G-Man, page 63
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Most people in government jobs—even high-level ones—did not, of course, have Hoover’s powerful lines of defense. Between April and November 1950, the height of the congressional investigations, 382 people were dismissed from federal employment due to allegations of homosexuality. At earlier moments, they might have found employment elsewhere in the government, but Hoover’s lists—along with the new civil service policies—helped to foreclose that option. For some, the shame of exposure, combined with the actual or potential loss of livelihood, proved too much to take. As the Lavender Scare accelerated, reports of suicide became another part of the Washington whisper chain, desperate acts undertaken by those who felt they had nowhere else to turn.[29]
At least one FBI agent committed suicide under questionable circumstances in 1950, shooting himself in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, at the YMCA, known in many cities as a gathering place for homosexual men. And it was not just mid-rank government employees who found their careers stunted or their lives snuffed out. Throughout the 1950s, figures of real stature around Washington—men who knew Hoover personally—began to crack under the pressure of the Lavender Scare. In one tragic incident, Washington police arrested Lester C. Hunt Jr., son of Wyoming senator Lester Hunt, for soliciting sex from a man in Lafayette Park. After his son’s humiliating trial, Senator Hunt withdrew his reelection bid, then shot himself in the head in his Senate office.[30]
When it came to the powerful and well connected, though, things often happened far more quietly. Over the course of the 1950s, Hoover learned of homosexual allegations against a host of influential men, including Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson, columnist Joseph Alsop, presidential appointee Arthur Vandenberg Jr., and Charles Bohlen, nominated as U.S. ambassador to Russia. He handled these in much the same way he had approached the Sumner Welles situation during the war: discreetly, and with due attention to political consequences.[31]
Even McCarthy ran into problems, a victim of the churning rumor mill that he himself had helped to set in motion. In 1952, the Bureau received a letter that seemed to come from an army lieutenant alleging that “Senator McCarthy had picked him up at the Wardman Park hotel, had taken him to his home and gotten him drunk, and had committed an act of sodomy on him,” according to Hoover’s summary. The letter alleged that this was standard practice for McCarthy: “He is a pervert—that is the real reason why he is still a bachelor.” Drawing on the latest psychological theories, the letter described McCarthy’s anti-homosexual posturing as a form of overcompensation, because as everyone knew, “the best way to avoid suspicion is to accuse somebody else.”[32]
McCarthy turned to Hoover in a panic, begging the FBI to investigate but to “be very circumspect” and “to be sure there is no possible leak.” Despite their past differences, Hoover promised to handle it all “very, very tightly at this end,” and to do what he could to track down the rumor. He kept his promise, restricting knowledge of the inquiry to a handful of top Bureau and Justice officials. “In view of the seriousness of the charges and the delicacy of the matter,” Hoover “thought it was imperative that no steps be taken that might lend the possibility of this becoming known to the press before the investigation was completed,” as he explained to the attorney general.[33]
The investigation itself proved to be a painful and awkward affair, requiring FBI agents to interview not only the lieutenant but also several of his friends about the details of their sexual activities. The lieutenant readily admitted to being “a queer” but denied ever sending any sort of letter about McCarthy, pleading with the agents not to bring his sexual history “into the light.” In the end, he agreed to sign a statement declaring that “at no time has Senator Joseph McCarthy . . . approached me at a Bar, or any place, struck up a conversation, invited me to a home, or any place, for purposes of committing an immoral act.” Hoover reported back that the original letter was “entirely a fake,” conjured up by a handful of the lieutenant’s friends as retribution against McCarthy.[34]
But the rumor mill was not yet done spinning. In October 1952, more than two and a half years after McCarthy first raised the issue of homosexuals in the State Department, a Las Vegas columnist alleged that the senator and a Milwaukee County Young Republican had engaged in “illicit acts with each other,” concluding that McCarthy was “the most immoral, indecent and unprincipled scoundrel to ever sit in the United States Senate.” Hoover once again did what he could to keep things quiet, deciding not to disseminate the information.[35]
Hoover’s willingness to act on McCarthy’s behalf indicates he may have sympathized with the senator’s plight. He also may have been thinking about the 1952 elections, and what they were likely to mean for his future in Washington. Less than two weeks after the Las Vegas exposé, Wisconsin voters reelected McCarthy to a second term in the Senate, part of a landslide election that put the Republican Party in control of Congress and the White House for the first time in two decades.
