J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  One possible explanation for the absence of incriminating activity was that the Soviets had closed down most of their espionage networks immediately after the defection of Gouzenko. But it was a temporary shutdown, as the FBI soon learned.

  There was still another explanation, which Hoover never admitted, at least not on paper, but which must have concerned him nonetheless: that Hiss wasn’t a Soviet agent or, at the very least, that he was no longer functioning as such (Chambers’s allegations all dated back to the 1930s).

  Hoover had rushed to the president with only the accusations of Chambers and Bentley. A year later he still lacked any support for these two very shaky limbs. Even an attempt to reactivate Bentley, this time as a double agent, failed; she met once with Gromov, on a Manhattan street corner, but she was given no further assignments.

  Soviet agent or not, Hiss was, at least in Hoover’s eyes, a security risk, and the FBI director was determined to get him out of the government.

  This was not easy. Unlike the FBI, the State Department was under civil service. Before Hiss could be fired, there would have to be a hearing, and Hoover was opposed to this because, as he explained to Clark, “the material against Hiss was confidential and if it were not used there would not be enough evidence against him.”19 In fact, the only evidence Hoover had, confidential or otherwise, was Whittaker Chambers’s allegations.

  Instead Hoover chose another approach, to leak the accusations; he thereby hoped to put enough pressure on Hiss to force him to resign. William Sullivan handled the leak, repeating the charges to selected members of Congress, as well as to a Catholic priest, Father John F. Cronin.

  During the Bureau’s early years, there had been few Catholics in the upper echelons of the FBI, although there was an abundance of Masons. Although Hoover denied being prejudiced, not until the mid-1940s did the FBI begin recruiting agent applicants at Catholic universities such as Georgetown, Fordham, and Notre Dame. Two things were responsible for the change: the FBI director’s realization that the Catholic church was strongly anti-Communist, and thus could be a valuable ally; and the need to replace the special agents who had defected en masse at the end of the war. In addition to soliciting Catholics as agents, informal liaison was developed with various church officials, such as Francis Cardinal Spellman,* Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, and Father John F. Cronin.

  Cronin’s relationship with the FBI—and, later, with Richard Nixon—became especially close. An assistant director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Cronin was asked to prepare a confidential paper on communism in the United States for American Catholic bishops. Requesting assistance from the FBI, he received it in such abundance—much of it directly from classified Bureau files—that he became known as something of an expert on the subject.† In his report to the bishops, which was prepared in November 1945, Cronin mentioned Alger Hiss by name four times, as an underground Communist party member.

  Hiss, however, didn’t resign. During most of January and February of 1946 he was in London with Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, attending the first meeting of the UN General Assembly, and probably wasn’t even aware that he was being pressured.

  In March, Hoover, Secretary of State Byrnes, and Attorney General Clark met in an attempt to find a solution to the Hiss problem. Byrnes, who also wanted Hiss out, to avoid possible future embarrassment to both the State Department and the administration, suggested several possible options, but Hoover found a reason to reject each. The FBI director did have one suggestion, however. Without informing the secretary of state that he had already done so, months earlier, Hoover suggested that Byrnes “contact several key men in the House and Senate and explain his predicament to them.”21 Then he could call Hiss in and inform him that serious allegations were being made about him, by various committees on the Hill. That way Hiss would be unaware that the charges had come from the FBI or that Byrnes himself was seeking his removal.

  Greatly impressed with Hoover’s backstage maneuvering, Byrnes jumped at the idea, unaware that the FBI director was mostly covering himself. This way there would be no need to produce the evidence against Hiss, which was flimsy at best. And, if the FBI director’s earlier leaks were to become known, Hoover could blame them on Byrnes.

  On March 21 the secretary talked to Hiss, who expressed puzzlement at the accusations, some of which had apparently reached him from Washington cocktail party chatter. Hiss then, at Byrnes’s suggestion, attempted to make an appointment with the FBI director but instead got Mickey Ladd, who had been instructed to volunteer nothing but simply to listen and take down whatever Hiss had to say. Hoover expressly ordered Ladd not to mention Whittaker Chambers’s name.

  Hiss denied either being a member of or sympathetic to the Communist party; reviewed several incidents in his past which might have caused such suspicions (for example, his association in the early thirties with the International Juridical Association, a group of leftish lawyers involved in labor law and civil liberties cases); and traced his career in government from his early New Deal years with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration through his work as counsel to the Nye committee (which was investigating World War I munitions profiteering), his recent UN assignment, and his present position in the State Department.

  Hiss also noted that he had attended Harvard Law School, been elected to the Law Review his second year, become one of Felix Frankfurter’s protégés, and after graduation, on Frankfurter’s recommendation, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—admissions that were not likely to endear him to the FBI director.

  It was a long, one-sided conversation. Ladd, on Hoover’s orders, asked few questions, thereby giving Hiss no clue as to who had made the charges or even how serious they were.

