J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Although Tolson was often referred to as Hoover’s alter ego, there were subtle differences between the two. In appearance, Clyde Tolson was thin, handsome in a plain, unaffected way, and just slightly taller than Hoover. It was, some suggested, the reason he always walked with a slight stoop.* Of the two Tolson was less rigid, less formal. He wasn’t above playing relief pitcher on the Bureau team. Unlike Hoover, who either lectured you or stayed silent, “very silent,” Ramsey Clark recalled, “Tolson could carry on a very engaging conversation on many subjects.”

  After the former attorney general published a book that was slightly critical of the Bureau, both Hoover and Tolson had attacked Clark viciously (Hoover calling him, among other things, a “spineless jelly fish” and the worst AG he’d served under). Yet, even after the attack, Clark could still remark, “Tolson seemed to me to be a sweet man. He seemed to be a gentle and thoughtful man.” Clark sensed in Tolson “compassion, which you never felt with Mr. Hoover.”4

  Alan Belmont, for many years a close associate of both men, observed that Hoover was more outgoing than Tolson, with a more evident sense of humor, but he “regarded Clyde Tolson as more of a friend.” Similar comments were voiced by Robert Wick, Robert Hendon, and others who worked with the pair.5

  In Washington, where there were many such creatures, Clyde Tolson was considered “the ultimate yes-man.” Even in the early days, Charles Appel recalled, Hoover liked to surround himself with yea-sayers. This trait, Appel believed, was good for neither Hoover nor the Bureau; and it was “the only difficulty” Appel had with him during his three decades in the organization.6

  Edward Tamm, who eventually gave up the number three spot to become a federal judge, saw Tolson as “a quiet man, always on his guard, always cautious about making a commitment or taking a position in which he would find himself out of step with the director. He would not endorse ‘mother love’ or ‘home cooking’ until he was sure the director agreed that that was what should be done.” Tolson would make his memo comments in pencil so that he could change them if Hoover expressed a contrary view. The blue ink was always the final word.

  In addition, Tolson was “very loyal—extremely loyal—to the director,” Tamm said, adding, “And I suppose that meant loyalty to the Bureau also, for some years. The words ‘director’ and ‘Bureau’ were strongly synonymous.”7

  Yet Tolson’s role went beyond merely being Hoover’s shadow. According to Belmont, Clyde Tolson was the watchdog of the Bureau: he had a perpetually pessimistic attitude, seeing the worst of everything. But it was, Belmont stressed, “a necessary function.” Tolson’s job was to protect the director’s flanks, to spot and, if possible, eliminate, any errors of commission or omission which might bring criticism of the director and/or the Bureau.8

  According to Courtney Evans, another former associate, Tolson’s major contribution was twofold: “One, he could moderate the director’s views at times; and, two, when the director wanted to get something resolved, but didn’t want to handle it himself, he would just quietly say something to Tolson and Tolson would get it done and nobody would know that Hoover had anything to do with it. That was his big service to the organization, and I think he fulfilled a valuable role.”9

  Not too surprisingly, Tolson became known as “Hoover’s hatchetman.” According to a tale often told among the agents, one day the director, noticing that the associate director appeared depressed, suggested, “Clyde, why don’t you transfer someone? You’ll feel better.” When the thought failed to raise Tolson’s spirits, Hoover advised, “Go ahead, fire someone; or, if you’re really feeling bad, do it with prejudice.” Former employees who were unable to obtain other government jobs because of the Bureau’s negative reports didn’t think it all that funny. And, often, they blamed not Hoover but Tolson.

  Being a buffer was among his several “necessary functions.”

