by Jim Marrs
World War I boosted the bureau into national prominence. During 1914 and 1915 explosions, fires, and other acts of sabotage occurred at several war plants. American public opinion slowly began shifting from neutrality to animosity toward Germany. The pace of this shift quickened in January 1917, when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare on American shipping. Congress declared war against the Central Powers, led by Germany, on April 6 and president Woodrow Wilson ordered the bureau to address wartime issues.
Wisely noting that all Americans of German descent could not be interned for the duration of the war, Wilson nevertheless required more than one million “enemy aliens” to register. The bureau, which had only three hundred agents by then, was expected to enforce this presidential edict.
The nation suddenly became aware of the danger of spies, and a full-blown spy scare swept across the land—much of the suspicion directed at labor unions and anarchists. Aided by a group of private vigilantes called the American Protective League, which eventually numbered more than a quarter million members, the bureau began to expand but quickly dropped association with the league, which was accused of overzealous activities and intimidating labor unions.
The next year a bomb exploded at the home of the new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, killing the two bombers. Palmer was incensed and immediately took action. He replaced bureau director Alexander Bielaski with William J. Flynn, a former chief of the Secret Service. Palmer also created a General Intelligence Division under the command of his twenty-four-year-old special assistant who had come to the bureau fresh out of the George Washington University Law School two years before—J. Edgar Hoover.
The Top G-man
No one man has held so much power for so long in the history of the United States as John Edgar Hoover.
In the 1950s, Hoover was an honors-encrusted hero, hailed as the foremost defender of American freedom and democracy. By the 1970s, he was being likened to Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s dreaded SS commander.
By the 1980s, knowledge of FBI abuses under Hoover’s leadership had become widespread, although the major news media—perhaps recalling the veneration it had lavished on Hoover for so long—seemed reluctant to spotlight his darker activities.
The truth of Hoover’s place in the still-untold history of modern-day America lies in the man’s background and motivations. One reason so little is known about him is that for so long everything printed about Hoover was either a product of FBI public relations or, at least, was approved by Hoover or a subordinate. To get any cooperation from the Bureau—a necessity for obtaining any information involving a federal investigation—news reporters were forced to stay on Hoover’s good side. Any story criticizing the director was an excuse to place the writer on the bureau’s list of people to be ignored.
Hoover was born on January 1, 1895, five years before the twentieth century began. He was the youngest of four children. Born in Washington, DC, Hoover rarely left the city in his entire life. Until her death in 1938, he lived with his mother in the family home at 413 Seward Square. Afterward he continued living there with his constant companion and the FBI’s associate director, Clyde Tolson.
His father, Dickerson N. Hoover, was a minor bureaucrat who served as chief of the Coast and Geodetic Survey’s printing division. His mother, Annie M. Scheitlin Hoover, was a plump housewife who faithfully instilled American middle-class virtues and Lutheran Christianity in her children.
As a schoolboy delivering groceries, young Hoover discovered the quicker he delivered, the more trips he could make, which meant more money. He soon was given the nickname “Speed.” Active in athletics, Hoover was once hit in the nose by a baseball—the basis of his bulldog-like appearance. After graduating from Washington’s Central High School, Hoover got a job as a clerk in the Library of Congress. At night he began attending George Washington University Law School, where he obtained his law degree in 1916 and a master of law in 1917.
With the world at war, there was frantic activity in the Department of Justice. Jobs were opening up every day. On July 26, 1917, Hoover joined the department and was placed in the enemy alien registration section. Earning a reputation as a diligent and efficient worker, Hoover soon became an assistant to the attorney general, who placed him in charge of the General Intelligence Division. Soon after taking charge of the division, Hoover was instructed by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to study subversive groups within the United States. Hoover went at the project with zeal.
As Hoover studied the background of communism, he came to a studied conclusion that in 1919 was used to deport about 3,000 American citizens:
American communists supported the Third International which was run by Soviet communists who advocated the violent overthrow of the US Government. Therefore American communists were advocating the violent overthrow of the government and could be deported as “enemy aliens.”
