G-Man, page 71
Among the evidence that Hoover shared with the cabinet that day, hoping to persuade them of the party’s continuing strength, was the incredible tale of a “CPUSA representative” who had recently returned from a secret odyssey to Moscow. According to Hoover’s account, which was enhanced by “top secret” drawings illustrating each stage of the journey, the man flew from New York to Moscow and then on to Beijing in a daring attempt to restore relations between the American party and its powerful counterparts abroad. In Moscow the American met with “top-ranking” members of the presidium, as well as with the head of the Soviet party’s international department. From there, he flew to China, where he spent two weeks in conversation with the “highest-ranking Chinese officials,” including no less a personage than the revolutionary turned dictator Mao Tse-tung.[20]
The dramatic story drove home one of Hoover’s central points: though the American party might look weak, it was busy preparing for a resurgence, aided and abetted by global communism’s two Great Powers. But Hoover never mentioned an aspect of events that might have cast serious doubt on that thesis. The “CPUSA Representative,” recently designated as international liaison between the American party and its friends in Moscow, was actually a Bureau informant, the central figure in a high-stakes espionage effort known as Operation SOLO.
The opportunity for SOLO, like the impetus for COINTELPRO, emerged from the confusion sparked by Khrushchev’s speech. In late 1956, with the American party in free fall and desperate for funds, party leadership decided that the time had come to revisit its methods of communicating with the Soviet Union. During the 1930s and early 1940s, communication had been relatively easy, with party members regularly traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Russia. With the dawn of the Cold War, however, travel had become far more restricted, especially for open party members. By 1956, the American party had resorted to communicating with the Soviets through a former acolyte who accepted deportation to Scotland after his Smith Act conviction, an arrangement that neither side found satisfactory. Into this void came talk of designating a new go-between, someone who could be trusted with Soviet money as well as Soviet instructions, thus shoring up the American party in its time of need. In early 1957, Hoover put out a call for the field offices to “capitalize on this situation” by identifying informants “who could be developed as a courier between the Communist Party, USA, (CP, USA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).” He deemed the project “of extreme importance,” the best chance since Venona “not only to determine the degree and type of control the Soviet Union exercises over the CP, USA, but to develop admissible evidence proving such control.”[21]
The man chosen for the mission was Morris Childs, an ailing but resilient fifty-six-year-old Chicago informant. Born near Kiev and brought to the U.S. as a child, he had converted early to communism, a charter member of the party during the wilderness years of the 1920s. In 1929, he left the United States to attend the Lenin School in Moscow, mastering a curriculum that ranged from guerrilla warfare and sabotage to the intricacies of Marxist theory. Upon his return, Childs worked for the party in Chicago, even running for Senate as the communist candidate from Illinois. In 1945, during the great shake-up following the war, he became editor of the Daily Worker, among the most influential posts in the communist pantheon. Two years later, he fell ill with heart problems and found himself pushed out of his editorial post. This accident of timing insulated him from the worst of McCarthyism but soured him on his comrades.
