The motto of the FBI is "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity." How well did William Sessions' all-powerful predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover, uphold these words? Not very, according to a just published biography of the late FBI chief. Anthony Summers' Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover is sure to disturb the old crime fighter's final rest.
Even as he railed against gays as "sexual deviants," Hoover apparently struggled with his own homosexuality. Summers offers fresh details of Hoover's 40-year friendship with Clyde Tolson, a handsome young agent he plucked out of the rank and file and quickly promoted to assistant director. The pair ate dinner together almost every night and vacationed together every year; Summers contends that Luisa Stuart, a former fashion model, once saw them holding hands in the back seat of a limo. According to Summers, the Mafia claimed to have the goods on Edgar and Clyde, including compromising photographs of the two men engaging in oral sex. That knowledge provided the mob with rich blackmail material. It protected gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello from FBI scrutiny for more than 20 years and forced Hoover to insist that syndicated crime was not a national problem.
Perhaps Summers' most bizarre revelation is an account provided by Susan Rosenstiel, the wife of a liquor distiller and gambling crony. Rosenstiel recalls attending what she thought would be an elegant private party at New York City's Plaza Hotel in the company of lawyer Roy Cohn, Hoover and others. Instead, Cohn introduced Rosenstiel to a woman named "Mary," dressed in a fluffy black dress, lace stockings and high heels. It was obvious Mary was no woman. "You could see where he shaved. It was Hoover," said Rosenstiel. Joined by Cohn, Hoover stripped down to a tiny garter belt and proceeded to have sex with two young boys. Cohn later joked about the evening. "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?"
Hoover's presidential snooping included efforts to pin an illicit liaison on Eleanor Roosevelt and culminated, most famously, with eavesdropping on J.F.K. frolicking with Mafia moll Judith Campbell and Marilyn Monroe.
"We had to be not only as straight as an arrow," recalled a former agent last week on PBS's Frontline. "We had to give every perception that we were straight as arrows." In 1972, at age 77, the omnipotent FBI chief became the first civil servant to be granted a state funeral, at which he was eulogized by Richard Nixon in the Rotunda of the Capitol as "one of the giants . . . a national symbol of courage, patriotism and granite-like honesty and integrity." But the year before, bedeviled by fallout from his efforts to tap the phones of journalists, the President had confided to John Ehrlichman, "We may have on our hands here a man who will pull the temple down with him, including me." It is not surprising that not one of the eight Presidents he served dared fire him.