G-Man, page 82
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Given such concerns, perhaps Hoover should have welcomed the news about Frank Kameny. A former government astronomer, in the late 1950s Kameny sued the federal government over his dismissal for homosexuality, adopting the language of discrimination, civil rights, and equal protection. He lost his case, but the effort appealed to other Washington men living “with a Sword of Damocles hanging over them,” as one ally later put it, never sure from one day to the next whether they would be rooted out and fired from government positions. In the summer of 1961, they founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, a local chapter of the nation’s first dedicated gay-rights organization. The group hoped to bring the Lavender Scare to an end once and for all, and to open up new possibilities for the men and women who had once been its targets. Hoover saw nothing liberatory in the effort. Upon learning of the chapter’s existence, he ordered the Washington field office to start tracking its activities.[18]
According to agents’ reports, the initial meeting was modest but spirited—“16 well-dressed men” convened for discussion and snacks at the Hay-Adams hotel. As a rule, Bureau agents resisted frequenting venues where gay men gathered, for fear that observers might conclude that they were there for the wrong reasons. Only after the Mattachine meeting dispersed did they descend on the hotel to grill the manager and waitstaff. According to Kameny, after that first meeting Bureau agents also began to show up in unexpected places, asking people close to the group to disclose membership lists and become informants. Kameny interpreted the FBI’s actions as a deliberate attempt at intimidation. Properly assembled and presented to the Civil Service Commission, the information gathered in such exchanges could get a man permanently blackballed from federal employment.
To Hoover’s shock, the Mattachine men responded in a way that would have been unthinkable during the Lavender Scare: they complained to the attorney general. In June 1962, Kameny fired off an angry letter to Bobby Kennedy, alleging illegal harassment by the FBI and demanding an end to federal investigation of the society. Hoover could hardly believe the gall and suggested that they all ignore the communication. But the Mattachine men were determined not to be ignored, and over the next several months, they mounted a campaign to irritate and provoke Hoover at one of his most vulnerable spots. They knew the rumors about his homosexuality. “I was gay, the people I was hearing it from were gay and the boxes Hoover and Tolson were in were boxes owned by gay men,” West Coast activist and Mattachine founder Harry Hay later recalled of the gossip about Hoover and Tolson together at Del Mar. “They wouldn’t be in that crowd otherwise.” As a 1961 memo noted, Hay’s own short-lived magazine had once gone so far as to print the “allegation that there were homosexuals in ‘key positions’ in the FBI,” thus earning the lasting scrutiny and hostility of the Los Angeles office. Kameny took a less direct approach, appealing to Hoover’s sense of justice while also hinting that he knew a thing or two about homosexuals at the FBI. A year after founding the Washington chapter, he wrote to Hoover suggesting that the FBI rethink its “policies of repression, persecution, and exclusion” toward homosexuals. “We realize that this area presents you with many potential problems, some of them quite subtle and touchy ones of politics and public relations,” he wrote—not least because among the “roughly a quarter-million” homosexual federal employees, there were “a number in your own bureau.”[19]
Hoover refused to write back, but the jabs kept coming, delivered mostly outside public view. Affecting a pose of informational awareness, the society began to invite Hoover to special events and lectures around Washington, including a talk by Donald Webster Cory, author of The Homosexual in America. “The lecture, entitled ‘The Homosexual—Minority Rights, Civil Rights, Human Rights,’ is one which we feel may be of interest to you,” the invitation explained, enclosing a complimentary ticket for Hoover. When Hoover failed to attend, they added him to the mailing list for their newsletter, the Gazette, providing the Bureau with regular updates on their “attempts to legalize the activities of homosexuals,” in the words of one Bureau summary.
