During the four-and-a-half-year Whitewater probe of the Clinton administration, dozens of innocent individuals and entities have been swept up into independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s and congressional Republicans’ investigative machinery — only to emerge with tarnished reputations, huge legal bills and the inability to do anything about their predicament.
Nowhere have so many people been tainted as in Little Rock, the close-knit Arkansas state capital, where subpoenas, depositions, indictments, convictions — and acquittals — have touched hundreds of lives.
One institution left reeling from a multitude of media and congressional allegations is the once-venerable Rose Law Firm, where Hillary Rodham Clinton used to practice law. Three of her partners, Vincent Foster, William Kennedy III and Webster Hubbell, joined the Clintons in Washington after their 1992 victory, but only Kennedy, who was Foster’s associate White House counsel, escaped back to Little Rock — and the firm — with comparatively minimal damage.
The Rose firm itself was accused of having a conflict of interest between its (and Hillary Clinton’s) representation of Jim McDougal’s Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and the firm’s later representation of the U.S. government against Madison’s auditor. It was also accused, falsely, of having “shredded” Madison and Whitewater documents — a story that led the national news shows when broken in 1994 by the conservative Washington Times newspaper.
The Rose firm was again falsely implicated when Hillary Clinton’s infamous “missing” billing records turned up in the White House in January 1996, two years after they were subpoenaed.
And while an independent investigation into all the Rose charges eventually determined there was virtually no substance to them, the firm — the oldest west of the Mississippi River, established in 1820 — has been seriously, and permanently, damaged.
One charge frequently leveled by Clinton detractors is that the White House is continually putting roadblocks in the way of Starr’s investigation. At the top of this list are the missing Rose firm billing records of Hillary Clinton’s 60 hours of work over 15 months for McDougal, which had been removed from firm files in order to answer New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth’s questions in March 1992, during the presidential campaign.
Ignored by the media and Clinton critics is the fact that when they did surface, the records substantiated Hillary Clinton’s public and sworn statements.
Sworn testimony given in deposition by both President Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, and White House Special Counsel Jane Sherburne, who were the first to question White House secretary Carolyn Huber after she located the records, tells a largely unreported story.
Sherburne, who was hired in January 1995 from the Washington law firm Wilmer Cutler & Pickering to manage the response to all Whitewater investigations, says that Huber was at first “very unsure about when or where she had found the records in the book room,” a catch-all storage room in the family quarters of the White House. When Huber later testified, her story had become “precise,” says Sherburne. She surmises that Huber, a former Rose Law Firm secretary, “had packed them up in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock before the Clintons moved to Washington.”
All the Clintons’ boxes were stored elsewhere, says Sherburne, and then brought, a few at a time, to the book room, where Huber unpacked them and determined what should be done with the contents.
“But in the rush to clear out the book room in 1995 to make office space for the people who were going to help Mrs. Clinton write her book, ["It Takes a Village"], Carolyn probably threw the billing records she had unpacked into a box along with the old shoes and empty hangers that were also in the box, and moved it to her office to deal with later.”
So much for the “mystery.”
In Starr’s search for records, Sherburne also had the distasteful task of complying with Starr’s threat to search the Clintons’ living quarters for a mysterious box described to her as having the name “Foster” on it.
“They wouldn’t give me a clue as to what size it was supposed to be,” Sherburne said. She was told that FBI agents would do the search. “‘Are you out of your minds?’ she says she told them. “FBI agents searching the president’s private living quarters?” After negotiations, Starr’s staff told her they would trust her to do it, accompanied by the White House head usher. Sherburne asked another lawyer to join her also.
Hillary Clinton’s reaction to the search? “‘Just get in here and do it,’” says Sherburne. “Her attitude by then was, ‘It’s another indignity I have to endure, and I’m not going to waste any energy getting upset about it.” There have been reports that the search included the Clintons’ underwear and lingerie drawers — Chelsea’s too. “The whole thing was so offensive to me that I don’t want to confirm or deny that,” says Sherburne, but Salon’s interview with Sherburne left no doubt that she had indeed searched the Clintons’ underwear drawers, and every other nook and cranny of the family’s living quarters. “It took several hours. It was thorough,” she says. “And it did not turn up a box with Vincent Foster’s name on it.”