  However carefully thought-out Hoover’s plan may have been, it backfired. Instead of resigning, Hiss left the FBI convinced that he had satisfactorily cleared up the matter.

  Hoover then tried to increase the pressure, with more memos to the White House and the State Department, and more leaks, including one to Walter Winchell, who on September 29 reported, “It can be categorically stated that the question of the loyalty and integrity of one high American official has been called to the attention of the President” (an item which could have referred equally well to Harry Dexter White).22 Byrnes did his bit by removing Hiss’s name from the State Department promotion list and denying him access to sensitive materials. Not until December 1946, however, did Hiss finally resign, to accept an appointment as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, at a greatly increased salary.*

  Although Hoover maintained the ELSURs (electronic surveillances) and FISURs (physical surveillances) for eight months after Hiss left the government, the intensive two-year investigation had failed to produce any evidence supporting Whittaker Chambers’s allegations. It proved very useful later, however.

  Hoover fared even less well with Harry Dexter White.

  In his November 8, 1945, memorandum to the president, the FBI director had identified White as one of fourteen people who had—wittingly or unwittingly—supplied information that was subsequently passed to an agent of the Soviet government. In his November 27 report he’d repeated that charge.

  Just two months later, on January 23, 1946, President Truman announced that he was sending the Senate the name of Harry Dexter White as his nominee to be the first American executive director of the International Monetary Fund.

  The FBI director’s reaction was stunned disbelief. Truman had simply ignored his reports. Hoover immediately ordered a new report prepared, this one focusing entirely on White, whom he now characterized as “a valuable adjunct to an underground Soviet espionage organization.” This information, he stated, had come from a total of thirty sources, “the reliability of which had been previously established.”23

  Dated February 1, the new report, which ran to twenty-eight pages, was delivered to Vaughan on February 4, and this may have been
the first time Truman became aware of the charges against White. Truman later stated, “As best as I can now determine, I first learned of the accusation against White early in February 1946,” indicating, if Truman’s memory was correct, that both of the earlier reports had been overlooked.24

  It is also possible that Truman saw those reports and, after consulting with Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson, gave them little credence. Truman’s biographer Robert J. Donovan suggests this is probably what occurred. “Piecing the story together from the recollections of persons then in the government,” Donovan states, “what appears to have happened is that Truman looked to Vinson for advice and Vinson did not attach great importance to Hoover’s letter. Neither then did Truman. After all, the letter did not specify what acts White had committed. It even left open the question of whether he had known that information he had supplied was being fed, allegedly, into ‘the Soviet espionage system.’ ”*25

  Then too, Truman may have thought that Hoover was just crying wolf. Like his predecessors (and successors), President Truman was deluged by FBI memorandums, a sizable number of them accusing one or more persons of being Communists.†

  But probably most important, just months earlier Truman had gone out on a limb to back Hoover in the Amerasia affair, only to find that the FBI director had no case.

  However, the president simply could not overlook the February memorandum. Secretary of State Byrnes sent him a copy, together with the earlier reports, emphasizing, “I deem [them] of such importance that I think you should read them.”27

  Truman met with Byrnes the next day, February 6. He was shocked by the contents of the reports, Byrnes told the president, and bluntly asked him what he intended to do about it.

  What did he suggest? Truman asked. Byrnes responded that he thought he should immediately contact the Senate and withdraw the nomination. A presidential aide then called Leslie Biffle, secretary of the Senate, to check on the status of the nomination and was told that it had just been favorably acted upon.

  There followed a series of meetings, involving, at various times, the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of the treasury, and the attorney general—but not the director of the FBI. (Truman was not about to confer even token Cabinet status on J. Edgar Hoover.) It is possible that, had he been directly consulted, the FBI chief could have persuaded the president that there was strong circumstantial evidence supporting the charges against White.

  Hoover was convinced that White was an active Soviet agent. True, during the course of the three-month investigation, he had not been observed passing any documents, but from the surveillances, wiretaps, and statements by informants the FBI had learned that White was in frequent close personal contact with nearly every one of the persons named as his associates in the spy ring. More than a few of those persons had received their positions in government on White’s recommendation. And several were, even prior to the appearance of Bentley, suspected, at least by the FBI, of having Communist affiliations.

  But Hoover wasn’t consulted. And no one, including Hoover’s boss, Attorney General Clark, knew exactly what corroborative evidence the FBI director possessed, if any. (Apparently Hoover didn’t even trust the president: in his initial report to Truman he had disguised even Bentley’s sex, by referring to a “contact man” who carried the rolls of film from Silvermaster to Golos.)

