He was a G-Man. He was a lady’s man. And given with whom he worked and where he hung out, he was probably a man’s man too. He was a big drinker.
And a super spy.
Two decades after his excruciating dismissal from the FBI he loved so much, he married J. Edgar Hoover’s secretary. Did he love her?
He worked with Marilyn Monroe, Joseph McCarthy, Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, and many more.
A FOIA search unearthed 533 documents from the FBI, but they withheld ninety more. What didn’t they want the world to know?
He was the father of my father, who never spoke about him. He was also the man whose legacy I inherited, and because of that, more than a little familial karmic cleansing has been required.
This is the story of my grandfather, Arthur Bernard Leckie, a shrewd little sleuth who might have known just enough to get him killed thirty-six hours before Marilyn’s death just up the road.
He was a G-Man. He was a lady’s man. And given with whom he worked and where he hung out, he was probably a man’s man too. He was a big drinker.
And a super spy.
Two decades after his excruciating dismissal from the FBI he loved so much, he married J. Edgar Hoover’s secretary. Did he love her?
He worked with Marilyn Monroe, Joseph McCarthy, Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, and many more.
A FOIA search unearthed 533 documents from the FBI, but they withheld ninety more. What didn’t they want the world to know?
He was the father of my father, who never spoke about him. He was also the man whose legacy I inherited, and because of that, more than a little familial karmic cleansing has been required.
This is the story of my grandfather, Arthur Bernard Leckie, a shrewd little sleuth who might have known just enough to get him killed thirty-six hours before Marilyn’s death just up the road.
Introduction
Bringing My Father’s Father Back to Life
Sometimes, a single person can encapsulate an entire era. A single
lifetime can entwine the strands of history, providing a reasonably
clear vision of life so many decades ago. And when that person to
whom that lifetime belonged was a grandfather you never knew,
there’s invariably a story to be discovered and told.
As a child, my grandfather, Arthur Bernard Leckie (ABL),
remained a mystery to me. I recently discovered part of the
extraordinary life he had led—this jolly, heavy-drinking, Hollywood
Noir incarnate straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. More than
once, the newspapers of the day praised him, though the term “a
shrewd little sleuth” lacks the intended compliment.
My father never spoke of his father to anyone, but I inherited his
legacy. This mysterious man is a part of me, and I will forever be a
part of him. I, his progressive, international human rights lawyer
grandson whom, of course, he never met, was more than a little
puzzled by recent discoveries I made that my grandfather was deeply
connected to the US empire and numerous client regimes.
As a globetrotting writer and human rights activist, I have spent
my life working in over eighty countries with several of the NGOs, the
1SCOTT LECKIE
United Nations (UN), and organizations I founded. I’ve always fought
for human rights for everyone, everywhere, and never given up on my
vision of a unified humanity where all enjoy every human right, every
moment of their lives. Indeed, it has gotten stronger as the years have
rolled by, faster and faster with each passing year. I do not see people
as their nationalities or citizenships. These are invisible to me, except
when such identities are used as grounds for discrimination or
oppression by another, more dominant, group; at that point, they
become all-encompassing. Under normal circumstances, however, I
see people as people; all of us are inherent parts of the human family
—none more or less important than any other. A single species of
homo sapiens all sharing a single planet.
Imagine my distress, therefore, when I first learned about my
grandfather’s work and how it seemed to run counter to all my life’s
efforts in a small way. It seems up to me to enact some form of
familial karmic cleansing to undo the sins of my grandfather. How
could I, a perpetual Green Party voter, writer and international human
rights lawyer dedicated to alleviating the suffering of the poor,
reconcile with a family background involving some of the worst
human rights abuses witnessed in 20th-century US history?
Near the end of this process, I suddenly realized that today I am the
sleuth; I am sleuthing the sleuth. Perhaps—if I am lucky—I may just
out-sleuth the shrewd little sleuth and find out my grandfather’s
absolute identity. How did he view the world? How ambitious was he?
Did he cut corners? Was all that schmoosing just a show? Was he
power-hungry? Did he seek fame and fortune, or did his version of
justice drive him more than anything else? How easily did he love—
and whom did he love? What was it that drove him to drink? How
close was he really to Hoover and all the other closeted men of power
with whom he (perhaps quite literally) rubbed shoulders with during
his career? Was ABL a heretofore secret kind of “friend” to Hoover,
much like the more famous Melvin Purvis or Guy Hottel, whose lives
became increasingly entwined with Hoover’s as time rolled on? Was
ABL kind and compassionate? Or was he cruel and selfish? Was he an
assassin? Was he murdered?
