6-12-05, 12:05pm
As a student of J. Edgar Hoover’s corrupt and sinister career as America’s and the world’s longest lived political police chief (he headed the FBI from 1924 to his death in 1972, a forty-eight year 'tenure in office' which hopefully will never be equaled) I must admit that I burst out laughing when it was revealed that Mark Felt, Hoover’s number two man at the time of his death and a longtime member of his inner circle, had leaked the information that eventually did in Hoover’s old political pal, Richard Nixon. A president who rose and prospered most of all by red-baiting was in part brought down by a henchman of the most contemptible red-baiter in U.S. history. Hoover had long specialized in leaking information to friends in the press like columnist Walter Winchell, and also to the House Un-American Activities Committee (where Nixon first hit the national headlines) and, of course, Joe McCarthy. Although Communists and other leftists were always Hoover’s primary targets, he also kept files on prominent politicians and used either direct or indirect blackmail threats to expand his FBI empire.
A little history might be of assistance (having written two encyclopedia articles on J. Edgar’s early career, I know more about him than I would care to, or is even printable). When he founded the Bureau’s General Intelligence Division during the Red Scare of 1919-1920, Hoover began to leak phony stories to the press about Bolshevik conspiracies and Communist uprisings, which were supposed to peak on May Day, 1920. Even though Washington was an armed camp that day, nothing happened. Hoover also used his position to compile huge lists of 'subversives' and 'enemy aliens,' dreaming of mass deportations. In 1920, he got Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to authorize mass raids against 'alien' radicals that brutally captured and held without habeas corpus nearly ten thousand people as subversive 'aliens' (more than half were soon released simply because they were U.S. citizens).
When the Red Scare died down and Warren Harding entered the White House in 1921, Hoover rose to the post of Deputy Director of the Bureau after he brought his files to Harding’s corrupt Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, and suggested they might be useful against Harding’s political enemies. In 1924, when the Bureau was overwhelmed with scandals, J. Edgar convinced a new Attorney General, ironically a progressive, Harlan Fiske Stone, who had opposed the 1920 raids and did not know about Hoover’s leading role in them, that he would end the FBI’s lawlessness and make it a professional agency working under the Attorney General. For the next forty-eight years, he turned those promises into a very bad joke.
Hoover was always a reactionary, racist, red-baiter and self-aggrandizing bureaucrat who used taxpayer’s money for personal luxuries, partied virtually every day for over four decades with a male acquaintance, Clyde Tolson, whom he met in the late 1920s in the bureau and promoted to high positions as they dined and traveled together for the rest of Hoover’s life. In the 1930s, he used the press to create the image that the FBI was the guardian of America’s security as it hunted down bandits like John Dillinger and Hoover himself the epitome of rugged American masculine virtue(Hoover would often show up after the shooting stopped to claim credit, but was never around when there was any danger).
Meanwhile, Hoover denied that there was such a thing as organized crime (the gangsters who followed the corporate monopoly model) in the U.S., while he had Winchell and other confederates place bets for him with leading bookies and frequented with Tolson nightclubs owned by gangsters.
During WW II, Hoover used the FBI's increased wartime powers to intensify his surveillance of CPUSA activists and 'enemy aliens.' Actually, German anti-fascist refuges like Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht and others were put under heavy FBI surveillance. Hoover was more interested in harassing them than pro Nazi elements. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who associated with left activists from the youth movement particularly, was even put under surveillance, and Hoover sought to disrupt her marriage to the president by accusing her of having an affair with Joseph Lasch, a student activist and later prominent liberal writer.
The cold war both unleashed Hoover to revive all of his worst attacks against the CPUSA and gave him greatly increased budgets to do so. Materials that the FBI leaked to HUAC were influential in the so-called Alger Hiss 'espionage case' which made Richard Nixon a national figure among red-baiters. As the case developed with Whitaker Chambers bizarre 'revelation' in Nixon’s presence of microfilmed documents that he had hidden in a pumpkin, the bureau then covered up material Chambers had given them in a 'confession'(that they had sat on for many years) concerning homosexual activities. Chambers had combined his fantastic 'confession' that his was a Soviet intelligence courier with the statement that he had at the same time been a homosexual desperately seeking sexual encounters with men. In his 'confession,' he claimed that his rejection of Communism for religious faith took place simultaneously with his total rejection of homosexual feelings for heterosexuality, statements more suited to a psychiatrist’s couch than police interrogations.