Chapter 35
A Glorious Year
(1953)
Hoover (center, seated at table) testifying before allies at the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, November 1953. He is accompanied by Tolson (left) and Louis Nichols (right), the architect of FBI public relations.
United Press/National Archives and Records Administration
Truth be told, Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was not much of a Republican. Like Hoover, he made his name as a nonpartisan public servant—the chief architect of D-Day and supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. Raised in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower had spent nearly his entire adult life in the army, the embodiment of a generation that encountered combat during the Great War and lived to see the peace fall apart. Before World War II catapulted him to fame, he worked in procurement and other glorified administrative positions. He had no experience in electoral politics. Indeed, he had often refused to say whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. That was part of what people liked about him. He had a big smile, a trim frame, and the open but weathered face of a genial Midwestern farmer. At the 1952 Republican convention, he bested the arch-conservative insider, Senator Robert Taft, as the candidate of competence and moderation. In the general election, he trounced the brainy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, taking nearly every state outside the South. After his victory, he assured party elders that he really was their man by vowing to cast out Truman’s old guard and bring a new slate of Republican appointees into power.
Presidential transitions had always been tricky for Hoover. Though appointed under a Republican president, he had now spent two decades working in Democratic administrations. Despite his bipartisan popularity, anyone who wanted to get rid of him would have been able to cite a host of errors, failings, and uncomfortable rumors. Eisenhower was not worried. If anything, he viewed the election as a chance to give Hoover the sort of support the FBI had lacked under the Truman administration. During the immediate postwar months, Eisenhower had sympathized with Hoover in his struggle to gain control of global intelligence. Since then, they had rarely interacted, but they continued to share roughly the same friends and enemies. “There had come to my ears a story to the effect that J. Edgar Hoover . . . had been out of favor in Washington,” Eisenhower later wrote of his mindset in 1952. “Such was my respect for him that I invited him to a meeting, my only purpose being to assure him that I wanted him in government as long as I might be there and that in the performance of his duties he would have the complete support of my office.” In a year when Republicans were determined to clean house, Hoover proved to be the great exception. “Midst inaugural comings and goings, power changes and talk of economy axes poised for a swing,” a Detroit writer observed, “one Washington official—FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—walked unconcernedly.”[1]
Thus began one of the most rewarding and successful periods of Hoover’s life. If 1919 had been the year that set his career in motion, 1953 became the year it all came together, with Hoover’s social, political, and institutional interests unusually well aligned. For a brief moment, the persistent tensions between his professional, good-government, and nonpartisan leanings on the one hand, and his worldview as a conservative on the other, seemed to resolve without much difficulty. In 1953, Hoover’s people came to power. He relished the experience.
Take what happened in Congress. Though the election displaced his ally Pat McCarran from the chairmanship of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, it re-empowered many of the influential Republicans Hoover had courted back in 1946 and 1947, when he first ran into problems with Truman. At HUAC, former FBI agent Harold Velde became the new chair. And the committee itself, once a congressional pariah, now possessed real cachet. All but a few dozen of the Republican House members requested to be assigned to its ranks. Even Eisenhower seemed to have been drawn in. He chose his vice president, Richard Nixon, out of the committee’s early leadership ranks.[2]
From Hoover’s perspective, these developments showed Washington at its best, run by men who admired his methods and ideas. Eisenhower had campaigned on a promise not just to get rid of the Democrats, but to take action on the communist issue—indeed, to claim it for the Republicans. In order to do that, he needed Hoover. From his first months in office, Eisenhower championed Hoover as a symbol of the new Republican administration: responsible but aggressive, restrained but action-oriented, especially where communism was concerned. He also helped Hoover get a taste of revenge against Truman, who had so often resisted the FBI’s claims and methods. In Republican Washington, Hoover was the quintessential insider, trusted in the highest offices and empowered to do what he wanted to do.