His younger brother, Jack, first agreed to inform for the FBI, upset at how the party had treated Morris. In 1952, under a program known as TOPLEV (short for “top-level” officials), the FBI encouraged Jack to recruit Morris, too. After a few exploratory meetings, Jack reported back that Morris was indeed “in a suitable frame of mind which would make him receptive to a contact by Bureau agents.” Hoover wasted no time in exploiting the opportunity. During his initial interviews with Bureau agents, Morris hinted that “he had information of a broader scope and of better quality” than even the redoubtable Whittaker Chambers. Based on this promise, Hoover authorized a starting salary of a hundred dollars per week. He also approved plans to send Morris to the Mayo Clinic at the FBI’s expense. The FBI hoped that proper treatment for Morris’s heart disease would allow him to reactivate as a party member—now on the FBI payroll.[22]
One of Hoover’s main interests at the time was the COMFUGs, Bureau shorthand for the “communist fugitives” who had fled underground in the face of Smith Act prosecutions. As CG-5824-S, his informant designation, Childs provided clues about no fewer than 350 “key individuals,” making him “the personification of the Bureau’s long-range informant development program.” Along with his brother, Morris also proved invaluable in helping the Bureau to understand the secret financial networks supporting the party, with their confounding array of front businesses and clandestine arrangements. By the time the opening for a Soviet courier came along, Morris was one of the most prolific and dependable of Hoover’s high-ranking informants. It made sense to try to maneuver him into the position.[23]
The plan worked spectacularly well. In early 1958, the Soviets invited Morris to Moscow as the newly recognized international representative of the American party. Anxious to see the trip come off smoothly, FBI agents intervened with the State Department to acquire a passport. FBI officials also agreed to pay their informant’s Chicago bills while he was abroad. In April, he set off for Moscow with instructions from Hoover to be on the alert for any evidence that the USSR “directs and controls” the American Communist Party. He returned three months later with the incredible tales that Hoover would ultimately convey to the cabinet, including descriptions of audiences with the Soviet party elite in Moscow and the detour to China to meet with Mao Tse-tung.[24]
Hoover received the accounts of Childs’s adventures in seventeen separate debriefing documents, compiled after interviews that ran up to eleven hours per day. Much of it he shared through “prompt dissemination” to Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and a select group of other high-ranking administration figures. As with Venona, he did not disclose the nature or identity of his source. Hoover himself was less interested in diplomatic intelligence than in what Childs revealed about the domestic party. At the November cabinet meeting, he revealed that Moscow would be sending two hundred thousand dollars to the American party in an attempt to stabilize its finances and hold on to remaining members. As a down payment, Childs received a shipment of seventeen thousand dollars in cash not long after his return. He passed it along to the FBI to be photographed and documented before handing it over to party leaders.[25]
Over the next decade and a half, Childs would undertake fifty-one more missions through SOLO, traveling not only to the Soviet Union and China but also throughout Latin America and Asia, where he met with a panoply of famous revolutionaries. His brother, Jack, would take over the financial side of the courier operation, helping to smuggle some $28 million from Moscow into the United States, incontrovertible evidence of Russian influence on the American party. Jack’s reports, like those of his brother, told amazing but true tales: of a personal meeting with Fidel Castro in Cuba, of clandestine rendezvous with Soviet contacts in the New York subway system, of a “secret service school” operated from private apartments in Moscow, where he was trained in the use of microfilm, invisible ink, codes, and ciphers. But none quite recaptured the excitement of that first trip, when Hoover realized what an “outstanding” coup his men had pulled off. In thanks, he sent a letter to Morris and his wife, instructing that his note be placed in an FBI safe once it had been shown to the informants. He also approved a thousand-dollar bonus, the first of many to come.[26]
* * *
—
Of everything Hoover had done since 1919 in the name of fighting communism, COINTELPRO and SOLO ranked among the most significant. Their impact would extend into the 1960s, when they would influence—and distort—politics at a variety of levels, from the manipulation of grassroots activists to the provision of intelligence for high-stakes geopolitical decision-making. But those programs were secret, their existence known to only a handful of men and women. They could not, therefore, do what Hoover had long argued would be crucial to the success of his anticommunist fight: mobilize public opinion to reject communism as an evil, illegitimate, and godless force. For that, Hoover developed the FBI’s third major anticommunist initiative of the post-McCarthy era.
