J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Fortunately for Hoover, McKellar did not ask about radio programs. Shortly before his appearance before the committee, Hoover had given Phillip H. Lord permission to broadcast a series of FBI adventures under the title “G-men.” The first episode, which aired three months later and which was entitled “The Life and Death of John Dillinger,” was prefaced by the following remarks by Lord:

  “This series of ‘G-men’ is presented with the consent of the Attorney General of the United States and with the cooperation of J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Every fact in tonight’s program is taken directly from the files of the Bureau.

  “I went to Washington and was graciously received by Mr. Hoover and all of these scripts were written in the department building. Tonight’s program was submitted to Mr. Hoover who personally reviewed the script and made some very valuable suggestions.”

  Nor did the senator ask about comic strips, such as “War on Crime,” whose continuity was written by Hoover’s friend and longtime Bureau publicist, the newspaperman Rex Collier. The first episode, which appeared the month after Hoover testified, also claimed to be “based on the official files” and produced “with the consent and cooperation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”17

  McKellar did ask, however, whether Hoover’s disapproval applied to magazine articles and stories.

  Hoover admitted that “upon a few occasions, a very few,” the attorney general had permitted writers to come in and write stories.

  Hoover did not define “very few.” In just the past year, more than fifty feature-length articles on the FBI had appeared, many evidencing Bureau cooperation.

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “Was anything appropriated to pay these writers?”

  MR. HOOVER: “No, sir; not a cent.”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “Have you any writers in your Department, or do you employ any writers?”

  MR. HOOVER: “Not in the Bureau of Investigation.”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “No writers are employed?”

  MR. HOOVER: “Not in the Bureau of Investigation.”

  Hoover’s answer was carefully qualified. Henry Suydam was on salary to the Department of Justice.*

  McKellar moved on, criticizing the Bureau for claiming successes when the real credit was due to other law enforcement agencies or the tips of publicspirited citizens.

  Senator Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming wondered if there was any truth in the stories that the Bureau didn’t cooperate with local police. Hoover responded that they did cooperate, “whenever we find that the local police are honest and will cooperate and will not give information to the press.”

  A month earlier Alvin Karpis had evaded an FBI trap in Hot Springs, Arkansas, after being tipped off by a contact on the local police.

  Disputing Hoover’s need for additional funds, McKellar concluded, “It seems to me that your Department is just running wild, Mr. Hoover…I just think that, Mr. Hoover, with all the money in your hands you are just extravagant.”

  MR. HOOVER: “Will you let me make a statement?”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “I think that is the statement.”

  Not all the committee members were antagonistic. The senator from Missouri was clearly on the FBI director’s side. Ironically, in years to come, they became bitter enemies.

  SENATOR TRUMAN: “How many unassigned cases have you pending?”

  MR. HOOVER: “We have pending 6,790 unassigned cases because of inadequate manpower to assign them.”

  SENATOR TRUMAN: “How much money did you turn in, in fines?”

  A master of statistics, Hoover was once again on safe ground. “We turned in, in fines, recoveries, and savings, $38 million last year as against a four-and-a-half million dollar appropriation.”

  Although McKellar tried to dispute these figures, he was obviously ill prepared and clearly came off second best. He then delivered a very low blow: he implied that Hoover was at least in part responsible for the deaths of four of his own men.

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “How many people have been killed by your Department since you have been allowed to use guns?”

  MR. HOOVER: “I think there have been eight desperadoes killed by our agents and we have had four agents in our service killed by them.”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “In other words the net effect of turning guns over to your department has been the killing of eight desperadoes and four G-men.”

  Suppressing his rage, Hoover explained that his agents were under strict orders to apprehend a man alive, if at all possible, and that only if a suspect pulled a gun, or was in the act of firing it, were the agents permitted to use their own weapons.

  McKellar ignored him: “I doubt very much whether you ought to have a law that permits you to go around the country armed as an army would, and shoot down all the people that you suspect of being criminals, or such that you suspect of having guns, and having your own men shot down.”

  Persisting over Hoover’s objection, McKellar added, “I am not blaming you for the enactment of those statutes, Mr. Hoover, because that is Congress’ fault. If we turned guns over to you and told you to kill the people that you suspect of crime, why, that is our fault.” Even if a law enforcement officer knew a man was a murderer, he shouldn’t have authority to kill him, McKellar asserted. “We have courts to take care of that situation.”

  MR. HOOVER: “Even if he pulls a gun on you?”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “We have established courts to look after those matters, and we ought to look after them in that way.”

  This was more than Harry S Truman could stand. “How would you catch them, Senator, if they commenced shooting at you?”

  McKellar was forced to admit that there “might” be cases where “it may be necessary.”

  Angered as Hoover was by McKellar’s charges, one exchange infuriated him more than any other and still rankled years later whenever he recounted the story.

  Senator McKellar asked Hoover what his qualifications were for his job. Hoover snapped off his answer: nineteen years with the Department of Justice, twelve of them as director of the Bureau of Investigation.

  “I mean crime school,” McKellar interrupted.

  He had set up a training school in the Bureau, Hoover explained.

  But this wasn’t good enough for McKellar: “So that whatever you know about it you learned there in the Department?”

  MR. HOOVER: “I learned first-hand; yes, sir.”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “Did you ever make an arrest?”

  MR. HOOVER: “No sir; I have made investigations.”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “How many arrests have you made, and who were they?”

