Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [4]
Susan Rosenstiel mentioned to me that she had once possessed a photograph of Hoover in the company of her husband’s mobster friends. That she did have such evidence was confirmed following publication of this book by Mary Nichols of The Philadelphia Enquirer, who met Mrs Rosenstiel years ago. ‘She did have suitcases of photographs that she had hauled away from her marriage to Lewis Rosenstiel,’ Nichols recalled. ‘The ones I saw showed Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn and Rosenstiel, at all sorts of social events with mobsters.’
As late as 2002, the journalist and author Ronald Kessler tried over several pages of a book on the Bureau to discredit both Susan Rosenstiel and the notion that Hoover’s sexuality may have influenced his long failure to pursue organized crime. While striving to persuade readers that Susan Rosenstiel was a hopelessly unreliable witness, Kessler ignored statements of law enforcement professionals and others to the contrary that had appeared in the original text of this book and in an earlier version of this foreword. He quoted me as having written that another source was ‘a former CIA counterintelligence chief,’ an assertion that made me seem ludicrously careless, when I had in fact written accurately that the man had been ‘linked to the CIA’.
When this book was first published, Hoover loyalists even attempted to contest the undoubted fact that Hoover failed to tackle organized crime until forced to do so late in his career. For those who need further convincing, I offer comments by three authorities, two of them senior FBI veterans.
Thomas Sheer, a Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s criminal division in New York in 1983, after Hoover’s death, spoke of the daunting side of the Mafia threat at that time. ‘We had to take a different approach,’ he said, ‘because of the enormous strength of organized crime in this area. I candidly believe the end result will be devastating for the five families, but it also raises questions about what the FBI has been doing for sixty years …’
Congressional crime consultant Ralph Salerno, interviewed in 1993, said Hoover’s position ‘allowed organized crime to grow very strong in economic and political terms, so that it became a much bigger threat to the wellbeing of this country than it would have been if it had been addressed much sooner. I think if they could have been attacked before they grew, before they got the wealth, before they got the knowledge, organized crime could have been nipped in the bud, and never would have grown as strong as it got to be in later decades.’
Neil Welch, an FBI Agent in Charge who became a legendary fighter against organized crime after Hoover’s death, praised this book. ‘Official and Confidential,’ he said, ‘is a powerful indictment of both the presidents and the Congress which allowed one man to have such enormous power over the nation’s law enforcement machinery – with no real accountability. FBI agents in the field could have been vastly more effective in their war on crime if the issues raised by Official and Confidential had been responsibly addressed in the public dialogue while Hoover lived.’
Publication of this book moved a former FBI Supervisor, Laurence Keenan, to write to me about another controversial episode – Hoover’s handling of the assassination of President Kennedy. Sent to Mexico City to investigate the alleged assassin’s visit there before the tragedy, Keenan had returned deeply frustrated. ‘I remember arriving there two or three days after the assassination,’ he recalled, ‘with the authority to coordinate all the investigations by the FBI