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On several documented occasions in the future, Edgar would attempt to smear other public men – including Adlai Stevenson, Martin Luther King, and three aides to President Nixon – as homosexuals. There is no evidence that any of the allegations were true.

The Welles case occurred at a time when rumors of Edgar’s own homosexuality were circulating among high government officials. Secretary Ickes noted it in his diaries, and Attorney General Francis Biddle delighted in making mocking jokes about it. ‘Do you think Hoover is a homosexual?’ he would say in a loud stage whisper as he and Assistant Attorney General James Rowe walked past Edgar’s office. ‘Shh …’ Rowe would respond, cringing with embarrassment. ‘Oh,’ Biddle would say, still talking loudly, ‘I only mean a latent homosexual.’

The whispers spreading about Edgar made him angry and afraid – and he retaliated whenever possible. Agents around the country received standing orders on the subject. ‘We had a communication,’ recalled FBI veteran Joe Wickman, ‘saying he wanted us to deny any of those allegations that might come in, and how. A report had to be made in every case. He wanted to know who said what.’

Ordinary citizens who made passing comments on Edgar’s sexuality found that, if their remarks filtered back to the FBI, agents arrived to conduct solemn interrogations. Reports to Edgar usually assured him the offender had recanted, sometimes apparently in a state of abject fear. ‘Agents were rather vigorous in their treatment of – [name censored in released document],’ one aide noted, ‘much more so than their memorandum would indicate.’

To disassociate himself further from homosexuality, Edgar would make sweeping public statements about his hunt for ‘sex deviates in government service.’ He ordered agents to penetrate homosexual rights groups across the country, collect names of members, record speeches and photograph demonstrations. Such surveillance continued for twenty-three years, long after the FBI had concluded that the activists were in no way ‘subversive.’

Edgar was enraged when the leading group, the Mattachine Society, put him, like other heads of federal agencies, on its mailing list. A few years later, Edgar contrived an assurance to the House Appropriations Committee that ‘no member of the Mattachine Society or anyone who is a sex deviate will ever be appointed to the FBI.’

Both Edgar and Clyde kept up a macho front all their lives. They let it be known that they liked smutty jokes, and would call senior colleagues to offer off-color gags – always about women – for inclusion in speeches. Edgar once gave a transparent ‘striptease’ pen, inscribed to President Truman’s Attorney General, Howard McGrath. One New Year’s Eve, at Gatti’s restaurant in Miami Beach, Clyde was seen presenting the sexagenarian Edgar with his birthday present – a Jayne Mansfield doll.

Edgar railed publicly against pornography, and endlessly demanded stern action against the ‘peddlers of filth,’ those ‘parasites of the most deadly variety.’ As late as 1960, one agent was criticized in front of dozens of colleagues for possessing a copy of Playboy magazine. ‘The Director,’ said Bureau officials, ‘looks upon those who read such magazines as moral degenerates.’

Edgar himself not only enjoyed Playboy but viewed pornographic movies in the Blue Room, a screening facility in Crime Records. A former Agent in Charge, Neil Welch, remembers how a Washington supervisor had to rush a fresh collection of obscene material – seized during Bureau operations – to Edgar’s office. Edgar was furious when agents failed to bring him surveillance pictures that showed black activist Angela Davis having sex with her lover.

Once, said Assistant Director William Sullivan, a senior aide with a passkey indulged the temptation to rummage through Edgar’s desk after hours. He found ‘lurid literature of the most filthy kind … naked women and lurid magazines that dealt with all sorts of abnormal sexual activities.’

Where sexuality is concerned, one must be careful