I don’t want another month to pass by without saying something about the so very enjoyable Fado Night at the Chameleon Suite, Corinthia Palace Hotel, in December. I have listened to Fado several times before since there is a family connection with Portugal. I must say, at first I found it somewhat lugubrious, on the whole. But not after attending this Fado evening which was organised by The Embassy of Portugal in association with Pinto Basto. The latter have established their international headquarters in Malta. They have been operating in Portugal since 1771 and are involved in transport management, liner services and shipping services.
The two stars of the evening were Maria Ana Bobone who not only sang so beautifully but occasionally accompanied herself at the piano while the male voice was another well known fadista, Antonio Pinto Basto. The three guitarists were of an excellent calibre, too. Fado, which means fate, is often described as the Portuguese Blues and deals with the sorrowful themes of despair, loss, betrayal, jealousy and unrequited love. It is an acquired taste and I believe after the evening at the Corinthia it is now another taste I have acquired. I hope there will be one more Fado evening this year too.
One of my Christmas presents was Puppet Master:The Secrets of J. Edgar Hoover by Richard Hack which I am reading while, in between, dipping into Alfred Sant’s Pupu fil-Bahar which although a lighter read, is in Maltese and needs more concentration on my part.
For nearly 50 years, Hoover ran the FBI. We’ve all heard about him. He was the gatekeeper of its secrets, its power and its image. Today, the Hoover legend is not just about crime fighting. It has as much to do with playing fast and loose with civil liberties, with collecting vast secret files on innocent people and with stories about his private life. This was a man with secrets of his own, including rumors of bizarre sexual behaviour and cross dressing. I am glad to read that no FBI head will ever again have the power Hoover had. Now FBI directors are not allowed to retain the post for more than ten years.
For his book, Hack interviewed dozens of Hoover’s acquaintances and poured over thousands of Hoover’s documents. Hoover was a man with a taste for the ugly side of power. His experience as a clerk at the Department of Justice helped him turn a disorganized federal agency into a true crime fighting organization. Hoover not only ran the FBI, but he managed its image everywhere, according to Hack. He even dictated to Hollywood and the studios followed Hoover’s orders of how crime and punishment should be portrayed in films. He looked at every movie, every reference, every scene, every actor. He approved it all. For example Hoover was not thrilled that James Cagney portrayed criminals in movies like Public Enemy. His only advice to Cagney was always, ‘Get killed by the end, make sure you’re dead because I don’t want to see any crooks living.’
Hoover was perhaps most controlling of his own image. A life-long bachelor, his immunity to personal scandal while in office, came, says the author, from sacrificing his own personal life. “For J. Edgar Hoover to be as powerful as he was, to maintain that image, he gave up his personal life. His work became his personal life. There was no other life.”
Hoover used his power to make life difficult for those people who he believed threatened him. With the birth of the modern civil rights movement, Hoover became convinced that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a pawn of the Communist conspiracy. He had agents follow King and record sexual encounters in various hotel rooms. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference offices were wiretapped and burglarized by the FBI many times, all in the hope of finding information that would discredit King. Though Hoover’s efforts proved futile, they demonstrated his ability to use the FBI as his personal tool. The author says Hoover felt insulted by the civil rights leader. King dared to ignore a Hoover phone call. “From that one unanswered phone call, for the rest of King’s life Dr King did not have a free moment from the spectre of J. Edgar Hoover, ever. He tapped him, he followed him.” It seems that Hoover was jealous of Martin Luther King who had a wife and family, authority and respect.
And then there was Hoover’s relationship with JFK and the entire Kennedy family. Hoover had supported Richard Nixon. When Kennedy got in, Hoover thought he was going to be fired. But nobody fired Hoover. JFK didn’t fire Hoover either because he didn’t know what Hoover really knew. When it really came down to it. In fact Hoover was scared to death. He brazened things out when necessary; bluffed his way.
When it came to the Kennedy clan, Hoover perhaps felt the most contempt for Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He thought he was a loose cannon he could not control and Hoover loved being in control. Robert Kennedy made Hoover turn his attention away from fighting communism to organized crime, which Hoover, at that time, believed was much less of a threat. It didn’t matter to him if there was the Mafia out there. They weren’t going to bring the government down, they were just making money illegally and there were plenty of cops to deal with that. Why did he maintain a hands-off policy toward the Mafia, which was allowed to conduct its operations nationwide practically free of FBI scrutiny or interference? There is speculation that he left the Mafia alone because they, in turn, had evidence of his cross-dressing and homosexuality and blackmailed him.
While much has been made about Hoover’s secret files on those around him, Hack says he learned Hoover had some secret files for his own personal use – files that included nude photographs. He had nudes of many people in an obscene file that he kept himself. It is no big surprise that he had nude photos of Marilyn Monroe but he also had some of Eleanor Roosevelt although, one would like to ask, who would have wished to see Mrs Roosevelt naked? How did Hoover come by these photos? He found out that the actor, comedian and writer, W.C. Fields happened to have a set of nude pictures of Mrs Roosvelt and Hoover asked for them.
There were nude photos of others of course. Hoover collected them to be used to blackmail people when it became necessary to do so. The general feeling was that you never knew who was looking over your shoulder with Hoover in office.
During World War I Hoover had worked for the Bureau of Investigation, keeping statistical records of immigrants for the Alien Enemy Bureau. A vigorous anti-communist, Hoover quickly moved up the ranks in the postwar period. When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the FBI undertook intensive surveillance of communists and other left-wing activists in the US Hoover’s animosity toward radicals of every kind led him to investigate both the Ku Klux Klan and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other African American activists in the 1960s.
The F.B.I. grew to become known as incorruptible with law officers who kept files on just about everybody, from gangsters and spies to pop culture figures including John Lennon.
Hoover has been a controversial figure since his death, and there has been much speculation about his personal life, family background and dictatorial rule over the Bureau.
He habitually used the FBI’s enormous surveillance and information-gathering powers to collect damaging information on prominent people throughout the country, and apparently he was able to intimidate even sitting presidents by threatening to leak damaging disclosures about them. He maintained a file of over 450,000 names until he died.
Within a few years of his death, public opinion about Hoover had shifted to the point that his name by itself conjured up the image of a government at war with the rights and liberties of its citizens.
On the whole I am finding him to be a sad figure with an interesting though sad personal life.
