J.Edgar Hoover: Father of the Cold War
By Andrew Kiel
Andrew Kiel has issued a revised and expanded version of his book, first issued in 2000. It is entitled J. Edgar Hoover: The Father of the Cold War. In the introduction, he argues that Hoover actually began the Cold War decades prior to 1945. He traces this back to the Palmer raids and Hoover’s active participation in them (which he tried to deny). Historians usually refer to this as the first Red Scare. And quite a few of them note that many of the acts of terror that took place—like bombings on Wall Street—were really done by anarchists.
There can be little doubt that Hoover was a major factor pushing the second Red Scare. For example, Hoover was very important in the case of Alger Hiss. And it was that case that gave Joe McCarthy the idea of opening Senate inquiries into domestic spying for the USSR. As the author notes in his first chapter, Hoover always maintained that communism was the root of all evil, both in the USA and internationally. (pp.5- 6) He also held that it was made up of an international conspiracy, which, to put it mildly, was not accurate.
Kiel observes that Hoover’s entry into the Justice Department coincided with the Russian Revolution. (p. 15). And Hoover chose serving there over enlisting in the military during World War I. While at Justice, his first important assignment was assembling lists of German aliens who appeared to be radicals and summarizing cases for their deportation. (p. 22) But very soon, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer turned to Hoover, at the then Bureau of Investigation, to put together a plan to mass arrest and deport radicals who Palmer suspected were involved in a series of domestic bombings.
As the book notes, during the planning stage, when Palmer got sick, Hoover himself continued to design the massive raids. (p. 30) He also arranged for the arrest subjects not to be advised about their rights to counsel. Once enacted, these went on from November of 1919 to February of 1920. About ten thousand were arrested, and 6,500 were released due to abuse of legal procedure. Palmer was so severely criticized by the nascent American Civil Liberties Union that it sabotaged his attempt to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1920.
But Hoover, partly due to deceptions about his participation, escaped pretty much unscathed—at least at the time. In fact, he became Acting Director and then Director in 1924, at age 29. He cooperated with Major General Ralph H. Van Deman in setting up a domestic intelligence network. And even when told about organized crime in the drug trade, he did very little to counteract that group. (p. 49)
Hoover falsified reports about the activities of the Bonus Army, and this helped push President Herbert Hoover’s decision to order the military to attack the last of the demonstrators. Which led to Hoover’s defeat at the hands of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. (p. 52) Relying on the work of Robert Unger, Kiel disputes the official Hoover/FBI story on the 1933 Kansas City Massacre, sometimes called the Union Station Massacre. In that incident 3 policemen and one FBI agent were killed, and two agents were wounded. This was part of an escape attempt for a criminal, Frank Nash, who was being transferred. Nash was also killed in the shootout. Revisionist authors like Unger claim that the men Hoover accused of being part of the hit team—Adam Richetti and Pretty Boy Floyd—were actually not. Richetti was executed after trial, and Floyd was shot to death in a shootout. Hoover used the incident to frame them and expand the Bureau’s powers.
By 1936, Hoover was back to countering subversion against both fascism and communism at home. The FBI began to utilize black bag jobs and listening devices to do so. Hoover used the formation of the congressional Dies Committee in 1938 as a platform to advertise his triumphs in the field. In 1944, he went on the radio to broadcast that message. He proclaimed that the Axis Fifth Column had been uprooted and smashed, and there had not been “a single act of enemy-directed sabotage in our nation”. (pp. 58-59)
By the end of World War II, it had become clear that Hoover had assembled secret files on powerful people, and Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney Generals like Frank Murphy, Robert Jackson, and Francis Biddle all warned about his accumulating power. (p. 61) Harry Truman had little love for the FBI:
We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex life scandals and plain black mail when they should be catching criminals. They also have a habit of sneering at local law enforcement officers. This must stop. Cooperation is what we must have. (p. 62)
The problem for Truman was that Hoover had amassed too much power by now. Secondly, the Dies Committee was about to evolve into the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Further, in 1946, both Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy were voted into Congress, Nixon in the lower house and McCarthy in the Senate. These two men would prove to be powerful appendages for the Director. They would broadcast all the accusations that Hoover could not actually prove about the Red Menace. In 1947, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act. This weakened unions and forced their leaders to take oaths swearing they were not communists. (p. 63)
Hoover now told Attorney General Tom Clark that he was going to:
