J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  At another time or under other circumstances, Hoover would probably have simply bypassed Donovan, making “end runs” to the attorney general. But knowing that Donovan was one of Stone’s favorites and that he was himself still in effect on trial, Hoover risked end runs rarely. Instead he was forced to suppress his anger.

  Not until many years later—when their battles were fought on a global scale, and William J. Donovan’s greatest dreams were, one after another, denied him—did he understand what an associate meant when he referred to J. Edgar Hoover’s “terrible patience.”

  Donovan himself was a master of gamesmanship, and although he failed to appreciate the duration and intensity of Hoover’s hatred, it took him no time at all to spot some of his tricks.

  “Hoover would memo you to death,” a later AG, Ramsey Clark, recalled. “An attorney general could have spent literally all his time preparing memos back to the director.” On any given day, Hoover might send a stack of fifty memos to the AG’s office, forty-nine of which dealt with routine matters. “But unless you read each, line by line, you could miss the paragraph in that one which was really important.”23 And thereafter, if he was ever challenged, Hoover would be able to respond, I informed you of that, on such and such a date.

  Donovan soon learned to retaliate, if not in quantity, in kind.

  As early as June 10, 1924, Stone had requested a review of the applicability of federal criminal statutes to Communist activities in the United States. Although the attorney general, busy attempting to reform the entire Justice Department, had apparently forgotten the request, Donovan, noticing that Hoover hadn’t replied, pressed him on it until he was forced to respond with a memorandum he would long regret.

  Dated October 18, 1924, and directed to William J. Donovan, assistant attorney general, Criminal Division, from J. Edgar Hoover, acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, its key paragraph read:

  “It is, of course, to be remembered that the activities of the Communists and other ultra radicals have not up to the present time constituted a violation of the Federal statutes, and consequently, the Department of Justice, theoretically, has no right to investigate such activities as there has been no violation of Federal laws.”24

  Despite the qualifying phrases, Hoover had been forced to admit, on paper, that most of his actions as head of the GID had been illegal. However, having served under both Palmer and Daugherty, and being himself somewhat expert on the subject, Hoover was well aware that anything put into a file could later be removed from it.

  But by this time Donovan had apparently begun to reevaluate his initial impressions of Hoover, for he did exactly what he presumed (and rightly) the acting director was doing. He began keeping his own file on J. Edgar Hoover.

  When the attorney general told him he was considering appointing Hoover permanent director of the Bureau, Donovan not only opposed the appointment; he went one step further: he urged Stone to fire him.

  As if Hoover didn’t have enough problems, the ghost of the Palmer raids rematerialized, this time in the form of still another ACLU pamphlet, entitled The Nation-Wide Spy System Centering in the Department of Justice.

  The simplest way to deal with the pamphlet would have been to ignore it. But Hoover didn’t have that option. Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, had sent a copy to the attorney general. Stone, in turn, had routed it to Hoover with the notation “Please comment.”

  The pamphlet went well beyond the Palmer era, including numerous new charges, among them that BI agents had aided local police in the violent 1923 May Day raids; that Burns had used his position, and BI agents, to promote his own detective agency; and that the Department of Justice had supplied a blacklist of suspected radicals to various employers and manufacturers.

  All this was true. It could also be laid on Burns.

  What most concerned Hoover was neither this nor the by now standard charges of wiretapping, bugging, mail opening, and burglary, but the pamphlet’s very strong attack on the Bureau’s files: their collection, retention, and dissemination. The ACLU also alleged that in addition to the many dossiers, the BI maintained a master index of “several hundred thousand” persons branded as “supporters” of radical causes. Denial wasn’t easy, since Burns had proudly claimed the existence of the master index and dossiers during his final appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee.

  Two other things must have bothered Hoover. One was the timing of this criticism, coming as it did while he was still trying to convince Stone that he was the right man for the job. The other was its source. For not only did Roger Baldwin and Harlan Fiske Stone share many of the same liberal views; they were also close friends.*

  Hoover responded to Stone’s request with a seven-page rebuttal, in which he denied many of the charges (the BI “has no apparatus for the tapping of telephone wires,” Hoover said, knowing full well this wasn’t true); blamed the others on Burns and Flynn; justified the retention of the indices and files as necessary support to other agencies (for example, the screening of passport applications for the State Department); and blasted the ACLU for such irresponsible acts as providing legal aid to the IWW.

  Nor could Hoover resist mentioning, though he did it most carefully, that the man who made these charges, Roger Baldwin, was an ex-convict.

  Stone responded to both Baldwin and Hoover with the same suggestion: Why don’t you two get together and talk things out?26

  Roger Baldwin was more than willing. In fact he looked forward to the meeting with a certain amount of relish. Although he had never met Mr. Hoover, he had a more than passing acquaintance with the Bureau of Investigation. On August 31, 1918, BI agents, aided by a group of patriots known as the Propaganda League, had raided the New York office of the pacifist National Civil Liberties Bureau, seizing its records and arresting, among others, its founder, Roger Baldwin.†

  While Baldwin was in jail he had a surprise visitor. The BI agent Rayme Finch, who had led the August raid, had an embarrassing request. The Propaganda League boys had so messed up the NCLB records that he could make no sense of them. Would Baldwin help straighten them out?

