J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  In the decades ahead that partnership grew much curiouser.

  Whether aware of it or not, Hoover had passed his last test. The probationary period was over. During the past seven months Attorney General Stone had not only observed Hoover’s performance but also quietly considered others for the post. Hoover, he later recalled, gave “far greater promise than any other man I had heard of.” He was, Stone felt strongly, “a man of exceptional intelligence, alertness and executive ability.”36

  On December 10, 1924, Attorney General Stone called Hoover into his office and, with even a trace of a smile, informed him that he could drop the “acting” from his title.

  He was making a number of other changes, Stone added. For example, William J. Donovan would no longer head the Criminal Division. He was promoting him to assistant to the attorney general, the second-highest position in the Justice Department, over all the divisions.

  It’s quite likely, though unrecorded, that during this same meeting Stone shared a personal secret with Hoover. Six days earlier, on December 4, Stone had written his son a letter which began, “Confidentially there is much prospect that I may go on to the Supreme Court by the first of the year.”37

  Stone’s appointment was announced on January 5, 1925; the Senate voted its confirmation on February 2; and on the twenty-fourth of that month Stone submitted his resignation as attorney general.

  Before Stone left office, Hoover took care of the Donovan problem. He did it very adroitly. He was fearful, he confided to Stone, that in the years to come the politicians might again attempt to take over the Bureau; if they succeeded, all of Stone’s ideas and concepts, and their efforts to achieve them, would be for naught.

  On January 12, 1925, Attorney General Stone issued a policy statement, in the form of a letter to all Department of Justice officials and employees. It stated that the attorney general would be responsible for overall supervision of the Bureau of Investigation and that the director of said Bureau would report directly to, and take his instructions solely from, said official.

  J. Edgar Hoover had won his first battle with William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

  Helen Gandy took the letter and put it in a folder, to which she gave the uninformative heading ATTORNEY GENERAL (SUBMISSION OF MEMORANDA BY). It was one of the first items in what would become known as the Official/Confidential file.38

  Periodically, over the years, Mr. Justice Stone dropped in on Director Hoover and asked for an accounting of his stewardship. Stone remained immensely proud of the man he had chosen, and quietly, behind the scenes, defended him in many a battle. Only in his later years did he voice reservations about certain practices of the Bureau, and even then the criticisms was muted and private, confidences shared with old and trusted friends. He complained, for example, that the FBI was getting much too much publicity; its effect on the organization could only be harmful.

  For his part, Hoover deified Harlan Fiske Stone. His would be the only formal portrait of an attorney general ever to hang in Hoover’s inner office. Over the years attorneys general came and went—a few Hoover even liked—but all at some point were made aware that no matter what they did, in Hoover’s eyes they’d never measure up to the man with the scowling face.

  The announcement of Hoover’s permanent appointment was largely ignored by the press. Time did mention it, but said of Hoover simply that he was known to have a retentive memory. Only the Washington Evening Star saw fit to devote a whole article to it. But since it ran on the obituary page, under the headline DAYS OF “OLD SLEUTH” ARE ENDED, most readers probably thought it just another death notice.

  And in a sense it was, for it concerned the end of an era. But even more significant, it announced a birth: the beginning of the Hoover myth.

  “The days of the ‘Old Sleuth’ are over,” proclaimed the Star. “The old-time detective, the man of ‘shadows’ and ‘frame-ups’ and ‘get the goods in any way you can,’ is a thing of the past.”

  There was a “new order” in the Department of Justice, the Star said, and heading it, representing “the new school of crime detection,” was “John Edgar Hoover, disciple of Blackstone.”

  “As an assistant to Burns, young Hoover got some education in the arts of the old school. But most of these he is casting aside. He is striking out along new and clean lines. He is not going to have men snooping around the offices of Senators and Representatives. He is going to try and do his work in a big and legitimate way.”

  The new director was a “homebred,” the paper proudly noted, a former Central High cadet who’d graduated from marching to Sousa tunes to his present membership in “the military intelligence division of the Officers’ Reserve Corps.”

