Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [85]
For Roosevelt, the Lash episode was not the only factor. He was angry, in the fall of 1943, when he was forced to dump Sumner Welles,’ his valued Undersecretary of State and personal friend, in order to prevent a scandal about his alleged homosexual activity. According to Dr Beatrice Berle, widow of Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Edgar’s role in the whispering campaign against Welles led to a terminal rift between the Director and the President.
‘After it was all over,’ she said in 1990, ‘Roosevelt told Hoover to get out, and he never received him again.’ The President did distance himself from Welles’ principal persecutors. And the files at the Roosevelt Library contain no more long private discussions with Edgar, and no genial correspondence, from this point on.
It had been said that, having raised Edgar up for his own political purposes, the President planned to curb his powers when the war ended, perhaps even to remove him from office. If so, he did not live to do it.
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‘We are a fact gathering organization only. We don’t clear anybody. We don’t condemn anybody. Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.’
J. Edgar Hoover, July 14, 1955
At 5:00 P.M. on April 12, 1945, Harry Truman hurried alone and unprotected along a deserted passage beneath the Capitol. Then, half-guessing the meaning of the summons to the White House, the sixty-year-old Vice President broke into a run. Two hours later, in the Cabinet Room, he found himself taking the oath of office as the thirty-third president of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, worn out after twelve years in office, had died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
Abroad, the end of the war was approaching. American troops were advancing on Buchenwald concentration camp, where 50,000 Jews had been murdered. The Soviet army was fighting on the approaches to Berlin. Hitler would soon commit suicide in his bunker; Mussolini would be shot by Italian partisans. Germany would surrender and, three months later, after President Truman had unleashed the atomic bomb, so would Japan.
In the midst of all this, and not for the first time, Truman was worrying about Edgar and the FBI. As a senator, he had objected publicly when the Bureau was absolved of all blame for Pearl Harbor. Now, in his first weeks as President, he was alarmed by what he learned about the FBI – bloated in size and power – that Roosevelt had left behind.
A month after taking office, Truman expressed these feelings in one of his celebrated memos to himself:
May 12, 1945
We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex life scandals and plain blackmail when they should be catching criminals. They also have a habit of sneering at local law enforcement officers. This must stop. Cooperation is what we must have.
Edgar scurried to shore up his position, scouring the Bureau for someone known to Truman who could serve as the new FBI liaison agent to the White House. ‘Mr Hoover wants you to know,’ the chosen man told the President, ‘that he and the FBI are at your personal disposal and will help in any way you ask.’ ‘Any time I want the services of the FBI,’ Truman retorted, ‘I’ll ask for it through my Attorney General.’
When the emissary took this message back to Edgar, recalled Assistant Director William Sullivan, ‘Hoover’s hatred knew no bounds.’ Truman had put him in his place as would no other leader except Kennedy, and he had lost his special access to the seat of power.
Even so, Edgar found a way to draw the Truman White House into his web. The President agreed that