Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [88]
Edgar’s standoff with the Agency would last until he died. ‘When requests came in from the CIA,’ said Sullivan, ‘legitimate, authorized requests, Hoover would drag his heels, meet half the request and ignore the other half.’ This pettiness led to a head-on clash with Truman’s second CIA Director, the illustrious General Walter Bedell Smith.
‘It is mandatory for you to give the CIA full cooperation,’ Smith told Edgar. ‘If you want to fight this, I’ll fight you all over Washington.’ Edgar backed off, but his file on Smith shows contempt. ‘Smith is a stinker,’ Edgar scrawled on one report, ‘and not a little one either.’ Relations with other Agency heads were even worse. According to CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton, Edgar did not sit down with a CIA Director more than five times in his entire career.
For a while after the war, Edgar seemed less surefooted, less certain of his direction. He clung to hopes of becoming Attorney General under some future Republican administration, but had put presidential dreams behind him. Some thought he might quit the FBI. There was speculation that he would become Baseball Commissioner.
On the personal front, this was a time of increased rumormongering about Edgar’s homosexuality. Once, at a dinner attended by the highest law officials in the land, Edgar was overwhelmed with embarrassment when a female entertainer – one of the Duncan Sisters – tried to sit on his lap. According to those present, he actually fled the room, and the story was around Washington within days. When, in a genuine mistake, the American Mothers’ Committee named Edgar one of the nation’s ‘Best Fathers of the Year,’ the newspapers simpered: ‘Oh dear … Mr Hoover is a bachelor.’ Few could have missed the innuendo.
It was at this time that Edgar’s worry about his homosexuality drove him to consult Dr Ruffin, the Washington psychiatrist. The visits soon ended, however, because Edgar was afraid to trust even the doctor.2 From now on, he merely tried to suppress homosexual rumors whenever possible, using FBI agents to intimidate the press.
In public as in private, Edgar was forever on the defensive against enemies real or imagined. To remain America’s ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ he needed to be seen to be fighting a clearly identified foe, and with massive public support.
The enemy of choice – whether it was substance or shadow – had always been Communism. Or, as Edgar pronounced it, ‘Commonism.’ And now, just as his image seemed to be losing its focus, history made him fashionable again. The Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellite states gave Edgar a new lease of life as an American hero. Behind the scenes, his spying on American citizens mirrored some of the excesses of the Communism he decried.
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‘The FBI’s war against Americans who were not criminals but who did not measure up to Director Hoover’s idea of an acceptable citizen, is a blot on our claim to be a free society.’
Congressman Don Edwards, former FBI Agent and
Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights
On his fifty-first birthday, New Year’s Day 1946, Edgar opened the door of his home in Rock Creek Park to a Presbyterian pastor, Dr Elson. The two men then prayed together in what Elson called ‘a spiritual act of mutual dedication,’ one they would repeat each New Year’s Day for the rest of Edgar’s life. A week later, at a Club of Champions ceremony in New York, Edgar knelt to kiss the sapphire ring of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, Francis Spellman.
With Spellman at his side, Edgar told the assembled throng that ‘Come what may, when thirty million Catholics assert themselves, the nation must pause and listen. There are only 100,000 Communists who are organized and articulate, but they are motivated by fanatical frenzy.’
The frenzy came, rather, from Edgar and right-wing zealots like Spellman. American Communists, Edgar told an audience of senior policemen,