J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  “I am disturbed at the repeated implications that the FBI has been inefficient and slothful with respect to investigations. Is there anything I can do for you?”46

  Ernst did a lot. He effectively neutralized criticism of the FBI within the ACLU. He reported private, and sometimes privileged, conversations to Hoover. Unbeknownst to their authors, he gave Hoover copies of personal letters he had received from such FBI critics as the journalist I. F. Stone, the columnist Max Lerner, Congressman Wayne Morse, and FCC Chairman Lawrence Fly (who had clashed with the FBI director over the issue of wiretapping). He led the fight to have the veteran Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn removed from the ACLU’s board of directors. He was instrumental in having the ACLU adopt the position that there were “no civil liberties issues involved” in the Rosenberg case.47 He even offered to become the attorney for the two accused atomic spies, not so much to help them (he’d already decided that Julius Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, were guilty) as to assist the FBI. If Nichols’s memorandum of their conversation is to be believed, Ernst made the offer “on only one ground, namely, that he could make a contribution,” and because he was convinced that if Julius Rosenberg broke and told all he knew, “this would be a terrific story and probably would be most helpful to the Bureau.”48 (Wisely or not, for both were convicted and executed, the Rosenbergs declined Ernst’s offer.)

  Even more important is what Ernst didn’t do. The nearly quarter century during which he served as general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union encompassed such epochal events at the Smith Act roundups; the federal loyalty investigations; the Hiss, Rosenberg, Lattimore, and Oppenheimer cases; blacklisting; and the anti-Communist witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Yet never once did Morris Ernst criticize, question, or even closely examine the FBI’s pervasive role in these and dozens of other related matters, almost all of which involved serious violations of constitutional rights.

  For all this, Ernst—and the ACLU—received very little in return. In 1939 Hoover arranged a secret meeting between Ernst and Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, during which a deal was apparently struck: HUAC would withdraw its charge that the ACLU was a “Communist front,” if the ACLU would, in return, purge itself of any known Communists. The ACLU’s “trial” of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn quickly followed, and Dies pronounced the organization free of any Red taint. Hoover also, over the years, helped “clear” some of Ernst’s clients whose loyalties or associations had been called into question.

  But that was about it. For the most part, all Hoover gave Ernst was encouragement and support in his battles as self-appointed defender of the FBI. “Do not ever hesitate to call day or night when you get in a controversy involving us and you need the ammunition,” Nichols urged Ernst.49 When the philosopher Bertrand Russell charged the FBI with manufacturing evidence and blackmailing witnesses to testify in the Rosenberg case, Nichols informed Ernst, who was anxious to get into the fray, “You no doubt will recall back in 1940 Russell’s appointment as a professor at the City College of New York was revoked by the New York Supreme Court on the grounds that he was not fit for the position due to his ‘immoral and salacious attitude toward sex.’ ”50

  To his credit, Ernst did not use this particular ammunition. But the ACLU did issue a statement calling Russell’s charges against the FBI “completely unproved and unjustified.”51

  That Ernst was a staunch anti-Communist—he’d battled Communist attempts to take over both the Newspaper Guild and the Lawyers Guild—may partly explain Ernst’s uncritical espousal of the FBI’s cause, but it is not the only reason and was probably less important than certain facets of Morris Ernst’s character—very human weaknesses which Hoover, and Nichols, recognized and exploited for their own ends.

