The Press: A Woman’s Intuition

MY SECRET LIFE WITH J. EDGAR HOOVER, shrilled the red headlines across the front page of the evening New York Post (circ. 351,700). On Page 3, beneath a black version of the same incendiary invitation, were pictures of the principals involved: the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a bachelor and a pudgy 64, and four-times-wed Post Publisher Dorothy Scruff, a slim 56. But anyone who swallowed the Post’s heavily scented lure last week in the hope of finding a spicy journalistic feast was doomed to disappointment. The flavor was all in the hook.

Far from exposing her secret life with J. Edgar—whom she has never met—Dolly Schiff revealed nothing more sensational than her own insinuation that the No. 1 G-man had stopped at practically nothing in an effort to kill a series of stories on the FBI about to begin in the Post. Banking mostly on intuition, Publisher Schiff charged that she was placed under surveillance (“Apparently the FBI was indeed watching me”) ; she insinuated —without any shred of evidence—that her hotel rooms were bugged. On a trip to Washington, she said, she was warned by the Post’s White House Correspondent Bob Spivack that the FBI was probably recording their conversation in Spivack’s car. Installed at the Shoreham Hotel, Dolly even changed rooms, inspected the garbage can (“I found some paper and wires which weren’t hitched to anything”), and was not reassured when the apprehensive Spivack took his leave of her room with a farewell addressed to the FBI microphones, “Goodbye, everybody.”

Dolly charged that Hoover had discussed the impending series with one of her advertisers in an attempt to bring pressure on the Post to kill the story. Hoover told the advertiser, said Dolly, that the Post was angry because the FBI had once forced the dismissal of Nancy Wechsler, wife of Post Editor James Wechsler, from a Washington job. Indignantly, and at exhaustive length that spared neither the reader nor Nancy, Publisher Schiff reported that Mrs. Wechsler had belonged to the Young Communist League for a short time years ago but had never been fired from a Government job.

From there, Writer Schiff went on to more innuendo: “I wondered why Hoover had lost his head. Why was he so scared? Drawing upon my knowledge of psychology, I decided he must be afraid that something damaging about his private life would be revealed in the series.” But, said she piously, the Post had no intention of doing any such thing. At week’s end, after four disorganized, unilluminating episodes, the series had produced nothing more damaging than the fact that the director of the FBI, as a boy, sang soprano in the church choir.