want to add one particular he said that he was trained by the federal, he was trained by the military and naval intelligence. he knows exactly what he is doing. this man is trained at a revolution. this man is trained at doing. i'm not a conspiracy theorist, but this man is trained to be iranian. and if he got to take out somebody like trump, he will. they don't have to do. thank you thank you. thank you all for the book again is, sandy hook. and it's at the time. my name is dan oppenheimer. i'm a writer here in austin, the director of public affairs for the college of liberal arts at ut austin. i've been doing this book festival. think for going on 14 or 15 years with the notable exception of some recent events that

prevented all of us from gathering in the way that we've become accustomed to. it's one of my favorite events here in austin and. i appreciate you all coming out and. it's exciting for me to be hosting this panel, city of secrets, which i just noticed 8 seconds ago is essentially a combination of the titles of. the two books that we'll be talking about today. so just to give you a quick run of show, i'm going to introduce jamie and catherine. i'll talk to them for about a half hour and then we'll do about 15 minutes of questions from the audience. you'll see a microphone that's back in the middle aisle. so i'll give you a heads up when we're a few minutes away from the question session and you can up behind that and ask questions and after i'll remind you of this at the but after this session, jamie and catherine will be with their book the signing tent, which i think is somewhere in that direction. it shouldn't be that hard to figure out signing copies of their book, their books will also be for sale there. so if you didn't come with book in hand, you can go buy one and

should. so with that, let me introduce our panelists today. kathryn mcgarr is the author city of newsmen public and professional secrets and cold war washington. she is an assistant professor at the university of wisconsin. madison where she teaches in the school of journalism and mass communication. she's also the author of the 2011 book the whole -- deal, robert strauss and the arts of politics james kirchik, who's the author of secret city the hidden history of gay washington. i should show you both of these books that have nice covers he has written about human rights, politics and culture from around the world. he's a columnist, tablet magazine, a writer at large for air and a nonresident senior at the atlantic council. he, the author of the end of europe dictators, demagogues in the coming dark age. his work has appeared in the new york times, the washington post, wall street journal, the atlantic, the new york review of books and the times literary supplement. he's a graduate of yale with degrees in history, political

science, and lives in d.c., though, as he told me recently, maybe for long now, there's no dark story to that. it just might be moving soon. so i guess i want to start by asking of both you just to give maybe give a brief overview of your book for the people, haven't read it or read about it yet and also maybe talk about why it was a labor of love for you. i'm going to assume that it was a labor of love for both of you. so let me start with catherine. sure. thanks, dan. so my book city of newsman, it's primarily about reporters who lived in washington, d.c. in 1950s and 1950s who reported on foreign policy, who did those big moments of change in u.s. foreign policy during world war two? and then the beginning of the cold war period. and i write about there social networks and clubs, kind of the literal boys clubs of washington that helped create the

appearance of consensus coming out of washington about foreign policy, about things like the united nations and naito. even when there was not actual consensus throughout the country and i argue that one of the ways they did this was through these very exclusive spaces where only other like minded, also white, also male reporters could gather, talk to sources, and talk with each other, and to sort of created certain narratives about, you know, saving western europe and saving white civilization in, this in this period. and also that these reporters weren't as patriotic naive as we are as later generations accuse them of being. there's a sense that the reporter is after world war two, we're somehow too patriotic, realize the government was lying to them, which, of course, wasn't true. they they knew the government was lying to them and they were trying to negotiate with the government to get better information. but they were also trying to prevent world war three and trying to prevent nuclear war

and felt responsible for the united states safety. and why was it a labor? why was it a labor love for you? hmm. i you know, i guess, i because i spent i didn't realize that this was why i was writing the book. but i did spend few months as a political reporter in. washington in the summer of 2009 and i didn't enjoy it and i think i've spent the last 13 years trying to find out why i it so much and i just i had such a wonderful time in the papers of all of these you know my my guys all of these reporters that i came to know really well through their, you know, letters to their mothers and the diaries they were keeping. and i just really enjoyed spending time with these with these historical actors, even when they they weren't making the best decisions. jamie yeah. so my book is also about a similar period of time, a little longer period of time.