Even more interesting to me is the quest to answer: How much
2SHREWD LITTLE SLEUTH
would my granddad and I have had in common? What joys would we
have shared, and where would we have diverged? How would each of
us have considered decisions when confronted with challenging
questions and choices that could determine our life pathways?
After more than sixty years, I have uncovered some mysteries
surrounding the colorful and topsy-turvy life of my grandfather, ABL,
who was involved in major American political events. Though I never
met my paternal granddad, we share a lot: two of my three names, a
quarter of my genetic make-up, and more than a few character traits
that I have just now discovered. Some of these I happily embrace.
Others, not so much.
I learned that less than thirty-six hours before dying in highly
suspicious circumstances, surrounded by intrigue, mystery, and all the
rest, he energetically danced for joy upon hearing the date of my
impending birth, his first grandchild. Knowing now of his happiness
about my pending arrival into this world instinctively brings me closer
to this mysterious man. But as I’ve also discovered in this sixty-second
year since his death, in our worldviews and the choices we made in our
working and personal lives, we had more than a few deviations, some
of which are as different as could be, with others nothing short of
terrifying.
As a lifelong social justice fighter, it’s more than a tad difficult to
reconcile my embrace of humanity with the life of this quintessential
American family member. He engaged in spying, secret investigations,
planting bugs and wiretaps, and exposing people for their political
views. He calculated proximity to some of the most foul and
destructive American political figures of the past century.
Perhaps I intuitively knew there was a need to clear the somewhat
fouled air when I chose a life dedicated to human rights, even though I
knew so little about ABL when I embarked on my global life. But
despite all this, he was my granddad, my dad’s dad, and all these
decades later, I want to know this peculiar man more now. I want to
try to bring him back to life so I can more deeply understand both him
and me better.
Thanks to this intriguing figure finding himself, or more likely
placing himself, right at the center of a series of critical historical
3SCOTT LECKIE
epochs and events from the 1930s until his unexpected death in
California in the early 1960s, there is just enough information out there
still to give me a strong sense of the very full life he lived. In the days
immediately after his death, there was so much more, but thanks to my
highly conscientious and legally fearful father, off went 99.9% of that
into the paper shredder and fire, never to be seen again. Three hundred
boxes of immaculately kept files are gone for good.
But in putting all of the remaining pieces of this story together for
the first time, instead of soothing any curiosity I might have had about
ABL, I feel a sense of disquiet about both the man himself and what he
endured in both private and professional realms. The very real
possibility that his death did not only occur out of the blue but was
brought upon him by something seriously sinister haunts me to the
core.
My granddad left this life just a few short months before I was
born in the same town where he died, the City of Angels, Los Angeles.
He passed away at the young and tender age of fifty-seven when my
dad was just twenty-nine, the exact age I was when I started learning
some of the details of the following, extraordinary story. Given the
grief I felt at my dad’s sudden demise when I was well into my fifties,
I still wonder how my father, just short of three decades old, dealt with
his dad’s equally unexpected death under nothing less than
bewildering circumstances.
Although perhaps reminiscent to some as a sort of Walter Mitty-
like character who lived in a fantasy world of sought-after but elusive
meaning, this intriguing man was, in fact, far more like a real-life
Forrest Gump. He seemed to be strategically placed right in the middle
of a series of major historical events during his adult life. Gump was
there meeting President Kennedy, seeing action in the Viet Nam War,
finding himself right in the center of the anti-war movement of the
1960s, and experiencing the early, tragic days of AIDS firsthand. ABL
was a core part of the early days of the FBI, at Pearl Harbor during
World War II, managing security at the founding meeting of the UN,
working as a spy for the stars, heading investigations with the anti-
communist and human rights violating McCarthy witch hunts, and so
much more. And then, there are all those links to Marilyn Monroe
4SHREWD LITTLE SLEUTH
during her (and his) final days ...
