J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Then, on February 6, in a series of 5:00 A.M. raids, the FBI arrested twelve persons, all veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who had fought on the Loyalist side against General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish civil war, charging them with violating a federal law prohibiting recruitment of personnel for a foreign army on U.S. soil.

  It was an old case—the recruitment had taken place in 1937 and the war itself was now over, Franco having won—but Attorney General Frank Murphy, undoubtedly encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, had dusted it off and presented it to a federal grand jury.

  Reacting to the raids—and charges of FBI brutality—most of the American Left, together with the Washington Times Herald, the New York Daily News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the columnist Westbrook Pegler, more than a hundred ministers, and over a dozen labor unions joined with Senator Norris in demanding that the attorney general investigate “the American OGPU.”9 Even the ACLU criticized the raids, although by now Hoover had established an even closer personal relationship with the civil rights organization. Worse, Hoover could no longer even count on the support of Frank Murphy.

  Frank Murphy had become attorney general in January 1939, following the resignation of Homer Cummings, one of the casualties of FDR’s Court-packing plan.

  Even before Murphy had been sworn in, Hoover had opened a file on his new boss. It was not without derogatory information. Like Hoover, Murphy was a lifelong bachelor; unlike him, the former Michigan governor was a “notorious womanizer,” with apparently little regard for the marital status of his conquests (one Washington hostess allegedly took a shot at Murphy, causing him and her other dinner guests to flee through the windows).

  On taking over the Justice Department, Murphy announced that the FBI was in such capable hands that he intended to leave it alone. And, for the most part, he kept his promise. But Murphy was an Irish pol of the old school, with what some felt was “an insatiable, almost pathological passion for publicity,”10 and he quickly learned that one way to get it was to fasten on to Hoover’s coattails. In the spring of 1939 the director, ever loath to share the spotlight, found himself pulled along on a speaking tour of the United States. Murphy being given to overdramatic gestures, they made headlines, as when the pair arrived unannounced in the yard of Leavenworth prison and nearly started a riot.

  On another occasion, both Murphy and Hoover were to address a bar association convention in El Paso. Since the FBI director was speaking first, he and Tolson arrived a day early and, with time to kill, the local SAC asked them if they wanted to accompany him across the border to Juarez. He had to verify some information from an informant, who also happened to be the proprietress of a sporting house.

  Hoover and Tolson went along for the ride and, as Hoover later put it—it was one of his oft-repeated stories—“had a nice visit with the good lady, about FBI business of course.”

  The next day Attorney General Murphy arrived in El Paso. He’d often heard about the nightlife of Juárez, he told Hoover, and wondered if the director could arrange a tour.

  The tour took them past the brothel. To the astonishment of the attorney general, one of the girls, recognizing Hoover and Tolson, leaned out the window and yelled: “Hey, you guys back here again tonight?”*11

  In later years the director recalled Murphy as one of his favorite attorneys general, undoubtedly, in part, because Murphy served only one year, before being appointed to the Supreme Court. Also, during that year they had only one major disagreement, and Murphy resolved it to Hoover’s satisfaction. Unlike Cummings, Murphy was against exempting the FBI from civil service—but he agreed to withhold action until the “emergency” was over. By the time the war ended, Murphy was long gone and none of his successors dared challenge the FBI director.

  Although his tenure was brief, Frank Murphy was important to both Hoover and the Bureau mostly for what he didn’t do. He didn’t oppose Hoover’s plan to resurrect the GID. Instead, as evidenced by the speed with which he pushed through the director’s request for presidential approval, he wholeheartedly backed the Bureau’s return to the investigation of personal and political opinions. Even more significant, Murphy made no move to stop Hoover when he began bypassing him, reporting directly to the president, both by memo and in person. In so doing, the attorney general of the United States decreased the power of his own office, while permitting the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to greatly increase his own.

