On July 21, just when his future prospects seemed to be evaporating, Purvis received the phone call that broke the Dillinger case. An Indiana policeman tipped him off that Anna Sage, a Chicago madam, knew where Dillinger was and was prepared to betray him. Sage, a Romanian émigré in trouble with the law, hoped to be rewarded with a permit to stay in the United States.
Edgar was advised the following day that Dillinger’s capture was imminent. In Chicago, Purvis and Inspector Cowley briefed a team of handpicked agents. In early evening, after a call from Sage, they moved into position around the Biograph Theater. In Washington, Edgar was at home with his mother, waiting for news.
Dillinger emerged from the theater at 10:30 P.M., and Purvis gave a prearranged signal. ‘I was very nervous,’ he recalled. ‘It must have been a squeaky voice that called out, “Stick ’em up, Johnny! We have you surrounded.”… Dillinger drew his .380 automatic pistol, but he never fired it. He dropped to the ground; he had been shot.’3
In the capital, Edgar hurried to his office to hold a midnight press conference. He praised Purvis for ‘almost unimaginable daring,’ while Attorney General Cummings sent fulsome praise. Edgar poured scorn on the dead bandit, insisting that his agents had opened fire only when Dillinger went for his gun. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary.
Whatever the truth, Edgar had no regrets. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I am glad Dillinger was taken dead … The only good criminal is a dead criminal.’
In a 1970 book, The Dillinger Dossier, author Jay Robert Nash offered the thesis that Dillinger did not die in Chicago at all, that an underworld fall guy was sent to the Biograph in his place. He cited striking flaws in the autopsy evidence, and detailed supporting testimony. An angry Edgar insisted that Dillinger’s identity had been proven through fingerprints, but no hard evidence was ever produced.
Days after the Dillinger shooting he was showing the press the dead man’s straw hat, his smashed spectacles, his fifty-cent cigar and a .38 automatic with a damaged barrel that had supposedly belonged to the bandit. These items remained on show in Edgar’s reception room, like hunting trophies, for decades to come. The pistol the public saw, however, was a phony. Its serial number – 119702 – proves that it did not leave the Colt factory until December 1934, five months after the Dillinger shooting.
Also on public display was a plaster cast of the dead man’s face, produced at a Chicago embalming college. It became, a New Yorker correspondent noted, ‘a sort of Kaiser’s moustache with the FBI.’ Years later, when a doctor wrote suggesting it was time the Dillinger exhibit was removed, Edgar was furious. The death mask, with just a hint of a smile about the lips, remained on permanent show.
After Dillinger, it seemed at first that Melvin Purvis could do no wrong. Edgar greeted him at Union Station on his triumphal arrival from Chicago, and the headline read: DILLINGER HEROES MEET. ‘He conducted himself,’ Edgar wrote privately to Purvis’ father, ‘with that simple modesty that is so characteristic of his makeup … He has been one of my closest and dearest friends.’
Purvis was in charge, that fall, when an alleged participant in the Kansas City Massacre, Pretty Boy Floyd, was killed in an Ohio cornfield. Edgar and Purvis were again photographed sharing victory together, with Edgar calling Floyd ‘a yellow rat who needed extermination.’ Extermination was what he had received. According to a police officer present at the scene, Purvis ordered another agent to fire into the bandit as he lay wounded on the ground. In a formal complaint, the local police chief said that, instead of going to call an ambulance as requested, Purvis called Edgar to report his latest coup. When he returned, Floyd was dead.
Hardly a week went by without the death or capture of another wanted man. Baby Face Nelson died of his wounds, after killing two agents himself, following a car chase in a Chicago suburb. In Florida, agents killed Kate ‘Ma’ Barker and her son Fred, a key figure in the Hamm kidnapping and other crimes. Singling out the woman in the case again, Edgar called Mrs Barker ‘the she-wolf … the brain of the whole organization.’ In fact, she had been no such thing.
At the height of his season of success, Edgar dumped Melvin Purvis. ‘He was jealous of him,’ Purvis’ secretary, Doris Lockerman, was to say. ‘Unless you continued to please the king, you didn’t continue as a favorite very long … They saw to it that Purvis got no more assignments that put him in the public eye. He found himself spending months interviewing applicants for jobs as agents. Every effort was made to denigrate him, to embarrass him. He was terribly hurt.’
