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HATRED OF HOOVER LIVES ON
By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid
The Washington Post’s hatred of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who makes his successors look like pygmies, erupted in August when the FBI released most of the files that it maintained on Senator Al Gore Senior, the father of Clinton’s vice president. A story by Joe Stephens said the files showed that J. Edgar Hoover and "his underlings" at the FBI "stalked" Gore, "monitored his speeches, issued vicious critiques of his activities, blacklisted him, called him stupid, spewed memos and bile about him." Stephens called this "a decade-long-war of enmity against the late Sen. Albert Gore Senior." He said this was all started when Gore, "groused to a colleague on the Senate floor that the FBI was spreading loose gossip about a friend. Gore believed the G-men had unfairly maligned her by tattling to her bosses at the White House that she, just maybe, had sex with a former boyfriend." But a memo in the FBI file says the exchange consisted of one senator saying, "The FBI does not prefer charges; it provides information," and Sen. Gore replying, "Yet no information is given as to the source of the derogatory statement." J. Edgar Hoover asked his aides to find out what Gore was talking about. They thought it might be the FBI’s probe of a White House employee who was the daughter of a friend of Gore’s. They had informed the White House that (1) she had allegedly ended a relationship with a man in 1952 "upon believing she was pregnant;" (2) her lover had allegedly declared himself to be "a member of the Huk (Communist) movement in the Philippines; and (3) in 1937, her mother and father had been arrested, the mother for petty larceny and the father for disorderly conduct. On March 18, 1954, Cartha DeLoach, a top FBI official, visited Gore to find out what was bothering him. He was met with a barrage of charges that the bureau disseminated raw, unevaluated information on innocent people and employed "guilt-by-association tactics." DeLoach tried to get Gore to cite a specific example with no success. Gore did charge that Hoover had overstepped the bounds in testifying before a Senate committee on Harry Dexter White, a former assistant secretary of treasury accused of being a Soviet spy. That charge that has since been confirmed by the Venona intercepts. A memo about DeLoach’s call on Gore concluded that the White case was what really bothered him. It said that the utmost discretion should be exercised in future contacts with the senator. Hoover ordered that there should be no contact with him without prior approval. The files show that In the next thirteen years only nineteen pages included any unfavorable reference to Gore, most of them in 1954. There were unfavorable comments in only three other years. Joe Stephens’ claim that the FBI, "stalked" the senator, "monitored his speeches," "blacklisted" him, "issued vicious critiques of his activities" and "spewed memos and bile about him" as Hoover waged a decade-long war, driven by paranoia is inaccurate. We could not find an iota of evidence in the files to support his vicious, wild charges.
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