  Eleven days after Murphy was sworn in as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Robert Jackson, his successor as attorney general, dismissed all the charges in the Spanish Loyalist cases, stating he could see “no good to come from reviving in America at this late date the animosities of the Spanish conflict so long as the conflict has ended.”*12

  Under attack from all sides—and without even the support of his nominal superior—Hoover, accompanied by Tolson, flew to Miami, where, ensconced in a cottage in the plush Nautilus Hotel, he personally directed a series of much publicized vice raids. But even this backfired. According to the Washington Times Herald, Hoover was frequently seen “in night spots at the beach where the presence of the G-men and the publicity accompanying their activities is said to be about as welcome as poison ivy to local boosters seeking more fun-bent visitors with ready dollars.”13 The vice raids—the last Hoover personally supervised—also caused Florida’s Claude Pepper to take to the Senate floor and charge the FBI director with infringing on states’ rights.

  The criticism did not let up on his return. After Hoover was spotted weekending in New York with his friend Walter Winchell, Representative Marcantonio loosed another blast, calling the FBI director a “Stork Club detective,” while the New York Daily News ran an old photograph—taken on New Year’s Eve three years previously—in which Hoover, wearing a funny hat, “covered” the current heavyweight champion, James Braddock, with a toy machinegun.14

  It could have been worse.

  With perhaps more drinks than caution—after all, it was his birthday as well as New Year’s Eve—Hoover had been persuaded by Winchell and the Stork Club’s owner, Sherman Billingsley, to pose for a “gag” shot. Looking around for someone to “arrest,” Hoover spotted an appropriately thuggish-looking individual at a nearby table. But the man was a poor sport: he not only declined to pose; he also hastily left the club. Braddock then volunteered to take his place.

  Both Winchell and Billingsley breathed sighs of relief. Unlike Hoover, they’d recognized the man: he was Terry Reilly, a syndicate killer, currently on parole for extortion and impersonating an FBI agent.

  Although Hoover and Winchell first met in 1934, during the Lindbergh case, the two did not become particularly close friends until 1938, following the death of Hoover’s mother.

  J. Edgar Hoover was forty-three years old when Annie Hoover died, after being bedridden for three years with what probably was cancer. The failure of his brother and sister to help pay for the full-time nurse-housekeeper he’d hired for her caused a lifelong schism between them. Although his sister Lillian was widowed, in poor health, and crippled, Hoover never visited her; when she died, he and Tolson “got to her funeral late and left early,” according to his niece Mrs. Margaret Fennell, who added, “In all fairness, I must say that J. E. was always accessible if we wanted to see him, but he didn’t initiate contacts with his family…I think you would have to say that he was not a family person.”*15

  If the death of his father affected him, he never mentioned it to interviewers. By contrast, he never really got over the death of his mother.

  Whenever Hoover went on a trip to one of the field offices, he’d call her at least once and often twice daily. On his return, he always brought a gift. It tended to be jewelry or an antique, but once it was a canary which he’d bought from Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Annie named it Jailbird and continued to treasure it even after it molted and they discovered it was a sparrow which Stroud had dyed yellow.

  For years Hoover had tried
to persuade her to move out of the Seward Square neighborhood, which had begun to “deteriorate.” Sunday afternoons they would look at one or two houses, mostly in Chevy Chase, an up-andcoming area which Hoover favored, but she always found something wrong with them.

  The year after her death, Hoover purchased a one-story brick house in the Rock Creek Park section of Washington, paying $25,000. A second story was added after he moved in. Some felt that 4936 Thirtieth Place was almost a shrine to Annie Hoover. There were pictures of her in nearly every room. Her son lived there for thirty-three years until his own death in 1972.

  After his mother’s death, Hoover, always accompanied by the associate director, spent most of his weekends in New York. If anyone questioned this—none did, until Marcantonio—there was the justification that this was where the Bureau’s largest field office was located, although Hoover rarely visited it except to make a press announcement.

