Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [6]
What would my critics have me do about the testimony to Hoover’s homosexuality, or to his relationships with mobsters? Leave it out, because some will not believe it, or because some deem it distasteful?
Some non-fiction authors do give the craft a bad name. There are those who do not genuinely research their material to the absolute limits of endurance, ingenuity, and available funds. Such writers pad their books with some of the appearances of professionalism, long bibliographies, and notes suggestive of scholarship. An author who once spoke to me to make an appointment but never called back, went on to claim in his source notes that he had interviewed me at length. If publishers were to ask more searching questions and insist on the disciplines, such poseurs would have to shape up or quit the profession.
There were no short cuts in the writing of this book. The pages that follow represent five years of grueling work, not least by the team of scholars and journalists I hired to help me cover the vast terrain of J. Edgar Hoover’s life. Our operation cost more than half a million dollars, which consumed virtually all the publisher’s generous advance. I rarely permitted one account alone to carry a pivotal element of the story, and almost always, I required buttressing testimony. I was especially cautious if information failed to fit the overall pattern. If a statement was an uncorroborated claim, I let the reader know it. The full source notes, in the hardback edition, are exhaustively thorough.
Few professional authors much like the word ‘definitive,’ so prodigally employed by their publicists. History is by definition ongoing. Nevertheless, I believe I have got J. Edgar Hoover about right. As a foreigner, I had the advantage of starting the work with no bias, no feelings one way or the other about the man’s virtues or sins. The result, whether people like it or not, is as honest a picture of this legendary American as the available facts, and hard work, permit.
My detractors, by contrast, used lies and distortion in their attempts to discredit me. As defenders of Hoover, they no doubt missed the irony – that their weapons were the very ones their hero used to abuse his fellow citizens for so long. One must not be scared by their ranting, although we should be troubled by the influence their kind have over so much of the American media.
Over my desk, at home in Ireland, I keep a framed cartoon. It depicts a firing squad standing, rifles ready and aimed – at a typewriter. As these pages show, J. Edgar Hoover believed he could use his power to silence the press, to crush individual writers and thinkers, and to smother truth. Yet, even at the height of his power, there were always a few writers tapping away somewhere, irritating the hell out of him with their protest. May the oppressors always be so irritated. May the writers never be silenced.
Anthony Summers
Co. Waterford, Ireland, 1994 & 2011
* See Chapter 23
1
October 1971, the Oval Office of the White House
The President of the United States, his Attorney General and key advisers are wrestling with an intractable problem. The problem is an old man, a man of whom the Chief of State is afraid.
RICHARD NIXON: For a lot of reasons he oughta resign … He should get the hell out of there … Now it may be, which I kind of doubt … maybe I could just call him and talk him into resigning … There are some problems … If he does go he’s got to go of his own volition … that’s why we’re in a hell of a problem … I think he’ll stay until he’s a hundred years old.
JOHN MITCHELL: He’ll stay until he’s buried there. Immortality …
RICHARD NIXON: I think we’ve got to avoid the situation where he can leave with a blast … We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me … It’s going to be a problem.1
Seven months