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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. You know us because you were just listening to part one of J. Edgar Hoover, and here's part two. So let's go, Stuff You Should Know. First of all, I hope everyone had a nice Wednesday.
That's nice, yeah. Because I assume we're going to release these as we usually do on a Tuesday, Thursday. Sure. When it's a two-parter. Yeah. It'd be weird otherwise, right? I hope no one did any research on that Wednesday. Hope no one watched that Clint Eastwood movie. No. On that Wednesday or any day. Yeah. I heard it was brainless and passionless. Was that Ebert? No, I think it was like an IMDB reviewer. Oh, okay.
Just a regular schmo. Yeah, who has strong opinions. All right. To catch everybody up, we are talking about J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI for 48 years through eight presidential terms.
who, and I think where we left off, it was through World War II, which we should mention. I don't think we got to this last time. This is a pretty good stat. During World War II, he managed to quadruple the size of the FBI. That's crazy. It grew 4X during World War II, which would set him up very nicely, as we teased in the last episode, to go and root out the commies.
Yeah, which was something that the average American was totally fine with the FBI doing. Like before, like they kind of broke their teeth on like chasing Nazis, rooting out Nazi sympathizers. America was totally fine with that because we were at war with the Nazis. It made sense. Now we're in the Cold War, this really kind of uneasy, weird world.
Chillier. With the Soviets. Yeah. So, yeah, the Soviets were our enemies. Therefore, communism was the enemy of America. So, yeah, FBI, go find those guys. Don't tell us how you're doing this. Just go do it. Yeah. I know in the last time we were – we didn't even finish answering because I don't think we knew for sure.
The two presidents that loved him, the two that didn't like him, and then the four that played ball. But I think we can throw Harry Truman and the did-not-like-him camp. Yeah. Because it seems that Truman was one of the only smart people that was like, hey, this FBI is...
Getting a little out of control and there's potential for this to become the American Gestapo here to no avail because the power just grew and grew despite what Truman thought. So that is a great example of about the time where the power of the FBI and in particular the power of J. Edgar Hoover became.
became potent enough that it was decoupled from the executive branch. It became its own thing. And J. Edgar Hoover was as powerful as presidents from about this point on. Because, as you said, Truman didn't like him or the FBI or what it could become, and it didn't amount to anything. Yeah. This is where it started, Chuck. Except, well, never mind. I was going to make a political joke, but I'm not going to do that. Okay. I'm going to be a bigger person. So,
We're talking the late 1940s here. There were top secret programs being run trying to infiltrate the American Communist Party, trying to infiltrate the spy network of the Soviet Union. One thing that we'll probably do an episode on at some point is the execution of the Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
But that was that was sort of one of the end results of this program was when he executed that married couple for espionage. Not he, but, you know.
He didn't literally do it. He certainly set it in motion. I'm sure he would have pulled that lever if they'd given him the opportunity. Yeah. Speculation, of course. So just like back in the day when he created the criminal records division and used that to essentially like get Hollywood on the FBI side, he did. He went back to that playbook.
But instead of just creating like movies that celebrated the FBI, he also sought to root out any kind of subversive message that might show up in movies too. Like you said before, he didn't like James Cagney playing a gangster, but he said, okay, you can do it as long as you die. Like the gangster has to die, right? Mm-hmm.
They took it further in the Cold War where they were like, not only does the gangster have to die, he has to basically be waving an American flag when he dies. Or he kills a communist as he's dying. That essentially is what we need to do here in these movies from now on. Yeah. And also set in motion actions that would lead to the eventual Hollywood blacklist had secret files on artists, right?
Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles was another. And this is, you know, just from that time period, he very famously and we talked about the fact the ad files on John Lennon and people like that later on in the 60s and 70s.
Love this files. But also little things like, hey, that movie, It's a Wonderful Life. I don't like it. It's on a list now because it's subversive, because it demonizes big banks and, you know, problems facing the common man. I don't like the message of It's a Wonderful Life. Yeah, we'll talk. I think this is going to have to make one of our Christmas specials because it's been on my list for years now. Oh, yeah. That'll be good to fill that out a little bit. Yeah.
