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By Root 893 0

and the CIA. But my attempt to talk to the witnesses was aborted. I had the authority from Director Hoover to conduct the investigation. But on having telephone contact with Washington, I realized that these orders were somewhat paper orders – not to be taken literally. My efforts were frustrated from Day One. It was agreed that I should return to headquarters and submit my report. I went in and talked to the Director, and there really wasn’t too much excitement. Because this was a foregone conclusion, that the investigation for all intents and purposes should be wrapped up. Within days we could say the investigation was over. Conspiracy was a word which was verboten. It was not to be heard on anybody’s lips. The idea that Oswald had a confederate or was part of a group or a conspiracy was definitely enough to place a man’s career in jeopardy. The realization soon came to me that my efforts in Mexico City had been window dressing. I knew the FBI had the capacity and the facilities to conduct a world-class investigation. When the FBI was told to do something and had the backing of the front office – meaning Mr Hoover – there were no limits to what we could do. However, looking back, I feel a certain amount of shame. This one investigation disgraced a great organization.’

There should be no doubt, finally, about Hoover’s blackmail of politicians. In 1993, in his memoirs, former British Home Secretary Roy – now Lord – Jenkins told of an extraordinary encounter he had with the Director in 1966. ‘I suppose,’ Jenkins recalled, ‘he did not think it much mattered what he said to “Brits,” and he talked with the wildest indiscretion. He denounced the Kennedys (Jack just three years dead, Bobby just two years away from being his nominal boss as Attorney General). He said he had somewhat, but not all that much, more respect for Lyndon Johnson. He implied that he had such detailed and damning material on every U.S. politician of note, particularly those of liberal persuasion, that his position was impregnable. No one could afford to sack or discipline him. The country was in a pretty terrible state, both morally and politically, but was just about held together by FBI agents, who patrolled it like a chosen race of prefects.’

On the day the first paperback edition of this book went to press, outraged by new information about Hoover’s abuse of the Congress, U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum introduced a bill that would remove the Director’s name from the headquarters of the FBI.

There was for a while something of a vogue for attacking the very genre of investigative books about living or recently dead figures, for dismissing their authors as money-grubbing literary predators. I have no time, certainly, for the sort of book that sometimes masquerades as non-fiction. ‘There is a name for writers who claim privileged access to the inner workings of people they describe,’ a Time correspondent wrote accurately in 1993. ‘The name is novelist.’ Others decry books of ‘pathography,’ defined by Joyce Carol Oates as life stories that ‘mercilessly expose their subjects’ and ‘relentlessly catalog their most private, vulnerable and least illuminating moments.’

I prefer Lytton Strachey’s more perceptive dictum, that ‘discretion is not the better part of biography.’ The fact is that the glimpses we now have of Hoover’s private life are illuminating, in a way far more important than the easy snigger with which many journalists greeted publication of Official and Confidential. If the allegations I published are essentially accurate, then we may have discovered why a vastly powerful figure, a law enforcement supremo who could have strangled the American Mafia in its infancy, failed in his duty. Hoover failed, according to the claims I reported, because he was compromised by his sexuality.

Many may object that the thesis is shaky, that some of those interviewed may have embroidered the facts, even made them up altogether. This is a risk for every biographer, whether an academic with letters after his name, or an investigative journalist by training, as