J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  The April 3 tryst never happened. On the prior weekend Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss Thompson, en route to a speaking engagement in Seattle, stopped over in Chicago, checking into the Blackstone Hotel. Late that same night, Lash arrived by bus from Chanute, and the three talked and played gin rummy until Lash, exhausted, impolitely fell asleep.

  Again Lash was under surveillance. But this time Mrs. Roosevelt was too. In addition to following her whenever she left the hotel, the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps bugged her rooms.

  On Sunday, before Lash’s departure, hotel employees informed the first lady that the Army had her under surveillance and was even listening in on her conversations, including her telephone calls to the president. Although she said nothing to Lash, on her return to Washington she protested strongly to both Harry Hopkins and General George Marshall, the Army chief of staff.

  The president’s reaction on learning that the Army had his wife under surveillance can be glimpsed in what followed. Perhaps, like Colonel Boyer, the commander in chief sensed a conspiracy, only this one directed by right-wing elements in the Army, for in a matter of weeks Colonel Bissel was relieved of his duties and passed over for promotion; Lieutenant Colonel Boyer, who’d ordered the surveillance, was transferred to an obscure post in Louisiana; and, to quote a CIC historian, “a lot of other butts were roasted.”24 In addition, the CIC’s files on subversives were ordered burned; and Sergeant Joe Lash was sent to the South Pacific.*

  Hoover learned of the CIC’s surveillance of Eleanor Roosevelt from sources in Army intelligence, who reported that a recording made from the bug hidden in the hotel room “indicated quite clearly that Mrs. Roosevelt and Lash engaged in sexual intercourse.”25

  Apparently, at some point in the telling, someone—either intentionally or inadvertently—mixed up Lash’s weekend visits with Mrs. Roosevelt and Trudy Pratt.

  Hoover and his aides continued to believe this version even after receiving copies of the supposedly burned CIC files on the surveillance in 1946.†

  And it was this version, together with the other “derogatory” materials in his massive files on Eleanor Roosevelt, that Hoover would use against her—once her husband was no longer president.

  Eleanor Roosevelt was not the only prominent member of the administration to attract the special attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Though he’d once refused to investigate Willkie or tap Farley, during FDR’s last two terms in office the FBI director, with the chief executive’s approval, conducted highly confidential investigations of the vice-president of the United States, the under secretary of state, and the wife of the president’s closest adviser.

  By the time Henry Agard Wallace became vice-president, in 1941, the FBI had thoroughly infiltrated the American Communist party. Through the use of informants, bugs, and taps—the FBI even monitored the conversations of Earl Browder and Robert Minor in Atlanta penitentiary—Hoover had ample evidence that the party leadership considered the highly idealistic Wallace a quite easily manipulated pawn. As in the case of Eleanor Roosevelt, Hoover took it upon himself to warn Wallace of the allegedly subversive backgrounds of his visitors and associates. On October 10, 1942, for example, the FBI director informed the vice-president that a women’s group he had agreed to see had actually been sent by the waterfront section of the Communist party. Later that same month Hoover wrote Wallace, “It has come to my attention that you may have possibly been extended an invitation to address a dinner to be held under the auspices of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee at the Astor Hotel, New York City, on Tuesday, October 27, 1942,” adding, just in case the vice-president was unaware of it, that the committee was a Communist-front organization.26

  What Hoover didn’t tell Wallace was that he was sending the same reports to the president, via Harry Hopkins; that he was monitoring many of the vice-president’s telephone conversations, by tapping the wires of his closest friends and associates, including his secretary; that he was also opening their mail and photographing letters Wallace himself had written; or that, even while on official trips, the vice-president was kept under surveillance. Following a 1943 Latin-American tour, Hoover memoed Attorney General Biddle, “I want to advise you of information which has reached me from a confidential source [a special agent] which indicates the possibility that Vice President Wallace is being unknowingly influenced by Bolivian Communists.27

  On another occasion, when Wallace was the speaker at a Los Angeles Union gathering, another of Hoover’s agents informed the director that “many well known Communists were in the audience” and that the meeting itself was under their “complete control.”28

  When Hoover suggested to Biddle that Wallace was being “unknowingly influenced,” he was hiding his real feelings. Although he had his doubts about Eleanor Roosevelt’s loyalty (one blue-penned notation read, “I often wonder whether she is as naive as she professes or whether it is just a blind to lull the unsuspecting”),29 Hoover was convinced that Henry Wallace was a knowing agent of the Communist conspiracy, with secret “pro-Soviet ties.”*30

  Equally sensitive was the Sumner Welles case.