But essentially, it's like you said, like that kind of message. Imagine finding It's a Wonderful Life subversive. That is how on guard they were looking for any not just pro-communist theme, but anti-American or anti-capitalist theme. There were FBI agents.
I don't know if that was their job or just one of the things they did occasionally was go to the movies and just watch movies to, to see if they needed to be investigated. That's what the FBI, one of the things the FBI was doing at the time. And again, bear in mind, we know this with the, the benefit of history with hindsight at the time, America did not know that the FBI was going and seeing movies. I think a lot of Americans would have had a problem with that. And it, it,
As a result, the FBI had a really great reputation across the board, across the political spectrum. Yeah. I wonder if they reported back like this movie is subversive and has some third act problems. Exactly. They introduced a gun in the first act and they didn't shoot it in the third act.
Another thing he had agents do was listen to music. Long before the PMRC and Tipper Gore came along, he had the FBI listening to R&B music that had what he deemed obscene lyrics. And he called it race music. And he said that, you know, when this stuff gets to the ears of white teenagers, we're in big trouble. So he was sticking his fingers, like you said, into every facet of American life.
including, as we'll find out right now, the early gay rights movement. Yeah, so the gay rights movement would have fallen into the obscenity file, which I think you referenced in the last episode, that he had a huge, huge collection of pornography. It wasn't just that. There were files on the sexual activities and proclivities of everyday Americans and also American elite, like leaders and celebrities and all that. Yeah.
But the gay community was investigated because it was obscene. They actually went after them for using the mail to send out mailers that had no trace of sexuality associated with them. It was just pro-gay mailers because gayness in the FBI's eyes was obscene, sexualized.
Sending out pro-gay pamphlets in the mail was tantamount to sending obscenity through the mail. And so they would use like these just the slightest pretense. And then in a lot of cases, no pretense whatsoever to go investigate and often infiltrate some of these movements that J. Edgar Hoover saw as un-American.
Yeah. And as you know, we talked a lot about his PR savvy. Some of the things he did was after the fact, he would go in and just kind of make stuff up to justify things he did. Yeah.
One of which, and, you know, I'll get to where I was going here in terms of the gay rights movement, but Ma Barker was a famous matriarch of a crime family. And her sons did a lot of crimes. They brought Mama along, Ma Barker, to, you know, to sort of distract, you know, they had this little old lady with them to distract them and stuff. But by all accounts, she was never actually involved in any crimes whatsoever.
And he made up all this stuff afterward to justify the fact that they killed her. Yeah, the FBI killed her and her favorite son, Fred, in a shootout in Florida. Yeah. So he basically said that Ma Barker led this criminal, like family criminal ring. Right. When in fact, she was the mom, but she wasn't leading anything. No, like you said, they just brought her along to deflect suspicion from the rest of the gang, right? People today still think Ma Barker was a criminal mastermind. Yeah.
All because J. Edgar Hoover made that up back in the day to justify the FBI doing that. And you were kind of using that as an example for him making stuff up after the fact that and that had to do with the gay community. Yeah, exactly. He basically created what's now known as the Lavender Scare, which was, hey, I'm trying to root out gay people, period, and gay people who work within the government, especially because they are potential security risks for.
For the fact that like a Russian spy might have dirt on them to blackmail them so they could blackmail them to give up government secrets. So we need to purge the government of gay employees, basically. Irony is notwithstanding, as we'll get to Hoover's sexuality in more detail later on. Right.
So, yeah, that was the lavender scare. It was quite effective. It's referenced indirectly in Clue, the movie. Michael McKean's being blackmailed because he's gay and he's a government worker. That's a direct reference to that, that whole unhappy period in America. I think Hoover's even mentioned in that movie, right? Yeah, for sure. He was the one who supposedly called the somebody. I can't remember who used the phone. Or no, maybe Tim Curry. I don't remember.
