Mrs Roosevelt’s many letters to Lash were filled with political chitchat and torrents of affection. ‘Joe dearest,’ began one letter written in February. ‘… I feel so excited about the thought of hearing your voice. What will I do when I actually see you?… I am glad you drink your milk and hope some day you get enough sleep … I am enclosing a letter that came with a valentine from Trud … I pray St Valentine too that he may bring us all together but that is because I need you very much … I must close so bless you dear and a world of love. E. R.’
Army Intelligence was watching on March 5, when Mrs Roosevelt had the first of two rendezvous with Lash in Illinois hotels. She checked into Room 332 of the Urbana-Lincoln Hotel in Urbana, accompanied by her aide, Malvina Thompson, told the desk she wanted no publicity and reserved an adjacent room, Number 330, for ‘a young friend.’ Joe Lash checked into his room that evening, and he and the First Lady stayed upstairs, except for one visit to the dining room, until they left the hotel thirty-six hours later.
Mrs Roosevelt wrote another ‘Joe dearest’ letter on the train that bore her away. ‘Separation between people who love each other,’ she wrote, ‘makes the reunion always like a new discovery … Bless you dear. Thanks for such a happy time. All my love E. R.’ Mrs Roosevelt wished Lash well for his meeting with Trude Pratt the next weekend.
The Army’s secret agents were there in strength a week later, when Lash and his wife-to-be had a tryst at the same hotel. This time the bedroom was bugged, and the microphones picked up the sounds of frequent lovemaking. They also picked up a call from the couple to Mrs Roosevelt at the White House.
Within days, a senior officer in Army Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Boyer, was writing an astonishing letter to a superior in Washington. The letters between Lash, Trude Pratt and Mrs Roosevelt, Boyer said, were evidence of a ‘gigantic conspiracy.’ In fact there is nothing conspiratorial in the letters. The Colonel, however, intended to wait for another opportunity, then burst in on Lash having intercourse with Mrs Pratt and arrest him on a morals charge.
Before the couple could meet again, Lash had another rendezvous with the President’s wife. It was in a bedroom at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, according to the report in Edgar’s file, that hidden microphones overheard Lash and Mrs Roosevelt having sex.
After that rendezvous, the pair again exchanged breathless letters. ‘I can’t tell you,’ wrote the First Lady, ‘how I hated to say goodbye. I loved just sitting near you while you slept …’ ‘I’m sorry,’ Lash wrote when he got back to base, ‘I was such a drowsy soul after dinner, but it was nicer drowsing in the darkness with you stroking my head than playing gin rummy …’ Lash also wrote to Trude Pratt, telling her that Mrs Roosevelt had taken him shopping and insisted he buy some ‘garish underwear.’
According to Lash, Eleanor was tipped off about the bugging by the management of the Blackstone Hotel. Furious, she raised the matter at the White House when she got back to Washington – with dire consequences for the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. When Lash was posted to the Pacific, the President’s wife went to San Francisco to say goodbye. ‘The hard part of loving,’ she wrote afterward, ‘is that one has to learn so often to let go of those we love.’
What to make of it all? Did the President’s wife sleep with Lash at the Blackstone, or anywhere else? Lash, who obtained the FBI and Army files in 1978, denied it; he expressed his outrage in Love, Eleanor, a memoir about what he maintained was an intimate but innocent friendship with Mrs Roosevelt. His widow, Trude, agreed. ‘I am not aware that Mrs Roosevelt ever had an affair, at any period during our friendship,’ she said in 1992. ‘So far as the alleged tapes are concerned, what may have happened was that Joe came to the hotel from his Army base terribly tired, and Mrs Roosevelt may have said, “Lie down on my bed and rest.” And she probably sat next to him and stroked his forehead. She was a very affectionate person, but the sex allegation is ludicrous. The President did become furious, but because he learned about the snooping, not because of any affair. Mrs Roosevelt said a lot of people were punished because of it.’
