‘I called you over,’ Edgar was to quote the President as saying, ‘because I want you to do a job for me, and it must be confidential.’ According to Edgar, Roosevelt wanted to know how he could obtain reliable intelligence on Communist and Fascist activity in the United States. Edgar said the FBI could legally do the job, although it was outside the realm of law enforcement, if the request came – technically – from the State Department. The next day, in Edgar’s presence, Roosevelt told Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the United States was threatened by Soviet and Fascist espionage directed from outside the country. ‘Go ahead,’ Hull is said to have responded, ‘investigate the cocksuckers!’
To avoid leaks, according to Edgar’s memorandum of the meeting, the President wanted no written request from the State Department to the FBI. Instead, Roosevelt said, he would ‘put a handwritten memorandum of his own in his safe in the White House, stating he had instructed the Secretary of State to request this information to be obtained …’
The Roosevelt presidential library was unable to trace such a memorandum, so there is no way of knowing what scope the President intended the order to have. What is clear is that he issued the directive secretly, without sanction of Congress, and that the Attorney General – Edgar’s boss – was informed only after the fact.
As a result of those White House meetings, Edgar’s freedom of action was greatly increased. Propaganda had already made him a mythological national guardian, the man who made the American housewife feel safe. Now, by presidential fiat, he wielded raw political power as well.
Immediately after his 1936 meeting with Roosevelt, and before even discussing the matter with Attorney General Cummings, Edgar triggered a massive surveillance operation against trade unionists and radicals. An FBI target list, still preserved in Bureau files, included the steel, coal and garment industries, educational institutions and organized labor. Though Edgar denied it at the time, the Bureau also began recruiting informants and preparing dossiers on political ‘subversives.’
In the spring of 1938, as eighteen alleged Nazi spies went on trial, the President responded to public pressure by making more funds available to the intelligence services. Edgar urged that the cash be used for domestic intelligence, and said it could be arranged without special legislation. Such spying on Americans at home, Edgar wrote to the President, should be pursued ‘with the utmost degree of secrecy in order to avoid criticism or objections which might be raised by either ill-informed persons or individuals having some ulterior motive.’ In the fall of the year, at a meeting aboard the presidential train at New York’s Pennsylvania Station, Roosevelt gave Edgar the go-ahead.
The Bureau now began hiring new agents in huge numbers – their ranks would swell from less than 1,000 in 1937 to nearly 4,000 by the end of the war. Many of the new recruits would be used to defend national security in wartime. Simultaneously, however, the Bureau gathered vast amounts of information on ordinary people of liberal persuasion, and on innocuous groups like the League for Fair Play (which supplied speakers for Rotary and Kiwanis clubs), the Independent Voters of Illinois, even a Bronx child-care center. There was a massive investigation of the NAACP, involving extensive use of informants. Edgar saw to it that all information gathered, including that collected on thousands of innocent citizens, was duly filed away for future reference.
The FBI file on the Ford Motor Company reveals that in January 1939, Edgar met with Henry Ford’s right-hand man, Harry Bennett. Bennett was a ruthless union-buster, whose special achievement had been to develop a day-to-day working alliance between Ford and the leaders of organized crime. He had personal contact with Detroit’s crime boss Chester LaMare, men like Joe Tocco and Leo Cellura, and he arranged Ford franchises for gangsters like Joe Adonis and Tony D’Anna.
Bennett used his underworld contacts to take care of Ford’s union problems. He used thugs to organize the beating of United Automobile Workers leader Walter Reuther, one of Edgar’s perennial targets, when he and others tried to distribute leaflets near the plant. In time he assembled a private army, armed with pistols, blackjacks and lengths of rubber hose, to break up union meetings and attack labor activists. Edgar got on very well with Bennett, sent him autographed photographs of their first meeting and worked with him as an ally. Edgar’s Agent in Charge in Detroit, John Bugas, soon had regular access to Bennett’s ‘vast files on Communist activities.’ Bennett, Bugas reported, was ‘a very valuable friend … without question one of the best sources of information.’
