‘Hoover lies when he denies responsibility for the Red Raids,’ Frankfurter told his law clerk Joseph Rauh. ‘He was in it – up to his ass.’1
Edgar claimed he had only been carrying out policy as instructed by others. This was a man, John Lord O’Brian would recall, ‘willing to carry out orders at any time.’ Judge Anderson, who presided at the deportation hearings, had no time for such officials. ‘Talk about Americanization!’ he snorted. ‘It is the business of every American citizen who knows anything about Americanism to resign if given such instructions.’
Neither Edgar nor Attorney General Palmer and the rest of his staff suffered the disgrace that should have resulted from the Red Raids. Congressional inquiries dragged on for so long – until a new Attorney General had been appointed under a new President – that everyone responsible escaped retribution.
Edgar had learned lessons he would not forget. For one thing, he now knew that state oppression could work in the United States. In spite of the furor, American Communists had suffered a crippling reversal. Party membership, estimated at about 80,000 before the raids, dwindled to 6,000 by late 1920.
Edgar also discovered it was possible to spy on people and hunt them down – not because of crimes but because of their political beliefs. To avoid being caught in the act, Edgar now knew, it was vital to ensure that – technically, at least – ‘due process’ was always observed. He also learned that a way had to be found to keep the investigator’s greatest treasure, his secret files, out of the public eye. Too many embarrassing documents came to light during the Red Raid hearings. Later, as FBI Director, Edgar would perfect a file system that, except on rare occasions, proved inaccessible to outsiders. Documents would be released on occasion, but only when it served Edgar’s purpose.
He was also learning about politics and the perils of allegiance to any one man. In June 1920, when Attorney General Palmer went to fight for the presidential nomination at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, Edgar went along. ‘At the time,’ political veterans recalled, ‘he saw his future tied to Palmer’s political fortunes. He served above and beyond the call of duty, and mobilized all his official contacts to serve Palmer’s cause.’
Later, after Palmer had failed to get the nomination and the Democrats had been defeated, a Senate probe discovered that Edgar and three other officials had traveled to San Francisco at taxpayers’ expense. Edgar claimed he had been on a routine investigation of radicals.
The probe could have cost Edgar his job, and he henceforth posed as a man above politics. He never joined a political party and – as a resident of Washington, D.C. – never voted.2 ‘I don’t like labels and I am not political,’ he liked to say in public.
This was not true. Edgar was a staunch right-wing supporter of the Republican Party from 1921 until the end of his life. ‘My associations have been with the Republican interests,’ he told a former colleague, Denis Dickason, in a private letter after Herbert Hoover’s victory in 1929. ‘The results of the last election are particularly gratifying to me …’
Few of those Edgar called friends were Democrats, and close associates never doubted his allegiance. ‘Hoover was a Republican from beginning to end,’ said veteran Justice Department official Patricia Collins.
When it suited him, however, Edgar would conceal this. ‘He could be all things to all people,’ said William Sullivan. ‘If a liberal came in, the liberal would leave thinking, “My God, Hoover’s a liberal.” If a John Bircher came in an hour later, he’d go out saying, “I’m convinced Hoover’s a member of the John Birch Society at heart.” He was a brilliant chameleon.’
He was also a turncoat. Assistant Bureau Director Frank Burke, who had gone out of his way to help further Edgar’s career, now heard his protégé was calling him ‘a political hack’ behind his back. In his rage, he threatened to ‘kick hell out of’ Edgar. The next time the two men met, recalled Agent James Savage, ‘the young skinny Hoover had surrounded himself with three husky bodyguards – all on the Department payroll.’
Things were going from bad to worse at Justice. Harry Daugherty, Attorney General under the feeble new President Harding, was a political wheeler-dealer even less suited to the job than Palmer had been. Political abuse continued, with a heavy dose of corruption thrown in. It was now, in the Daugherty reshuffle of 1921, that Edgar finally joined the agency that would be his professional home for the rest of his life. On August 22 he was appointed Assistant Director of the Bureau of Investigation. The new Director, William Burns, a cigar-chomping former New York City detective, and something of a playboy, was a man who handed out jobs as political favors.
