Hoover Reconsidered And Redressed

On Feb. 14's "Fresh Air," Terry Gross interviewed Tim Weiner, author of the newly published Enemies: A History of the FBI. Weiner's extensive research and measured analysis make it impossible to dismiss J. Edgar Hoover, despite his bigotry and systematic abuses of power, as the monstrous cartoon figure to which we're becoming increasingly accustomed. Weiner describes him instead as the quintessential Cold War national security zealot. Some excerpts from the fascinating conversation (all quotations are Weiner's words):

The roots of the national security state:

Hoover had a terrible premonition after World War II, that the United States was going to be attacked, that New York or Washington was going to be attacked by suicidal, kamikaze airplanes, by dirty bombs of cobalt-60 or another radioactive material. And he never lost this fear. It stayed with him for 25 years, 'til his death. It was a premonition, if you will, of the 9/11 attacks. He never forgot Pearl Harbor....Hoover is the inventor of the modern American national security state. Every fingerprint file, every DNA record, every iris recorded through biometrics, every government dossier on every citizen and every alien in this country owes its life to him. And we live in his shadow, though he's been gone for 40 years....

Hoover did not want any limits on him. He wanted no charter. He wanted no rules imposed by outsiders. He wanted the FBI to, as the secretary of state had said under Roosevelt, investigate the so-and-so's. And he believed that the Soviet Union was trying to steal America's atomic secrets, to burrow into the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI and the White House, and he was right.

The source of Hoover's suspicions about Martin Luther King:

Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the '60s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War. These people were enemies of the state, and in particular, Martin Luther King was an enemy of the state. And Hoover aimed to watch over them. And if they twitched in the wrong direction, the hammer would come down.... The fact -- and it is a fact, although it's an uncomfortable fact -- that Martin Luther King's most prominent white adviser, ghostwriter of books, writer of speeches, legal counselor, confidante, was a man named Stanley Levison, who had been, at least up until the time he joined ranks with Martin Luther King in 1957, a secret member of the communist underground in the United States.

Hoover and homosexuality:

[Hoover] conflated -- and he was not alone -- communism with homosexuality. Both communists and homosexuals had secret, coded language that they spoke to each other in. They had clandestine lives. They met in clandestine places. They had secrets. And in, you know, certain cases, such as the British spy ring that penetrated the Pentagon and the CIA in the '40s and early '50s, they were both communists and homosexuals. Hoover didn't see a dime's worth of difference there. They were one and the same. This was hammered into him when the FBI dealt with one of the most famous informants in the history of American government, Whittaker Chambers (right), who helped bring down secret Soviet espionage rings in this country. He was a well-known writer at Time magazine - writer and editor. Chambers was a secret homosexual and a secret communist. Hoover saw a nexus there, and he never let that thought go....

Now, of course, the $64,000 question was: Did Hoover do this because he was a repressed homosexual closet case, and he was using his rage to destroy homosexuals?...This is a myth. It's been around since 1937, since Hoover went after homosexuals and government. It was - gasoline was poured on the embers of this by Bill Donovan, Hoover's mortal enemy in government. It's been around forever. Now, what do we know that this? Hoover never married. He never had an adult relationship with a woman, other than his mother, whom he lived with until he was 43, the day she died. Hoover was also inseparable from his number two man at the FBI, Clyde Tolson. Now, the evidence -- if you can call it that -- that Hoover was a secret homosexual rests almost entirely with an account by a British journalist who's only witness is a convicted perjurer. The evidence on the other side is strong. Hoover never loved anyone, except his dogs. He was married to the FBI. And the idea that he was a secret homosexual who, you know, wore tutus for fun is a myth. Unfortunately, that's the only thing anybody seems to know about him today....

If you look at the man and you listen to people who knew him and worked with him, it's almost inconceivable for this man to have had a secret life. His entire life was devoted to the uncovering and collection of secrets on other people, including their sex lives. Could he have carried off a double life like that? When you read his work, when you listen to his tapes, when you investigate the great investigator, there's no there there.

Hoover and the roots of Watergate:

The Pentagon Papers, as your listeners of a certain age will remember, was the secret history of the Vietnam War that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned in the Johnson years. It ran to 17 volumes, and it essentially said that, you know, we kept pushing on into the big muddy, even though we weren't going to win the war. It was a political war, not a military battle. These papers walk out of the Pentagon, out of probably the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. Nixon knows within days that it's a former Pentagon officer named Daniel Ellsberg who's done it, and by God, he wants Ellsberg destroyed and tried, and he wants the evidence. You know, he wants to break into the Brookings Institution, firebomb it, send a fake, you know, fire team in there and blow the safe, as he said.

Hoover doesn't want to do this for a lot of reasons, one of which they're going to get caught. Second is that Ellsberg's father-in-law is a friend of his who gives a lot of toys to the FBI,... Louis Marx. And Hoover won't do it. Nixon goes ballistic, and that's when the Plumbers are created to do the work that J. Edgar Hoover wouldn't do.

And two generations after Hoover's death, George W. Bush with "chalk on his spikes":

There is an incredibly dramatic moment in 2004 where the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller...confronts the president of the United States in the Oval Office over the White House's secret eavesdropping program that has transgressed its boundaries and overstepped the law and the Constitution. Through its data mining tactics, through its eavesdropping technologies, they've gone beyond what even the secret court that oversees eavesdropping will authorize....And Mueller tells the president, in the Oval Office, face to face, with a handwritten letter of resignation in his breast pocket that either the program is curtailed and brought within the law or he, the head of the FBI, will resign, as will the entire command structure of the Justice Department, from the attorney general down.

