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by
Beverly Gage
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May 16 - June 9, 2024
He also asked the FBI to look into the sexual practices of government officials, reflecting a budding concern that certain forms of sexual behavior—especially homosexuality—made government employees vulnerable to blackmail and intimidation.
Before the war, the Bureau had employed just 600 women, mostly clerks and typists. By 1943, it employed a whopping 7,800, an increase of more than 1,000 percent in just four years.
“This policy of Mr. Hoover’s is so analogous to the one employed by Mr. Hitler in denying membership to Jews in his notorious Gestapo and Storm Troop organization,” wrote one columnist, “it is almost frightening.”
Ernst saw no contradiction between serving as general counsel for the ACLU and speaking out on Hoover’s behalf.
He did not tell them, for instance, that Baldwin remained on the custodial detention index, identified as a dangerous person to be snatched up in case of invasion.
Apparently impressed by what he saw, in late 1944 Hopkins asked for an extraordinary personal favor, requesting that the FBI begin following and wiretapping his wife.
Like so many of Hoover’s innovations, COINTELPRO was not a fact but a process: of learning and dodging, of adjusting to new pressures and new capacities.
Hoover’s office recommended two techniques. The first was the anonymous letter, which could be sent to a party member or friendly press contact to highlight some unflattering aspect of communist policy or experience. The second, more versatile method involved the use of informants to spread rumors and stoke division within party circles. Simply wasting the party’s time—diverting meetings into “non-productive, time-consuming channels”—was a virtue, in Hoover’s view.
Observing the communists’ internal chaos, the rival Socialist Workers Party, a tiny Trotskyist sect, launched a recruitment drive aimed at “bringing about defections of CP members.” The FBI did its best to help out, smuggling membership lists and meeting locations to the SWP.
In June 1957, he discovered that local communists in Cleveland seemed to be catching on to COINTELPRO, whispering among themselves that “the FBI has evidently launched a campaign of ideological harassment through anonymous mailings.” In response, Hoover temporarily called off the use of such letters throughout the country. Over time, his office compiled a list of refinements that would make the mailings less easily identifiable as FBI forgeries: limiting their number of recipients, including spelling errors and typos, using commercial-size paper (eight and a half by eleven inches) rather than
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Despite clear signs of the party’s weakness, Hoover managed to view 1958 as even more perilous than 1956 and 1957. Though he could take pride in the occasional FBI success, on the whole he still felt that not nearly enough was being done.[18]
There was, first, the matter of shirtsleeves. Though Bobby usually showed up to work in a suit and tie, as the day wore on he often shed these encumbrances, first removing the jacket, then the neckwear, then loosening his collar and rolling up his cuffs. To Hoover, this was tantamount to reporting for work in pajamas.
And in fact he did play touch football in the office, a Kennedy-family diversion now brought indoors. Bobby also liked to play darts, flinging sharp-tipped metal projectiles at a target on the wall, pocking up the fine walnut paneling when he missed. Hoover saw both games as “pure desecration—desecration of government property.”
On another occasion, Bobby provoked a major internal incident by attempting to use the Bureau gym after hours.
On another occasion, he brought several of his children to visit while Hoover was out and allowed them to rummage through the director’s papers.
“He hit a goddamn buzzer and within sixty seconds, the old man came in with a red face, and he and Bobby jawed at each other for about ten minutes,”
This, at least, was the message delivered by Brumus, a lumbering, slobbering Newfoundland dog who had been a gift from the famed satirist James Thurber.
According to legend, Brumus once deposited a steaming pile near the entrance to Hoover’s reception room.
When Morris decided to rejoin the party at the FBI’s behest in 1952, it was Levison who showed up in Chicago as an emissary from the CP leadership, assigned to vet Morris’s reliability and motivations.
the FBI pressed for still more information about his background, going so far as to interview his ex-wife and her new husband, a former business partner of Levison’s, about the possibility that Levison might be a Soviet spy. His ex-wife dismissed the possibility out of hand, but her husband (himself a former communist, now living under an assumed name) was not so sure.
The first historians to write about Levison’s activities suggested that he broke with the Communist Party around this time, as he transitioned into working with King. Now, with better access to the FBI’s files, it seems clear that this was not true.
At no point did Hoover seem to entertain the idea that communist leaders might be exaggerating their own influence and power over Levison, or over the broader civil rights movement.
