Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr intervened with Arkansas state prosecutors on several occasions between 1994 and 1996 in an attempt to prevent them from bringing criminal charges against David Hale, then the central witness in his investigation of President Clinton, according to law enforcement records and sources.
Starr’s pressure on the state prosecutors culminated during a meeting with them on Sept. 21, 1995, when one of his senior advisors warned that Starr might even consider charging the local law enforcement officials with federal witness intimidation if they proceeded with bringing criminal charges against Hale, according to three sources familiar with the discussions.
The new information indicates that even some of Starr’s own investigators had privately raised questions among themselves about the fairness and integrity of Starr’s four-year investigation of the president — an investigation that led to the impeachment report sent to Congress Wednesday. The criminal case against Hale that Starr attempted to derail involved a scam in which Hale looted funds from an insurance company that sold funeral and burial insurance to Arkansas residents, mostly poor African-Americans.
The facts in this case, had it been allowed to proceed to trial in a timely manner, may have further eroded Hale’s credibility as a witness against Clinton, and thereby negatively affected Starr’s entire effort long before the Monica Lewinsky scandal salvaged the independent counsel’s investigation of the Clinton presidency. As it is, the insurance scam trial of Hale is now finally scheduled to begin on Oct. 6, far too late to be relevant to Clinton’s predicament now that his presidency has been crippled by the Lewinsky affair, and his possible impeachment appears imminent.
Starr’s previously undisclosed intervention in the state case was opposed by at least two FBI agents and a federal prosecutor working for him, who said they believed that the Whitewater counsel should have taken a neutral position regarding the returning of any criminal charges against Hale by the local authorities, according to federal law enforcement officials.
The career law enforcement officials working for Starr believed that his intervention was unjustified, and reflected an inappropriate closeness between Hale and Starr’s top prosecutors that often colored their judgment during the course of the long Whitewater probe. Starr has often cited the work of such career law enforcement officers on his staff as evidence that neither politics nor a personal agenda has played any role in his investigation, but this case raises new doubts about that claim.
Starr’s intervention in the state case dramatically reversed the position of his predecessor as Whitewater independent counsel, Robert Fiske, who had advocated a posture of strict neutrality regarding the probe of Hale by Arkansas authorities. Starr himself had originally followed Fiske’s lead by taking a position of neutrality, only to later abruptly — and mysteriously — reverse himself in the matter.
His reversal took many of the career law enforcement officials who were working for him at the time by surprise, three sources said in interviews. The officials involved said that they were kept in the dark regarding Starr’s reasoning in reversing his own previous position.
Starr’s office also secretly monitored the progress of the state investigation through a series of informal contacts with the Little Rock Police Department, which was conducting the probe of Hale for the state prosecutors, according to law enforcement documents and sources.
The contacts between the Whitewater investigators and the Little Rock Police Department are detailed in dozens of pages of handwritten notes by the police detective who directed the state investigation of Hale, as well as in contemporaneous records also kept by two FBI agents working for Starr.
Starr and his senior prosecutors had about a half dozen meetings with the state prosecutors regarding the state’s potential prosecution of Hale, according to the law enforcement records and sources. FBI agents working for Starr also had at least a dozen contacts with a Little Rock police detective to covertly monitor the activities of the state prosecutors.
Initially, Starr and his top aides made the contacts with the state prosecutors to discuss how they might coordinate their various efforts and encourage cooperation between their respective agencies. Starr at first only requested that Hale not be arrested by state authorities during a period of time that he was giving sensitive federal grand jury testimony and also that Starr be given advance notice of any arrest, four law enforcement officials said in interviews.
But soon Starr and his top aides began to question not only the standing of the state prosecutors to bring any charges against Hale, but also their motivations. Next, Starr started aggressively pressuring the local law enforcement offices not to issue any indictment against Hale at all, according to sources and documents.
Starr also proposed an alternative to the state prosecutors returning an indictment against Hale by raising the possibility that Hale’s state offenses might be brought up during a federal sentencing hearing of Hale for his Whitewater crimes. The state prosecutors rejected Starr’s proposal as insufficient, saying that Hale would almost certainly escape any significant punishment under the plan — if he was even punished at all.
On Sept. 21, 1995, during an impasse in their discussions, Sam Dash, a senior advisor to Starr, told the state prosecutors that their actions might be construed as federal witness tampering if they were to bring any indictment of Hale, according to three law enforcement officials who were present at the meeting.