Daugherty was as gung ho to crush Communists and radicals as his predecessor. His tactics included spying on congressmen and senators, and some of the results went to Edgar. In the future, Edgar would always say carefully that there had been no snooping on Congress ‘since I became Director.’ That would not be true but, when he did become Director, he would cover his tracks.
Edgar’s brother Dickerson, less than impressed with Edgar’s title – Assistant Director, Bureau of Investigation – continued to tease him. One night, as Edgar walked home alone along Seward Square, he realized he was being followed. A shadowy figure vanished into the bushes behind him, then reappeared, rushing out of the darkness with a bloodcurdling yell – Dickerson! Edgar rushed home to Mother, tormented by his brother’s mocking laughter. Annie then took reprisals by stepping up her unkindnesses to Dickerson’s wife, whom she had always despised.
Jokes about detectives went down badly with Edgar. He claimed detective work held no allure, that he ‘detested’ crime fiction. Yet he owned a complete set of Sherlock Holmes stories, and was once spotted buying cheap detective magazines at a newsstand.
As Assistant Director, image and status were everything. Sometime earlier Edgar had become a Mason, going through the bizarre initiation ceremony that involved being blindfolded, having a noose placed around his neck and swearing at dagger point never to reveal Masonic secrets. Edgar would go on to become a Knight Templar, a Noble of the Mystic Shrine, on and up into the Masonic atmosphere until – at sixty – he attained the Ancient and Accepted Rite of the Thirty-third Degree.
In the twenties, in an America hooked on jazz and dance marathons, he lived a prim life. He still had no girlfriends, but did see a lot of Frank Baughman, a former classmate he had brought into the Justice Department. Smartly turned out in white linen suits, the two of them would venture out to the new Fox movie theater on Sunday nights. They would remain lifelong friends, though Baughman reportedly ‘lost his inside track’ when he got married.
By his own account, Edgar’s one true love at the time was Spee De Bozo, the dog that became his pet in 1922. The dog, an Airedale, accompanied its master each morning to fetch the newspaper, and sat by the table to eat the food Edgar rejected. It was Spee De Bozo’s photograph, not that of a friend or relative, that Edgar kept on his desk at work. This was the first in a succession of seven dogs Edgar would own.
Years later, when Spee De Bozo died, Edgar made a production of the funeral. He and three male companions drove to Aspin Hill animal cemetery to watch, their hats on their shoulders, as the white-shrouded corpse was lowered into the earth. ‘This,’ Edgar told one of the cemetery staff, ‘is one of the saddest days of my life.’
FBI propagandists often used the dog angle. ‘I remember one individual,’ an aide would intone in all seriousness to an audience at Yale University, ‘on the eve of going to the electric chair, writing Mr Hoover and asking him to take care of his dog, and also expressing his appreciation of what was done for him.’ Edgar liked to trot out the story of the arrival of Spee De Bozo’s successor, a terrier called Scottie. ‘I can still see my mother,’ he would say. ‘Tears welled into her eyes, her surprise matched only by her joy.’
In fact, home life was strained. Most nights, Edgar would retreat upstairs as soon as he got home. Behind his bedroom door, he worked into the night on official papers. No
w that he was Assistant Director he sometimes had to make speeches, and the prospect terrified him. From her room next door, his niece Margaret often heard him rehearsing. For some time, she said, he ‘had a problem with stuttering.’
A congressman, watching Edgar at work in pursuit of Communists, had thought him a ‘slender bundle of highcharged electric wire.’ He was smoking cigarettes now, a Turkish brand called Fatima, and too many of them. By 1924, still pasty and underweight, he was complaining of stomach problems.
At twenty-nine, Edgar was lonely and under stress. But he was about to make a major step forward in his career, an achievement that would make his mother very happy indeed.
5
‘I certainly do not want to indicate that Hoover did not have some unusual ability in structuring an organization designed to perpetuate a sort of dictatorial control of both the FBI and, so far as he could manage it, the minds and aspirations of American citizens: but so did Adolf Hitler.’