In March 1958, he published Masters of Deceit, a book-length distillation of everything he had learned over the past four decades about “Communism in America and How to Fight It,” in the words of the book’s subtitle. At Crime Records, Sullivan helped to write the book, drawing upon much of the information he had gathered for his secret background memo early in COINTELPRO. Though Hoover did not write the words on the page, there can be no question that the book, like so much of what came out of Crime Records, reflected his concerns and worldview. Masters of Deceit repeated many of his familiar bromides. Communists were “evil” and “anti-God,” out to dupe the public through “shabby, deceitful phrases.” It also emphasized Hoover’s message about the perils of apathy. “The present menace of the Communist Party in the United States grows in direct ratio to the rising feeling that it is a small, dissident element and need not be feared,” the book maintained, articulating the same worry that Hoover had pressed on the cabinet. Though produced in full public view, Masters of Deceit was itself a counterintelligence operation of sorts, aimed at discrediting the party. “We cannot afford the luxury of waiting for communism to run its course like other oppressive dictatorships,” the book warned the American people. The language was almost identical to what Hoover told his own agents working on COINTELPRO.[27]
At Henry Holt publishers, Masters of Deceit was all but guaranteed an enthusiastic reception because Clint Murchison, Hoover’s oilman patron from La Jolla, happened to own the company. As the publication date approached, Hoover made a point of sending advance copies to anyone who mattered within the Eisenhower administration, including Allen Dulles and the new attorney general, William Rogers, who replaced Brownell in late 1957. He also sent it along to friends outside Washington, many of whom were quick to offer promotional support. After testifying at the Smith Act trial, informant Herbert Philbrick had published his own anticommunist tell-all, I Led Three Lives, subsequently made into a dramatic television series. In 1958, he threw his celebrity behind Masters of Deceit, appearing on a local Boston station to recommend the book to area readers. Boston archbishop Richard Cushing went even further, declaring the book “the classic text book pertaining to Communism” and helping to distribute some two thousand copies. The ACLU’s Morris Ernst came through with a cover spot in the respectably bookish Saturday Review, while Kappa Alpha ordered up a laudatory feature in its national fraternity journal. The American Legion, still Hoover’s number-one institutional admirer, bought copies for every member of its press association.[28]
The FBI itself gave the book its greatest push, mobilizing agents to extoll its virtues and hand out copies. Each field office was expected to contact local bookstores, along with the local press, on matters of publicity and sales. Those who did the best received bonuses and raises. On one occasion, Sullivan traveled to Ohio to speak before the Citizens’ Committee of Cincinnati, a grassroots group invented by the local field office to impress Hoover. Sullivan arrived to find a fleet of trucks packed with copies of Masters of Deceit, with a free book promised to anyone who showed up for the event. “Needless to say,” he later wrote, the reviews produced through these methods tended to be “excellent.”[29]
Press coverage by those less firmly bound to Hoover proved somewhat more mixed. Newspapers across the country syndicated Masters of Deceit as an article series, accepting his publisher’s offer of direct access to “The Book J. Edgar Hoover Had to Write.” Other publications, especially those on the left, tended to view the book’s arrival with more skepticism, less a matter of historic urgency than an attempt to renew public hysteria over an issue better laid to rest. Writing in the New York Post, one critic described Masters of Deceit as merely the latest twist on a “self-manufactured myth.” The author dismissed Hoover as a mental lightweight, “intellectually ill-prepared” to comprehend the nuances of the communist struggle.[30]
Equally harsh criticism came from investigative journalist Fred Cook, who accused Hoover of “fanning the embers of McCarthyism” while trying to pose as a disinterested expert. Cook followed up his review with a sixty-page investigation for The Nation magazine. While the article critiqued nearly every phase of Hoover’s career, it reserved special ire for his “grandiose magnification of the subversive menace.” Cook found Hoover’s demagoguery and repressive policies far more dangerous than the actions of a few thousand party members.[31]