  In September 1940 William Bankhead of Alabama, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, died of a heart attack. A presidential train was dispatched to Alabama for the funeral, Vice-President Henry Wallace and other administration officials filling in for the president, who was too busy to attend. On the return trip there was considerable drinking, and Wallace and others noticed that Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was putting away more than his share. On returning to his stateroom late that night, Welles repeatedly rang the bell for the porter. When several responded, Welles exposed himself and made “certain lewd homosexual suggestions.”31

  Sumner Welles was FDR’s man in the State Department. Frequently bypassing the secretary of state, Cordell Hull—whom he considered narrow-minded and unimaginative—Roosevelt relied heavily on Welles in his foreign-policy decisions. Although Welles’s specialty was Latin America, where he’d served for several years, there were few state secrets he wasn’t privy to. Moreover, coming from an aristocratic background similar to that of the president, Welles had practically grown up with the Roosevelt clan. He’d served as a page boy at Eleanor and Franklin’s wedding, had been in the same class at Harvard with Eleanor’s brother Hall. He and his wife, Mathilde, were especially close to the first lady.*

  After the train trip, one of the porters filed a complaint with his employer, the Southern Railway Company, and gossip about the incident quickly spread, helped greatly by the efforts of William Christian Bullitt, who’d obtained a copy of the complaint.

  Bullitt, whom the columnist Marquis Childs once described as “an Iago of Iagos,”32 was a self-promoting opportunist, with a greatly inflated sense of his own importance. According to Ted Morgan, whose source was Dorothy Rosenman, Bullitt had even seduced FDR’s secretary, Marguerite “Missy” Le-Hand, “whose friendship greatly facilitated access to the president.”33 Appointed ambassador to Russia in 1933, Bullitt had been unable to get along with the Russians and, convinced the post was beneath him, had persuaded Roosevelt to appoint him ambassador to France. Though no happier there, he’d remained until the German invasion. At present he was seeking another ambassadorship, and it was likely he saw in the Welles incident a means to get it. Moreover, he hated Welles, who had the job he felt a friend should have had.

  On January 3, 1941, the FBI director was summoned to the White House by Harry Hopkins, who, on the instructions of the president, entrusted him with an especially delicate task: the investigation of the allegations concerning Sumner Welles.

  Hoover placed Ed Tamm in charge of the investigation, and the FBI obtained statements from the porters and others on the train. They also learned that there had been prior incidents—even one on another presidential train, en route to Chicago—and that, when drunk, Welles was given to roaming Washington’s public rest rooms and parks, seeking homosexual partners, preferably “coloreds.” It was supposedly because of such
activities, in this case with young boys, that Welles had been recalled from Cuba some years earlier.34

  While the investigation was still under way, a reporter asked the under secretary of state if he had heard the story that was going around. Professing to be greatly shocked, Welles called on Attorney General Biddle and gave his version of what had happened on the train. Admitting he had been drinking “rather heavily” that night, he stated that he had become ill and, after taking a sleeping pill, had ordered coffee from the dining car. After that, he presumed he’d fallen asleep. He couldn’t recall anything else happening.35

  On January 29 Hoover briefed the president on the results of his investigation. The personnel on the presidential trains were specially chosen, their backgrounds and associations carefully checked, Hoover said. Besides, they had no reason to lie. The allegation that “Mr. Welles had propositioned a number of the train crew to have immoral relations with them” was, Hoover told FDR, apparently true. Hoover also informed the president that it was his friend William Bullitt who was spreading the story and that he had told it to his enemy Senator Burton K. Wheeler, among others.”

