Enemies: A History of the FBI

by Tim Weiner

  Attorney General Palmer took Hoover’s case directly to the White House. Palmer demanded to see the president immediately. This led directly to the first cabinet meeting convened by Woodrow Wilson in seven months. The White House had been an isolation ward ever since Wilson’s cataclysmic stroke.

  At 10:00 A.M. on April 14, 1920, Palmer passed through the guarded entrance alongside the locked gates of the White House, walked upstairs to the president’s study, and saw a dying man. Wilson could not move unaided. His thoughts were fleeting, his speech halting. The president was only dimly aware of the war on communism being waged in the United States.

  A few minutes after the cabinet meeting began, Palmer tried to take control. One reliable eyewitness account survives, from the diaries of the navy secretary, Josephus Daniels, who described the “red-hot debate” Palmer started. Palmer argued that the country faced the threat of revolution and insurrection. He steered the president’s attention to the crisis being created by Louis Post. He demanded that Post be fired.

  The president “told Palmer not to let the country see red”—“a much-needed admonition,” as Daniels heard it, “for Palmer was seeing red behind every bush.” Palmer chose to interpret the president’s words in a completely different way. He heard what he wanted to hear: a go-ahead for his campaign to cleanse the country of the Communists.

  On April 29, Palmer announced that the United States would face a terrorist attack on May Day. His warning came straight from Hoover and the Bureau of Investigation—a red alert of an international conspiracy to kill American leaders and destroy American landmarks.

  “The plot is nationwide,” the attorney general told the newspapers. He said government officials and corporate executives were targets for assassination; warnings had gone out to all those on the list of marked men. Bureau agents, state militiamen, and police officers were on guard across the country, concentrating on New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans; watching over railroad stations, harbors, Wall Street offices, and the homes of the most powerful men in America.

  It was a false alarm. May Day came and went uneventfully. “While the night is not over, it looks as if the expected disturbances have been headed off,” Hoover told reporters late that evening. A perceptible snickering began—a smattering of suspicion, as Hoover himself recorded, that the May Day plots were “creatures of the imagination of the Attorney General.” In short order, the press, the public, and the political establishment began to question the judgment of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Congress quickly cut Palmer’s budget request for the Bureau of Investigation by one-third.

  On May 7, Hoover sat on a back bench in a congressional hearing room and took notes as Louis Post appeared before a hostile House Rules Committee. Over the course of two days’ testimony, Post made mincemeat of the charges of political misconduct that Palmer and Hoover had lodged against him. Case by case, Post argued that not one in one hundred of the men arrested in the January raids could be rightfully accused of planning to overthrow the government by force. He contended that even a despised alien was entitled to due process; warrantless arrests, forced confessions, and guilt by association were not the American way. After ten hours of testimony, the congressmen decided they would not impeach or condemn him. Instead they would summon Palmer to answer Post’s accusations himself.

  Hoover immediately began to prepare testimony for the attorney general. He revised his closely reasoned legal briefs arguing that membership in the Communist Party constituted a crime against the United States and a deportable offense. He told Palmer that he had the perfect opportunity to tell the world “the real story of the red menace.”

  But Louis Post struck back first. His lawyer had mobilized a coalition calling itself the National Popular Government League, and it was about to publish a broadside, “Report to the American People upon the Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice,” signed by twelve prominent law school deans and lawyers—among them Hoover’s new archenemy, Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard liberal. Hoover ordered the Bureau’s chief in Boston, George Kelleher, to open a file on the future Supreme Court justice.

  The “Report to the American People,” published on May 28, 1920, accused Palmer and Hoover of torture and illegal imprisonment. It said they had mounted an “assault upon the most sacred principles of our Constitutional liberties.”

  “Wholesale arrests both of aliens and citizens have been made without warrant or any process of law; men and women have been jailed and held incommunicado without access of friends or counsel; homes have been entered without search warrants,” it said. “We do not question the right of the Department of Justice to use its agents in the Bureau of Investigation to ascertain when the law is being violated. But the American people have never tolerated the use of undercover provocative agents or ‘agents provocateurs’ such as have been familiar in old Russia or Spain. Such agents have been introduced by the Department of Justice into radical movements … instigating acts which might be declared criminal.”

  Hoover worked feverishly for the next three days preparing Palmer’s response to Congress. He put everything he had into it—his bulletins on the Red menace, the seized records of American leftists, his agents’ affidavits against the deportees, paragraphs copied out of radical pamphlets, the annals of the Russian Revolution, the public decrees of the Comintern, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1847. The document went back and forth across decades and nations—more than thirty thousand words thrown together in seventy-two hours.

  The presidency was at stake: the Democratic National Convention was in four weeks, and Palmer remained among the front-runners in a weak field. The future of America’s war on communism could turn on his performance. So might the future of his chief strategist. If Palmer won, Hoover could succeed him as attorney general.