My dad never mentioned his father as I grew up in Southern
California before I decided to very intentionally and permanently
expatriate myself from the United States at the age of twenty-two. As a
result, I spent my youth with almost no knowledge of the life of my
grandfather other than a single memento, a hand-drawn penciled
portrait—described by the artist Jerry Doyle as a cartoon—of ABL
with a similar-looking man looming over him, as if intentionally
placing himself into a position of suggestive domination, a hand
sensually laid onto ABL’s right shoulder. This unsettling drawing was
presented to ABL at a testimonial dinner given in his honor on
February 27, 1939, held at the Penn Athletic Club in Philadelphia,
where he headed the local FBI office. A word bubble quote, which I
memorized as a child, extends from the mouth of the speaker, says,
“Leckie is one of our most outstanding agents. It is men like he that
have made the organization what it is today.” That agent was my
granddad. The organization was the FBI. And the man to whom we
can attribute that quote turned out to be none other than the
controversial, first, and multi-decade boss of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover. A letter thanking Doyle and
ABL for the cartoon from Hoover lets us know that he gratefully
received a copy of this strange drawing of one of the FBI’s first
employees.
As a child, I was thankfully not brought up in a religious
household, though parts of the Leckie clan were and still are deeply
religious, fundamentally so. In one of the few attempts by my parents
to interest me in the pursuit of eternal life, I was forced to attend a
session of Sunday school at a local Presbyterian church. Though only
eleven years old, I felt so averse to this idea that I intentionally shut
the index finger of my left hand into the door of my maternal
grandmother’s yellow Corvair—a notoriously dangerous car model
made famous by Ralph Nader’s book Unsafe at Any Speed—breaking
the finger in the process and wailing in so much agony that I
permanently avoided joining the God Squad. And yet, despite my early
aversion to deity-based beliefs, as much as I may respect people’s
wishes to have soul-soothing faith in such things, for a time during my
5SCOTT LECKIE
early years, I was nonetheless somehow instilled with an
overwhelming sense of fear of an all-powerful god. This god
controlled everything, punishing those who strayed from
righteousness. In my juvenile mind’s eye, Hoover loomed over my
seated and subservient grandfather, like God himself. Whenever I
would think of God, it was not the image of an old White man with a
beard floating in the sky but the wavy hair of Hoover, who amassed
god-like powers that destroyed the lives of a great many people, my
granddad included. Knowing what we know now, all these decades
later, with his right hand visible atop ABL’s shoulder, the absence of
his left hand raises questions.
Known by many names, including The Bulldog and even The State
Within the State, Hoover infamously ran the FBI with an iron grip for
nearly fifty years, throughout the terms of eight successive presidents,
starting with the driving force behind the League of Nations,
Woodrow Wilson in 1924, and ending with the disgraced and corrupt
Richard Nixon in 1972. Among other highly questionable practices,
Hoover notoriously compiled and kept compromising career-
destroying files on numerous major politicians or other people of
influence in the country. Far from dedicating himself solely to the
important work of protecting the American population from criminals
and the crimes they committed, he instrumentally turned many
elements of the leading domestic law enforcement agency in the US
into tools of oppression and nothing less than human rights abuses.1
Hoover demanded blind loyalty from his staff. He imparted an
organizational worldview known by all who worked under him: if any
information came to light involving the White House or high echelons
of political power, it would be brought to his attention first,
presumably to bolster the secret files. Hoover intentionally instilled
fear in countless people, and his once sterling reputation during the
first decades of the FBI spiraled markedly downwards toward the end
1There are numerous books written about Hoover's misdeeds, and among many
others, any of Athan Theoharis' 23 books will reveal every single tidbit of the FBI
leader's often unsavory ways of doing things. For those interested, consider starting
your reading with this: Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political
Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan, Temple University Press, 1978.
6SHREWD LITTLE SLEUTH
of his life as his more dubious methods and agenda became more
widely known.
One writer recounted the views of former Acting Attorney General
Laurence Silberman, the first person to peruse Hoover’s secret files
after his death, who noted that, “J. Edgar Hoover was like a sewer that
collected dirt. I now believe he was the worst public servant in our
history.”2 The sheer scale of his secret files is staggering. Hoover kept
hundreds of files in his office comprising 17,750 pages, many of
which held compromising sexual material on at least 164 people.3
Presidents, politicians, entrepreneurs, actors, activists, and others
feared Hoover, but my acquiescent granddad did not—at least not
initially.
