J. Edgar Hoover

These were not a few followers with casual ties but those in leadership positions with decades-long associations to both King and organized communism, one of whose fronts had an adherent involved in a president’s murder.

It is too easy viewing the past’s urgency with the present’s dispassionate eye, imputing motives such as “racism.” King and fellow travelers such as singer Paul Robeson had more in common than color. They were also imbued by a political philosophy whose practical consequence was an arsenal of hostile weapons 90 miles from the American coast.

The director was hardly a “loose cannon.” Attorneys General under Harding to Nixon signed off on legal warrants. Even so, aside from keeping a watchful eye on Rev. King, the director did little to actually impede his actions. As regards subversive neutralization in general there were obvious excesses, but all were par for the course of national security work and nothing like what other agencies engage in today.

Hoover viewed King as a rabble-rouser with extremely dangerous connections who at minimum was involved with foreign infiltrators advocating violent overthrow of the government. Such associations would even now justify a wiretap search warrant in any American jurisdiction, and possibly a drone strike as well.

Allegation #3 – Capital Offense – Suspect is supposed to have been a closeted homosexual.

This allegation is so old, so singular, and so meritless it ought not bear discussion. Yet repetition lends reliability and many fools believe it to be true.

Claims of Hoover’s homosexuality originated with one Susan Rosenstiel, who stated she witnessed the director in, of all places, The Plaza Hotel in New York City twice during the 1950s wearing women’s clothing. She went on to assert she saw him doing this at what she described as “homosexual orgies” (raising the question why any woman would be present).

No doubt there was already a willingness to propagate the most licentious fabrications about the director, as many factions bore him ill will. There is also the fact that neither he nor his top aide Clyde Tolson ever married. Yet this speaks more toward the extreme dedication to duty of an earlier age than it does of sexuality. Hoover was also romantically involved with actress Dorothy Lamour over a period of years and was involved later with actress Ginger Rogers’s mother.

In examining the tale’s veracity, one should look less at the director and more at Ms. Rosenstiel. She served time at Rikers Island jail for, of all things, perjury on the stand and lying under oath. As if more proof is needed, Rosenstiel did not volunteer this salacious story but was paid to tell it. The singular allegation was never substantiated by anyone at any time or anywhere. When the Soviet KGB archives were unsealed it was learned that they, his erstwhile enemies, had attempted to propagate such a claim.

Worst of all is that Hollywood uses these fallacious allegations of homosexuality as a weapon. The exact people who claim to embrace all aspects of sexuality are the very ones frequently hurling accusations of homosexuality as ridicule. They plead they do so only to unnerve the object of their scorn, yet such proclamations of an “outing” (however false) are hyper-hypocritical. One cannot esteem something one simultaneously uses as a bludgeon. In this, Hollywood ought to be ashamed.

So who was J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI?

A man dedicated to his office and to the country he served. A man who foresaw the hidden and disguised menaces to true freedom we have been seduced into venerating by our willful ignorance of their actual nature. A man who was everything the West once revered but now reviles because it cannot produce men one-tenth so stalwart.

J. Edgar Hoover was nothing less than a genuine American hero, and that is why Hollywood must destroy him at all costs.