And one of those groups was the Mattachine Society. And they were, we talked about them in our episode on Stonewall Uprising. We talked about them in the episode about the trans uprising that came before Stonewall in San Francisco and the Tenderloin. Mattachine Society was there. They were the foils to those groups. They wanted to gain respect for the gay community by pointing out the gay community goes to work and goes to church and feeds their dog and
and tips their newspaper delivery guy, just like you. That was the Mattachine Society's thing. But they also had kind of like a brutal little sense of humor. They would frequently mail J. Edgar Hoover invitations to their meetings.
Because they were infiltrated anyway, but they were also making reference to the rumors that J. Edgar Hoover was gay. And they were like, come join us in our meetings. And apparently it used to drive him up the wall whenever he got one of those. That's pretty funny. Yeah. So we talked about the conundrum that is J. Edgar Hoover, despite the fact that he was a K.A. in college and hired all these sort of, you know, whores.
legacy Confederate supporter types. He was not sympathetic to the Klan at all because they fell into the bucket of a vigilante organization that would flout the rule of law. So he was not into that. The FBI was, were the ones who uncovered the Mississippi burning murders of 1964.
So I'm not saying like that he was just some great friend of of the black race or anything like that, but just sort of one of those odd conundrums of his career.
Yeah, I've never seen an explanation for that aside from he found the KKK to flout the law, that he didn't like that. They were vigilantes and you can't have vigilantes in J. Edgar Hoover's America. So, yeah, but they did have some successes in investigating some civil rights murders and crimes. Again, though, this is at a time when America is totally unaware of what the FBI's tactics are.
And so because the FBI, you know, investigated the Mississippi burning murders in 1964 and went so far as to set up a field office in Jackson, Mississippi, all of a sudden the NAACP, the ACLU, they love the FBI.
That's on one side. On the other side are conservative Americans who hate the idea of any communism infiltrating into America. He's fighting communism very publicly. One of the masterful things he did was to use Joseph McCarthy as a foil.
Joseph McCarthy was off the rails accusing anybody and anyone of being a communist on the flimsiest evidence. And eventually public opinion kind of turned on him. But J. Edgar Hoover used that as like, I'm fighting communists for real and I'm level-headed, above the boards and super competent. And it helped him raise his status among communists hating and fearing Americans too. So at this point,
say the early to mid 60s, everyone essentially considers J. Edgar Hoover an American hero and the FBI as a nonpartisan law enforcement agency that's above reproach. That's right. But not everybody. And we'll take a break because we're going to talk about one person who didn't like him. And that was Martin Luther King Jr. So
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All right, we're back. We were talking about how J. Edgar Hoover was just building his power by doing things that would win over the hearts of Americans, left and right, black and white. And in 1956, we need to back up just a little bit because under Eisenhower, Hoover created something called COINTILPRO, the Counterintelligence Program. We've talked about it a little bit on different episodes before.
I see on my master list the one that the guy made that where he wrote down everything we ever mentioned doing a full episode on. And you have Cointelpro listed as one that you wanted to do a full episode on. Yeah, it's on my ideas list still. Okay. Just wanted to remind you. It's just such a bummer. Sometimes I'm like, I can't bring myself to doing that one yet.
So going till pro comes along initially was fighting the Communist Party, but then expanded to surveil and get files on the civil rights movement, civil rights leaders, black power groups, also white supremacist organizations. But we have you know, I mentioned that.
Martin Luther King Jr. was not a fan. That is to say the least. They were enemies in a big way. In 1957, Hoover had him surveilled, had him wiretapped.
learned of King's infidelities and basically like he was known to do was like, hey, we've got this stuff on you, by the way. Here's a little a tidy package. It's anonymous. You should probably go kill yourself is is what that package also said. And all of this supposedly stems from a few things.
