Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [3]
There has been a fresh development on the subject of the claim that a sex photograph of Hoover and Tolson was in the possession of James Angleton, the CIA Counter-Intelligence chief. Former intelligence officer John Weitz, like Angleton a veteran of the wartime intelligence organization OSS, revealed that it was Angleton who – years earlier – showed him a similar picture of the two men. Whether or not they were authentic, there can be little doubt that such photographs did exist, and that Angleton believed they could be used to intimidate Hoover.*
The most persistent criticism of Official and Confidential, however, has centered on the passage – just three pages long – in which I report the allegation by Susan Rosenstiel, a former wife of liquor millionaire Lewis Rosenstiel, that Hoover dressed in female clothes to take part in group sex with attorney Roy Cohn, her husband, and young male prostitutes. Hoover defenders maintained that Mrs Rosenstiel was not a credible source because she pleaded guilty to an attempted perjury charge in 1971. I told readers this but, unlike the critics, also explained the context. The very week the charge was brought, the New York State Legislative Committee on Crime had planned to produce Mrs Rosenstiel as a witness to her husband’s links to the Mafia. The Committee’s Chairman and Chief Counsel were outraged at the perjury development. The perjury charge was brought in connection with a 1969 civil suit – a move lawyers considered unprecedented and bizarre. Committee officials believed it was instigated by Rosenstiel himself, using his vast wealth and influence to obstruct the official inquiry by discrediting his former wife. Court records show the tycoon had used similar tactics in the recent past, to pervert the course of justice.
Those trying to discredit Mrs Rosenstiel claimed that she was ‘reputedly an alcoholic with mental problems,’ known as ‘Snow White’ in (unnamed) circles. During six years’ work on Official and Confidential, including extended interviews with the woman, I found not a jot of evidence to support such accusations. Nor were such weaknesses even rumored until after publication of my book. On the contrary, the former Chief Counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and Committee investigator William Gallinaro, found Mrs Rosenstiel an exceptionally good witness. ‘I thought her absolutely truthful,’ Judge McLaughlin told me. ‘The woman’s power of recall was phenomenal. Everything she said was checked and double checked, and everything that was checkable turned out to be true.’ Although this assessment of Mrs Rosenstiel is in this book, it was not quoted in a single newspaper.
Critic after critic, on the other hand, asserted scornfully that Mrs Rosenstiel was the only witness to speak of Hoover’s alleged cross-dressing. In fact, the passage immediately following the Rosenstiel account consists of a similar report, by two witnesses who said they learned of Hoover’s penchant for women’s clothes at a different time and place from those described by Mrs Rosenstiel. The second two witnesses had never heard of Susan Rosenstiel, and their story was unknown to her.
Since publication, I have received FBI files on both Lewis and Susan Rosenstiel – files withheld during the years I worked on the book in spite of an early application under the Freedom of Information Act. They contain nothing to diminish belief in Mrs Rosenstiel. They do show that Hoover was interested in, and concerned about, the FBI handling of Lewis Rosenstiel, as early as 1939. They contain what appears to be the record of a first meeting between the two men in 1956, although