Edgar was a hard taskmaster. During Prohibition, which coincided with his first decade in office, he fired agents caught drinking – even off duty. In 1940, long after Prohibition, an agent had his pay cut just for being in the company of a colleague who got drunk in a nightclub. As late as 1960, rookie agents, caught with a half-bottle of Cutty Sark, were threatened with dismissal.
Unmarried agents were expected to live like monks. Once, when Edgar learned that an agent had been caught having sex with a woman in the Knoxville, Tennessee, office, he did not just fire the offending couple. He dispersed almost all the Knoxville staff around the country.
Though Edgar insisted that he had no wish to keep his men unmarried, he tried in the early days to obstruct marriages that failed to please him. At best, prospective wives were given the Bureau once-over. At worst, Edgar used covert means to break up marriages of which he did not approve. One agent’s wife received anonymous letters claiming, falsely, that her husband was unfaithful.
In 1959 Erwin Piper, Agent in Charge in San Diego, was forbidden to act as best man to one of his staff because – over the objections of the Catholics in the office – the Catholic agent was marrying a Protestant divorcee. Edgar demoted Piper, even though he knuckled under, for arguing with the objectors in the first place.
Once agents were married, Edgar kept a strict eye on them. Heads of FBI field offices, known as Agents in Charge, were under orders to inform him if colleagues were having affairs outside their marriages. Edgar called such men ‘doubleyolkers.’
Generations of agents lived in terror of the inspection teams, known as Goon Squads. Their task was to descend without warning to sniff out the most trivial transgression – an airline schedule left in a desk drawer that should contain only official papers, laundry left in the wrong place, dirty clothes left behind a radiator. Edgar would claim his own office got the same treatment, which was not true.
Minor transgressions usually resulted in a letter of censure, and every agent earned a stack of them. Graver sins meant a transfer within hours. To face a series of transfers was to go on ‘the Bureau Bicycle,’ the device used to ease out an agent who had committed no fireable offense. A man forced to move every couple of months might resign.
The ultimate sanction, dismissal ‘with prejudice,’ spelled long-term disaster. The victim would never again obtain federal employment, and had no reference to help him get another job. For most of Edgar’s tenure, there was no one to appeal to once he had decided to fire someone.
An agent’s life was dangerous, and became more so in the gangster era of the thirties. Until 1934 agents carried guns only in an emergency, and twenty-two of them died on duty while Edgar was Director. In spite of the risks, and in spite of the draconian discipline, men readily served under Edgar. They received better pay and fringe benefits than similar government employees, and developed an esprit de corps that was the envy of other agencies. As for the dangers, Edgar earned the respect of his agents by personally supervising the manhunt that captured the killer of Edwin Shanahan, the first agent to be killed on duty. He saw to it that widows of murdered agents were looked after with a pension, and guaranteed a clerical job if they wanted one.
Edgar could play the compassionate boss or, without warning or justification, the ogre. One man recalls the readiness with which Edgar gave him a transfer to be near his pregnant wife, another the savage reception he got when – offered a promotion – he asked for a month’s delay to look after a newborn child. The promotion was canceled, the agent demoted to the ranks.
Edgar was loved and loathed by his men in equal measure. In the hungry years of the twenties and thirties, though, he made the Bureau a man’s institutional home, very like a branch of the armed services, a shelter from the outside world. Soon instructors were telling recruits, with a straight face, ‘This is the greatest organization ever devised by a human mind.’ They were officially instructed to quote Emerson: ‘An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man’ – meaning, of course, the Director. The Bureau became an extended family, with Edgar as a sort of nineteenth-century patriarch, praising or punishing as he saw fit.
Meanwhile, Edgar had made the Bureau unique and indispensable. In an era when much of America had progressed little since the days of frontier justice, Edgar brought modernity to law enforcement. He moved into the Director’s office in 1924 hefting several boxes of dog-eared fingerprint cards. These, coupled with 800,000 prints sent to the old Bureau from Leavenworth Penitentiary, were the germ of a technological revolution.
Edgar’s dream was ‘Universal Fingerprinting,’ the notion that the prints of every citizen – the innocent as well as the guilty – should be recorded. That never happened, but he soon became the custodian of those held by police forces across the country, then those of thousands of federal employees and later – in World War II – those of every soldier, sailor and airman, every worker in war industries.
Edgar’s fingerprint bureau grew from one small file room to a huge L-shaped clearing house high in the Department of Justice, and eventually to a six-story building occupying an entire city block. By the sixties it was said that the fingerprint cards, stacked one on top of another, would reach 113 times higher than the Empire State Building. By the time Edgar died, a vast computerized Identification Division offered instant access to the whorls, loops and arches of the fingers of 159 million people.
Edgar developed a massive Crime Laboratory, room after room in which rows of experts pored over ballistics evidence and analyzed poisons, hairs and fibers. Other staff members spent their entire working lives immersed in the Rubber Stamp and Printing Standards File, the Checkwriter Standards File, the Safety Paper Standards File, the Typewriter Standards File, the Confidence Man File or the Anonymous Letter File.