Um, one is that apparently Martin Luther King jr. Ignored a phone call from him one time. No. And that disrespect just consumed Hoover, uh,
And King also very publicly questioned whether the FBI was like, why more research resources weren't being used and put out to investigate crime against civil rights leaders, Mississippi burning case aside. Right. He was like, there's no black FBI agents. You guys are not investigating black crime and crimes against civil rights leaders like you should. And so because of all of this,
Um, he was not a fan of Martin Luther King jr. And here's the point where we should at least mention that there was, uh, a rumor that has never been proven one way or the other that J Edgar Hoover was of mixed race. Oh, really? Yeah. There was a WAPO article in 2011, uh, where a woman, uh, came out and said, Hey, my great uncle, like when we were young said that J Edgar Hoover was a second cousin. Um,
And he could prove it, but he, no one ever talked about it out loud because we were all scared to because Hoover would have probably had us killed or something, or we would have disappeared. And if you look up J it was J Edgar Hoover, uh, of mixed race or part black, you'll get just scores and scores of articles of people that, that think he was, uh,
Which could help explain like he was sort of a self-hating, like the fact that he may have been of mixed race and also gay could help explain the fact that he went after civil rights leaders and in the gay community as sort of a self-hating sort of thing.
sort of thing. Right. That certainly tracks. But there's never been anything that's been proven. I think some people are saying that it's absolutely not true, but it's the kind of thing we should at least mention. Right. For sure. So I want to talk a little more about that package that arrived anonymously. Supposedly, the FBI made it seem as if it was written by a disillusioned black supporter of Martin Luther King who had somehow come upon
of his sexual escapades in hotels. Just somehow. Right. And that they sent it right after he got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. And his wife, Coretta, received the package and she opened it. And,
And I was looking into it a little bit. She wrote an autobiography in 2017. And she said still to that day, she did not believe that that was MLK on those tapes. She did not believe that he had ever been unfaithful, that he had such a guilty conscience. He would not have been able to walk around carrying that. He would have had to have just blurted it out or something like that. And that that wasn't him, that that was all just made up. And I thought that was fascinating because you hear so much
about like it's just put out there as a matter of fact that MLK cheated on his wife and that the FBI had audio recordings on it. It never even occurred to me that the FBI had sent him potentially something that wasn't him that had framed him. And exactly the way that people walk around today thinking Ma Barker was a criminal mastermind, it's entirely possible that we all walk around thinking MLK used to go to sex orgies
Because the FBI made that up. That was totally within the realm of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI's tactics. Yeah, that's a good point. It really makes you question some of the stuff that we know about things, for sure. Because that was exactly the kind of thing they did. They used underhanded tactics in COINTELPRO where they would try to break up marriages. Like you said, they would try to drive people to suicide. For organizations, they would send in people who would essentially...
They would identify who was maybe the second in command and try to get them to turn on the first in command and just create turmoil. They did it everywhere, including the Black Panthers, as we talked about extensively in the Black Panther episode. Oh, yeah. That's just what they did. And I also saw that one of the things they would do is send them to meetings to just ask all sorts of dumb, mundane questions to drag the meeting out and make it so boring that people wouldn't come back again. Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. He had moles all over the place using all sorts of disruptive tactics. Yeah. Pretty crazy. It's really interesting. Yeah. So we talked a lot sort of about the presidents that were using him, tolerating him and working with him in different capacities. Nixon, like you said, loved the guy because he.
Nixon was a crook and was game for any kind of ill-gotten gains that he could get through Hoover. They were kindred spirits. Yeah, he was like, this is all just great. This is fine. I love you. He did consider firing him at one point, like many have. And again, we kind of went over that in the first episode. Most of them had their reasons whether or not they had dirt against them. Or I did find some historians that say that Hoover...