it begins around the new deal and it goes to the end of the cold war. and this an era when what i call the specter of homosexuality haunted. now washington is, a city of secrets and secrets are a form of power in washington, more secrets. you have access or the greater secrets that you have access to, the more power you have. there's many different levels of security clearance that you can get as an as an elected official or working various institutions in washington national, security institutions. and there was no more dangerous secret during this period of time than than being gay it was actually worse to be gay than to be a communist. and there are some examples can talk about later but primarily the reason for that is that a communist could leave the communist party. they could come out, so to speak, and denounce the party and their colleagues. in fact, some of the most important of the early american conservative movement were ex

communists. but once you were as a homosexual or a sexual deviants, as the term went, your career was over. and so this seems a fascinating prism through which to study all different sorts of events and phenomena. presidencies really from fdr until the of the cold war. and the reason i start with world war two is because that is when really the concept of national security takes shape in american politics. and it was believed that because had this terrible dark secret that they were more liable to blackmail. and so this became the justification for excluding and, you know, purging gay people from the government and that didn't really end until 1995, when bill clinton lifted the ban on gay people receiving security clearances. and so my book goes through everything from world war two to mccarthyism to the rise of the conservative movement, the

african-american civil rights movements. richard nixon's paranoia, the reagans iran-contra, all these events and personalities, they're all sort of affected. or they had a connection with this secret of homosexual in some way. and so that's the book. and it was a it was a labor of love because. well, i'm a journalist and as a as a journalist, you love to find new that no one has found before. and when you're dealing with gay history, there's a lot of stuff that's never been reported before because it was kept secret, because people were ashamed or they were frightened. families would often the diaries and the papers of their gay relatives. right. so it's all sort of hidden and kept away. and i got a chance to uncover a lot of this in this book and also as a gay man myself, it was fascinating to discover, you know what was life like to be a gay person, the 1950s or

seventies or eighties in washington? i mean, the opportune cities that one had were really and, you know, fortunately, that doesn't exist today. but if i had been born earlier, my life would have been very different. and so it was it was a real i felt a real personal investment in in writing the story. so i guess the question for for both of you, though, obviously to go off in different directions. i mean, have my favorite characters in your books, but i suppose maybe just asking you if you could. it doesn't have to be the favorite, but favorite character who you kind of lived with in the writing of this book, whose story you just found really compelling, or whose personality you found compelling, you could just pick and talk about them a little bit. sure. so someone i felt like i got to know fairly well was scotty reston. james reston, whom some of you may remember as a columnist. but before he was a columnist, he was a diplomatic. and i followed him through world

war two when he was in. and out of government. he went to london for a bit and worked for the office where information and he he's sort of seen as being, you know, this very earnest. presbyterian, scottish, presbyterian was was often mentioned about him and he he was very earnest. but he also was very earnestly sort of trying to push back what the government was doing. so you know, behind the scenes, working with the state department telling them everything they're doing wrong at the peace conferences while he then is going and and getting information behind their backs at the peace conferences, he became very close to the publisher, the new york times, arthur hayes, sulzberger, which is one of the reasons he then kept moving up at the times was because he kind of got adopted into that family again because of world war two. and that's one of the reasons my book starts world war two. it's because so many of these bonds were forged in that period.

and so i loved seeing, you know, reston in his thirties and arthur he sulzberger or in the sixties takes him on a trip to all these different battle zones. they go to russia together in army planes, together they play gin rummy and just sort of seeing them become friends. but sulzberger didn't like reston, didn't drink as much as he wanted him to drink. so his next wartime trip to the pacific front, he took turner, who also was very fun to get to know. and who was was known to be able to hold his liquor than better than reston. but i love seeing reston navigate his friendships and navigate the new york times newsroom as someone who was, you know, trying to be objective and also trying to explain to arthur sulzberger why. arthur sulzberger was wrong about everything. so i'm actually going to choose a character who's local to texas whose name is robert waldron. he was an aide to, lyndon