Had this material been made known during the Hiss case, the whole espionage hysteria would have been difficult to maintain in the face of the sex scandal. Hoover’s agents made sure that would not happen by both covering up the confession and threatening to expose and destroy Hiss’s gay stepson, Timmy, if Hiss, who knew of Chambers homosexual activities, brought them up at the trial. Hiss did the honorable thing for his family, but destroyed his reputation and career in the process and became a powerful albeit totally fraudulent national symbol for Soviet subversion in the Roosevelt administration.
But Hoover was only warming up. When Joe McCarthy began to make even more fantastic charges about Communist 'spies' in the State Department in 1950(whom McCarthy claimed had 'given over' both Eastern Europe and China to Communists) the FBI also fed him information when it was useful to them, although he often improvised, embroidered, and simply made up things which he then presented regularly to a compliant press. McCarthy’s attacks on the army, the CIA, and the Eisenhower administration in 1953-1954 led directly to the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, in which the bulk of the U.S. capitalist establishment was compelled to destroy the Frankenstein monster that they had created and was now threatening some of their core institutions. Hoover, for reasons of self-preservation, also distanced himself and the bureau from McCarthy during the hearings.
Although McCarthy as an individual was destroyed, McCarthyism continued. However, a shift in the Supreme Court away from simply endorsing the worst McCarthyite abuses led Hoover in 1956 to create a secret counter-intelligence program (Cointelpro) to permit the bureau to continue the searches and seizures, wiretappings, mail openings, frame-ups and others actions which had never been fully legal but were now under court scrutiny. The CPUSA was the initial target of the Cointelpro program, which lasted until it was exposed and discredited in 1971, and the majority of Cointelpro attacks were directed against CPUSA members, although the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party, the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) and particularly in its last years the Black Panther Party were also targeted.
Leaking libelous stories to friendly members of the press and television reporters were an important part of Cointelpro actions. These included stories aimed at preventing Communist party leaders Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis and Herbert Aptheker from speaking on college campuses, even such low and contemptible acts as spreading stories of infidelity to break up CPUSA couples, harassing children of CPUSA activists, attempting to prevent CPUSA national chair Gus Hall from obtaining a drivers license and even driving Mary Blair, wife of longtime CPUSA Wisconsin leader Fred Bassett Blair out of a position as a Cub Scout den mother.
When Richard Nixon became president, all of these policies were intensified against a much larger number of old and new targets. However, the late 1960s saw a different political climate in which mass opposition to the Vietnam War and the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement had produced extensive resistance to what in the 1950s had been routine assaults on civil liberties.
The new climate was such that even Hoover vetoed in 1970 a plan drawn up by one of Nixon’s rightwing henchman, Tom Huston, for the sort of mass arrests and 'preventive detention' of radicals that J. Edgar had in one form or another advocated since WWI. Hoover wasn’t worried about civil liberties violations—he never had been—but feared mass resistance to such policies along with judicial opposition and media exposes might boomerang against the FBI.
It was in response to the FBI’s and the CIA’s 'failure' to carry out his criminal acts that Nixon formed a 'special intelligence unit,' ostensibly to stop leaks to the press but in reality to carry out against his political enemies in the Democratic party establishment the sort of actions that the FBI had been carrying out under Cointelpro and that Hoover had been carrying out since the Red Scare of 1919.
It was in this atmosphere that Hoover died in 1972 as the Watergate conspiracy took shape. It is unlikely that Mark Felt, Hoover’s number two man at the time of his death, was motivated by civil libertarian convictions. No one so closely associated with Hoover ever had such convictions. Rather, it is likely that he was bitter that Nixon had gone over him and the rest of the Hoover coterie to appoint an outsider, L. Patrick Gray, as Director. Gray’s loyalties were to Nixon, not to the Hoover group that had controlled the FBI since 1924. The Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, was also loyal to Nixon. Both had been involved in the Watergate cover-up. Unlike Hoover (this is pure speculation on my part) Felt didn’t have the influence to subtly blackmail Nixon into giving him what he wanted. So he did what his mentor had done so many times in the past—leak materials to the press (in this case the 'liberal' Washington Post, not one of Hoover’s favored conservative publications and columnists) in order to protect the interests of the Hoover clique. In the process, he made a huge positive contribution to the protection of civil liberties and democratic rights in the United States, a wonderful example of the law of unintended consequences.
To American progressives, Mark Felt is no hero but a minor villain who turned on major ones. Today the Bush administration is using the 'Patriot Act' (an ill-named modern version of the old Alien and Sedition Acts) to do openly what Hoover and Nixon did secretly in the past. Finding out who 'deep throat' was is a minor footnote to history.
Preventing the Bush administration from continuing to implement policies that make the Watergate conspiracy look minor is a major task for all progressive activists.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
