On a June day in 1951, the owner of a Washington beauty shop engaged in a bit of gossip that won her a permanent place in the secure files of J. Edgar Hoover. She said she'd heard that the FBI's longtime director took payoffs from bookies and was a homosexual.
An FBI employee, Hazel Baxter, was having her hair done at the time and reported the remark to her superiors.Three days later, according to newly published FBI files, the beauty shop owner was "vigorously questioned" by FBI agents and "advised in no uncertain terms that such statements . . . would not be countenanced."
A memo assured Hoover that the woman "fully realizes the seriousness of her accusations and it is not believed that she will ever be guilty of such statements."
A new book, "From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover," cites the incident to show that at the same time Hoover squirreled away derogatory material about the sexual lives of John and Robert Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, members of Congress and other public figures, he used the resources of his agency to silence persistent rumors about his own sexual behavior.
The files were assembled by Athan Theoharis, history professor at Marquette University, decadelong critic of the FBI and diligent user of the Freedom of Information Act. The materials furnished him were heavily censored; details, names and titles often were deleted.
Hoover's system of keeping the memos in his own office allowed the bureau, when it did not want to share information, to truthfully tell Congress or other government agencies that sought-for data could not be found in its "central records system."
Hoover's files illustrate, Theoharis wrote, that he "exploited the FBI's resources to serve the political interests of the White House and to advance his own bureaucratic, political and moralistic agenda during 48 years as director." Hoover's tenure ended with his death in 1972.
Homosexuality - allegations of his own and of other people's - was a recurring theme in the files. Hoover started monitoring homosexual rumors in 1937.
In 1944, a man jailed in Louisville, Ky. on a morals charge earned a visit by the FBI for saying that he knew Hoover was a homosexual with a 17-year-old lover. He recanted.
M.W. McFarlin, who ran the FBI's Louisville office, reported to headquarters that the suspect had signed a statement saying his allegations were "untrue and without any basis in fact."