johnson. he was from texas, a very small town, probably. you don't even know about it. it's very small. and he was working as a congressional aide for the the congressman from the seat that lbj had once occupied and and lbj had this tendency just sort of like stealing other people's staff members and bringing them on to his own. and he started working for lbj when lbj was vice president. and then in the in november 63, as lbj was moving into the white house, he wanted to bring waldron with him as as a white house staffer. and walter was being, it was going through a security clearance investigation, as you had to do to be to work the white house. and in the process of that, it was discovered that robert waldron was gay and in an instant he was kicked off staff. his white house pass was revoked and his political career was ended. and it's a very tragic story

that i tell i tell it for the first time. i'm proud to say that not even robert caro was was aware of this story. i actually informed him about it. take that. robert caro. i actually i discovered part of story in the lbj library, but i also discovered the bulk of it through. waldron's, fbi, which i had declassified about a 1000 pages and in that fbi file. i found the letter that waldron wrote to the man who outed him to the civil service commission, which was the bureau ocracy in charge of these investigations. it's a heartbreaking letter, but that to me, i think was one of the it was probably the the the most moving part of the book, i think and i think the most sort of representative story that i tell, because this was someone who was extremely close to lbj. we were all familiar with the walter jenkins right there. walter jenkins, who was lbj his senior aide, who was a who was arrested at the ymca for having

sex just a couple of weeks before the 1964 election. that was a front page story across the country. this was another gay scandal that did not become public. but lbj was really worried about it. he was actually he was he was concerned that this story also going to come out, so to speak, around the same time. and then he wouldn't be with just one gay scandal. there would have been two gays in his white house. and that that was terrifying to him. and there are conversations between and and jagger hoover where basically telling hoover, you know, you got to keep this secret, this this can't come out. so it's a really dramatic story and probably my favorite in the book. so i've a question kind of for both of you, which i think is an interesting intersection of your two books. i don't i don't think it's just a kind of linguistic overlap. but kathryn, you use the phrase -- in your book a number of times to talk about the culture of. i think mostly straight newsmen in washington. and jamie, your book is about

homosexual ality in washington. and i, i want to hear both of you sort of talk, talk, talk to each other about those those words in the context of of what kind of place d.c. is and how those two concepts of homosexuality and homosexuality kind of overlapped and didn't in d.c. in these kind pre postwar years, most of your books are sort of covering. yeah. so i think that a lot of the homosexuality that i'm seeing of the men enjoying out with other men did come out of world war two where that was very normalized rate, especially if you're in the army. that's that those are the cohorts that you're that you're with. and so they they thought that it was totally normal to have stag dinners and stag. and so that was sort of the default for professional occasions, for social occasions was to have just men and it was and it was homosexual. joe alsop, who i'm sure you can

talk a bit more about, is sort of famous as one of the biggest cold warriors of this period. and he's he's in my book, but he's not central to it because isn't one of those working reporters, going to the state department press conferences, he sort of considered himself above the fray. and he also was very well-connected in washington. so even though it was an open secret among his his cohort that was gay, it didn't really affect his access. and, in fact when he then was being in the in the fifties and hoover said, you know, we're looking into this allen dulles head of the cia said, i'll stop admits he's a homosexual stop looking into this he's on blackmail. we all know he's gay and we care. he was a very well-connected family. he had a brother who was also a reporter who was very popular. he had dinner parties that were important to the functioning of washington and just simply did not matter that he was gay.