Intensify the Bureau’s investigation of Communist party activities and Soviet espionage cases so as to produce a list of all members of the Communist Party and any others who would be dangerous in the event of a break in diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, or any other serious crisis involving the United States and the USSR. (ibid)
And he did. He made a list of 12,000 of the most dangerous people he thought were Reds and was ready to seize them in case of a war with the USSR. Truman was on the defensive, and he knew it. In 1946, the GOP announced that the election choice would be between Republicanism and Communism. Truman now established ’loyalty boards’ in the federal government and the Truman Doctrine of containment as foreign policy. But Truman did resist Hoover when he established the Central Intelligence Agency. Truman insisted that Hoover should not run both a domestic and foreign intelligence apparatus. (p. 64)
But Hoover, Nixon, the HUAC and McCarthy were off and running. As author Stefan Kanfer has depicted it, the Plague Years were let loose upon America. And J. Edgar Hoover was one of its main architects; some would say he was the main driver. It was the age of the Hollywood Ten, with Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan as informants for the FBI. (p. 65) The Smith Act was used to convict over 100 leaders of the CPUSA. That was followed by the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which required communist organizations to register with the Attorney General. (p. 68) Truman vetoed the act, arguing that it violated civil liberties. But Congress overrode his veto. It ultimately ended up restricting communists from federal employment and denying them passports. It was the age of FBI infiltrator Herbert Philbrick and his TV show I Led Three Lives. Hoover had 300 agents working on the Alger Hiss case in aid of Richard Nixon. (pp. 66-67; please watch this film about that case https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur3zMy5_BSw)
Then came the Klaus Fuchs/ David Greenglass/Rosenberg case. Hoover knew that there were problems in that case. (p. 68) In fact, it turned out that Greenglass had committed perjury against the Rosenbergs. (NY Times, 10/14/14, story by Robert McFadden) As Hoover did with Nixon, he also supplied Joe McCarthy with reams of information in order to make the most outlandish statements about a communist ring of espionage within the US government. As FBI agent William Sullivan later stated:
We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using. I knew what we were doing. I worked on it myself. At the same time, we were telling the public we had nothing to do with it…We gave McCarthy all we had, but all we had were fragments, nothing could prove his accusations. (pp. 68-69)
When Robert Kennedy became minority counsel of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and when attorney Joseph Welch stood up to the senator on live television, these combined to be McCarthy’s Waterloo. But again, by disguising his relationship with McCarthy, Hoover was able to escape the effects of the senator’s downfall. When, in fact, many memos and letters prove that they were quite close. (p. 69)
But although McCarthy had crashed and burned, Dwight Eisenhower listened to the Director on the subversion issue. (p. 70) And in 1956, Hoover began his infamous COINTELPRO projects: the surveillance, infiltration and subversion of leftist groups and organizations; the most famous example being the destruction of the Black Panthers.
In 1960, Hoover supported Richard Nixon for president, and he tried to hurt John Kennedy’s campaign by spreading stories about Joseph Kennedy. (p. 73) Once JFK won and he installed Robert Kennedy as Attorney General, there were certain things that RFK changed in the Director/AG relationship. For example, Bobby wanted a direct line to Hoover; he did not want to go through the Director’s secretary. He would talk to FBI agents without telling Hoover in advance, and he would walk into Bureau meetings without warning. (p. 74)
But there were two areas of policy in which Hoover and RFK greatly differed. Bobby Kennedy had made his reputation as a Senate counsel attacking and questioning certain members of national organized crime, the Cosa Nostra--for example, Sam Giancana. And the Cosa Nostra was an area of criminal activity that the FBI and Hoover had pretty much ignored. Secondly, Bobby Kennedy felt that the communist threat was, to say the least, rather exaggerated:
It is such nonsense to have to waste time prosecuting the Communist Party. It couldn’t be more feeble and less of a threat. And besides, its membership consists largely of FBI agents. As far as having any real influence as a party in the United States, it’s zero. (p. 76)
What made it worse was that friends of Hoover and his number two man, Clyde Tolson--like millionaires Syd Richardson and Clint Murchison--thought John Kennedy was really a socialist who was anti-business. This was accented by the president’s actions during the famous Steel Crisis of 1962. (p. 79)
And there was a third area of disagreement. The Kennedys were not going to repeat what Eisenhower did by pretty much ignoring civil rights. In this critic’s opinion, Kiel underestimates what Kennedy did in that field prior to 1963. But for the first time, Bobby Kennedy made some FBI agents work under him for that cause. (Click here for more https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-1)
There was one other point of contention. There was a real possibility that JFK was not going to grant an exception for Hoover to the rule of retirement at age 70. Lyndon Johnson did so. (p. 105)