Arthur Murtagh, former FBI Agent
On Mother’s Day 1924, Annie Hoover presented her son with a star sapphire ring studded with diamonds, one that he was to wear every day for the rest of his life. The previous day, May 10, a date that future agents would be required to memorize, Edgar had been promoted to head the Bureau of Investigation.
The way Edgar told it – and he told it often – he was called in that Saturday by Harlan Stone, the new Attorney General picked to clean up the Justice Department. Stone had started by firing William Burns, and Edgar half-expected to be fired, too. Instead Stone growled, ‘Young man, I want you to be Acting Director.’
Edgar offered this account only when Stone had been dead for years. He left out a less glamorous part of the story. Stone had taken over the Department knowing nobody, with no idea whom to trust. He therefore began consulting cabinet colleagues, including Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce.’1
Edgar had long been in touch with his namesake’s personal staff. He was especially close to Hoover’s closest aide, Lawrence Richey, a former Bureau agent who knew Edgar affectionately as ‘J. E.’ Told the Attorney General was casting around for a new Bureau chief, Richey had an easy answer. ‘Why the hell should they look around,’ he said, ‘when they have got one of the brightest young attorneys on the job at the present time?’ It was Edgar’s name that went to Stone.
Edgar’s appointment was not reported in the press, and Stone made it clear the job was not yet permanent. ‘I want just the right man,’ he said. ‘Until I find that man, I intend personally to supervise the Bureau.’ The Attorney General’s priority, after the abuses of the Daugherty period, was to restore confidence. Edgar’s was to hang on to his job at a dangerous time, and convince Stone he had made the right choice.
In the old Bureau there was an office known as the ‘Buzzard’s Roost,’ a room – according to an article generated by Edgar – ‘where the loafers congregated to swap dirty stories and help polish off the bottle which every returning agent was expected to furnish.’ Edgar closed it down and fired numerous agents. ‘Hoover,’ it was reported, ‘was as repulsed by the immorality of the roost as by the time it wasted.’
Of all his achievements, Edgar’s cleanup of the agent corps was the one of enduring worth. Since the start of his tenure, and to the present day, corruption among FBI agents has been virtually unheard of – a rare achievement in any police force. Their integrity has earned the admiration and confidence of the public, and made them the jewel in Edgar’s crown.
The new Director did something else that pleased Stone, who had been an outspoken critic of Bureau outrages during the Red scare. He found that Edgar the Red-hunter had suddenly become Edgar the moderate. Within ten days of his appointment, he was assuring a Senate committee that the Bureau would no longer investigate citizens because of their political opinions.
At Stone’s request, Edgar met with the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Roger Baldwin. Baldwin had accused the Bureau of operating ‘a secret police system,’ had himself seen the telephone tapping equipment that Edgar denied existed, had seen Bureau plans to set up a phony union local and pack it with government informants. Now, though, after Edgar’s assurances about a ‘new era,’ Baldwin wrote to Stone saying he had been ‘wrong about Mr Hoover’s attitude.’
After Edgar’s death, however, when Baldwin was ninety-three, he was able to see old Bureau files on the ACLU. These showed that, even during the Stone regime, Edgar continued to receive reports on ACLU meetings – complete with purloined minutes and names of contributors – from an informer in place. The Bureau used police intelligence to spy on the group, and – as late as 1977 – was still refusing to say whether such operations had ceased.
Edgar tried to appoint his best friend, the right-wing extremist George Ruch, as his most senior aide. The Attorney General vetoed that plan following a public outcry, but confirmed Edgar’s permanent appointment as Director of the Bureau of Investigation. The news was announced on December 22, 1924, ten days before Edgar’s thirtieth birthday. (Federal was not added to the name ‘Bureau of Investigation’ until 1935. Only then did it become the FBI.) He would hold the post for forty-eight years, a quarter of the time the United States had existed as a nation.
For the rest of both their lives, Edgar fawned upon Stone and Herbert Hoover, the men most responsible for his promotion. Both received regular letters of adulation, and found FBI agents waiting to welcome them on their travels. Edgar jumped to do confidential research for Hoover, or fix a summer job for Stone’s chauffeur – a stream of little favors in return for the break they had given him.
