Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [96]
gave me some very bad news about J. Edgar Hoover. I hope it is only gossip. Geo. [perhaps Truman’s confidant George Allen] suggests I see the President alone.
The ‘bad news’ was very probably about Edgar’s homosexuality. ‘One time,’ Truman confided to the author Merle Miller, ‘they brought me a lot of stuff about his personal life, and I told them I didn’t give a damn about that … That wasn’t my business … I said to him, “Edgar, I don’t care what a man does in his free time: all that interests me is what he does while he’s on his job.”’
The President was justifiably angry, three months later, when he received an FBI report on the heterosexual adventures of two of his own aides. Charlie Ross, his Press Secretary and friend, had supposedly ‘chased a couple of gals around the deck’ during a boat trip. The same report raked up a youthful love affair of Dave Niles’, his trusted Administrative Assistant. ‘Being a victim of Cupid,’ Truman snorted at a Cabinet meeting, ‘is not being a victim of Moscow propaganda.’
Here was the President of the United States being bothered with FBI gossip about his aides’ dalliances with women, when he had just been briefed on Edgar’s own behavior. In Edgar’s case, by comparison, there was at least cause for concern. A homosexual FBI Director, in charge of the nation’s internal security, was a classic target for any hostile intelligence service – especially that of the Soviet Union.
That same month, June 1949, saw Edgar publicly humiliated over the case of Judith Coplon, a young Justice Department employee accused of giving information to the Soviets. Coplon had been caught meeting a Soviet diplomat while carrying a purse stuffed full of summaries of FBI reports. Then, to Edgar’s horror, the judge at her trial ruled that, to establish the authenticity of the material found in her purse, the FBI would have to release the originals of the documents.
This would be the first time that raw FBI files had ever been made public, and Edgar was worried not because they contained super-secret data, but because they were a mishmash of unchecked tittle-tattle. Edgar protested, right up to the President, but in vain. The documents were produced in court, and proved as embarrassing as Edgar had feared.
It emerged that, even during the trial, the FBI had been bugging privileged conversations between Coplon and her attorney. Agents had then hastily destroyed the resulting records and disks, in a cover-up that could only have happened with Edgar’s approval. During those weeks, which Edgar would recall as ‘pretty rough going,’ Truman came as close as he ever would to firing his FBI Director.
Edgar was not used to taking knocks, and certainly not in the glare of national publicity. The Coplon debacle came just weeks after he and Clyde, resplendent in white suits and waist-deep in gladioli, had held court at celebrations marking his silver anniversary as Director. Now, brought down a peg or two by a blast of criticism, Edgar felt deeply insecure. At fifty-four, the paranoia in him had long since excluded the possibility that he himself could be wrong about anything.
Edgar’s list of perceived enemies was expanding. Now he would take on liberals, the Church, even the publishing industry, with a venom. He was enraged by an article in Harper’s Magazine that fall, in which the historian Bernard De Voto said the FBI reports uncovered by the Coplon case were ‘as irresponsible as the chatter of somewhat retarded children.’ A furious Edgar called for information on De Voto, and his aides knew how to please him. They solemnly reported a flaw in the Pulitzer winner’s personality. De Voto, they declared, exhibited the ‘Harvard intellectual liberal attitude, devoid of practicality …’
‘I like a country,’ De Voto had written, ‘where it’s nobody’s damned business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks,