J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Charles Winstead, exiled to an isolated resident agency in New Mexico, would tell each new agent assigned to him, “The first thing you’ve got to do is unlearn everything they taught you at the Seat of Government. The second is to get rid of those damn manuals.”5

  †Purvis was also a Kappa Alpha, as were Nathan, Clegg, Edwards, and most of the other men Hoover chose to fill the Bureau’s top positions.

  *Credit for the coinage of the phrase “public enemies” has been much debated. Frank J. Loesch, of the Chicago Crime Commission, used it in early 1930, and New York newspapers declared the bootlegger Irving “Waxey” Gordon “Public Enemy Number One” later that same year.

  Hoover both appropriated and popularized the two expressions. It was not until 1950, however, that the Bureau introduced its “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list, which Crime Records made available to newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Other law enforcement agencies claimed that many of the fugitives were listed only when their arrest was imminent, to boost the Bureau’s success rate.

  †Sergeant Zarkovich, it was later revealed, was also one of Mrs. Sage’s regular customers.

  *The agents themselves were well aware who had shot Dillinger. While attending firearms school, SA Tom McDade heard the details of the Biograph shooting from both Clarence Hurt and Charles Winstead. Melvin Purvis never fired his gun, nor did he ever claim he had.

  *According to McDade, that agent was Sam McKee, who told McDade the story while the two were on stakeout one night.

  *Melvin Purvis was not the only one to feel Hoover’s wrath as a result of the Dillinger case. Captain Matt Leach, head of the Indiana State Police, had directed the chase up until the time the Bureau had come in and commandeered the investigation. Following Dillinger’s death, Leach criticized Hoover’s “foolhardy methods.” Hoover, who had refused to cooperate with the Indiana State Police, later succeeded in getting Leach fired, after citing thirteen instances in which he had refused to cooperate with the FBI.

  †In reviewing Persons in Hiding, the New York Times remarked, “It is time that Mr. Hoover gave his ghost some fresh material. This book is washed over and dimmed by banalities. Those who take it up after reading Courtney Ryley Cooper’s earlier books will hardly escape the conviction that they have read it before.”21

  14

  A Problem of Identity

  Shortly after Dillinger’s death, Attorney General Cummings invited the columnists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen to his home for dinner. He needed advice.

  In the eyes of the public, the gangsters had become Robin Hood figures. The department was even under fire for killing, rather than capturing, Dillinger. It was Cummings’s belief—emphatically shared by Hoover—that if his “war on crime” was to be successful, public opinion had to be on the side of law enforcement. Regarding the conversation, Pearson recollected, “If the underworld came to believe the FBI was invincible, Cummings argued, there would be less kidnapping. To that end, he asked our advice about the appointment of a top-notch public relations man.” Both Pearson and Allen agreed on the choice of Henry Suydam, Washington correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle.

  Suydam’s appointment as a “special assistant” to Cummings was announced on August 29, 1934, and, according to Pearson, he “did a terrific job. He really went to town with Hollywood, the radio industry and everyone else to make the FBI invincible.”1 Suydam was greatly aided by two interrelated events.

  When special agents of the Bureau captured George “Machine Gun” Kelly in September 1933, Kelly had begged, “Don’t shoot, G-men; don’t shoot!” It was the first time the SAs had heard the term, which Kelly explained was underworld slang for “government-men.”2 Various newspaper columnists and radio commentators—including the dean of both, Walter Winchell—soon picked up and popularized the expression.

  A year later, in late 1934, Hollywood adopted a self-imposed movie-censorship code, which banned the immensely popular gangster films. By making the G-man their hero, however, producers were able to circumvent the ban. In 1935 alone, there were sixty-five such movies, the most memorable being G-Man, starring James Cagney, who, just four years earlier, had attained stardom with his portrayal of the gangster Tommy Powers in the film Public Enemy.