Starr did not attend that particular meeting, though he had been at most of the others with the state prosecuting attorneys. But three other Whitewater prosecutors, Bradley E. Lerman, Ray Jahn and Amy St. Eve, as well as three Arkansas state prosecutors, were present when the witness-tampering issue was raised, according to the same sources.
The intervention by Starr’s office did in fact intimidate Mark Stodola, then the prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’ sixth judicial district, to some degree and delayed the bringing of criminal charges against Hale, law enforcement sources said. The delay may have also significantly weakened the ability of the state to make its most effective case against Hale, the sources said.
Ultimately, however, the state prosecutors went ahead and signed an arrest warrant against Hale in early July 1996. Criminal charges filed by the state prosecutors charged that Hale had made misrepresentations to the state insurance commission regarding the solvency of an insurance company that he had owned, National Savings Life. The prosecutors also alleged in court papers that Hale had made the misrepresentations to conceal the fact that he had looted the insurance company.
National Savings Life had marketed so-called burial insurance to a mostly poor, African-American clientele residing in the delta surrounding the town of Pine Bluff, Ark. In exchange for a modest monthly premium, the insurance company paid out a benefit to a beneficiary’s family upon the beneficiary’s death, to cover the costs of a funeral and burial plot. State regulators seized the firm after they discovered that Hale had looted funds from the insurance company, and that therefore no funds would be available to pay for any funerals or burials.
Hale was to stand trial on the state charges last April, but the case was delayed when Hale complained of chest pains and entered a local hospital. The trial was delayed a second time in July when Hale’s attorneys filed an appeal with the state Supreme Court. He is currently scheduled to stand trial on Oct. 6.
Hale is also currently the subject of a federal grand jury investigation examining allegations that he received covert payments of money and other gratuities from conservative political activists during a period of time that he was a cooperating witness in Starr’s Whitewater investigation. That federal criminal inquiry is being directed by Michael Shaheen Jr., a former senior Justice Department official.
Charles G. Bakaly III, a spokesman for the Whitewater independent counsel, has said Starr and other prosecutors in his office “followed the letter and spirit of the law” while consulting with the state authorities. Tona De Mers, an attorney for Hale, declined to comment. Stodola also said he would have no comment for this story.
Sources close to Starr say that the intervention on Hale’s behalf was appropriate because they believed that the state prosecutors were interfering with their own federal investigation. They also said they believed the state prosecution to be politically motivated.
In private conversations with other Whitewater investigators, Starr and his top deputy in Arkansas, W. Hickman Ewing III, said they believed that the state prosecution was done at the behest of allies of then-Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. Tucker, along with Jim and Susan McDougal, the Clintons’ partners in their failed Whitewater real estate investment, were convicted by a federal jury in June 1996 on mail fraud and conspiracy charges brought by Starr’s office. Hale was the government’s chief witness during that trial.
Among other things, Starr and Ewing pointed out that the investigation by state prosecutors originated from a referral from the Arkansas state insurance commissioner, Lee Douglass, who had first been appointed by then-Gov. Clinton and was later reappointed by Tucker. Douglass has said that his office stumbled upon the fraud at Hale’s insurance company while conducting a routine audit, and that when the fraud was discovered, he had no other choice but to notify the appropriate law enforcement authorities.
Despite an exhaustive investigation, Starr’s office was unable to find any evidence of any role by Tucker or any of his political allies to attempt to influence the state prosecutors, according to federal law enforcement officials. Tucker himself became a cooperating witness in Starr’s investigation in February 1998 and confirmed that he had had no contacts with the state prosecutors regarding Hale, according to federal law enforcement officials.
In a telephone interview with Salon, Tucker repeated his denials that he had had any role in the state case: “My policy was to stay as far away from the insurance investigation as possible … I had a man [Hale] who was making allegations against me while someone who I had appointed was recommending actions against Hale,” Tucker said. “I didn’t want to be seen in any way to be impeding any investigation.”
And a federal judge also subsequently found no evidence of any wrongdoing by the state prosecutors in their decision to charge Hale. The judge’s ruling was in response to a civil lawsuit Hale filed against the state prosecutors alleging that their prosecution of him was politically motivated and thus denied him his due process under the law. Hale sought to have the federal court enjoin the state prosecution, a request that was turned down in especially harsh language by Federal District Court Judge George Howard Jr., who presided over the case.
“After a thorough review of the record, the Court cannot find that the criminal prosecution against Hale was instituted for any impermissible purpose,” Judge Howard wrote in his March 4, 1998, ruling. “The charges were brought after a thorough investigation. There is no evidence, either direct or by inference, that the prosecution is motivated to harass or punish Hale for cooperating with the federal government, or was brought because of some political agenda on the part of the Prosecutor … The evidence reveals that the State has a very valid and legitimate reason to prosecute Hale for violation of state law.”