The constant stream of charges against Hillary Clinton and her partners besmirched the reputation of the Rose firm, which until then had been the premier firm in Arkansas. Rose’s reputation “was tarnished — for the most part wrongly and unfairly and in ways that can never be undone,” writes reporter Terry Carter in the July issue of the American Bar Association Journal. “The Rose Law Firm got a bum rap” and came under relentless scrutiny that “probably few could survive.” His article chronicles Rose’s descent into the maelstrom and its efforts to recover from the charges and slurs hurled at it.
Carter blames “an unholy alliance of congressional members and staff, special interest groups and the news media,” but except for Webster Hubbell’s conviction for overbilling — which the firm itself, not Starr — uncovered, “sensational allegations of wrongdoing at the firm have proved untrue, and that has gone unreported.”
The firm was left to pick up the pieces and move ahead, without what had been the expected return of Foster, whom, Carter says, many Rose attorneys regarded “as the soul of the firm.” Nine Rose lawyers have left to form their own firm, taking its most lucrative practice in securities with them.
Leading Rose today is Ronald M. Clark, who as the firm’s point man during the years of investigations was badgered by the press and by the Republicans on the Senate Whitewater Committee, particularly Chairman Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y. When the FDIC reported in spring 1994 that the Rose firm had no serious conflicts of interest in the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan work, “D’Amato was furious,” according to Carter, and he ordered a re-investigation.
Under the more compliant Resolution Trust Corporation, the re-investigation was turned over to the Washington office of Pillsbury Madison & Sutro, and the RTC specifically designated Jay Stephens as the lead attorney. Stephens, President George Bush’s appointee to the office of U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, had just been fired by President Clinton, as had all 90 U.S. attorneys, which is customary when the opposing party wins the White House.
In addition, Stephens had publicly and personally criticized President Clinton and had considered challenging for Democratic Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb’s seat in 1994 (as had Starr). Clintonites and Democrats complained loudly about Stephens’ partisanship, and Pillsbury later put the investigation into the hands of two other Pillsbury attorneys.
Pillsbury vastly widened the investigation to include all of Rose’s work on 38 savings and loans for the RTC and FDIC in the S&L “bailout” of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Like hundreds of law firms nationwide, Hubbell and Foster at Rose sought and received some of the massive amount of legal work the government was contracting out.
Then, in a stunning reversal of government policy, many of these same firms were later themselves aggressively audited and sued. But Pillsbury reported in 1995 that it still hadn’t found “substantial problems with Rose’s work.” Indeed, in 1994, Ira Parker, the RTC’s associate general counsel, told this Salon reporter, “I chose the Rose Law Firm to do the work because they were the best firm in Arkansas.”
But D’Amato also found that exoneration unacceptable, and ordered Pillsbury back to work, the edict being “to find wrongdoing,” says Carter. Pillsbury, he says, then found a few “impermissible conflicts” that were inevitable “in a small state with only so many lawyers capable of handling big matters.” The RTC demanded a return of $300,000, and Rose finally settled (as have many law firms to avoid lengthy and even more costly litigation with the government and its bottomless pockets) for $210,000.
Ron Clark observed: “They didn’t find one thing wrong with Foster’s bills.” And Pillsbury’s final 1996 report noted, regarding Rose’s work for Madison Guaranty: “It simply would not be persuasive to argue that, for $21,000 [in legal fees over several years], McDougal corrupted the Rose Law Firm and convinced half a dozen lawyers, most of whom he did not know, to join him in a scheme to violate the law … The conspiracy theory is hopelessly flawed.”
Jay Stephens refused to review and sign off on his firm’s report, despite having billed the government $68,000 for what he called his “minimal” work. Republicans had labeled Hillary Clinton’s work for Madison “substantial,” when, in fact, she had realized only about $300 from her work for Madison and McDougal.
The Pillsbury report also addressed the widely reported canard that the Rose Law Firm had “shredded” Madison Guaranty and Whitewater-related documents. Pillsbury said that any discarding of those documents was done “in a seemingly innocent context of routine purging of files.”
It turned out that a college student who had worked as a courier for Rose had leaked the shredding story to the Washington Times. He later advertised in the American Spectator that he had samples of shredded Whitewater paper to sell, although the actual documents shredded had nothing to do with Whitewater, says Carter.
Today, determined to rebound, Rose has instituted a tighter management system under Clark and changed its compensation system. “How many firms in America could withstand what we withstood and survive?” Clark asked in his interview with Carter. Not counting the hours spent on complying with congressional demands, Rose’s legal bills exceeded $1 million.
