Official and Confidential (24 page)

He got them, and the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended that he be awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, normally awarded only to those who had performed valiantly in battle. Although Edgar sent a stream of fawning notes of thanks to his supporters on Capitol Hill, the idea was dropped. On July 25, however, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his arrival at the Justice Department, he was celebrating anyway. Edgar posed beside a giant postcard of congratulations and sat for color photographs – still a novelty in those days – with Clyde at his elbow.

Then Edgar went off on yet another vacation with Clyde, cheered by anniversary congratulations from the President himself. Edgar responded with a gushing letter, telling Roosevelt the years under his leadership had been ‘some of the happiest years of my life.' ‘You may rest assured,' he wrote, ‘that you may continue to count upon all of us at the FBI …'

The truth behind the formal flattery was very different. For a long time now, Edgar had been snooping on the President's wife.

14

‘If there had been a Mr Hoover in the first half of the first century, A.D., can you imagine what he would have put into his files about a certain trouble-maker from Nazareth, his moral attitudes and the people he consorted with?'

New York Times
reader's letter, 1970

E
dgar and Clyde loathed Eleanor Roosevelt. One of the reasons he never married, Edgar liked to say, was that ‘God made a woman like Eleanor Roosevelt.' He called her the ‘old hoot owl' and mimicked her high voice in front of senior colleagues. Mrs Roosevelt was in her late fifties in World War II, and she was not physically attractive. While her husband sought solace with other women, contemporaries wondered about Eleanor's passionate friendships outside the White House – some with women known to be lesbians. Edgar sniggered about these things behind the First Lady's back.

‘The President,' he told an aide on his return from a White House meeting, ‘says the old bitch is going through the change of life … we'll just have to put up with her.' He once descended unexpectedly on W. C. Fields, the comedian, asking to see certain ‘interesting pictures.' Fields did, indeed, have three trompe l'oeil miniatures of the President's wife. The right way up, they were ordinary pictures. Upside down, they were grotesque anatomical views of a woman's vagina. Edgar thought them hilariously funny, and took them away with him.

It was Mrs Roosevelt's politics, though, that Edgar could not abide. She was deeply committed to a host of liberal causes, more deeply – many thought – than a woman of her
era should have been. Above all, she campaigned persistently for decent housing and fair treatment of America's black citizens – and that really rankled Edgar. He once watched, glowering, at the Mayflower Hotel when she attempted to bring two black men into the restaurant. Told of rumors that black women in the South were joining ‘Eleanor Roosevelt Clubs,' he ordered agents to investigate.

‘Whenever a black would speak out,' said William Sullivan, ‘he attributed it to Mrs Roosevelt.' ‘Hoover called her a nigger lover, and worse,' recalled Clyde's friend Edna Daulyton. ‘Clyde felt the same. He said she should mind her own business and not stick her nose into her husband's affairs. He said the White House was wide open to the wrong kind of people.'

Mrs Roosevelt sometimes invited potential embarrassment because, as her husband's biographer Ted Morgan put it, she was ‘a soft touch.' In her pursuit of liberal causes she bumped up against Communists and radicals, and plain oddballs, and seemed to think the President's wife could do so with impunity.

Edgar, who had long since infiltrated the Communist Party, was told what Mrs Roosevelt had supposedly said about him to a Communist friend. ‘Now you see what a bastard Hoover is,' she was quoted as saying. ‘That's how he covers up his Fascist attitude. You should have seen Franklin … He said this was just another proof of the duplicity of that smug would-be-Himmler.'

Such reports made Edgar even angrier. As late as 1960, he would still be speaking of the widowed Eleanor as ‘really dangerous.' According to former agent G. Gordon Liddy, ‘He attributed a lot of the leftish positions that President Roosevelt took to her malevolent influence. He said he was often able to solve problems he had with Communists only after he learned they originated with Eleanor Roosevelt. Then he would go to her husband – and Roosevelt would overrule Eleanor in Hoover's favor.'

