Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [91]
Soon he was phoning his brother at midnight from a pay phone at the Nutburger stand on Sunset Boulevard, to pass on information about the latest HICCASP meeting. As the Bureau’s Confidential Informant, code number T-10, Reagan took to calling FBI agents to his house under cover of darkness, to tell of ‘cliques’ in the Screen Actors Guild that ‘follow the Communist Party line.’ He supplied the names of actors and actresses and, in an appearance arranged at Edgar’s personal suggestion, did so again during a secret appearance before the Un-American Activities Committee.
Edgar investigated citizens who were not Communists and who had broken no law. Concerned about articles that, in his view, were ‘severely and unfairly discrediting our American way of life,’ he was to order an FBI study to look for ‘subversive factors’ in the backgrounds of prominent writers and editors. Out of a hundred people picked at random, agents identified ‘pertinent factors’ that might account for the way forty of them were writing. Reports on them were turned into unlabeled blind memoranda, untraceable to the FBI, for Edgar to circulate ‘on an informal and confidential basis.’
Over the years, Edgar’s literary targets would include America’s most honored writers. Some, like Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett and playwright Lillian Hellman, were indeed involved with Marxist causes. They were trailed, surveilled and had their mail opened. When Hammett died – a veteran of both wars – the FBI schemed to prevent his burial at Arlington Cemetery.
Numerous other famous writers had no links to Marxism but were investigated all the same. There is a 400-page file on Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck. Agents opened her mail, too, even though she did nothing more subversive than write about racism and join the ACLU.
We now know Edgar kept files on Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, Erskine Caldwell, Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan and Carl Sandburg. The FBI tagged Ernest Hemingway ‘leftist’ and ‘phony,’ and kept a file on his wife Mary as well. It reported on John Steinbeck, who alarmed the FBI because he ‘portrayed an extremely sordid and povertystricken side of American life,’ as well as Irwin Shaw, Aldous Huxley, John O’Hara, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Rex Stout, creator of investigator Nero Wolfe, was deemed to be ‘under Communist influence,’ and there was even a file on E. B. White, author of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web.
Files were also kept on painters and sculptors, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore – even on Picasso, who never set foot in the United States. Great scientists were also targeted. Edgar thought Dr Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine, suspect enough to merit a four-page warning letter to the White House, because he was a member of the American-Soviet Medical Society. Salk was said to be ‘far left of center,’ and had a brother in the Communist Party.
Edgar had started collecting information on Albert Einstein in 1940 because he attended pacifist meetings alongside Communists, and because he had supported the Republican cause in Spain. After the war, when the physicist realized he was being watched, he grew deeply disillusioned. ‘I came to America,’ he said in 1947, ‘because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.’ At the time of his death, the FBI dossier on him had grown to thousands of pages. They contain no evidence that he was ever disloyal.
The actor Charlie Chaplin, one of Einstein’s friends, embodied all that triggered fear and anger in Edgar. Foreignborn, in England, he lived a rich heterosexual life, and he was a utopian ‘internationalist’ who cheerfully hobnobbed with Communists. He was also one of the most famous men on earth, more famous than the Director of the FBI, and universally adored.
The Bureau had considered Chaplin dangerous even before Edgar became Director, when officials worried that his ‘Communistic’ movies would