  “Young Mr. Hoover…has no entangling alliances,” the Star reported. “Among his friends he is known to be as clean as a hound’s tooth…

  “It is an interesting experiment that Attorney General Stone is making…Detectives of the old school the whole world over, from Scotland Yard to Tokio, will be watching this new idea in Washington.”39

  Robert T. Small, who wrote the Star piece, was not just a local reporter. He was also Washington correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association. His article on Hoover appeared in scores of newspapers all over the United States.

  Long before Mother Hoover had finished pasting the clippings in her scrapbook, the first magazine article on her son appeared, in the very popular Literary Digest.

  Small also wrote for the Digest. Picking up on Small’s old-and-new sleuth theme, the Digest editors took a bit of literary license, observing that in contrast to “the prominent and much-discust” Burns, “the new chief detective, John Edgar Hoover, is a scholar, a gentleman and a scientist.”

  Heady stuff for one of any age. And, in the new director’s case, addictive.

  * * *

  *That J. Edgar Hoover never publicly acknowledged Mrs. Willebrandt’s role in his appointment was probably due less to sexism than to that remarkable woman’s affinity for generating controversy.

  Forgetting her many accomplishments, people tended to remember Mabel Walker Willebrandt for such things as introducing the issue of Al Smith’s Catholicism in the 1928 campaign (although she later converted to Catholicism); telling a reporter who questioned her regarding the Ku Klux Klan, “I have no objections to people dressing up in sheets if they enjoy that sort of thing”; abandoning her husband (or so he charged in a well-publicized suit); and—after retiring from her job as the Justice Department’s chief prohibition officer—obtaining government subsidies so that the California grape industry could market a pulp product which, if one added water and sugar and waited sixty days, produced a 12 percent wine.

  *A travel-weary visitor from Washington was offered a drink by the Denver SAC. Within a week Denver had a new special agent in charge.

  *Nor were most of the ideas either Stone’s or Hoover’s. Stone’s admitted model was Scotland Yard. He knew little about its actual operating procedures, but it had what he considered the three main qualifications for a successful police organization: (1) that it be law-abiding itself; (2) that all appointees be men of intelligence and some education; and (3) that they be subjected to a thorough course of training for their work.

  †A special was a case so important that a number of agents were assigned to it alone. JODIL (the Bureau’s telegraphic shorthand for the search for John Dillinger) was one such case. Each special was run by one experienced agent. Operating from the scene, not Washington, and with the authority to make instant decisions, he personally picked each member of the elite squads and, ignoring field office boundaries, sent them wherever the leads pointed. This highly concentrated assault, the forerunner of the modern strike force, broke many of the Bureau’s biggest cases.

  *As Roger Baldwin put it many years later, “Harlan Stone was a very good friend of ours. He had our ideas and we had his ideas.”25

  †The National Civil Liberties Bureau, one of the forerunners of the American Civil Liberties Union, h
ad been formed expressly to protect the rights of conscientious objectors. The Propaganda League was composed of members of the prestigious Union League Club. As dollar-a-year employees of the Justice Department, they were exempt from military service.

  *Many years later, on the eve of his ninety-second birthday, Roger Baldwin—who had lived to read his own FBI file—recalled these and subsequent meetings with a rueful smile: “Mr. Hoover professed to be a great believer in civil liberties. He often lectured me about them.”

  Baldwin died August 26, 1981, at the age of ninety-seven.

  *Neither the agents nor their director seemed to understand what Baldwin and the ACLU were up to. For example, in 1934, Hoover himself reported to FDR’s press secretary Steve Early that the ACLU had “participated actively in connection with lynching, radical activities, etc.”30

  11

  “This Is the Last Straw, Edgar.”

  John Garibaldi Sargent, Harlan Fiske Stone’s successor, was in poor health, didn’t like Washington, and spent as little time there as possible. In an interview many years later J. Edgar Hoover recalled Sargent as one of his favorite attorneys general.