  There were also G-man radio programs, pulp magazines, comic strips, toys, even bubble gum cards. And the number of magazine and newspaper features extolling the Bureau increased tenfold.

  Sympathetic reporters, such as Rex Collier of the Washington Star and Courtney Ryley Cooper of American Magazine, were given personal access to Hoover, as well as to his Interesting Case Memoranda (or IC Memos), which provided inside information on the Bureau’s most famous cases, as told from the approved Bureau point of view. These invariably spotlighted the director. According to Jack Alexander, “Someone had to be the symbol of the crusade, and the director decided that because of his position it was plainly up to him.” He had been “reluctant to accept the role,” Hoover told Alexander, “because it meant sacrificing the personal privacy he had enjoyed before all the G-man excitement began, but he felt he was not justified in refusing it simply because it was distasteful.”3

  In print, J. Edgar Hoover became the symbol of the whole Bureau, and its lone spokesman. In charge of each and every case, he issued all the orders and made all the critical decisions, while the SAs were relegated to faceless anonymity. As far as the director was concerned, there would be no more Melvin Purvises.

  He was, with Suydam’s help, a colorful spokesman. Speaking before the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1935, in what the New York Times described as “probably the bluntest talk on crime ever uttered by a public official,” Hoover assailed the parole system, with its “sob-sister judges,” “criminal coddlers,” “shyster lawyers and other legal vermin.” It was due to them, he said, that “human rats” like John Dillinger flourished.4

  When a Justice Department official criticized his outspokenness, Hoover told him, “I’m going to tell the truth about these rats. I’m going to tell the truth about their dirty, filthy, diseased women. I’m going to tell the truth about the miserable politicians who protect them and the slimy, silly or sob-sister convict lovers who let them out on sentimental or illy-advised paroles. If the people don’t like it, they can get me fired. But I’m going to say it.”*5

  Hoover wasn’t fired. The Justice Department official, however, later resigned.

  There were those who suspected that Hoover’s newly adopted “tough cop” image was, at least in part, an attempt to counteract the rumors of his homosexuality. The publicist Lou Nichols, who would soon replace Suydam and receive his baptism of fire orchestrating the press coverage of the Karpis case, implied as much when, many years later, he told the author, “That [the capture of Karpis] pretty much ended the ‘queer’ talk.”6 It didn’t however.

  Hoover wasn’t the only one with an image problem. The Bureau itself had been plagued with a similar problem since its founding.

  Over the years it had been called the Bureau of Investigation, the Division of Investigation, even, briefly, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, while its agents had been known as operatives, investigators, special agents, and G-men (a label which could apply to personnel assigned to any agency of the government).

  Hoover had been mulling over the problem since he was first named director. Just as he had changed his own name from John Edgar Hoover to J. Edgar Hoover in order that he wouldn’t be mistaken for a deadbeat, so did the organization he headed need a name that would distinguish it from the BI of Flynn, Burns, and Gaston Means.

  According to Ed Tamm, the decision finally to do something about it came about because of a radio program. For several years the American Tobacco Company had, with the Bureau’s approval, sponsored a radio program on the adventures of a special agent code named K-5. In 1934, however, the Hearst papers introduced a comic strip, which didn’t have Bureau approval, entitled “Special Agent X-9.”*

  Such incidents were bound to r
ecur, the director said, so long as the Bureau lacked a distinctive, easily recognizable name. Ordering his top aides to submit their choices, he specified that preferably the name should be one with catchy initials; the Criminal Investigation Division of Scotland Yard, for example, was popularly known as the CID.

  It was Tamm who, “with all due modesty,” came up with the name by which the organization would become world famous: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover wasn’t persuaded until Tamm explained that its initials, FBI, also stood for the three principles which best exemplified the character of the special agent: Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.†

  The change was not problem free. Once the decision was made, Hoover ordered new stationery printed. When he saw it, Attorney General Cummings “exploded,” according to Tamm. The words “FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION” were in larger type than “THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE.”8

  Among those who most loudly protested the name change was Elmer Irey, the Treasury Department’s chief law enforcement officer. The new name implied that Hoover’s was the only federal bureau of investigation, Irey complained, whereas there were at least a dozen others, including Treasury’s own Secret Service.