Finally, this provoked a response. “This material is disgusting and offensive and it is believed a vigorous objection to the addition of the Director to its mailing list should be made,” an FBI memo noted. At that point Hoover decided that the Mattachine leadership should be brought into headquarters for a face-to-face chat with Bureau agents. The public relations office took the lead on the arrangements, tracking down Kameny as well as the editor of the offending newsletter. To Bureau agents’ astonishment, when the two men arrived at the Crime Records office a few weeks later they seemed perfectly at ease, explaining that they sent the newsletter to every official in Washington and hardly understood why Hoover would object. They also—“somewhat facetiously”—invited Hoover to attend their upcoming national convention and participate more fully in their activities.[20]
The interviewing agents followed a preplanned script: the FBI did not make policy, but it was in fact federal policy that homosexuals be expelled from their jobs. The meeting lasted just eight minutes, but the agents left with an uneasy feeling. “Whether or not these mailings to the Bureau are discontinued,” they wrote, making the best of a bad situation, “it has been clearly made a matter of record that the receipt of such items is considered offensive and are not desired.”[21]
Their concerns proved to be well placed. A few weeks after the meeting, the Mattachine men wrote to the Bureau with a final offer: they would take Hoover off their mailing lists if he would remove all their names and organizational information from Bureau files. At this point, Hoover more or less gave up and decided to stop responding.[22]
Elsewhere in Washington, though, they were starting to attract more favorable attention. In 1975, the federal government would rescind its ban on the employment of homosexuals in the civil service, due largely to the work of activists such as Kameny. The change came too late for Hoover.[23]
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Despite Hoover’s warnings about Judith Campbell, John Kennedy continued to produce an array of sexual scandals and annoyances throughout his time at the White House. In May 1962, actress Marilyn Monroe appeared onstage at Madison Square Garden for the president’s forty-fifth birthday gala, dressed in a white ermine coat and sequined evening gown, to puff out a seductive, breathy “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” song before thousands of well-wishers. Kennedy declared her sultry performance an entirely “sweet” and “wholesome” event, a winking reference to the rumor that he and Monroe were having an affair. There were stories that Bobby was seeing Monroe as well, gossip that the attorney general dismissed as having moved well “beyond any semblance of the truth” but that Courtney Evans, forced to mediate between the White House and the FBI, suspected might be true. That gossip in turn produced a raft of conspiracy theories, at least some of which Hoover attempted to investigate.[24]
One involved a dustup over Mariella Novotny, a call girl who had worked the New York society scene in 1960 and supposedly ended up in the arms of then-senator John Kennedy. She came to Hoover’s attention via Scotland Yard, which was busy investigating the Brits’ own high-powered sex scandal, known as the Profumo affair. In an interview with British authorities, Novotny denied having a sexual relationship with Kennedy, though she recalled “a rumor that was going around New York that the president had many girlfriends.” With Hoover’s permission, Evans passed the news along to Bobby, who declared the allegations “preposterous” but admitted that everyone should be prepared for “more similar stories” as time went on. “He would like for us to continue to advise him of any such matters coming to our attention on a personal basis,” Evans reported back to Hoover, “as he could better defend the family if he knew what was being said.” In truth, inviting Hoover further into the family’s business was probably the last thing Bobby wanted.[25]
Then there was Ellen Rometsch, potentially the most scandalous of them all: a German émigré, five feet seven, with black hair, green eyes, and a penchant for “heavy makeup,” in the FBI’s description. Rometsch had made her name as a “party girl” at Washington’s Quorum Club, an exclusive if dumpy Capitol Hill pleasure palace frequented by congressmen and senators. When Hoover caught wind of her activities and her alleged relationship with the president, he initiated a national-security investigation based on her place of birth in East Germany. Agents ultimately concluded she posed no serious Cold War threat. Hoover nonetheless took pains to ensure that she would not “get a visa” to return to the United States and tell tales about the president. Her story did not disappear, however. Once the newspapers began to rumble about the “high executive branch officials” known to be “friends and associates of the part-time model and party girl,” the attorney general and the president saw little choice but to ask for Hoover’s help.[26]
After years of tension and sniping and second-guessing, their entreaty must have been satisfying for Hoover, an acknowledgment that his political skills and connections could, on occasion, be of use even to the Kennedys. In particular, they wanted him to speak on the president’s behalf with Senators Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate, respectively, who were threatening hearings into the national-security angle of the Rometsch story. Hoover initially toyed with Bobby, suggesting that the attorney general simply share the FBI’s report on the available evidence. In the end, though, he agreed to serve as middleman on the logic that “they would give more credence to what I had to say than any statement” from a nepotism-addled attorney general. In a private meeting at Mansfield’s house, Hoover explained that while “there were of course a number of Senators and a number of Congressmen who were clients of these so-called ‘call girls,’ ” the senators should have no cause for concern about espionage or leaks. He also implied that the senators should perhaps be careful when it came to throwing stones in glass houses. While assuring them that “there had been no breach of security,” he noted that “the matter of immorality . . . has been rather common in the Senate and the House,” not just the White House. Under the circumstances, everyone would be well-advised to “keep quiet.”[27]
In thanks for the meeting, John Kennedy invited Hoover to lunch at the White House. Like Hoover’s earlier visits, this one has often been portrayed as an exercise in arm-twisting, with Kennedy as the aggrieved innocent and Hoover as the scheming villain, gloating over his knowledge of the president’s foibles. But it is also possible that Hoover sympathized in some small way with the president, a powerful man made vulnerable by unruly and unconventional desires. Bobby hinted at such a possibility in the midst of the Rometsch investigation, reminding Hoover that “there are always allegations about prominent people that they are either homosexuals or promiscuous.” Those words might be construed as a nod to Hoover’s own supposed secrets. Either way, the FBI and the Kennedys were now in it together.[28]
Chapter 45
The Most Dangerous Negro
(1963)
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at the March on Washington in August 1963. After the march, an FBI memo declared King “the most dangerous Negro” in America.
Bob Adelman/Library of Congress
When he began to piece together the connections between Levison, King, and O’Dell back in 1961, Hoover had assumed that it would be easy to handle the situation: he would tell the White House, the White House would tell King, and the alleged communists in question would quietly be ousted from positions of influence. The wiretaps and bug installed at Levison’s home and office were the next step in that process. Through surveillance, Hoover planned to gather evidence that would support his allegations of ongoing communist connections and put further pressure on King. He did not find what he was seeking. As agents began to transcribe dozens and then hundreds of hours of private conversation, they came across few contacts between Levison and Communist Party leaders, much less with the Soviet Union. What they found instead was a wealth of detail about the civil rights movement’s strategies.