Howard also ruled that Hale’s allegations were “fraught with innuendo and speculation.” He went on to rule: “Hale implies that a conspiracy exists involving Stodola and other persons out to retaliate against him for cooperating with the Independent Counsel. There is absolutely no evidence that any of the entities or individuals identified by Hale ever even talked to Stodola about Hale, let alone tried to influence the decision to prosecute.”
The state case against Hale began after state regulators discovered during a routine audit that Hale’s insurance company, National Savings Life, was insolvent. On Sept. 27, 1993, Lee Douglass, the state insurance commissioner, seized National Savings Life, saying the firm was “technically insolvent and needed to be placed in a rehabilitation posture for the protection of its policyholders.”
Just four days before Hale’s insurance company was seized by the state regulators, a federal grand jury in Little Rock had also indicted Hale on four felony counts that he had defrauded the federal Small Business Administration of more than $3.4 million. Hale later pleaded guilty to two felonies, admitting that he had committed the fraud through Capital Management Services, a federally subsidized lending company that Hale also headed at the time.
The state investigation of National Savings Life and the federal investigation of CMS were unrelated, according to several law enforcement officials. CMS’s mandate was to provide federal funds and private capital to minority and disadvantaged businesses, but the federal investigation found that Hale misappropriated monies from the SBA program for himself, and that he made fraudulent and illegal loans to a number of Arkansas political and business leaders.
Hale was facing that federal indictment when he first made allegations of criminal wrongdoing against President Clinton. Hale alleged that in 1986 then-Gov. Clinton pressured Hale to have CMS make a fraudulent $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, one of the Clintons’ partners in their failed Whitewater land investment.
In defending their actions, state officials point out that their investigation of Hale’s National Savings Life preceded the time when Hale first started making his charges against Clinton and Tucker, and thus they could not possibly have undertaken their probe as retaliation for his charges against the two popular Arkansas political figures. State records show that the audit and review of National Savings began in August 1993, several months before state officials could even have learned of Hale’s charges against Clinton and Tucker.
The state regulators then referred the matter for potential criminal action to the prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’ sixth judicial district during early summer 1994, according to court records. The state regulators and law enforcement officials said their actions were exactly what was required by law.
Almost from the inception of the state probe of Hale, Starr’s office took an intense interest in the case, according to law enforcement sources and records. Initially, Fiske, Starr’s predecessor as Whitewater independent counsel, and Starr simply monitored the state investigation and took no position at all regarding any local charges against Hale, according to law enforcement records and sources.
Then, for reasons that are not known, Starr and his top Arkansas deputy, Ewing, abruptly reversed their own position in the summer or fall of 1995. In doing so, Starr and Ewing were also overruling the concerns of FBI agents assigned to the Whitewater investigation who thought Starr should not interfere with the state probe.
Starr and Ewing then began making demands to the state prosecutors that they not go forward with any criminal charges against Hale, according to the law enforcement records and sources.
Federal Whitewater investigators say they were not consulted concerning the abrupt shift of positions by Starr and Ewing: “There has generally been a very deliberative and corroborative atmosphere around here,” recalled one of the federal investigators. “Everybody is asked for their input, from the youngest, most inexperienced legal assistant on up … There was none of that type of discussion on this one.”
The pressure on the state prosecutors culminated in the Sept. 21, 1995, meeting, when Starr’s senior advisor, Sam Dash, told three of the state prosecutors during a meeting held at the offices of the independent counsel that if the local law enforcement officials were going to proceed with an indictment of Hale, they could in turn find themselves facing federal witness tampering charges.
Ultimately, however, the Arkansas state prosecutors disregarded this threat and filed both arrest warrants and a “criminal information” (the equivalent of an indictment) against Hale. On Feb. 13, 1996, Stodola defiantly wrote Starr that his office intended to prosecute Hale, notwithstanding the Whitewater independent counsel’s wishes:
“We have completed our … investigation of David Hale and have decided to charge him with violating Arkansas law. Mr. Hale not only committed multiple crimes against the federal government, but there is also probable cause to believe he has independently violated state law as well …
“In the final analysis, it is ultimately a decision for the prosecutor, either state or federal, to determine how best to protect society’s interest in bringing wrongdoers to justice. In the case at the bar, David Hale should be held to answer for what he has done.”
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" 
