Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [82]
Lash was thirty when he met Eleanor, then fifty-five, at a 1939 session of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Lash was not a Communist, but a fervent anti-Fascist who had visited the Soviet Union and Spain during the Civil War, then returned to become a radical student leader. To Edgar he was a subversive who deserved investigation. Eleanor, however, took Lash under her wing, invited him to meet the President at the White House, lent him money and tried to further his career.
On Edgar’s orders, FBI officials prepared an eleven-page memorandum on Lash in 1941. The following January, agents broke into the New York headquarters of the American Youth Congress, of which Lash was a leader, and photographed the First Lady’s correspondence with the group’s officials. The same month, when Lash’s application to join the Navy was turned down, Mrs Roosevelt wrote to Attorney General Biddle.
‘I wonder,’ she asked, ‘if it would be possible for you to run down for me through the Federal Bureau of Investigation … what they really have on Joe Lash.’ Biddle referred the inquiry to Edgar, who replied smoothly that ‘the FBI is conducting no investigation.’ This was a common Bureau circumlocution. In Bureauspeak, the collection of information was different from a full inquiry. In fact, Edgar’s closest aides had been discussing Lash with the naval authorities.
Drafted instead into the Army, Lash spent the weeks that followed with Mrs Roosevelt clucking solicitously around him. She paid for champagne and the band at Lash’s farewell party in New York. Edgar took note of all this, and of the fact that Lash stayed in White House accommodations when on leave from his base near Washington.
By November 1942, Edgar was sending ‘extremely confidential’ information – its nature still censored in a document released by the FBI in 1990 – to a general in Army Intelligence. The next month, following an FBI burglary at the offices of the International Student Service, an FBI report referred to Lash and Eleanor Roosevelt and their ‘unusual friendship.’ ‘This,’ one of Edgar’s aides wrote, ‘is nauseating.’
In April 1943, when Lash had been posted to Illinois, Edgar sent more information to the military authorities, specifically to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. Then, three months later, on instructions from the White House, the corps was drastically reduced in numbers and merged with another unit. By 1944, it had been virtually dismantled. Why?
The answer lies in a two-page report sent to Edgar’s office on December 31, 1943, and stored ever since in his files. It was from Agent George Burton, reporting on contacts with two counterintelligence colonels. The unit’s surveillance of Lash, Burton reported, had covered his meeting with Mrs Roosevelt at a hotel in Chicago. The President himself had found out and summoned General Strong of Army Intelligence to the White House with the relevant records. ‘The material,’ Agent Burton reported,
contained a recording of the entire proceedings between Lash and Mrs Roosevelt which had been obtained through a microphone which had been planted in the hotel room. This recording indicated quite clearly that Mrs Roosevelt and Lash engaged in sexual intercourse during their stay in the hotel room … After this record was played Mrs Roosevelt was called into the conference and was confronted with the information and this resulted in a terrific fight between the President and Mrs Roosevelt. At approximately 5:00 A.M. the next morning the President called for General Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, and … ordered him to have Lash outside the United States and