The FBI later discovered that Bennett had purchased many of the Communist names in his files from Gerald Smith, the local Fascist leader. This did nothing to dampen Edgar’s enthusiasm for him.
In late 1939, without seeking higher authority, Edgar boldly ordered his staff to prepare dossiers for a Custodial Detention List, an index of people who could be detained in time of war. The list named not only those who sympathized with Germany and its allies, but also those with ‘Communist sympathies.’ It included, too, people who had done nothing to deserve suspicion, like Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times.
In 1942, on his way to a foreign assignment, Salisbury had problems obtaining a passport. It was not until forty years later, when he obtained his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, that he found out why. An eccentric female neighbor had told the authorities that Salisbury was an ‘employee of the German government.’ He was a code expert, she believed, because he had recording devices at his home. Salisbury’s house was secretly searched and a file opened on him at the FBI. It was this that caused the passport problem. Salisbury’s name went onto the Custodial Detention List, marked: ‘Pro-German – stated he is in employ of German government.’ Salisbury remained technically liable to arrest and internment, in the event of a national emergency, until 1971.
Edgar would resist bitterly when, in 1940, Attorney General Jackson insisted that the Justice Department – rather than the FBI – assume overall control of the Detention List. The Director found a way not to comply in 1943, when Attorney General Biddle ruled that the Department existed to pursue law-breakers, that it had no business cataloguing citizens according to their alleged ‘dangerousness,’ and directed that the Detention List be abolished. Edgar simply ordered his officials to maintain the list, but to call it the Security Index instead. He did this secretly, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered in 1975, without informing Biddle, who was his boss.
In public, most attorneys general talked as though their relations with Edgar were good. In private, there was often terrific friction. Frank Murphy, a future Supreme Court Justice, who held the office in 1939, would conclude that Edgar had ambitions to become Attorney General himself. He found the Director’s behavior alarming. ‘He is almost pathological,’ Murphy told Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell. ‘He can get something on anybody if he starts investigating him; that is his tendency.’
Indeed, Edgar kept a file on Murphy himself, one that contained information on his private life, and which stayed open until he died. Parts of the file remained withheld during research for this book.
In June 1939, with war looming in Europe, President Roosevelt agreed that the FBI – with the War and Navy departments – should take over all intelligence operations. In September, as Hitler signed a nonaggression treaty with Stalin and prepared to invade Poland, the President announced publicly that Edgar was to head the fight against foreign espionage and sabotage. At the same time, he authorized him to gather information on ‘subversive activities.’ The orders were vague and designed to respond to a temporary need. Their effect, however, was to give Edgar the nearest thing he would ever have to a charter to conduct domestic intelligence – one he would fall back on for the rest of his career.
Edgar’s first use of the new authority caused a storm of protest. In January the arrests of a number of anti-Semitic agitators, on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, ended in fiasco. It emerged that the men had received their inspiration and their
weapons from a paid FBI informant, and all charges were dropped.
Then FBI agents in Detroit and Milwaukee seized twelve radical activists on the grounds that, three years earlier, they had recruited volunteers to fight on the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Under an old statute, it was an offense for private citizens to raise an army on U.S. soil for a foreign conflict. The arrests were curious because the alleged offenses had occurred so long ago, and the war in question was over. The new Attorney General, Robert Jackson, swiftly dropped the charges – too late, however, to stifle public outrage.
Edgar’s men had swooped down before dawn, broken down doors, ransacked homes, held their prisoners incommunicado for nine hours, strip-searched them twice and allowed them access to lawyers for just one minute before they appeared in court. It was all reminiscent of the Red Raids of 1920 – and this time Edgar could not deny responsibility.