After several grillings before the Senate Whitewater Committee, D’Amato offered a left-handed apology to Clark and the Rose firm, perhaps inspired by the senator’s own approval ratings, which had dropped below 30 percent. D’Amato acknowledged that “witnesses such as Clark may find themselves in positions which are unfair,” and that he believed Clark “attempted to answer the questions to the absolute best” of his recollection, had not “withheld anything” and “answered in all candor … We have a duty to try to set that record straight and indicate that.”
That exchange, however, was not reported in any publication — not the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette nor the Washington Times, which broke the discredited shredding story.
But then, the Whitewater story has always been much more a media story than an actual criminal case, anyway. The Whitewater story is actually a breakdown in American journalism of historic proportions, as some of the country’s leading media outlets failed to understand — and accurately report — the complexities of a political witch hunt.
Writing in Rolling Stone this week, Rick Perlstein looks at how the FBI regularly entraps and creates “terrorists” out of anarchists and activists, while comparatively ignoring violent white supremacist groups.
Using some recent examples, Perlstein paints a startling picture. He notes the arrest this month of a small group of self-identified anarchists, participating in Occupy Cleveland, who — strung along in an FBI sting — planned to blow up a large Ohio bridge. The target was suggested and (fake) C-4 explosives were provided by an FBI infiltrator. As Perlstein put it, the episode was one among numerous law enforcement schemes since 2001 in which “the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.”
Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.
The distinction between entrapment (which is illegal) and a sting (which is legal) now appears to be a much eroded line in the sand. As Perlstein’s piece points out, it is up to a jury once arrests have been made whether law enforcement set up a trap or a sting. In previous decades, defendants have been acquitted in cases of entrapment; but not in recent years:
Not a single “terrorism” indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them when offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”)
One of the most famous recent cases of FBI infiltration — which is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone article — hangs over anarchist networks worldwide. Brandon Darby, the once trusted activist and organizer-turned-FBI-informant and now writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, is the dirtiest name to utter in anarchist circles. Darby infiltrated groups organizing protests around the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Darby fed the FBI information, which helped them seize riot shields made by a group from Texas. Enraged by the seizure (but still viewing Darby as a comrade) two young men from Austin, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, bought the materials for and constructed Molotov cocktails with the thought of using them against state vehicles. The two, however, decided overnight that this was a bad idea — and left the devices at home, with no intention of using them.
Darby passed information about the Molotov cocktail plans on to the FBI, and McKay and Crowder were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. While Crowder accepted a plea deal without trial for a two-year prison sentence for making the devices, McKay went to trial, arguing Darby entrapped him. The trial ended with a hung jury. Before the retrial, however, McKay retracted claims of entrapment and agreed to accept a plea deal (and serve a four-year prison sentence, for making the Molotovs and perjury).
Perlstein notes that “the State is singling out ideological enemies” – and if federal sting targets are much to go by, the State’s position is clear: anti-capitalists, environmentalists and Muslims are threats; racists are not. We can respond by decrying FBI activity, and by arguing that their targets are not real threats. Or, we can take patterns of FBI activity more seriously and ask why anti-capitalists are more threatening than white supremacists. This line of questioning can likely be reduced to two questions, chanted again and again up and down the country when protest front lines are faced with lines of police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”
This interview first appeared in The Browser, as part of the FiveBooks series. Previous contributors include Paul Krugman, Woody Allen and Ian McEwan. For a daily selection of new article suggestions and FiveBooks interviews, check out
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The job of the intelligence services is to understand others and help leaders act more wisely, says Tim Weiner, the author of a new history of the FBI. There’s also, he tells us, a balance to be struck between liberty and security.
You have spent decades studying the inner workings of America’s intelligence system, and the past few years looking at newly released files from the FBI. What will we learn by reading your new history of the FBI, “Enemies”?
You will learn that the Bureau has served first and foremost as a secret intelligence service reporting to the president of the United States. In its first incarnation under J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled the Bureau for 48 years, the FBI was the president’s secret intelligence service. Today, 40 years after Hoover’s death, we still live in the shadow of his legacy. How do you run a secret intelligence agency in an open and democratic society? How do you balance national security and civil liberty? How can we be both safe and free? These are questions that Hoover struggled with, and that we struggle with still.
Your prize-winning book about the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” was called “a credible and damning indictment of U.S. intelligence policy” by Publishers Weekly. What are the counts in your indictment, if you agree with that assessment?