This marked the beginning of the infamous “Palmer raids,” in which Hoover prepared the legal cases. Early in 1920, at the orders of Attorney General Palmer, the bureau launched a series of raids on communist meeting places in thirty-three cities, rounding up more than 2,500 aliens. These raids drew both praise and condemnation. Through the years, Hoover continually used the communist threat to great personal advantage, even putting his name on the popular book Masters of Deceit, which helped fan the fires of the 1950s communist scare.
Was there any real threat from American communists? In his resignation letter to Hoover, William C. Sullivan, at one time third-ranking official at the FBI, wrote:
In the mid-Forties when the membership of the Party was about 80,000 and it had many front organizations, you publicized this widely month in and month out. In fact it was far too widely publicized to the point where you caused a communist scare in the nation which was entirely unwarranted. . . . I am just as opposed to communism as you but I knew then and I know now that it was not the danger you claimed it was and that it never warranted the huge amounts of the taxpayer’s dollars spent upon it. . . . What happened when the Communist Party went into a rapid decline? You kept the scare campaign going just the same for some years. However, when the membership figures kept dropping lower and lower you instructed us not to give them to the public any more and not even to the Justice Department. . . . At the time of my leaving the Bureau [1971] . . . the membership figures of the Communist Party are down to an amazing 2,800 in a nation of over 200 million people and you still conceal this from the people.
It has been said that of the small number of members of the Communist Party in those days, almost half were FBI informers. But Hoover never let the facts stand in the way of his campaign to eradicate communism, even if it meant neglecting one of the true menaces to America—organized crime.
In the forty-eight years that Hoover controlled the United States’ only national police organization, he served eight presidents and outlasted more than a dozen attorneys general. Hoover also was close to leaders of the Nazi-dominated International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) prior to World War II and was named vice president of Interpol in 1946.
Organized-crime investigator Peter Maas has reported that prior to Robert Kennedy’s becoming attorney general, only four FBI agents in the New York office were assigned to organized crime and they were kept busy with in-office “bookkeeping” duties. Yet about four hundred agents were on the streets of the city searching out communists.
As late as January 1962, Hoover was on record as saying, “No single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the nation.” As with the communist threat, Hoover was not telling the truth.
Shortly after the aborted mob conference at Apalachin in 1957, Sullivan and other top FBI officials prepared a monograph on the Mafia that was sent to the top twenty-five government officials concerned with law enforcement. Learning of this, an angry Hoover recalled all twenty-five copies and had them destroyed. He denounced the monograph as “baloney,” and this report was never heard of aga
in.
After Mafia thug Joe Valachi was brought to Washington by attorney general Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department for testimony before a Senate committee, Hoover was forced to grudgingly admit to the existence of an organized-crime structure in this nation. Why did Hoover act like there was no such thing as the Mafia when there was so much evidence to the contrary?
In his book The Bureau, Sullivan wrote:
[Hoover] didn’t want to tackle organized crime. He preferred his agents to spend their time on quick, easy cases—he wanted results, predictable results which produced the statistics Hoover thrived on. . . . Investigating the Mafia promised to be more difficult than rounding up juvenile auto thieves. Organized crime is far more complicated: the Mafia runs legitimate businesses as a front for their illegal operations. Mafioso are rich and can afford the best lawyers, while we have to use government lawyers, some of whom are excellent, some of whom aren’t worth a damn. And the Mafia is powerful, so powerful that entire police forces and even a mayor’s office can be under Mafia control. That’s why Hoover was afraid to let us tackle it. He was afraid we’d show up poorly.
