J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Although Walsh’s Teapot Dome probe resulted in a number of indictments, several trials, and a few convictions, Wheeler’s own investigation of the Justice Department did little more than expose various illegal acts committed by the Bureau of Investigation, many of which BI Chief Burns admitted under oath.

  The former attorney general Harry Daugherty was brought to trial twice on charges of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government; after both juries failed to agree, the charges were dismissed. Although fired by Attorney General Stone a month after he took office, Burns was never charged with any of the crimes he committed while heading the Bureau of Investigation, but two of his operatives were convicted of trying to fix a jury. Gaston Means was tried, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison on larceny and conspiracy charges. After his conviction, he wrote Daugherty repudiating his Senate testimony; but it did no good; he served his full sentence.

  There is little doubt that Hoover was happy to see Means incarcerated. He felt an intense personal dislike for the man, and Means had become an all-too-public symbol of the corruption which flourished within the Bureau of Investigation during the Harding years.

  But Hoover had not seen the last of Gaston Means. He would pop up in the midst of the Lindbergh case, con the heiress Evalyn McLean out of a $100,000 “ransom,” and almost pinch the Hope diamond. In prison, on his deathbed, he would run his final scam, and die knowing that his last victim had been none other than his old “friend” J. Edgar.

  Nor had Hoover seen the last of Burton K. Wheeler and Thomas J. Walsh.

  Fortunately Hoover had neither the ability nor the time for prognostication. He had more than enough problems in the present, as a result of the reappearance of a specter from the past. The new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, had been one of the foremost critics of the Palmer raids.

  * * *

  *Following his retirement from military service in 1929, and for the next twenty-three years, the retired major general ran his own nationwide network of private informants, who infiltrated the Communist party, labor unions, church groups, the ACLU, and various civil rights organizations, at the same time amassing millions of pages of secret files. Notes the New York Times writer Richard Halloran, “The heart of the Van Deman files, according to military sources who have seen them, comprises confidential intelligence reports that General Van Deman obtained regularly from Army and Naval intelligence and from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”1

  It was a reciprocal arrangement. For more than three decades, Hoover had access to, and traded information with, a privately financed intelligence network of civilian, military, and police spies—without the knowledge or consent of any of his superiors, be they attorneys general or presidents.

  †How much this contributed to Daugherty’s conversion is unknown, but it certainly didn’t hurt Hoover’s chances. It’s quite possible Hoover oversold his case, for Daugherty became increasingly paranoid on the subject, at one point claiming that his “Red Enemies” had put poison gas in a bouquet of flowers on a platform where he was speaking.

  *For example, it failed to define the phrase “any other immoral practice,” leaving its interpretation to the discretion of the investigators.

  *As any former special agent could testify, the word “voluntary” was a misnomer if ever there was one. VOT reached its most ludicrous extreme in the 1960s when the special agent in charge of the New York field office demanded that each agent’s voluntary overtime had to exceed the office average.

  *He purchased the first dog—an Airedale they named Spee Dee Bozo—a year after his father’s death, to provide companionship for his mother, since he often worked late. Over the years Spee Dee Bozo was followed by eight others of different breeds, all having two things in common: they were spoiled outrageously and, to the frequent discomfort of guests, they were never disciplined.

  *In addition to Wheeler and Walsh, at least two other senators (Robert La Follette and Thaddeus Caraway) and one representative (Roy Woodruff) got the same treatment. All five had dared criticize the Justice Department.

  *At Daugherty’s insistence, Burns had finally cut his former operative adrift; his larcenous ways were a discredit to the Justice Department, the attorney general said, apparently with a straight face. When Means agreed to testify for Wheeler, he apparently never intended to take the stand. As late as the eve of his appearance, Means was still trying to communicate with Daugherty, in the Bureau’s secret code, offering to disappear if the attorney general dropped other charges pending against him. Daugherty ignored him, probably to his lasting regret.

  *Senator Walsh served as Senator Wheeler’s defense counsel in the trial. He not only disproved the charges, his cross-examination forcing two key witnesses to admit they’d perjured themselves; he also presented strong evidence indicating that the whole case had been conceived in Daugherty’s office as a means to discredit Wheeler’s investigation.

  The jury took two votes, Wheeler would recall: “The first was to go out to dinner at the expense of the government. The second was to acquit me.”21

  10

  The Director

  Leaving the White House after his confirmation by the Senate, the new attorney general asked a policeman, “Where is the Department of Justice?” Had the wind been right, he wouldn’t have needed to ask. “When I became Attorney General,” Harlan Fiske Stone later recalled, “the Bureau of Investigation was…in exceedingly bad odor.”1 But so was the rest of the Justice Department, he quickly discovered. Although he was determined that Burns would have to go, other matters had priority and it was a month before he called the BI chief into his office.

