J. Edgar (directed by Clint Eastwood, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Judi Dench, Armie Hammer)

by David McReynolds 
Published by Portside
November 11, 2011

EdgeLeft is (an occasional column, which may be distributed, reprinted and otherwise used without permission)

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) who, depending on your
politics, looked much like a toad ... or a bulldog ...
was without question a monster of American political
life. Since his life is now so distant to those younger
than forty, the film has great value as an historical
"look back" at the life and career of a deeply flawed,
remarkably powerful man.

As a fan of the work of Clint Eastwood I wish I could
give the film unqualified praise, but my praise, while
real enough, is limited by two regrets. First, while I'd
credit the actors with filling their roles, so that we
soon enough forget Leonard DiCaprio was so recently the
golden boy of youth, as he ages toward the stout,
balding figure of Hoover; and that it takes some time to
realize Hoover's mother is played by that most
accomplished of actors - Judi Dench; make-up and acting
cannot always accomplish miracles. In the case of Armie
Hammer, who plays Clyde Tolson (Hammer played the
double role of the Winklevoss twins in The Social
Network), his acting skills do not make him believable
as an elderly Tolson, crippled by a stroke. Sadly, the
make-up leaves him looking as if he were headed for a
Hallowe'en party.

Second, I quarrel with Clint Eastwood's approach in
which past and present shift throughout the film. But
that was his decision and the film works despite my
quibble.

There are some things which might have been covered in
the film. Younger viewers will not know that Hoover
persisted in denying the existence of the Mafia - so
much so that it became a kind of joke (to which passing
reference is made in one of the Hercule Poirot TV
mysteries). There were suggestions that the Mafia might
have had something on Hoover. It is just as likely that
Hoover felt the Mafia too big a challenge.

Hoover's role began began in 1924, when he was appointed
the first director of the Bureau of Investigation, which
later became the FBI. His role was to combat
"subversion". In the wake of the Russian Revolution, and
the folly of some acts of violence by American radicals
(to which I'll return later), there was widespread fear
of a "Bolshevik Revolution". Hoover played a key role in
the Palmer Raids, the deportation of hundreds of aliens.
Then, in the early 1930's, in part linked to the
conditions of the Depression, criminal gangs held up a
number of banks in the Midwest, John Dillinger became a
kind of national folk hero. The FBI played a key role in
jailing the gangsters.

On the eve of the Second World War, the FBI investigated
German agents and had the key role in counter-espionage.
With the rise of the Cold War, Hoover became obsessed
with the danger of Soviet spies and "un-American
groups". There are few of us who were politically active
in that time who do not have FBI files. (Mine was about
300 pages, when I got it under the Freedom of
Information Act, - it was for the most part accurate -
though I was amused that the FBI agent assigned to my
case wrote that I was a Trotskyist, basing his
conclusion on his access to the documents of the
Communist Party's "Control Commission" in Southern
California!).

Pacifists often met with FBI agents in the course of
routine checks being made on men who had applied for
status as conscientious objectors. I met with agents on
several occasions when they were asking if certain men
were, in fact, members of the War Resisters League (I
always said yes, whether I knew them or not, as it might
help get them a CO status and keep them out of jail). I
remember one such meeting in the early sixties when I
was serving a 25 day jail term on Hart's Island for
taking part in a Civil Defense protest. I was on a work
crew, dirty from digging. I smoked then, and was very
short of cigarettes. A guard came down to the work crew
and called me out, saying the FBI wanted to see me.
Grimy, and in need of a smoke (which the agent
generously offered) he asked me some routine questions
about someone applying for CO status. When I got back to
the work crew my prestige had, I soon found out, risen
greatly, as the men assumed I was involved in some major
crime to merit an FBI visit.

A month or two after I finished that short term, I was
in my office at the old 5 Beekman Street address when
the same agent came in with similar questions - and, in
clean clothes, I was happy to offer him a cigarette.

There are other areas the film might have covered (I'm
not faulting Eastwood for choosing to focus on the
personal life of Hoover - only noting areas younger
people wouldn't be aware of). During the Vietnam War
Hoover chose to ignore the Supreme Court limits on his
power and set up a "dirty tricks" program called
COINTELPRO which sought to disrupt the Black Panthers,
Martin Luther King Jr., SCLC, the Communist Party - and
the WarResisters League. While we at WRL were never able
to prove it, it was our assumption that the raid on our
offices in 1968, when the office machinery was wrecked,
the office badly messed up, and the membership files
stolen, was a COINTELPRO project.

This only touches on the dirty world of J. Edgar Hoover,
a man so powerful, with his vast secret files, that no
President dared to fire him. A man who could destroy
careers, drive people of talent, but of left wing views,
to seek new lives in Europe. (One interesting act of
defiance - remarkable at the time - was the detective
story The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout, author of the Nero
Wolfe series. Written in 1965, when Hoover was in full
power and no one could safely criticize him, Stout ends
the story with Hoover ringing the bell on Wolfe's West
35th St. home - and Wolfe left it unanswered).