In March 1935 Edgar sent Purvis a curt note that began ‘Dear Sir,’ and asked him to account for a report that he had gotten drunk at a Chicago party. Purvis called it an ‘unmitigated and unadulterated lie.’ Then a newspaper said Purvis had waved a gun about in a Cincinnati store, tried to telephone Edgar, then staggered away. Doris Lockerman recalls no such incidents, and wonders whether the story was planted. ‘Everyone,’ she said, ‘was afraid of Hoover.’
Purvis resigned on July 10, by telegram. The man whom Edgar had called his ‘closest friend’ now became the target of his lasting spite. When studio boss Darryl Zanuck offered Purvis a crime consultancy in Hollywood, Edgar intervened to block it. He spied on Purvis when he was preparing his autobiography. Yet Purvis never betrayed Edgar, never published the private correspondence that would have made the FBI Director the laughing stock of the country. He married, served with distinction as a colonel in World War II, ran a local radio station and worked for various congressional committees.
To mention Purvis’ name to Edgar, according to a veteran official, was ‘like dropping a bomb into Mount Vesuvius.’ His name does not appear at all in The FBI Story, the authorized Bureau history published in 1956. There is no character called Purvis in the Hollywood movie of the same name, produced under Edgar’s control. When Purvis was in line for a Senate job, Edgar ordered officials to disseminate ‘derogatory information’ about him.
In 1952, when Edgar successfully destroyed Purvis’ chances of getting a federal judgeship, his wife suggested a reconciliation attempt. FBI records show the men did meet – for six minutes. ‘I remember being taken to Hoover’s office,’ recalled Purvis’ son Alston. ‘Hoover started talking on the phone, and ignored my father for about a minute. I saw my father’s hands start trembling. Then he said to Hoover, “You goddamn son of a bitch, when I bring my wife in, you stand up.” Hoover did stand up … but that ended the reconciliation.’
One morning in 1960, two months after Purvis’ appointment as Chief Counsel to a Senate committee, his wife heard the crack of a pistol shot. She found her husband dead, at fifty-six, with a .45 automatic in his hand. Purvis had committed suicide, the press reported, following months of pain from chronic back trouble.
The Purvis family was not so sure. The death came just weeks after the fatal shooting of the old bootlegger Roger Tuohy – right after his release from jail for a kidnapping he had not committed – in a case Purvis had directed. Thirty-six hours before Purvis died, he had been visited by someone driving a large black car with out-of-state plates. The next morning he called a lawyer to discuss his will. Of all the weapons in his large collection, it was the pistol of a thirties gangster that was found in his dead hand the next morning. Edgar expressed no sadness, made no comments to the press and sent no message of condolence to Purvis’ widow. Mrs Purvis, for her part, sent Edgar a bitter telegram:
WE ARE HONORED THAT YOU IGNORED MELVIN’S DEATH. YOUR JEALOUSY HURT HIM VERY MUCH BUT UNTIL THE END I THINK HE LOVED YOU.
Along with Edgar, another FBI official scribbled negative comments in the file when Purvis died – Associate Director Clyde Tolson. Long since, in a conversation with socialite Anita Colby, Edgar had added a new wrinkle to the mythology about John Dillinger. ‘Edgar told me,’ Colby recalled, ‘that it wasn’t Purvis who got Dillinger, it was Clyde Tolson. He said they just let Purvis take the credit, but Clyde really did it.’
This was yet another example of Edgar’s capacity for
untruth. Bureau records show Tolson was at headquarters the day Dillinger died. He may, however, have been a key factor in what really went wrong between Edgar and Purvis: Clyde Tolson had for some time been Edgar’s constant male companion, and would remain so for nearly half a century.
8
‘Words are mere man-given symbols for thoughts and feelings, and they are grossly insufficient to express the thoughts in my mind and the feelings in my heart that I have for you.’
J. Edgar Hoover, in letter to Clyde Tolson, 1943
Clyde Anderson Tolson was born in 1900 near Laredo, Missouri, in the heart of the Corn Belt. His parents were poor, and a move to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, did not bring prosperity. Clyde’s father, a Baptist who eked out a living first as a small-time farmer, later as a freight guard on the railroad, told his two sons to go out into the world and better themselves.
