Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [246]
2. See Chapter 9.
Chapter 16
1. It is clear that there was indeed a Communist espionage operation in the early forties and that documents were leaked by sources in Washington. Some of the Bentley/Chambers testimony fits the skein of evidence in the Rosenberg and Fuchs spy cases. There is still no certainty, however, that either White or Hiss was wittingly involved.
2. For coverage of COINTELPRO, see Chapter 33.
3. As of the 1948 elections, Mundt became a senator.
4. ‘I never played poker in my life,’ Hoover claimed in a 1946 note. McGaughey’s account, and other anecdotes, shows that he lied. His congressional poker circle in the forties included Representatives Michael Kerwin, Thomas Martin and Ben Jensen, and Senator Stiles Bridges. (H notation, Jan. 16, 1946, OC 51, Cooper article, NY journal, Dec. 3, 1937, Infamy, Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, by John Toland, NY, Berkley Books, 1983, p. 342.)
5. The four convicted were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell and David Greenglass, all in connection with the Rosenberg spy case. For all the controversy, little doubt remains that the Rosenbergs did betray nuclear secrets. Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, published in 1990, acknowledged the Rosenbergs’ ‘significant help’ in accelerating Soviet development of the atomic bomb. Hoover had been the first to suggest the prosecution of Ethel, in spite of a lack of hard evidence against her, in the hope that it would ‘serve as a lever’ to force Julius to crack. He never did, but Hoover waited hopefully at an open telephone line until the very moment of the couple’s execution in 1953. At home in Virginia that night, according to his son, FBI propaganda boss Louis Nichols and the friendly journalist Rex Collier ‘went around the house turning off the lights, so they would have more electricity at Sing Sing to electrocute the Rosenbergs. It was symbolic.’ (Intl. Ann Ginger, Director, Meiklejohn Institute, and Gene Dennis, archivist, ILWU, San Francisco, 1992, Rosenberg File, by Ronald Radosch and Joyce Milton, NY, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983, Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths, by Irene Philipson, NY, Franklin Watts, 1988, [Khrushchev] Khrushchev Remembers, ed. Jerrold Schecter and Vyacheslav Luchkov, Boston, Little, Brown, 1990, pp. 193ff, Anthony Villano, op. cit., pp. 25ff, int. J. Edgar Nichols, 1988.)
6. In 1953, when the Republicans had returned to the White House, Edgar made a sensational congressional appearance in support of Attorney General Brownell’s claim that Truman had ignored FBI warnings about Harry Dexter White. Hoover claimed he appeared only because Brownell ordered him to, but Brownell said in 1988 that Hoover ‘volunteered.’ (Int. Brownell, 1988, OC 67, NYT, Nov. 7, 14–19, 22–27, 1953, Life, Nov. 23, 1953, P, p. 318, Drew Pearson Diaries, 1949–59, ed. Tyler Abell, NY, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974, p. 284.)
Chapter 18
1. There is no report that Hoover ever expressed any sympathy for the likes of Rockwell.
2. In 1956, again before an election, Hoover would feed information on Stevenson to Richard Nixon. He would later tell a Kennedy aide that Stevenson was a ‘notorious homosexual.’ (Nation, May 7, 1990, citing FBI records.)
3. A source interviewed for this book contradicted a note in FBI files suggesting that Hoover ceased providing McCarthy with information in the summer of 1953. The interviewee, an electronics specialist who bugged McCarthy and his aides on behalf of the military during the Army-McCarthy hearings, said the secret help continued to the end. ‘I was listening in,’ he recalled, ‘two, sometimes three times a day, to calls between Hoover and Roy Cohn. Cohn and McCarthy were still getting everything they had from