  Yet, perhaps more important than any of them was that he was J. Edgar Hoover’s only truly close friend. Roger Baldwin, in an interview shortly before his death, saw nothing unnatural in this. It would have been unnatural, Baldwin thought, had someone in such a high and solitary position not had at least one “buddy,” someone he could confide in, trust.10

  Others offered another interpretation. The constant companionship of “Junior” and the “Boss” did not go unnoticed or unmentioned, either in Washington or in the field. As the author David Wise put it, Hoover’s bachelor life-style “inevitably gave rise to whispers about his sexual preferences, if any.”11

  Tolson accompanied Hoover when he flew to New Orleans on April 30, 1936, to follow up on the Karpis lead. Agents had already staked out the apartment, on Canal Street, where they’d been informed Karpis was staying, and Inspector E. J. Connelley, who now headed the specials squad, diagrammed the building and nearby streets on a blackboard in the New Orleans field office, assigning agents to the roof, fire escape, and every possible exit. When the team assembled at the scene, however, the unexpected happened: Karpis and Hunter sauntered out of the apartment, crossed the street, and got into their automobile.

  According to the official FBI version—recounted in dozens of articles and books—as soon as Karpis slipped into the driver’s seat, Hoover ran to his side of the car and Connelley ran to the other side, where Hunter was sitting. There was a rifle on the backseat. Before Karpis could reach for it, Hoover lunged through the open window and grabbed the fugitive by the collar. “Stammering, stuttering, shaking as though he had palsy,” Hoover would recall, “the man upon whom was bestowed the title of public enemy number one folded up like the yellow rat he is.” Ashen-faced with fear at the sight of the famous profile of the FBI director, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis meekly surrendered. “Put the cuffs on him, boys,” Hoover ordered. Only then was it discovered that, despite all the meticulous preparations, no one had remembered to bring handcuffs. Improvising, the captors tied Karpis’s hands behind him with an agent’s necktie.12

  After driving Karpis to the New Orleans field office—the newly captured felon having to provide directions since all the others in the car were out-oftowners—Hoover called a press conference to announce his first arrest.

  “Now that Karpis has been captured, who takes his place as Public Enemy #1?” a reporter asked.

  Recognizing a ready-made opportunity to strike back at Senator McKellar, the director replied, “Politics itself is Public Enemy #1. Political attempts to hamper and interfere with Federal and other police and prosecuting agents are the real menace at present.” Hoover then specifically criticized, without naming names, those politicians who tried to dictate appointments and assignments of agents, as well as those who were themselves linked to the underworld.13

  On May 1 the New York Times headlined:

  KARPIS CAPTURED

  IN NEW ORLEANS

  BY HOOVER HIMSELF

  On May 8 the headline read:

  ENEMY LIST CUT TO ONE

  J.E. HOOVER CAPTURES

  CAMPBELL IN TOLEDO

  On May 11:

  ROBINSON CAPTURED IN

  GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA

  PUBLIC ENEMY SLATE CLEAN

  On May 13 the “Topics of the Times” columnist observed, “The timing has been so dramatic that one might almost suspect a touch of stage direction, as if J. Edgar Hoover had all three of his quarry in hand and chose to release them one by one.”14

  Following McKellar’s lead, the subcommittee had recommended a $225,000 cut in the FBI budget request. When the matter reached the Senate floor, the Republican Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan saw a chance to embarrass the New Deal, and attack McKellar as a miser whose misdirected parsimony would once again cause the threat of kidnapping to hang over every cradle in America.

  According to Jack Alexander, “While he talked, Democratic leaders gathered in an excited knot and decided to abjure McKellar’s cynicism. Obviously, it would not do to permit the Democratic standard to wave on the side of the underworld. When Vandenberg sat down, one Democrat after anothe
r got up and lavishly eulogized the G-men and their work. After the echoes of the oratory had died down, an amendment embodying the proposed cut was defeated by a throaty roar of noes and the Senate voted the full appropriation. McKellar sat apart in Catilinian silence, shunned by friend and foe alike.”*15

  That same week Congress also voted to increase FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s salary from $9,000 to $10,000 per year.

  Although those special agents who participated in the capture of Alvin Karpis were well aware that the director’s version wasn’t exactly the way it happened, none ever publicly disputed the official account.