I certainly agree that “Legacy of Ashes” is credible, because every assertion is documented. There are about 200 pages of endnotes, and about 80 pages of endnotes in “Enemies.” When I say something, I back it up. But “Legacy of Ashes” is not an indictment of the CIA. The CIA and FBI are reflections of who we are as Americans. We are the most powerful nation on earth. We project our power across the globe, and in order to do that we need good intelligence. When intelligence fails, war happens and people die. When intelligence succeeds, war can be prevented and lives can be saved.
America is not very good at gathering intelligence, but we’re getting better. It’s understandable, because Americans have only been at it in a serious and concerted way since World War II. The British have been at it since Queen Elizabeth I, over five centuries. The Russians have been at it since Peter the Great. And the Chinese have been at it ever since Sun Tzu wrote “The Art of War,” so 26 centuries.
I want my books to serve not as an indictment but as a warning. If the U.S. doesn’t strike the balance correctly between security and countervailing concerns, we may lose our rights and our liberties, and we may not survive as a free republic. We have made many mistakes, the consequences of which can be measured in blood and treasure, but we are improving – particularly over the last three years.
Let’s turn to the books you’ve chosen, beginning with Sun Tzu. Tell us about “The Art of War,” and what an ancient Chinese military treatise has to do with contemporary U.S. intelligence.
Sun Tzu, a Chinese general 26 centuries ago, tells us: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” That is the mission of intelligence. We can build all the billion dollar spy satellites we want – and we do – but to know your enemy is to talk to him in his own language. That is the job of spies, and that is what “The Art of War” teaches.
Chapter seven focuses on the dangers of direct conflict. How do U.S. intelligence agencies, as Sun Tzu says, “subdue the enemy without fighting”?
Through intelligence. Intelligence is the art of war without weapons.
How about black ops?
Well, you need to define what that is. Is it disinformation, lying, cheating or stealing? Black ops can mean all of those things. It can mean propaganda. It can mean putting a spy in the enemy’s camp. It can mean putting a bomb under the hood of the car of an Iranian nuclear scientist. The phrase “black operations” encompasses a multitude of sins.
All of them committed by U.S. intelligence?
The last one I listed was the work of the Israelis.
Let’s turn to a 1964 book that brought to light the role that intelligence services played in U.S. foreign policy.
“The Invisible Government” was the first reported book that actually described what the CIA did. It was written almost 50 years ago, and was a landmark. It explained that the CIA was not James Bond, which was just then becoming popular – that intelligence was not a matter of flying into a foreign capital in a trench coat, overthrowing a government, having a martini, making love and then catching the next plane. It showed that intelligence was a difficult, dirty, dangerous and at times tedious business which was about information, and how information meant power.
So it’s a very good book that is still vital today. And David Wise is still writing great books about intelligence.
In the introduction, the author defines the invisible government as the “interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States… a loose, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government”, with the CIA “at its heart”. Is that 50-year-old description of America’s intelligence apparatus still accurate? How did 9/11 change the structure of U.S. intelligence?
Things got much more complex. There are now 17 different American intelligence services, with a bureaucracy of interlocking directorates above them overseen by the Director of National Intelligence. All of them are required to report to the secretary of defense, who in turn reports to the president. In the last three years things have gotten better, largely due to the author of our next book.
That author is former CIA director and U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Michael Gates.
Robert Gates was the head of the CIA under the first President Bush. Under the second President Bush, at the end of 2006, he succeeded the irascible Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. He stayed on under Obama until just a few months ago.
Gates, as you can see in “From the Shadows,” really understands how intelligence can serve and do disservice to the president of the United States. He probably had more experience in intelligence than anyone who has ever been secretary of defense. The secretary of defense basically runs the show when it comes to intelligence. We spend somewhere just south of $100 billion a year – the precise amount is classified – on intelligence, and the secretary of defense controls 85 to 90 percent of that.
Tell us more about this book.
Bob Gates basically got off the bus from Wichita, Kan. in 1966 and went to work for the U.S. government. He went from the air force to the CIA. After learning Russian, he became an expert – as we defined it – on Russia during the Cold War. He himself never went to Russia until the Cold War was ending, even though he was considered to be among the leading experts on the USSR. He got off the plane and Gorbachev said to him: “How does it look from the ground?” Because the U.S. had been staring down at the Soviet Union from spy satellites and planes, but we didn’t understand what was going on on the ground. We could count the missiles, but we didn’t see the potatoes rotting in the field because there wasn’t enough fuel to take them to market.
