Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [86]
Another Truman aide, John Steelman, knowingly encouraged a new form of covert communication between the FBI and the White House. Previously, under Roosevelt, Edgar’s men had passed on political information, the sort of material the FBI had no business handling in the first place, by reading briefing papers aloud to presidential aides. Afterward, to avoid leaving a paper trail, the documents would be carried back to FBI headquarters. Now Curtis Lynum, one of Edgar’s new emissaries, dreamed up a refinement of the system.
‘One day,’ he recalled, ‘I cut off the top and bottom of the memo I was reading from and handed the memo to Mr Steelman, who said, “Why can’t we do this on all messages you bring?” I replied that I would take the matter up with Mr Hoover.’ Edgar jumped at the idea. Sensitive intelligence was henceforth sent to the Truman White House on unwatermarked paper with no FBI letterhead and no signature, information that could never be tracked back to its source.
In the first weeks of his presidency, according to Harry Vaughan, Truman learned how Roosevelt had used Edgar to tap telephones for political information. ‘What is that crap?’ the President is said to have cried when shown transcripts of a bug on Tommy Corcoran, the political fixer who had defected from the Roosevelt camp. ‘Cut them all off. Tell the FBI we haven’t got any time for that kind of shit.’
If Truman did say this, he soon changed his mind. FBI files contain some 5,000 pages reflecting eavesdropping on Corcoran during the Truman years. Edgar personally supervised the taps, which were operated from an apartment on Thirteenth Street, N.W., ‘one of the central plants,’ the files describe it, under the direction of Edgar’s friend Guy Hottel.
Wiretaps aside, Edgar sent the Truman White House tidbits of political intelligence of all kinds – a warning that a scandal was brewing or advance information about a newspaper series critical of the President. And Truman accepted it. Perhaps he felt there was little harm in taking advantage of Edgar’s political espionage service, if he could stall more serious FBI abuse of civil liberties. By permitting political wiretapping, however, he made Edgar custodian of a secret that, if leaked, could have imperiled the administration.
Truman made himself beholden to Edgar, and that was the way Edgar liked things to be. There was, too, a significant skeleton in the President’s political cupboard, his longstanding link with the crooked Democratic Party machine in Kansas City, Missouri, his home state.
Truman had risen in the world as a protégé of Tom Pendergast, the political boss who, when necessary, enforced his rule with the help of the Mafia. It was Pendergast who had sent Truman to the U.S. Senate, a connection that, Truman confided to his wife, would be ‘a lead weight on me from now on.’
Edgar was aware of all this. He had himself been in Kansas City when Pendergast had been indicted for tax evasion several years earlier, and knew he had a potential weapon. During the presidential contest of 1948, he would leak information on Kansas City corruption to help Truman’s opponent, Governor Dewey.
Yet, knowing of Truman’s personal dislike for him, Edgar still felt vulnerable. He had his agents report to him on every shift in the political wind, every rumor that his own job was at risk. He became insecure to the extent of paranoia.
‘Hoover was frightened of his life with Truman,’ William Sullivan recalled. ‘I know that