GOSSIP MEN
J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy,
Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation
by Christopher Elias
Univ. of Chicago. 288 pages, $35.
“SURVEILLANCE STATE masculinity” is Christopher Elias’ term for the toxic brew of national security hyper-vigilance and a new concept of masculinity that “saddled men with endless anxiety” that emerged in the “Red Scare” decade, the 1950s. Elias’ Gossip Men is a deeply researched sociological examination of this uniquely American phenomenon as told through the intertwined lives of three men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn. In Elias’ telling, the story of surveillance state masculinity found its defining moment in the Army-McCarthy hearings, a sordid televised drama of accusation and counter-accusation that grew out of Sen. McCarthy’s charges that Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government and the media. Cohn was his henchman, Hoover an ally at the FBI.
The writing is crisp and intelligent, but readers looking for dramatic storytelling—or, certainly, for gossip—will not find much in Gossip Men. A professor of history at the American University of Cairo, Elias has written a sociological thesis, dense with information, extensively footnoted, and carefully hewing to the facts. If it lacks a little in narrative panache, it makes up for it in scholarly rigor. And the personalities at the heart of the story are certainly vivid enough to show through the academic veneer.
Elias’ major project is to show how gossip and innuendo, and specifically how popular gossip magazines and scandal sheets like Confidential and The Inquirer, played an outsize role in enabling McCarthy and his cronies to influence public opinion.
“For all three men, [gossip]was an important means of gathering information that might prove useful in achieving their political and professional ends,” he writes. “They all adeptly wielded the tools of gossip journalists, including hyperbole, insinuation, and guilt by association. Hoover, McCarthy and Cohn used the media to enhance their own public images while concurrently employing distilled malice to paint their opponents in a negative light including with the broad brush of effeminacy that they themselves so feared.”
In a section titled “The Topography of Modernity,” Elias shows, among other things, how popular gossip magazines seeded the culture with images of masculinity as an impossible ideal that put an ever-anxious male population on the defensive at all times. One magazine, Broadway Brevities, made anxiety about homosexuality explicit in a series of articles called “Nights in Fairyland,” which “purported to be a behind-the-scenes look at the city’s gay nightlife.”
In three successive chapters, we learn how Hoover, McCarthy, and Cohn came to prominence in this milieu, and how all three men trafficked in sexual gossip—and were later the object of it. Hoover excelled at using publicity and deployed movies, radio, and press accounts to create the hypermasculine image of the “G-man.” The rise of Hoover, the G-man, and the FBI as cultural icons was also deeply associated with the Cold War fear of Communism. After his death, Hoover’s star dimmed when his extensive use of blackmail, especially sexual blackmail, to control politicians was revealed. Yet he was himself widely believed to have been gay, and a now discredited story about his participation in eccentric cross-dressing parties was widely reported.
It was McCarthy, in Elias’ telling, who made the connection between Communism and homosexuality explicit in speeches that called for “removing perverts from our government.” Elias notes that it was partially due to McCarthy’s charges that the Senate appropriated $10,000 for the investigation of “homosexuals and other perverts in government jobs,” helping to expand the government’s harassment of gay men known as the “Lavender Scare.” Writes Elias: “McCarthy’s speeches reveal how fears of nonnormative gender and ‘deviant’ sexuality overlapped with political radicalism in a moment of moral panic.”
But it was Roy Cohn, surely one of the most malevolent characters ever to strut across the American stage, who brought this mix of furtive sexuality and power politics to its highest pitch, engaging in political combat with a willingness to use intimidation, influence-peddling, and intrigue of all kinds. Cohn was undoubtedly gay despite his denials to the bitter end; he died of AIDS in 1986.
The Army-McCarthy hearings centered around the figure of David Schine, a wealthy and handsome hotel chain heir whose virulent anti-Communism brought him to the attention of Cohn, who hired him on as a consultant to McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. When Schine was drafted into the Army, Cohn sought aggressively to get preferential treatment for him. When the Army pushed back, charging Cohn and McCarthy with inappropriate conduct, the two men accused the Army of covering for Communists within its ranks.
Many believed that Cohn’s excessive interest in Schine was romantic in nature, and questions from Senators during the hearings made oblique reference to this. (Homosexual innuendo was an undercurrent throughout the hearings, as when a senator asked a witness if a certain photograph came from a “pixie,” explaining that “a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.”) Elias allows that Cohn’s insistence could just have been a function of his aggressive, unyielding personality: “Cohn had become so powerful and so adept at getting his way that he was likely shocked when the Army refused to immediately buckle under his usual tactics of backroom horse-trading and outright bullying. Upon realizing the Army would not engage in quid pro quo, Cohn reverted to brinksmanship in an effort to demonstrate that he, McCarthy and their allies held more power than the Army.”
In an epilogue, Elias asserts that surveillance state masculinity is still with us. He implicates Donald Trump, who was introduced to Manhattan power politics by none other than Roy Cohn. “In many ways, Donald Trump is the ultimate practitioner of surveillance state masculinity in his masculinist persona, his weaponization of proprietary information, and his employment of the tools of gossip.” Elias also compares Trump’s following to that of the populist Wisconsin constituency that launched McCarthy’s career in the Senate.
The national security apparatus that has grown up since the end of World War II has plundered the country’s wealth at the expense of domestic social programs. It has helped to create the “Imperial Presidency,” fostered a sense of perpetual crisis that has led the country into misbegotten wars, and created what Patrick Moynihan, the late Senator from New York, called a self-perpetuating “secrecy system.” Elias’ convincing contribution to the understanding of this travesty is to show that central to the surveillance state and secrecy system was, and is, a highly politicized version of masculinity and sexuality.
Mark Moran is a writer who lives and works in Washington, D.C., and writes professionally about medicine, science, and health.