Gates learned through bitter experience, over the course of half a century, how intelligence works. It’s an amazing book. And as secretary of defense he used that knowledge to improve our intelligence services.
What precisely is the relationship between the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence apparatus?
Ultimately, intelligence should serve the national security of the United States. When you get up in the morning and open the paper or turn on your computer, you want to know: Is the world safe? Is my country safe? Is my city safe? Is my family safe? That is what the president wants to know too, and that is the job of intelligence.
Can any flow chart explain the relationship between the 17 agencies that are part of the U.S. intelligence service and Department of Defense?
In theory, it’s a bunch of boxes that connect and send intelligence up through the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to the president. In the past, it has worked more like 17 different musicians with 17 different scores playing a cacophonous tune with the conductor flailing his arms madly. But we’re getting better at it.
Next you cite one of Barbara Tuchman’s lesser-known works of history, “The March of Folly.” Tell us about it.
In short, this is one of the greatest books ever written. Why did the Trojans take in the wooden horse? Why was America in Vietnam? Barbara Tuchman explores those questions, and the answer is folly – leaders acting against the interests of their constituents.
Folly explains so much of the history of world events. People believe that the world is run by conspiracies because that is what they read in novels and see on cheap TV series. But the course of world events is determined less by conspiracies than it is by stupidity. Why did the British lose the United States? How did the Renaissance popes bring on the Protestant reformation? Folly. Lack of intelligence.
Please connect the dots to our topic of intelligence.
Consider the three meanings of the word intelligence. It is the power of your mind; it is secret information; and it is secret action taken in the name of a nation. If we had more intelligence we would know our enemies, have fewer wars and there would be less folly throughout history.
If the Trojans knew the Greeks were in the horse, they wouldn’t have opened the gates.
Exactly. Why did they let the horse in? Folly.
“The March of Folly” is used to teach blind spot analysis in business schools, a method for uncovering faulty or obsolete assumptions. How do intelligence agencies perform blind spot analysis to prevent the sort of folly that Tuchman described?
“The March of Folly” explains how not to make decisions. Leaders must learn to act only out of enlightened self-interest. To use power wisely, they must make intelligent use of information. If they blunder on based on faulty assumptions, then the Greeks end up inside of Troy and Americans wind up mired in Vietnam for a decade.
Let’s end with George Orwell’s “1984.” Most of us know it, but please explain why you chose it.
None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?
“1984″ described, in 1948, what the modern surveillance state was going to look like. At the time, J. Edgar Hoover was creating that surveillance state. He is the man who invented the fingerprint file. Every camera that stares down on us in Washington, New York and London, and every bit of biometric data collected on us, is a tribute to Hoover. The greatness of Orwell’s book is that he saw it coming and described it in terms we could understand. What Orwell foretold in “1984″ was already happening as the book was being published. And that is what my history of the FBI, “Enemies,” is about.
But you suggest that America’s Big Brother is a bit of a bumbling uncle.
Like I say, we’re relatively new at this. We’ve only been at this in a serious way since World War II. The lessons of Sun Tzu are 26 centuries old and we’re only just internalising them. So give us a chance.
Also, to know your enemy you must talk to him in his own language. Nowadays that might be Arabic or Pashto or Chinese or Urdu. We don’t speak those languages very well. We want everyone to speak English. We want everyone to look like us, think like us and be like us. That isn’t a very good cultural climate for producing successful intelligence, nor for the enduring projection of power.
During a visit to the FBI, as you point out, President Obama proclaimed “we must always reject as false the choice between our security and our ideals.” But you suggest that liberty and security are opposing forces. How has the pendulum swung between liberty and security? And which way is it swinging now?
In the introduction to “Enemies” I point out that Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1787, said almost exactly the same thing. We have to have liberty and security. They are opposing forces and there is a constant tug of war between them. We strive to strike the right balance.
I would argue that over the last three years we’ve been getting it less wrong than we once did. Have we been attacked in a serious way? No. Have we created any new secret prisons? No. It was the FBI who reported the abuses in Abu Ghraib. It was the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who stared down George W Bush and told him to scale back electronic eavesdropping. Robert Mueller is an ex-Marine and also a great respecter of civil liberties. He has said that he is not going to go down in history as the guy who won the war on terror but took away our civil liberties – because that would be a pyrrhic victory.
When the FBI makes mistakes under Mueller, it admits and corrects them. He and the people he reports to must strike the balance between liberty and security every day. Lately, we’re doing a pretty good job. There will always be mistakes. Getting the balance precisely right is extremely difficult and, like democracy itself, is a work in progress.