At the Kansas City field office, Felt had received a letter of censure for hiring a man whose lips were judged too “large” and “prominent” to meet Bureau specifications.
Hoover depicted the SNCC leader not only as the “chief architect of ‘black power,’ ” but as a clandestine ally of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a tiny, obscure left-wing sect that Hoover characterized with outsize alarm as “a highly secret, all-Negro, Marxist-Leninist, Chinese-communist-oriented group.”[19]
Hoover saw three men in the country who could become that sort of “messiah” figure: Carmichael, the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad, and King himself. He ordered his men to prevent any such leader from rising to power.[11]
he secretly ordered the convention flooded with informants instructed to vote in favor of the RYM candidates, for fear that the serious-minded PLP might turn a “shapeless and fractionalized” SDS into an actually “disciplined organization.”
In 1969, Nixon asked Hoover to investigate rumors about a “coterie of homosexuals” at the White House, in which high-ranking aides supposedly met after hours in secret rendezvous. Hoover soon pronounced the whole thing ridiculous, much to the relief of White House counsel John Ehrlichman and chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, both of whom had been named as members of the ring.
Where the report called for “relaxing restrictions” on covert mail opening, he noted that the practice was “clearly illegal” and likely to result in “serious damage . . . to the intelligence community” if revealed to the public.
When the moment came for Huston to chime in, Hoover dismissed him, calling him by the wrong name (Hoffman, Hutchinson) before returning to the leisurely review process.
When Hoover received Huston’s notice announcing the new policy, he “went through the ceiling,” in the words of one aide, demanding that Attorney General John Mitchell take up the matter directly with Nixon.
Nixon could read between the lines, and quickly rescinded his approval of the Huston Plan.
During Nixon’s first few years in office, Hoover’s budget nearly doubled, to $334 million (about the same as the State Department’s),
The following month, Time quoted him musing aloud about the violent tendencies of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (“They don’t shoot very straight. But if they come at you with a knife, beware”) and King’s moral vicissitudes (“I held him in complete contempt because of the things he said and because of his conduct”).
He even found it hard to sympathize with the four students shot and killed by National Guardsmen during an anti-war demonstration at Ohio’s Kent State University, informing the White House that “the students invited and got what they deserved.”[19]
On April 28, after fourteen years of “neutralizing” and “disrupting” social movements that ran afoul of FBI priorities, Hoover reluctantly ordered a halt to COINTELPRO.[21]
Over the next several weeks Nixon made two fateful decisions in response to Hoover’s reluctance to pursue Ellsberg. First, he authorized the creation of the Plumbers,
His staff spent the late summer and early fall of 1971 brainstorming how to make that happen, entertaining ideas as far-fetched as allowing Hoover to keep his car and personal staff after retirement, or even bumping him up to the Supreme Court.
Instead of letting Hoover go, Nixon ended up promising approximately a 20 percent increase in personnel for the FBI’s foreign offices.
Sometime over the next few hours, his heart stopped. He died alone, but with the world still watching.[8]
National Review, still the essential text of the conservative movement, marveled at Hoover’s ability to please such audiences while leading “an agency that is in many ways the very image of the modern superstate—faceless, powerful, adapted to the latest technology, almost inhumanly efficient.”
“Gray’s primary assignment is to consolidate control of the FBI, making such changes as are necessary to assure its complete loyalty to the Administration,” Ehrlichman wrote.
Before Hoover’s coffin was lowered into the ground, the honor guard removed the American flag draped across the top and folded it into a crisp-cornered triangle. Then they handed it to Tolson, in quiet acknowledgment of his forty-four years at Hoover’s side.
He chose to continue on with Gray, a misstep that one historian later described as Nixon’s “most fateful and disastrous decision in this crucial period.”
Far from being “careful” at the hearings, he was gloriously, ineptly honest, far more open than Hoover ever would have been.
Lost in the wave of condemnation was one of the central facts of Hoover’s life: whether or not they knew every detail of what he was up to, millions of people, from presidents down to the smallest of small-town editors, had always aided and supported him—not despite but because of his willingness to target those who challenged the status quo.
And yet there is a certain loss in this image of Hoover as a one-dimensional villain, the embodiment of all that is worst in the American political tradition. For one thing, it makes him a too-easy scapegoat; his guilt restores everyone else’s innocence.