yeah, yeah, yeah. world war two is paradoxically a very. phenomenon for gay people, but also a repressive one. it's world war two when the u.s. military codifies the ban on homosexuals, although very few gay people were actually from serving in the military because they needed practically every warm body. and so you have lots of anecdotal evidence, lots of gay people reporting later that the wartime experience serving in the military was a really important moment for them, understanding that there was actually other gay people in the world. right. because america was a much more rural society then a lot of gay people would have felt alone that they were the only one in the world. but then they're thrust into these single sex environments, whether it's the women's army corps or they're in barracks or are being shipped overseas, and they realize for the first time, oh, wait, there's other gay people. right. so it's a very it's been called a national coming out moment. but then a couple of years

later, during the years of the cold war, there's what's called the lavender scare, which is coterminous the red scare and. this is the fear of homosexuals in the federal government and it starts right off almost, you know, three weeks after joe mccarthy makes his speech alleging that there's homosexuals in the state sorry, communists in the state department then revealed that there had been homosexuals in the department and the to become conflated and the state department becomes seen in the public imagination as this very homosexual institution. right. because we need we need to be tough in fighting communism. we need to take the fight to the communists and we have all these lavender in the state department. they're these cookie. they want diplomacy. and in fact. there was a cartoon published in the new yorker in 1950 at the height of this. right. the liberal progressive new yorker magazine. and it showed a it was a little cartoon and it showed a man applying for a job.

and he's saying to the guy who's interviewing him, yes, sir, it's true. was fired from the state department, but only for. so, so that's how pervasive that's how pervasive the association was and the public imagination of homosexuality and diplomacy. the state department and the republican sweep in 1952 with dwight eisenhower and the republicans take control of congress and, the presidency for the first time since the new deal. one of the planks that the republicans were running on was to clean up the mess in washington. and it wasn't just the corruption. the truman administration, they were talking about the moral depravity of, the of the state department and j edgar hoover was spreading rumors. adlai stevenson was homosexual. and, you know, he had three strikes against him. adlai stevenson he was a bachelor. he was a former and he was an intellectual. right. so those three things were were

kind of it was it was like three strikes. they were associated with homosexuality. so i have just going off in different directions, both of you. but i first i want jamie can you tell the joe alsop story of blackmail? because i know you've told it, but it's such a great story and touches on so many. right. joe alsop is one of the most powerful, all influential columnists around the 1940s and fifties. and he was visiting moscow in 1957. he had an interview with khrushchev and later that evening, he was set up in called an espionage parlance, a honey trap. right. so handsome young that basically seduced him in a hotel. and the next these these are kgb agents bused in with photographs. and they try to blackmail alsop and he later say that he contemplated suicide. but what he did was he was well connected. he out he happened to have a friend who was the ambassador to the soviet union, charles

bohlen, who himself, interestingly enough, had been the target gay smears earlier that decade was not gay at all, but he had been at yalta and was sort of a swear word in kind of right wing politics at the time. it's where eastern europe was was essentially consigned to the soviet sphere of influence. and so bohlen had been attacked mccarthy as a homosexual, and he was friends with alsop. he was sympathetic to him. so he basically got alsop of moscow on the next flight. and when alsop did was he wrote as as mentioned, he wrote like a nine page confession of entire basis, homosexual life. he said, i've been an incurable since boyhood. i've seen doctors, they've tried to fix it. they can't fix it. but he did what any gay person would have been expected to do during that period of time. you know, he refused the entreaties of his potential blackmailers and he wrote a confession to cia.

so he did exactly what have been expected of a patriotic gay person at the time. and they did try to blackmail him later in the early 1970s. photograph was of this encounter were sent across washington to number of alsop's enemies in the press, including art buchwald. the humor columnist at the washington post who hated alsop. he actually had written a play making fun of alsop. it was on broadway. but buchwald, he got these photographs and he put them right in the trash. he thought, you know what? this is a private man's life and i'm not going to get involved with this. and it shows you how different washington was 50 years ago, because i can assure you that if compromising of certain journalists were sent to their. thomas friedman yeah. if or, you know if compromising photographs of tucker carlson were sent to rachel maddow. i don't think rachel maddow would throw them in the trash. i think they'd be on within 5

