Old Blue Eyes and Old Evil Eye

Both singer Frank Sinatra and longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were fascinating characters. Now, we get a measure of Hoover’s fascination with the life of Old Blue Eyes, who died this year at 82. The FBI’s files on Sinatra, released to the public Tuesday, cover an incredible 1,275 pages compiled over nearly 30 years.

Parts of the files seem to be serious enough, including the FBI’s long attempt to document Sinatra’s alleged association with organized crime figures. But the dossier does not tell us much that we did not already know. We learn that gangster Lucky Luciano had Sinatra in his address book. Take that to court? Hardly.

There are interesting tidbits on Sinatra’s medical deferment from the draft during World War II; he had ear damage severe enough to disqualify him. But there was nothing to the tip passed on to the FBI by gossip columnist Walter Winchell that Sinatra escaped military service because of an alleged $40,000 bribe to the examining physician.

As with so much of what Hoover and his agents collected, the Sinatra files are filled with unsubstantiated reports from unidentified informants, press clippings and other trivia.

All these years later, the material reminds us again of the length to which Hoover would go to collect any mention, any rumor, any dirt that he thought might serve his own purposes later. One of Hoover’s favorite ways of slurring a supporter of the civil rights movement was to associate him or her with communism. That vile lie was leveled not only at Sinatra; it was used against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others.

In the end, history saw it all clearly: It is Hoover, not those whose careers he tried to destroy with his whisper campaigns, whose reputation is forever tarnished.