...At the annual convention of the International Association of Police Chiefs in Los Angeles on October 3, 1960, when the proposal for a national nerve centre to coordinate the fight against organized crime was formally presented, Hoover, greatly respected by police chiefs around the country, took the podium to tell the chiefs that “the persons who endorse these grandiose schemes have lost sight of some basic facts. America’s compact network of state and local law enforcement agencies traditionally has been the nation’s first defense against crime. Nothing could be more dangerous to our democratic ideals that the establishment of an all-powerful police agency on the federal scene. The truth of these words is clearly demonstrated in the experiences of nations ruled by ruthless tyrants both here in the Western hemisphere and abroad.” [...]
[COMMENT: That Hoover was perfectly right, should be painfully obvious to us today. Se evidentiam requiris, circumspice.
End of comment by C. Porter]
One big reason for the Department of Justice not focusing heavily on organized crime before RFK’s tenure is that the department’s investigative arm, Hoover’s FBI, was using most of its resources during this period to combat Communism domestically – a mission with which virtually everyone agrees Hoover was obsessed. Although some have said that the reason for the FBI’s inattention to organized crime was that the mob (specifically Meyer Lansky) possessed compromising photographs of Hoover in homosexual situations and blackmailed him into calling off his dogs, no credible evidence has ever surfaced to substantiate this allegation.
[footnote omitted]
The chief peddler of this argument is conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers that the “evidence” Summers cites is so sleazy and so transparently unworthy of belief (e.g., that
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Hoover, who we know was more concerned about his reputation and legacy than perhaps any other public figure in America, would go out in public to famous nightclubs and racetracks and hold hands with his alleged lover, Clyde Tolson; dress up like a woman and engage in sex orgies with several participants at leading New York hotels; have homosexual sex parties at his home with men, including some of the top officials at the FBI; and permit mobsters to point at him at racetracks and shout out loud, so everybody could hear, that he was a “fucking, degenerate queer”) that I’m not going to dignify Summer’s charges by a serious discussion of them. I don’t know what Hoover’s sexual orientation was.
[footenote: Many of Hoover’s defenders say that his life was so consumed by the FBI that he was asexual. Even someone like William Turner, a ten-year veteran of the FBI who was definitely not a Hoover apologist, wrote “My impression is that Hoover was a misanthrope devoid of erotic impulses, that he was frigid, and that he felt no passion either way” (Turner, Rearview Mirror, p. 8.]
What I do know is that Summers failed miserably in trying to prove his allegation. How he got a book published in 1993 with scurrilous trash like this in it, I don’t know.
Summers picked on an awfully difficult guy for his preposterous allegations. Even if Hoover had the sexual orientation Summers asserts he did, by all accounts he was exceptionally proper, even stiff in his demeanor. Compare the following description of Hoover with Summers’ Hoover: When recalling her going to Washington to testify before the Warren Commission, Marina Oswald said, “Seven or eight men met me; apparently they were all FBI. But when I shook hands with Mr. Hoover, who was with them, I was chilled from top to bottom. It was as if you met a dead person. He had a coldness like someone from the grave.” Though Hoover was no prude, taking an occasional drink and dining regularly at night spots like Toots Shor’s, 21, and the Stork Club in New York, friends said they never heard him tell an off-color story in his life.
Hoover’s counterpart in the federal intelligence community for several years was CIA Director Richard Helms. He was quite familiar with Hoover’s lifestyle, describing it as extremely routine, even banal. He goes on to say that “in the Washington fish bowl.... I find it impossible to believe that anyone as well known and as easily identified as Hoover might have managed a clandestine sex life. Was Hoover eccentric? Yes. Very eccentric? Yes, indeed. An active homosexual? No way.”
Here’s what Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach, the deputy director, the number three man in the FBI hierarchy, who worked alongside Hoover and Tolson for many years, has to say:
“When Anthony Summer’s Official and Confidential was first published, I read it with disbelief.... Summers charges in his book that Hoover and [Clyde] Tolson [Hoover’s number-one assistant in the FBI] were homosexual lovers... It so disgusted me that I simply put it out of my mind. Even when it was repeated in newspapers and echoed on TV talk shows, I concluded that the fair-minded people of America would reject so ridiculous as accusation based on such flimsy evidence, that their good sense would see through the fraud. But... I discovered that in the wake of Summers’ book, Hoover’s homosexuality was widely accepted as undeniable truth... Neither man [Hoover and Tolson] was a homosexual... No one who knew Hoover and Tolson well in the FBI has ever even hinted at such a charge. You can’t work side by side with two men for the better part of twenty years and fail to recognize signs of such affections. Contrary to what Summers would have you
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believe, neither Hoover nor Tolson was the least bit effeminate. Both were tough and manly.”
As indicated, there is no credible evidence that Hoover’s not going after organized crime was connected to his sexual orientation. Although organized crime was a national organization run by the commission of mob leaders... What few knew was that Hoover’s fear and passion against Communism started way back in 1919, five years before he became FBI director, when he thoroughly researched the origin and philosophy of the worldwide Communist movement.