Anthony Summers - Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

Official and Confidential:

The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

Anthony Summers

For Robbyn

I thank the close colleagues and friends who made this book possible. A full Acknowledgments section will be found in its closing pages. The project lasted for five years and demanded work on a scale I could not have hoped to achieve alone. Some 850 people were interviewed, and storage of the hundreds of thousands of documents required the addition of an entire new floor to my house.

On the investigative team, I am especially grateful to Dr Kathryn Castle, lecturer in American History at the University of North London, and her husband Paul Sutton, who spent a year in the United States carrying out extensive research. In San Francisco and Washington, Ingrid Young and Glyn Wright were real Sherlocks when it came to tracking down interviewees and obscure documents. In Ireland, with the assistance of Pauline Lombard, Jeanette Woods typed and retyped the manuscript and organized the ever-expanding archive.

The book was conceived by Putnams president, Phyllis Grann, who lived up to her reputation as a legendary publisher. Also in New York, Andrea Chambers was a redoubtable editor and Marilyn Ducksworth managed promotion with skill I have never seen equalled. Allison Hargraves, the copy editor, dealt meticulously with a mountain of detail. At Gollancz in London, Liz Knights and Joanna Goldsworthy once again proved to be loyal friends, as well as top-flight publishers. That doyen of Manhattan agents, Sterling Lord, nursed me and the first edition of the book through tough times. This new edition is the result of an initiative by Eburys Andrew Goodfellow, helped along as it progressed to reality by my agent and friend at Curtis Brown, Jonathan Lloyd.

I shall never be able to repay the debt of gratitude I owe to Robbyn Swan, the fine Washington journalist who joined the project expecting to conduct a handful of interviews, stayed four years and captured my heart. We married, had three children and two decades and three marathon book projects later she is still working with me.

To Robbyn, much more than thanks.

A. S.
Ireland, 2011

FOREWORD

The information in your book made me want to retch. I dont think I will ever believe anything about our form of government again nor will I have confidence in anyone in office, ever. They named a building for him and it is still there?

An American reader of Official and Confidential,
to the author, 1993.

I n the autumn of 2011, with the Hollywood movie J. Edgar in the offing, a senior FBI official spoke publicly about an aspect of what the film might perhaps portray. During the making of J. Edgar, he said, director Clint Eastwood and star Leonardo DiCaprio had sought information about legendary Director Hoovers relationship with Clyde Tolson, his longtime aide and companion.

Time was that to have addressed the question of Hoovers sexuality would have been unthinkable in official Washington. Even now, Assistant Director Mike Kortan said only that vague rumours and fabrications on the subject were backed up by no evidence in the historical record The Society of Former Special Agents sniffed that a kissing scene said to be in J. Edgar had led it to reassess the tacit approval it had given to the movie. The J. Edgar Hoover Foundation was said to have told Eastwood that such portrayal would be monumental distortion unfounded, spurious.

In an era when homosexuality is out of the closet, such outrage is perhaps overheated. When this book was first published in 1993, with the impertinence to report not only on the supposed homosexuality but on other exotica, there was not only fury from FBI old-timers but also a resounding national chuckle shared even by the President.

In March that year, Bill Clinton rose to address the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., traditionally an evening for topical satire. In the audience was FBI Director William Sessions, then fighting a losing battle against accusations of abuse of office, and the President gave him no encouragement. I might have to pick an FBI Director, he grinned, and its going to be hard to fill J. Edgar Hoovers pumps.

Everyone understood the allusion. For the past month, since hardback publication of this book, America had been tittering at the allegation that Hoover liked dressing up in womens clothes. On television, Jay Leno and David Letterman made cracks, and the Saturday Night Live team performed a skit. The New York Times magazine devoted a serious commentary page to the implications, and John Updike penned a spoof for the New Yorker. In a later edition, in a reference to the transvestite in the movie The Crying Game, the magazine ran a cartoon featuring the Jaye Edgar Hoover Building. From left to right, the joke took on a momentum of its own. The Nation ran a mock advertisement for an imaginary movie called The Lying Game, starring Hoover in slinky evening gown and bouffant wig. In the United States and England, the tabloids phonied up photographs of the Director dressed as a woman. The London Times offered a verse of doggerel and, months later, Newsweek waded in with yet another cartoon.

The concept of Hoover in drag seems likely to become a permanent fixture in the public mind. It also made me, very evidently, Public Enemy No. 1 of diehard Hoover loyalists. For your part in the success of Anthony Summers book, one told my publisher, in a letter from Texas, you should hang your head in shame. You have helped do what the Communists could never do destroy the character of a man dedicated to the ideals on which this nation is founded. From Montana, an outraged correspondent castigated the publisher for printing libellous, totally false remarks about a great American. A New Yorker sounded off about lurid and ludicrous allegations set forth by unsavory witnesses. Another complaint, from Brooklyn, used precisely the same phrase.

The use of identical words was no coincidence. All the letter writers quoted put pen to paper in the space of a few days, two months after the book came out. Three were former FBI agents, and the fourth was an agents wife. I have no doubt that their spleen was orchestrated, just as the great American himself used to orchestrate an outpouring of complaints to members of Congress, whenever there seemed the shred of a possibility that he might lose his job.

In early February 1993, when my publisher was about to launch Official and Confidential, an irate caller told the promotions department to watch out for an upcoming television show, on which the despicable Anthony Summers would get his come-uppance. On Larry King Live, sure enough, a coldly furious Cartha DeLoach, a surviving Hoover aide who features large in the book, came forth with an attack short on facts but stern as an Iranian fatwa. Not only was the book garbage innuendo lies, but and this was the intended coup de grace I was a discredited journalist. Before the program I had spotted DeLoach hunched over a telephone, writing notes on a scrap of paper. Now, on live television beamed around the world by CNN, he read from a year-old Washington Times column that had accused me of lying and cowardice for my comments about a CIA official. The article was so inaccurate and malicious that, for the first time in my life, I had started libel proceedings.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Heim, of the Society of Former FBI Agents, fired off an enraged letter to the Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which had like the BBC in England broadcast a program featuring key allegations made in this book. As a major plank of his broadside, Heim also cited the distortions published in the