seconds. so among this sort of, you know, upper crust of group of group of journalists, there was a kind of code, you know where they would sort of protect one another. and it was very it was a very small group of people. i mean, alsop was very you know, i don't want to give you the impression that he was typical i mean, alsop was kind of he was privileged enough that he could get away with this, you know, thousands of gay people, you know, lower than him in the in the totem pole lost their jobs, their careers, ruins, people committed suicide. i mean, that was what usually happen to a person in washington. alsop was sort of an exception catherine i'm going to i'm going to do my very impression and say what is the deal with the gridiron club? because i have been hearing that phrase for most of my adult life. and i had some vague notion of what it was. but i realized i was reading your book. i didn't actually know what was. also, just for the record and sure, somebody more skilled at google could could beat me at this. i tried to figure out it was by

looking online. and it's not that there's not, but it actually like it's weirdly like sort of vaporous or something like that. so what is the deal with the gridiron club? why is it important? is it still around? it is still around. it's off the record, which is why couldn't find much about it. and it's still attended by the most important people in washington journalism and politics and. it's still white tie and tails which was their formal dinner. they had an informal dinner which just tuxedos. so this was a group of male journalists, male until the 1970s, helen thomas was the first woman member. is that right? yeah. so 1972, they voted in their first black member. there's letters that they write to each other saying we've now let in a black man. and so we might as well let in a woman. and one of the people, i mean, it's.

it's i mean, i guess it's a joke, but it's really not not and. yeah. and so they invited women to attend that dinner, which had been stag up until then. and then allowed women to actually become members in 1975. but the organizations in the 1880s, at a time when there was a lot of tension in between the press and especially the senate. and so members of the press decided that they should come together and have some sort of more collegial setting. and so they a dinner club. and then eventually it became this this annual banquet where. the journalists would put on skits with the were parodies of whatever was happening in washington, very, you know, insider, insider skits and songs and they would dress up in costume. they they would up in blackface in the forties and fifties and sort of this is one of they would dress up in drag, which is a common way that sort of men

were were how not feminine. they were putting on drag or proving how not they were by putting on blackface and performing these in these skits. and so it was a very big deal to get invited to it. they were very invitations. there were only 50 members of the gridiron club during this during this time period. and so these dinners were a really big deal and. they ensured that no, except the people who were like them could come to these dinners and benefit these these networks. so i'm curious, both of you, you know, this is more kind of abstract writerly question, like how you think about kind of types in your in your book and and i'll explain that so so jami, you talk in your book at few points about how kind of the discipline of the closet kind of produced a certain type. and that was drawn to dc for specific reasons, but obviously

you're also trying to there's like tapes that you use to help elucidate things and then your tapes that you deflate like the idea of the you know, closeted gay member administration who's going to turn on the administrator and or be easily blackmailed and katherine in your book you talk about i mean two types that i think of there's the kind of joe alsop type which is blueblood eastern seaboard, you know, sort of member of a kind of rarefied elite. but then there's also this kind of i think this was like scotty reston is like from the midwest, went a state college, became a daily journalist. obviously a lot of overlap. but you're also to deflate or kind of peel away way in which these people have been caricatured as kind of just these sort of unsophisticated, patriotic so how did you guys think about the issue of sort of type generalization in kind of sort of telling the stories of these characters? yeah. so washington during, this period i write was simultaneously the gayest and anti-gay a city in america, which is sort of appropriate

when you think that washington is also a city defined by hypocrisy and i say it was the gayest city in the sense that there was a type of gay man in the term has been used the best little boy in the world. it's to describe certain type of gay man, many gay gay men in this era right of closet when they're very repressed and they're channeling all energies into basically pleasing authority figures, whether it be their teachers they're doing a lot of extracurricular activities. they're excelling school. there's actually been a studies that have been shown that actually gay men do in academics and they have a higher percentage of graduate degrees and whatnot. and so you saw just a lot of gay men coming washington, particularly during the new deal. and after escaping small towns, provincial places to a city in, you know, really excelling in a lot of these jobs. chiefs, staff, press secretaries and whatnot, while