Clyde took the train to Washington when he was eighteen, after a year at business college. He was a good-looking young man, with piercing black eyes and an athletic build, a careful dresser who favored cream linen jackets and spectator shoes, but nothing too fancy. He could have passed, the press would note later, ‘for a slightly studious customers’ man or a very junior partner in a brokerage firm.’
Clyde got a job as a clerk at the War Department, and flourished. By the time he was twenty, thanks to an appetite for work and an astonishing ability to absorb vast quantities of information, he had become Confidential Clerk to the Secretary of War. Eight years later, feeling it was time to move on, he began attending night classes in law at George Washington University.
As a boy, Clyde and his friends had played a game they called Jesse James, after the outlaw. Clyde’s grandfather’s cattle had been stolen by James, so he always wanted to play the role no one else wanted – the Sheriff. He wore a silver star, which he carried in his pocket long after he grew out of schoolboy games. So it was that in 1927, after receiving his law degree, he applied to become a Special Agent at the Bureau of Investigation.
At first it seemed Clyde would be disappointed – the Bureau had no vacancies. Then, early the next year, the Secretary of War sent a personal recommendation. Edgar reviewed the application form, which bore Clyde’s photograph. It was his first glimpse of an exceptionally handsome young man, an open face above a fashionable wing collar.
Edgar read glowing references from a succession of distinguished men, government Secretaries, the Judge Advocate General, a Missouri newspaper owner and a Republican National Committeeman. Here was a fellow who, very like Edgar, had been President of his sophomore class, a member of the University Senate and a keen participant in fraternity life. Clyde was so personable that he had been taken along on an official War Department trip to the Panama Canal. He was reportedly ‘not at all dissipated,’ and had ‘shown no particular interest in women.’
Edgar hired Clyde, then favored him as no other Bureau recruit would ever be favored – promoting him from rookie agent to Assistant Director in less than three years. Clyde would never have any day-to-day experience in the field. Instead, after just four months in Boston, Edgar brought him back to Washington, ‘because of an emergency.’ At headquarters, Clyde filed stern reports on overtime rules, revealing himself to be a martinet after Edgar’s own heart. Then, after a token fortnight as Agent in Charge in Buffalo, New York, he was promoted to Inspector and brought back to the capital for good.
A year later, Clyde had become one of only two Assistant Directors in charge of administration. And within weeks of that appointment, Edgar was insisting that Clyde be included on White House invitation lists.
This was blatant favoritism. The rapidity of the young man’s rise may have no parallel in any government agency. Clyde was where he was because Edgar saw in him exactly what he needed – a man who could be both an absolutely trustworthy lieutenant and a compatible companion.
Edgar was highly visible, famous for chattering on like a machine gun. Clyde, colleagues noted, was a ‘Sphinx,’ ‘a shadow,’ a man so gray he was ‘invisible if he stood against a gray wall.’ He ‘looked worried even when he felt good’ and made colleagues uneasy with his long silences.
Many agents have expressed a grudging affection for Edgar, the ‘Old Man.’ No one seemed to have a soft spot for Clyde. ‘Tolson,’ said Jim Doyle, a former organized crime specialist, ‘was a No. 1 class asshole. A conniver.’
Clyde was ‘the beady eye,’ a man of ice who took delight in punishing or firing subordinates. A Bureau black joke had him telling Edgar, ‘Gee, I’m depressed. I think I’ll go home for the day and go to bed.’ ‘Clyde, don’t do that,’ came the apocryphal reply. ‘Just look down the list, pick out somebody and fire him. You’ll feel a lot better.’ Tolson, the story goes, beamed and asked hopefully, ‘With prejudice?’
Even those closest to the Director, like Edgar’s secretary, were wary of Clyde. ‘Helen Gandy and Tolson,’ recalled Assistant Director Cartha ‘Deke’ DeLoach, ‘circled around each other like cats. They both had enormous influence on Mr Hoover, and both were scared to death of him. Tolson was smarter than Mr Hoover – he had a razor-sharp mind. His great failing was that he slavishly followed Mr Hoover’s every dictate.’
‘My alter ego is Clyde Tolson,’ Edgar liked to say. ‘He can read my mind.’ Perhaps, but there was one thing Edgar could not relinquish, even to Clyde – total control. Clyde received cantankerous memos from the Director just like everyone else. If there was a case of athlete’s foot in the Bureau gym, it was Clyde who took the flak. If the clock in Edgar’s car was slow, it was Clyde who had to explain why. Ten years into his service, Clyde was still getting a slap on the wrist for leaving documents in his clothes closet at the Bureau.