The harsh words of his would-be judges had little effect on the book’s sales. Masters of Deceit entered the New York Times bestseller list at No. 5 and quickly jumped to the No. 1 spot, where it stayed for six weeks. Over the next several years, the book sold more than two million paperback copies, in addition to 250,000 hardcover sales. Hoover allegedly distributed more than half of the profits to himself, Tolson, and Nichols, though the book was written by his taxpayer-funded staff. He also earned something else of inestimable value. At a moment when McCarthy’s death might have signaled the end of anticommunism as a national preoccupation, Hoover managed to keep it front and center.[32]
* * *
—
The success of Masters of Deceit only enhanced Hoover’s reputation in Washington, especially among Republicans who had promoted him as the responsible alternative to McCarthy. Eisenhower found no more awards to dole out, but he expressed his appreciation for Hoover in other ways. There were private notes of support and camaraderie. And there were invitations to exclusive White House events. In September 1959, in one of the strangest-bedfellow occasions of his presidency, Eisenhower invited Hoover to a white-tie state dinner with none other than Khrushchev, the first Soviet premier to set foot on American soil. The official dinner speeches heralded a new era of peace and cooperation in U.S.-Russian relations, but Hoover’s presence signaled something else: a fixed enmity now forty years in the making, flexible in its contours and methods but unchanging in its essential principles.[33]
In the same week as the Khrushchev dinner, the film version of The FBI Story premiered at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Hoover had already seen the film, breaking down in tears after the private screening in Washington, when he told film director Mervyn LeRoy it was “one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever seen.” Former Crime Records chief Lou Nichols, now a private citizen, went to see it as an anonymous member of the New York public, contacting Hoover that same evening to say that the film looked “great,” at once an “institutional picture” and a personal tribute to the FBI’s “guiding genius.”[34]
If Hoover had been a different man, such a moment might have inspired thoughts of retirement, of laying down the burdens that he had assumed thirty-five years earlier, when he first accepted Harlan Stone’s challenge to reenvision the Bureau. But Hoover could not quite believe that the institution he had forged in his own likeness, and that he had mobilized in the service of his own ideology, could carry on without him.
Part IV
The War at Home
(1960–1972)
Preface
The glory of the 1950s had been the way the pieces all came together. During his first two decades as director, Hoover had focused on building the FBI: acquiring and adjusting to new duties, pleasing his superiors, hiring the right men, and setting the right policies in place. With the end of World War II, he had begun to forge a new path, using the Bureau’s growing power to promote and enforce his anticommunist vision. In 1945, few Americans had been focused on communism as their top concern. A decade later, they were thinking of little else—and when they thought of communists, they often thought of Hoover. Conservatives cheered his blistering language and willingness to use state power in support of the “American way of life.” Liberals appreciated his restraint and words of caution, relieved to have an alternative to Joe McCarthy. Despite the occasional outcry, his effort to turn the FBI into the nation’s “one bulwark” against subversion had made him popular, in Washington as throughout the country.
That balance collapsed in the 1960s, as the issue of communism began to fade and other, more divisive matters took center stage. First among them were race and civil rights, areas in which Hoover had never been able to reconcile his personal views and professional obligations. Unlike communism, civil rights divided the country, and Hoover found himself caught in the middle. He tried to offer just enough to keep each side satisfied while pursuing his own agenda, just as he had during the Red Scare. But the trick did not quite work this time. As during the 1940s and 1950s, he mounted campaigns against the most extreme elements of the segregationist South, especially the Ku Klux Klan. Those efforts were far outstripped, however, by his surveillance, harassment, and intimidation of civil rights leaders and activists. Over the course of the 1960s, he departed more and more from his vision of the FBI as a professional, apolitical institution and a bastion of upright, objective Government Men. The contradictions that he had negotiated for so long—between liberalism and conservatism, between his faith in apolitical governance and his commitment to an ideological cause—finally collapsed in on themselves. So did the American consensus that had once sustained him.