  Like the director, Ernst enjoyed the excitement of New York’s nightlife (“They were both of them that kind of fellows,” Roger Baldwin observed),52 although Ernst preferred “21,” where he held court at his own table. While Hoover attracted celebrities, Ernst was attracted to them—and almost pathetically courted them. And J. Edgar Hoover was one of the biggest of them all. Ernst liked to think of himself as a secret mover, a manipulator behind the scenes. He handled a number of confidential matters for FDR. He often prefaced his letters to Hoover with “For your eyes alone.” Hoover and Nichols dropped him just enough little tidbits to make him believe that he was privy to their most private deliberations—and that he, to some degree, influenced them. Ernst took his role so seriously that he frequently lectured the director. Although often irritated—and sometimes enraged—by his presumption, Hoover pretended to give his recommendations serious consideration, but then, more often than not, promptly filed and forgot them. There was one other thing. Without questioning Morris Ernst’s very real concern for the underdog, one could note that his defense of unpopular causes often put him in the spotlight, of which he was inordinately fond. And among the liberal Left, defending the FBI had to be one of the most unpopular causes of all.

  When the Ernst-Hoover letters were first made public, in 1977, as the result of Freedom of Information Act suits filed by the ACLU, Aryeh Neier, then executive director of the organization, concluded, “The harshest judgment about Morris Ernst that I can make on the basis of the FBI files is twofold: He valued the company of people such as J. Edgar Hoover, and he helped ward off ACLU criticism of the FBI, not by underhanded methods, but by openly defending bureau practices which to me seem indefensible. Wrongheaded, yes, but a spy, no.”53

  Harrison E. Salisbury, in his excellent Nation piece “The Strange Correspondence of Morris Ernst and John Edgar Hoover,” summed up Ernst’s role as follows: “On balance, it seems clear that Ernst’s greatest value to the Bureau was as publicist, a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”54

  But Morris Ernst was far more important than that. Because of him, for nearly twenty-five years the one organization in the American Left which had the resources, prestige, and independence to investigate and expose the many illegal acts committed by the FBI—thus, by acting as a public watchdog, putting at least some check on J. Edgar Hoover’s ever-growing power—chose not criticism or even silent acquiescence but blind advocacy.

  Denied the company and credibility of the ACLU, those remaining few on the left who dared criticize the FBI were easily discredited as “Communists, commie symps and other like-vermin.”

  If Hoover was grateful to Ernst, he never showed it. Unknown to Ernst, Hoover never trusted him, as the blue-ink notations on their correspondence abundantly indicate. Nor, though he accepted its support, did he trust the ACLU. His agents never stopped investigating the organization, monitoring everything from its bank accounts to the license plate numbers of those attending its meetings.

  Also unknown to Ernst, who set great store by his close personal friendship with the director, he hadn’t even been corresponding with J. Edgar Hoover. Nearly all of the letters which bore Hoover’s signature were written by Lou Nichols. It was one of Nichols’s tasks, among many, to “handle” Morris Ernst.

  Although Roger Baldwin later admitted, “I’m afraid it took me a long time to come to the conclusion that he was really a menace,” Morris Ernst never harbored any doubts about Hoover.55

  When their correspondence came to an abrupt end in 1964—terminated by Clyde Tolson, in a bizarre fit of jealous rage—Ernst was shattered. He never realized that the “friendship” he so prized had actually ended a decade earlier. With Ernst’s retirement as the ACLU’s general counsel, Hoover no longer needed him. Also, by this time Hoover had developed other contacts within the ACLU who were willing to go even further to please the FBI than Morris Ernst had gone.

  In May of 1940 Hoover lost an old adversary and a last battle. Emma Goldman died of a stroke in Toronto. Despite Hoover’s objections, the Immigration and Naturalization Service granted her last request: permitted reentry into the United States, after an exile of twenty-one
years, she was buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, near the graves of her Haymarket comrades.*

  During the 1940 presidential campaign, the FBI conducted more than two hundred full or partial investigations of Roosevelt’s political enemies. Given that large number, it was perhaps inevitable that at least one would become public knowledge. When it did, in the final month of the campaign, it cost Roosevelt the support of one of the country’s most powerful labor unions.

  On October 17 the United Mine Workers’ president, John L. Lewis, called on the president in the White House. The FBI was investigating him, Lewis angrily charged. They even had his phones tapped. And they were doing this, he’d been told, on orders from the president himself.†

  “That’s a damn lie,” Roosevelt snapped.

