Official and Confidential (2 page)

Following publication of
Official and Confidential
, the
New York Post
reported that Hoover and Tolson were drawn into a 1966 probe of a nationwide extortion racket. A member of the U.S. Congress, two deans of Eastern universities, and William Church, the admiral in charge of the New York naval yards, were among the many victims of a blackmail ring that systematically entrapped homosexuals. Although not publicly named at the time, Clyde Tolson was one of the ring's targets, according to the
Post
story. A photograph of Hoover with one of the extortionists, according to the report, surfaced during the police inquiry – then vanished. While independent research has failed to confirm the account,
Post
reporter Murray Weiss said: ‘I stand 100% behind everything I wrote'.

There has been a fresh development on the subject of the claim that a sex photograph of Hoover and Tolson was in the possession of James Angleton, the CIA Counter-Intelligence chief. Former intelligence officer John Weitz, like Angleton a veteran of the wartime intelligence organization OSS, revealed that it was Angleton who – years earlier – showed him a similar picture of the two men. Whether or not they were authentic, there can be little doubt that such photographs did exist, and that Angleton believed they could be used to intimidate Hoover.
*

The most persistent criticism of
Official and Confidential
, however, has centered on the passage – just three pages long – in which I report the allegation by Susan Rosenstiel, a former wife of liquor millionaire Lewis Rosenstiel, that
Hoover dressed in female clothes to take part in group sex with attorney Roy Cohn, her husband, and young male prostitutes. Hoover defenders maintained that Mrs Rosenstiel was not a credible source because she pleaded guilty to an attempted perjury charge in 1971. I told readers this but, unlike the critics, also explained the context. The very week the charge was brought, the New York State Legislative Committee on Crime had planned to produce Mrs Rosenstiel as a witness to her husband's links to the Mafia. The Committee's Chairman and Chief Counsel were outraged at the perjury development. The perjury charge was brought in connection with a 1969 civil suit – a move lawyers considered unprecedented and bizarre. Committee officials believed it was instigated by Rosenstiel himself, using his vast wealth and influence to obstruct the official inquiry by discrediting his former wife. Court records show the tycoon had used similar tactics in the recent past, to pervert the course of justice.

Those trying to discredit Mrs Rosenstiel claimed that she was ‘reputedly an alcoholic with mental problems,' known as ‘Snow White' in (unnamed) circles. During six years' work on
Official and Confidential
, including extended interviews with the woman, I found not a jot of evidence to support such accusations. Nor were such weaknesses even rumored until after publication of my book. On the contrary, the former Chief Counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and Committee investigator William Gallinaro, found Mrs Rosenstiel an exceptionally good witness. ‘I thought her absolutely truthful,' Judge McLaughlin told me. ‘The woman's power of recall was phenomenal. Everything she said was checked and double checked, and everything that was checkable turned out to be true.' Although this assessment of Mrs Rosenstiel is in this book, it was not quoted in a single newspaper.

Critic after critic, on the other hand, asserted scornfully that Mrs Rosenstiel was the only witness to speak of Hoover's
alleged cross-dressing. In fact, the passage immediately following the Rosenstiel account consists of a similar report, by two witnesses who said they learned of Hoover's penchant for women's clothes at a different time and place from those described by Mrs Rosenstiel. The second two witnesses had never heard of Susan Rosenstiel, and their story was unknown to her.

Since publication, I have received FBI files on both Lewis and Susan Rosenstiel – files withheld during the years I worked on the book in spite of an early application under the Freedom of Information Act. They contain nothing to diminish belief in Mrs Rosenstiel. They do show that Hoover was interested in, and concerned about, the FBI handling of Lewis Rosenstiel, as early as 1939. They contain what appears to be the record of a first meeting between the two men in 1956, although other evidence suggests they met earlier. That year, when Rosenstiel asked to see Hoover, the Director saw him within hours. Mrs Rosenstiel alleged that Hoover brought pressure on politicians to help further her husband's business interests – and the file shows that the millionaire did lobby the Director's office about his business problems. In 1957, the unctuous Rosenstiel was assuring Hoover that ‘your wish is my command.' Later, when Rosenstiel was sick, Hoover sent him flowers.