Electoral politics played a role in this shift. Hoover turned sixty-five on January 1, 1960, entering the new decade as an elder statesman, out of sync with the new generation’s youthful energies. Had things gone another way, he might have been forced to step down a few years later, at the mandatory federal retirement age of seventy. He was saved from this fate by two friends who happened to end up in the White House. The first was Lyndon Johnson, Hoover’s longtime neighbor on Thirtieth Place. The second was Richard Nixon, his old ally in the anticommunist cause. With their help, the FBI continued to expand into new areas—most notably, civil rights and organized crime. But some of Hoover’s biggest challenges came in figuring out when to cooperate with his friends in the White House and when to resist.
The dramatic story drove home one of Hoover’s central points: though the American party might look weak, it was busy preparing for a resurgence, aided and abetted by global communism’s two Great Powers. But Hoover never mentioned an aspect of events that might have cast serious doubt on that thesis. The “CPUSA Representative,” recently designated as international liaison between the American party and its friends in Moscow, was actually a Bureau informant, the central figure in a high-stakes espionage effort known as Operation SOLO.
The opportunity for SOLO, like the impetus for COINTELPRO, emerged from the confusion sparked by Khrushchev’s speech. In late 1956, with the American party in free fall and desperate for funds, party leadership decided that the time had come to revisit its methods of communicating with the Soviet Union. During the 1930s and early 1940s, communication had been relatively easy, with party members regularly traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Russia. With the dawn of the Cold War, however, travel had become far more restricted, especially for open party members. By 1956, the American party had resorted to communicating with the Soviets through a former acolyte who accepted deportation to Scotland after his Smith Act conviction, an arrangement that neither side found satisfactory. Into this void came talk of designating a new go-between, someone who could be trusted with Soviet money as well as Soviet instructions, thus shoring up the American party in its time of need. In early 1957, Hoover put out a call for the field offices to “capitalize on this situation” by identifying informants “who could be developed as a courier between the Communist Party, USA, (CP, USA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).” He deemed the project “of extreme importance,” the best chance since Venona “not only to determine the degree and type of control the Soviet Union exercises over the CP, USA, but to develop admissible evidence proving such control.”[21]
The man chosen for the mission was Morris Childs, an ailing but resilient fifty-six-year-old Chicago informant. Born near Kiev and brought to the U.S. as a child, he had converted early to communism, a charter member of the party during the wilderness years of the 1920s. In 1929, he left the United States to attend the Lenin School in Moscow, mastering a curriculum that ranged from guerrilla warfare and sabotage to the intricacies of Marxist theory. Upon his return, Childs worked for the party in Chicago, even running for Senate as the communist candidate from Illinois. In 1945, during the great shake-up following the war, he became editor of the Daily Worker, among the most influential posts in the communist pantheon. Two years later, he fell ill with heart problems and found himself pushed out of his editorial post. This accident of timing insulated him from the worst of McCarthyism but soured him on his comrades.
His younger brother, Jack, first agreed to inform for the FBI, upset at how the party had treated Morris. In 1952, under a program known as TOPLEV (short for “top-level” officials), the FBI encouraged Jack to recruit Morris, too. After a few exploratory meetings, Jack reported back that Morris was indeed “in a suitable frame of mind which would make him receptive to a contact by Bureau agents.” Hoover wasted no time in exploiting the opportunity. During his initial interviews with Bureau agents, Morris hinted that “he had information of a broader scope and of better quality” than even the redoubtable Whittaker Chambers. Based on this promise, Hoover authorized a starting salary of a hundred dollars per week. He also approved plans to send Morris to the Mayo Clinic at the FBI’s expense. The FBI hoped that proper treatment for Morris’s heart disease would allow him to reactivate as a party member—now on the FBI payroll.[22]
