Dangerous to presidents
Anthony Howard
J. EDGAR HOOVER: THE MAN AND THE SECRETS by Curt Gentry Norton, £19.95, pp. 846 here is only one secret that the world now wants to know about J. Edgar Hoover, the man who ran the American Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years. Did he, while constantly inveighing against 'degenerates' and 'perverts', himself have a male lover in the person of his associate director of the FBI, Clyde A. Tolson? Despite an otherwise detailed account of their relationship — Tolson, we learn, was even the main beneficiary of Hoover's will — that is one secret this book signally fails to crack. They may have done everything else together — never separating even on holiday — but the author does not come up with any clinching evidence that they ever shared a bed.
It could be, though, that a `Not Proven' verdict on this point was the one this book was deliberately designed to bring in. Cer- tainly, Curt Gentry's narrative reads throughout like the screenplay for a movie to come — and that, as the dustjacket obligingly reveals, is what is about to happen. 'A motion picture version' of the book, to be co-produced by the author with Francis Ford Coppola, is, the publishers promise, a treat in store.
In the light of that disclosure, a number of the more perplexing aspects of the way Gentry has chosen to tell his story fall neatly into place. The start, for example, with the quick flash forward to Hoover's death and funeral seems tailor-made for big screen Godfather treatment — though in any cinematic version it would be nice to think that the tiresome repetition of various details would not be quite so obvious at the end. The screen-writers would do well, too, to clean up on some of Gentry's more egregious errors — such as his inability to tell the difference between a senator and a congressman, his misdating of the shooting of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan or his naive statement that John Profumo was `an old friend' of Harold Macmillan. These may be mistakes that a professional crime-writer suddenly come to the new field of public affairs could easily make; but they hardly re- inforce confidence in the author's command of more complex issues.
One strength of Gentry's narrative is, however, the portrait of Hoover himself. In most respects, `the nation's No 1 G-man' was, of course, a monster and it would have been all too easy to depict him throughout in villainous colours. To his credit, Gentry resists any such temptation, even drawing attention to the fact that towards the end of his career — when his hold on his job hung by a thread — Hoover's loyalty to the integrity of the institution he had created still took precedence over everything else. The FBI director's refusal to co-operate with the Nixon administration in discredit- ing the once famous Dita Beard memoran- dum in the ITT slush-fund case of 1972 'Why is it that whenever we have friends round for dinner you always try to put me down?' fully deserves to be remembered. It is, as this book indicates, a salutary reminder that Hoover was not always the docile servant of authority.
If anything, indeed, the account Gentry presents does more damage to the reputa- tions of successive presidents than it does to Hoover himself. With one glorious exception, Harry Truman, they all appear to have been mesmerised by the federal Frankenstein they had combined to build up. No one ever demonstrated more conclusively than Hoover the truth of Machiavelli's adage that knowledge is power. It was precisely because occupants of the White House from Roosevelt to Nixon were frightened of what Hoover knew that they proved so reluctant to tangle with him.
The classic case, of course, was provided by the Kennedys. Both the President and his brother Robert, the Attorney General, quietly loathed Hoover; but each well understood that they had too much to hide to risk any direct collision with him (when Robert Kennedy tried mixing it with Hoover over bugging and wire-tapping he got so much the worse of the engagement that he had no alternative but to retreat into silence).
The story of cowardice and complicity which Gentry relates is a gruesome one, not redeemed at all by the salacity that was often displayed as Hoover brought his reports to the executive mansion. But the author still misses one trick. He fails entirely to mention the one presidential candidate (Gene McCarthy in 1968) who vowed from the start of his campaign that his very first action on taking office would be to fire the director of the FBI.
As it was, Hoover was allowed to linger on — if increasingly as a constitutional anachronism. He even safely served past his 75th birthday, with Nixon never quite daring, despite two abortive efforts, to lower the boom upon him. In the end, it was the Grim Reaper who took a hand. On 1 May 1972 the 77-year-old director had spent an apparently normal day at the office, mainly in the company of his faithful
secretary who herself was 75 (the pair of them somehow symbolised a police gerontocracy that even the Kremlin never matched). On the way home he stopped off for his regular nightly supper with the one other person for whom he had ever displayed any lasting affection (though six years younger than the man he termed 'the boss', Clyde Tolson had already suffered three strokes). By now the FBI's associate director had become, in effect, the dependent partner, personally as well as professionally. That was perhaps just as well. It meant, at least, that the American press was able to announce that a national idol had died at home 'peacefully in his sleep' and that any more prurient questions could be kept for movie audiences to resolve long after the public standards he represented had passed out of fashion.
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