What survives of Edgar's file on the First Lady is 449 pages long. While Edgar was alive it sat in one of two large file cabinets behind Miss Gandy's desk, one of the supersensitive files that were kept separate from the main system. Some former aides say they were so placed to restrict access to a handful of senior staff – thus protecting the subjects of the files, many of them prominent public figures. Many, however, believe the files were a storehouse of human foibles, ammunition for actual or potential blackmail.

Mrs Roosevelt got wind of Edgar's temerity in January 1941, when she learned FBI agents had investigated both her social secretary, Edith Helm, and a second aide, Malvina Thompson. The agents had probed deep into the private lives of the women, asking questions of Thompson's neighbors, interrogating desk clerks about comings and goings at her hotel room. They even grilled people in Helm's hometown in Illinois.

When Mrs Roosevelt protested, Edgar tried to brush her off with a smooth reply. The check on Mrs Helm was a routine one, he insisted, undertaken because the woman worked for a committee linked to the Council for National Defense. There would have been no investigation, he said, had the FBI known the women worked for the President's wife. Unimpressed, for both women were well known in Washington, the First Lady fired off another letter.

‘I do not wonder,' she wrote this time, ‘that we are beginning to get an extremely jittery population … This type of investigation seems to me to smack too much of the Gestapo methods.' Edgar had to apologize, but the long-term effect was probably to inflame him even more against Mrs Roosevelt. Word of the episode had flashed around Washington – and to humiliate Edgar was to make him more dangerous.

Scholarship in later years gave some credence to the notion that the President's wife had a secret sex life. Her 1992 biographer, Blanche Cook, suggested she may have had physical
relationships with Earl Miller, the state trooper who served as her bodyguard, and with Lorena Hickok, the lesbian reporter who covered the White House for the Associated Press. No one has gone so far as Edgar, who suspected Mrs Roosevelt of having affairs with several men, including her black driver, an Army colonel, her doctor and two leaders of the National Maritime Union.

The two labor leaders, both former sailors, used to joke about cultivating the First Lady to gain access to the President. ‘Goddamn it, Blackie,' one was overheard saying to the other on an FBI bug, ‘I've made enough sacrifices. Next time
you
service the old bitch!'

This was almost certainly no more than a coarse joke, but Edgar took it seriously. Here was promising material – information suggesting that the President's wife was sleeping with two labor leaders, one of them a leading member of the Communist Party. Edgar sent the President a cascade of reports on the two men, but kept the sex angle to himself. Then, at the height of the war, he began to concentrate on one of Eleanor's left-wing male friends – Joseph Lash.

Lash was thirty when he met Eleanor, then fifty-five, at a 1939 session of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Lash was not a Communist, but a fervent anti-Fascist who had visited the Soviet Union and Spain during the Civil War, then returned to become a radical student leader. To Edgar he was a subversive who deserved investigation. Eleanor, however, took Lash under her wing, invited him to meet the President at the White House, lent him money and tried to further his career.

On Edgar's orders, FBI officials prepared an eleven-page memorandum on Lash in 1941. The following January, agents broke into the New York headquarters of the American Youth Congress, of which Lash was a leader, and photographed the First Lady's correspondence with the group's officials. The same month, when Lash's application to
join the Navy was turned down, Mrs Roosevelt wrote to Attorney General Biddle.

‘I wonder,' she asked, ‘if it would be possible for you to run down for me through the Federal Bureau of Investigation … what they really have on Joe Lash.' Biddle referred the inquiry to Edgar, who replied smoothly that ‘the FBI is conducting no investigation.' This was a common Bureau circumlocution. In Bureauspeak, the collection of information was different from a full inquiry. In fact, Edgar's closest aides had been discussing Lash with the naval authorities.

Drafted instead into the Army, Lash spent the weeks that followed with Mrs Roosevelt clucking solicitously around him. She paid for champagne and the band at Lash's farewell party in New York. Edgar took note of all this, and of the fact that Lash stayed in White House accommodations when on leave from his base near Washington.