May have had dirt on these people. He may not have. It could have been a career-long bluff, but he had such power and worked in such secrecy that nobody knew what he had on anyone. So it wasn't worth going up against him to test that and find out. Yeah. I saw elsewhere also, and all of this probably came from Beverly Gates. She did such a great, like, masterpiece.
investigation of him as a person and the impacts he had. One of the explanations I saw is that some presidents and other elected officials were just plain scared of the guy. He just had so much power and was so willing to use it in just the worst ways to personally ruin your life if you wanted to, that to be so bold as to go on his, get on his bad side. Some people are just like, it's, I don't have the metal for that kind of thing.
And then another explanation I saw was that all those presidents who couldn't resist the temptation of using the black arts that he was a master of, that automatically was dirt that he had on them. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. He'd be like, okay, you can get rid of me, but I'm taking you down with me. So you probably should just leave me on the job. Yeah.
Yeah, this quote from LBJ was pretty great. And it kind of sums it up was, I would rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. So like, it's better to keep an eye on this guy than fire him and see what happens next. Exactly.
And again, this was like, so there was a big, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, going on with all eight of the presidents that he served under. And again, it did not matter what political leanings or stripes they had, what ideology they came from. He would find a way to work with them and get them to work for him.
Yeah, we mentioned early on in the first episode, I believe, that the Kennedys were not fans, nor he of them. He specifically oversaw the investigation into the JFK assassination, was later criticized for not looking more into the conspiracy, the various conspiracies, but certainly that the American government could have somehow been involved in.
Uh, he didn't really didn't like Bobby Kennedy. Um, Bobby was young. He was 35 years old. He was seen by Hoover and others as underqualified. And he would, you know, he would go to work and, and take off his tie and his jacket and just work in his, in his unbuttoned suit shirt with the sleeves rolled up. And Hoover did not like that kind of thing at all when he wanted appearances to be very tidy and very old fashioned.
Just really interesting stuff. I think it was LBJ that gave him an indefinite exemption from
from mandatory government retirement at age 70, which was the law at the time. And this was in 1964, just a few days before Hoover was to testify for the Warren Commission. And he, you know, he stayed on that job until he died. When I was a one-year-old baby, one and change, May 2nd, 1972, at the age of 77, he died from a heart attack. Yeah.
That's how we quit. Yeah, and died popular. Yeah, that's the thing. Like you said, one of the reasons like probably some presidents didn't want to take him on was just out of his popularity. He...
he was just looked up to by a huge swath of American society for essentially the whole time he was on the job, so much so that he could also alter public opinion about things like you explained how he was not a fan of Martin Luther King. He came out and called Martin Luther King America's, quote, most notorious liar at a time when the same year that MLK was given the Nobel Peace Prize, where he was at his
his peak of popularity or he was ascending to the peak of popularity and reverence. Right. Um,
Like J. Edgar Hoover comes out, he's like, I don't like him. He's a liar. And a lot of America was like, yeah, totally. He's a liar. We agree with you. He could just kind of sway things like that too. He also had the willingness to do stuff like that if he thought it would serve him well, or if he hated somebody so much that he would publicly denounce them because they didn't return his call. You know, when I read that story, I was like, no way. But then the more I learned about the guy,
It's like, it seems like that could have been a thing. He thought so much of himself that being ignored by a prominent civil rights leader was like, all right, you're on the list.
So you talked about how Bobby Kennedy and he did not like each other. Apparently, the machinations of the social lives of elected officials was so loosey-goosey. I'm sure still is, but was so loosey-goosey during the Kennedy administration that Bobby would borrow the Los Angeles field office director's car to go visit Marilyn Monroe when he was having an affair with her.
The head of the FBI in Los Angeles. No, Bobby, they both were having an affair with Marilyn Monroe. Oh, did they? I don't think I knew that. And supposedly he had borrowed the field office director's car and went to go visit Marilyn the day that she died. And that some people trace her suicide to having just been broken up with by Bobby Kennedy, who was again using the field office of Los Angeles director's car.
car to go do that. Well, despite all this, like we said, he remained popular. In 1971, there was a Gallup poll that found 74%
Seventy four percent. It's a pretty high number of Americans thought he was doing an excellent or good job. And then only seven percent thought he was doing a poor or bad job. I imagine in 1971, you know, kind of through the 60s, that seven percent were sort of the most hardcore, you know, left wing hippies that were around at the time. They're still mad about the Rosenbergs, probably.