simultaneously it was a real pressure cooker because they weren't actually allowed to be open about who they were. and i find a lot of i mean, i mentioned this guy, robert waldron was was an example of that. and almost every president i write had a close gay advisor or friend who was very loyal to them. i mean, being so vulnerable in this way when you know that at any moment career could end like that and, made them very loyal to their bosses. they were very dependable, you know, not not having a family or a wife at homentyou could be available at, you know, 2 a.m. when your boss calls you and needs you to do something. so the kind of way that washington works made it really suitable and gay men in particular could really succeed in a in a in a place like washington and to some extent, they still do. i mean, you go to washington and it's it is still a really gay city. i mean, you go on capitol hill and there's a there's a much higher percentage of gay men on capitol hill than than than we

are as a percentage of of of the population. but i did also dispel this notion of the gay traitor. right. which sort of looms over the entire book. there wasn't a single example in the history of the united of a gay person actually being blackmailed by a foreign because they were gay. right this was something that was obsessing washington for thousands of people lost their jobs over it there was actually a study done in the early 1990s of about 121 cases of americans who committed espionage over the entire 20th century. i believe six of them were gay, but not a single of them did it under duress of blackmail was all because of, you know, money or ideology or, whatnot. there are plenty of straight people who committed blackmail. oftentimes, perhaps because they were being blackmailed because of their romantic, extracurricular. right. but not a single gay person. i think i was also trying to sort of dispel certain certain types. and as you mentioned, was that this was sort of an elite ivy

league east cohort, which was not the case. that was the case for joe. that was the case for a lot of the men in government at that time. but it wasn't true of reporters who were mostly covering for policy in this period, who mostly were from the midwest, mostly from, you know, working families attended the state school or attended. no, no college at all, worked for the daily papers and then kind of worked their way to washington and also trying to push against that idea that they were somehow you know so, so patriotic that they were too patriotic, realize that the government was duping them. one of my favorite letters is one that joseph harsh, who was a reporter for the science monitor and cbs from ohio, he wrote this letter to his famous columbia historian and saying, if i actually wrote what i thought, i would have no readers, because if i wrote the truth, it's so counter to the current of

american folklore, which is sort of this idea that america was this, you know, place for for good and we were always fighting for democracy. you saying you i wouldn't have a job and i would have readers. and so sort of how clear eyed they were behind the scenes in these private and amongst themselves and to other people about what what that patriotism and really means and how complicated the patriotism was. so i want to i'm going to take questions in a minute. so people who have questions want to start lining up behind the microphone. it's right in the center aisle. i guess this is a little bit unfair because. this isn't what you guys wrote about, but you're both, in a sense, on the ways that that the worlds of journalism and politics in d.c. were visible to the people inside them and kind of invisible or opaque to people outside of them. and it's unfair because i want to ask, is that still the case? what are the ways in which these worlds in d.c. are kind of if you're a part of it, you know

what's going on? it's not like, you know, it's not like it's mysterious but to people out in the provinces, we are here in texas, it might be opaque to. i think jamie will be to answer more thoroughly because he actually lives there. my my $0.02 is that it seems like people can keep a secret in washington. a few years ago, the russia dossier was, one of the ones we at least found out about because, buzzfeed news, would not along with the other news organizations. and they said are going to publish this. so it seems like it's still possible to keep secret. yeah, but i think it's a lot because of the rise of twitter and social media and just the diversity of, the media and also it's not the clubby boys club that it was before. and i think that in terms of my book, i don't think that sexual secrets still have the sting that can destroy a political

career, whether for gay people or straight people in some sense, i think donald trump obviated, right? i mean, here you have a guy who his personal life was basically like that of a villain from a sunday school parable. who was supported by the most, you know, socially conservative voters in, the country. so it kind of, you know, maybe that's a silver lining, right? and that's people's personal lives. sex lives are no longer can no longer be the fodder for destroying a political career in the way that they used to be. i think so. i see we have a question i just want to before you ask your question, i just to take a point of personal privilege. i think i saw my son, jason gideon in the audience and i just or they may have wandered but just i want to get them on tv so that they're nice so that they're nice to me later but go ahead, sir. i yeah, i have a question. would you lean in a little bit i think. yes and i'll try it tuck.