One of Hoover’s main interests at the time was the COMFUGs, Bureau shorthand for the “communist fugitives” who had fled underground in the face of Smith Act prosecutions. As CG-5824-S, his informant designation, Childs provided clues about no fewer than 350 “key individuals,” making him “the personification of the Bureau’s long-range informant development program.” Along with his brother, Morris also proved invaluable in helping the Bureau to understand the secret financial networks supporting the party, with their confounding array of front businesses and clandestine arrangements. By the time the opening for a Soviet courier came along, Morris was one of the most prolific and dependable of Hoover’s high-ranking informants. It made sense to try to maneuver him into the position.[23]
The plan worked spectacularly well. In early 1958, the Soviets invited Morris to Moscow as the newly recognized international representative of the American party. Anxious to see the trip come off smoothly, FBI agents intervened with the State Department to acquire a passport. FBI officials also agreed to pay their informant’s Chicago bills while he was abroad. In April, he set off for Moscow with instructions from Hoover to be on the alert for any evidence that the USSR “directs and controls” the American Communist Party. He returned three months later with the incredible tales that Hoover would ultimately convey to the cabinet, including descriptions of audiences with the Soviet party elite in Moscow and the detour to China to meet with Mao Tse-tung.[24]
Hoover received the accounts of Childs’s adventures in seventeen separate debriefing documents, compiled after interviews that ran up to eleven hours per day. Much of it he shared through “prompt dissemination” to Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and a select group of other high-ranking administration figures. As with Venona, he did not disclose the nature or identity of his source. Hoover himself was less interested in diplomatic intelligence than in what Childs revealed about the domestic party. At the November cabinet meeting, he revealed that Moscow would be sending two hundred thousand dollars to the American party in an attempt to stabilize its finances and hold on to remaining members. As a down payment, Childs received a shipment of seventeen thousand dollars in cash not long after his return. He passed it along to the FBI to be photographed and documented before handing it over to party leaders.[25]
Over the next decade and a half, Childs would undertake fifty-one more missions through SOLO, traveling not only to the Soviet Union and China but also throughout Latin America and Asia, where he met with a panoply of famous revolutionaries. His brother, Jack, would take over the financial side of the courier operation, helping to smuggle some $28 million from Moscow into the United States, incontrovertible evidence of Russian influence on the American party. Jack’s reports, like those of his brother, told amazing but true tales: of a personal meeting with Fidel Castro in Cuba, of clandestine rendezvous with Soviet contacts in the New York subway system, of a “secret service school” operated from private apartments in Moscow, where he was trained in the use of microfilm, invisible ink, codes, and ciphers. But none quite recaptured the excitement of that first trip, when Hoover realized what an “outstanding” coup his men had pulled off. In thanks, he sent a letter to Morris and his wife, instructing that his note be placed in an FBI safe once it had been shown to the informants. He also approved a thousand-dollar bonus, the first of many to come.[26]
* * *
—
Of everything Hoover had done since 1919 in the name of fighting communism, COINTELPRO and SOLO ranked among the most significant. Their impact would extend into the 1960s, when they would influence—and distort—politics at a variety of levels, from the manipulation of grassroots activists to the provision of intelligence for high-stakes geopolitical decision-making. But those programs were secret, their existence known to only a handful of men and women. They could not, therefore, do what Hoover had long argued would be crucial to the success of his anticommunist fight: mobilize public opinion to reject communism as an evil, illegitimate, and godless force. For that, Hoover developed the FBI’s third major anticommunist initiative of the post-McCarthy era.