Suddenly the press was comparing the FBI to the secret police forces of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In Congress Senator George Norris spoke of ‘an American Gestapo,’ calling Edgar ‘the greatest publicity hound on the American continent.’ The way things were going, he added, there would soon be ‘a spy behind every stump and a detective in every closet in our land.’ As FBI files now reveal, Edgar had a stool pigeon on Senator Norris’ own staff in 1940.
Three days after the Detroit raids, Edgar was called in to see the President. Then, with Clyde in tow, he departed on a surprise ‘vacation’ to Miami Beach. There he ensconced himself in a villa attached to the Nautilus Hotel, an island retreat for the very rich, to shelter himself from the barrage of criticism.
In Washington, Edgar’s aides lobbied furiously to drum up a counterattack. Behind the scenes, agents investigated everyone who had criticized the arrests of the Spanish Civil War activists. Edgar, meanwhile, tried to get Attorney General Jackson to make a statement in his defense. Jackson hesitated. His predecessor Frank Murphy had made him ‘very dubious’ about Edgar, warning that the FBI spied on government officials and tapped their telephones. Edgar denied such charges and offered to resign, and Jackson ended up issuing a compromise statement, expressing confidence in Edgar and committing the government to the protection of civil liberties.
Edgar survived the crisis because he had the most powerful protector of all, the President. Characteristically, Roosevelt made light of the row. ‘Edgar,’ he called across the room at a Washington Press Club reception. ‘What are they trying to do to you?’ ‘I don’t know, Mr President,’ Edgar replied. Roosevelt then made an exaggerated thumbs-down gesture with both hands, proclaiming loudly, ‘That’s for them.’ Everyone present knew Edgar’s job was safe for the foreseeable future.
‘Hoover continued in his job and added to his power,’ observed Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, ‘because he managed to worm himself into the complete confidence of the President.’ Edgar achieved that, as he would with future presidents, by sending a stream of political intelligence to the White House.
‘He started playing up to him,’ said William Sullivan, ‘telling him little tidbits of gossip about high-ranking public officials whenever he could …’ Francis Biddle, who followed Jackson as Attorney General, had the same experience. ‘Lunching alone with me in a room adjoining my office,’ Biddle recalled, Hoover began ‘sharing some of his extraordinarily broad knowledge of the intimate details of what my associates in the Cabinet did and said, of their likes and dislikes, their weaknesses and their associations.’
In June 1940, when Roosevelt wrote to thank him for the ‘wonderful job’ he was doing, Edgar responded with flattery. He told the President his note was ‘one of the most inspiring messages which I have ever been privileged to receive … a symbol of the principles for which our nation stands.’
The job Edgar was doing, as both men knew, was far beyond the proper responsibilities of an FBI Director. Roosevelt had asked the FBI to ‘look over’ the mountain of critical telegrams he had received after making a broadcast on national defense. Edgar obliged by running name checks and opening files on hundreds of citizens.
FBI political espionage for the White House became routine. In late 1940, when the President asked Edgar to assign an agent to Palm Beach to watch the administration’s ‘friends and enemies,’ Edgar obliged with ‘complete coverage.’
Roosevelt turned to Edgar for help when, at a time the Chicago Tribune was opposing his defense plans, he wanted to boost a rival paper in the city. ‘FDR used the FBI for all kinds of dirty tricks,’ said the Tribune’s Walter Trohan, who became a trusted Bureau contact. ‘When the new newspaper, the Sun, was trying to put the Tribune out of business, the government used the FBI to intimidate newspaper publishers. I took it up with Hoover later, and he said, “Yeah, but I got a letter directing me to do it.” And he showed me the order. He wanted proof before he did that kind of thing …’
As time went on, Roosevelt often bypassed his Attorney General and communicated directly with Edgar. A long line of future attorneys general, who theoretically had full authority over the Director of the FBI, would have to learn to live with the same humiliation. As Secretary Ickes noted in his diary in June 1941, Edgar had become ‘so strong that apparently he can dictate who is to be the Attorney General, his titular chief.’
