Nixon to fear, as he himself said in a recently released Watergate tape, that – if dismissed – Hoover might ‘bring down the temple with him, including me.’

By far the loudest hoo-ha, however, was over the passage indicating that Hoover was homosexual, the information suggesting that he liked to wear female clothing on occasion and – far more important – the possibility that knowledge of such peccadilloes gave Mafia bosses a hold over the Director.

Detractors said that my sources on Hoover’s sexuality were unreliable. They sniped at me for reporting the claims of Susan Rosenstiel, who said she had seen Hoover dressed as a woman, on the grounds that she was herself disreputable. They dismissed the comments of mafiosi, simply because they were mafiosi.

My sources on Hoover’s sexuality include a well-authenticated eye-witness, a longtime personal friend of Hoover and his principal lover Clyde Tolson, and Hoover’s psychiatrist’s widow. After hardback publication, I heard from Marie Gladhill, whose father Vilhelm Buch was a Danish newspaperman based in Washington, D.C. ‘Many Danes used to contact my father when they came to Washington,’ Mrs Gladhill told me. ‘I was present, in the early thirties, when he received a visit from a young Danish sailor about nineteen years old, who had recently been arrested – for some homosexual offense, I think. My father asked him how he had got out of jail. And the young fellow laughed and said, “Mr Hoover got me out.” And he told how Hoover had taken him home with him. As if to explain, he said, “Mr Hoover is homosexual”…’

In a speech to a writers’ conference in the eighties, the novelist William Styron said that Hoover had once been spotted with his companion, Clyde Tolson, on the patio of a beach house in Malibu, California. ‘There was the head of the FBI,’ said Styron, ‘painting the toenails of his longtime male friend.’ Styron told me in 1993 that he received this information from a source he considered reliable. He believes the story to be ‘absolutely true.’

Following publication of Official and Confidential, the New York Post reported that Hoover and Tolson were drawn into a 1966 probe of a nationwide extortion racket. A member of the U.S. Congress, two deans of Eastern universities, and William Church, the admiral in charge of the New York naval yards, were among the many victims of a blackmail ring that