Susan Rosenstiel mentioned to me that she had once possessed a photograph of Hoover in the company of her husband's mobster friends. That she did have such evidence was confirmed following publication of this book by Mary Nichols of
The Philadelphia Enquirer
, who met Mrs Rosenstiel years ago. ‘She did have suitcases of photographs that she had hauled away from her marriage to Lewis Rosenstiel,' Nichols recalled. ‘The ones I saw showed Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn and Rosenstiel, at all sorts of social events with mobsters.'

As late as 2002, the journalist and author Ronald
Kessler tried over several pages of a book on the Bureau to discredit both Susan Rosenstiel and the notion that Hoover's sexuality may have influenced his long failure to pursue organized crime. While striving to persuade readers that Susan Rosenstiel was a hopelessly unreliable witness, Kessler ignored statements of law enforcement professionals and others to the contrary that had appeared in the original text of this book and in an earlier version of this foreword. He quoted me as having written that another source was ‘a former CIA counterintelligence chief,' an assertion that made me seem ludicrously careless, when I had in fact written accurately that the man had been ‘linked to the CIA'.

When this book was first published, Hoover loyalists even attempted to contest the undoubted fact that Hoover failed to tackle organized crime until forced to do so late in his career. For those who need further convincing, I offer comments by three authorities, two of them senior FBI veterans.

Thomas Sheer, a Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's criminal division in New York in 1983, after Hoover's death, spoke of the daunting side of the Mafia threat at that time. ‘We had to take a different approach,' he said, ‘because of the enormous strength of organized crime in this area. I candidly believe the end result will be devastating for the five families, but it also raises questions about what the FBI has been doing for sixty years …'

Congressional crime consultant Ralph Salerno, interviewed in 1993, said Hoover's position ‘allowed organized crime to grow very strong in economic and political terms, so that it became a much bigger threat to the wellbeing of this country than it would have been if it had been addressed much sooner. I think if they could have been attacked before they grew, before they got the wealth, before they got the knowledge, organized crime could have been nipped in the bud, and never would have grown as strong as it got to be in later decades.'

Neil Welch, an FBI Agent in Charge who became a legendary fighter against organized crime after Hoover's death, praised this book. ‘
Official and Confidential
,' he said, ‘is a powerful indictment of both the presidents and the Congress which allowed one man to have such enormous power over the nation's law enforcement machinery – with no real accountability. FBI agents in the field could have been vastly more effective in their war on crime if the issues raised by
Official and Confidential
had been responsibly addressed in the public dialogue while Hoover lived.'

Publication of this book moved a former FBI Supervisor, Laurence Keenan, to write to me about another controversial episode – Hoover's handling of the assassination of President Kennedy. Sent to Mexico City to investigate the alleged assassin's visit there before the tragedy, Keenan had returned deeply frustrated. ‘I remember arriving there two or three days after the assassination,' he recalled, ‘with the authority to coordinate all the investigations by the FBI and the CIA. But my attempt to talk to the witnesses was aborted. I had the authority from Director Hoover to conduct the investigation. But on having telephone contact with Washington, I realized that these orders were somewhat paper orders – not to be taken literally. My efforts were frustrated from Day One. It was agreed that I should return to headquarters and submit my report. I went in and talked to the Director, and there really wasn't too much excitement. Because this was a foregone conclusion, that the investigation for all intents and purposes should be wrapped up. Within days we could say the investigation was over. Conspiracy was a word which was
verboten
. It was not to be heard on anybody's lips. The idea that Oswald had a confederate or was part of a group or a conspiracy was definitely enough to place a man's career in jeopardy. The realization soon came to me that my efforts in Mexico City had been window dressing. I knew the FBI had the capacity and the facilities to conduct a world-class investigation.
When the FBI was told to do something and had the backing of the front office – meaning Mr Hoover – there were no limits to what we could do. However, looking back, I feel a certain amount of shame. This one investigation disgraced a great organization.'

