J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  “McCarthyism” was, from start to finish, the creation of one man, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

  There was, of course, a quid pro quo. In return—in addition to giving the FBI director a new witch-hunt, which resulted in more agents, more money, and more power*—Hoover’s enemies became McCarthy’s own. Hoover supplied McCarthy with the ammunition to attack both individuals—Harry S Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, “Ad-lie” Stevenson, as the senator was fond of referring to the governor of Illinois, and James Wechsler of the New York Post, among others—and organizations, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency.

  According to Lyman Kirkpatrick, “McCarthy never lost an opportunity to make a public statement attacking the CIA.”38 Although Kirkpatrick was the agency’s inspector general during the Eisenhower era, he was unofficially referred to as “McCarthy’s Case Officer.” One of his jobs was to make sure that none of the McCarthyites penetrated the agency, another that no current employees were blackmailed into cooperating with the senator. The CIA director at the time, Allen Dulles—unlike his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who buckled under whenever McCarthy attacked—had a standard response to each McCarthy charge of Communists in the CIA, one which indicated that Dulles had a definite sense of humor: tell it to the FBI, he challenged, and let them investigate. Instead McCarthy moved on to other targets, following the advice of Senator Robert A. Taft, who’d once advised McCarthy, “If one case doesn’t work, bring up another.”39

  One of the many victims of McCarthyism was the twenty-year friendship between Hoover and the columnist Drew Pearson. Even had McCarthy not come along, it was perhaps inevitable that the two would eventually clash, Pearson being a muckraking journalist intent on exposing government misdeeds, Hoover a bureaucrat who felt it a part of his job to suppress such disclosures, unless they were in his best interests. What was surprising was that the split hadn’t occurred earlier and that the cause itself was so relatively minor: the case of the woman who came to dinner.

  In late November 1950 Jean Kerr, McCarthy’s secretary, had gone to Hawaii on vacation and Hoover had instructed the Honolulu SAC Joseph Logue to “contact her and extend every possible courtesy during her visit.”40 It was no more and no less than the normal consideration the FBI director extended visiting dignitaries, according to Logue, except for an unfortunate accident. While sightseeing with the SAC and several other agents, Kerr fell and broke her hip. Rushed to the hospital, she was operated on by a prominent bone specialist, and the agents kept track of her progress, visited her regularly, passed on the director’s Christmas and New Year’s greetings, and in late January—nearly two months and twenty-five confidential radiograms later—finally, probably with a big sigh of relief, arranged that her flight home be met with a wheelchair and an ambulance.

  It took Jack Anderson a couple of months to pick up the story, at which point he called Lou Nichols and asked why an FBI agent was chauffeuring Joe McCarthy’s secretary around Hawaii. Nichols said the Honolulu office had merely extended the usual courtesies shown members of Congress and their administrative assistants, that the tour had occurred after office hours and on the agents’ own time and that this in no way implied a connection between Senator McCarthy and the FBI. Infuriated by the inquiry, Hoover blue-penned, “This fellow Anderson & his ilk have minds that are lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.” Also labeling Anderson “a flea ridden dog,” Hoover decreed that any one in any way associated with him—which of course included his boss, Drew Pearson—was to be considered “infected.”41

  Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson had just made the dreaded no-contact list.

  This was in April 1951. On June 14 Pearson noted, in his diary, that one of his friends had been visited by an FBI agent who’d naively asked, “What is it that Pearson has on J. Edgar Hoover?” This was, Pearson observed, “the second or third time the FBI has been prying into me this year.” Some two months earlier, he recalled, SAs Maurice Taylor and Charles Lyons had interviewed some thirty persons, trying “to find out the names of my servants, whether I had a night watchman, when I went away to the farm, whether the house was unguarded during trips to the farm, where I kept my files, what my files were like, to say nothing of whom I talked to…

  “This is the kind of Gestapo tactic which they had in Germany and Russia. But the FBI has built itself up—partly with my help—to an impregnable position where it can do no wrong. Apparently, civil liberties and the sanctity of a man’s home or office now mean nothing.”42

  Pearson was underrating his role. Since 1932, when his first “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column appeared, he had constantly praised the Bureau and its director, even letting Hoover write guest columns while he was on vacation. Pearson had been the one, during the Homer Cummings era, who had suggested that the Bureau needed a good publicist. Next to Winchell, he was, or so he believed, the director’s favorite columnist. An older agent recalls that one of his duties every Friday night was to place a bulky envelope on Pearson’s front steps, ring the bell, and then disappear, providing Pearson with one or more exclusives for his half-hour Sunday broadcast, as well as material for his daily columns.