Hoover was once untouchable but no longer. Now, more than fifty
years after his death, growing voices request a renaming of the FBI
headquarters building, which is named after Hoover, because of his
controversial views and practices.4 His legacy is rightfully tarnished
forever; there is no doubting that.
In early August 1992, several years after my human rights life
began5
, I briefly returned to Southern California with my Dutch
girlfriend, whom I was living with in Utrecht at the time. One night,
we took my dad out to dinner at a small Italian bistro on Balboa Island
in Newport Beach, and much to my amazement, after a few glasses of
excellent dry white wine, my dad—a rare teardrop forming in his eye
—suddenly blurted out, “My dad died thirty years ago today.” Because
he never spoke about his dad during my early years, he stunned me by
even mentioning him. My dad’s cousin, Chuck Leckie, believes that it
took my father thirty years to begin spilling the beans simply because,
in a heartbreakingly truthful remark that I fear is all too accurate, my
2Anthony Summers, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Pocket Books, 1993, p. 221.
3Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: De Man en Zijn Geheimen (English: J. Edgar
Hoover: The Man and His Secrets), Toren Boeken, 1991, p. 29.
4https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-02/j-edgar-Hoover-name-fbi-
director-fbi-building-racist-homophobic-legacy.
5My forthcoming memoir, Mr. Housing Rights: The Joyous Highs and Devastating
Low of an Eccentric Human Rights Life gives detailed accounts of many elements of
my ongoing human rights career. See also: www.scottleckie.com.au.
7SCOTT LECKIE
dad tragically “didn’t want his dad to be a part of him.” ABL—as we
all have—had many sides, some good, some not so good, and some of
these deeply affected my father long after his father’s death. The
elements of his personality and lifestyle that may have disturbed my
sensitive dad are one thing. The central role he played in pivotal
political moments, some of which became shameful events in US
history, is something else entirely.
By this time, I had been politically active throughout the world for
several years. I understood the importance of protecting human rights
and, thus, just how dangerous a man Hoover turned out to be. I jumped
at the chance of finally asking my dad to tell us something more than
what that strange drawing depicted. In 1992, all I knew were a handful
of FBI stories and the creepy cartoon; everything else I’ve learned
started that night, increasing again in the past few months while I
began writing this story. Somehow, this anniversary loosened
something within my father, heavily helped, I suspect, by the effects of
the wine on a man who never drank too much, starkly contrasting with
his heavily alcoholic father. That evening, he let loose, unloading an
incredible array of stories about the life of his father, none of which I
had ever heard before.
My grandfather was born in Alabama, although I always thought
he was born in New Jersey, the place ABL went to live briefly after his
stint at the FBI ended. I knew of our family links to the American
South, a place so different from the gentle coastal Southern California
life of Orange County that I grew up in, but I never imagined that ABL
grew up there. During my early years, I didn’t really understand the
implications of this, even though my first name was inherited from
ABL’s sister, my Great Aunt Mary Scott Godbold, whom people
called Scottie.
Without knowing the area’s history or the gruesome details of the
US Civil War, the Confederacy, slavery, segregation, the Ku Klux
Klan, George Wallace, and others, I loved visiting Mary Scott and her
stern husband, John, when I was quite young. Everything felt different
the second we disembarked at Montgomery Airport. It was like
entering another world, something which surely must have helped to
spark my lifelong love of travel and visiting new and unknown places.
8SHREWD LITTLE SLEUTH
It is difficult to describe the feeling of awe that occurs every time I
visit a new place, something I have had the good fortune to feel
hundreds upon hundreds of times over the years. We would drive what
seemed a great distance from Mary Scott and John’s house in the small
town of Camden after drinking overly sweet homemade lemonade
with still not-yet-dissolved sugar granules visible at the bottom of the
condensation-laden glass—a desperate attempt to cool off from the
oppressive humidity of the South. We would then reach a catfish
restaurant located on a dark, gloomy, moss-covered bayou, where I
was transported back in time to a place I could have never imagined
existed in the real world.