Yeah, I mean, they seem like the only people in America that didn't like the guy. Yeah. So, yes, the thing is, is he wasn't immune to changes in public opinion and shifts in public opinion. There was a point where Nixon got frustrated with him. And actually, this is about the time where he was thinking of firing him because J. Edgar Hoover essentially said, no, I can't do any more of your dirty tricks. The public's mad at me because they're learning about stuff that I've done and said, like,
For example, he told the White House that the Kent State protesters that were killed by the National Guard invited and got what they deserved. And he just became more and more of a loose cannon the older he got. Apparently, he would take hours-long naps in his office during the day. He just...
He just wasn't somebody – he was too powerful to be that loose of a canon. But he also – he was sensitive to how people viewed him. He was a perfectionist, so he wanted everybody to think he was perfect.
So when public opinion would kind of like ebb and flow, he would say like Nixon, no, I can't help you out. So Nixon turned to his own dirty tricks group and used former FBI agents to carry out his tricks when J. Edgar Hoover wouldn't have the FBI directly do it anymore.
Yeah. And I think that happened on the heels of in 1971. There was a group that broke in to a field office, an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and stole stole some COINTELPRO documents, some top top secret documents that were released to some to the media and some to members of Congress that didn't even know this stuff.
And this was during the Nixon administration, and it was very embarrassing, but also just really screwed up what Nixon was up to. So it was a big public thing. I think Hoover sort of backed off on – it was such a big deal, like what was released, that he backed down from really pursuing whoever leaked those Pentagon Papers. Right.
And that just wouldn't do for Nixon. So that's why, like you said, he turned to dudes like Gordon Liddy. Yeah. So I say we take a break and then we come back and talk about the tide turning and just public opinion about Hoover and his personal life after the break. What do you think? Let's do it. Stuff You Should Know
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Okay, so almost immediately after Hoover's death, stuff starts coming out. That COINTELPRO break-in in Pennsylvania was a huge turning point. That happened in 1971. He died in 1972. I think by 1975, the Senate was undertaking investigations into some of these abuses that had been revealed by the COINTELPRO papers. And
As more and more stuff came out, J. Edgar Hoover's image completely turned and was tarnished. And it became what we think of him today, starting around the mid-70s. Before that, again, American hero. After that, I mean, sure, there were a lot of people with crew cuts and pocket protectors who were still totally fine with all the tactics he'd done. But most Americans had started to change their opinion of him starting around then.
Yeah, absolutely. This is also when the government was like, hey, that guy that was that headed the FBI for 48 years, maybe that's not such a good idea. Right. To have give someone that much power. So in 1976, Congress set a 10 year term limit for the director of the FBI and the Justice Department got together and was like, we need good some new guidelines here that really separate
Yeah.
So I thought that would get a chuckle. There we go. No, it was good, but also semi-believable. So, yeah. So we have this terrible image of J. Edgar Hoover these days. But there's another kind of facet to it that isn't necessarily terrible. It's more just fascinating. And that is, you know, a question, was J. Edgar Hoover gay? And aside from, say, like photo documentary evidence,
And it's essentially everything else you could possibly need to say like, yes, this guy was gay. He was gay because he wasn't even hiding it in a lot of ways. He was living out in plain sight, which again kind of goes to underscore how powerful he was. He was essentially living in a gay marriage with another man and all the people around him knew it and no one was comfortable talking about it.
Yeah. So this was Clyde Tolson portrayed by Armie Hammer in the Clint Eastwood movie. And although I didn't see the movie, I did read a lot about it today. And the movie is that's a big part of the movie is like making no qualms about the fact that they were essentially married to one another. Right. Hoover backing up just a little bit. He lived with his mom.
in the home that he grew up in until she died in 1938. He was a 43-year-old man. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. Just pointing that out. He never married, obviously. He had a...