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If Eisenhower had never been much of a Republican, he also had never been much of a Christian, preferring quiet prayer and personal introspection to anything as showy as going to church. That changed once he entered the realm of electoral politics. When he arrived in Washington in January, seeking a church that would reflect this sensibility, Eisenhower turned to Edward Elson, Hoover’s longtime confidant and personal minister. In order to provide a model of piety for a troubled nation, Eisenhower planned to join Elson’s congregation, thus making it “the church of the Eisenhower administration,” in the words of one Washington paper. On Inauguration Day, Eisenhower gathered his cabinet and innermost confidants, along with their families, for a morning ceremony of prayer and blessing at National Presbyterian. Newspapers estimated the full entourage at 180 men, women, and children, including Nixon, his wife, Patricia, and their two little girls. Elson presided over the service, welcoming the city’s Republican elite to his parish. He asked the Lord to bless Eisenhower with “health of body, serenity of soul, clarity of insight, soundness of judgment.”
The rest of the day attempted to preserve this mood of reverence, the most overtly pious inaugural in the city’s memory. After taking the oath of office on the Capitol steps, Eisenhower began his presidency by offering a plea to “Almighty God,” hastily scribbled out that morning after his return from National Presbyterian. His “little prayer,” as it came to be known, implicitly acknowledged the moment’s partisan shift, calling upon “all the people, regardless of station, race, or calling” to join in common purpose despite “differing political faiths.” Hoover had long shared Eisenhower’s belief that the law of God and the law of man should be made one. Now he thrilled to the idea of a Republican president willing to promote these values to the public at large. “This humble prayer touched Americans from coast to coast,” he later wrote. “A President with such a deep religious sense and with such a sincere spiritual motivation, seeking to be guided by the right, sets an example for all the people.”[3]
Eisenhower’s religious example continued as the pomp and pageantry of the inauguration gave way to the routine work of governance. He quickly announced plans to join National Presbyterian as a full-time congregant, the first time that anyone could remember a president actually becoming a member of a local church. In Eisenhower’s case, joining the church required special effort, since he had never been baptized. On February 1, Elson performed the baptismal rites in a private ceremony. He concluded from this experience that Eisenhower “is a man of simple faith, who is sincere in his religious doctrine.”[4]
But the president’s membership at National Presbyterian was also inescapably political, intended to signal the values of the new Republican order. On the evening of his baptism, he appeared on Back to God, a half-hour television spectacle sponsored by the American Legion. A few days later, he participated in a National Prayer Breakfast, the first of its kind, to discuss the challenges of “Government under God.” From that point on, Eisenhower insisted that all cabinet meetings open with prayer. Hoover had already been engaging in similar rituals for years, from his partnership with the Legion to the communion breakfasts for FBI agents, who now saw in the Eisenhower administration a reflection of the religious ideals he had long promoted.
From National Presbyterian, the Rev. Elson affirmed the importance of these rituals for America’s Spiritual Recovery, the title of a book he published in 1954. In contrast to the dens of homosexuality, prostitution, and gambling publicized in Washington Confidential, Elson described the nation’s capital as “one of the most religious cities in all the world,” home to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Crusade, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the FBI National Academy. “This is the real Washington,” he insisted. “This is my Washington—the symbol of America’s great spiritual renaissance.” During his first summer in office, as if to demonstrate Elson’s claims, Eisenhower convened his cabinet to sign a document declaring that the United States drew its strength and vitality from the Bible. The following year, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and put “In God We Trust” on the nation’s postal stamps (and, later, its paper currency).
