Posted on 09/21/2011 8:23:43 AM PDT by AtlasStalled
Clint Eastwood's new film about J. Edgar Hoover which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the storied FBI Director declines to expressly address his sexuality, and leaves it to viewers to draw their own conclusion about his relationship with Associate Director Clyde Tolson.
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M. Wesley Swearingen, an agent from 1951 to 1977, writes in FBI Secrets about the long-standing rumors within the Bureau concerning Hoover and Tolson which include allegations that the FBI Director ignored the Mafia for decades because the wise guys had incriminating goods on the supposed lovers.
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The allegations were fleshed out -- so to speak -- in Official and Confidential: the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summer. A review of the book ("Partners For Life") by Sidney Urquhart for Time magazine summarizes one alleged incident as follows:
Perhaps Summers' most bizarre revelation is an account provided by Susan Rosenstiel, the wife of a liquor distiller and gambling crony. Rosenstiel recalls attending what she thought would be an elegant private party at New York City's Plaza Hotel in the company of lawyer Roy Cohn, Hoover and others. Instead, Cohn introduced Rosenstiel to a woman named "Mary," dressed in a fluffy black dress, lace stockings and high heels. It was obvious Mary was no woman. "You could see where he shaved. It was Hoover," said Rosenstiel. Joined by Cohn, Hoover stripped down to a tiny garter belt and proceeded to have sex with two young boys. Cohn later joked about the evening. "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?"
The "two young boys" with whom Hoover allegedly had sex perhaps were provided by Ed "the Skull" Murphy who was a long-time Genovese associate involved in the crime family's gay bar and boy prostitution rackets in New York City.
(Excerpt) Read more at bitterqueen.typepad.com ...
could be that he was protecting informants or the entire Northeast political structure -- Particularly a certain family from Hayannisport.
The mob's control of the gay bars in New York is well known. It was their payments to the cops that kept them from getting raided. That they'd have been involved in male prostitution as well as female prostitution doesn't seem particularly shocking.
As far as the narcotics business, you've been watching too much TV. The mob was involved in the heroin trade back in the 1920s. Lucky Luciano had major control over the operation, and established the smuggling routes (often through Montreal) early on.
A few of the familiies tried to keep their people away from it, but it wasn't out of moral concern--it was out of worry about the attention it would draw from law enforcement.
“How can the IRS seize property without a warrant if the 4th amendment still stands?”
Your tagline just begs to have the rest of the story told. I left this part out because there are obviously a lot of people on this thread that don’t want anything bad said about Hoover.
Actually the story is much worse.
The friend of mine, like many FBI agents at the time, transferred into the IRS for one simple reason. After being told to “back-off” on the mafia, the attitude of the agents was, “screw it, we know where they live, we’ll go after their money.” Many transferred to the IRS, and for a while they went after the Mafia and had great success. Then it all came to a halt.
Mr. Hoover then committed what I consider to be his most unpardonable sin against the United States. He went to Eisenhower with some vague BS story about interference and convinced Ike that the IRS should become a “compliance” agency and leave the “enforcement” to the FBI.
Most people don’t realize that prior to this despicable act, the IRS actually concentrated on REAL criminals. The current IRS, which goes after retired school teachers not reporting income from piano lessons, while it ignores drug king pins, is all the result of Hoover’s desperate attempt to protect the Mafia.
And yes, after this change my friend and everyone else in the IRS was told to “back-off” there as well. Makes you feel good the next time you hear of someone going through one of these day long, “compliance” audits.
There was a hotel in Mexico that Hoover went to almost every year. It was a notorious “out of the way” spot. Many bosses and secretaries went there to play house. The Mafia decided it would be a great place to generate blackmail money, and set up people working there to take pictures. One such group of pictures shows a larger, round headed nearly bald man performing oral sex on a younger man. They have been published an I am certain can be found on the web someplace. To me, they are so grainy it could just as easily be Elmer Fudd without his hat.
At any rate the story is that once the Mafia had these pictures they were able to put Hoover in their back pocket.
Unless there are more clear pictures than the ones I've seen, I would say the evidence is inconclusive.
I don't view it as being 'guilty' of anything, just as a fact should be faced.
and the burden is on a dead man (or anyone who wishes to defend him) to prove otherwise?
I think the burden is on anyone who believes otherwise to provide a more logical explanation for the known facts about Hoover. If it wasn't Hoover and Tolson, just two guys who went everywhere together and vacationed together, had a lifelong devotion to each other and had no interest in women, everybody would just accept that yes, they are most likely gay.
Neo-Nazis say that Winston Churchill was a cross-dressing queer. See the parallel between Euro-fascists in their propaganda?
What you say is 100% true. To which it should be added that FDR's bipartisan hatchet man in that whole sorry episode was none other than Earl Warren, the same Earl Warren who would become a hero to the left for judicial activism on the supreme court.
For a balanced portrait of Mr. Hoover read Hoover’s FBI by
Cartha D. Deloach (Former FBI Deputy Director).
On ML King and the FBI read Hellhound On His Trail by Hampton Sides.