  The president did not ask the FBI director’s advice as to what he should do, nor did Hoover offer it. Although Welles had committed a felony, as the law then read, there was never any question of prosecuting him, according to Tamm. His agents had taken “statements” from the porters, not “signed affidavits,” as they would have had they been preparing a case for court. But there was concern, great concern, that Welles’s activities might make him susceptible to blackmail.36

  Having heard the story from Bullitt, Secretary of State Hull called on the president and demanded that Welles be fired. But Eleanor intervened, saying that she was afraid that if he was dismissed, Welles might commit suicide. Attorney General Biddle also tried to discuss the matter with the president, but Roosevelt treated it rather lightly, remarking, “Well, he’s not doing it on government time, is he?”37

  Apparently Roosevelt felt if he ignored the scandal, it would go away. But, when several months passed with no action, Bullitt forced the issue, himself calling on the president with a copy of the porter’s affidavit in hand. Roosevelt scanned it and admitted, “There is truth in the allegations.” But it wouldn’t happen again, the president assured Bullitt, for Welles now had a guardian who, posing as a bodyguard, was watching him night and day.

  This didn’t satisfy Bullitt. He wanted Welles out immediately. His continued presence was ruining morale in the State Department. And what about the war effort? How would the fighting men feel if they learned that the number two man in the State Department was a criminal and sexual deviate? Ever arrogant, Bullitt then delivered his ultimatum: unless Welles was dismissed, he would under no circumstances consider taking another position in the State Department or the Foreign Service.38

  This was apparently too much for FDR. Pleading illness, he signaled Pa Watson to usher Bullitt out and canceled his appointments for the rest of the day. Roosevelt later told Steve Early, “Poor Sumner may have been poisoned but he was not, like Bill, a poisoner.”39

  To quiet Bullitt, however, Roosevelt sent him on a mission to Cairo, but on his return Bullitt tried to peddle the story to three of FDR’s arch-enemies: Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, her brother Joseph Medill Patterson, and their cousin Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publishers, respectively, of the Washington Times Herald, the New York Daily News, and the Chicago Tribune. But much as they hated “that cripple in the White House,” as Cissy Patterson often referred to FDR, even they wouldn’t touch it.

  On October 24, 1942, more than two years after the incident on the train, Secretary of State Hull arranged a secret meeting with J. Edgar Hoover in his suite at the Wardman Park Hotel. Stating that he knew the FBI had conducted an investigation of the Welles allegations, Hull asked to see the report. Although confirming that there was such a report, Hoover said he couldn’t show it to him without presidential consent, which was not forthcoming. Hoover, of course, reported the meeting to the president.

  Perhaps the timing was coincidental, but that same day Hoover also sent the president a memorandum on another secret meeting, this one of several top American Communist leaders at the New York home of Frederick Vanderbilt Field, during which Sumner Welles was discussed. According to Hoover’s informant, who reportedly was present, “Browder allegedly spoke disparagingly concerning Mr. Welles. He described Welles as inferior in intelligence to Party leaders and said that he could make a fool out of him at any time.”40

  Did the Communists know of Welles’s homosexuality? There was no reference to it in the informant’s report, yet Browder’s odd remark raised that disquieting possibility. William Bullitt, for one, suspected that they did and that Welles was already a pawn of the Russians.

  Having failed to convince the president that he should fire Welles, Hull and Bullitt now took the story to Senator Owen Brewster, Republican of Maine, hoping he could persuade the Truman committee, of which he was a member, to conduct an investigation. Brewster also approached Hoover, asking to see the report, but received the same refusal. Later, in discussing the Welles situation with Attorney General Biddle, Hoover noted that in both reported instances Welles had been intoxicated, and wondered aloud if a person could be so drunk he’d commit such an act, then completely obliterate it from his memory. Welles’s problem, Hoover told Biddle, was obviously a lack of self-control. It was an interesting observation.

