Don’t blame President Lyndon Johnson for digging up salacious
gossip on future Motion Pictures Association President Jack
Valenti. The devil made him do it.
“Previously confidential FBI files show that [J. Edgar] Hoover’s
deputies set out to determine whether Valenti, who had married
two years earlier, maintained a relationship with a male
commercial photographer,” a page-one Washington Post
story revealed last week. “Johnson initially blocked the FBI
from obtaining a sworn statement from Valenti or approaching the
photographer, asserting that Valenti was ‘attracted to the women
and not to the men,’ files show. But under FBI pressure, the
president relented and approved an investigation of his close
friend.”
The investigation evidently concluded that the
ad-man-turned-Johnson-aide-turned-Hollywood-lobbyist was not a
homosexual. “Even Bill Moyers, a White House aide now best known
as a liberal television commentator, is described in the records
as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House
staff members,” the Post further reported. “Moyers said
by e-mail yesterday that his memory is unclear after so many
years but that he may have been simply looking for details of
allegations first brought to the president by Hoover.”
The Washington Post’s scoop, and Moyers’s non-denial
denial, regurgitates a familiar excuse: Hoover did
it. In this time-worn script, the FBI director plays the
role of Mephistopheles, with various liberal presidents cast as
the innocent with the pesky devil upon his shoulder.
Don’t blame President John Kennedy, or his attorney general
brother Bobby Kennedy, for sleazily bugging Martin Luther King’s
hotel rooms. The devil made them do it.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. contended in Robert Kennedy and His
Times that tapping King’s phone “had been on Hoover’s agenda
for some time.” “The Bureau kept up its pressure,” Schlesinger
wrote, and “Kennedy finally assented.” Schlesinger pled with the
reader to understand “the dilemma in which Hoover had placed the
Kennedys”: “If Robert Kennedy refused a tap on King and anything
went wrong, Hoover would have a field day. On the other hand, a
tap might end the matter by demonstrating King’s entire
innocence, even to the satisfaction of the FBI.” The Kennedys’
motives, Camelot’s court historian implied, were entirely benign.
“The Kennedys authorized the taps for defensive purposes—in order
to protect King, to protect the civil rights bill, to protect
themselves.”
Don’t blame Harry Truman for ordering suspected Communists out of
federal government jobs. The devil made him do it.
Biographer David McCullough noted that Hoover had pushed for more
stringent measures weeding out loyalty and security risks from
federal jobs, claiming that the “whole concept troubled” Truman
and the “political pressures bore heavily” upon the 33rd
president. Truman didn’t want to do it. Alas, the devil made him
do it: “On Friday, March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to
Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing an
elaborate Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. And he
did so with misgivings.” As a postscript to the affair, the
Truman biographer notes: “Truman’s concern over J. Edgar
Hoover continued to trouble him.”
Don’t blame Woodrow Wilson for jailing (e.g., Eugene Debs, Kate
Richards O’Hare, and “Big” Bill Haywood) and deporting (e.g.,
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman) radicals. The devil made him
do it.
A 2007 book by Kenneth Ackerman places much of the blame for the
first “Red Scare” on J. Edgar Hoover, despite being just 24,
fresh out of law school, and a low-level bureaucrat, and makes
excuses for Woodrow Wilson, despite being president of the United
States. “J. Edgar Hoover had been [attorney general A. Mitchell]
Palmer’s special assistant when the raids began on November 7,
1919, and he had his fingerprints all over them,” contends
Young J. Edgar: Hoover, The Red Scare, and the Assault on
Civil Liberties. How did the young mastermind escape notice
from contemporaneous chroniclers? “Edgar carefully kept his name
out of the all the press releases and news accounts of the day;
Palmer wanted all the headlines for himself. But no one could
deny this was Edgar’s job from start to finish.” Tying Woodrow
Wilson to the policies of the Wilson administration proved more
problematic for Ackerman. “And what did Woodrow Wilson think?
Nobody quite knew, because the president never quite said.” As
Ackerman would have it, “the president’s mind was elsewhere,”
making it difficult to connect him to his own policies.
J. Edgar Hoover is necessary to square the soaring liberal
rhetoric on civil liberties with the atrocious civil liberties
records of liberal presidents. With an ideology extolling civil
liberties crashing into its record of smashing civil liberties,
ideologues reshape the facts to fit the ideology. The
blame-Hoover template asks readers to believe that the president
takes orders from the director of the FBI rather than the
reverse. It portrays the world-class arm-twister Lyndon Johnson
as a man prone to crying uncle, Woodrow Wilson as secretly
opposing his administration’s policies, and the Kennedys acceding
to electronic surveillance on Martin Luther King only for his own
protection.
The familiar narrative of the FBI director making liberal
presidents go against their better judgment is convenient but
false. J. Edgar Hoover’s posthumous ability to make liberal
academics and journalists to go against their better judgment, on
the other hand, grows ever more powerful with every revisionist
biography and page-one scoop.