  Oddly enough, the day after Pearson’s June 14 diary entry, Lou Nichols called and asked him to come down and see him. “Half apologetically he said that he supposed I knew the FBI had been investigating me and he wanted me to know the circumstances. He said that he was afraid that I was getting sore at Hoover and he wanted me to know that it wasn’t Hoover’s fault.”43 He had been investigated—not two or three times, as Pearson had suspected, but five times thus far that year—on orders from Attorney General McGrath and the Truman administration. While Pearson thought this might be true—the nicest thing that Truman had ever called him was “that SOB”—he also blamed Hoover and, even more, his press lord.

  The following day Pearson arranged to see a possible source, only to find that an FBI agent had interviewed him just twenty minutes after he’d called for an appointment, leading him to the obvious conclusion that the FBI had tapped his phone.

  On July 6 Lou Nichols called Pearson and told him that he was no longer under investigation. That same day HUAC made public testimony revealing that Pearson’s former employee Andrew Older was a Communist; it neglected to mention that when apprised of this fact, by Hoover, the staunchly anti-Communist columnist had promptly fired him.

  Although Pearson continued to write favorably about Hoover and his organization, when he felt they deserved it, he now began looking at the activities of the FBI with a much more critical eye.

  As for the head of Crime Records, Pearson plotted his revenge carefully. Had he been Winchell or Pegler or George Sokolsky, he probably would have used his column to bury him; instead Pearson, a practicing Quaker, chose the opposite tack: he praised him. And in so doing, item by item, nearly all of them seemingly innocuous, he systematically destroyed the FBI career of Louis B. Nichols.

  * * *

  *By contrast, Chambers testified that Hiss had supplied the apartment rent-free to his fellow party member and that the old car had been passed on to him for use by a Communist party organizer.

  *Shown photographs of the documents by his attorney, Hiss immediately identified three of the four notes as being in his own handwriting, and said the fourth was probably his also. As for the typed digests, he denied having seen any of them previously; all, however, he stated, after reading their contents, must have been summaries of actual State Department reports. What he couldn’t understand, he said, was how any of these materials came to be in Chambers’s possession.

  A search of the State Department files did turn up the original documents on which the summaries were based. Though ranging from “classified” to “secret,” few were particularly sensitive and most consisted of trade agreements which would seem to have been of little importance to the Soviets.

  Even more interesting, most had never been routed through sections where either Alger or Donald Hiss worked, leading to the s
upposition that some other person or persons had passed them to Alger—or, in the opposite scenario, directly to Chambers.

  †This may be in error, as many of the FBI documents relating to HUAC and the Hiss case and, particularly, to Richard Nixon have never been made public. One possibility is that these documents were destroyed when Helen Gandy shredded the late director’s Personal File. There are, however, other possibilities, which will be discussed in later chapters.

  *In his memoirs, Richard Nixon, though hiding Father Cronin’s role, partly confirms the above when he states, “Because of Truman’s executive order we were not able to get any direct help from J. Edgar Hoover or the FBI. However, we had some informal contacts with a lower-level agent that proved helpful in our investigations.”2

  Rephrasing the executive order in the words that President Truman had probably originally used, Attorney General Tom Clark—on learning from HUAC’s chairman, Karl Mundt, that he’d received documents from the FBI—called Assistant Director D. M. Ladd and told him, “Any SOB that gives Congressman Mundt any information gets his ass kicked out of this building…I want you to get the word around that anyone giving information to the Committee is out, O-U-T!”3

  †The two developed rolls, which contained cables and other State Department documents, some of them in code and all dated during the early months of 1938, were introduced into the legal proceedings which followed. The other three rolls, once they had been developed, were withheld from the grand jury, the court, and the Hiss defense, for reasons of security. According to Richard Nixon, “Some of the documents were relatively unimportant, but the State Department still felt in 1948, ten years after they had been taken from the government files, that publication of the complete ‘pumpkin papers’ would be injurious to the national security.”5

  Not until 1975 was Alger Hiss—as the result of a Freedom of Information Act suit—allowed to examine the three withheld rolls of microfilm. Two were from the U.S. Navy Department and contained instructions on how to use fire extinguishers, life rafts, and chest parachutes; the third roll was blank.

  *“The typewriters are always the key,” President Nixon supposedly told Charles Colson in the presence of John Dean and the White House tapes. “We built one in the Hiss case.”8 Nixon did not say who “we” referred to.