The FBI Crime Laboratory quickly became the most advanced in the world – and the key to the expansion of Edgar’s empire. The first step was to persuade America’s police chiefs, always jealous of their power, that in an increasingly mobile nation a centralized fingerprint system was essential. Once local forces started shipping copies of their prints to Washington, thousands of them every day, the payoff in arrests and convictions proved Edgar right.
The fingerprint and laboratory operations alone changed the Bureau from a small agency with limited jurisdiction to a vital facility upon which all other law enforcement depended. Soon it would offer the Uniform Crime Reports system, a bureaucratic miracle that coordinated millions of crime statistics pumped in from across the nation. Next came the Law Enforcement Bulletin, which started as the first centralized Wanted list and became a slick magazine bringing the Bureau’s views – or rather Edgar’s – to every policeman in the land. Soon the Bureau had a virtual monopoly on the supply of crime information, not only to the police but to the country at large. Accurate or not, its version became gospel.
The final link with the police would be forged in 1935, when Edgar created the police training school that became the FBI National Academy. In an era when there was no such thing as a professional qualification for policemen, the officers who took the Academy course went home to become the elite. Eventually, of the Academy graduates who remained in law enforcement, one in five would end up running a police department. Graduation exercises became grand occasions attended by presidents and attorneys general, and the Academy was recognized as the West Point and Harvard of law enforcement.
Edgar had been shrewd. He knew there was a deep-seated fear of a national police force, so he repeatedly went out of his way to say such a force could never work. The police fraternity he created, though, came close to being the very thing he publicly deplored. It depended entirely on the Bureau – and the Bureau, everyone knew, was Edgar.
Edgar always limited the Bureau to what he knew it could do successfully. He avoided accepting a mandate to police drug trafficking, for example, because he feared exposing his agents to corruption, and because there was little chance of easy success. So it was that other agencies dealt
with narcotics, violations of Prohibition, smuggling, forgery and immigration offenses. Indeed, while Edgar was Director, the Bureau had jurisdiction over only a minute percentage of the serious crimes committed in the United States.
Edgar readily took on more straightforward targets, those that offered easy prestige. He responded willingly in the thirties, when a series of spectacular crimes convinced the nation it was being overwhelmed by a crime wave. For Edgar, launched on a rocket of publicity designed originally to benefit the government, it would prove the breakthrough that assured his fame.
Edgar succeeded at self-advertisement like no comparable public figure, in the long term because, at the taxpayers’ expense, he created Division 8, euphemistically known as Crime Records and Communications. His workaholic confidant Louis Nichols, another graduate of George Washington University Law School, built the division into a bureaucratic Madison Avenue devoted to the greater glory of Edgar and the FBI.
Crime Records had multiple functions. One was to send the public messages that had nothing to do with law enforcement – and everything to do with what Edgar wished to preach. This language appealed to the emotions, especially that of fear, and denounced ‘moral deterioration,’ ‘apathy that is really a sickness,’ ‘disrespectful young people,’ ‘the depraved deeds of teenage thugs,’ ‘moral decay,’ ‘anarchist elements,’ ‘jackals of the news media,’ ‘the menace to the security of our country,’ ‘a new specter haunting the Western World’ – all those horrors in a single speech. The implication was that only Edgar and his FBI stood between America and disaster.
Edgar developed an insidious language, known to some as ‘Bureauspeak,’ for use in sensitive communications. This was used to smear people Edgar perceived as political enemies. The paragraph that follows concludes an interagency memo about the ‘alleged interracial sexual indiscretions’ of a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department:
These allegations were not made directly to representatives of the FBI but were received through a third person. Thus the FBI is not in any position to comment upon the reliability of the source; however, the source has furnished some other information, some of which is of a questionable nature, which leaves considerable doubt as to the credibility of the source.
In this one paragraph of Bureauspeak, Edgar managed to throw doubt on his source, thus protecting the Bureau, while still besmirching the character of his target. The memo, like thousands of others, had absolutely nothing to do with law enforcement.
Such quibbles later became academic. Edgar had been vastly strengthened politically when, on the eve of World War II, President Roosevelt handed him the new mission of protecting national security. Thanks to a mandate intended mainly to ensure effective investigation of Fascists, Edgar was again poised to tackle his enemy of preference, the ‘radicals.’
With Crime Records providing a torrent of propaganda, with a vastly expanded FBI employing more than 3,000 agents by 1946 and with presidential sanction to use police state tools such as wiretapping, the way was clear for a new open season on Reds. Thousands of American citizens were persecuted by the FBI, directly or indirectly, while Edgar fostered the notion that the Communists were somehow responsible for all manner of American social problems – from changing sexual standards to juvenile delinquency.
Edgar’s protégé Joseph McCarthy would make similar noises and succumb to his own demagoguery. Edgar survived because he was careful never to take center stage, and because he sustained the illusion of being ‘above politics,’ an unimpeachable source for the facts the nation needed to know.