One of the Roosevelts’ six children, Franklin, Jr., joined his name to Joe Lash’s denials. His elder sister, Anna, however, added an interesting item of information. Sh. recalled that as late as 1944, a year after the Blackstone episode, an officer brought her a bundle of what he described as ‘love letters’ from Lash to Eleanor, which the censor had intercepted. She took them to her father, as the officer had requested, and he took them from her without a word. Whatever the President’s feelings were, he concealed them.
The 1943 letters certainly show that the First Lady was extraordinarily indiscreet. If she thought she could meet repeatedly with a young man in hotel bedrooms with impunity, she was also naive in the extreme. Yet she was fifty-eight years old at the time, a quarter of a century older than Lash, and the letters show she was acting all along as matchmaker between her young protégé and his married girlfriend. It seems unlikely, if not entirely impossible, that she was nevertheless sleeping with the young man.
Yet clearly a recording of sex activity did exist. Did the Army somehow confuse its evidence of Lash’s intercourse with his future wife, Trude Pratt, with its reports of his meetings with Mrs Roosevelt? Perhaps, but the one item that might resolve the truth is missing. According to a former Army Intelligence Colonel, it did still exist, ‘well out of circulation,’ as late as 1967.
Edgar, for his part, made sure that Agent Burton’s report, eventually joined by the Army surveillance reports and copies of Mrs Roosevelt’s letters to Lash, went into the bulging file cabinet in Miss Gandy’s office. There they remained until 1953, when an opportunity arose to make use of them.
In 1953, when Republican President-elect Eisenhower was keen to remove Eleanor Roosevelt from the U.S. delegation at the United Nations, Assistant Director Louis Nichols briefed Eisenhower’s aides on the alleged affair with Lash. The aides took it seriously. In 1954, when the New York Post was critical of Eisenhower, Nichols found a way to disinter the allegation again. Pointing out that Lash was now a Post correspondent and that Mrs Roosevelt was close to the paper’s editor, he suggested Edgar carry the smear to the President himself.
Much later, when Assistant Director William Sullivan fell out with Edgar, he sent him a passionate indictment of the Bureau’s failings. ‘Mr Hoover,’ he wrote,
you have regularly told the public FBI files are secure, inviolate, almost sacred. Years ago, when I first discovered this was not true at all, I was stunned. But we had created in time a certain atmosphere in the FBI difficult to describe … We have leaked information improperly as you know, on both persons and organizations. My first recollection was leaking information about Mrs Roosevelt, whom you detested …
Whatever President Roosevelt knew of Edgar’s role in the Lash affair, he apparently lost patience with him long before the end of the war. ‘Mrs Roosevelt said her husband was very upset with Hoover,’ Trude Lash recalled. ‘I had the impression the President had asked her not to discuss the details, but it was clear he was turning away from Hoover. Hoover knew it, and tried to make himself seem indispensable by finding out things Mr Roosevelt needed to know. As I understood it, however, the President said privately that he would dismiss Hoover as soon as possible.’
For Roosevelt, the Lash episode was not the only factor. He was angry, in the fall of 1943, when he was forced to dump Sumner Welles,’ his valued Undersecretary of State and personal friend, in order to prevent a scandal about his alleged homosexual activity. According to Dr Beatrice Berle, widow of Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Edgar’s role in the whispering campaign against Welles led to a terminal rift between the Director and the President.
‘After it was all over,’ she said in 1990, ‘Roosevelt told Hoover to get out, and he never received him again.’ The President did distance himself from Welles’ principal persecutors. And the files at the Roosevelt Library contain no more long private discussions with Edgar, and no genial c
orrespondence, from this point on.
It had been said that, having raised Edgar up for his own political purposes, the President planned to curb his powers when the war ended, perhaps even to remove him from office. If so, he did not live to do it.
15
‘We are a fact gathering organization only. We don’t clear anybody. We don’t condemn anybody. Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.’
