THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506220586
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
GAY Edgar Hoover.
The story was too good to be true. Two years ago, Anthony Summers wrote a gleefully scandalous best seller titled Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover which claimed that the former FBI director was homosexual, had been seen at least twice dressed in flamboyant drag at homosexual orgies and had been effectively blackmailed by organized-crime bosses into leaving them alone. The mainstream media bought it, lock, stock and bum documentation - not just ``Hard Copy'' and the National Enquirer, but Vanity Fair, USA Today and ``Frontline.''
Summers had wrung his authorial hands before in speculative conspiracy-theory books on the Kennedy assassination and Marilyn Monroe. He was fairly accustomed to making journalistic hay out of wild surmise. Admittedly, Hoover was a sitting duck: Who didn't despise him already for his sanctimonious abuses of power, wielded over a staggering 48-year government tenure from 1924 to 1972?
The FBI chief, who looked like a bulldog with a thyroid condition, routinely authorized illegal investigative techniques and kept a personal file of dossiers on prominent Americans, all the while overlooking little details like the existence of the Mafia in the United States. Meanwhile, Hoover made his minions kowtow. He was an extremely dangerous, calculating creep.
He was also, upon publication of Summers' book, long dead and unable to defend himself against less certifiable aspersions on his character.
So Summers took the uncorroborated statement of an old divorcee with an ax to grind, and the media handed him a mike. Hoover had supposedly been spotted by this sole-surviving gossip more than 40 years ago, engaging in homosexual activities in a private suite at New York's posh Plaza Hotel. The first time, the big guy was supposedly ``wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig''; the second time, he had ``a red dress on and a black feather boa around his neck.''
Never mind the tacky ensembles, there was more. On second thought, never mind that, either. The point is, this stuff went from unsupported speculation to received opinion in about eight microseconds.
Jay Leno promptly noted on the air that when Sen. Strom Thurmond first arrived in Washington, ``J. Edgar Hoover was still walking around in a training bra.'' The New Yorker was quick to present our hero as a ``G-man in a G-string.'' At a Washington press dinner, President Bill Clinton expressed concern about replacing then-embattled FBI Director William Sessions because it would ``be hard to fill J. Edgar Hoover's pumps.''
Well, the story's utter hooey, and here's the book that proves it: J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (Ivan R. Dee, 176 pp., $19.95) by Alan Theoharis. Make no mistake - this is not an apologia for Hoover. Theoharis has substantial credentials as a longstanding critic of the man and his methods.
Theoharis, a Marquette University history professor, is also author of The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition - From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover; and Spying on Americans. His new book was funded by grants from the Field Foundation, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Institute, among others. He's responsible.
``Hoover's leadership of the FBI,'' reports the professor, ``can best be understood not in terms of Summers's morality play of compromised homosexuality but as a by-product of the politics and priorities of Cold War America. It is a story of a resourceful bureaucrat who successfully circumvented the limitations of the American constitutional system of checks and balances. In so doing, Hoover compromised the FBI's and the Justice Department's abilities to convict organized crime leaders.''
Was Hoover gay? Theoharis doubts it. Hoover was preoccupied not with sex but power.
``If he was a practicing homosexual,'' the author adds, ``he would also have taken whatever safeguards were needed to ensure that such a dark secret would go with him to the grave.''
Undoubtedly Theoharis' illuminating look at the truth will not sell nearly as well as Summers' creatively evasive falsehood. But it is a disturbing reminder of the dangers of bandwagon journalism in the '90s. The prevailing tabloid mentality, seizing on the sensational, often overlooks the darker implications of a much more complicated reality. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB