by Curt Gentry
Hoover seemed in many ways the perfect complement to Burns. Although the BI chief was only sixty-two, newspapers usually described him as “elderly,” which was kinder than stating that many believed he was suffering from premature senility. By contrast, Hoover’s youth and vitality were a plus. Unfamiliar with the operations of the Bureau, and having no background in the law, other than in finding ways to circumvent it, Burns needed as his chief assistant someone capable of running the Bureau on a day-to-day basis. Hoover, having worked very closely with the BI for the past four years, met that qualification and more.
When Burns went to the Hill to request the Bureau’s annual appropriation from Congress, Hoover accompanied him. They made a colorful pair, the “elderly” private detective in his old-fashioned frock coat, which was both multicolored and checked, and his young assistant, who was as snappy in his answers as in his dress. While Burns testified, Hoover handed him charts, graphs, and statistics. Hoover loved statistics, although he often used them loosely. As he’d learned in his debating years, they could be used to prove almost anything.
For example, in 1921 Burns requested, and received, funds to hire additional agents, citing as his justification a large backlog of cases. When he testified in 1922, the BI chief couldn’t help bragging that the backlog was “pretty much up to date,” but then, only minutes later, he requested funds for still more agents. If the backlog was up to date, the committee asked, why did he need more agents? The question perplexed Burns, but not his young assistant. After consulting with Hoover, Burns replied that although 70 percent of the old cases had been cleared up, the number of new cases was up 80 percent.
Hoover could even prove—as he did year after year—that although the Bureau was requesting more money, its operation was actually costing less.
In 1919 Congress had passed the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act (commonly known as the Dyer Act), which made the transportation of a stolen vehicle across a state line a federal offense. As far as the Bureau was concerned, this was, statistically, the most important law Congress had ever passed. Since the majority of such thefts were made by joyriding teenagers, neither their apprehension nor the recovery of the vehicles was difficult. But they added significantly to the BI’s arrest totals, and when the value of the vehicles was computed, it came to a very large number.
Thus Burns could claim, as he did in 1922, “The value of automobiles recovered by our service amounts to more than our appropriation.”10
When you added the recovery totals to that of the fines imposed by the courts upon conviction of the various offenses, the BI often seemed to be operating at a tremendous profit.
However, inevitably there would come a day when the amount of the fines and the recoveries wouldn’t be enough to match the Bureau’s burgeoning budget. Long before this occurred, Hoover anticipated it, and with a touch of genius added a third category: savings. Savings were computed by taking the total number of hours of voluntary unpaid overtime (VOT) logged by all the employees of the Bureau and multiplying it by the average cost of each manhour.*
Sometimes the Bureau would even request less money than it had the year before, an act apparently so novel it never failed to elicit surprised comment from the committee. More often than not (as happened in 1924), Hoover would return later in the year and, citing an unexpected rise in whatever the current menace happened to be, obtain a supplemental appropriation.
Considering his meteoric rise, Hoover should have been happy. There are reasons to believe he wasn’t.
The same year Hoover was appointed assistant BI chief, his father died, of “melancholia.” With his death, Hoover became his mother’s only companion and sole support. Both being strong-willed and set in their ways, clashes were inevitable, although from the vantage point of J.E.’s next-door nieces, they were mostly amusing. For example, as soon as J.E. left for work in the morning, Mother Hoover would pull down all the shades; the moment he returned home at night, he’d go around the house raising them. He was also, Margaret remembers, “quite a tyrant about food.”11 His favorite breakfast was a poached egg on toast. If the yolk was broken, he’d send it back to the kitchen. Yet, even when it was perfect, by his standards, he’d have only one bite, then put the dish on the floor for the dog to finish.*
He was a tyrant about other things. There was still a strong streak of the puritan in him, and a bit of the frustrated preacher. Even after his nieces had reached marrying age, he continued to caution them to be careful where they went and with whom they associated. One evening when Margaret was going out with friends, she confided to him that they might even visit a “speakeasy.” He told her, “If you’re in a place that’s raided, kindly don’t give your right name.”12
Hoover’s good name meant a great deal to him. While applying for a charge account in a downtown store, he was denied credit. Asking the reason, he learned that there was another John Edgar Hoover in Washington, who had been running up bills and bouncing checks all over town. From then on he signed all his memos “J. Edgar Hoover.” Hoover’s concern with preserving his good name became an obsession, one which extended to the organization of which he was now a part.
Often, when he told people where he worked, they responded with knowing grins. In Washington, during the Harding administration, the Department of Justice had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue. After a time Hoover simply said he worked for the government.
According to Don Whitehead, the situation became so bad that Hoover considered resigning. Although there is no evidence to support this, it no doubt bothered him to be connected with an organization in which he could feel no pride.
Together Daugherty and Burns had very quickly turned the Bureau of Investigation into a dumping ground for political hacks. The number of special-agent posts being limited, many of the new arrivals were hired as dollar-a-year men. Some, especially those who worked on Prohibition cases, banked up to $2,000 a month.
Yet this was a pittance compared with the take of another Burns appointee, Gaston B. Means. Even Burns’s own background appeared clean alongside that of his former operative and close friend. During the war Means had worked for both the Germans and the British, spying on each for the other. One of the greatest con men of his time, Means would brag to associates that he had been charged, and acquitted, of every crime on the statute books, including murder. Because of Means’s notoriety, Burns avoided giving him a title, but he did give him an office, which was just down the hall from Hoover’s.
“At his disposal were badge, telephone, official stationery, an office, and the complete files of the Bureau of Investigation,” wrote Francis Russell, a biographer of the Harding era, adding, “That was all he needed.”13
Already well acquainted with members of the underworld, Means sold Bureau protection to some, their own Bureau files to others, and the promise to “fix” federal cases to anyone interested. He also sold liquor licenses to bootleggers and pardons to those foolish enough not to buy licenses. Apparently he did quite well. Although he received only seven dollars a day as a “special employee” of the Bureau, he managed to maintain a huge house, three servants, and a chauffeur-driven Cadillac.
Means also took on numerous “special assignments of a confidential nature” for the administration. These ranged from suppressing a book which claimed that President Harding was of “mixed blood” to spying on Democratic members of Congress and their families. Means later testified about one favored technique:
“There is a servant working in this house. If she is a colored servant, go and get a colored detective woman take her out; have this colored detective to entertain her, find out the exact plan of the house, everything they discuss at the table, the family, write it down, make a report. And any information you find that is—report what you find…and then if it is damaging, why of course it is used. If it is fine, why you can not use it. It does no damage.”14
Knowing Means’s background (though Means’s own file “disappeared” the day he started
working for the Bureau), Hoover took an immediate dislike to the man and on at least one occasion asked Burns to order Means to stay out of his office. According to Whitehead, “Hoover didn’t like the man’s spending habits or his morals.”15
The corruption of the Harding administration was revealed in bits and pieces, few of which seemed significant in and of themselves. But Thomas J. Walsh, the senior senator from Montana, thought he discerned a pattern, particularly in the leasing of the Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming, oil reserves. The more bits and pieces Walsh collected, the more “coincidences” he found, and the more he thought the Senate should investigate.
Walsh discussed the matter with his friend Burton K. Wheeler, Montana’s newly elected junior senator, who agreed something smelled bad. But Wheeler was itching for a fight of his own. What if he took on Attorney General Daugherty and his Department of Easy Virtue?
It would, they agreed, be a hell of a fight, a pair of “Montana boys” against more or less the entire administration. The odds didn’t bother them—both would have been uncomfortable if they hadn’t been the underdogs—and they’d fought, and won, just such a battle before, breaking the Anaconda Copper Mining Company’s domination of their state.
Information on their intentions quickly reached Daugherty, and countermeasures were taken. Even before the hearings began, BI Chief Burns sent three special agents to Montana to dig up any dirt they could find on Wheeler. A fourth man, employed by the Republican National Committee, went along to do the same job on Walsh.
Back in Washington, Bureau agents placed the two senators, their families, and their friends under surveillance. Wheeler would recall, “Agents of the Department…stationed men at my house, surrounded my house, watched persons who went in and came out, constantly shadowed me, shadowed my house, and shadowed my wife.”16
They also, according to evidence presented before the committees, tapped telephones, intercepted mail, broke into offices and homes, and copied correspondence and private papers, looking for anything which might be used for blackmail.*
They tried to set up Burt Wheeler too.
Despite their affinity for a good fight, Walsh and Wheeler were quite unalike. In age, a quarter century separated Wheeler from his idol, but it went beyond that. Walsh was cerebral; before his opponent ever raised a glove, Tom Walsh had fought, and usually won, the battle in his mind; while his personal life was so austere as to be ascetic. By contrast, Wheeler was physical, hotheaded, inclined to swing first and aim later.
Burns tried to frame Wheeler with the standard props, a woman and a hotel room. That he failed proved only that Wheeler had been forewarned. That he tried proved Burns knew his man. He knew Walsh, too, and didn’t bother trying.
The dissimilarities also showed in the hearings they conducted. Walsh began his, in October 1923, quietly and without fanfare. Three months later, Wheeler launched his with an action so unprecedented it violated every tradition of the Senate: on being recognized for his maiden speech, the freshman senator demanded the immediate resignation of the attorney general of the United States.
Walsh carefully constructed his case out of those little bits and pieces until, cumulatively, his proof seemed irrefutable. Wheeler, by contrast, proved little but made grand charges. And, most telling, while Walsh was questioning geologists, bookkeepers, auditors, and accountants, and putting his few spectators to sleep, Wheeler swore in as his star witness none other than that legendary confidence man Gaston B. Means.*
No one slept while Means was testifying. He strung out his always entertaining, though seldom verifiable, tales like a gossipy washerwoman, only the dirty linen he was hanging out was that of the Harding administration.
It was incredible testimony—complete with payoffs, bribes, kickbacks, sex and liquor parties. However, since it came from Means, there was the question of how much of it was worthy of belief.
For example, Means testified that as soon as the attack on Daugherty had begun, he’d gone to the attorney general and offered him some advice. What he really needed to rally the country round him, Means had suggested, was another Red scare. Daugherty liked the idea, although he’d turned down Means’s offer to bomb his own home, even though Means had hastily added, “While your family’s away, of course.”
Even after the hearings were under way, Burns and Hoover did not let up. Immense pressure was exerted on possible witnesses in both the Teapot Dome and the Justice Department probes. Many fled the country or, as Wheeler put it, “simply disappeared,” while “some witnesses who cooperated with the committee were notified that their employment with the government was terminated.”17
Samuel Hopkins Adams recalled such a case. One of the Bureau’s female employees was served with a committee subpoena. Given a choice between testifying or receiving a contempt citation, she testified. “The next day,” according to Adams, “she received a letter from J. Edgar Hoover…peremptorily demanding her resignation.”18
Wheeler, in his autobiography, Yankee from the West, stated, “Some of our witnesses were approached to find out what testimony they would give. Others were shadowed.” Wheeler added, as if this and the two prior statements were connected, “J. Edgar Hoover, then assistant chief of the Bureau of Investigation, sat next to Daugherty’s defense counsels throughout the hearings.”19
Walsh had his own recollections of how, during his inquiry into the Red raids, Hoover, then a special assistant to the attorney general, had set next to Palmer, helping him with his answers.
Other than the administration, nothing, it seemed, had changed.
The Bureau now began playing even rougher.
United in their support of the Republican administration, most of the major American newspapers either played down or neglected to report many of the committees’ findings. There was one important exception, the chain of papers owned by William Randolph Hearst. But then suddenly they, too, stopped reporting the proceedings.
Wheeler sought out a Hearst reporter whom he trusted and asked him if he knew what had occasioned the abrupt change.
“Burns has gotten after Hearst and threatened him with something,” the reporter cryptically answered. Although obviously reluctant to say more, the reporter finally confided, “Well, they have a case against Hearst for taking Marion Davies across the state line. They’ve told him they’ll prosecute unless he lays off your investigation.”20
Wheeler’s own ordeal wasn’t over yet. Less than four weeks into the hearings, a federal grand jury in Great Falls, Montana, indicted the senator on charges of influence peddling.* When Wheeler returned to Great Falls for the trial, it looked as if the town were hosting a Justice Department convention; his friends counted twenty-five to thirty agents on its main streets.
Wheeler had a number of friends in Great Falls. One—who is unidentified in his autobiography, but was probably the local telephone operator—made an intriguing offer. As Wheeler tells it, “One night I received a telephone call in my hotel room from a stranger asking me if I would be interested in reports of the nightly telephone conversations between the Justice Department and the special prosecutor in the case.”
In his Senate hearings, Wheeler had waxed indignant about the Justice Department’s listening in on telephone conversations. But that was in Washington; this was Great Falls. If the offer caused a crisis of conscience for Wheeler, it goes unmentioned in his autobiography. He continues his account, “Naturally I was. The caller said that if I was in the room at a certain time every night he would give me a fill-in.” Wheeler made sure he kept the appointments. However, “the long-distance telephone calls turned out to be fairly routine progress reports to J. Edgar Hoover; they proved only that [Hoover] was keeping close tabs on the trial.”22
All the same, the incident reinforced certain suspicions Burt Wheeler shared with Tom Walsh: that J. Edgar Hoover, William J. Burns’s second-in-command and the man who had the job of actually running the Bureau of Investigation on a day-to-day basis, undoubtedly knew of,
and may even have ordered, many of the illegal acts which had been used in the campaign to discredit them.
Warren Gamaliel Harding was spared seeing his administration fall. On August 2, 1923, two years and five months after his inauguration, the twentyninth president of the United States died in a San Francisco hotel room, of causes his doctors ever after disputed, leaving as his legacy a grieving widow; a memoir-writing mistress with whom he’d dallied in a White House closet; at least one illegitimate child; and his friends, the “Ohio gang,” whom he’d placed in some of the highest positions in government.
With Harding’s death, his vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, had become the nation’s thirtieth president. Coolidge, a man of few words and dour expression, did not hurry into anything, including cleaning up the corruption he’d inherited. Not until after Wheeler had made his charges, and the Walsh investigation was entering its fourth month, did Coolidge seriously consider replacing his attorney general, and he didn’t get around to actually doing it until Daugherty made the foolish—though perhaps understandable—mistake of defying the U.S. Senate, by refusing to either testify or turn over the records of his department.
Under pressure from an indignant Congress, the president sent the attorney general a sharp note ordering him to resign, then announced the resignation before Daugherty could even reply. Although it had taken him a while to start, Coolidge now seemed determined to surround himself with “an atmosphere of probity,” beginning with his Cabinet and working out. On April 8, 1924, Daugherty’s successor was sworn in. He was Harlan Fiske Stone, former dean of the Columbia Law School.
One of the new attorney general’s first acts was to turn over the requested Justice Department files to the Wheeler committee. But when Wheeler went through them, he found “they appeared to have already been emasculated.”23 Harry Daugherty had learned at least one lesson from A. Mitchell Palmer.