Historic verisimilitude has never been Hollywood’s top priority, and its latest blockbuster, “J. Edgar,” is no exception.
Director Clint Eastwood, who often played the part of a lawman on the big screen, is now serving up what amounts to a brief for the defense of the FBI’s legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio). In the process, Eastwood distorts the historical record, omitting facts about Hoover’s ruthless abuse of power, and even sanitizing the infamous cross-dressing rumors involving America’s top cop.
The film deservedly gives Hoover credit for establishing the first federal police force that used modern forensics to nab bad guys, especially Prohibition-era gangsters whose grisly kidnappings and murders had captivated the public’s appetite for the lurid underworld of criminals and their molls. Eastwood also provides a plausible rationale for Hoover’s lifelong paranoia about Communism: Soon after World War I ended, the Washington home of Hoover’s boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, was bombed by an anarchist.
Fair enough.
But the biopic inaccurately portrays Hoover as a critic of Sen. Joe McCarthy. In fact, the FBI director was a crucial ally of the Red-baiting demagogue. Indeed, at Hoover’s personal direction, agents spent hundreds of hours perusing FBI files to supply McCarthy with evidence of Communist subversion. Hoover also coached McCarthy about how to insulate himself from criticism by labeling targets as “loyalty risks” instead of “card-carrying Communists,” which was harder to prove. A Hoover deputy even instructed McCarthy on manipulating press coverage by releasing his attacks just before news deadlines so that reporters wouldn’t have time to interview the other side.
Nor does the film discuss Hoover’s order to “neutralize” Eastwood’s one-time costar, actress Jean Seberg, by falsely telling journalists that she was pregnant thanks to a leader of the Black Panthers. Seberg later committed suicide; her family blamed the FBI smear.
The biopic does portray Hoover’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly because of his ties to Soviet agents, which led to FBI bugs that captured the civil rights leader’s marital infidelity. But here, too, “J. Edgar” underplays Hoover’s nefariousness. In fact, the FBI planted listening devices in King’s home, office and hotel rooms, recording more than a dozen large tape reels whose contents Hoover provided to numerous parties: the president and vice president, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA, the military, the United Nations, members of Congress, and the press.
What vital intelligence did Hoover disseminate? That King, according to Hoover, was a “tom cat” with “obsessive degenerate sexual urges.” The FBI claimed to have recorded King in flagrante during group sex parties in which, according to FBI transcripts, he boasted of his prowess (“I am the best pussy-eater in the world”) and invoked Jesus while in the throes of passion: “I’m fucking for God!”
Ultimately, FBI accounts of King’s sexual antics turned out to be embellished. Although King committed adultery, a Hoover deputy involved in the smear campaign later admitted that the African-American voices captured on FBI bugs may actually have been those of King’s associates; to the white agents who made up Hoover’s force, all black voices evidently sounded the same. Still, that didn’t stop Hoover’s minions from compiling yet another field report that spread the preposterous story that King, after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, got drunk and chased prostitutes down the hallway of his Oslo hotel — while stark naked.
Hoover stubbornly believed his incendiary leaks would “destroy the burrhead.” But they didn’t. Despite Hoover’s best efforts to spread the dirty details, no member of the press reported on them; in the mid-1960s, such gossip-mongering was anathema to the mainstream media. Still, no journalists had the courage to reveal the FBI’s witch hunt against King, either; news executives feared crossing Hoover no less than the politicians who were routinely blackmailed by him. (According to author Curt Gentry, Hoover blocked a critical magazine article by circulating photos of the publisher’s wife performing fellatio on her black chauffeur.)
Even King’s assassination didn’t stop the FBI’s vilification. Indeed, the worldwide grief over his murder made Hoover more determined than ever to resurrect the salacious stories about the martyr’s sex life. This time, the FBI found a willing outlet: columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who quoted from Hoover’s classified files about King’s “illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent Negro dentist.” (Anderson later decided that Hoover had used him to implicate King in “a posthumous scandal, to turn even his death into a sordid affair.” Three years later, Anderson paid him back by becoming the first prominent mainstream journalist to turn on Hoover — rifling through his trash, exposing his financial corruption and blackmailing techniques, even hinting that he was gay.)