  The price of Sargent’s absences, however, was that Hoover had to deal with his second in command, William J. Donovan. But Hoover found a way to turn this to his advantage.

  Washington insiders believed that Stone had been appointed to the Supreme Court after less than a year as AG because he’d been doing too good a job cleaning up the Justice Department, particularly in his prosecution of antitrust cases, which had languished during the terms of his predecessors Daugherty and Palmer.*

  Donovan, who now headed the Antitrust Division, found his unit woefully underbudgeted (Congress appropriated only $200,000 for the fiscal year 1927 and $2,000 less for 1928) and, as a result, badly understaffed. According to his chief assistant, Donovan was forced to make “an arrangement” with J. Edgar Hoover, whereby he would use BI agents—schooled in either law or accounting—in his antitrust investigations.2

  There was, for Hoover, always a quid pro quo. In this case, it was simple: Donovan let the Bureau of Investigation go its own way, with minimal supervision.

  Also, Donovan had other things on his mind. Dour Calvin Coolidge having announced that he did not intend to serve another term, Herbert Hoover decided to seek the Republican presidential nomination. A close friend of the Great Engineer since World War I, Donovan became “the principal strategist of the Hoover campaign,”3 advising the candidate on tactics, rallying support, persuading fellow Catholics not to bolt to Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic standard-bearer, even helping Hoover write his acceptance speech.

  In return, Herbert Hoover gave William J. Donovan what Donovan believed to be a firm promise: if elected, he would appoint him attorney general of the United States.

  During his first half dozen years as director, J. Edgar Hoover quietly, but steadily, rebuilt the Bureau of Investigation. Until the Lindbergh kidnapping, few of its cases made headlines. But they did make enemies.

  While still AG, Stone had ordered the Bureau to conduct a secret investigation of conditions at Atlanta penitentiary. Posing as prisoners, the special agents found abundant evidence of graft, theft, and the selling of favored treatment to wealthy bootleggers. The Bureau also investigated the Washington, D.C., Police Department (for brutality) and the graft-ridden Cincinnati PD (for Prohibition and narcotics violations). Although all three investigations resulted in successful prosecutions, they did not make Hoover and his Bureau of Investigation especially popular in law enforcement circles. (Of the sixty-two convicted in Cincinnati, forty-eight were policemen.) According to Charles Appel, after the Washington investigation there were immediate requests for investigations of seventy-two other police departments across the nation. Hoover, who was already having trouble getting police cooperation—many of the Bureau’s white-slave cases exposed police payoffs by brothel madams—wisely chose to deny the requests, citing lack of authority.

  Hoover was already learning to pick and choose which cases it would be most advantageous for the Bureau to handle.

  Hoover could impose upon the Bureau a chain of command, strict discipline, rigid procedures, and, in time, a sense of mission; what he couldn’t give it—what the men themselves had to develop—was esprit de corps. It came about as a result of a killing.

  Even in the “new Bureau,” the special agents continued to operate as investigators, rather than law enforcement officers. They were not empowered to make arrests. When agents apprehended a suspect, a local policeman, sheriff, or federal marshal had to be called in to make the arrest official. Nor could they carry firearms. More than a few criminals escaped while SAs vainly looked for telephones.

  Contrary to regulations, some of the agents did carry their own guns. Edwin Shanahan wasn’t one of them. Shanahan was alone and unarmed when, on October 11, 1925, he approached Martin Durkin, a suspected auto thief, in a Chicago garage. Durkin, who had a gun next to him on the car seat, shot Shanahan in the chest. Shanahan was the first special agent killed in the line of duty since the founding of the Bureau in 1908.

  Informed of Shanahan’s death, Hoover told an aide, “We’ve got to get Durkin. If one of our agents is killed and the killer is permitted to get away, it will be open season on all our agents. Get him.”4

  During the three-month search for Shanahan’s killer, the Bureau was united as never before. Competition developed between the squads. Even those not assigned to the case volunteered their off-duty time. When Durkin was finally captured on a train outside St. Louis, it was because the Bureau had tracked him across twelve states and over thousands of miles. Nevertheless, the agents had to stand by while local police made the arrest. Equally ignominious, Durkin had to be tried in a state court, there being no federal law prohibiting the killing of a U.S. government agent. Still, the loss of one of their own and their successful capture of his killer gave the BI something it had previously lacked—a pride of outfit. No one need any longer be ashamed to say he was a special agent of the Bureau of Investigation.

  For his part, Hoover promised the agents that he wouldn’t rest until Congress passed laws (1) giving them the power of arrest; (2) permitting them to carry, and use, firearms; and (3) making the murder of a special agent a federal crime.

  It took nine years—and the Kansas City massacre—for Hoover to be able to fulfill his promise.

  On November 6, 1928, dry Herbert Clark Hoover won a landslide victory over the decidedly wet Catholic Alfred E. Smith.

  It was also a victory for the thirty-three-year-old BI director who shared his surname. Through the new president’s secretary, Lawrence Richey, J. Edgar Hoover for the first time had entrée to the White House.

  In the interim between Herbert Hoover’s election and his inauguration the following March, the BI director met numerous times with Richey. Although memorandums of their conversations apparently no longer exist,* it is known that one of the subjects they discussed was Assistant to the Attorney General William J. Donovan.

  Shortly after the election, the president-elect called Donovan to his home in Palo Alto, California, and asked him to draw up a list of possible appointees to his Cabinet. Donovan did so, leaving only one position blank. According to Donovan’s biographer Richard Dunlop, “When Donovan returned east, he had every reason to believe Hoover would appoint him attorney general.”5

  While Donovan waited, “considerable pressure [was] brought against the proposed appointment,” President Hoover later admitted.6 The Ku Klux Klan and various influential Protestant clergymen opposed Donovan because he was Catholic. Bishop James Cannon and the Anti-Saloon League opposed him because, although he was a teetotaler, Donovan “lacked enthusiasm for the Volstead Act.”7 Also united in its opposition to Donovan was a most unlikely trio: Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Thomas Walsh and, although less publicly, Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover.

  Finally Donovan was summoned to the president-elect’s Washington home on S Stree
t. When he reemerged, his face was flushed.

  “Did he ask you to become attorney general?” a reporter asked.

  “No,” Donovan replied.

  “Did he want you to be secretary of war?”

  “No, we sat there rather embarrassed, and finally he asked me what I thought of the governor generalship of the Philippines. I told him I wasn’t interested. By that time it was becoming most uncomfortable, and I left.”8

  Donovan resigned from the Department of Justice and returned to private practice. As his attorney general, the new president appointed William D. Mitchell, who was both a Protestant and a dry.

  Denied his stepping-stone to the presidency, Donovan, according to Dunlop, “always considered his treatment at Hoover’s hands the greatest disappointment of his life.”9

  Although at the time Donovan principally blamed Herbert Hoover, for buckling under pressure and for not being honest with him, many years and many battles later, Donovan voiced the suspicion that another Hoover, J. Edgar, had probably played a far greater role in the president-elect’s decision than he’d previously suspected.

  At least one person had no doubts about the importance of J. Edgar Hoover’s role. When the former OSS boss William “Wild Bill” Donovan was being considered as possible director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952, the director of the FBI remarked, in the presence of Clyde Tolson and other top aides, “I stopped him from becoming AG in 1929 and I’ll stop him now.”10

  Hoover lived the Bureau. Nearly every night, most often accompanied by his old college chum Frank Baughman and a couple other Bureau officials—usually Vincent Hughes and Charles Appel—he had dinner at the same popular restaurant, Harvey’s, located on Connecticut Avenue just a block from the Mayflower, sitting at the same table, which was so situated as to avoid interruptions. There was usually only one topic of conversation, Appel would recall, the Bureau—how to improve it, how to defend it against its enemies. Although occasionally Hoover and his companions took in a movie after dinner, or spent an hour or two at the University Club, more often than not they returned to headquarters, then located at Vermont and K, for more work.