  On the morning of June 1, Palmer and Hoover ascended together to the top floor of the Capitol. The small hearing chamber of the House Rules Committee overflowed with reporters and spectators. One window looked south from Capitol Hill toward Hoover’s home. Congressman Philip Campbell, Republican of Kansas, called the hearing to order at 10:00 A.M.

  Hoover sat silently at Palmer’s side. The attorney general looked down and began to read, and he did not stop until the afternoon of the following day. He described a world on fire. Communism was attacking the nation’s political institutions, its churches, its schools, its factories, its newspapers, winning converts through its insidious lies. Its “revolutionary disease” had spread from the slums of New York to the huts of Afghanistan through “the poison virus” of its ideology. Palmer invited anyone who doubted the nature of the threat to look at the photographs of the prisoners taken by the Bureau of Investigation, to see the “cruelty, insanity, and crime” staring from their “sly and crafty eyes.”

  “My own life is threatened daily,” he said; his character assassinated by the “friends of these criminals” who represented them in court and before Congress. Palmer saved his most bitter words for Louis Post and the lawyers who signed the “Report to the American People.” Such men, he said, were no better than the Communists. “They have not hesitated to give the widest publicity to their defenses of all of these communists and criminal anarchists and to their charges that these people have been outrageously treated.…

  “I think the public is entitled to know what is going on in the country,” Palmer said. “I have tried to tell them. I have told them the truth.”

  But it was not the whole truth. Late on the second day of his testimony, Palmer placed into the Congressional Record a document Hoover had prepared about the work of the Radical Division of the Bureau of Investigation. It contained “the complete story … of the bomb plot which broke out in a dozen cities a year ago today,” Palmer said. Buried deep within this report were a few plaintive paragraphs revealing that, in retrospect, the government might have been wrong to blame the bomb plots on the Communists. But the attorney general did not read a word of it. “It would
take up too much time,” he said. “It is a story which might beguile an hour or so.”

  Palmer’s public image had been scarred by his warnings of threats that never materialized. By the time he arrived at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, which opened in San Francisco at the end of June, his political reputation was plummeting and his dreams of nomination disappearing. Hoover, making his first trip to the West Coast, was one among many Justice Department aides who gathered at Palmer’s suite in the St. Francis Hotel, holding out hopes that he could still win. But after forty-four ballots, Palmer withdrew. His life in politics was over.

  Palmer and Hoover were called once more to the Capitol, in the last days of the Wilson administration, to testify about the Red raids of January. Palmer insisted he was unaware of the details. Not even how many search warrants had been signed? asked Senator Thomas J. Walsh, a Montana Democrat. “I cannot tell you, Senator,” Palmer replied. “If you would like to ask Mr. Hoover, who was in charge of this matter, he can tell you.” The senator turned to the young crusader.

  Hoover said he had no idea. “You know nothing about it at all?” Senator Walsh asked. And Hoover said: “No, sir.” For the rest of his life, he disavowed his role in the raids. He was learning that secrecy and deception were essential to political warfare.

  “WE’LL GET THEM”

  Hoover prepared a report to Congress claiming that the raids had resulted in “the wrecking of the communist parties in this country”—a premature boast. A total of 591 aliens had been ordered deported. The United States held 178 Americans convicted under the espionage and sedition laws. Hoover’s own records showed that at least nine out of ten people jailed in the January 1920 raids were now free. He had set out to remove thousands of radicals from the American landscape, and he had fallen short.

  Hoover determined that it was time to revamp the Radical Division.

  He renamed it the General Intelligence Division. This was not a cosmetic change. Hoover now intended to cover “not only the radical activities in the United States” but also those “of an international nature,” and not only radical politics, but “economic and industrial disturbances” as well. His ambitions were expanding. So was his understanding of what it would take to protect America.

  In a word, it was intelligence. He wrote that it was better to fight subversives in secret; the government could not handle “the radical situation from a criminal prosecution standpoint.” The law was too weak a force to protect America. Only secret intelligence could detect and disrupt the threat from the left and protect America from attack.

  Shortly after noon on Thursday, September 16, 1920, as Hoover was putting the final touches on his plans for the General Intelligence Division, a horse-drawn wagon exploded at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in Manhattan. It had been a pleasant day, and hundreds of people had left their desks for a lunchtime stroll, a brief respite from the great money machine. A bomb turned the center of American capitalism into a slaughterhouse. Blood ran in the streets where the first Congress of the United States had convened and the Bill of Rights had become law. Shrapnel scarred the walls and shattered the windows of J. P. Morgan and Co., America’s most formidable bank. The scars are still there, graven into the cornerstones facing the sidewalk.

  The bomb killed thirty-eight people and injured roughly four hundred. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States, and it held that distinction for the next seventy-five years.

  Minutes before the explosion, three blocks away, a postman had emptied a mailbox. He found five crudely misspelled pamphlets, handmade with rubber stamps and red ink. “Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you,” they said. They were signed “American Anarchist Fighters.”

  The Wall Street bombing was almost surely an act of revenge for the indictments of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charged five days before in the murder and armed robbery of a shoe-factory paymaster and his guard outside Boston. Hoover pushed the investigation to no avail. No suspects were ever brought to justice.