There were also other considerations. Most people now accept that Hoover’s lack of interest in organized crime was a result of the blackmail threat due to his homosexuality. According to Don Fulsome, who covered the Nixon White House for United Press International, “J. Edgar Hoover was in the hip pocket of America’s godfathers, reputedly because they had pictorial proof of his homosexuality.” This referred to persistent rumors that the mob had photographs of Hoover in compromising situations with Tolson as well as wearing a pink ballerina’s tutu.
Hoover was well-known for his ingratiating attitude toward Washington politicians. The more powerful the politician, the more Hoover tried to befriend him—and control him, thanks to the voluminous files Hoover had accumulated through the years.
One thing is certain: by the time of World War II, the FBI’s vast power was centered solely in J. Edgar Hoover.
But if blame must be assigned for this situation, it may, as argued by Tom Wicker, associate editor of the New York Times, be laid on the American public. Wicker wrote:
The public—gulled, it is true, by the Bureau’s incessant propaganda—until recent years loved it all; and what considerable percentage of voters Washington believed were still devoted to J. Edgar Hoover at his death was suggested by the President’s funeral oration and by Congress’s decision that his body should lie in state, where Lincoln and Kennedy had lain. There was little or no outcry when the Director, guardian of liberty, spoke up for Joe McCarthy, called Martin Luther King a liar and for years singlehandedly held up congressional passage of a consular treaty with the Soviet Union. There was always a radio audience for “The FBI in Peace and War” and the G-man movies to which the Director invariably lent “technical assistance” and his seal of approval—as long as they pictured his men on the side of the angels. For decades, his turgid and moralistic articles appeared with the regularity of the seasons in “Reader’s Digest” and “American” magazines, and publishers took turns presenting his self-aggrandizing books to the waiting public. If J. Edgar Hoover passed eventually beyond the normal restraints of office, the American public seemed to view this process happily, and with a sense of gratitude.
Public criticism, however, grew over the Palmer raids of communist meeting places. Federal agents were charged with unconstitutional searches and seizures, individual rights violations, and even using agents provocateur.
After hearing testimony of warrantless arrests and prisoners being held incommunicado, one federal judge declared, “It may . . . be observed that a mob is a mob, whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers, and the vicious classes.” Later a Senate committee looked into the raids, but divided on its views of the operation and failed to reach a consensus. It was the first—and last—congressional investigation of the FBI.
Chastised by the complaints over the Palmer raids, the Justice Department saw its morale go from bad to worse. In an effort to demonstrate leadership in this moral crisis, newly elected president Calvin Coolidge appointed Harlan Fiske Stone, a former dean of the Columbia University Law School, attorney general. Soon after taking control of what had become known as the “Department of Easy Virtue,” Stone named twenty-nine-year-old Hoover acting director of the bureau.
Hoover moved rapidly to restore respect for the bureau, which was in real danger of being disbanded due to the years of problems and criticism. His actions produced immediate results. Asked whether one of his agents would investigate the activities of a senator’s son, Hoover once stated, “This Bureau cannot be used for partisan purposes.”
Backed solidly by Stone, Hoover rehabilitated the bureau’s image.
Over the next fifteen years, Hoover moved the bureau from a few hundred unarmed investigators to a full-fledged national police agency. And all the while, he kept an eye open for favorable public relations opportunities. By the early 1930s, Prohibition had propelled crime into the national spotlight and Hoover was there to share the glory. During the heyday of Bonnie and Clyde and the Ma Barker Gang, hardly a day passed that Hoover wasn’t being quoted in the nation’s press. His legend grew.
In the early 1930s, Hoover, a staunch Republican, was very cautious about his moves within Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic administration.
By 1933, kidnapping was added to the list of crimes under the jurisdiction of the FBI due to the public clamor over the abduction of aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. This list grew longer the next year, with the addition of killing or assaulting a federal officer, fleeing across state lines, and extortion involving interstate commerce. By 1935, bureau agents had the power to go beyond investigation. They were allowed to serve warrants and subpoenas, to make seizures and arrests, and to carry arms. The bureau had become the very thing that Hoover had often spoken against—a national police force. Also that year, the word “federal” was added to the bureau’s name, and soon the initials FBI were well-known all over the world.
