A Transvestite FBI Father and A Homophobic President Dick that Likes Dick

Here we go again. First it was ‘FBI director J Edgar Hoover was a secret cross-dresser and a closet gay.’ Or, no, wait. That wasn’t first. First was ‘Anti-Communist Senator Joe McCarthy was a repressed homosexual.’ Now we have ‘Richard Nixon had a secret homosexual lover.’

This week the Mail reported on a biography out next month called Nixon’s Darkest Secrets. In it the author, Don Fulsom, makes the claim that the lying, disgraced Nixon – forced to resign from the White House after the Watergate Scandal - may have had a decades-long sexual relationship with a Mafia-connected Cuban-American called Bebe Rebozo.

Not that Fulsom has turned up any actual evidence that Nixon and long-time friend Rebozo were lovers. What Fulsom offers is stuff like this: observers noticed the intimacy between Nixon and Rebozo became most apparent when they were drunk. 

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Proof enough of an affair? My mother's signed picture of J Edgar Hoover that I discovered as a young child

An aide recalled them playing a game called King of the Pool while on holiday in Florida: ‘It was late at night, the two men had been drinking. Nixon mounted a rubber raft in the pool while Rebozo tried to turn it over. Then, laughing and shouting, they’d change places.’

And that is about the strongest the ‘evidence’ gets that Nixon was having sex with Bebe Rebozo.

But Bebe Rebozo? That, let me tell you, is a name I have known all my life. But I never heard of Bebe as Nixon’s sexual partner.

Before I get into Bebe I’d better explain how such a name as his – and plenty of other names that later turned up in political scandals and national headlines – came to fill my head from the time I was old enough to sit up and listen.

A picture of my mother Margaret taken in November 1945. It was only after finding the signed photo that I discovered she had worked in the FBI head quarters

As a small child, I was soaked in California politics (Nixon and later Ronald Reagan both came out of California politics). My father was a newspaperman with a talent for politics: for political strategy, political campaigns, political speech-writing and later for putting together political alliances on the Senate side of Washington’s Capitol Hill.

At one point he wrote a weekly column that appeared in more than 100 newspapers across the South and up into New England. When he decided to write a book, it sold more than 200,000 copies the summer it was published.

All this meant that even before I was in kindergarten I was living in the kind of house where the Governor of California would drop by to talk politics with my father. I suspect the Governor, a widower, was also there to enjoy my mother’s homemade cake while the talking went on, and probably to enjoy her company, too.

Why not? She was a woman who was both capable and beautiful, and had come out of her private girl’s college with a determination to be independent of her strict father. She learned to type – perhaps in defiance of her father - and that along with her natural skills as an organiser meant that from the age of 20 she could, and did, get jobs from the Pacific northwest to the East coast. Possibly the blue eyes and the good legs didn’t hurt her job prospects. At one point she became a staff member at FBI headquarters in Washington. But I’ll get back to my mother and the FBI in a moment.

 

But let’s get back to President Nixon and the man with whom he ‘may have had’ a homosexual relationship. What I knew from an early age about Bebe Rebozo was that ‘Bebe Rebozo is Nixon’s bag man.’ Then I learned that the ‘bag’ in question held the money. And why did it hold the money? Because – and I might have used this line for practising my handwriting I knew it so well - ‘Dick Nixon is a crook.’

Anyway, since I knew about Bebe, I always assumed everyone knew about Bebe. Later, after the Watergate scandal broke and the connection between Nixon and this Cuban-American bagman came out, I couldn’t figure out why anyone was surprised.

But what was never suggested in any of the political talk I heard about the crooked Nixon was that he was homosexual.

Not that speculation on sexual activities wasn’t discussed among the politcos who came to our house. After my family moved near Washington and my father was five days a week on Capitol Hill, I learned long before John Kennedy’s assassination that as a senator he had been having sex with a number of women on the Hill. The omniscient Doorkeeper of the Senate and his staff knew just what was going on with the priapic Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts, and word got out to the politicos. (The rule I was taught at the time was that every politician on the Hill was either on women or on drink.)

