Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [230]
For months past, Edgar had spent much of his time in the office staring out the window, as the girders of the new FBI building rose, very slowly, across the street. He kept a photo album of it on his desk, which aides updated constantly. ‘At the rate it is going up,’ he would say, ‘none of us will be around by the time it is finished.’
Many of ‘us’ were already gone. Of his oilmen friends, Billy Byars had died in 1965, Clint Murchison in 1969, and Sid Richardson was long gone. The previous fall, looking unsteady himself, Edgar had buried the old classmate he had been close to in the early days at the Bureau, Frank Baughman. Baughman was one of the few who still called Edgar by the old nickname, Speed. Two months earlier, Walter Winchell had died of cancer in Los Angeles. Edgar had not bothered to go to the funeral.
Others were failing fast. Lewis Rosenstiel had suffered a stroke. Clyde had been in the hospital again with heart problems. Edgar himself was talking about God more than usual. ‘For me,’ he told a writer for an Evangelist magazine, ‘Jesus is a living reality … I know that I can count on our Redeemer.’ Edgar had recently made his last will, leaving almost his entire fortune to Clyde.
In late April, when Cartha DeLoach saw him at a Hearst Newspapers lunch in New York, Edgar seemed feisty enough. Roy Cohn, his protege from the McCarthy days, was there, too. He thought the Director looked well, younger than his seventy-seven years. ‘I had a checkup and everything is fine,’ Edgar said. ‘If I retired, I’d fall apart and rot away. That’s what happens when you quit. I’m staying.’
There was another reason to hang on. ‘You’ve been through the same type of persecution,’ he told Cohn. ‘My time had to come. But I’ve got the bums on the run. And I’m staying right where I am.’
Back in Washington, Edgar dined at the Cosmos Club and attended the Saturday racing at Pimlico as usual. On Sunday, April 30, he drank martinis with neighbors across the street, pottered about in the garden and watched ‘The FBI’ on television.
Edgar’s last day alive, by a great irony, was May Day, the workers’ holiday celebrated by the Left, the Left he had struggled all his life to suppress. Edgar arrived at work alone, without the ailing Clyde.
It was not a pleasant day at the office. That morning, in his Washington Post column, Jack Anderson offered revelations about FBI dossiers on the private lives of political figures, black leaders, newsmen and show business people. Hours later, in a carefully timed appearance on Capitol Hill, he promised to prove it.
‘The executive branch,’ the columnist testified to a congressional committee, ‘conducts secret investigations of prominent Americans … FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover has demonstrated an intense interest in who is sleeping with whom in Washington … I should make clear that I am not offering hearsay testimony. I have seen FBI sex reports; I have examined FBI files … I am willing to make some of these documents available to the Committee.’
These were astonishing claims in 1972, and the FBI corridors were abuzz with talk about Anderson that day. This, however, was only one in a salvo of new attacks. Earlier, Edgar had obtained advance copies of two books about himself. Citizen Hoover, by Jay Robert Nash, was a savage attack on Edgar’s entire career. Americans, Nash wrote, no longer knew what to make of Edgar. He was both ‘benefactor and bully, protector and oppressor, truth-giver and liar … The truth is the FBI of our collective memory never really existed outside of the very fertile and imaginative mind of its eternal Director … To him, all high adventure was possible in the cause of Right, all moral victories over obvious evil inevitable, so long as