Lest anyone fail to give credit where credit was due, Elson dedicated his book to Eisenhower, “who by personal example and public utterance is giving testimony to the reality of America’s spiritual foundations.” Elson also included an introduction by Hoover, sealing their public partnership as minister and parishioner, both loyal to the new president. Like Elson, Hoover mourned the “devastating effects” of “Secularism” but took heart in the country’s “spiritual recovery,” as more and more Americans began to attend church. “There are hopeful signs for a better day,” Hoover wrote, thanks in no small part to a president with “a deep religious sense” and a desire to serve as a living “example for all the people.”[5]
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Hoover saw another hopeful sign in Eisenhower’s choice of vice president. When Eisenhower accepted the nomination in 1952, it was as the candidate of mild centrism. Supporters urged him to balance the ticket with someone who appealed to the party’s conservatives. Hence the choice of Richard Nixon, who had the added benefit of hailing from the populous state of California. An awkward physical specimen, his motions jerky and his suits too large, Nixon was not nearly as likable as Ike. But he had other useful qualities, including a willingness to get down in the political trenches while Eisenhower stood apart. Hoover found Nixon useful, too—not only as a fellow anticommunist but as a political loyalist willing to do battle on behalf of the Bureau.
Nixon had once wanted to be an FBI agent. Back in 1937, at the peak of the G-Man craze, he sent in an application listing his qualifications for the job. And as Hoover admitted, he was qualified. Nixon had played football in college (always a bonus at the Bureau). He’d also known how to please his law professors and deans. The FBI agents who interviewed him had come away impressed, declaring Nixon a “tactful,” “self-confident,” and “well-poised” fellow, “manly appearing” and “possessing [the] good physique” expected of all FBI recruits. Hoover submitted a recommendation to hire him. A few weeks later, however, a note in Nixon’s file declared him “not qualified,” and Tolson canceled the appointment. Hoover later hinted that Nixon had short-circuited the process in order to get started on his law career, but Nixon said he had simply never heard back.[6]
In any case, “the FBI’s loss ultimately became the country’s gain,” as Hoover joked to a group of academy graduates. It eventually became the FBI’s gain as well. Elected to Congress in the Republican sweep of 1946, Nixon had landed on HUAC just as it was starting its liaison relationship with the Bureau. His first speech in Congress, delivered in February 1947, denounced the Communist Party as a “foreign-directed conspiracy” and included long quotes from “a report by J. Edgar Hoover.” For one of his first legislative initiatives, Nixon proposed a law that would require Communist Party members and front groups to register with the federal government.[7]
Far more than any other HUAC member, it was Nixon who had pushed the Hiss/Chambers confrontation forward, often (though not always) with the cooperation of the FBI. Hoover had been chagrined when Nixon, not the FBI, revealed the Pumpkin Papers. But the two men agreed all along that Chambers was the truth teller and Hiss the liar. As the case moved from Congress into the courts, Nixon attempted to mollify Hoover through acts of public tribute. During the Coplon affair, he took up Hoover’s cause as his own, expressing outrage at the attorney general’s decision to move forward with the trial over the FBI’s wishes. As the controversy continued, he authored a resolution in recognition of Hoover’s twenty-fifth anniversary as director, urging the Judiciary Committee to declare “its complete confidence” in Hoover as well as its “appreciation” for the “unselfish public service” performed over the course of two and a half decades. When Hiss’s perjury conviction came down in early 1950, Nixon took to the House floor for a stem-winder outlining the hidden “lesson for the American people.” He accused the Truman administration of ignoring early warnings from the FBI, brandishing a 1945 memo from Hoover to Truman that outlined a growing suspicion about Hiss. Future administrations, Nixon argued, “must give complete and unqualified support to the FBI, and to J. Edgar Hoover, its chief,” lest they fall prey to the same blind spots and weaknesses.[8]