A very forward-facing public relationship with Dorothy Lamour, the actor. Some people, and this is again with sort of the different biographers' takes, I saw one biographer say, oh, they were, he is not gay. He was absolutely in love with Dorothy Lamour. That was the love of his life. Who said that?
It was one of the biographers. And he said it was absolutely true because Dorothy L'Amour never denied that that was the case. Oh, okay. Other people say, no, no, come on. She was a beard. And that was a fake romance created for PR. He always said he couldn't find an old fashioned girl. But it was like you said, it was it was well known.
Sort of sort of like a lot of stuff when you work in politics. I remember when my friend worked on Capitol Hill like 30 something years ago and he would talk about George Bush seniors affair and mistress. And he was like, yeah, everyone knows.
That that's going on. And I was like, how does this stuff not get out? And he was like, it's Capitol Hill. He's like, there are a lot of just secrets within this city, within this very small area that are just sort of out in the open secrets that somehow just don't get talked about in the mainstream press. This was back then. I think it's probably a little bit different now. Um,
But apparently everybody in Washington knew and I guess sort of quasi accepted the fact that Clyde Tolson and J. Edgar Hoover were in love. Let's talk about how the evidence that people knew and accepted the fact, shall we? Sure. Every morning, J. Edgar Hoover in the Bureau limousine would go pick up Clyde Tolson on the way to work every morning. Every day they would go eat lunch together at Harvey's. Can I say something real quick? Yeah.
I did see one historian say something kind of funny when he was talking about the fact that they came and left together for work. He said, this is a time when carpooling was not in fashion. Right. It was probably considered communist. Maybe so. So that's, you know, all very circumstantial. So lunch together, you said. They had lunch every single day together at Harvey's on the house, I read or saw somewhere. And then they would vacation together.
Yeah. Apparently they would go to Miami during the winter. They would spend a month every year in La Jolla with Pat and Richard Nixon. A couple's vacation, right? There's plenty of photographs of them hanging out on the beach together. And then the one that gets me, the one where it's like, okay, this group of people is totally aware of this and totally accepting of it. I didn't know where you're going. They would send joint invitations to them to parties. Yeah.
Yeah. Like you did not just send J. Edgar Hoover an invitation to a social event. You sent J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson an invitation to the social event or else you were on Hoover's S list. Yeah. And they sent joint thank you notes for stuff. Yeah. Like a couple. They were a couple. The only thing I'll say is that you and I get joint invitations for weddings and stuff. Okay. Yeah, sure. But we're a couple of sorts.
We've never been to Miami together. No, nor have we spent a month in La Jolla. That's on my list, though. We spent a weekend in La Jolla, I think, for Comic-Con.
We spent a week in Guatemala together. That's true. So we're comparing apples to oranges here, I think. Yeah. And we're just kidding around, of course. But there was a who knows how many real letters because his personal longtime secretary, Helen Gandy, portrayed by Naomi Watts in the movie. Like we said before,
shredded and burned all of his personal files. A lot of it was apparently boring stuff like IRS stuff and pet vet records and just boring day-to-day things. But among that stuff was all of his personal correspondence and letters. And who knows what was in those letters because we do know of one, you know, love letter that existed to Tolson from 1943. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't remember the exact quote, but essentially what he was saying is like, you know, there's no words can describe how much love I have in my heart for you. And
Like it's a love letter. It's a love letter. It certainly isn't appropriate for a boss to his right-hand man because I don't know if we spelled this out. This was his right-hand man. This guy was his number two at the FBI essentially the entire time he was at the FBI. So even accepting the idea that maybe they were a gay married couple essentially, at the very least all of this stuff –
is not appropriate for a boss and his underling, at the very least. Yeah. He also left Tulsa in his entire state, about 550 grand back then, a little more than 4 million today. The flag draped on his casket at his funeral was given to Tulsa. Tulsa was buried with him.
