FBI Probes

The extent to which J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1935 to 1972, collected information on the sex lives of political figures to be used as leverage is legendary. In February 2009, The Washington Post published information it had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act documenting Hoover’s investigations into Jack Valenti, who was a presidential aide to Lyndon Johnson in the‘60s.

“Republican Party operatives reportedly were pursuing a parallel investigation with the help of a retired FBI agent, bureau files show. No proof was ever found, but the files, obtained by The Washington Post under the federal Freedom of Information Act, provide further insight into the conduct of the FBI under Hoover, for whom damaging personal information on the powerful was a useful tool in his interactions with presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon.”

The FBI in 1950s

In the 1950s, the FBI were responsible for providing to Civil Service Commission with background information on its applicants and employees. It did so by working with postal inspectors, who would subscribe to gay pen pal clubs and trace the activity of its members, monitor gay bars, and obtain records of arrests of men on “morals charges”.

When the Mattachine society was founded in the 1950s it was under constant FBI surveillance. A legacy of the McCarthy era, and the communist witch hunts, was that any organised group was considered a potential threat. The FBI would be called in to make sure that no Commie Shenanigans were going on. FBI and police would attend meetings and conventions Mattachine leaders were forced to use pseudonyms as a result.

The Mattachine’s magazine One published an article in 1955 which claimed that homosexuals occupied key positions in the FBI. This was certainly true of the unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn. There were rumours that Hoover and associate FBI director Clyde Tolson were lovers. Hoover ordered a crack-down that was nothing less than vicious. The subject rather unhinged him.

“Justice is incidental to law and order.”
– J Edgar Hoover

“No member of our generation who wasn’t a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.”
– Lyndon B Johnson

“I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently, because Lyndon Johnson is my president.”
– Jack Valenti

“Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.”
– J Edgar Hoover

“We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.”
– Lyndon B Johnson

“It’s increasingly clear that the government is involved in political surveillance of organizations that are involved in nothing more than lawful First Amendment activities, … It raises very serious questions about whether the FBI is back to its old tricks.”
– Anthony Romero
First openly gay Excecutive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union
(2005)