Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [216]
Subsequent Post columns contained serious revelations. Anderson disclosed that Edgar’s millionaire friends had long been picking up the tab for his summer vacations in California. He said Edgar had accepted more than a quarter of a million dollars in royalties from Masters of Deceit and two other books on Communism he had not even written. ‘This is an offense,’ Anderson pointed out, ‘that, if it had been committed by some other government official, the FBI might have been asked to investigate.’
If those articles scared Edgar, a third must have shaken him to the core. ‘Competent sources,’ Anderson wrote, ‘told us that Hoover had consulted Dr Marshall de G. Ruffin, the society shrink, about his nightmares.’ Anderson was perilously close to one of Edgar’s most sensitive secrets, for it was Ruffin whom Edgar had consulted years earlier about his homosexuality.1
Edgar was rattled. He talked about Anderson with Attorney General Mitchell and, after the story about the psychiatrist, with Mitchell’s deputy, Richard Kleindienst. ‘With these jackals,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t put anything past them … I have been undecided whether to sue for libel or not.’ ‘If they spelled your name right,’ Kleindienst advised, ‘leave it alone.’
Clyde Tolson, Anderson reported, was now too ‘feeble’ to do his job properly. It was true. Clyde suffered another stroke that year, failed to recognize his own nephew when he visited him in the hospital and found it hard to follow conversation. To hide his faults when he did go to work, Clyde was henceforth smuggled out of his apartment by a back door. A discreet arrival at the office was easy – via the underground parking lot and an elevator that stopped near his office. Yet that year Edgar gave his friend a special bonus for excellent service. ‘Mr Tolson,’ he wrote, ‘performs his tasks quickly and with outstanding accuracy … His services are without parallel.’
Edgar’s own schedule, never as grueling as his publicity suggested, was now very light. ‘By the time I left in 1970,’ said Cartha DeLoach, ‘he would come in at nine on the dot, stay until eleven forty-five, go to lunch at the Mayflower and come back around one. Then he would close his doors until three and go right on home. I never could get him during that time. That was his workday, every day.’
Out-of-town officials now found Edgar virtually inaccessible. ‘Months and months went by,’ said Neil Welch, ‘when he wasn’t seeing anybody. It’d been regular as clockwork that he saw all Agents in Charge once a year. But for the last year and half he cut them all off. We just couldn’t get any information – just total silence. Nobody had seen him, nobody could see him. Asking how he was was like it must’ve been trying to find out how the Tsar was, in Russia …’
What the public now saw was a cantankerous old man, issuing blasts of bigotry at his enemies – not least those unable to answer back, like Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. When former Attorney General Ramsey Clark criticized him in a book for his ‘self-centered concern for his own reputation,’ Edgar promptly proved him right. In a three-and-a-half-hour harangue to a reporter, he labeled Clark ‘a jellyfish and a softy.’
At the Nixon White House, the unease grew. One reason for keeping Edgar on had been the fear of jettisoning a national institution, a man assumed to have overwhelming public support. That assumption was no longer valid. Fifty-one percent of those questioned in a Gallup poll thought Edgar should retire. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ said one Washington columnist, ‘has spent too much time being a demi-god.’ Lawrence Brooks, a ninety-year-old former judge who had observed Edgar in action since 1919, was moved to quote Abraham Lincoln. ‘We must,’ he said, ‘disenthrall ourselves.’
In February