Edward Ennis, a senior aide to Francis Biddle, felt that attorneys general were cowed by Edgar’s relationship with the President, and by an ‘even deeper fear that he had files on everybody.’ The best that could be said, wrote Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, was that Edgar ‘has run a secret police with the minimum of collision with civil liberties, and that is about all you can expect of any chief of secret police.’
The fact was, though, that for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal official did wield such power, and his assault on civil liberties would be persistent and serious.
In May 1940, Roosevelt gave the go-ahead for use of that vital tool of any secret police, the telephone tap. On its face, Edgar’s track record on wiretapping was entirely respectable. The Bureau’s first manual, issued in 1928, said flatly that tapping was ‘improper, illegal … unethical’ and would not be tolerated. Edgar had assured Congress that any agent caught wiretapping would be fired.
Though some sought to find loopholes in it, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 had seemed to outlaw wiretapping altogether. And, in spite of an Attorney General’s ruling that allowed some tapping with prior approval, Edgar continued to say that he was against it except in life-or-death circumstances, such as kidnappings. The testimony of his own men, however, makes it clear that was not true.
For two months in 1936, five FBI agents were forced to reveal in court that the Bureau mounted round-the-clock wiretaps to investigate a case of interstate theft in New York. The evidence made it clear that this was nothing unusual, that there had been dozens of similar assignments, using the most sophisticated equipment available.
According to other agents, Edgar had on occasion used bugging to further his own private interests. There had been the time, years earlier, when he ordered taps on the telephones of Roosevelt’s Postmaster General James Farley, who wanted him replaced as FBI Director. In 1937, during a clampdown on brothels in Baltimore, reporters had asked Edgar about rumors that telephones were bugged during the operation. ‘We have to do that sometimes,’ he said carefully. It later emerged that there had been bugging – enough to fill two volumes of notes on conversations in one brothel alone. Part of their mission, former agents were quoted as saying, had been to get smear material on police officials who had fallen out with Edgar.
‘Perhaps only Mr Hoover himself,’ Federal Communications Chairman James Fly was to write, ‘can tell exactly how many times he has instructed his men to break the law that his Bureau was supposed to enforce; but he has chosen not to discuss such details.’ In 1940, when Edgar was quietly lobbying for looser wiretapping laws, it was Fly’s congressional testimony that ensured the legislation was rejected. Edgar detested the FCC Ch
airman from then on, so much so that – even two decades later in retirement – Fly insisted on meeting a reporter out of doors, for fear his home was bugged by the FBI.
In the spring of 1940, convinced that wiretapping was vital to national security, President Roosevelt overrode the law. He authorized the Attorney General to permit eavesdropping on ‘persons suspected of subversive activities against the United States, including suspected spies …’ This order, Francis Biddle pointed out long afterward, ‘opened the door pretty wide to wiretapping of anyone suspected of subversive activities [Biddle’s emphasis].’ It was to remain Edgar’s basic authority for telephone tapping for a quarter of a century.
Attorney General Robert Jackson was so unhappy about this development that he distanced himself from the issue and let Edgar decide who should be wiretapped. Evidence of the sort of bugging Edgar would approve came less than a year later.
Harry Bridges, the thirty-five-year-old leader of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, had long been a thorn in the side of management. He was also an irritant to Edgar personally. Five years earlier, when Edgar had briefed Roosevelt on the internal threat from Communists, he had named Bridges as the man who could paralyze the nation’s shipping. Even after the union leader came out in favor of a peace agreement with management, Edgar pursued him relentlessly.
Bridges was vulnerable because he had been born in Australia. Edgar claimed he was a Communist, and foreignborn Communists could be deported for membership in ‘an organization advocating the violent overthrow of the government.’ Bridges said he had never joined the Party, though he admitted being an admirer of ‘the Soviet workers’ state.’ The result of his latest deportation hearing was still pending in the summer of 1941.
Official and Confidential Page 14
