Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [8]
Yet President Nixon, in his turn, had collided with Hoover. Early on, the elderly Director had become impossible to live with. He cut off liaison with all other intelligence agencies. For reasons of self-preservation rather than principle, he sabotaged the President’s battle plan for an intelligence offensive against radical activists. Then he enraged Nixon by soft-pedaling the investigation of Daniel Ellsberg, the government analyst who leaked Vietnam War documents to the press. His erratic public performance made him an embarrassment to the administration. Despite all this, Richard Nixon did not dare fire him.
The President tried to do so, on several occasions. In the fall of 1971, aware that Nixon had summoned Hoover for a showdown meeting, officials sat watching the clock, waiting for news that the Director had finally been forced out of office. The news never came. Though Nixon has never admitted it, the old man fought off disaster with his most trusty weapon: knowledge.
Recently released White House transcripts reveal that the President and his aides were squirming with worry over the damage Hoover could do. On Nixon’s orders, aides scurried to retrieve incriminating documents – proving the President had ordered the bugging of newsmen – ‘before Hoover blows the safe.’ There were a string of other reasons to be afraid. Hoover, it seems, was aware of some of the White House crimes that preceded Watergate. He even had personal information on Nixon – potential scandal involving a woman.
The Director knew Richard Nixon’s sins and secrets, as he knew those of so many others. When he died, there was panic over what information might lie in his office. Nixon’s Chief of Staff scrawled a terse note: ‘… find out what’s there, who controls it – where skeletons are.’
In Congress, many senators and congressmen lived in fear of the files Hoover held on them – or that they feared he held. The Freedom of Information Act has made it clear that their fears were justified. The record proves conclusively that FBI agents routinely reported in detail on the sexual activity of politicians – both hetero- and homosexual. Eyewitness testimony reveals how one prominent senator was terrorized into inaction by a reading from his own FBI file.
One of Hoover’s closest colleagues, William Sullivan, was to describe him – after he was dead – as ‘a master blackmailer.’ Yet that is only part of the story. New evidence indicates that this immensely powerful man had a fatal flaw of his own. He was the product of a painful childhood, the son of a mentally ill father and a domineering mother, and his adult life was marred by emotional turmoil and sexual confusion. The Hoover who preached stern moral sermons to America secretly practiced homosexuality – allegedly even transvestism.
As Hoover himself repeatedly warned, homosexuals have always been prime targets for compromise by hostile intelligence agencies – not least that of Edgar’s bête noîre, the Soviet Union. So tormented was Hoover by his secret vulnerability that he once sought help from a Washington psychiatrist.
The suggestion that the blackmailer was blackmailed, though, comes from a different and startling direction. Why, many have asked, did Hoover long neglect pursuit of the most insidious criminal force of all – the Mafia? Several mob figures now assert that, as they understood it, Hoover posed no threat. He and top organized crime figures had ‘an understanding.’
Early in Hoover’s career, according to mob interviews, he was trapped by his own homosexuality.