In March 1958, he published Masters of Deceit, a book-length distillation of everything he had learned over the past four decades about “Communism in America and How to Fight It,” in the words of the book’s subtitle. At Crime Records, Sullivan helped to write the book, drawing upon much of the information he had gathered for his secret background memo early in COINTELPRO. Though Hoover did not write the words on the page, there can be no question that the book, like so much of what came out of Crime Records, reflected his concerns and worldview. Masters of Deceit repeated many of his familiar bromides. Communists were “evil” and “anti-God,” out to dupe the public through “shabby, deceitful phrases.” It also emphasized Hoover’s message about the perils of apathy. “The present menace of the Communist Party in the United States grows in direct ratio to the rising feeling that it is a small, dissident element and need not be feared,” the book maintained, articulating the same worry that Hoover had pressed on the cabinet. Though produced in full public view, Masters of Deceit was itself a counterintelligence operation of sorts, aimed at discrediting the party. “We cannot afford the luxury of waiting for communism to run its course like other oppressive dictatorships,” the book warned the American people. The language was almost identical to what Hoover told his own agents working on COINTELPRO.[27]
At Henry Holt publishers, Masters of Deceit was all but guaranteed an enthusiastic reception because Clint Murchison, Hoover’s oilman patron from La Jolla, happened to own the company. As the publication date approached, Hoover made a point of sending advance copies to anyone who mattered within the Eisenhower administration, including Allen Dulles and the new attorney general, William Rogers, who replaced Brownell in late 1957. He also sent it along to friends outside Washington, many of whom were quick to offer promotional support. After testifying at the Smith Act trial, informant Herbert Philbrick had published his own anticommunist tell-all, I Led Three Lives, subsequently made into a dramatic television series. In 1958, he threw his celebrity behind Masters of Deceit, appearing on a local Boston station to recommend the book to area readers. Boston archbishop Richard Cushing went even further, declaring the book “the classic text book pertaining to Communism” and helping to distribute some two thousand copies. The ACLU’s Morris Ernst came through with a cover spot in the respectably bookish Saturday Review, while Kappa Alpha ordered up a laudatory feature in its national fraternity journal. The American Legion, still Hoover’s number-one institutional admirer, bought copies for every member of its press association.[28]
The FBI itself gave the book its greatest push, mobilizing agents to extoll its virtues and hand out copies. Each field office was expected to contact local bookstores, along with the local press, on matters of publicity and sales. Those who did the best received bonuses and raises. On one occasion, Sullivan traveled to Ohio to speak before the Citizens’ Committee of Cincinnati, a grassroots group invented by the local field office to impress Hoover. Sullivan arrived to find a fleet of trucks packed with copies of Masters of Deceit, with a free book promised to anyone who showed up for the event. “Needless to say,” he later wrote, the reviews produced through these methods tended to be “excellent.”[29]
Press coverage by those less firmly bound to Hoover proved somewhat more mixed. Newspapers across the country syndicated Masters of Deceit as an article series, accepting his publisher’s offer of direct access to “The Book J. Edgar Hoover Had to Write.” Other publications, especially those on the left, tended to view the book’s arrival with more skepticism, less a matter of historic urgency than an attempt to renew public hysteria over an issue better laid to rest. Writing in the New York Post, one critic described Masters of Deceit as merely the latest twist on a “self-manufactured myth.” The author dismissed Hoover as a mental lightweight, “intellectually ill-prepared” to comprehend the nuances of the communist struggle.[30]
Equally harsh criticism came from investigative journalist Fred Cook, who accused Hoover of “fanning the embers of McCarthyism” while trying to pose as a disinterested expert. Cook followed up his review with a sixty-page investigation for The Nation magazine. While the article critiqued nearly every phase of Hoover’s career, it reserved special ire for his “grandiose magnification of the subversive menace.” Cook found Hoover’s demagoguery and repressive policies far more dangerous than the actions of a few thousand party members.[31]
The harsh words of his would-be judges had little effect on the book’s sales. Masters of Deceit entered the New York Times bestseller list at No. 5 and quickly jumped to the No. 1 spot, where it stayed for six weeks. Over the next several years, the book sold more than two million paperback copies, in addition to 250,000 hardcover sales. Hoover allegedly distributed more than half of the profits to himself, Tolson, and Nichols, though the book was written by his taxpayer-funded staff. He also earned something else of inestimable value. At a moment when McCarthy’s death might have signaled the end of anticommunism as a national preoccupation, Hoover managed to keep it front and center.[32]