  Convinced the records would prove that his group had not counseled draft resistance, as charged, Baldwin agreed. Each morning, for the next month, an agent would check Baldwin out of the Tombs and take him to the Bureau offices at 15 Park Row, where he’d work on the records. For his part, Rayme Finch proved a good host. At mealtimes he insisted on taking Baldwin to the better restaurants. Once, to break up the monotony, he even treated him to a burlesque show. And, for hours on end, he regaled him with tales of his exciting adventures as an agent.

  Baldwin later recalled, “With great pride, he showed me his telephonetapping equipment and asked if I wanted to listen in on any conversation; he’d put on anyone I named. I declined. He also showed me a whole setup for forming an IWW local—forms, membership cards, literature. Thus the [BI] would catch the ‘criminals’ they made.”

  In going through the files, Baldwin discovered that a Bureau document had been inserted by error: it was headed ROGER BALDWIN—IWW AGITATOR. “I handed it to Finch without comment,” Baldwin recalled. “He looked a bit embarrassed for the first time and said, ‘We have to make it strong even if it isn’t right.’”27

  Although the BI charges were dropped, Baldwin, himself a conscientious objector, was convicted of draft evasion, and served nine months in prison. Now he was looking forward to meeting Mr. Hoover. He had more than a few questions for Mr. Burns’s successor.

  Hoover, by contrast, prepared for the meeting in the Justice Department’s law library, researching the statutes concerning the retention and destruction of federal records.

  J. Edgar Hoover (George Washington University Law School ’16) and Roger Baldwin (Harvard ’05, Caldwell penitentiary ’19) met on August 7, 1924. Although the attorney general sat in, he let the Bureau’s acting director do most of the talking.

  Young Mr. Hoover, Baldwin was pleased t
o observe, was not at all like Mr. Burns. Polite, and very lawyerlike, Hoover quickly assured Baldwin that he had played an “unwilling part” in the activities of Palmer, Daugherty, and Burns, claiming that while he regretted their tactics, he had not been in a position to do anything about them. Speaking rapidly, he snapped off, item by item, the attorney general’s new guidelines, explaining exactly what he had already done to implement each. The General Intelligence or Anti-Radical Division was being disbanded; the infiltration of labor unions and political groups was a thing of the past, as was Bureau involvement in state and local syndicalism cases; the private detectives and dollar-a-year men were out, their replacements law school graduates, carefully selected, specially trained. His sole concern, Hoover told Baldwin, was helping the attorney general build an efficient law enforcement agency.

  Although it was more recitation than dialogue, Baldwin was impressed. Hoover marked a welcome change from Burns and Flynn. Also, Harlan Stone trusted him, and he trusted Harlan Stone.

  Baldwin left the meeting feeling he had won several victories. Most important, of course, was the dismantling of the GID. Hoover had assured him there was not a single man in the department now assigned to investigate radicals.

  Hoover, for his part, knew he’d won a victory. And a very great one. Backed by his research, the attorney general had told Baldwin that without an act of Congress he lacked the authority to destroy the master index and personal files compiled by his predecessors. All he could do, Stone said, was promise Baldwin that as long as he was attorney general they would not be misused.

  Hoover had won the right to keep the files. Decades passed before that right was again even feebly challenged.

  Baldwin and Hoover met again on October 17, this time without Stone. At their earlier meeting Hoover had urged Baldwin to contact him “personally” if ever there were allegations of wrongdoing on the part of any of his agents. In return, Hoover promised a thorough investigation and, if the evidence warranted it, stern corrective action.

  Baldwin arrived prepared to hold him to that promise, with a list of specific allegations. To each Hoover also answered with specifics: this arrest was made by the Secret Service, not the Bureau; these were postal inspectors; obviously this man was impersonating a federal agent—we’ll investigate.

  Like many others, Baldwin was impressed with Hoover’s administrative ability. When he didn’t have the facts at hand, he quickly obtained them from an aide. But more often than not, each case, no matter how detailed, was already filed away in his amazingly retentive memory. Even more important, Hoover seemed quite sincere in his assertion that the Justice Department had entered a new era.

  Indeed, in his enthusiasm he seemed to be offering nothing less than a partnership: the Bureau of Investigation and the American Civil Liberties Union working together to protect the rights of all citizens.*

  The new Bureau had a single mandate, Hoover told Baldwin: to investigate alleged violations of federal law. No longer would it concern itself with personal opinions or beliefs.

  Hoover also assured Baldwin that the American Civil Liberties Union was not, and had never been, a subject of investigation by the Bureau.28

  The truth was otherwise. The American Civil Liberties Union had been a subject of intensive investigation from almost the day it was founded, and it remained so for at least another fifty-two years.

