Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [241]
A sociopath is a person who, because of mental illness, lacks a sense of social or moral responsibility. Edgar ran his course as head of the FBI, for half a century, by presenting himself as the precise opposite.
Edgar’s sexuality comes as no surprise to the psychologists. ‘His basic problem,’ said Dr Lief, ‘seems to me to have been that he was both attracted and repelled by women. Because he separated lust and love it’s likely that he idealized mother figures and lusted after the degraded woman, which would explain his reported liking of pornography. If I hadn’t known anything about his alleged homosexual tendencies, my guess would have been that his primary adaptation was to transvestism, which indeed turns out to have been part of the picture.’
For Edgar, transvestism may have offered a form of release. Like his homosexuality, however, it surely brought terrible inner torment. Studies of transvestism are filled with stories of emotional turmoil. Many transvestites attempt suicide, and almost all live in terror of being exposed. It is surely no coincidence that the earliest report of Edgar’s crossdressing refers to the postwar years, when worries about sex drove him to consult a psychiatrist.
Edgar’s puritanism seems to have been the hypocrisy of a public man overcompensating for private weaknesses. In 1957, the year before the alleged cross-dressing episodes involving sex with young males at New York’s Plaza Hotel, Edgar had launched a call for the suppression of pornography. ‘If we act now,’ he declared, ‘we can look forward to a new generation of young people with clean minds and healthy bodies living in a better, cleaner America.’
According to Dr John Money, Professor of Medical Psychology at Johns Hopkins University, Edgar’s sexual conflicts fit a familiar pattern, one seen quite often in policemen. ‘You find this sort of thing in officers who work for the Vice Squad. They may hang out in men’s toilets in order to arrest other men, but they make sure they get themselves serviced first. They may look like knights in shining armor, but they’re undercover agents psychologically as much as by profession.
‘Hoover’s whole life,’ observed Dr Money, ‘was one of haunting and hounding people over their sexuality, brutalizing them one way or another because of it. He took on the role of being the paragon, keeping the country morally clean, yet hid his own sexual side. His terrible thing was that he needed constantly to destroy other people in order to maintain himself. Many people like that break down and end up needing medical help. Hoover managed to live with his conflict – by making others pay the price.’
Noting that some personality types are now universally known by the names of famous case histories – sadism for the Marquis de Sade, masochism for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and so on – Dr Money proposed that Edgar’s name be used in similar fashion. ‘Hoover,’ he believed, ‘is a model to describe those who exhibit a paraphiliac, or perverted, type of sexuality by sacrificing other people to exorcise their own demands. He had what I call “malignant bisexuality,” and I suggest quite seriously that his condition should henceforth be called the “J. Edgar Hoover Syndrome.”’
On September 30, 1975, a Marine band struck up a specially composed ‘J. Edgar Hoover March’ in the courtyard of the vast concrete complex that Edgar had hoped to see finished, and which is now the FBI headquarters. Hours earlier, workmen had raised a glittering name high on the facade that faces Pennsylvania Avenue. This was to be the J. Edgar Hoover Building, as decided by Richard Nixon immediately after Edgar’s death.
The headquarters was inaugurated by Nixon’s successor, President Ford. He chose his words carefully, offering most of his praise not to the memory of Edgar, but to the ‘special agents, legendary symbols of American justice for decades.’ He spoke of Edgar little and with reserve, calling him only ‘a pioneering public servant.’
By late 1975, caution had become essential. The evils of the Hoover years were beginning