Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [84]
What to make of it all? Did the President’s wife sleep with Lash at the Blackstone, or anywhere else? Lash, who obtained the FBI and Army files in 1978, denied it; he expressed his outrage in Love, Eleanor, a memoir about what he maintained was an intimate but innocent friendship with Mrs Roosevelt. His widow, Trude, agreed. ‘I am not aware that Mrs Roosevelt ever had an affair, at any period during our friendship,’ she said in 1992. ‘So far as the alleged tapes are concerned, what may have happened was that Joe came to the hotel from his Army base terribly tired, and Mrs Roosevelt may have said, “Lie down on my bed and rest.” And she probably sat next to him and stroked his forehead. She was a very affectionate person, but the sex allegation is ludicrous. The President did become furious, but because he learned about the snooping, not because of any affair. Mrs Roosevelt said a lot of people were punished because of it.’
One of the Roosevelts’ six children, Franklin, Jr., joined his name to Joe Lash’s denials. His elder sister, Anna, however, added an interesting item of information. Sh. recalled that as late as 1944, a year after the Blackstone episode, an officer brought her a bundle of what he described as ‘love letters’ from Lash to Eleanor, which the censor had intercepted. She took them to her father, as the officer had requested, and he took them from her without a word. Whatever the President’s feelings were, he concealed them.
The 1943 letters certainly show that the First Lady was extraordinarily indiscreet. If she thought she could meet repeatedly with a young man in hotel bedrooms with impunity, she was also naive in the extreme. Yet she was fifty-eight years old at the time, a quarter of a century older than Lash, and the letters show she was acting all along as matchmaker between her young protégé and his married girlfriend. It seems unlikely, if not entirely impossible, that she was nevertheless sleeping with the young man.
Yet clearly a recording of sex activity did exist. Did the Army somehow confuse its evidence of Lash’s intercourse with his future wife, Trude Pratt, with its reports of his meetings with Mrs Roosevelt? Perhaps, but the one item that might resolve the truth is missing. According to a former Army Intelligence Colonel, it did still exist, ‘well out of circulation,’ as late as 1967.
Edgar, for his part, made sure that Agent Burton’s report, eventually joined by the Army surveillance reports and copies of Mrs Roosevelt’s letters to Lash, went into the bulging file cabinet in Miss Gandy’s office. There they remained until 1953, when an opportunity arose to make use of them.
In 1953, when Republican President-elect Eisenhower was keen to remove Eleanor Roosevelt from the U.S. delegation at the United Nations, Assistant Director Louis Nichols briefed Eisenhower’s aides on the alleged affair with Lash. The aides took it seriously. In 1954, when the New York Post was critical of Eisenhower, Nichols found a way to disinter the allegation again. Pointing out that Lash was now a Post correspondent and that Mrs Roosevelt was close to the paper’s editor, he suggested Edgar carry the smear to the President himself.
Much later, when Assistant Director William Sullivan fell out with Edgar, he sent him a passionate indictment of the Bureau’s failings. ‘Mr Hoover,’ he wrote,
you have regularly told the public FBI files are secure, inviolate, almost sacred. Years ago, when I first discovered this was not true at all, I was stunned. But we had created in time a certain atmosphere in the FBI difficult to describe … We have leaked information improperly as you know, on both persons and organizations. My first recollection was leaking information about Mrs Roosevelt, whom you detested …
Whatever President Roosevelt knew of Edgar’s role in the Lash affair, he apparently lost patience with him long before the end of the war. ‘Mrs Roosevelt said her