  Hoover adroitly deflected the criticism, by passing it on to his superior. Appearing before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations on December 18, 1934, Hoover gave full credit for the name change to Attorney General Cummings. It was his idea, Hoover said, adding, “I heartily concur.”9

  Elmer Irey was not Hoover’s only enemy. The ever-growing list included some of the most powerful people in Washington. However, as counterbalance, Hoover had cultivated and made friends with a number of people in Roosevelt’s inner circle, including Assistant Secretaries of State Raymond Moley and Adolf Berle (whose former commanding officer was General Van Deman); Presidential Secretary Major General Edwin M. “Pa” Watson; Presidential Press Secretary Stephen Early; and, in time, the president himself.

  Among his enemies, in addition to Louis Howe, whom he never really trusted, were James Farley, Roosevelt’s postmaster general and unofficial chief of patronage, who wanted his own man to head the Bureau; the president’s close friend and chief aide Harry Hopkins; Felix Frankfurter, an old enemy, who had recently been elevated to the Supreme Court; the president’s wife, Eleanor; and, perhaps most important, Irey’s boss, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.

  In the spring of 1935, Congress, over administrative protests, passed a bill authorizing early payment of the World War I bonus. After deciding to veto the measure, President Roosevelt scheduled an address before a joint session of Congress to explain his action.

  Fearing possible demonstrations—General Douglas MacArthur’s 1932 rout of the bonus marchers was still much in mind—early on the morning of the speech the U.S. Capitol Police called Hoover and asked if he would assign a detail of special agents to the galleries of the House of Representatives. Although the protection of the president was the function of the U.S. Secret Service, an arm of the Treasury Department, Hoover, on his own authority, sent a detail of about thirty men, headed by SA Lou Nichols, to the Capitol.

  Apparently the SAs were not inconspicuous. The news that Hoover’s men were protecting the president was on the wire services even before Roosevelt had finished speaking. Irate, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau called and angrily berated the FBI director. Hastily covering himself, Hoover immediately wrote a memorandum to Cummings, shifting all blame to the U.S. Capitol Police. “I am making this report to you in some detail,” the FBI director wrote the attorney general, “because I thought Mr. Morgenthau might speak to you about it, in view of the fact he seemed somewhat annoyed and irritated.”10

  Morgenthau was more than annoyed and irritated. He suspected, and quite rightly, that Hoover wanted to take over protection of the chief executive. The Secret Service men had close, direct, daily contact with the president; they also, simply by their presence, became privy to many of the secrets of the White House.

  Hoover not only desired such access but lusted after and schemed to get it through the administrations of four presidents, finally abandoning the idea only with the assassination, while under Secret Service protection, of President John F. Kennedy.

  Nor was this Hoover’s only conflict with Morgenthau. Following the slaying of Dillinger, two Secret Service agents had conducted a secret investigation of the Bureau, seeking to prove that Hoover’s men had used unnecessary and excessive force in this and other cases. Alerted to the probe, Hoover strongly protested to Cummings, who in turn went directly to the president. Although Morgenthau demoted the two men and wrote a letter of apology to Cummings—in which he stated, “The irresponsible action taken by these men is one which I heartily disapprove and will not permit”—Hoover remained convinced that Morgenthau himself had instigated the inquiry, as part of a grand plan to discredit the Bureau while consolidating all the Treasury’s investigative agencies “into a single agency which would overshadow the FBI.”11

  In Morgenthau, Hoover had made an enemy of a man who had the ability to influence history’s verdict on the FBI director. While serving through all four of Roosevelt’s administrations, the treasury secretary kept a unique “diary.” An assistant copied down verbatim all of those conversations Morgenthau deemed important, including the secretary’s telephone calls. And many were with, or concerned, J. Edgar Hoover.

