When Seigenthaler returned to the Justice Department, Attorney General Kennedy took one look at him and said, “He was out of it today, wasn’t he?” Hoover’s quicksilver moods became a running joke, which was made all the more surreal by the assumption that Hoover himself was homosexual in style if not in performance. On learning that the Director’s associate and bachelor housemate, Clyde Tolson, had been hospitalized for an operation, the Attorney General quipped to his aides, “What was it, a hysterectomy?”