J. Edgar Hoover, July 14, 1955
At 5:00 P.M. on April 12, 1945, Harry Truman hurried alone and unprotected along a deserted passage beneath the Capitol. Then, half-guessing the meaning of the summons to the White House, the sixty-year-old Vice President broke into a run. Two hours later, in the Cabinet Room, he found himself taking the oath of office as the thirty-third president of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, worn out after twelve years in office, had died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
Abroad, the end of the war was approaching. American troops were advancing on Buchenwald concentration camp, where 50,000 Jews had been murdered. The Soviet army was fighting on the approaches to Berlin. Hitler would soon commit suicide in his bunker; Mussolini would be shot by Italian partisans. Germany would surrender and, three months later, after President Truman had unleashed the atomic bomb, so would Japan.
In the midst of all this, and not for the first time, Truman was worrying about Edgar and the FBI. As a senator, he had objected publicly when the Bureau was absolved of all blame for Pearl Harbor. Now, in his first weeks as President, he was alarmed by what he learned about the FBI – bloated in size and power – that Roosevelt had left behind.
A month after taking office, Truman expressed these feelings in one of his celebrated memos to himself:
May 12, 1945
We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex life scandals and plain blackmail when they should be catching criminals. They also have a habit of sneering at local law enforcement officers. This must stop. Cooperation is what we must have.
Edgar scurried to shore up his position, scouring the Bureau for someone known to Truman who could serve as the new FBI liaison agent to the White House. ‘Mr Hoover wants you to know,’ the chosen man told the President, ‘that he and the FBI are at your personal disposal and will help in any way you ask.’ ‘Any time I want the services of the FBI,’ Truman retorted, ‘I’ll ask for it through my Attorney General.’
When the emissary took this message back to Edgar, recalled Assistant Director William Sullivan, ‘Hoover’s hatred knew no bounds.’ Truman had put him in his place as would no other leader except Kennedy, and he had lost his special access to the seat of power.
Even so, Edgar found a way to draw the Truman White House into his web. The President agreed that his military aide, General Harry Vaughan, should liaise directly with Edgar – and Edgar promptly made the relationship conspiratorial. ‘There’s going to be a lot of talk,’ he warned Vaughan. ‘When you come over, I advise you to come in on Pennsylvania, get on the elevator, go to the seventh floor, walk around to the other bank of elevators, go down to the third floor, walk around to this bank of elevators, come up to the fifth floor, and come into my office. You and I have legitimate things to talk about. It’s the President’s business, it’s my business, it’s your business, it’s nobody else’s business.’
Another Truman aide, John Steelman, knowingly encouraged a new form of covert communication between the FBI and the White House. Previously, under Roosevelt, Edgar’s men had passed on political information, the sort of material the FBI had no business handling in the first place, by reading briefing papers aloud to presidential aides. Afterward, to avoid leaving a paper trail, the documents would be carried back to FBI headquarters. Now Curtis Lynum, one of Edgar’s new emissaries, dreamed up a refinement of the system.
‘One day,’ he recalled, ‘I cut off the top and bottom of the memo I was reading from and handed the memo to Mr Steelman, who said, “Why can’t we do this on all messages you bring?” I replied that I would take the matter up with Mr Hoover.’ Edgar jumped at the idea. Sensitive intelligence was henceforth sent to the Truman White House on unwatermarked paper with no FBI letterhead and no signature, information that could never be tracked back to its source.
In the first weeks of his presidency, according to Harry Vaughan, Truman learned how Roosevelt had used Edgar to tap telephones for political information. ‘What is that crap?’ the President is said to have cried when shown transcripts of a bug on Tommy Corcoran, the political fixer who had defected from the Roosevelt camp. ‘Cut them all off. Tell the FBI we haven’t got any time for that kind of shit.’
If Truman did say this, he soon changed his mind. FBI files contain some 5,000 pages reflecting eavesdropping on Corcoran during the Truman years. Edgar personally supervised the taps, which were operated from an apartment on Thirteenth Street, N.W., ‘one of the central plants,’ the files describe it, under the direction of Edgar’s friend Guy Hottel.