  Faced with the possibility of a congressional investigation on the eve of the 1944 election, Roosevelt finally realized that, much as he needed Welles, he would have to let him go. In August 1943, after a cover-up of nearly three years, the president requested and received Sumner Welles’s resignation; and J. Edgar Hoover added another fat folder to his Official/Confidential file.*41

  Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles hadn’t been fired when he’d exposed him, Hoover later told his aides, because “that old biddy Eleanor Roosevelt protected him.” And she’d protected him, the FBI director added, “because his softness toward Russia served the interests of the Communist party.”43

  In addition to Wallace and Welles, the president also asked Hoover to investigate the wife of his most trusted adviser.

  During his last years in office, Roosevelt became increasingly concerned with press leaks. He was particularly incensed when personal White House conversations were quoted almost verbatim in Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson’s Washington Times Herald.* Obsessed with finding the source of the leaks, he had Hoover place Harry Hopkins’s wife under surveillance.

  In 1942 Hopkins had married for the third time, taking as his wife Louise Macy, a former Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar. For a time FDR seemed rather smitten with the new Mrs. Hopkins, who was not only quite beautiful but also had something of a reputation,† and, much to Eleanor’s displeasure, he even persuaded the newlyweds to move into the White House. By 1944, however, Roosevelt’s appreciation had diminished, and, suspecting that it was Mrs. Hopkins who was leaking White House gossip to her friend Cissy Patterson, the president—with Harry Hopkins’s approval—asked Hoover to place her under both physical and technical surveillance.

  Although the surveillance, which continued off and on through 1944 and the early part of 1945, failed to confirm Roosevelt’s suspicions, Hoover apparently felt the information worth keeping. Although ordered by the White House to destroy all copies of the surveillance reports, he saved one set, which he placed in two manila envelopes in Harry Hopkins’s own OC file.45

  Although Hoover was fighting enemies on a dozen different fronts, his major adversary remained William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

  In December 1943 the OSS chief—apparently without prior authorization from the White House, the State Department, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff—negotiated a secret agreement with Vyacheslav Molotov, Russia’s commissar of foreign affairs. Ostensibly to coordinate activities against the Germans, the OSS and the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, would exchange teams of agents,
the OSS setting up a liaison office in Moscow and the NKVD one in Washington, D.C.

  Although it took Hoover two months to learn of the plan—from “confidential but reliable” sources in the State Department, the Pentagon, and, undoubtedly, the OSS itself—once informed he moved quickly. On February 10, 1944, he fired off a “Dear Harry” letter, warning Hopkins that Donovan proposed to let Soviet spies roam freely in the United States. England had done much the same thing, he pointed out, and as a result “the history of the NKVD in Great Britain clearly showed that the fundamental purpose of its operations there was to surreptitiously obtain the official secrets of the British Government.”46

  In a separate memo to Biddle, he brought the warning closer to home. Secret agents of the NKVD were already operating in the United States, he reminded the attorney general, “attempting to obtain highly confidential information concerning War Department secrets.”47 As Biddle knew, Hoover was referring to the recent attempts of the American Communist Steve Nelson and NKVD agents to obtain classified information regarding the development of the atomic bomb, a plot which the FBI had discovered through wiretaps and other surveillances.

  Alerted by Hoover, Admiral William Leahy and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also protested to the president, and Roosevelt, who was growing more than a little disenchanged with Donovan’s tendency to act first and ask permission later, tabled the proposed OSS-NKVD exchange. It appeared J. Edgar Hoover had won yet another battle against his arch-rival.

  Unknown to the FBI director, had he pursued the matter further, he would have uncovered information so damaging that Roosevelt might well have fired Donovan. For Wild Bill had jumped the gun. Long after Donovan’s death, the intelligence historian Anthony Cave Brown was given access to the former OSS chief’s private papers. There he learned that Donovan hadn’t waited for FDR’s approval. “Documents, special equipment, secret intelligence—all began to flow in considerable quantities from the OSS to the NKVD. Few categories of intelligence or equipment were withheld, and the United States sent expensive equipment such as miniature cameras, miniature microdotmanufacturing systems, and microfilming cameras and projectors—all of which were of use in the large-scale NKVD espionage operations then going on in the United States.”48