There should be no doubt, finally, about Hoover's blackmail of politicians. In 1993, in his memoirs, former British Home Secretary Roy – now Lord – Jenkins told of an extraordinary encounter he had with the Director in 1966. ‘I suppose,' Jenkins recalled, ‘he did not think it much mattered what he said to “Brits,” and he talked with the wildest indiscretion. He denounced the Kennedys (Jack just three years dead, Bobby just two years away from being his nominal boss as Attorney General). He said he had somewhat, but not all that much, more respect for Lyndon Johnson. He implied that he had such detailed and damning material on every U.S. politician of note, particularly those of liberal persuasion, that his position was impregnable. No one could afford to sack or discipline him. The country was in a pretty terrible state, both morally and politically, but was just about held together by FBI agents, who patrolled it like a chosen race of prefects.'

On the day the first paperback edition of this book went to press, outraged by new information about Hoover's abuse of the Congress, U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum introduced a bill that would remove the Director's name from the headquarters of the FBI.

There was for a while something of a vogue for attacking the very genre of investigative books about living or recently dead figures, for dismissing their authors as money-grubbing literary predators. I have no time, certainly, for the sort of book that sometimes masquerades as non-fiction. ‘There is a name for writers who claim privileged access to the inner workings of people they describe,' a
Time
correspondent wrote accurately in 1993. ‘The name is novelist.' Others
decry books of ‘pathography,' defined by Joyce Carol Oates as life stories that ‘mercilessly expose their subjects' and ‘relentlessly catalog their most private, vulnerable and least illuminating moments.'

I prefer Lytton Strachey's more perceptive dictum, that ‘discretion is not the better part of biography.' The fact is that the glimpses we now have of Hoover's private life
are
illuminating, in a way far more important than the easy snigger with which many journalists greeted publication of
Official and Confidential
. If the allegations I published are essentially accurate, then we may have discovered why a vastly powerful figure, a law enforcement supremo who could have strangled the American Mafia in its infancy, failed in his duty. Hoover failed, according to the claims I reported, because he was compromised by his sexuality.

Many may object that the thesis is shaky, that some of those interviewed may have embroidered the facts, even made them up altogether. This is a risk for every biographer, whether an academic with letters after his name, or an investigative journalist by training, as I am. Forget, for a moment, the huffing and puffing about Susan Rosenstiel. Witnesses of total rectitude, with impeccable credentials, are known to offer false stories on occasion. Any biographer, or any lawyer, knows that.

What would my critics have me do about the testimony to Hoover's homosexuality, or to his relationships with mobsters? Leave it out, because some will not believe it, or because some deem it distasteful?

Some non-fiction authors do give the craft a bad name. There are those who do not genuinely research their material to the absolute limits of endurance, ingenuity, and available funds. Such writers pad their books with some of the appearances of professionalism, long bibliographies, and notes suggestive of scholarship. An author who once spoke to me to make an appointment but never called back, went on to claim in his source notes that he had interviewed me at length. If publishers were to ask more searching questions
and insist on the disciplines, such poseurs would have to shape up or quit the profession.

There were no short cuts in the writing of this book. The pages that follow represent five years of grueling work, not least by the team of scholars and journalists I hired to help me cover the vast terrain of J. Edgar Hoover's life. Our operation cost more than half a million dollars, which consumed virtually all the publisher's generous advance. I rarely permitted one account alone to carry a pivotal element of the story, and almost always, I required buttressing testimony. I was especially cautious if information failed to fit the overall pattern. If a statement was an uncorroborated claim, I let the reader know it. The full source notes, in the hardback edition, are exhaustively thorough.