Uh, when he died, there were all kinds of rumors and things and columns written about this sort of things, mocking him at the time. Um, Tolson said on his FBI application that he handed Hoover that he was quote, not interested in women.
And then Hoover also had a collection of photos of Tolson asleep in bed. And, you know, they weren't like necessarily naked or anything, but just a large collection of photos of him sleeping in bed. I saw them described as tender photos. Sure. So, yeah, that was that's there's a lot of evidence that they had a marriage, a long marriage.
like, decades-long marriage out in the open. And one of the things that stands out to me is that everybody in their society, in their group, in Washington society, accepted it, at least to some degree or another, and other people clearly didn't care at all. And this is at a time where
Like, you could fire employees for being gay because you were worried they were going to get blackmailed. I think it's just fascinating that duality where politicians or other people have to be like, yeah, I know, being gay is terrible, middle America. Isn't it the worst? Where personally, they're like, there's nothing wrong with gay people. I have nothing wrong with gay people. They just...
It just got dragged out because so many people did have a problem with it. And ironically, it wasn't the people calling the shots. It was the people who, I guess, elect the people calling the shots.
Yeah, absolutely. When Hoover died, Nixon named Tolson the acting director of the FBI. He held that position for one day and then retired, was not in great health himself. And another little fun fact that's stuff you should know related is that Tolson was part of the FBI team that nabbed the Nazis that invaded Florida. Awesome. Yeah. Great job, Tolson. What else you got?
Well, I mean, if this is the end, we promised at the beginning just a little armchair diagnoses of his mental fitness. This is not something that people should do properly. It's frowned upon to just sort of diagnose someone after their death. But it was a time where a lot of this stuff people weren't seeking help for, given his family history with his father's death.
depression and mental illness that ended his life. A lot of legitimate, you know, clinicians have said that they fully believe that J. Edgar Hoover, at the very least, had a narcissistic personality disorder with paranoia attached. And that could very well explain sort of how he went about his career. Yeah. I saw at the very least he was a perfectionist.
That can be very driving. Is that a disorder? It's not a disorder, but it certainly can make you make some strange decisions and go in strange directions that other people might not. Good thing I'm not a perfectionist. I know. So what else you got?
I got nothing else. All right. So, Chuck, we I mean, there's so much stuff that has been left, like uncovered, unsaid, unread, unresearched. So if anybody out there has some great stories about J. Edgar Hoover that we didn't touch on, we'd love to hear them. And in the meantime, while you're generating those emails, it's time for listener mail. All right. Explanation of gears for Josh.
Hey guys, here's a possible way to explain gears, speed changes, and gear ratios that may help with your comprehension, even if you don't understand the mechanical concept. That is, driven divided by drive. For example, your input gear, which is the one being driven by the windmill rotor, for instance, has 500 teeth. The gear on the generator itself only has 50 teeth. So it's about one-tenth the size.
You divide 500 by 50, you equal 10. So that will give you a 10 times increase in speed. So for every one turn of that windmill rotor, the generator turns 10 times. I got it.
And if you want to slow things down, just put the gears in the opposite place. 50 teeth on the input gear, 500 teeth on the output. 50 divided by 500 is 0.1. So that is a ratio of 1 to 10. So for every 10 turns of the windmill blade, the generator turns once. Okay.
I think the difference, I think I actually have this now. I think in addition to it being explained really well, I had my eyes closed and was visualizing it while you were reading it. So I think that was the big breakthrough. Yeah.
All right, so that is from Mike Lewis. Mike! I just want to shout out Mike's company. He's the owner of Iron Doctors. If you are in Colorado Springs, and really they said they go anywhere in Colorado, and he didn't ask. He, in fact, said, please, you don't have to plug my business. It was just a work email. But I like to because Iron Doctors service industrial machinery and construction vehicles anywhere in Colorado.
Well, thanks a lot, Mike. I appreciate it. I truly understand gears now. Way to go. And if you want to be like Mike, then you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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