Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [81]
Mrs Roosevelt sometimes invited potential embarrassment because, as her husband’s biographer Ted Morgan put it, she was ‘a soft touch.’ In her pursuit of liberal causes she bumped up against Communists and radicals, and plain oddballs, and seemed to think the President’s wife could do so with impunity.
Edgar, who had long since infiltrated the Communist Party, was told what Mrs Roosevelt had supposedly said about him to a Communist friend. ‘Now you see what a bastard Hoover is,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘That’s how he covers up his Fascist attitude. You should have seen Franklin … He said this was just another proof of the duplicity of that smug would-be-Himmler.’
Such reports made Edgar even angrier. As late as 1960, he would still be speaking of the widowed Eleanor as ‘really dangerous.’ According to former agent G. Gordon Liddy, ‘He attributed a lot of the leftish positions that President Roosevelt took to her malevolent influence. He said he was often able to solve problems he had with Communists only after he learned they originated with Eleanor Roosevelt. Then he would go to her husband – and Roosevelt would overrule Eleanor in Hoover’s favor.’
What survives of Edgar’s file on the First Lady is 449 pages long. While Edgar was alive it sat in one of two large file cabinets behind Miss Gandy’s desk, one of the supersensitive files that were kept separate from the main system. Some former aides say they were so placed to restrict access to a handful of senior staff – thus protecting the subjects of the files, many of them prominent public figures. Many, however, believe the files were a storehouse of human foibles, ammunition for actual or potential blackmail.
Mrs Roosevelt got wind of Edgar’s temerity in January 1941, when she learned FBI agents had investigated both her social secretary, Edith Helm, and a second aide, Malvina Thompson. The agents had probed deep into the private lives of the women, asking questions of Thompson’s neighbors, interrogating desk clerks about comings and goings at her hotel room. They even grilled people in Helm’s hometown in Illinois.
When Mrs Roosevelt protested, Edgar tried to brush her off with a smooth reply. The check on Mrs Helm was a routine one, he insisted, undertaken because the woman worked for a committee linked to the Council for National Defense. There would have been no investigation, he said, had the FBI known the women worked for the President’s wife. Unimpressed, for both women were well known in Washington, the First Lady fired off another letter.
‘I do not wonder,’ she wrote this time, ‘that we are beginning to get an extremely jittery population … This type of investigation seems to me to smack too much of the Gestapo methods.’ Edgar had to apologize, but the long-term effect was probably to inflame him even more against Mrs Roosevelt. Word of the episode had flashed around Washington – and to humiliate Edgar was to make him more dangerous.
Scholarship in later years gave some credence to the notion that the President’s wife had a secret sex life. Her 1992 biographer, Blanche Cook, suggested she may have had physical relationships with Earl Miller, the state trooper who served as her bodyguard, and with Lorena Hickok, the lesbian reporter who covered the White House for the Associated Press. No one has gone so far as Edgar, who suspected Mrs Roosevelt of having affairs with several men, including her black driver, an Army colonel, her doctor and two leaders of the National Maritime Union.
The two labor leaders, both former sailors, used to joke about cultivating the First Lady to gain access to the President. ‘Goddamn it, Blackie,’ one was overheard saying to the other on an FBI bug, ‘I’ve made enough sacrifices. Next time you service the old bitch!’
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