J. Edgar Hoover killed Joan of Arc
J. Edgar summed it all up: “There is something addictive about secrets.”
Have you finished reading your August 1956 edition of Elks Magazine yet? It had a swell article about J. Edgar Hoover. He was talking about Communism. He was always talking about Communism. Everybody was. The Red Scare was big that year.
Hoover had a warning for his fellow Americans: the Commies were everywhere, hatching heinous evil plans along our quiet, leaf-strewn streets. In our schools. Our courthouses. Our places of worship. Our barbershops and beauty salons. Our swimming pools, dime stores, trailer parks, newsstands, cafes, and Elk halls. At our dinette tables. Inside our kitchen cabinets. Nestling amid the folded sweaters in our cedar chests. On our tv screens. Inside our radios. Lulling us, calling us from orange juice commercials and the top 40 hit parade. Here’s what he said about them:
“The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.”
The problem with Americans, he said, was that they lacked imagination. They were too factual, too naïve, too good-natured to fathom the depths of Communist depravity, the cunning insidiousness of Communist duplicity, the virulence of Communist resentment of America’s prosperity. It was the nation’s good fortune, though, that J. Edgar Hoover had a great imagination. Nobody could match him. Not Einstein. Not Edison. Not even Walt Disney.
Hoover could imagine evil anywhere, in anything, in anybody. With a power like that, he was morally obliged to wield it in defense of the country he loved. That was why, after a door-busting, two-fisted spree of the 1930s when the FBI took down John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly, the Director abandoned the scenes of actual crimes for imaginative forays into the dismal lairs of the Communist mind.
While Mafia dons were busy crapping on his stoop and tee-peeing his front yard, Hoover concluded that they didn’t exist. His imaginary steed set a course to his imaginary kingdom of Commie infiltrators. Since he was neither a medium nor a psychic, it was hardly surprising that Hoover’s imaginary evildoers turned out to be funhouse mirror manifestations of himself. That’s probably why he discovered so much perversion in the Commie sphere.
Much has been rumored about Hoover the man. His private life. His peccadilloes. Rumors that he was a closeted gay, that he was practically married to his chief of staff Clyde Tolson, that he was a cross-dresser who frequented costume parties with Cardinal Francis Spellman. Just rumors. No one will ever know for certain. Pay no attention to them. Who cares? Even if it was true, just wish J. Edgar and Clyde joy to their sheets, then go paddle your own canoe.
That brand of forbearance will make you a better person than the Director. Hoover himself was never one to ignore a rumor. The juicier, the more titillating, the better. He collected them on 5”x8” notecards, stuffed them in his sock drawer, hoarded them along with secret surveillance photos and reel-to-reel tapes of his enemies in their most private moments. He cherished rumors about the Kennedys, John and Bobby both. Jackie, too. About Martin Luther King, who he tried to shame into suicide. And about Jean Seberg, the actress who played Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s movie Saint Joan (Wheel Productions, 1957).
Poor Jean Seberg. Her only crimes were that she liked the Native Americans she grew up with in her native Iowa, believed the Black Panthers were doing some good work with inner-city children, and had a romance with a man whose skin was darker than her own. Joy to her sheets? Not in J. Edgar’s America. He sicced his COINTELPRO boys, pronto.
“COINTELPRO” was short for Counter Intelligence Program, a special cadre of agents who specialized in dirty tricks, character assassination, and all sorts of covert and/or illegal operations. A fictional version of COINTELPRO plays an important role in the novel Timberline. The devious FBI agent Carlin Wenceslaus serves COINTELPRO as well as another organization, the Giovanni Order.
Seberg had contributed money to the Black Panthers and to the Meskwaki Nation in Iowa. Hoover didn’t like that. She was also pregnant, supposedly by someone other than her husband. Maybe by a Black man. COINTELPRO followed her, hounded her, slandered her, fed suggestive news leaks to the press. The Los Angeles Times covered the scandal with breathless indignation. Seberg, stressed beyond endurance, went into premature labor. Her baby died a few days after being born.
J. Edgar wasn’t done with her, though. More surveillance. More wiretaps. More photographers. The CIA. The Pentagon. The Justice Department. More stories in the Los Angeles Times. Blacklisting. The end of her career. She died a suicide in 1979. She died for her sins. Jean Seberg was a sinner. A Communist sinner, and Hoover was on a mission from God, to battle the great Satan of Communism.
It's a funny thing, though, this Satan hunting. “Satan.” His name in the Old Testament meant “Accuser.” When we attempt to ferret out the Satan in others and call them to account, we become the accuser. Whoever seeks Satan out, becomes Satan.
J. Edgar himself knew this. He even warned America against bearing false witness: “Smears, character assassination, and the scattering of irresponsible charges have no place in this nation. They create division, suspicion, and distrust among loyal Americans—just what the communists want—and hinder rather than aid the fight against communism.”
So, in destroying Jean Seberg, Hoover had assisted the Communists. Did that ever trouble him? Did he lie sleepless at night in his bed, whether alone or in Clyde’s warm embrace, troubled by his own betrayal of American values?
Likely, if he suffered any sleepless nights at all, they were spent festering over the bundles of 5”x8” notecards in his sock drawer. The secrets they contained. The nasty, dirty bedroom secrets. He was addicted to them. Addicted to the power they conferred.
And he himself? Well, he was fighting for America, rescuing us from the Commies. He was just using the weapon that came to hand, that sock drawer of dirty secrets. He couldn’t be held responsible for the slime that oozed between his fingers. He knew the American mind . . . or thought he did. He knew Americans at heart were prigs and voyeurs. In America, dirty secrets were better than bullets.
Of course, Hoover only knew himself – and then, only dimly. One key to the man may lie in a biographical fact. He was born in Washington, DC, spent his entire life there, died and was buried there, in the Congressional Cemetery. In a sense, Hoover was DC, writ small. The incarnation of its genius loci. The incarnation of a city built on a swamp as a result of a backroom deal between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, on land that had been stolen from the Piscataway tribe and then seized again from white owners who’d been reluctant to sell. A city that rose alongside an open cesspool where, until the end of the 19th century, the stink was so noxious that summers there made its citizens sick.
Washington DC. Never a wholesome place. Cursed ground, some would say. The French engineer Pierre L'Enfant struggled to impose order on it, to tame its genius loci with a lovely geometric plan of intersecting street grids. River miasmas, sewer gas and slums asserted its true nature. Then in 1895, about the time the cesspool was finally filled in, a child was born. J. Edgar, the embodied essence of Washington’s disease.
Washington, a city that has produced more monsters than the sleep of reason ever could. Get away from there. Turn tail and run, Lot-like. DC isn’t America. Neither was J. Edgar. Shake the dirt from your sandals and set forth. Find America. Not the sock drawer of dirty secrets. The real America.
I tell you: there’s more genuine moral virtue to be found in an Indian reservation roadhouse in Iowa on a Saturday night than in the halls of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court building and the FBI headquarters combined. Find it. Find that roadhouse. Maybe you’ll even spot Jean Seberg’s ghost at a shadowy table there, swaying to the music among the people she loved.
~ D. Gray
Author, Timberline (or, Politics Is Hell)
Watch a Mike Wallace Presents report from 1981 on Jean Seberg and the FBI