  In the interim, he jotted down notes on what he thought wrong with the Bureau: “filled with men with bad records…many convicted of crimes…organization lawless…many activities without any authority in federal statutes…agents engaged in many practices which are brutal and tyrannical in the extreme…Felix Frankfurter says key to my problem is men…I agree.”2

  Stone also began asking around for suggestions as to whom he should pick as Burns’s replacement. “I don’t know whom to trust,” he confided to John Lord O’Brian, now in private practice in Washington; “I don’t know any of these people.”3

  O’Brian did not recommend his former assistant, but then apparently neither did he say anything seriously disparaging about him. But many others mentioned him. “Hoover” was a name Stone heard quite frequently, and not, one suspects, always by accident, although not all recommended him, “Many people thought Hoover too young a man,” Stone recalled, or that he “had been in too close contact with the Burns regime.”4

  Stone even mentioned the problem during a Cabinet meeting. Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, in turn told his assistant, Lawrence Richey, that Stone was looking for a man to replace Burns.

  “Why should they look around when they have the man they need right over there now—a young, well-educated lawyer named Hoover.”

  “Do you think he can do the job?” the secretary asked.

  “I know he can,” Richey replied. “He’s a good friend of mine.”5

  Lawrence Richey, who’d earlier recommended his friend for the post of assistant BI chief, had a most unusual background. He had begun working for the U.S. Secret Service at the age of thirteen. Peeking in a basement window, he saw a gang of counterfeiters at work and reported them. Thereafter the agents used him for surveillance, break-ins, and other jobs for which a regular agent would have been too conspicuous. At sixteen he became a full-time operative. At twenty-one he was assigned to President Theodore Roosevelt as his personal bodyguard. On leaving the SS, Richey had founded his own detective agency. At thirty-two he was introduced to Herbert Hoover, who was then serving as World War I food administrator, and Hoover hired him to investigate allegations of fraud and corruption in the food program. For the next forty-two years, until his own death, Richey served as the Great Engineer’s principal aide and confidential informant. According to one writer, Riche
y was “a mysterious and even sinister figure,” who had “a special gift for turning up embarrassing tidbits about political opponents.”6

  Richey and J. Edgar Hoover were members of the same Masonic lodge, as well as the University Club. Richey liked to talk about his Secret Service exploits, and Hoover was, in those days, a good listener.

  Richey’s recommendation carried considerable weight and Commerce Secretary Hoover passed it on to Attorney General Stone.

  In years to come, former president Hoover on occasion remarked, “I was somewhat responsible for the appointment of J. Edgar Hoover.” In telling the story, he always added, “But it wasn’t nepotism, mind you; we aren’t even related.”7

  J. Edgar also credited Herbert Hoover with being responsible for his getting the appointment, and this version appears in all the FBI-authorized handouts.

  But Alpheus Thomas Mason, who as Stone’s biographer had access to all his papers and interviewed or corresponded with most of those involved, stated that the person most responsible was a woman, Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, then an assistant attorney general.

  One morning Stone asked Willebrandt what she thought of Hoover. She told him she regarded him as “honest and informed” and said that he operated “like an electric wire, with almost trigger response.”

  “Everyone says he’s too young,” the attorney general told her, “but maybe that’s his asset. Apparently he hasn’t learned to be afraid of the politicians, and I believe he would set up a group of young men as investigators and infuse them with a will to operate independent of congressional and political pressure.”*8

  Someone had done quite a selling job on Stone.

  Although J. Edgar Hoover credited Herbert Hoover, and Mason credited Willebrandt, still another factor may have been as important as the recommendations. Commenting on his choice in a letter to Dean Young B. Smith, his successor at Columbia, Stone observed, “I found him receptive to the ideas I held.”9

  Hoover, always quick to pick up on nuances, probably sensed very early that what Stone really wanted was someone to take his ideas and run with them.

  On May 9 the attorney general called William J. Burns to his office and told him that he desired his resignation. Burns said he had no intention of resigning. This was not exactly news to Stone; Burns had been telling reporters this for a month.

  Stone responded, “Perhaps you had better think that over.”

  Burns, who had good reason to believe that Stone might have prosecution in mind, did, and resigned the next day.10

  That same day Attorney General Stone issued a statement to the press. It was, in its own way, a return to the beginnings, echoing the idealistic hopes that Attorney General Bonaparte had espoused when he created the Bureau in 1908, but there was a difference, the admission that in the intervening years something had gone very wrong.

  “There is always the possibility that a secret police may become a menace to free governments and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly apprehended or understood. The enormous expansion of Federal legislation, both civil and criminal, in recent years, however, has made a Bureau of Investigation a necessary instrument of law enforcement. But it is important that its activities be strictly limited to the performance of those functions for which it was created and that its agents themselves be not above the law or beyond its reach.

  “The Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals. It is concerned only with their conduct and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws of the United States. When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty, which it should be our first concern to cherish. Within them it should rightly be a terror to the wrongdoer.”11

  Later that same day the attorney general summoned twenty-nine-year-old J. Edgar Hoover to his office. Hoover knew, of course, that Burns had been fired. What he didn’t know, he later stated, was whether he’d be next.