  One of Hoover’s most powerful enemies was neither in the White House nor in the Cabinet. He was on Capitol Hill, in a position where he could do the director and the FBI the greatest possible harm.

  As a later attorney general, Francis Biddle, recalled, “Senator [Kenneth Douglas] McKellar had been in the Senate since 1926, and was chairman of the subcommittee that had charge of the appropriation of the Department of Justice. He was not therefore a man lightly to offend.”12

  Offend him Hoover did, as early as 1933, by refusing to appoint a number of McKellar’s constituents special agents. When the Tennessee Democrat complained to Attorney General Cummings, Hoover went even further: the following week he fired three special agents from Tennessee.

  McKellar was, Biddle noted, one of the most powerful men in the Senate; he was also “obstinate, vindictive, shrewd—and he never forgot.”13

  Although Congress had passed the package of crime bills, insufficient money had been appropriated for their implementation. In the spring of 1936, Hoover personally appeared before both the House and the Senate subcommittees to ask for an appropriation of $5 million—nearly twice his previous budget estimate.

  McKellar was waiting for him. Accompanied by Assistant Director Clyde Tolson—and as always superbly prepared, with statistics, charts, and graphs close at hand—Hoover told the senators that because of the work of his special agents the crime of kidnapping had almost been eliminated in the United States. Since the kidnapping statute had been enacted in 1932, the Bureau had performed investigations in sixty-two cases. “Every one of these cases has been solved.”14 Federal bank robbery, once among the most popular of crimes, had been reduced dramatically. The midwestern crime wave was over. Dillinger was dead, as was Lester Gillis, a.k.a. Baby Face Nelson. George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his wife, Kathryn, had been captured and convicted. Both Ma Barker and her son Fred had been killed in a shootout at Lake Weir, in Florida, and Arthur “Dock” Barker and other members of the infamous gang had been apprehended.

  There was one notable exception, whom the director did not see fit to mention. Although Alvin “Creepy” Karpis (who later bragged, “My profession was robbing banks, knocking off payrolls, and kidnapping rich men”)15 had been elevated to Public Enemy Number One and a $5,000 reward placed on his head, he had successfully evaded FBI traps in New Jersey, Ohio, and Arkansas. In Arkansas, agents had lobbed flares into an empty building, burning it to the ground. Unfortunately for Hoover, its irate owner happened to be a close friend of Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, and the FBI’s latest failure to get Karpis received wide coverage in the press.


  McKellar waited until after Hoover had finished explaining why the Bureau needed additional funds before he sprung his trap.

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “Is any money directly or indirectly spent for advertising?”

  MR. HOOVER: “There is not. We are not permitted in any way to engage in advertising.”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “Do you take part, for instance, in the making of any moving pictures?”

  MR. HOOVER: “That is one thing that the Bureau has very strongly objected to. You have seen several of the G-men pictures, I believe.”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “I have…They virtually advertised the Bureau, because your picture was shown in conjunction with them frequently.”

  Hoover had to admit that this was correct, but he claimed it wasn’t his doing. “We declined emphatically to lend any form of endorsement and had nothing to do with their production; furnished no advice, technical advice, or other advice as to the production of those pictures.”

  Hoover had objected to these pictures, to his closest aides. Why should Hollywood make all the profits? Also, if the Bureau produced its own motion pictures, it would have complete control over their content, he argued.

  Assistant Director Harold “Pop” Nathan, who was still acting as a counterbalance to Hoover’s wilder enthusiasms, had persuaded him to drop the idea, saying it would leave the Bureau open to far greater criticism than McKellar’s.

  McKellar pressed on: “I think they have hurt the Department very much, by advertising your methods.”

  Hoover claimed that the Bureau had, “in every instance,” registered its official disapproval.16