And President Bush says, according to his memoirs: What are you talking about? What program? What problems? What legal issues? And Mueller looks at him with a very steely gaze and says: I think you know what we're talking about, Mr. President. And at that point, it's a crime to lie to the FBI. It's punishable by five years in prison. And that's where we were.

[T]he president had chalks on his spikes at that moment. He was at the line, and about to cross it. And he says, Bush says in his memoir: Visions of the Saturday night massacre during Watergate dance in his head when, you know, two attorneys general and the command structure of the FBI resigned rather than cover up for the president. Mueller wins. Bush eventually backs down, and that is a triumph of the rule of law.

As The GOP's Poison Pill Goes Down

Rep. Darrell Issa, defending his move against women's reproductive rights, compares the members of his all-male panel to Martin Luther King, Jr....Romney shows guts and stands up for women (the candidate's late mother, that is)...Dick Morris claimed on Monday that ABC's George Stephanopoulos, his fellow former Clintonite, was paid to float the contraception issue at a recent GOP debate. "They want to create the impression that the Republicans will ban contraception, which is totally insane," he said. This was right before we learned that Rick Santorum, possibly the GOP frontrunner, wants to ban contraception.

"Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory"

The peroration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech, on April 3, 1968 in Memphis

"Godspell" And The Judas Paradox

When Christopher Lanham, now a St. John's eighth grader, was five or six, his father, Randall, a diligent Bible student, told him that Jesus's death enabled the salvation of the world at the first Easter.

Wouldn't that mean, Christopher replied, that Judas was a good guy?

Christopher was doing the kind of exegesis you don't normally encounter in kindergarten. Second century theologians grappling with the same paradox produced the revisionist, non-canonical gospel of Judas, in which the great betrayer is portrayed as Jesus's co-conspirator. Christopher solved the riddle his own way early this month in the St. John's Middle School production of "Godspell," in which he portrayed both John the Baptist, who was present at the beginning of Jesus's public ministry, and Judas, who helps bring it to an end.

My thanks to Christopher's mother, Kristen Welles Lanham, who helped the cast and crew get ready for their performances and also graciously sent me the photo of Christopher and me as well as of the Holy Eucharist the cast, crew, and I celebrated a couple of hours before the April 7 premiere. We used the propers for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose musical cadences opened the hearts of his congregations and audiences to the possibility of a better world. Our young people did the same with their song, dance, and acting. As I wrote to the people of St. John's in our annual Easter letter:

The players’ energy had their audiences grinning, and the rousing tunes had our toes tapping. But the end was all too familiar. The world rejected the son of God. His followers couldn’t stay awake with him, even for an hour. The Cross.

Thankfully, the kids (including Jesus) rushed back in for their last number and curtain calls. The music swelled, and the audience, at all four shows, responded with standing ovations. The cast and crew had worked long hours, after school and on weekends, to get ready. Their faces glowed with pride at a job well done. Having just reenacted the moment when humanity failed God, they brimmed with hope and possibility, promise and love. It reminded me of the feeling I get every Easter, bathed in the forgiving light of the empty tomb.

In the audience at the closing performance on April 10 was our St. John's Easter miracle herself, seven-year-old Emma Williams (left), who saw the show with a friend.

Dr. King And The Good Samaritan

Early one morning last week, we St. John's pilgrims visited a spot about halfway between Jerusalem and Jericho for a few moments of meditation. Invited to say a prayer by our guide and friend, Canon Iyad Qumri (shown below, pointing down to the old Jericho road), I mentioned that Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King had once visited the same place, or one nearby. He mentioned their pilgrim visit in his last speech, on April 3, 1968, the day before he was murdered in Memphis. He was trying to persuade the city's pastors to come out of their pulpits and offer direct support to striking sanitation workers:

I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Dueling Hypocrisies

Charles M. Blow writes today:

I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.

He really doesn't find it curious. He's a smart guy, so he understands it completely. Reverse the polarities in his condemnation of hypocrisy -- challenge the Glenn Beck critics who aren't upset about the cultural center and mosque -- and you take in a category of liberal-minded people like Charles M. Blow and get yet another reminder of the persistent and sometimes exhausting divides over what's sacred in our civic life.

That's why the Constitution comes in so handy, preserving Beck's right to speak and Muslims' to worship where they choose. How upset people get about those freely exercised rights is a different question. I find I'm upset about neither. I'll add that I'm squishy on neither the threat of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism nor the saintly heroism of Dr. King.

Or We Could Just Get Over Ourselves

Republican leaders think there shouldn't be a mosque near the World Trade Center because of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

Civil rights leaders think Glenn Beck shouldn't have a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28 because of what happened on Aug. 28, 1963.

Blessed Are The War-Preventers

Noting my passing reference to Dr. King earlier today, a friend who discerningly studies leadership (and pretty much everything else) shared his jewel of a precis:

The courage, charisma and eloquence of Dr. King may have prevented a racial war that would have left history's greatest country divided and weakened. If wars can change history, so can those preventing wars. Dr. King was a peacemaker appropriately awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, and uniquely honored with an American national holiday. Following in the footsteps of Gandhi, King demonstrated the courage it takes to be a peacemaker. He kept his eye on the prize despite being stabbed in New York, stoned in Chicago, and bombed in Montgomery. His tragic Memphis martyrdom underscored the threat of racism and the depth of Dr. King's courage to give his last full measure of devotion.