  Entering the office, Hoover was struck by two things: even seated behind his desk, the attorney general looked immense (Stone was almost six and a half feet tall, and weighed well over 250 pounds); and he was scowling.

  “Young man,” Stone said abruptly, “I want you to be Acting Director of the Bureau of Investigation.”

  Hoover responded, “I’ll take the job, Mr. Stone, on certain conditions.”

  “What are they?”

  “The Bureau must be divorced from politics and not be a catch-all for political hacks. Appointments must be based on merit. Second, promotions will be made on proven ability and the Bureau will be responsible only to the Attorney General.”

  “I wouldn’t give it to you under any other conditions,” the attorney general, still with his perpetual scowl, replied. “That’s all. Good day.”12

  The foregoing is Hoover’s own version of the historic May 10, 1924, meeting, as recounted to Mason, Whitehead, and many others. Since it was widely publicized while Harlan Fiske Stone was still living (he was by then chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), and he never challenged it, one can assume this was much the way it happened. But it omits one important detail. Missing from all the accounts, except Mason’s, is any mention that this was a temporary, interim appointment. According to Mason (whose source was a letter by Stone), “On May 10 Stone asked Hoover to serve as acting director with the understanding that the appointment was temporary, effective until such time as the Attorney General could find the best possible man for the job. Not only was Stone cautious in making the appointment temporary; he also required Hoover to report directly to him.”13

  That Hoover was just “filling in” was no secret in Washington. Six days after his meeting with Hoover, the attorney general told the Washington Herald, “I am in no hurry to select Mr. Burns’ successor, because I want just the right man for the job. Until I find that man, I intend personally to supervise the Bureau.”14

  Hoover was very much on trial. If he wanted to keep the job, he had to convince Stone that he was doing it not only well but better than anyone else Stone might find.

  When Stone said he intended to supervise the Bureau directly, he meant it. Three days after Hoover’s appointment the attorney general sent him a sixpoint memorandum establishing the basic policies he wanted implemented:

  “1. The activities of the Bureau are to be limited strictly to investigations of violation of law, under my direction or under the direction of an Assistant Attorney General regularly conducting the work of the Department of Justice.

  “2. I desire that the personnel of the Bureau be reduced so far as is consistent with the proper performance of duties.

  “3. I request that you go over the entire personnel of the Bureau, as conveniently as may be done, and discontinue the services of those who are incompetent or unreliable.

  “4. I, some time ago, gave instructions that the so-called ‘dollar-a-year’ men should be discontinued, except in those cases where the appointees are in the regular employment of this Department. Please see that these instructions are carried out with all convenient speed.

  “5. Until further instructed, I desire that no new appointments be made without my approval. In making appointments, please nominate men of known good character and ability, giving preference to men who have had some legal training.

  “6. I am especially anxious that the morale of the Bureau be strengthened and I believe a first step in that direction is the observation of the foregoing suggestions.”15

  If Stone had any doubts regarding Hoover’s ability to get things done, they were dispelled three days later, when the acting director reported back that (1) he had issued orders strictly limiting all investigations to violations of federal law; (2 and 3) he was in the process of going through the personnel files of every employee of the Bureau, setting aside those whose employment should be terminated “for the best interests of the service”; (4) he had notified the �
�dollar-a-year” men their services were no longer required; and (5) he had raised the employment qualifications so as to exclude from consideration any applicant without legal training or a knowledge of accounting.

  As for (6): “Every effort will be made by employees of the Bureau to strengthen the morale…and to carry out to the letter your policies.”16

  The first man Hoover fired, with Stone’s emphatic approval, was Gaston Means, who was in jail but was listed as a “temporarily suspended” employee. He also fired Burns’s secretary, Mrs. Jesse Duckstein, shortly after she testified before the Wheeler committee. But her firing probably had less to do with her testifying than with the fact that Helen Gandy was now running the office.

  Although older agents speak of the “great purge” of 1924, there were no mass firings. During the next seven months only sixty-one persons left the Bureau, less than half of them agents. Hoover was too wise in the ways of Washington to dismiss immediately everyone who’d used political influence to obtain his or her job. Stone could afford to be idealistic; Hoover, being on probation, had to be practical; and it would have been not only impractical but suicidal to replace a large number of Republican patronage appointees during a Republican administration. He fired some and gradually eased out others. Most quit without prompting, on learning of the strict new standards. Even at that, he stepped on toes.

  One agent ignored his Bureau assignments to run campaign errands for a prominent senator. Deciding to give him a last chance, Hoover transferred him to another state. Within days Hoover was called into Stone’s office, to face a scowling attorney general and a very irate senator. Stone asked for the facts in the case. Hoover recited them from memory. When he’d finished, the attorney general commented, “I am not sure, Mr. Hoover, that you haven’t made a mistake.” Then, after a long pause, he added, “I think you should have fired the agent.”17