As Kiel notes, these and other conflicts with the Director led to him not being very chagrined when he called up Bobby Kennedy to tell him his brother had been shot in Dallas. (p. 106) But beyond that, after JFK was killed, as Bobby said, ”…he no longer had to pay any attention to me. And it was in the interest of…Johnson-- to have that kind of a relationship and arrangement.” (p. 107)
From here, the book more or less divides itself into two long sections. The first is a rigorous and detailed critique of how Hoover mishandled his duties for the Warren Commission. Hoover very quickly decided that first, he was going to label Oswald a communist, and second, he was going to make him into a lone gunman. As Kiel notes, there are some puzzling aspects to this almost instant verdict. One of the most interesting paradoxes is that Hoover knew that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City by the 23rd. Hoover understood that neither the picture nor voice tape that was sent up to his agents matched the man in detention in Dallas. (p. 127) In other words, someone was conducting a masquerade about 7 weeks in advance of the guy who would be blamed for the murder of JFK. Kiel could have added that six weeks later, Hoover wrote in the marginalia of a memo that the CIA had sold him a snow job on Oswald in Mexico City. (The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, by James DiEugenio, p. 266)
In the face of many discrepancies about who Oswald really was, Hoover kept up the charade that the man was a true communist. Kiel quotes Alan Belmont—who supervised the Oswald inquiry for Hoover-- and Tolson as having decided on this as early as the 24th. (p. 144) The author notes several witnesses who offered testimony that this was likely not the case, like Dennis Ofstein, who said Oswald talked to him about microdot photography when they worked together at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. (p. 150) Kiel also mentions the suspicious trail Oswald left in New Orleans with men like Guy Banister and David Ferrie.
When William Sulivan told Hoover that a matter like Kennedy’s assassination could not be investigated in a week’s time, Hoover replied with “Just how long do you estimate it will take? It seems to me we have the basic facts now” (pp. 215-16) The reader should keep in mind that the FBI never really did do a bottom up investigation of Oswald in Mexico City. And there were indications of a conspiracy by witnesses like Richard Case Nagell and Joseph Milteer that the FBI knew about. Instead, Hoover decided to construct dossiers on the members of the Warren Commission. These included sexual activities and alleged communist associations. (p. 217) After all, it was Hoover who briefed Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach before he wrote his infamous memo on November 25th, saying the public must be convinced Oswald was the assassin and he had no confederates. (pp. 218-19)
As the author notes, after a meeting in Washington, it was Hoover who more or less put the skids to the Texas inquiry on the case being conducted by Attorney General Waggoner Carr. (p. 226) As Senator Richard Russell said about the rather shabby FBI report that the Director submitted to the Commission: “They have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.” To which Congressman Hale Boggs replied, “You have put your finger on it.” (p. 227)
As Kiel notes, Hoover made a rather shocking statement to the Commission when asked about the possibility of a conspiracy. He said:
I have been unable to find any scintilla of evidence showing any foreign conspiracy or any domestic conspiracy that culminated in the assassination of President Kennedy. (p. 312)
To mention just one instance, it was the FBI who tipped off the Secret Service in Chicago in early November that there was a plot afoot to kill Kennedy when he visited there. Their informant was codenamed ‘Lee’. (DiEugenio, p. 274) The author concludes that Hoover was guilty of obstruction of justice in the Kennedy case.
The second long section of the book deals with the issue of Kennedy and Vietnam. Disagreeing with what LBJ wrote in his book The Vantage Point, Kiel does not believe that Johnson continued the same policy that President Kennedy had on Indochina. (p. 342) Kiel does a fairly decent job in tracing the background of this epochal conflict from about 1950 to Johnson’s massive escalations.
Although he does mention it, one point I think he should have accented more was how Truman broke with FDR’s policy in Indochina. (p. 344) Kennedy was pretty much trying to go back to FDR.
So what does this have to do with Mr. Hoover? Kiel is trying to indicate that if the Director had not covered up what happened to JFK in Dallas, then this motive—over Vietnam—could have emerged back then. My reply is well, maybe, but I think that is kind of a stretch. For the simple reason that very few people in the sixties even imagined such a thing. Mainly since Johnson had done such a good job concealing what he had done. (I should add, the author confuses the poor five-part special on Vietnam, Turning Point, as being made by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. They made the almost as bad, but previous, The Vietnam War. Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/turning-point-the-vietnam-war-part-1)
There seems little doubt today that Hoover acted as a knowing accessory after the fact in the murder of JFK. And Kiel could have also added to his verdict the HSCA report on the probable fixing of Jack Ruby’s polygraph test. (DiEugenio, pp. 267-70). Kiel has hammered one more nail into the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.