  The question of whether “forgery by typewriters” was committed is, many feel, the key to the enigma of the Hiss case. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and previously suppressed by the FBI, seem to prove that the typewriter introduced into evidence wasn’t the same one the Hisses had once owned, for it was manufactured two years after the initial purchase of the Hiss Woodstock. Also suppressed was an early report from the FBI Laboratory which concluded that the comparison did not show that Priscilla Hiss had typed the documents (the FBI documents “expert” Ramos Feehan later testified otherwise). For articles dealing with this complex issue, see John Lowenthal, “Woodstock No. 230099: What the FBI Knew But Hid from Hiss and the Court,” Nation, June 26, 1976; and Fred J. Cook, “The Typewriters Are Always the Key,” New Times, October 14, 1977. Morton and Michael Levitt devote most of a chapter to the issue in their book A Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 184-209, as does Alger Hiss in his most recent book, Recollections of a Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 212-24. For other books which treat this, and other aspects of the Hiss case, see the bibliographical listings for: David Caute, Whittaker Chambers, Fred J. Cook, Alistair Cooke, Alger Hiss, Tony Hiss, Earl Jowitt, John Chabot Smith, Edith Tiger, Allen Weinstein, and Meyer A. Zeligs.

  *The J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, supported initially by large donations from two former bootleggers, Lewis Rosenstiel and Joseph Kennedy, with Roy Cohn and Louis Nichols acting as the go-betweens, would have a long and checkered history.

  *Interviewed in 1976, shortly before his death, Alan Belmont was asked, “Do you have any doubts about the Hiss case?” He responded, “No…I do not have any doubts about this case,” adding the qualification “I always considered privately that Mrs. Hiss was stronger than Alger Hiss was.”12 Other former agents made similar remarks, stating that they were convinced that Priscilla Hiss was really the guiding force behind her husband’s “disloyal acts.” However, this was standard Hoover mythology: Emma Goldman was more culpable than Alexander Berkman, Katherine than George “Machine Gun” Kelley, Priscilla than Alger Hiss, Ethel than Julius Rosenberg.

  Behind every bad man, J. Edgar Hoover seemed convinced, was an even worse woman.

  *A former special agent remarked, “It was an ideal way to spend an afternoon or evening. We enjoyed the hell out of it.”13

  †The uncertain status of the Hiss case was certainly a factor in Hoover’s reluctance to proceed with still another espionage case, the director just having learned that his chief witness, Chambers, not only was waffling as to what he would testify to but had also confessed to being an ex-homosexual.

  *This was a 115-page summary of all known information about the KGB and GRU’s activities in the United States during the past fifteen years. It also included sections on the intelligence activities of the satellite countries.

  *Between the two trials, on July 26 and October 13, 1949, Ladd sent Hoover two reports on “possible vulnerable points in our activities” regarding the National Lawyers Guild and the Coplon case. Copies released under the Freedom of Information Act are so heavily censored—in one a page and a half has been blacked out—as to make them unreadable.

  One can presume, with some safety, that the excised portions contain references to even more illegal acts than are now known.

  *As an employee of the United Nations, Gubitchev did not possess diplomatic immunity. However, at the request of the State Department, he was deported immediately after sentencing.

  As a postscript, it may be added that Amtorg, not knowing whom to believe, fired its attorney, Isadore Gibby Needleman.

  †The court, however, noted in regard to the New York case that Miss Coplon’s “guilt was plain.”

  *Following her second trial, Judith Coplon married one of Leonard Boudin’s law associates.

  †The code name for JUNE MAIL was later changed, according to the former assistant to the director William Sullivan, though some of the older agents continued to use it. “As I remember, all these electronic matters were kept in what we called the JUNE file. They were kept out of the general indices. I seem to recall that they were given special protection, I’m not sure of this, but I think maybe twenty-four hours a day there was always someone present where these files were.”22

  *Such information was also conveyed to SACs and ASACs during field office inspection tours or when they were periodically recalled to the Seat of Government for “retraining.”

  *It was a practice that was much refined in later years: Alan Belmont testifying before the Warren Commission, rather than the men who actually conducted the investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination; James Adams appearing before the Church committee instead of John Mohr; and so on.

  †The functions of MI-5 (pronounced “M-eye-5”), domestic security, most closely resembled those of the FBI, while those of MI-6 (“M-eye-6”), which was charged with security outside the country, were more like those of the CIA. Although a confirmed Anglophobe, Hoover, when forced to make a choice, preferred to deal with MI-5 rather than MI-6. Philby, however, though attached to MI-6 (and well on the way to heading the organization, many felt), in his liaison capacity represented both organizations.

  *Presumably, the Inga Arvad sex tapes which John F. Kennedy so feared were among the items stored here, although less potentially useful recordings from MISURs and TELSURs were usually kept only a few weeks, then erased.

  *On returning to the office after giving the materials to McCarthy, Anderson found Pearson writing a column denouncing the senator. Pearson was the first, and for a long time the only, reporter to question McCarthy’s allegations and accounting.

  “He is one of our best
sources on the Hill,” Anderson argued.

  “He may be a good source, Jack, but he’s a bad man,” Pearson replied.

  Anderson’s disillusionment with McCarthy came shortly thereafter, when the senator presented the information he’d given him not as speculation but as fact, destroying the career of a quite possibly innocent person.32