He had long since secured the unquestioning loyalty of a powerful constituency that included the police, federal and state prosecutors, the myriad agencies that now relied on the FBI to perform security clearances, and patriotic organizations like the American Legion. The Legion, which Edgar had systematically wooed and penetrated, virtually deified him.
A series of polls showed that, by the late forties, a majority of the population had come to believe Edgar and the Bureau could do no wrong. Criticism was virtually nonexistent until the mid-sixties, and, when there was any, Edgar found ways to stamp it out. Impertinent journalists were frightened into silence or smeared.
By the end of the war, largely thanks to Crime Records, Edgar also had the Congress in his thrall. The Bureau made contact with and kept files on every single politician who made it to Capitol Hill. Men in key positions were courted assiduously, and most were happy for a chance to share Edgar’s limelight. Far from being a supplicant seeking funds, as were most agency heads, he pulled the strings.
Edgar’s annual appearance before the House Appropriations Committee was a cakewalk. He would produce an array of wondrous statistics on crime, alleged FBI successes to make the Bureau look good, coupled with dire warnings to justify his latest request for cash. He was never denied a legislative mandate, and his demands were never refused. From 1924 to 1971 there was not a single public hearing on the FBI budget.
Edgar presented himself as the obedient, even obsequious, servant of authority. In theory his boss was the Attorney General. In practice, once Edgar became a public hero in the thirties, that seniority became nominal. No attorney general dared risk a head-on confrontation with the man who had become a national symbol of integrity and continuity.
The eight presidents he served, of course, had the power to fire Edgar. One or two came close and several yearned to do so, but none succeeded. Edgar had a way of making his services seem essential, and presidents who doubted it dared not offend the powerful forces who believed Edgar’s cause was their own.
Edgar’s vast filing system was part of his stock in trade. He was proud of it, just as he was proud of his scientific advances. Presidents and politicians, however, had to live with the threat – real or imagined – that those files could bring disaster down on their heads. From routine reports to scandal-filled dossiers, from detailed analyses to random fragments of information, Edgar’s paper mountain was both bureaucratic dream and democratic nightmare. Even today, few outside the FBI understand Edgar’s record system. While he was alive, no one in the outside world knew anything about it. Edgar’s insistence on secrecy, which he defended in the name of protecting privacy, made sure of that.
Edgar’s record system included files with names like the OBSCENE file, the SEX DEVIATE program, COINTELPRO, OFFICIAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, JUNE MAIL, even a DO NOT FILE system, so named to keep reports on illegal Bureau break-ins out of the central record system.3
The files remained, always, under the ultimate control of just one man. Edgar’s senior men might be brilliant in their specialties or mere time-serving hatchet men. Some were fine men of integrity, others devious creatures capable of great evil. All, though, depended on Edgar in a closed, compartmentalized world that permitted no alliance capable of threatening Edgar’s position.
He created this private fiefdom in such a way that – as long as he lived – he had absolute power over those who served him, and the weapons to fend off those who did not. He had, moreover, created an instrument that could be used to undermine civil liberties.
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‘I want at this time to say that so long as I am Director of the FBI, appointments will continue to be made on merit, without regard to creed, color, or nationality.’
J. Edgar Hoover, 1943
Those who knew him at close quarters discovered there was something obsessive about Edgar. The little boy from Seward Square, the offspring of a disturbed father and an ambitious mother, was insistent that everything should run precisely as he directed, that everything should fit his concept of perfection.
This showed itself in the little things, like Edgar’s fixation on tidiness. At home, servants would report, there was hell to pay if a bedspread was even slightly askew, a cushion out of place, an undisciplined leaf neglected on the front path. Edgar’s first act on reaching the office each morning, his secretary recalled, was to give his shoes a flick with
a duster – in case they had lost their sheen during the ride in the car to work.
At headquarters, which Edgar had everyone call the Seat of Government, an official once found himself in hot water because his office window shade was – in Edgar’s opinion – pulled down too far. He said it gave the building ‘a messy look from the outside.’
Like Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, Edgar worried constantly about germs. He waged war against them by insisting his office be kept cold, and later by installing an ultraviolet light reputed to eliminate viruses. A servant, armed with a swatter, was assigned to deal with flies. The Director shrank from physical contact with strangers, especially those with moist palms.
Edgar defended his fragile self like a nuclear bunker. This was a man, his associates learned the hard way, who never – ever – admitted he was wrong; he could not even admit the possibility. Once, when a Special Agent in Charge felt obliged to point out Edgar was quoting incorrect figures, he sat in silence, red as a beet, until the agent slipped quietly out of the room. Later, Edgar crucified the man who had supplied the statistics.
Edgar’s officials became expert at dealing with this problem – on issues that mattered and many that did not. When Edgar refused to accept solid research showing the Civil Rights movement was not, as he insisted, Communistinspired, an Assistant Director simply admitted humbly that his report had been ‘wrong.’ When Edgar dismissed as ‘baloney’ research confirming the existence of the Mafia, its authors did not argue. When Edgar announced his grief at the killing of an agent who had only been wounded, the man’s colleagues jokingly drew straws for who would finish him off. The Director was never wrong.
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