  Again, as in the case of Hiss, a number of options were debated, only this time Hoover wasn’t a party to the discussion. The president could ask the Senate to reconsider the nomination; he could refuse to sign White’s commission; he could let the nomination go through, then dismiss White and make no statement; or he could call White in, tell him he’d changed his mind, and ask for his resignation. Truman seemed inclined to adopt the latter proposal, the attorney general reported to the FBI director on February 26. At any rate, Clark said, an effort would be made to “remove” White, although he was skeptical whether it would work. If White did assume the post, Clark told Hoover, he would “be surrounded by persons who were specially selected and were not security risks.”*

  The president had also stated that he was “interested in continuing the surveillance,” Clark said, and Hoover responded that if that was his wish, the FBI “would continue the investigation.”28

  Truman did not choose to take any of the options. Much to Hoover’s disgust, he let the nomination go through, and on May 1, 1946, White took his post as one of the executive directors of the International Monetary Fund.

  This wasn’t the last of the White affair, however. Two years later—and less than three months before the 1948 presidential election—Hoover, in an attempt to embarrass Truman, secretly arranged to have the White case made public before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was not content with that. Suppressing his rage over this and a host of other accumulated grievances, the FBI director waited five more years before exacting his ultimate revenge, when, in a rare, highly publicized personal appearance on the floor of the U.S. Senate, he charged—in much more carefully phrased words but with the same unmistakable meaning—that former president Harry S Truman was a liar.

  Beginning in the late 1930s, FBI employees were required to report any contact with a foreign national to their superiors. Effective January 1946, a new policy was inaugurated: any FBI employee who had any contact of whatever kind—official, social, or accidental—with any member of the White House staff was ordered to report it to the director’s office.

  Foreign nationals were no longer the FBI’s only enemies.

  In the November 1946 elections the Republicans gained control of both houses for the first time since 1928. Among the new faces were three “war heroes” (or so claimed their campaign brochures): Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, and Representatives Richard M. Nixon, Republican of California, and John F. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.

  In common with all freshmen legislators, each rated a new FBI file, which was maintained in the office of Lou Nichols, who handled congressional liaison. Hoover, however, already had files on each. The most potentially damaging—and the fattest, containing over 250 documents and more than 600 pages—was initially kept in Nichols’s office and later transferred to the office of the director, where it became a part of Hoover’s own Official/Confidential file.

  Although much of it dealt with the sexual activities of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, it was not filed under his name but was instead captioned FEJOS, MRS. PAUL, NEE INGA ARVAD-IS-ESP-G, the initials being Bureau shorthand for INTERNAL SECURITY-ESPIONAGE-GERMAN.

  The Republican sweep also brought a change in the leadership of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was now headed by J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. Although Thomas’s tenure was brief—in 1949 he was convicted of padding his office payroll and sentenced to three years in prison* —1947, his first year as chairman, saw the real beginning of the secret relationship between HUAC and the FBI, and set the pattern for all the years that followed.

  In March 1947 Representative John Rankin announced that the committee intended to look into Communist subversion of American movies—a headline grabber if ever there was one.

  In May, however, just a month before the inquiry was initially scheduled to start, Chairman Thomas admitted to the Los Angeles SAC Richard Hood that the committee didn’t have enough information to conduct the hearings. The committee, Thomas complained, was “severely handicapped by lack of any information” to use in questioning prospective witnesses. For example, the committee intended to subpoena nine Hollywood personalities but didn’t have the background data needed to question them. As for the stated purpose of the hearings—to expose Communist infiltration of the film industry—the committee had so little proof of this that it couldn’t decide whether it was worthwhile to send an investigator to the West Coast for a month to develop possible leads.

  In short, Rankin, in announcing the probe, had gone off half-cocked, and Thomas was literally begging the FBI for help. Not unaware o
f J. Edgar Hoover’s legendary ego, Thomas appealed to it, arguing that the background information they needed—the sources of which he promised to keep confidential—“would further Mr. Hoover’s premise that the best way to fight Communists was to expose them.”

  SAC Hood discussed the request with Lou Nichols, and, both being sympathetic to Thomas’s plea, together they came up with several suggestions they felt the director might be willing to accept, once assured that nothing would be done to “embarrass the Bureau.”

  Nichols knew his boss. On receiving their recommendations, Hoover wrote in the margin, “Expedite. I want Hood to extend every assistance to the committee.”

  Every assistance, in this case, meant giving HUAC not only what it had asked for—the background data on the nine persons which Thomas had requested, together with a blind memorandum summarizing “Communist activities in Hollywood,” thus belatedly providing the justification for the hearings—but also two all-important lists. The first contained the names and affiliations of persons in the motion picture and radio industries who, allegedly, at some point in the past or at present, belonged either to the Communist party or to one of the “fronts,” those organizations which the FBI deemed to be Communist controlled or Communist influenced. The second consisted of the names and profiles of thirty-two individuals whom the Bureau described as potentially “cooperative or friendly witnesses.”29 (Included on this list was the actor Ronald Reagan, who later voluntarily testified before the committee. A confidential informant for the FBI since 1943, Reagan had spied on the activities of members of the Screen Actors Guild while serving as the union’s president.)

  The hearings, which finally took place that October, garnered all the publicity the committee had hoped for, and more.