Edgar had escaped from the rubble of the old Bureau. Now, from a small power base, he began to build an empire. Edgar was to create one of the most powerful organizations in the United States, in some troubling ways the most powerful of all. He would achieve it thanks to a combination of rapid social change, political shifts and a good deal of luck. He brought to the task his own brilliance as an organizer, a shrewd ability to read the national mood and a capacity for self-advertisement unparalleled in public life.
Edgar came to office at precisely the right moment. After the chaos of the Harding presidency, America was putting its faith in efficient administrators, education and the wonders of technology. The new Director responded to all three requirements.
Edgar fired the deadwood along with the crooked agents, and closed more than twenty field offices. Within five years, far from expanding, he would cut the number of agents to 339, a quarter less than when he had taken over. New recruits had to be between twenty-five and thirty-five, and have a background in law or accountancy.2
A rookie agent arrived on the job with a letter of appointment from Edgar, a salary of $2,700 a year plus travel allowance, and an obligation to go anywhere in the United States at any time. He presented himself for duty dressed in a suit, white shirt and conservative tie, topped off with a plain straw hat. He signed an oath of office, in the early days a terse statement promising to defend the Constitution ‘against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ Later, newcomers would take an extraordinary pledge, issued over Edgar’s own signature. It read like a catechism, with Masonic overtones:
Humbly recognizing the responsibilities entrusted to me, I do vow that I shall always consider the high calling of law enforcement to be an honorable profession, the duties of which are recognized as both an art and a science … in the performance of my duties I shall as a minister, seek to supply comfort, advice and aid … as a soldier, I shall wage vigorous warfare against the enemies of my country … as a physician, I shall seek to eliminate the criminal parasite which preys on our body politic … as an artist, I shall seek to use my skill for the purpose of making each assignment a masterpiece …
One of the new recruits, Edward J. Armbruster, served from 1926 to 1977 as an expert on bank fraud. He was typical of the new breed of agent, a teetotaler and nonsmoker, a Mason and Sunday school teacher, who brought seven of his pupils into the FBI, and lived all his li
fe in the Sears and Roebuck prefabricated house bought the year Edgar became Director. Edgar thought him a paragon, and allowed him to work long past retirement age.
An agent of a later generation, Norman Ollestad, drew this portrait of a veteran colleague. ‘He surrounded himself with an armor of shibboleths – rings, badges and jeweled pins. He was all battened down. A lion’s head clasp kept his tie from going awry, cuff links tightened down his white sleeves. He wore a college ring on his right hand to set him apart from the uneducated, and a Masonic ring on the same hand that protected him spiritually. On the third finger of his left hand he wore a wedding band as a shield against any designing women he might interview.’
Leon Turrou, a celebrated first-generation recruit, offered a telling definition of the sort of man Edgar wanted. ‘He is part and parcel of the great middle class. He will always eat well and dress well, but he will never get that sleek Packard or that sumptuous house … He is a man who for better or worse is married to his job twenty-four hours a day. He belongs to the Bureau body and soul, and is simply on loan to his family and friends. He learns to revaluate his life in terms of his work, divorcing himself from the ordinary pleasures of ordinary mortals and often forgetting how to relax. The motto of his life is “For God, for country, and for J. Edgar Hoover.”’
Under their breath, agents would come to call Edgar ‘Kid Napoleon.’ He was dictatorial and diminutive in stature – estimates of his height vary between 5’7” and 5’10”, the higher figure being the one he had entered in his personnel record. Edgar compensated for his lack of height, generations of colleagues noted, with artful devices. The Director sat on a swivel chair, screwed up to the maximum height so that he looked down at visitors, who were ushered to a low couch. His chair and desk, in turn, sat on a slight platform. ‘He used to accuse me of wearing built-up shoes so I would be as tall as he was,’ said Miami agent Leo McClairen. ‘That was funny, because I stand six foot two.’ Edgar, however, did have his shoes custom-built, by a personal shoemaker.
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