Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [54]
Dr Harold Lief, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and past president of the American Academy of Psychoanalysts, concluded that Edgar was probably ‘a bisexual, with a failed heterosexuality, because of what I see as the sharp division between lust and love in his history.’
The conflicting pressures of dealing with his sexual confusion in private, while posturing as J. Edgar Hoover, masculine, all-American hero in public, eventually drove Edgar to seek medical help. Probably in late 1946, in the wake of continuing rumors that he was a homosexual, Edgar took his worries to a psychiatrist.
Almost all his adult life, Edgar was a patient of Clark, King and Carter, a diagnostic clinic in Washington that handled many distinguished patients. Dr William Clark, who founded the practice, usually looked after Edgar himself. Soon after the war, however, puzzled by a strange malaise in his patient, he referred Edgar to a colleague who specialized in psychiatry, Dr Marshall de G. Ruffin.
A product of Harvard and Cornell, Dr Ruffin had taught psychology at the School of Aviation Medicine during the war. He would go on to become Mental Health Commissioner for the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and president of the Washington Psychiatric Society. He accepted Edgar as a patient, says his widow, Monteen, because Dr Clark ‘couldn’t quite understand what was wrong with him … He was suspicious, so he had my husband see him because of his specialty in psychiatry. It was the group opinion – Hoover needed to see a psychiatrist.
‘He was definitely troubled by homosexuality,’ Mrs Ruffin told the author, ‘and my husband’s notes would’ve proved that … I might stir a keg of worms by making that statement, but everybody then understood he was homosexual, not just the doctors.
‘After a series of visits,’ said Mrs Ruffin, ‘my understanding was that Hoover got very paranoid about anyone finding out he was a homosexual, and got scared of the psychiatry angle.’ Edgar ceased seeing the psychiatrist after a while, but reportedly consulted him again as late as 1971, not long before his death.
Dr Ruffin’s case notes on Edgar are not available. He burned them in the fireplace of his home, along with other patient histories, shortly before his own death in 1984. The surviving member of the practice Edgar attended, Dr Hill Carter, refused to discuss Edgar’s sexuality.
By 1946, when he first consulted Dr Ruffin, Edgar’s social life had long since lost the high profile of the thirties. Edgar had taken his private life out of the public eye and virtually underground. William Stutz, then a young trainee at Schaffer’s flower shop in Washington, offered a glimpse of how he went about it.
‘First thing each morning,’ he said, ‘a Lincoln limo would pull up outside. The chauffeur, usually a black man, would come in and pick up a carnation, a special variety called Dubonnet that we shipped in by air. Normally he would just carry it out to the limousine and drive away. But one day he gave me the motion to go out to the limo, and the glass was rolled down, and the mature man in the back asked if I had a private telephone line. If I had, he said, he would use it to place some orders. Well, it was Mr Hoover, and my boss had a line assigned to me to take his orders.
‘If that phone rang I dealt with the call. It was usually a man’s voice. Apparently Mr Hoover wore his carnation every morning, but only till twelve o’clock – he complained if it did not stay fresh till noon. More often the call was to make a separate order, a flower for a friend. His favorite was a Cypripedium orchid with green and brownish speckles on the throat, the sort of thing a man could send and still remain macho. It came in a glass vial with