  However, one other person who was on Canal Street that day told a different story, although thirty-five years passed before he got a chance to recount it. According to Alvin Karpis, it was Clarence Hurt, not J. Edgar Hoover, who ran up to his side of the car and, putting a .351 automatic rifle to his head, demanded, “Karpis, do you have a gun?”

  “No,” Karpis replied.

  “Are you sure you have no gun on you?”

  Karpis admitted that there were two rifles, wrapped in blankets, in the luggage compartment of the vehicle; but since it was a hot day, shirt-sleeve weather, rather than don coats to hide their .45s, he and Freddie had left them behind.

  “Well,” responded Hurt, a former lawman and one of the special agents who’d shot Dillinger, “then I guess I’d better put my safety on before someone gets hurt.”17

  At this point, Karpis claimed, “I heard one guy shouting, ‘We’ve got him. We’ve got him. It’s all clear, Chief.’ “ Two men then emerged from behind the apartment building. “Both were wearing suits and blue shirts and neat ties. One was slight and blond. The other was heavy-set with a dark complexion. I recognized the dark, heavy man. I’d seen pictures of him. Anyone would have known him…I knew at that moment, for sure, that the FBI had finally nailed me.”

  According to Alvin Karpis, only after he and Hunter had been safely apprehended did FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Assistant Director Clyde Tolson appear on the scene.

  In his 1971 autobiography, Karpis debunked every detail of Hoover’s “first arrest.” For example, the rifle on the backseat. “What rifle? What back seat? We were in a 1936 Plymouth coupe that had no back seat.”

  “The story of Hoover the Hero is false,” Karpis asserted. “He didn’t lead the attack on me. He hid until I was safely covered by many guns. He waited until he was told the coast was clear. Then he came out to reap the glory…

  “That May Day in 1936, I made Hoover’s reputation as a fearless lawman. It’s a reputation he doesn’t deserve…I made that son-of-a-bitch.”18

  Karpis was charged with four counts of kidnapping in the Hamm and Bremer cases.* Anticipating a reduced sentence, Karpis pled guilty to one count of the Hamm kidnapping; he was instead sentenced to life imprisonment. Although Karpis was eligible for parole after fifteen years, J. Edgar Hoover, preferring an imprisoned symbol to a freed felon, personally opposed his parole requests, and Karpis served thirty-three years—twenty-three of them on Alcatraz, the longest any man ever served on the Rock; and the remainder at McNeil Island, where he taught a convicted car thief named Charlie Manson to play the steel guitar. Paroled in 1968, Karpis was deported to Canada, then became a resident of Spain.

  It was there in 1978 that the former special agent Thomas McDade tracked him down. McDade—who had the unique distinction of having Baby Face Nelson chase him, guns blazing, at Barrington, and who was one of the raiding party that killed Freddie and Ma Barker at Lake Weir—swapped tales with his old adversary. Although the two—the hunter and the hunted—made plans to collaborate on a TV program, Karpis died the following year, at age seventy-one, of an apparently accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

  Hoover’s next-to-last big arrest occurred shortly after midnight on December 15, 1936.

  Harry Brunette, a twenty-five-year-old former librarian, was wanted, along with his partner, Merle Vandenbush, for the kidnapping of a New Jersey state trooper, as well as a series of bank robberies. New York police, working closely with New Jersey officers, tracked Brunette and his wife to an apartment on West 102nd Street, which they placed under surveillance. As a courtesy—to their lasting regret—they also informed the FBI.

  On the afternoon of December 14, representatives of the three law enforcement agencies met and agreed to postpone the arrest until two the following afternoon, when Brunette, who was known as a night owl, would probably be asleep. Also, they hoped that by waiting they might catch his partner, Vandenbush. It was agreed that since the NYPD had located the fugitive, he would become its prisoner.

  Shortly before midnight, the two NYPD officers assigned to the stakeout took a coffee break. While they were gone, Hoover and Tolson arrived in a taxi from the St. Moritz Hotel, on Central Park South. Perhaps recalling how the NYPD had outmaneuvered the Bureau in the arrest of Hauptmann, Hoover, without waiting for the return of the two New York policemen, on his own authority ordered a raid.