  In this matter, Hoover could neither deny knowledge nor shift blame. The first report on the new organization, a confidential memorandum dated March 1, 1920, was addressed to and prepared for the benefit of “Mr. Hoover,” head of the GID. Nor could Hoover profess ignorance about the identity of the memo’s author. He was one of Hoover’s closest friends, George F. Ruch, who “helped research” Hoover’s famous briefs against communism.

  Ruch, summarizing an even longer report by a secret agent identified only as “836,” reported that the ACLU would soon launch a nationwide campaign protesting the recent raids and advocating free speech and free press. By “free speech,” Ruch noted disbelievingly, these people meant that “anyone, no matter whether anarchists, IWWs, Communists, or whatever else, should be allowed to speak and write all they wished against this government or any other government!” Apparently Ruch had never heard of those revolutionary documents the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

  Ruch felt the free-speech campaign was of such “grave importance” that he recommended that Hoover assign agent 836 to watch “nothing else.”29

  By January 1921 the file on the ACLU was already voluminous. Summaries of ACLU meetings noted who attended, what they said, and how much money was collected. There were lists of the organization’s pitifully small bank accounts, with all deposits duly recorded. At least one agent sat through each of Roger Baldwin’s speeches, taking copious if often misleading notes.* Other reports contained detailed summaries of ACLU executive committee meetings. Since the minutes of these meetings were never published, their “confidential source” had to be a bugging device, an informer high in the organization, or a burglary. By probably the last means, the BI “obtained” the ACLU’s mailing list, which it copied and sent to each local BI office, labeling it a basic list of American radicals.

  On June 2, 1921, the agent E. J. Connelley sent Hoover a garbled recounting of Baldwin’s latest speech, recommending that “a very prompt decision” be made concerning this organization. One was, but it pleased neither Connelley nor Hoover, Attorney General Daugherty deciding that “so far” the ACLU had committed “no act which could be construed as being in violation of any federal statutes now in existence and for that reason action by the government is precluded at the present time.” Despite this ruling, the investigation never stopped.

  By January 1924 this group of “Pinks and Reds” and “all tints between,” as the agent H. J. Lenon put it, had become the preeminent organization in the civil liberties field; or, as Lenon phrased it, the ACLU was now playing “big brother to them all, from the bomb-throwing Anarchist to the wrist-slapping pacifist, and the preferred occupation, slacker.”31

  Nor was the organization itself the only subject of investigation. Each member of the ACLU’s national board rated a file. Several, such as those on Baldwin and Frankfurter, were already sizable. The Harvard professor, according to his dossier, was “considered a dangerous man.” Helen Keller, whom history would remember as the famed blind, deaf, and mute author-lecturer, was, to the Bureau, “a writer of radical subjects.” The Nobel laureate Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House, was a “zealous and consistent supporter of radical and revolutionary movements.” Attorney Clarence Darrow, who had recently defended teacher John Scopes in the celebrated Tennessee Monkey Trial, was accused of helping other radicals capitalize on evolution, thereby “gaining entree…to certain coveted circles…hitherto closed to their propaganda.”

  As for Baldwin himself, he was no longer an “IWW agitator” but an “intellectual anarchist,” which would have made him a fit subject for deportation, had not his ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.32

  Nor could Hoover argue that this interest predated the Justice Department’s “new era.” On August 28, 1924—just three weeks after his first meeting with Baldwin—Hoover received an updated report on an ACLU function so detailed that it included the exact amount of pamphlet sales: $36.54. On November 19 the Bureau “obtained” the names and addresses of 130 persons who had contributed to “the new radical newspaper” Civil Liberties. As late as 1940 Hoover was still giving his personal attention to such matters as approving a $5 membership fee for an undercover agent.33

  Contrary to Hoover’s assurances to Baldwin, the Bureau never ceased to be interested in personal opinions or beliefs.

  Also contrary to his pledge to both Baldwin and Stone, the Bureau never stopped collecting and filing away information on alleged radicals. For the next fifteen years, from 1924 to 1939, agents in the field continued sending such information to their special agents in charge, who would in turn forward them to
SOG.

  The GID was dismantled (until 1939), and the Bureau did halt new investigations into these particularly sensitive areas. But none were necessary for—unknown to Attorney General Stone and most of his successors—Hoover had secretly made other arrangements which provided him with the information he desired, without any of the risks.

  Baldwin was greatly impressed by Hoover. “I think we were wrong in our estimate of his attitude,” Baldwin happily admitted in a letter to Stone. Days after the letter, the ACLU issued a press release, praising Attorney General Stone’s new guidelines and his choice of John Hoover as acting director. And this was followed by numerous speeches in which Baldwin assured his audiences that the ACLU now believed that the Justice Department’s Red-hunting days were over.34

  Perhaps more than a little surprised at how well his confrontation with the “intellectual anarchist” had gone, Hoover wrote Baldwin an effusive thankyou letter, in which he said, “If I can leave my desk each day with the knowledge that I have in no way violated any of the rights of the citizens of this country…then I shall feel satisfied.”35

  Thus began the curious partnership of what soon became the leading law enforcement agency in the United States, and that nation’s foremost—and at times only—organization dedicated to the safeguarding of individual liberties.