However, J. Edgar does what perhaps most needed doing -
humanizing Hoover as a sad, sexually frustrated, deeply
insecure man who tried to re-arrange facts to help
insure his place in history. A man whom Presidents
feared, never liked, and never dared to fire.

There had been rumors for years that Hoover was
homosexual. His relationship with Clyde Tolson certainly
provided the needed grist for the mill. Hoover had been
at his job for several years before he was introduced to
Clyde Tolson. There are surely few of us who have not
had that electric moment when we met a person to whom we
are instantly drawn. In most cases those electric
moments never light a real fire, but when Tolson turns
up in Hoover's office, having applied for a job, there
is absolute clarity about the relationship. Tolson
"takes charge of the scene," moving to open an office
window, handing Hoover a hankerchief to mop his face,
which had broken into a sweat.

Tolson is hired. Hoover soon makes him his second in
command - a post Tolson accepts "only if you will agree
we will always have lunch and dinner together." It is
clear that Tolson is in love with Hoover, and quite
aware of that. It isn't clear whether Hoover is ever
able to really come to terms with the fact he had a
lover. It is, I think, quite possible the two men never
had an actual sexual encounter. But in a remarkable
scene, which homosexuals will recognize as valid, when
Hoover tells Tolson he is thinking of marriage, there is
a sudden physical encounter, breaking glass, and the two
fight, hitting each other, tumbling and wrestling
together until, Tolson on top, says "I love you" and
kisses Hoover. Hoover says "Never do that again" but it
seemed to me that scene was solid, that Eastwood caught
the truth of the relationship.

There is a chilling moment when his mother, Judi Dench,
tells him she will teach him how to dance, that,
referring to a school boy who had been outed for cross
dressing (and had then committed suicide), she would
rather have a dead son than a "daffodil son". One
hears, in the mother's words, the most ancient of
primitive demands that the race must reproduce itself.

While Tolson never gives a sense of having political
views of his own, he does, near the end of the film, as
Hoover has completed his autobiographical notes, tell
Hoover the truth. He tells him that he has read the
book, that the notes are a fiction, that Hoover hadn't
personally made the arrests he had claimed, that it was
not Hoover, but special agent Melvin Purvis who had
tracked down Dillnger. (Hoover, jealous of Purvis' role,
had exiled him to a distant post). It is a devastating
but not vindictive setting straight of the record.

It is precisely because Clint Eastwood has made the
sexual angle central to the film, without playing games
with it, that the film is so powerful. We are able to
see the corruption of Hoover (who loved playing the
horses, and accepted the arrangements with the tracks
that his bets always paid off), the racism, the fanatic
fear of subversion, and yet to see the haunted man
behind the throne of power.

This generation cannot easily conceive of the power the
FBI held on the imaginations of the American public. And
it was, to some extent, justified. In 1954, as the US
was considering getting involved in the French disaster
in Indochina, Maggie Phair and I, from the Socialist
Party, had gone down to the boardwalk in Ocean Park late
at night to stencil the slogan "Send Dulles, Not Troops,
to Indochina". (Dulles was then Secretary of State). I
had with me a slim folder containing the layout for a
leaflet on Vern Davidson, a Socialist Party member then
in prison for draft resistance, and some addresses of
locat contacts, and finally some totally non-political
family snap shots, which of personal value.

When Maggie and I were done, and I went to pick up my
manila folder, it was gone. Clearly a theft, but one
with few rewards. The next morning I called the FBI
office in Los Angeles, and said that someone had stolen
something of mine which, if the thief was patriotic, he
would turn over to the FBI. The FBI (of course) denied
any knowledge of the matter. However a year or two later
the photos that had been in the folder were mailed to me
at my parent's address - an address which hadn't been on
the folder. Score one for the FBI.

Two final points. I said earlier that I'd remark on the
folly of the occasional acts of radical violence. The
casual radical, the young radical "here on vacation",
can talk about using violence, bombs, sabotage, in
resistance, ignoring that the history of such acts
(which helped provide the basis for setting up the FBI)
is always to give greater power to the State. There is
surely no one to whom radicals should pay more heed that
Lenin, who warned against the "propaganda of the deed",
the folly of thinking the force of the State could be
overturned by random acts of violence. All of history
has shown that there is nothing easier to penetrate than
a secret organization. Secrecy and violence play into
the hands of Hoover and those like him.

The second final point is troubling and I offer it
uneasily. No modern state can afford to be without some
security apparatus. We can condemn the FBI, but we were
also furious that it did not send its agents into the Ku
Klux Klan. We know that the problems of organized crime
and of irrational violence which can come as easily from
the right as from the left (remember the Oklahoma
bombing) require some agency of investigation. The
problem how to maintain control over such agencies. I
pose the problem - I do not have the answer.

Meanwhile, catch J. Edgar and see how dangerous the
secret police can be, and how deeply they threatened our
freedoms within very recent memory.


(David McReynolds worked for many years for the War
Resisters League, was Chair of the War Resisters
International and twice the Socialist Party's candidate
for President. He is retired, lives on Manhattan's Lower
East Side with his two cats. He can be reached at:
[log in to unmask])

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