The secret policeman

OFFICIAL AND CONFIDENTIAL: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover By Anthony Summers (Victor Gollancz, $250) BECAUSE it promises such sensational reading, it is a temptation to damn Anthony Summers' new biography, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover , with faint praise. At last, for the reader with a predisposition to believe that an individual's right to liberty, justice and fraternity, should be preserved, revenge is nigh. We will discover in Mr Summers' 438-page work, with its substantial notes, what many had already suspected: that the authoritarian head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was a twisted soul who blackmailed and persecuted others for the criminaland anti-social behaviour he himself practised. The book, we are promised, will prove that Hoover, who sat at the top of the world's most advanced information gathering network, was a homosexual, a blackmailer and a passive collaborator in the defence of the Mafia. For the persecuted of the McCarthy era to the prosecuted liberals of the sixties, the book should be a vindication. But, sadly, for all its promise - including the claims that Hoover used his knowledge of US President John F. Kennedy's private life to ensure that Lyndon Johnson became vice-president and that he was blackmailed by the Mafia after they discovered he wasa homosexual and a transvestite - proof is not substantially revealed. Instead, we are presented with a series of controversial claims which set out to establish that Hoover was a moral degenerate, and which, on balance, leave readers unconvinced. The thesis of the book begins where so many other biographies have ended: that Hoover, the brilliant, assiduous student of law, who rose to the top of the FBI while still in his 20s, was not just a villain but a hypocritical and tortured one. To substantiate his claims, Mr Summers, also the author of Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, The Kennedy Conspiracy and a highly-regarded work on the British Profumo affair, Honeytrap, said he and his research team spent four years researchingthe secret life of the world's most powerful policeman. During those years the team turned up people who said that Hoover had a long-standing homosexual relationship with Clyde A. Tolson, a colleague in the FBI, and that he had attended, if not participated in, gay orgies at the Plaza Hotel in New York. To complement these proclivities, Hoover, who made persecution of homosexuals one of his life-long causes, is alleged to have publicly flaunted himself as a transvestite during these and other gatherings, where he paraded in a little (or big) black dress, high heels, wig and false eyelashes. Such penchants, the author argues, placed Hoover in the psychological pay of the Mafia who blackmailed him into protecting their activities from prosecution. Much of this, however, appears to be based on secondhand accounts, rumours and a single reference to a court appearance in New Orleans, allegedly on charges of homosexuality. So while this material is titillating, it does not make the book. What does, however, is the flesh given to past portraits of an obsessed Hoover, buried as an all-American hero and now regarded as one of the nation's most sinister examples of corrupt power. His targets included every US president from the wartime leader Franklin D. Roosevelt to the last president who entered his domain, disgraced Richard Nixon. During his 48-year reign Hoover compiled massive security files on the nation's leaders and when necessary, the biographer argues, used this intelligence to place people in power who thought and acted as he believed they should. In the course of his manipulations, he took extraordinary risks and made catastrophic mistakes. He collected files and pictures which supposedly proved President Kennedy's adultery, before and after he became president, and information on President Nixon's involvement in Watergate. It was this knowledge, as the book obliquely illustrates, that gave Hoover both power and protection. A long-term resident of Washington, who not only worked but had grown up and been educated in the US capital, he was soaked in the history and, as time went on, the scandal of the city. He knew where skeletons were buried and with the vast FBI network at his fingertips he also had, on many occasions, the evidence to support what was high-class gossip to the less well-informed. Nobody escaped his net. In one example of how the tentacles of the FBI reached across the world, Mr Summers describes a Nixon visit to Hongkong in 1958. Then 45, married and serving as vice-president, Nixon met a Hongkong woman in her 20s, Marianna Liu, who was working as a tourist guide. After he resigned from office, Liu is reported in the book as saying, they met each year from 1964 to 1966 when Nixon came to the territory on business. Both parties denied any sexual involvement but there was a suspicion that the woman was a Communist Chinese agent. Years later, after FBI and CIA investigations into the episode had been completed, a photograph of Liu with a newly-elected President Nixon appeared in the American press. The American agent involved alerted Hoover to Liu's past history. Mr Summers provides a named source to prove his claim but, in the end, Hoover seems to have done nothing. Unchecked sexual innuendo was grist to Hoover's manipulative mill, he argues, to be stored, and later played out when his own powerful interests were either threatened or needed to be shored up. Hoover, of course, became worse as he grew older. He surrounded himself with old men like himself and that in the end was his downfall. Nixon set the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against him and eventually this more youthful network began to contain his power. Hoover died as the revelations about Nixon's involvement in the Watergate cover-up were about to break. In the context of Mr Summers' biography, the outcome might have been quite different if Hoover had lived through the investigation.