Somewhat to Hoover’s surprise, the political intelligence gleaned from the wiretaps added to his political influence at the White House over the course of 1963, a crucial year of civil rights negotiation. It did not, however, help him to resolve the growing conflict between his racial views and his duties as a federal lawman, or between the FBI, the Justice Department, and the White House. As the movement reached a crisis point in 1963, Hoover displayed a new openness to mobilizing his men on behalf of the Kennedys’ agenda—even to working with Black activists on occasion. At the same time, he grew more hostile toward King, who was fast becoming one of his top public enemies.
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Had he cared to do so, Hoover might have used the early Levison wiretaps to develop a nuanced sense of King as a rising movement leader, driven by high ambition and acute caution. But he was still interested in a narrower project: getting Levison and O’Dell out of King’s orbit. In late April 1962, presumably at Hoover’s behest, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee subpoenaed Levison to appear for questioning. Under oath, he barely tolerated their inquiries. “I am a loyal American and I am not now and never have been a member of the Communist Party,” Levison declared before refusing to answer any further questions. Hoover scoffed at the denial, especially because the Childs brothers continued to report from party sources “that Stanley Levison, because of his association with the King movement, is doing the most important work in the CP today.” Stymied in his effort to use SISS to force a confession, Hoover settled for identifying Levison once again as a “key figure” in the Communist Party.[1]
Toward O’Dell, Hoover adopted a somewhat different strategy, relying not on the subpoena power of SISS but on the secret pressures and manipulations of counterintelligence. In July, Hoover received word that O’Dell was still “considered by the CPUSA, as being a member of its National Committee.” With that revelation in hand, he authorized the writing of an anonymous note about O’Dell’s communist past, to be distributed without attribution to friendly Southern newspapers. The goal, according to the New York office, was not only to ensure that O’Dell would be fired from the SCLC, but to “cause other Negro organizations . . . to clean out anyone who possibly could cause embarrassment because of Communist affiliation or background.” Several major newspapers took the bait, publishing identical articles that described O’Dell as “a concealed member” of the party’s national council.[2]
At this point King made his first significant miscalculation in dealing with Hoover, one that would cost him dearly in the months ahead. Under pressure to respond to the O’Dell allegations, King issued a carefully worded public statement denying any knowledge of his employee’s communist leanings, either past or present, and vowing to get to the bottom of the matter. The statement described O’Dell as a mere “technician” at the SCLC, brought in to help with “the mechanization of our mailing procedures.” Hoover believed both claims were false: that King had been briefed by the White House about O’Dell’s communist associations, and that O’Dell was in fact a key insider at SCLC. King’s statement also maintained that O’Dell had resigned pending an “exacting and fair inquiry.” But this, too, turned out to be untrue. As Hoover soon learned, O’Dell was temporarily being paid through a side channel on the assumption that SCLC would “probably rehire him,” in Levison’s words, once the furor blew over.[3]
A sympathetic interpretation of King’s actions would attribute them to personal and political loyalty, the desire to protect valued colleagues from red-baiting. Hoover merely saw an example of King’s willingness to harbor communists despite being warned against it. His anger increased the next month, when King complained in a press interview that Hoover often assigned white Southern-born agents to Southern field offices, leaving the FBI too “friendly with the local police” and overly “influenced by the mores of the community.” King cited the case of Albany, Georgia, where the SCLC, working with other civil rights organizations, had recently launched a campaign of marches, boycotts, and nonviolent civil disobedience. In Albany, according to King, the FBI’s Southern-born agents inevitably “sided with segregationists,” preferring to fraternize with the police rather than protect the rights of demonstrators.[4]
Of everything Hoover had learned about King in the past few years, it was this minor criticism that seems to have caused the greatest personal animus. Indignant at the suggestion of bias, Hoover instructed his aides to tally up the records from the Albany office, counting which agents had been born where. Upon discovering that four out of five hailed from Northern states, he told them to contact King and correct the record—at which point King made another small but fateful mistake. Though an FBI official left two messages at the SCLC, King did not call back. FBI memos concluded that he “obviously does not desire to be given the truth” and labeled him a “vicious liar.”[5]
This conviction—that King was a man of lies and deceit, hopelessly compromised by his association with communists—guided Hoover’s interpretation of events over the next several months, as the SCLC began to lay plans for what would become its moment of greatest national impact: an anti-segregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Racism explains much of Hoover’s animus: as King became more prominent and influential, Hoover increasingly viewed him as a disrupter and a threat, in violation of the natural order. If asked, though, Hoover would have denied any ulterior motivation; according to him, King was simply lying and deserved what he got. In January, King rehired O’Dell based on the idea that O’Dell had left the Communist Party “quite awhile before” going to work at the SCLC—a claim that Hoover found preposterous. That same month, both O’Dell and Levison traveled to Dorchester, Georgia, for a top-secret, small-group strategy session in advance of the Birmingham campaign. To Hoover, their inclusion at that meeting proved that they were still powerful insiders at the SCLC, helping to determine the future direction of the civil rights movement despite their connections to the Communist Party.[6]