  “Nobody calls John L. Lewis a liar,” the labor leader said as he got up and stormed out the door, “and least of all Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”57

  A few days later, Lewis went on the air to denounce Roosevelt, endorse Willkie, and make public the wiretapping charge.

  Choosing his words carefully, Hoover denied the allegations: “The fact of the matter is that this Bureau never has and is not now making any investigation of John L. Lewis. Therefore, the story is entirely untrue as it affects the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”58

  So stated, this was correct. The FBI had never conducted a “full field investigation” of Lewis himself. But it did have his daughter Kathryn, a secret Communist party member, under surveillance, and since she lived with her father and worked in his office, it monitored all of the labor leader’s telephone conversations.

  Moreover, the FBI was conducting an intensive investigation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which Lewis then headed, as well as each of its member unions.

  Even without Lewis’s support, Roosevelt had no trouble defeating Willkie, and on November 6 Hoover sent the president another effusive letter, this one congratulating him on his election victory. In concluding it, he wrote, “As you have expressed, I feel that the greatest single task that lies ahead is to unify all of our people in this period of emergency in order that our national defense may be strong and present an irresistible barrier to any ideas that menacing totalitarian dictators might entertain.”59

  Unity was probably the last thing on Hoover’s mind. Fiercely protective of what he conceived to be the FBI’s domain—and ever ready to expand its boundaries—he was currently engaged in heated bureaucratic battles with the Army, the Navy, the State Department, and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  * * *

  *According to one published account, supposedly based on the recollections of former special agents, Hoover had Farley tapped and tailed from the moment he started trying to have the director replaced in 1933, and he even tried, unsuccessfully, to entrap him in a New Orleans bordello.13

  As for the man Farley had in mind for Hoover’s job, Val O’Farrell, a New York City private detective, Hoover infiltrated men in his agency and prepared a blind memorandum for Cummings which stated that “O’Farrell had while employed by the New York City Police Department been charged with bribery and with making false affidavit, and that he was last year in the personal bodyguard of Dutch Schultz.”14

  *Initially, in an arrangement that was not at all to Hoover’s liking, the FBI tapped the consulates and the Army the embassies. Before long, however, despite delimitation agreements, everyone got into the act. The Vichy French, for example, were “penetrated” by the FBI, OSS, BSC, MID, and ONI. In addition to the taps and bugs, most of the intelligence services also utilized informants or their own undercover operatives. Allen Dulles enjoyed claiming that while OSS officers were invited guests at diplomatic functions, the FBI agents were there only because they were posing as hired help.

  †One was probably the matter of Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s son and FDR’s cousin, who had disappeared. The president wanted the FBI to locate Kermit, by following his mistress, a masseuse, so he could be hospitalized and treated for his various ailments, which included acute alcoholism and a venereal disease. FDR also asked Hoover to do what he could to sever the relationship.18

  *Lest it fall into wrong hands, Hoover’s April 11, 1940, order did not refer to especially sensitive materials. As was often the case with such highly confidential, in-house instructions, the real purpose of the blue memorandum was communicated orally to headquarters personnel, supervisors, inspectors, and SACs. The form itself bore only the notation “This memorandum is for Administrative Purposes—To be Destroyed After Action Is Taken and Not Sent to Files or Information Memorandum—Not to be sent to Files Section.”20

  There was one built-in problem with the “do not file” system, and for this only J. Edgar Hoover was to blame. As the former SAC Neil J. Welch noted, “In the file-conscious Bureau, agents recognized that any paper potent enough for DO NOT FILE status was important and worth keeping.”21

  Thus the assistant directors, as well as the field offices themselves, amassed large secret files which Hoover believed had been destroyed. For example, the New York field office kept a nearcomplete record of surreptitious entries committed by its agents from 1954 to 1973.