tuck. okay. yeah. jamie, you had mentioned jager who were a couple of times and i'm curious about the that he was gay himself and if how on earth did he manage to keep that secret so there's no there's no evidence. the question was about j. edgar hoover. he looms large over this book. obviously, he was the director of the fbi for almost half a century. there's no evidence that jager, hoover was homosexual. there's no evidence he was a heterosexual. he certainly he was certainly very sensitive to the rumors that he was a homosexual. and rumors go back to the 1930s since he was starting the bureau of investigation as it was called. and i found you know, clips from newspapers and magazines where they're referring to the the fact that he he walks with a medicine his step or that he

lives with his mother or that he collected antiques, which apparently was kind of a euphemism for a homosexual. um, he was extreme sensitive to this, as was the bureau. there's a story i tell in the early 1943. it's in the middle of war two. there are a group of women having a weekly bridge game in rural pennsylvania, and one of them mentions apropos nothing that the director of the fbi is a queer. and unfortunately for her one of the other women in her bridge club, her nephew is an agent in the fbi. she mentioned it to her nephew within a few days, the woman who said this was summoned to the local field office where she was entering, aided by a special agent in charge, wanting to know, demanding to know where did hear this about the director? we're in the middle. a war right now. his job is to protect the country why are you going around spreading awful rumors about the

director, putting the fear of god into her and demanding that she go back to her club next week and tell everyone that she didn't she didn't know what came over her. and it's not true that the director is a queer and this is in fbi records. they documented this this there are many examples of this that i came across in my research of just random american citizens saying that, oh, did you hear the director is a queer somehow it gets back to the fbi and they would send agents to go intimidate these people and to quash the rumor so they were very sensitive about this. you've all probably heard, you know j. edgar hoover was a cross-dresser. it's depicted in the movie the clint eastwood made with leonardo dicaprio. that story is bunk. it comes from the widow, a mob boss who was paid by a journalist to kind of tell this that she had been present at the plaza hotel and she witnessed some kind of -- with j. edgar hoover and roy cohn. and they were committing all these depraved sex acts on young boys and.

jake hoover was wearing a dress. i mean, that is the origin of that story? it is. it is one of the most widely believed myths about about j. edgar hoover. thank you. i think this is particularly for jamie, but perhaps both of you do speak up a little bit as they go. i think this is particularly for jamie, but perhaps for both of you, i'm wonder while your focus here in the in the united states the parallels perhaps to what was going on in great britain during the same period of time. the question was about, are there parallels to what was going on in great britain during the same period of time? there were there were the the westminster lobby correspondents who were sort of similarly cliquish. i think that because washington was so insular and isolated in way that london isn't, paris isn't. and a lot of these other great capitals and sort of the way that it was, the way that it was

founded, means that it actually is a very particular case. and there's a there's a reason, a little bit of exceptionalism, i think, in our stories, washington was very unusual in its origins, where it's only business is its politics. there a number of parallels with great britain and there's there's an important one in my book and that's the defection in 51 of guy burgess donald mclain. these are two of the cambridge five soviet spies and burgess and mclain had worked at the u.s. at the british embassy in washington. they defected to the soviet union in 1951. burgess was a flamboyant homosexual. this was widely known, and he was a communist and this became a very important sort of paradigmatic example of the homosexual traitor. right here was an actual of one. and it reverberated back in because the uk very dependent upon the united as it's you know

it's intelligence partner right we're sharing intelligence very closely with great britain and hoover is very upset by this. how could this allow this sexual deviants such access? he was he was a diplomat and a spy for mi6. how you allow this homosexual within security service. and so in order to maintain their security relationship both mi6 and mi5, which is the british version of the fbi in order to maintain the relationship with the united, they had to institute their own lavender scare in britain. they had to crack down on homosexuals, the foreign office and in mi6 in order to to continue the flow information. yeah, i don't know if you address this in, your book, but i wonder how naive people really were about washington back then. if you would watch mr. smith