By November 1942, Edgar was sending ‘extremely confidential' information – its nature still censored in a document released by the FBI in 1990 – to a general in Army Intelligence. The next month, following an FBI burglary at the offices of the International Student Service, an FBI report referred to Lash and Eleanor Roosevelt and their ‘unusual friendship.' ‘This,' one of Edgar's aides wrote, ‘is nauseating.'

In April 1943, when Lash had been posted to Illinois, Edgar sent more information to the military authorities, specifically to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. Then, three months later, on instructions from the White House, the corps was drastically reduced in numbers and merged with another unit. By 1944, it had been virtually dismantled. Why?

The answer lies in a two-page report sent to Edgar's office on December 31, 1943, and stored ever since in his files. It was from Agent George Burton, reporting on contacts with two counterintelligence colonels. The unit's surveillance of Lash, Burton reported, had covered his meeting with Mrs Roosevelt at a hotel in Chicago. The President himself had found out and summoned General Strong of Army
Intelligence to the White House with the relevant records. ‘The material,' Agent Burton reported,

contained a recording of the entire proceedings between Lash and Mrs Roosevelt which had been obtained through a microphone which had been planted in the hotel room. This recording indicated quite clearly that Mrs Roosevelt and Lash engaged in sexual intercourse during their stay in the hotel room … After this record was played Mrs Roosevelt was called into the conference and was confronted with the information and this resulted in a terrific fight between the President and Mrs Roosevelt. At approximately 5:00 A.M. the next morning the President called for General Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, and … ordered him to have Lash outside the United States and on his way to a combat post within ten hours … It was learned that the President had ordered that anybody who knew anything about this case should be immediately relieved of his duties and sent to the South Pacific for action against the laps until they were killed …

Today it is difficult, if not impossible, to ferret out the truth behind this astonishing document. It is peppered with inaccuracies, and other surviving documents fall short of establishing for sure whether or not Eleanor Roosevelt had an affair with Joe Lash. The file shows that the Army's sleuths, who regularly opened Lash's mail, discovered he was receiving a stream of letters from both Mrs Roosevelt and a fellow radical, Trude Pratt. Pratt, then still married to another man, was going through a complicated courtship with Lash, with intimate encouragement from the President's wife.

Mrs Roosevelt's many letters to Lash were filled with political chitchat and torrents of affection. ‘Joe dearest,' began one letter written in February. ‘… I feel so excited about the thought of hearing your voice. What will I do when I actually
see you?… I am glad you drink your milk and hope some day you get enough sleep … I am enclosing a letter that came with a valentine from Trud … I pray St Valentine too that he may bring us all together but that is because
I
need you very much … I must close so bless you dear and a world of love. E. R.'

Army Intelligence was watching on March 5, when Mrs Roosevelt had the first of two rendezvous with Lash in Illinois hotels. She checked into Room 332 of the Urbana-Lincoln Hotel in Urbana, accompanied by her aide, Malvina Thompson, told the desk she wanted no publicity and reserved an adjacent room, Number 330, for ‘a young friend.' Joe Lash checked into his room that evening, and he and the First Lady stayed upstairs, except for one visit to the dining room, until they left the hotel thirty-six hours later.

Mrs Roosevelt wrote another ‘Joe dearest' letter on the train that bore her away. ‘Separation between people who love each other,' she wrote, ‘makes the reunion always like a new discovery … Bless you dear. Thanks for such a happy time. All my love E. R.' Mrs Roosevelt wished Lash well for his meeting with Trude Pratt the next weekend.

The Army's secret agents were there in strength a week later, when Lash and his wife-to-be had a tryst at the same hotel. This time the bedroom was bugged, and the microphones picked up the sounds of frequent lovemaking. They also picked up a call from the couple to Mrs Roosevelt at the White House.

Within days, a senior officer in Army Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Boyer, was writing an astonishing letter to a superior in Washington. The letters between Lash, Trude Pratt and Mrs Roosevelt, Boyer said, were evidence of a ‘gigantic conspiracy.' In fact there is nothing conspiratorial in the letters. The Colonel, however, intended to wait for another opportunity, then burst in on Lash having intercourse with Mrs Pratt and arrest him on a morals charge.