But sexual scandal on Nixon and Bebe? Nope, never heard a whisper of that. Just, ‘Nixon is a crook, Bebe is his bagman.’

Family man: President Richard Nixon, left, gives a speech as he is listened to by First lady Pat Nixon, centre, and daughter Tricia Nixon, right

Yet here we go again. A political figure on the American right – or at least what the American left claim is the American right, I’d say Nixon was no conservative – is being subjected to post-mortem sexual smears. So if you ask, ‘What do Nixon, Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy have in common?’ the answer is not that they were closet gay. Nobody knows if they – or anyone else – are or were ‘secretly’ homosexual.

So nobody knows if these three were gay, any more than we can know if the first three married Westminster politicians you can name are ‘secretly gay.’ All we can say is that in their lifetimes there was no evidence that Nixon, Hoover or McCarthy were homosexual. Anyway, if they were that was their own private business, not ours: or are the left-wingers making these charges against Nixon trying to say that homosexual activity is as scandalous as carpet-bombing Cambodia?

What Nixon, Hoover and McCarthy have in common is they were on the anti-communist American right. So the thing that all the charges about alleged secret deviant sexual behaviour have in common is that the charges were, are, made by members of the American left-wing, and based on no evidence at all. One other thing all the men have in common: none of the charges were made against them when they were alive and could defend their reputations.

Secret gay lovers? Richard Nixon, right, with Bebe Rebozo at Key Biscayne, Florida

Which is why I find that these charges against Nixon are particularly repulsive coming from Don Fulsom, a man who was a reporter in Nixon’s Washington. If he had some dirt on Nixon and Bebe Rebozo he should have come out with it then. In America, unlike here or in Britain, libel laws are so loose that it is near-impossible for a public figure to win a libel case against a newspaper – especially if that public figure were Nixon, whose reputation had been destroyed by 1974 when he was forced to resign as president. Any defence lawyer could have made a case that Nixon had no reputation left to lose.  Award for damages, one penny.

Instead, Fulsom has waited until eight years after Nixon’s death to come out with it. Unfortunately, both of Nixon’s daughters are still alive to hear the smears. Nice work, Fulsom, but do the decent thing and give your royalty cheques to charity. There are a hundred different things for which Nixon ought to be attacked. A baseless accusation that he was a ‘secret’ homosexual isn’t one of them.

Fulsom’s book comes just as a new film about J Edgar Hoover opens in the cinemas. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover and is directed by Clint Eastwood. It hasn’t arrived in Brussels yet, so I have to rely on reports from reviews and from what I’ve seen in the trailers and read in the film’s publicity.

I hardly have to tell you that the point of the film is to present the crime-busting, Commie-spy hunting, FBI chief Hoover, as a repressed – or perhaps active – homosexual. It suggests he had a smouldering emotional tie to his unmarried second-in-command at the bureau, Clyde Tolson.

Hoover was head of the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972. What the film is doing is leeching onto the infamous claims that Hoover was a secret gay who used to go to parties dressed as a woman. The evidence for these claims is non-existent, but the left keeps licking their lips and repeating them.

Yet where did the claims come from? We can trace them to a specific source on the left. The Greek writer Taki covers this in his column in the January edition of Chronicles, the American paleo-conservative magazine: ‘Twenty years or so after he died, the rumour was started about [Hoover’s] cross-dressing in gay orgies by a woman’ – Taki means Susan Rosentiel, and no you’ve never heard of her – ‘who was known even among her radical circle for her fabrications and Baron Munchausen-like tales. Trendy lefty media went wild. Here at last they had the bum nailed.’ 