goes to washington, you have the final where he's the hero. but along the way it's a very dark movie at one point they're you know beating up a newspaper boys to keep from delivering the truth and there's a hepburn tracy movie to think of the name. but where spencer tracy is running for office, they're trying to co-opt him. you in all sorts of dirty ways. it seems at least was kind of on to it even the forties and fifties. i also write about a film in my advise and consent, which may have read the novel and seen the movie, which centers on story of a gay senator or a closeted gay senator whom some enemies of his attempt, and try to blackmail. and what's revolutionary about novel less so the film which was directed by otto preminger. the novel portrays the gay senator's a hero in that he is

standing for what's right. he is trying to defend the country from the president, is nominated as secretary of state who had a communist. and this the senator, the hero of the novel is basically the only voice of reason trying to prevent this secretary of state nominee from being actually put in office. and he has this gay secret in his past and the author of that the author of the novel was alan drury, who was senate a times men. he was a senate correspondent for the new york times and also probably a closeted gay man himself. but this was a very novel and actually having a gay or a gay hero because american literature at that time, the only ways in which gay people were depicted were as villains, as murderers, as sick psychopaths and as victims. but here you had an upstanding you know, he was closeted, obviously, but he was upstanding gay hero otto preminger in the which is a great film but really

he changed the depiction homosexuality in that film and happens to be the first film in american postwar that shows the interior of a gay bar. it was very controversial. it was the film, you know, it had been illegal. it had been against the the the mpaa, the motion picture association. they had a code, right, where you couldn't depict certain on screen. you couldn't depict prostitution, you couldn't depict drug use, you couldn't depict lots of things. you couldn't depict homosexuality. this was the first movie to depict homosexual reality openly. it came out six years ago. preminger really changed the plot a little bit, and he made it much more lurid. i mean, that scene where, you know, he walks into the gay bar for the first time. it's like all these streets very darkly lit. it's all these creepy looking men. and the main character, you know, he runs out of the room and he and he runs in and he trips into a puddle and he goes off and kills himself. but that's a fascinating book to revisit and a fascinating film

revisit. hi. good morning. i apologize that i've read either one of your books, but i'm always curious as an author, how do you deal with taking people of their time? you mentioned blackface before 1950s. it just wasn't controversial. but today it is. so does it a mention? should it be judged? people are being white. that's my question. thanks. yeah, yeah. that's a great question. and i guess i would want to push back a tiny bit on the idea that they didn't know what they were doing. i feel like they did what they were doing. there's even, you know, jokes in the letters about like, oh, we know you're going to be so excited to get into blackface because they kind of already know that they shouldn't be doing it and they know that they're all men surrounded entirely by a black waitstaff. they also are very consciously prevent black men and women, you know, women of color and women from joining their club. so they didn't even want black

reporters to be allowed in the congressional press galleries. until 1947. and the only reason they then allowed in this one reporter was because congress intervened. and so a lot of the you know, the letters that i have and the memos that i have talk about how the reporters were actually sort of the most prejudiced in this group, the, you know, preventing most integration. so, you know, in the national press club in 1954, let in this same black male reporter, but it was hugely controversial. and they're fighting behind the scenes and and they they truly do know how bigoted they. yeah, i mean, look, jamie, can you just because we're almost done, i mean, be quick. i the views that we have usually now rightly abhor as homophobic were why oddly held in this country by liberals and progressive as well. in fact, the first outing in american politics that i detail in the book, it was of it was it was liberals who were outing a

conservative senator. and my point is only you have to understand the context of what you're writing in. and i and i think the book you'll see is a is a measure of history. it's not a polemical. you know, i'm not i'm not they're condemning all these people for holding views that were extremely common. i mean, gay people didn't really have any friends in this period of time. they were a universally to be sick, to be criminal or to be mental cases, to be sinners. and that's just the sad reality of what the was. and obviously, thankfully, we've we've come a long way since then. so i want to thank all of you coming out and thank catherine and jamie jamie.