And what about such gossip, including that Hoover had a secret double-life as a drag queen? In Eastwood’s movie, the rumor is transformed from the erotic to the morose: Minutes after the death of Hoover’s mother, he grieves near her body, weeping mournfully as he dons her necklace and a favorite dress. The lawman is not a sexual pervert, you see, just a faithful and bereaved son.
In truth, the outlandish cross-dressing story was circulated more than three decades after it allegedly occurred, when a witness of dubious credibility told writer Anthony Summers that she saw Hoover at a New York orgy, engaging in sex with young boys while reading a Bible. He was supposedly dressed in a red skirt, lace stockings, high heels and curly wig, a black feather boa around his neck and makeup with false eyelashes on his face.
Perhaps the posthumous vilification of Hoover as a depraved sexual hypocrite is only poetic justice; after all, during his lifetime, he was Washington’s consummate master of sexual slander and political blackmail. But instead of ignoring the baseless transvestite story, “J. Edgar” attempts to sanitize it and rehabilitate Hoover’s image.
Even Eastwood’s depiction of the FBI director’s relationship with his longtime deputy and confidant — and reputed lover — gives Hoover the heterosexual benefit of the doubt. Although Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) is portrayed as Hoover’s loyally swishy sidekick, Hoover returns the adoration with only a manly love, rebuffing Tolson’s overture to turn the relationship physical. However tormented, Hoover remains in the end closeted even from himself.
To be sure, cinematic license is to be expected in such movies; feature films are not nonfiction biographies. But given the known facts of Hoover’s life, Eastwood has painted his subject in the best light possible—better than he deserves and infinitely kinder than Hoover ever treated his many enemies, who included some of the most heroic figures of that tumultuous era.
Somewhere, J. Edgar Hoover is smiling: Clint Eastwood has made his day.
We gather today to pay tribute to two genuine American icons, but without saying anything nice about either of them. Clint Eastwood has made a movie — or at least I think that’s what it is; the lighting is often so dim it’s difficult to make out — about longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who acted as the wacko third rail of American law enforcement for almost half a century. “J. Edgar” is one of those prestige Hollywood pictures that sounds, at first, as if it might be a good idea: a name director, a supposedly big star playing a major historical figure, and a script by young screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who since “Milk” has become the go-to scribe for what is no doubt described in story meetings as “gay material.” But instead of a good idea, “J. Edgar” turns out to be one of the worst ideas anybody’s ever had, a mendacious, muddled, sub-mediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history’s most controversial figures.
I’ll get to the historical and political insults of “J. Edgar” shortly, and they are legion. But most of all it’s a boring and silly movie, which features Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling around his dreary, post-Victorian suite of offices, looking worried under a mountain of latex and makeup (when he plays the 1970s-era Hoover) and talking in one of those unplaceable, old-timey Northeast Corridor accents. (Admittedly, Hoover in life had a strange voice; he lived from birth to death in Washington, D.C., but spoke in an affected manner that sounded nothing like today’s mid-Atlantic accent.) It’s like a combination of acting-school exercises and the History Channel, with all the production values and dramatic intensity that suggests. Hoover’s longtime deputy director and presumed lover, Clyde Tolson, is played by Armie Hammer as — how do I put this delicately? — an absolute flaming queen, who uses the term “fashion-forward” during a department-store shopping expedition set in about 1930. For just a minute there, it looks as if “J. Edgar” is about to become “Queer Eye for the FBI,” and I’m profoundly sorry it doesn’t.
Actually, if there’s one area where Black’s lumpy screenplay, with its awkward chronological backing-and forthing, deserves some credit, it’s in the highly plausible account of Hoover’s relationship with Tolson. From early on in Hoover’s FBI career it was widely assumed that he was gay, but the evidence was always circumstantial and the handful of people who knew him personally always denied it. (The allegations that he was a cross-dresser came from only one source, and don’t match anything else we know about this intensely cautious and private individual. Most historians view them as urban myth.) I think the fairest thing to say is that it seems likely Hoover was primarily homosexual, despite his purported romance with actress Dorothy Lamour, but not at all clear whether he acted on those impulses. Black imagines Hoover and Tolson cohabiting as “confirmed bachelors,” in a state of permanently unresolved erotic tension, which would go a long way toward explaining the secret policeman’s massively screwed-up psychology.