  This time the director let “Junior” have his moment of glory. When Brunette ignored the command to surrender, Tolson, armed with a submachine gun, shot the lock off the apartment door. When Brunette shot back, the agents lobbed tear gas shells into the apartment, setting it on fire. Although Brunette’s wife, who was shot in the thigh, surrendered, the fugitive managed to flee down the hall to a storage closet, where he held off the agents for another thirty-five minutes, until his ammunition ran out.

  In the meantime the fire department arrived. But its attempts to put out the blaze and evacuate the other residents were frustrated by an overzealous FBI agent who held them back at gunpoint.

  “Dammit, can’t you read?” a fireman growled, pointing at his helmet. “If you don’t take that gun out of my stomach I’ll bash your head in.” The agent backed off.19

  Ignoring still another part of the prior agreement, Tolson, accompanied by some two dozen FBI agents, took Brunette to the New York field office in the Federal Building at Foley Square, as their prisoner.

  However, Hoover, not Tolson, got the headlines.

  25 ‘G-MEN’ LED BY HOOVER CAPTURE

  BANDIT IN BATTLE ON WEST 102D STREET

  There were other headlines in the days that followed:

  HOOVER RAID HERE

  ON KIDNAPPER LAIR

  SCORED BY POLICE

  They and New Jersey Troopers

  Accuse Federal Chief of Trying

  to Steal the Glory

  VALENTINE ASSAILS

  HOOVER’S ‘FANFARE’

  Says Federal Man’s Methods

  Make Headlines But Police

  Get Same Results Quietly

  HOOVER DEFENDS RAID

  TO CATCH BRUNETTE

  Federal Chief Says New York

  Police Had Left Scene When

  Kidnapper Was Found20

  Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine of New York charged the FBI director with being “a hunter of headlines” as well as of fugitives.21 Hoover, who had already sent out letters graciously commending Valentine and Fire Chief John J. McElligott for their “cooperation,” replied that his Bureau “had never double-crossed anybody,” that “hindsight is better than foresight,” and that all precautions had been taken to prevent innocent people, including firemen, from being hurt. The important fact to remember, Hoover insisted, was not how or why Brunette had been captured but that “this embryo Karpis or Dillinger is in custody.”22

  In addition to giving the assistant director a new nickname, Killer Tolson, the Brunette capture widened the schism between the FBI and the NYPD. It soon reached the point where neither offered even token cooperation to the other.

  Two months later the police captured Brunette’s partner without firing a shot. Vandenbush told them he had been on his way to see Brunette when the firing broke out; in fact, he said, he’d gotten so close to the excitement “that he could almost have leaned over and touched the director on the shoulder.”23

  With the exception of the appr
ehension of Louis Lepke, whose surrender Walter Winchell arranged two years later, this was the last of J. Edgar Hoover’s big arrests. Although he personally conducted several vice raids in Miami—to justify his nonvacation there—complaints from local hotel owners that he was ruining the tourist business brought his participation, and the raids, to an end.

  There was still another reason for Hoover’s stepping out of the spotlight. He’d run out of public enemies.

  However, the director did not have to look far for a new “menace” to justify his increasingly large budget requests. He found two, in fact. One, communism, was an old menace, newly resurrected, while the other, fascism, was linked to a bizarre plot—a proposed coup d’état in which a number of the nation’s leading industrialists had allegedly banded together to remove Roosevelt from the presidency, by force if necessary, and take over the government of the United States.

  * * *

  *Recalling his former employer, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, whom he admired greatly, Tolson made an interesting comment: “If Baker had been two inches taller, I believe he would have been President of the United States.”3

  *Senator McKellar—who rated several FBI dossiers, one of which made its way into the Official/Confidential file under the heading FBI APPROPRIATIONS DIFFICULTIES—never opposed Hoover again. In 1943 McKellar attended the graduation ceremonies at Hoover’s “crime school,” the FBI National Academy, where he praised “this great instrument of law and order that has been built up by the grand man who is your director.”16