Much of the information I’ve learned about my grandfather I
gained through a successful FOIA search in 2002 that resulted in the
acquisition of a tantalizingly thick box of over five hundred pages of
FBI documents mentioning ABL and a vast array of his activities
during his time at the Bureau from 1934–1939. Opening this box and
leafing through these decades-old documents all about my granddad
was a magical experience, like discovering buried treasure. The man I
never knew suddenly came to life. In equal measure, however, it was
also an immensely strange and somewhat disquieting feeling to hold
copies of letters in my hands, the originals of which were once held by
the hands of the infamous Hoover, with a still fresh-looking ink
signature of the man who did so much to push American democracy
and, in the end, my grandfather to the brink. One thing that stood out,
though, was the indication in the cover letter from the Department of
Justice that “623 pages(s) were reviewed, and 533 page(s) are being
released.” What might be hiding in those missing ninety pages? What
could lurk there that the DOJ doesn’t want to world to learn about?
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, when he would visit his
family, ABL, this new man, so positively impacted by the free-spirited
energy of the West Coast, became a hero to many. His nephew Larry
Godbold remembered that “As a kid, Uncle Bernard was like
Superman. Having an uncle in the FBI and having all these stars as
clients, my claim to fame was him. When he’d greet me, he’d reach
into his pocket and pull out ten or more quarters, which seemed like a
million dollars.”
9SCOTT LECKIE
It was around this time that the issue of alcohol again came up.
Larry told me, “Your grandfather was awfully colorful and had a great
personality. He did like to drink a lot, which surprised me. We had a
phone in the hall right outside my room, and sometimes, he would call
real late at night to my mother (his sister), and I think he was calling
from a bar. She was very supportive of him.” I guess he used to like to
drink and dial.
ABL, Bunny to his closest friends and family, was my father’s
father. He naturally died (or was killed), it’s still not clear which, four
months before I was born. He lived veiled in the world of the FBI’s
highest echelons and at the pinnacle of America’s secrets and lies. But
his true desires may have forced him to live a life cloaked in a closet
because society didn’t want to see what it preferred to ignore. It left
the telling of his extraordinary life to a grandson he never knew.
In the pages that follow, I seek to bring out the man and his larger-
than-life personality by recounting many of the major highs and lows
of a truly interesting life. What follows is anything but a hagiography.
It is entirely absent of any, at least intentional, palimpsest. More than
anyone, I want to know the truth and what made my grandad tick.
Whom did he love? What did he loathe? What did he do well? Where
did he fail? Where did he go in his free time? What was his favorite
drink? What did he believe in? How free or unfree did he feel? Did
any swords of Damocles hang perpetually over his head? Did he live
and die a happy and contented man, or did his demons come back to
haunt him one by one?
In seeking answers to these and other queries, almost
unintentionally, I came to know my grandad in previously unimagined
ways. After six decades of him playing almost no role whatsoever in
my life, I now know him so well that he frequently comes to me in my
dreams, where we face each other smiling, conversing about a plethora
of topics, our conversations always ending before he can answer the
biggest question of all, “How did you really die, Grandad?”
10
This was a truly intriguing read. Firstly, because of the person about whom the book is about: Arthur Bernard Leckie. He was a prominent figure in Hoover's FBI with links to Marilyn Monroe and, like the famous film star, died suspiciously. I mean, if that doesn't grab your attention, then I don't know what will, especially if you love a conspiracy theory.
Secondly, the book is written by his grandson, Scott Leckie and there is a sense of Scott trying to connect with the grandfather who he never knew, despite the fact that they probably would not have had many world views in common. This adds an extra element, a personal one which permeates the book and Scott's voice is ever present in his observations and his commentary, some of it quite humorous so that although you feel like he is invested in investigating his grandfather, Scott's style is more that of a curious observer rather than someone who is likely to be shaped by what he discovers.
Unfortunately, Scott does not have a lot to go on in order to establish the sort of man his grandfather was. But don't let that fool you into thinking that this is a read with very little fodder: the way that this book unfolds is well done throughout. Scott Leckie takes the evidence that he has been able to acquire and examines each individual piece, sharing with us his insights and his reflections. This is also presented within the context of the time and I have learnt an inordinate amount about Hoover, the fears and concerns of Americans and the means used to uncover and collate information in order to stem the Communist threat. Add to this some Hollywood glamour and other famous names and you have an enthralling read.
And what is also good about this book is that you can speculate with Scott about what his grandfather's life was about. He has enough in the form of letters and newspaper cuttings and photos (a lot of which he shares so you can see them too) to make a picture of his grandfather but this picture is blurred and indistinct. In the theorising is the enjoyment. Scott is asking "Who was this man, my ancestor?" and you're with him as he tries to make sense of what he's found.
A truly interesting read.