Wiretaps aside, Edgar sent the Truman White House tidbits of political intelligence of all kinds – a warning that a scandal was brewing or advance information about a newspaper series critical of the President. And Truman accepted it. Perhaps he felt there was little harm in taking advantage of Edgar’s political espionage service, if he could stall more serious FBI abuse of civil liberties. By permitting political wiretapping, however, he made Edgar custodian of a secret that, if leaked, could have imperiled the administration.
Truman made himself beholden to Edgar, and that was the way Edgar liked things to be. There was, too, a significant skeleton in the President’s political cupboard, his longstanding link with the crooked Democratic Party machine in Kansas City, Missouri, his home state.
Truman had risen in the world as a protégé of Tom Pendergast, the political boss who, when necessary, enforced his rule with the help of the Mafia. It was Pendergast who had sent Truman to the U.S. Senate, a connection that, Truman confided to his wife, would be ‘a lead weight on me from now on.’
Edgar was aware of all this. He had himself been in Kansas City when Pendergast had been indicted for tax evasion several years earlier, and knew he had a potential weapon. During the presidential contest of 1948, he would leak information on Kansas City corruption to help Truman’s opponent, Governor Dewey.
Yet, knowing of Truman’s personal dislike for him, Edgar still felt vulnerable. He had his agents report to him on every shift in the political wind, every rumor that his own job was at risk. He became insecure to the extent of paranoia.
‘Hoover was frightened of his life with Truman,’ William Sullivan recalled. ‘I know that personally. During his entire career in the White House, Truman had nothing to do with Hoover and wouldn’t let Hoover get anywhere close to him.’
Two years into his presidency, Truman ended Edgar’s hopes of achieving his most ambitious dream, control over foreign intelligence. This was something he had been angling for as early as 1940, when he proposed an FBI Special Intelligence Service, with agents stationed all over the world. This was the dream he was nurturing when he fought his hated rival, William Donovan, for control of overseas intelligence. Though forced to settle for jurisdiction over just a slice of the global territory, Latin America, his real ambition remained worldwide.
Before the war was over, Edgar had again been talking privately of a worldwide network of FBI agents. In London, U.S. diplomats suspected he already had undercover men in place in the embassy code room, snooping on State Department communications. Donovan’s men watched the FBI nervously.
In November 1944, at Roosevelt’s request, General Donovan had produced a blueprint for peacetime intelligence. It foresaw a ‘central intelligence authority’ under the personal supervision of the President and, Donovan hoped, with himself at its head. Edgar said there was no need for such an agency, and pressed for a return to pre-war arrangements, with the FBI holding the reins. Sudden
ly there was a string of press attacks on Donovan’s plans, warning of the dangers of a ‘Super Spy System.’ Donovan was convinced that one of the stories, based on a top-secret memorandum, had been deliberately planted by Edgar.1
Edgar’s machinations came to nothing, however, with Truman in the White House. The President told Budget Director Harold Smith he was ‘very much against building up a Gestapo’ at the FBI. Far from allowing it to expand, he thought the Bureau should be ‘cut back as soon as possible to at least the pre-war level.’
Edgar went on lobbying to secure what he claimed was his turf. Generals and admirals, congressmen and senators were persuaded to plead his cause at the White House. They obliged because they, too, had territory to protect, and because some believed Edgar’s claim, dating back to the war, that Donovan’s OSS was ‘hiring a bunch of Bolsheviks.’ A check conducted after the war, by Edgar’s own agents, identified no Communists in what remained of the organization.
Truman turned a deaf ear to Edgar’s claim to both domestic and foreign intelligence. ‘One man shouldn’t operate both,’ he told his aide Harry Vaughan. ‘He gets too big for his britches.’ The President rarely agreed to see Edgar, and slapped him down hard when they met to discuss this issue. ‘Hoover tried to argue with the President,’ said Vaughan. ‘Truman said no, and when Hoover persisted, he said, “You’re getting out of bounds.”’
The President eventually approved the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, as a response to the real threat of Soviet subversion, but with no role for Edgar. The CIA was to be responsible to the President, through a National Security Council, and its focus was to be on intelligence evaluation rather than field operations. (The ‘covert action’ capacity, for which the Agency is now best known, was a later development.)
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