Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [52]
After Edgar’s death, during an inquiry into FBI corruption, probers discovered how he spent taxpayers’ money to entertain Lamour. ‘Witnesses told us about the time he had a party for Dorothy Lamour,’ recalled investigator Joseph Griffin. ‘She’d sung all those songs about moons, and Hoover wanted her to have a moon that night. So the FBI Exhibits Section installed an electric globe way up in a tree in his garden, and rigged it up to look like a moon.’
Edgar himself hinted at his feelings about Lamour as late as 1969, during a visit to his home by Arthur and Mara Forbes, managers of the resort he stayed at each summer in California. ‘In his den,’ Mara recalled, ‘her signed pictures were all over the wall. He grinned all over and made no bones about it – it was as if it was the big love of his life, something serious.’
Lamour declined, in her late seventies, to say more about Edgar on the record than she did in her autobiography. The real nature of their relationship was to remain one of the mysteries of Edgar’s life.
Edgar’s sexual torment had effects far beyond his personal life. In his day, as is still often the case today, anything other than evident heterosexuality could destroy a public official. Acutely aware of the danger, Edgar overcompensated. Like several other public figures with a secret homosexual life, Edgar often behaved viciously toward fellow homosexuals. Once, reportedly, this resulted in the destruction of a leading statesman’s career.
In the fall of 1943 Roosevelt announced the resignation of Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. Welles was forty-seven, a brilliant diplomat and one of Roosevelt’s personal friends. The President said the resignation was because Welles’ wife was sick, but it was really the outcome of a drawn-out homosexual scandal in which Edgar played a key role.
Three years earlier, during a night train journey with fellow cabinet members, Welles had allegedly tried to bribe several black male Pullman staff members to have sex with him in his compartment. A prolonged whispering campaign followed, and, after trying to protect Welles for many months, Roosevelt decided he would have to go.
Edgar’s file on the case suggests he behaved impartially throughout, that he merely looked into the matter at the President’s request, then briefed senior officials – telling them no more than was absolutely necessary. Edgar’s memoranda, however, sometimes hide more than they reveal. In the Welles case, others paint a very different picture.
The unpublished diaries of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, show Edgar went out of his way to volunteer dirt on Welles – two years before the diplomat resigned and at a time when the President was trying to take the heat out of the scandal. In June 1941, Ickes noted, Edgar said he had ‘absolute proof that Welles is a homosexual … and he did not ask that I hold this information in confidence … To my surprise, I found that Hoover was very talkative.’
Author and former New York Times correspondent Charles Higham stumbled on fresh information about Edgar’s role. A retired FBI official said Edgar connived with one of Welles’ sworn enemies, William Bullitt, to destroy him. The incident on the train, the official claimed, was an FBI setup – some of the Pullman staff who went to Welles’ compartment were paid to do so.
Historian Dr Beatrice Berle, widow of Adolf Berle, then Assistant Secretary of State, and a cousin of Welles’, recently recalled that her husband, too, was sure the scandal was ‘a put-up job.’ Edgar’s malice, reportedly, was sparked by his distrust of Welles’ liberal tendencies – and by gossip that Welles was especially