It is also documented that Dr. King counted many Republicans among his supporters as well. Charlton Heston, George Romney and the GOP Senator from Maryland (name slips my mind) who replaced Senator Tydings, racist hero of the left who took down Joe McCarthy, are just three of many which come immediately to mind.
Dr. King was a registered Republican. I don't believe it was ever established that he was a card carrying Communist.
Regardless of J. Edgar Hoover’s sexual proclivities, the real problem was his longevity in office. He was appointed by Calvin Coolidge (!) and ran the agency until the Nixon administration, almost 48 years. That is way too long for any person to run a government agency.
It’s true he created the modern FBI, but he also ran it as a personal fiefdom. That’s the problem I have with him. All the problems with the FBI in his later years grew from the fact he had been in office too long and was never challenged.
But the left lionizes the s.o.b. for what he did to Senator Joseph McCarthy.
I know more than a few men who are not homosexuals, in their forties, and have just given up on dating, marriage and everything that goes along with it. They have just had it, and it isn’t worth it to them.
Who knows what is in the mind of others? To characterize a man as a sodomite because he is unmarried is not not only unfair, but mean spirited as well.
Perhaps your life experiences haven’t been broad enough to know just how wrong that assumption is, I don’t know you. But I know from my own experience that what you say is simply not true.
This is the very reason why the IRS was created. Not for collecting revenue for operating the government but for collecting information on each and every citizen. This is a concept that should be repugnant to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of Liberty. As to Hoover, I'm not even sure the establishment of the FBI was consistent with a strict reading of the Constitution but I like that when they started the "agents" were required to bring local police with them to make an arrest and the police were the only ones who could do so. Under Hoover that changed as did the prohibition against agents carrying firearms. I think there are far more things to be angry with Hoover about (and the Congress that let him get away with it) than silly rumors about cross dressing. I also think he was in power for much too long and may have been mentally diminished to some degree at the end.
1. FDR
The head of the FBI reports to the Attorney General. It was FDR who authorized Hoover to come directly to him. FDR didn't want people to know how suspicious he was of the labor movement (man that drives liberals crazy). He had Hoover spying on them throughout the 30's.
2. JFK
That's right, he and Bobby were both suspicious of the civil rights movement. Liberals heads explode when you mention that all of the wiretapping and spying that Hoover did on Marting Luther King was with warrants signed by ROBERT KENNEDY.
3. LBJ
He was totally suspicious of the antiwar movement and gave Hoover complete authority to go after them with every means possible.
Oh yea, Nixon.
He hated Hoover, had nothing to do with him, and made no secret of his plans to fire him as soon as he was elected a second time. Many people suspect Hoover blew the whistle on the whole Watergate thing because he knew Nixon was going to get rid of him.
Liberals have done a magnificently job of linking Hoover and Nixon as well as Hoover and Republicans, when in fact all of his worst excesses occurred under LIBERAL DEMOCRAT PRESIDENTS!
Their patron saint of world peace, Woody Wilson, loved the APL and their tactics that were much like a certain German movement of a few years later.
The American Protective League
By the first year of WWI, American political leadership was ferreting out disloyalty and enforcing scientific conformity. Any number of private and secret societies appeared to forward this cause. The "Anti-Yellow Dog League" was one of these, composed of schoolboys above the age of ten, who searched out disloyalty each day from one of its thousand branches nationwide, barking like German shepherds when a disloyal yellow dog, otherwise someone looking like you or me, was flushed from cover and branded. Schools enthusiastically cooperated in "Dog Hunts," as they were called.
The U.S. Justice Department secretly empowered private associations as volunteer spy-hunters. One, the American Protective League (APL), earned semi-official status in the national surveillance game, in time growing to enormous size. Founded by a Chicago advertising man, the APL had twelve hundred units functioning across America, all staffed by business and professional people. It was a genuine secret society replete with oath and rituals. Membership gave every operative the authority to be a national policeman. The first location placed under surveillance in every neighborhood was the local public school. Assignments were given by the old (Federal) Bureau of Investigation and by the War Department’s Intelligence Division to report on "seditious and disloyal" conversation. From the authorized history of the APL comes this specimen case:
Powers County, Colorado: investigated fifty cases of mouth-to-mouth propaganda, a notable cause being that of a German Lutheran minister who refused to answer the questions as to which side he wished to win the war. He asked for time. The next day he declared very promptly that he wanted the United States to win. He was instructed to prove this by preaching and praying it in private as well as in public, which he agreed to do.
The APL checked up on people who failed to buy Liberty Bonds. It spotted violators of food and gasoline regulations, rounded up draft evaders in New York, disrupted Socialist meetings in Cleveland, broke strikes, threatened union men with immediate induction into the army. The attorney general of the United States reported to Congress, "It is safe to say never in history has this country been so thoroughly policed."
It is something that keeps me awake at night -- why this is verified fact and is virtually unknown today
“Words are mere man-given symbols for thoughts and feelings, and they are grossly insufficient to express the thoughts in my mind and the feelings in my heart that I have for you,” Hoover wrote to Tolson in 1943. “I hope I will always have you beside me.”
See #38, #39.
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