The first link was provided by Glenn Greenwald, who did all my bitching for me, providing an withering, and eminently justified, takedown of Post columnist Ruth Marcus, all hot and bothered by—wait for it—an outbreak of free speech in Kansas!
You’re surely aware of the story of Emma Sullivan, the 18-year-old high school student in Kansas whose tweet re Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, “#heblowsalot,” has pretty much gone around the globe, or at least from Natchez to Mobile. Sam’s staff notoriously leaned on Miss Emma’s school to punish little miss trash mouth, but Emma wouldn’t back down, and her mother backed her up: “I raised my kids to be independent, to be strong, to be free thinkers. If she wants to tweet her opinion about Governor Brownback, I say for her to go for it and I stand totally behind her.”
Well, that kind of crazy free speech, First Amendment talk was too much for a columnist in the leading newspaper in our nation’s capital: “If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smart¬alecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.”
No, Ruthie didn’t much care for Emma, but she cared for Emma’s mom even less: “The parental role is to inculcate values of respect for authority— even those you disagree with—and the importance of civil discourse. It’s not to stand up for your little darling no matter how much she mouths off.” Ruth, you totally suck.
The Post’s next journalistic outrage totally does not involve sucking. Well, I’m pretty sure of that, though, in fact, I could be wrong. So what’s the deal, Lucille? You also may be aware that Clint Eastwood has released, to fairly restrained applause, J. Edgar, a biopic on J. Edgar Hoover, starring Mr. Titanic himself, Leo DiCaprio, dancing around the Director’s long-time infatuation with his number two man, Clyde Tolson.
J. Edgar’s been out for close to a month, and the film’s generally been criticized by its wishy-washy tone on just about everything in Hoover’s life, and, frankly, at this point, it’s pretty much old news. Well, not to the Washington Post. They’ve got plenty of room to allow some old G-men* to bitch about the portrayal of their chief in a long story by Carol Morello with the bland headline “FBI agents upset over movie alleging J. Edgar Hoover was gay.”
Well, they are, and that’s what the story is about. They bitch about the movie and say what a great guy the Director was and put flowers on his grave forty years after the guy is dead.† Morello doesn’t work very hard to provide perspective. She does say this: “John Fox, the FBI historian, said speculation about Hoover’s sexuality never got very far. ‘Hoover was single all those years,’ Fox said. ‘His closest friend and associate was another man. Periodically through the history of his tenure, there was an innuendo here, an innuendo there that he was homosexual. But that was the extent of it.’”
I think Carol could have worked a little harder than that. There was more than an innuendo here and an innuendo there. I heard “J. Edgar’s a homo” jokes when I was in high school in 1963, and my high school was not what you see on “Gossip Girl.” But now, in 2011, when gays are getting married, the Post will run an article that does nothing more than let old G-men lie about their boss.
I remember that, several years ago (and, probably, several Post staff reductions ago), the Post ran a funny (and not bitchy) article about J. Edgar and Clyde, based on a staff memo prepared for FBI personnel assigned the ball-shriveling task of caring for the two when they arrived at bureau offices in California or Florida on vacation.‡ According to the memo, everything had to be exactly the same for each man, to ward off complaints along the lines of “How come Edgar had a new bar of soap in his soap dish this morning and I didn’t?” or memos beginning “It has come to my attention that Mr. Tolson’s bed has two queen-sized pillows while the Director’s bed has one queen-sized and one standard-sized pillow.” The reporter, whose name I can’t recall, had a good chuckle at the thought of these two fussy old queens running the most powerful law enforcement agency this side of the KGB.
But that was then, when the Post used to question authority instead of worshipping it.
Afterwords
I previously alluded to this matter, before J. Edgar dropped, in a post entitled “Ronald Kessler, totally bending over forwards to be fair,” discussing Kessler’s account of l’affaire de Edgar and Clyde in his book The Bureau, The Secret History of the FBI. Kessler summed things up as follows: the two “were inseparable. They ate lunch together every day and dinner together every night. They vacationed together, staying in adjoining rooms, and they took adoring photos of one another.” Move along, folks, move along. Nothing to see here. Nothing to see.
Slate discusses the matter more intelligently here, and concludes with a heartfelt message from Edgar to Clyde: “Words are mere man-given symbols for thoughts and feelings, and they are grossly insufficient to express the thoughts in my mind and the feelings in my heart that I have for you. I hope I will always have you beside me.” Sounds like a man in love to me. And not in a bad way, either. Even tyrannical, law-breaking shitheads can have feelings.
*Old, old G-men, actually, because Hoover died in 1972.
†And how gay is that?
‡Hoover carried bureaucratic nest-feathering to a degree unimaginable today. He loved to go to the racetrack, so he created FBI offices in Florida and California near famous racetracks with special guest quarters (used, of course, only by Tolson and himself). Hoover got a new Cadillac limousine each year (the President got a new one every three years). The old ones would be rotated out to the “racetrack” field offices so that he and Clyde could travel to the track in style.