But when we get back to the question of how Hoover’s psychology affected his exercise of power, “J. Edgar” goes from being just a minor melodrama about a conflicted and closeted gay man to being simultaneously stupid, offensive and random. Historical characters appear and disappear in shticky little pieces — Jessica Hecht as Emma Goldman, Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh, Jeffrey Donovan doing the world’s worst “pahk the cah in Hahvehd Yahd” accent as Robert F. Kennedy, Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon — without ever seeming to justify their presence on the stage. You get the feeling they’ve all got a problem with Hoover, but you’re never sure why. Maybe they just found him a weird and distasteful little man, which is certainly how he comes across. On the other hand, it might be helpful if this movie made the point that Hoover was as close as we’ve ever come (so far) to having an unelected dictator, and that the only real reason he didn’t become a Stalin-level tyrant was the constraint of a democratic political system he could not entirely subvert, much as he tried.
Eastwood and Black certainly bring up many of the things that made Hoover so noxious, beginning with the Palmer raids of 1919-20, which resulted in the arrests of thousands of communists and anarchists who had committed no crime. At the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed to head a special Red-hunting branch of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations, which launched his long career as a self-appointed guardian of American political rectitude, devoted to stamping out dissident opinion wherever it cropped up, and whether or not constitutional rights got trampled in the process. “J. Edgar” makes clear that Hoover conducted secret surveillance on suspected Commies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who purportedly had a lesbian affair with a reporter); perjured himself before Congress; conducted an especially vile counterintelligence program aimed at undermining the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders; and generally turned a blind eye to organized crime in his relentless persecution of left-wingers.
But you get almost no sense of the extent or intensity with which Hoover mobilized the federal government’s police force to crack down on unconventional political opinion. The second Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy 1950s is never mentioned, nor is the word COINTELPRO, and Hoover’s vicious racism is largely ignored. (Intriguingly, the rumors that Hoover was gay were echoed, during his lifetime, by speculation that he might be partly black.) Furthermore, all this stuff is presented as quirky side info in a story about a weird dude who lived with his mom (Judi Dench, giving the only tolerable performance in the whole film) and had a lifelong boyfriend he maybe never slept with. Oh, and he was way ahead of his time when it came to fingerprinting. Did I mention that? Everybody pooh-poohed his interest in bringing forensic science to law enforcement, and now look! Yes, Hoover was a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, quite likely a paranoid sociopath and incipient fascist, a terrifying incarnation of many of the worst currents of American political opinion in one individual. OK, yeah, that’s all true — but his real legacy is found in “CSI: Miami.”
Just in case you think I have some kind of personal bias when it comes to J. Edgar Hoover, well, I plead 100 percent guilty. He ruined the lives of countless innocent people and was instrumental in spreading the idea that the Constitution doesn’t apply to people who say bad things about the government. He pretty much built the slippery slide that led to the national-security state of the last decade, when civil liberties have been eviscerated and privacy is a sham. (I will further add that he personally supervised the surveillance and harassment of my mother, her then-husband and many of their colleagues in the 1940s labor movement, and I’ve seen the files to prove it.) If there’s a darker figure in American history since the Civil War, I’m really not sure who it is. Nixon? George W. Bush? Not even close. Dick Cheney? Only in his undead dreams. I only wish I believed in hell so I could believe that it wasn’t hot enough for John Edgar Hoover.
But in all honesty, I’d much rather see a vigorous, propagandistic, right-wing defense of Hoover as a bastion of true Americanism than this tepid, long-winded and phony-looking exercise, which sort of implies that, on the one hand, he wasn’t a very nice man but, on the other, he was an actual human being who suffered pain. But honestly, what can we expect from Clint Eastwood at this point? This movie says a great deal more about him, I’m afraid, than it does about J. Edgar Hoover. And what it says is that one of the greatest American screen actors of the 20th century has squandered much of that legacy in the 21st by becoming a director of indifferent Oscar-bait movies that look handsome on the surface but have nothing to say, and that nobody ever wants to watch twice. Even by the dismal recent standards of “Hereafter” and “Invictus” and “Changeling” this movie is a disappointment, because watching it once is bad enough, and because it may leave younger viewers with the impression that J. Edgar Hoover was mostly important to history because he wasn’t gay enough to have decent fashion sense.
The five men arrested on April 30 for plotting to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, Ohio. (Credit: AP/FBI) 
U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach, left, and FBI special agent in charge Stephen Anthony walk past a map showing the location of a bridge on Ohio Rt. 82. Five men, pictured on the wall behind the map, have been arrested for conspiring to blow up the bridge. (Credit: AP/Mark Duncan) 
Leonardo DiCaprio in "J. Edgar" 
Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover in "J. Edgar" 