By the beginning of World War II, the FBI boasted an Identification Division with thousands of fingerprint records, a complete and up-to-date laboratory, and a National Police Academy for training state and local law-enforcement officers. Even today it is considered the peak of a lawman’s career to be selected for training at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. And Hoover made use of this, too. According to former assistant director Sullivan, “Hoover felt that the alumni of the FBI training course were his men. Thanks to this network of FBI-trained police officers, we had a private and frequently helpful line to most city and state police organizations throughout the country.”
Hoover also used the FBI Academy’s prestige against perceived enemies. On the day of the JFK assassination, a shocked Dallas FBI agent named James Hosty told Dallas police lieutenant Jack Revill that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist known to the FBI, and that the bureau had information that Oswald was capable of committing the assassination. Since all government agencies were saying they had no knowledge of Oswald, this story was a bombshell.
As a result of this conversation, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry told TV news reporters that the FBI was aware of Oswald but had not informed the Dallas police. When challenged to prove his charge by the head of the Dallas FBI office, Curry qualified his statement by saying he had no personal knowledge of the issue. But the damage had been done.
Until Curry’s retirement in 1966, Hoover conducted a vendetta against the Dallas police, according to FBI documents released in 1980. The documents show that under orders from Hoover, FBI officials were prohibited from conducting training courses for Dallas police, and policemen from that city were not invited to attend the FBI Academy, claiming lack of manpower.
In January 1966 Dallas mayor Erik Jonsson visited Hoover in Washington. After hearing Hoover’s complaints against Curry, Jonsson told the petulant director he would “immediate
ly instruct the city manager to have a stern talk” with the police chief. Curry resigned less than a month after the Jonsson-Hoover meeting and within weeks, Dallas police were again receiving FBI training.
Hoover did not gain such immense power overnight. After turning his bureau into an anticrime force, he began to look into other areas. Beginning with secret meetings between President Roosevelt and Hoover in the summer of 1936, the bureau began moving quietly into intelligence gathering. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the bureau was directed to investigate espionage, sabotage, and violations of neutrality regulations. It also apprehended draft evaders and enemy aliens. It should be noted that Hoover was one of the few government officials who opposed the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans as a violation of their civil rights.
This new authority marked the beginning of this nation’s multiagency intelligence establishment and marked a period of extraordinary growth for the bureau. The FBI, which boasted only 391 agents in 1933, counted nearly 5,000 by the end of the war.
During the war, the FBI was called upon to gather intelligence on activities detrimental to US interests in South America. And while this activity was ordered terminated with the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, the FBI even today retains large offices in Mexico City, Brasilia, Ottawa, Vienna, Berlin, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Baghdad, among many other cities.
Also during the war, Hoover’s path crossed that of a young naval intelligence officer with unexpected and long-term repercussions. The FBI had been snooping after a suspected Nazi agent, a beautiful woman named Inga Arvad who had attended the wedding of Germany’s Field Marshal Hermann Goering and met with Adolf Hitler. A former Miss Denmark, she had no trouble attracting young men in wartime Washington. One of these men was naval Ensign John F. Kennedy.
Hoover’s FBI wiretapped an apartment shared by Kennedy and “Inga binga,” as he called his paramour, and picked up the sounds of sexual play. They also picked up a few remarks by Kennedy concerning sensitive security matters. After both the Navy and his father had been alerted to the danger presented by Kennedy’s involvement with a suspected agent, young Kennedy was quickly transferred to the South Pacific. It was there, of course, that Kennedy led the survivors of PT-109 back to safety, thus becoming a war hero and helping to launch his political career—all thanks to the diligent J. Edgar Hoover. It could thus be argued—with great irony—that it was Hoover who actually set young Kennedy on the course that ended in Dallas.