  *One reporter to whom the FBI leaked the story was Walter Trohan, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune and a longtime Hoover favorite. In his book Political Animals, Trohan observed, “Jackson played a role in the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, where he picked up the free and easy morals of the military. When he died in the apartment of a female secretary in Washington, it was said he had come to the capital from his Virginia home to shop at a Sears Roebuck store, although there was one closer to his home. The explanation went on to say that when he felt himself stricken, he thought of the secretary’s apartment and sped there for shelter and care.”35

  †When Morris Ernst was interviewed in 1975, the year before his death, his memory was already failing. He admitted to having been Hoover’s personal attorney, but couldn’t remember in exactly what capacity he’d served him. He did recall, however, the “grand and glorious nights at the Stork Club” with Hoover, the man he said he perhaps admired “as much as any other.”37

  When asked specific questions, Ernst referred the author to his correspondence with Hoover and Louis Nichols, which he’d given to the Humanities Center of the University of Texas at Austin. But there are huge gaps in that correspondence (for example, it does not begin until 1947), and those letters and memorandums since released under the Freedom of Information Act are also obviously incomplete, leading one to suspect that many of the Ernst-Hoover-Nichols materials may have been in the Personal File which Helen Gandy allegedly destroyed.

  Hoover apparently objected, more than once, to Ernst’s characterizing himself as his “personal attorney.” Yet in 1971 Hoover told David Kraslow, then of the Los Angeles Times, that Ernst had been his “personal attorney for many years.”38

  One occasion on which Hoover consulted Ernst in a professional capacity is known—when he was considering a possible libel action against Time and sought Ernst’s legal advice.

  *Her longtime friend Alexander Berkman had shot himself four years earlier. “So miscast for the role of violence was this essentially gentle intellectual,” observed Richard Drinnon, “that he bungled his suicide. The bullet he had fired perforated his stomach and lower lungs and lodged in his spinal column. It was sixteen hours before death finally came.”56

  †In his anger, Lewis let slip that the source for his charge was none other than the former attorney general Frank Murphy.

  19

  The View from the Balcony

  J. Edgar Hoover watched Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third inaugural parade from the balcony of the Department of Justice Building at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Although the FBI director shared the fifth floor with the attorney general, that portion of the balcony which overlooked Pennsylvania Avenue was on the FBI side, and relations between the director and AG being what they were, no one suggested s
haring the view.

  With Roosevelt’s reelection, the talk of replacing Hoover abruptly stopped. It was apparent, especially to his enemies, that Hoover had the president’s ear and that unless he made a serious mistake, his Bureau would retain its privileged status for another four years.

  Hoover himself was less sanguine. Looking off his balcony, he saw the Seat of Government under siege from all sides. Since the “smear campaign” of the previous year, Hoover had developed an increasing paranoia about “plots” to defame him and/or the FBI. The rumor that German agents were opening bank accounts in the director’s name, which would then be exposed to show he was secretly working for the Nazis, mushroomed into an investigation that lasted six months and, at one time or another, involved almost the entire Bureau, although there was never any evidence supporting the tale.

  There is no question that some of his aides, including Lou Nichols, played on Hoover’s fears. Others, such as Ed Tamm, who was in charge of the investigative side of the Bureau, discreetly checked out the allegations and, if finding them baseless, then had to diplomatically convince the director that they were without foundation. One such “plot,” in which a disturbed informant charged that at least twenty-three persons were engaged in a “continuous whispering campaign against Mr. Hoover,”1 though debunked by Tamm, made its way into the OC files.

  So did the rumors of Hoover’s homosexuality. For years Hoover had ignored such talk. Then, in the early 1940s, he reversed himself and insisted that each rumor be investigated. For example, a female FBI employee, while having her hair done in a Washington, D.C., beauty shop, overheard the owner tell another customer that Hoover was “a queer.” Interviewed by two special agents, the beauty shop owner denied having made the remark. Still, she rated a four-page report and her own folder in the OC files.2