Richard Nixon hugs his wife, Pat, as they leave Republican headquarters in Los Angeles to return to their hotel following his election victory

Why did they want to nail a man who was busted organised crime and protected America from Nazi and Soviet spies? As Taki says, ‘He had many enemies. Hoover was openly homophobic, didn’t trust Jews, and was accused of being a racist during the civil-rights troubles of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.’

I asked Dr Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles and one of my fellow bloggers here at the Mail, about Rosentiel. He told me she ‘had been married to a bisexual. In one of her divorce cases, apparently, she got the idea that Hoover had worked against her. She had a conviction for attempted perjury, which makes her not exactly a reliable witness.’

And boy did Rosenthiel know how to egg-up a smear: she claimed she had seen a man she was sure was Hoover several times at homosexual orgies at the Plaza Hotel in New York, dressed as woman, wearing a black wig and having sex with teenaged boys who were reading the Bible.

The claims are ludicrous. Quite apart from the fact that Hoover was for decades under 24-hour security surveillance by FBI agents, does anyone really imagine that Hoover, the master of dig-the-dirt, would be so reckless as to go to orgies at the Plaza Hotel dressed as a woman? The bureau would have been sizzling with gossip within hours. It never was.
What one review has pointed out is that the film does not show any of the known relationships Hoover had, in particular, there is no scene showing him with the beautiful dark-haired Hollywood actress Dorothy Lamour.

Apparently, before a speculative movie scene showing Hoover being kissed by Clyde Tolson – ‘I love you, Clyde, I love you’ -- a reference is made to Lamour. But no scenes depict this genuine heterosexual relationship between Hoover and the actress, indeed, no woman depicting Lamour even makes it into the film.

Why not? Because if the film presented the real J Edgar Hoover – the man who stood against President Roosevelt when he interned tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans during the war, the man who fought to keep Ethel Rosenberg, wife of the Soviet atomic bomb spy Julius Rosenberg, out of the electric chair – then the Hollywood left (actually, that’s redundant, there is nothing but left in Hollywood) would have had no interest in financing the film. But picturing J Edgar as gay, that’s box office.

And speaking of picturing: I mentioned at the start that my mother had once been on the staff at FBI headquarters. I only found out about that when – again, I was very young – I came across a picture at home of J Edgar Hoover, looking like what Dorothy Lamour’s publicity people might have called ‘mean, moody and magnificent.’ The picture was inscribed to my mother by Hoover.  I asked about it, and that’s when I found that during the war, when my mother was in her early 20s and before she had met my father, she had worked at the bureau.

She worked somewhere in admin, that’s all I could find out, not as an agent – see her picture to note that this was not a woman who could have worked undercover unnoticed. But it seemed she was noticed by J Edgar, certainly enough to have him sign a picture to her. She would say nothing else to me about her time at the bureau, or the picture. All I know is that at the time of her early death she still had the picture of J Edgar hidden away, because I found it again.

So, considering what is passing as ‘evidence’ for the relationships of right-wingers such as Hoover, here is what we have about Hoover and my mother  – and it is a lot more solid evidence than anyone has that Hoover and Tolson were homosexual lovers.

One, Hoover liked beautiful dark haired young women such as Dorothy Lamour. Their paths crossed. Two, my mother was a beautiful dark haired young woman. Their paths crossed.  Exhibit A: see picture inscribed by Hoover.

One more piece of evidence ‘that may not be conclusive,’ as writers such as Fulsom say about their claims about Nixon and directors such as Eastwood say about their claims about Hoover: I do know that around the time my mother was at the FBI she drove a new Packard roadster convertible, of which no more than 100 were made each year during the war.

What kind of connections do you need to have in wartime Washington to get your gorgeous 20-something feminine hands on that kind of car?

I see a book shaping up. I have enough evidence for a working title: ‘Am I J Edgar’s secret love child?’  You’ll find it on the bookshelf at Waterstone’s next to ‘Tail-Gunner Joe, and in more ways than one: was Senator McCarthy a shirt-lifter?’

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