TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014471.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 87

The Emperor's Old Files


By JOHN ELSON


J. EDGAR HOOVER: THE MAN AND THE SECRETS
By Curt Gentry
Norton; 846 pages; $29.95


    For nearly five decades, he artfully promoted himself as
America's chief guardian of law and order, ever on the alert to
foil public enemies and Soviet spies alike. In fact, J. (for
John, which he dropped in the '20s to avoid confusion with a
small-time crook of the same name) Edgar Hoover, the longtime
director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was normally
more engaged in battling his real enemies: anyone in Congress,
the White House, the Justice Department or other intelligence
agencies like the CIA who threatened his imperial sway over the
crime-busting organization he had molded into an extension of
his straitlaced, bureaucratic self.

    In this relentless but richly detailed biography, Curt
Gentry lauds Hoover for transforming the FBI from a haven for
corrupt political hacks into an efficient national police. But
during much of the director's extraordinary reign, from 1924
until his death in 1972, the bureau was virtually a law unto
itself. Intercepting mail, wiretapping, burglaries, break-ins:
the G-men insouciantly did them all, and usually without
authorization by the courts or Hoover's nominal boss, the
Attorney General. In peak years the FBI had as many as 1,000
bugs in place at any given time. Bureau agents illegally
listened to conversations between Alger Hiss and his attorneys
during the accused Soviet spy's second trial in 1949. When G-men
learned (via wiretaps, of course) that the leftish National
Lawyers Guild was preparing a report on the bureau's illegal
activities, agents burgled the guild's offices to steal copies
so the President and the Attorney General would be prepared to
counter the charges.

    For all the sub-rosa snooping, there were curious gaps in
the FBI's store of ill-gotten knowledge. Hoover for years had
loftily denied the existence of organized-crime families. As a
result, the FBI had virtually nothing on file about the dons who
were surprised by local police at a now famous Mafia summit in
Apalachin, N.Y., in 1957. Two weeks before John Kennedy's doomed
visit to Dallas in November 1963, FBI agents knew that Lee
Harvey Oswald had threatened to kill the President, but they
failed to notify the Secret Service. Hoover ordered documents
shredded and forced agents to perjure themselves to keep the
Warren Commission from discovering this shameful lapse.

    A key source of Hoover's power and longevity in office was
his private dossier of personal and official/confidential files
-- derogatory information, often unsubstantiated, about the
misdeeds and peccadilloes of celebrities and public officials.
The material in these folders, kept under lock and key, served
two purposes: 1) to amuse and titillate superiors whose favor
the director sought to curry and 2) to cow potential opponents
into silence and cooperation. Among the most feared and hated
men in Washington was the bureau's unofficial liaison officer
with Congress, whose task it was to inform a Senator, say,
whenever G-men unearthed a particularly useful piece of dirt
about the individual or his family. From then on, that Senator
was usually in Hoover's back pocket on votes affecting the
bureau.

    Hoover was unforgiving: once an enemy, always an enemy.
Perhaps his most loathed nemesis was "Wild Bill" Donovan,
wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA's
predecessor), who made the mistake of trying to take over the
FBI's domestic surveillance operations for his own shop. Long
after Donovan's death in 1959, Hoover continued to tell people,
falsely, that his old foe had succumbed to syphilis contracted
from prostitutes during World War II orgies. Eleanor Roosevelt
made Hoover's hate list for having accused him of trying to
build an American gestapo. In revenge, the director spread
rumors of her alleged love affairs with both men and women.
Hoover persuaded comedian W.C. Fields to give him a set of
obscene drawings of the President's wife, which he delighted in
showing friends.

    The son of a federal bureaucrat, Hoover had thought of
becoming a Presbyterian minister before he was hired by the
Justice Department as a clerk in July 1917. He so blatantly
cultivated an image of pious rectitude that one wit dubbed him
"that Virgin Mary in pants." In reality, Hoover was permanently
on the take: he decorated his home at government expense,
funneled royalties from his ghostwritten books into a private
slush fund, accepted free vacations in Florida and California
from toadying millionaires. Hoover had no qualms about using
gossip about clandestine homosexual encounters for blackmail.
Meanwhile, he was seen so often in the company of his deputy,
Clyde Tolson, that stories constantly circulated that the two
bachelors were lovers. (Gentry leaves unresolved the question
of Hoover's homosexuality and generally is better at describing
what the director did than at analyzing what made him tick.)

    "Hoover never trusted anyone he didn't have something on,"
an aide once said. In the end, Gentry argues, Hoover became
prisoner of the confidential files he had amassed to keep others
in thrall. Harry Truman and John Kennedy had wanted to fire
Hoover, but pressure on the director to step down reached a peak
during the Nixon era. Fearful that his enemies might succeed,
Hoover began going through the confidential folders to determine
which ones might prove damaging if they fell into the wrong
hands. He had barely reached the letter c when he gave up the
task as hopeless. After Hoover's death, his faithful secretary,
Helen Gandy, had the personal files secretly transferred to the
director's home. It took her 2 1/2 months to get rid of them
all. Destroying the files may have been illegal, Gentry writes,
but it was an honorable attempt to preserve Hoover's good name
and that of the bureau. Gandy knew the real secret of the files:
"nothing they contained was as derogatory as the very fact that
they existed."