  “We’ll get them,” vowed Hoover’s boss, Bill Flynn. But the Bureau never did.

  6

  UNDERWORLDS

  “I AM NOT FIT for this office and should never have been here,” President Warren G. Harding lamented in the White House. His judgment, for once, was sound.

  Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher who had risen beyond his station in life as a Republican U.S. senator from Ohio. When he became president on March 4, 1921, he brought his crooked friends with him to Washington. The closest was his campaign manager, Harry M. Daugherty, who became the attorney general of the United States.

  Two prominent Republican senators strongly warned Harding against the nomination. “Daugherty has been my best friend from the beginning in this whole thing,” the president-elect replied. “He tells me he wants to be Attorney General and by God he will be Attorney General!” A skilled political fixer, Daugherty had spent years twisting arms as a lobbyist in the Ohio statehouse; his specialty was killing legislation opposed by big companies. He cut deals between businessmen and politicians with common interests in money and power. His reputation preceded him to Washington. Once he arrived, Daugherty grew in office. He became one of the nation’s leading white-collar criminals.

  Though the Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation would fall into deep dishonor during the Harding years, J. Edgar Hoover would thrive.

  Hoover won promotion to the number-two position at the Bureau of Investigation at the age of twenty-six. His reputation was unblemished, his aptitude for infighting undiminished, his focus on the Red threat unrelenting, his expertise unquestioned. He saw no great distinction among American radicals—Communists, Socialists, anarchists, pacificists. They were enemies of the state.

  While Hoover took care of the war on communism, Harry Daugherty took care of his friends. The new attorney general placed an old pal, William J. Burns, in charge of the Bureau in August 1921. Hoover, by now an accomplished cultivator of his superiors, assured Burns that the Bureau had been infiltrating the ranks of American radicals for years. “We made an effort to have an informant in every one of the leading movements of the country,” he said, and the General Intelligence Division was on guard against new threats from the Left.

  Burns, at the age of sixty, was America’s most famous private detective. His talent for self-promotion was impressive. After gaining notoriety as a jury-tampering federal investigator in the 1905 land-fraud cases championed by President Theodore Roosevelt, he had won acclaim by tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms to convict two labor racketeers in the 1910 dynamite attack on the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, which had killed twenty-one people. He came close to going to prison himself in 1915 for stealing documents from a New York law firm. Hours after the 1920 Wall Street bombing, Burns publicly announced that the Communists were behind the attack and vowed to bring them to justice. He offered a $50,000 reward on behalf of the W. J. Burns International Detective Agency for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bombers. Now, as the Bureau of Investigation’s director, Burns promised the public that the Bureau would find the Wall Street bombers.

  Bureau agents in Chicago, looking for clues in the bombing, intercepted a letter from the Communist Party underground in New York. The government was “holding us responsible for the Wall Street disaster,” it said, warning against a new crackdown. “The January raids are past history,” it began. “So some of our members are beginning to think that EVERYTHING IS SAFE. WE WANT TO CALL YOUR ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IS STILL ON THE JOB. It will continue ON THE JOB as long as we exist as a Revolutionary Organization. Spies, stool pigeons, provocateurs, and every form of scum is bound, in some way or other, to get into the organization or learn of its activities.… EXERCISE GREAT CAUTION.… IF YOU ARE ARRESTED … ANSWER NOTHING.”

  “AN OUTLAW ORGANIZATION”

  Hoover m
obilized his growing network of informers. He combed through reports and tips from Bureau agents, army and navy intelligence officers, leaders of the American Protective League, commanders of the American Legion, police chiefs, corporate executives, bankers, insurance men, telephone and telegraph companies. He warned that the Reds were burrowing into labor unions, factories, churches, schools, colleges, newspapers, magazines, women’s clubs, and Negro organizations. His weekly bulletins to the attorney general hammered home the threat. Daugherty needed no convincing. “Soviet Russia is the enemy of mankind,” he maintained. “They have set out to conquer not only America but the world.”

  In the spring and summer of 1921, dozens of Bureau agents under Hoover’s command spied on suspected Communists across the country, infiltrated their meetings, and broke into their headquarters. When Bureau agents and the New York bomb squad crashed into an apartment on Bleecker Street, seizing Party membership lists, internal reports, and encoded communiqués, they found a pamphlet entitled “Rules for Underground Party Work.”

  The rules were explicit:

  1) DON’T betray Party work and Party workers under any circumstances.

  2) DON’T carry or keep with you names and addresses, except in good code.

  3) DON’T keep in your rooms openly any incriminating documents or literature.

  4) DON’T take any unnecessary risks in Party work.

  5) DON’T shirk Party work because of the risk connected with it.

  6) DON’T boast of what you have to do or have done for the Party.

  7) DON’T divulge your membership in the Party without necessity.

  8) DON’T let any spies follow you to appointments or meetings.

  9) DON’T lose your nerve in danger.