Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [95]
Edgar climbed onto the bandwagon of the candidate most likely to dislodge Truman, that of Republican Thomas Dewey. It was six years now since the FBI had started collecting information on Dewey, and the signals had been mixed. During the last campaign, agents had learned, Dewey had said privately that the right place for Edgar was a jail cell.
Later reports were more positive, and in 1948, according to William Sullivan, Edgar was dreaming of political advancement under a President Dewey. As the primary campaign began, he secretly placed Bureau resources at Dewey’s disposal.
‘With the help of the FBI,’ Sullivan recalled, ‘Hoover believed Dewey couldn’t lose … In exchange for his help, the Director believed that when Dewey became President he would name Hoover as his Attorney General and make Nichols Director of the FBI. To complete the master plan, Tolson would become Hoover’s assistant. It would have been a nice setup, because with Nichols at the helm, Hoover would have had the FBI as tightly under his control as if he had never left … Hoover’s ambitions didn’t stop at the Justice Department. If he couldn’t be President, Hoover thought it would be fitting if he were named to the Supreme Court, and he planned to make his term as Attorney General a steppingstone to that end.’
Dewey accepted Edgar’s help, Sullivan claimed, and agents assembled briefing papers to help Dewey prepare for his broadcast debate with his primary opponent, Harold Stassen. ‘There was such a rush to get the material to him,’ said Sullivan, ‘that it was sent in a private plane to Albany, New York … The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman … We resurrected the President’s former association with Tom Pendergast, political czar of Kansas City, and tried to create the impression that Truman was too ignorant to deal with the emerging Communist threat. We even prepared studies for Dewey which were released under his name, as if he and his staff had done the work. I worked on some of these projects myself.’
Edgar became seriously ill with pneumonia that fall and was in Miami Beach recuperating on Election Day, November 2, 1948. Clyde and Lou Nichols had been telling him what most people believed, that Dewey was sure to win. The next day the Chicago Tribune ran its famous headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, only to be confounded by news that the opposite had happened. Truman was back in the White House.6
‘A heavy gloom settled over the Bureau,’ Sullivan recalled. From Florida, Edgar sent a furious memorandum blaming Nichols for having ‘pushed me out on a limb.’ Edgar, said Sullivan, ‘never could admit that he had made a mistake.’
Yet on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1949, Edgar was still Director of the FBI. He invited the twenty-one-year-old actress Shirley Temple, whom he had known since her days as a child star, to join him on his office balcony to watch the parade pass along Pennsylvania Avenue. Wearing what Temple recalls as ‘his best Santa Claus smile,’ Edgar gave her a present – a tear-gas gun disguised as a fountain pen.
Edgar had survived, but he could never feel safe. Always, whatever his other worries might be, there loomed the threat of his own sexuality.
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‘It is almost impossible to overestimate Mr Hoover’s sensitivity to criticism of himself or the FBI. It went far beyond the bounds of natural resentment to criticism one feels unfair. The most casual statement, the most strained implication, was sufficient cause for Mr Hoover to write a memorandum to the Attorney General complaining, and impugning the integrity of its author.’
Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General
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