Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [98]
Melish and his father were eventually driven out of their church, in spite of the overwhelming support of their parishioners. It would be twenty years before the younger Melish had a kind of consolation, when he was asked to return as assisting priest.
Some people, it is said, pull the blinds down over their minds when they reach their fifties. Edgar fitted the stereotype, with the difference that he institutionalized the failing. Those who criticized the Bureau were subject to investigation. Those who found fault with Edgar himself suffered his fury, the fury of a man with 3,000 agents and huge financial resources at his disposal.
In the summer and fall of 1950, Edgar abused his power in an outrageous attempt to stifle free speech. It began when he learned that William Sloane Associates, the New York publishing house, was shortly to publish a book on the FBI by Max Lowenthal, a personal friend of President Truman’s. Lowenthal had been squirreling away documentation on the FBI and its Director since the late twenties, when he had been Secretary of the National Commission on Law Enforcement. What he had learned worried him, and now he was bringing forth a 500-page critique.
Edgar’s machinations to crush the book began the moment he learned of its existence. He asked his friend Morris Ernst, a prominent New York attorney, to sabotage the book by approaching the publisher behind the scenes. Correspondence shows the FBI was assailing the book’s ‘distortions, half-truths and incomplete details’ long before publication.
Lowenthal’s son, John, believed he knew how Edgar knew of his father’s book before it came out. The family home, he said, was raided by burglars who ‘seemed more interested in going through my father’s papers than in his possessions.’
In September, as if spontaneously, Republican Congressman George Dondero delivered a ten-minute diatribe against Lowenthal in the House. Dondero was one of Edgar’s stable of tame congressmen, a man who could be relied upon to do the Director’s bidding – in this case to smear Lowenthal for alleged Communist connections. Next came a sudden summons for the author to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The record of the hearing was leaked to the FBI’s friends in the press in November, the day before the Lowenthal book was published. When the book received a favorable review, another of Edgar’s political friends, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, rose in the Senate to lambaste the reviewer.
The personal files of Edgar’s propaganda chief Louis Nichols, long locked away in steel file cabinets in the Nichols family garage, demolish Edgar’s denials that he spoon-fed confidential information to members of Congress. On occasion, Edgar even wrote their speeches for them.
The Nichols files contain an original draft of Congressman Dondero’s denunciation of Lowenthal. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, the speech made by the Congressman merely parroted a diatribe prepared at the FBI on plain paper, without signature. It is the cover note, apparently from Nichols to Edgar, that gives the game away:
I am attaching a documentation to the details on Max Lowenthal … I checked every reference to Lowenthal in the Bureau. You will observe that several items were obtained from technicals. I feel safe in using these because of the phraseology used in each instance. In many instances, it is the only way we can tie Lowenthal in with some of these buzzards … If you approve the matter as it now stands, you could just tell Miss Gandy to pass the word to me that the project is O.K. … You may destroy the old copy I sent you …
‘Technicals’ was current Bureau jargon to describe wiretaps. Lowenthal’s FBI file shows that agents had been collecting information on him for nearly thirty