  Arriving by train Friday night, the pair breakfasted in their complimentary Waldorf suite Saturday morning, usually playing host to one or two friends, who then accompanied them to a nearby track, wherever the ponies were running. Although Saturday nights invariably ended at Winchell’s table at the Stork, they were usually preceded by dinner at Soulé or Maxims or Gallagher’s and a brief visit to “21” or Toots Shor’s. Shor, who had been a speakeasy operator during Prohibition, recalled, “When Hoover put his stamp of friendship on you, somehow you felt like a clean, decent guy.” At Gallagher’s, J. Edgar Hoover’s picture is still on the wall.17

  But even New York was too close during the holidays. Each December, starting in 1938, Hoover and Tolson spent two weeks in Florida, usually in the company of Winchell, who vacationed there at the same time. According to Hoover’s friend George Allen, “he never spent another Christmas in Washington after she died.”18

  “It was like the Belle Epoque in France,” Ernest Cuneo later recalled; “it was like a Dufy painting of Longchamps on Grand Prix Day.” Not only were there “beautiful women, beautifully clothed—terrific form, terrific grace, and terrific color—there was style. It was quite the opposite of any coarseness.”

  “The Stork Club,” Cuneo remembered, more than a little wistfully, “belonged to an age that is gone.”

  Nor were the women the only attraction. To the Stork Club, and in particular to Table 50 in the Cub Room, gravitated “the most important men in the world—newspaper and book publishers, bankers, Hollywood magnates, celebrities of all kinds, the international Who’s Who—because this was before TV, and the only communications went out through the columnists.”

  Walter Winchell was the dean of them all. According to Cuneo, who was attorney to both Winchell and Drew Pearson, the gossip columnist had a daily readership of about forty-eight million, but even that figure didn’t indicate his influence, for “when Walter finished broadcasting on Sunday night, he had reached 89 out of 100 adults in the U.S.”19

  And for more than twenty years—until his newspaper, the New York Mirror, folded under him, and his television sponsors dropped him, for implying that Adlai Stevenson was a homosexual—he broadcast the praises of his friend John Edgar Hoover.

  Unquestionably each used the other. It was Winchell, more than any other journalist, who sold the G-man image to America; while Hoover, according to Cuneo and others, supplied Winchell with “inside information” that led to some of his biggest “scoops.”

  Hoover denied this. “The truth is that Winchell got no tips from me of a confidential nature,” the FBI director told the New York Times in 1954. “I cannot afford to play favorites.”20

  The real truth is that, in addition to the tips, Hoover often supplied Winchell with an FBI driver when he was traveling; assigned FBI agents as bodyguards whenever the columnist received a death threat, which was often; helped him obtain a commission in the naval reserve, in 1934; then helped him shed it, in 1942, when it was revealed that he was receiving $5,000 per weekly broadcast while supposedly on active duty with the U.S. Navy.21

  Yet, even though they used each other, there also existed between them a genuine friendship.

  At times it was sorely tested. For two years Louis “Lepke” Buchalter was one of the nation’s most wanted fugitives. A key figure in the gang known as Murder Incorporated, Buchalter was wanted not only by the FBI but, especially, by New York’s racket-busting district attorney, Thomas Dewey. When a $50,000 reward failed to reveal his whereabouts (he was living in a furnished room next to police headquarters in Brooklyn), both the NYPD and the FBI turned the heat on his underworld associates, not only hurting their “businesses” but also disrupting their personal lives.*

  One night in early August 1939, Winchell received a call at the Stork Club. If the conditions were right, he was told, Lepke might be willing to surrender, but only to the “feds.” Dewey had vowed to execute him.

  Winchell called his attorney, Ernest Cuneo, who in turn called Attorney General Frank Murphy. Murphy located Hoover at Tolson’s father’s funeral, and immediately after the services the pair flew from Iowa to New York. Hoover wanted Lepke badly, but even more he wanted to upstage Dewey.