In Clyde’s eyes, though, Edgar could do no wrong. ‘This is what the Boss wants,’ he would tell senior colleagues supposedly convened to make a decision, and there the debate would end. ‘The Director,’ Clyde said to anyone who would listen, ‘is the Man of the Century.’
To many he seemed a pathetic figure, especially as he aged. Washington gossips would note that he walked humbly a pace or two behind Edgar, changing pace in order to stay in step.
Edgar called him ‘Junior’ in the early days, later just ‘Clyde.’ In public, even in the virtual privacy of the directorial limousine, one chauffeur noted, Clyde called Edgar ‘Mr Hoover.’ Former officials, even very senior ones, still cannot bring themselves to say plain ‘Hoover,’ two decades after his death. Occasionally, though, Clyde was heard to call the boss something no one else ever called him – ‘Eddie.’
It soon became clear, from their daily rituals, that Edgar and Clyde were more than colleagues. Every day, on the dot of noon, the limousine would bear them to lunch at the Mayflower Hotel. There they would consume hamburgers and vanilla ice cream or, when Edgar was watching his weight, chicken soup and salad. According to the hotel’s publicity, Edgar once noticed the FBI’s third Most Wanted man sitting two tables away, had him arrested, then resumed eating. Another less kind account said he looked straight through the criminal and failed to recognize him.
Five nights a week, for more than forty years, except for a break when Edgar quarreled with a new owner, the pair would appear at Harvey’s Restaurant, then on the 1100 block of Connecticut Avenue.
‘They would come in together and sit up on a little dais,’ recalled barman George Dunson, ‘a step up from other people. Mr Tolson would always face the door, and Mr Hoover sat with his back to the wall. Mr Tolson did it so he could watch who was coming in. If anyone tried to get Mr Hoover, they couldn’t come at him from behind.’ Once Edgar became really famous, the management put a barrier between him and unwelcome strangers, by blocking the aisle with a trolley.
Under an arrangement negotiated by Clyde, the pair consumed all they could eat – in one of the best restaurants in town – for $2.50 and the price of their drinks. For years, they did not even have to pay that. ‘The check was picked up by Hoover’s friend Harry Viner, who ran a big laundry business,’ said
former Washington police inspector Joe Shimon. ‘His reward was that Hoover made one of his relatives an agent when World War II started. Later, when Harvey’s closed down for a while, Hoover sent agents to the restaurant opposite, to try and arrange a special rate. He was a chiseler.’
Edgar liked steak, medium rare, and, more exotically, green-turtle soup. He took part in the restaurant’s oystereating competitions, and usually won. At the end of the evening he would leave carrying a bag of ham and turkey, provided by the management, to take home to his dogs.
Once, when Edgar and Clyde arrived late to find their regular table was taken, they made a scene and stormed out. Harvey’s owner, Julius Lulley, was often the butt of Edgar’s peculiar brand of practical jokes. When Lulley’s wife complained that her husband would not give her a new fur coat, Edgar had agents photograph him with another woman, then used the pictures to change his mind.
Edgar, who was so stern with his agents about drink, enjoyed whiskey, and officials in distant field offices had to keep up with his changing taste in brands. Edgar never drank much in front of colleagues, and none of them ever saw him drunk. Away from the office, said Miami restaurateur Jesse Weiss, who met Edgar in the thirties, things were different. The mood at private parties could be ‘real friendly, loose, a lot of guys drinking booze, “Hooray for Hell, who’s afraid of fire?” – that kind of thing …’
The waiters at Harvey’s also remember heavy drinking. ‘Mr Hoover drank Grand-Dad,’ said Pooch Miller, who was maître d’ for thirty-six years. ‘I used to give him six miniatures when he arrived, with club sodas to go with them. And after he’d finished drinking we’d bring him his dinner, five days a week.’ ‘Today,’ said Aaron Shainus, whose father owned Harvey’s at one point, ‘Hoover would be considered an alcoholic.’
The pair became a Washington legend, one heavy with the innuendo that they were homosexual lovers. Robert Ludlum, in his novel The Chancellor Manuscript, was to write what no one dared say straight out in their lifetime. For Ludlum, Clyde’s ‘soft pampered face – struggling for masculinity – had for decades been the flower to the bristled cactus.’
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