* * *
—
The success of Masters of Deceit only enhanced Hoover’s reputation in Washington, especially among Republicans who had promoted him as the responsible alternative to McCarthy. Eisenhower found no more awards to dole out, but he expressed his appreciation for Hoover in other ways. There were private notes of support and camaraderie. And there were invitations to exclusive White House events. In September 1959, in one of the strangest-bedfellow occasions of his presidency, Eisenhower invited Hoover to a white-tie state dinner with none other than Khrushchev, the first Soviet premier to set foot on American soil. The official dinner speeches heralded a new era of peace and cooperation in U.S.-Russian relations, but Hoover’s presence signaled something else: a fixed enmity now forty years in the making, flexible in its contours and methods but unchanging in its essential principles.[33]
In the same week as the Khrushchev dinner, the film version of The FBI Story premiered at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Hoover had already seen the film, breaking down in tears after the private screening in Washington, when he told film director Mervyn LeRoy it was “one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever seen.” Former Crime Records chief Lou Nichols, now a private citizen, went to see it as an anonymous member of the New York public, contacting Hoover that same evening to say that the film looked “great,” at once an “institutional picture” and a personal tribute to the FBI’s “guiding genius.”[34]
If Hoover had been a different man, such a moment might have inspired thoughts of retirement, of laying down the burdens that he had assumed thirty-five years earlier, when he first accepted Harlan Stone’s challenge to reenvision the Bureau. But Hoover could not quite believe that the institution he had forged in his own likeness, and that he had mobilized in the service of his own ideology, could carry on without him.
Part IV
The War at Home
(1960–1972)
Preface
The glory of the 1950s had been the way the pieces all came together. During his first two decades as director, Hoover had focused on building the FBI: acquiring and adjusting to new duties, pleasing his superiors, hiring the right men, and setting the right policies in place. With the end of World War II, he had begun to forge a new path, using the Bureau’s growing power to promote and enforce his anticommunist vision. In 1945, few Americans had been focused on communism as their top concern. A decade later, they were thinking of little else—and when they thought of communists, they often thought of Hoover. Conservatives cheered his blistering language and willingness to use state power in support of the “American way of life.” Liberals appreciated his restraint and words of caution, relieved to have an alternative to Joe McCarthy. Despite the occasional outcry, his effort to turn the FBI into the nation’s “one bulwark” against subversion had made him popular, in Washington as throughout the country.
That balance collapsed in the 1960s, as the issue of communism began to fade and other, more divisive matters took center stage. First among them were race and civil rights, areas in which Hoover had never been able to reconcile his personal views and professional obligations. Unlike communism, civil rights divided the country, and Hoover found himself caught in the middle. He tried to offer just enough to keep each side satisfied while pursuing his own agenda, just as he had during the Red Scare. But the trick did not quite work this time. As during the 1940s and 1950s, he mounted campaigns against the most extreme elements of the segregationist South, especially the Ku Klux Klan. Those efforts were far outstripped, however, by his surveillance, harassment, and intimidation of civil rights leaders and activists. Over the course of the 1960s, he departed more and more from his vision of the FBI as a professional, apolitical institution and a bastion of upright, objective Government Men. The contradictions that he had negotiated for so long—between liberalism and conservatism, between his faith in apolitical governance and his commitment to an ideological cause—finally collapsed in on themselves. So did the American consensus that had once sustained him.
Electoral politics played a role in this shift. Hoover turned sixty-five on January 1, 1960, entering the new decade as an elder statesman, out of sync with the new generation’s youthful energies. Had things gone another way, he might have been forced to step down a few years later, at the mandatory federal retirement age of seventy. He was saved from this fate by two friends who happened to end up in the White House. The first was Lyndon Johnson, Hoover’s longtime neighbor on Thirtieth Place. The second was Richard Nixon, his old ally in the anticommunist cause. With their help, the FBI continued to expand into new areas—most notably, civil rights and organized crime. But some of Hoover’s biggest challenges came in figuring out when to cooperate with his friends in the White House and when to resist.