  On Sunday night, when Winchell went on the air, Hoover and Tolson were sitting beside him. “Attention Public Enemy Number One, Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter!” Winchell breathlessly announced, “I am authorized by John Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to guarantee you safe delivery to the FBI if you surrender to me or to any agent of the FBI. I will repeat: Lepke, I am authorized by John Edgar Hoover…”

  After Winchell went off the air he received a call. “Walter? That was fine. See you.”

  A few days later there was a second call. This time the caller, who said he was speaking for Lepke, wanted to know what sentence he could expect. Winchell went to the Waldorf and talked to Hoover. Although Dewey wanted to try Buchalter for murder and extortion, there were only two federal charges pending against him: the fugitive charge and a narcotics indictment. If convicted, Hoover told Winchell, he would probably get between twelve and fifteen years.

  Winchell relayed the message.

  Almost nightly, for the next three weeks, Winchell received a telephone call from the man who claimed he was Lepke’s spokesman, each of which he dutifully reported to an increasingly exasperated J. Edgar Hoover.

  Convinced he was being ridiculed, Hoover finally exploded, in front of everyone in the Cub Room. “I am fed up with you and your friends!” the FBI director shouted at the gossip columnist. “They can make a fool out of you, but they are not going to make a fool out of me and my men!”

  “They are not my friends, John,” Winchell protested.

  “They are your friends! They are your friends!” Hoover reiterated, livid with rage. “And don’t call me John! I’m beginning to think you are the champ bullshitter in town!

  “Why are you doing this to us, anyway? Your ratings slipped or something? Did you do it to get your ratings back up?

  “Tell your friends I will order him shot if he doesn’t come in within forty-eight hours.”

  Sure that his rivals would have the story in minutes, Winchell himself angrily stormed out of the Stork Club. Tolson caught up with him on the street and urged him to do what Hoover had told him.

  “You people haven’t been able to find him for two years.” Winchell angrily responded. “How you gonna find him in forty-eight hours?”

  Two days later Winchell received another call. When he reached Hoover at the Waldorf, the director’s voice was icy cold. His own, he later admitted, was more than a little hot. “My friends, John,” Winchell informed him, “have instructed me to tell you to be at Twenty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue between ten-ten and ten-twenty tonight. That’s about half an hour. They told me to tell you to be alone.”

  “I’ll be there,” Hoover snapped, slamming down the phone.

  According to the official FBI version of Lepke’s capture, “On the night of August 24, 1939, Director Hoover walked alone through New York City’s streets to the c
orner of 28th Street and Fifth Avenue. And there the hunted man, Buchalter, surrendered to him. The FBI got Buchalter, and Winchell got an exclusive story.”

  It didn’t quite happen that way. Hoover was not on foot, and he wasn’t alone. Unknown to Winchell, more than two dozen agents had the corner under surveillance. Having picked up Lepke several blocks away, per instructions, Winchell pulled up beside the director’s distinctive black limousine. Then he and Lepke got into the back of the FBI vehicle. Hoover, Winchell recalled, was “disguised in dark sunglasses to keep him from being recognized by passersby.”

  Winchell introduced the two men. Hoover, declining the proffered hand, said, “You did the smart thing by coming in.” En route Lepke asked about his probable sentence, and Hoover repeated the estimate of twelve to fifteen years. Only then did Lepke realize that he had been betrayed, by one of his most trusted aides. Abe “Longie” Zwillman, who was later found a “suicide” in his fashionable New Jersey residence, had told him Hoover had promised he’d get only ten years and that with good behavior he’d be out in five or six. With the unwitting help of J. Edgar Hoover and Walter Winchell, the mob had set up Louis “Lepke” Buchalter.23

  Winchell didn’t even get his exclusive. At 11:15 P.M., just minutes after reaching the New York field office, Hoover called in the press to announce Lepke’s “capture.” Both the New York Daily News and the Associated Press had the story out before the late edition of the Mirror reached the streets, while Hoover, in his announcement, stated only that “Walter Winchell gave the FBI considerable assistance,” which, in any paper except Winchell’s own, rated less than two lines of type.24