  MR. HOOVER: “I handled the investigation of Emma Goldman and I prosecuted that case before the immigration authorities up to the Secretary of Labor. I also handled the Alexander Berkman case, and the case of Ludwig Martens, the former Bolshevik Ambassador to the United States.”

  McKellar drove his point home: “Did you make the arrests?”

  MR. HOOVER: “The arrests were made by the immigration officers under my supervision.”

  SENATOR MCKELLAR: “I am talking about the actual arrests…You never arrested them, actually?”19

  It did no good for Hoover to explain that the Bureau didn’t even have the power of arrest until 1934. McKellar had made his point. America’s top cop had never arrested anyone.

  That it was a ridiculous charge—one which not only ignored Hoover’s tremendous talents for organization and leadership but somehow found his courage deficient because he, the commanding general, had never personally led his troops into battle—mattered not at all. McKellar’s accusations stung.

  Hoover felt, according to one biographer, “that his manhood had been impugned.”20

  As his testimony before the Senate subcommittee indicated, Hoover still considered the deportation of Emma Goldman one of his greatest achievements. Although this had occurred seventeen years earlier, to Hoover it was in no way ancient history: as far as he was concerne
d, it was still an open case.

  Following their 1919 deportation aboard the “Soviet Ark,” Goldman and Berkman had hoped to find sanctuary in Russia. They had soon become disillusioned with the Communist government, however, and had set out on a long pilgrimage across Europe, in search of a country willing to grant them residence. It appeared, for a time, that they would be allowed to remain in France. But in 1931 they were told that their request had been denied, “to please the U.S.”

  It did not occur to them that one man might be responsible. After being asked to leave France, Berkman wrote Roger Baldwin and other friends, “It is hardly probable that any American busybody or some individual Secret Service man (as suggested by Roger) would have so much influence with the French government.”

  However, as one of Goldman’s biographers, Richard Drinnon, notes, “Even if Emma and Berkman had pretty well forgotten the colorless functionary who had helped hustle them out of the country, Hoover had by no means forgotten them and his first and most important ‘cases.’ And a concerned word from him to his French counterparts, by way of commendable follow-up, was quite sufficient to thicken their plot.”21

  In early 1934 Emma Goldman requested permission to return to the United States for a lecture tour. Despite J. Edgar Hoover’s strong objections, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, reacted favorably to Goldman’s request—which was supported by such eminent figures as John Dewey, Roger Baldwin, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser—and granted her permission to return for ninety days. Hoover won a compromise, however. Emma wanted to arouse world opinion against Hitler and fascism. Instead she was allowed to lecture on only two subjects: literature and drama.

  Hoover kept her under surveillance almost every day she was in the country. When, in a Philadelphia speech, she departed from the permitted topics to state that the people of the United States were lucky to have freedom of speech and that Americans should never give up this freedom, one of his agents reported her remarks to Hoover, who in turn suggested to his Justice Department superiors that possibly “her activities in this country at the present time are in violation of the agreement upon which she was permitted to enter.”22

  “But the wheels of justice had slipped,” according to Drinnon, “as Mr. Hoover might have discovered had he turned from his confidential reports to his calendar or even to his daily newspaper.”23 Hoover’s memorandum was dated May 4, 1934. By this time Emma had finished her tour and had been in Canada for several days.

  Returning to headquarters following his appearance before McKellar’s subcommittee, Hoover instructed Tamm that when Alvin Karpis was located he was to be notified immediately, so that he could participate in the arrest.

  Three weeks later Karpis and another fugitive, Fred Hunter, were traced to an apartment on Canal Street in New Orleans and placed under surveillance.* Hoover was in New York with Assistant Director Clyde Tolson when he received the news. Although the pair had partied late the night before, guests at the Stork Club table of the columnist Walter Winchell, they chartered a flight to New Orleans the same day.

  * * *

  *In attacking the parole system, Hoover was also indirectly criticizing another Justice Department agency, the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Among those who took issue with Hoover’s remarks was Lewis E. Lawes, the warden of Sing Sing prison. Thereafter, whenever a Sing Sing parolee committed a major crime, Hoover went out of his way to publicize that fact.

  *Hoover ordered an investigation of the comic strip. No derogatory information was found on either the cartoonist, Alex Raymond, or the writer and ex-Pinkerton operative, Dashiell Hammett. However, the report on the latter was the first entry in what over the next several decades grew into a 278-page file. The investigative agent reported back to Hoover that in his opinion the comic strip was “not subversive.”7

  †The three terms also appear frequently in Masonic rituals, while Fidelity was the name of the Bureau’s own Masonic chapter.

  *Some months later Hoover forced Suydam’s resignation. While it is possible he did this to deflect criticism such as McKellar’s, there was another, and probably more influential, reason. Assuming that since he’d been hired by the attorney general, and it was his “war on crime,” Suydam had made the mistake of trying to publicize Cummings and the entire Department of Justice, not just Hoover and his lone bureau. In early 1937 Hoover secretly persuaded congressional friends to tack a rider onto the Justice Department appropriations bill specifying that no money could be expended for the salary of an assistant to the attorney general who did not have a law degree. It affected only one man, Henry Suydam, who resigned shortly afterward.

  By this time the FBI director’s own publicity empire was well established. As Drew Pearson put it, “After the head start Henry gave Hoover, he had no trouble with his public relations.”18

  *According to the scuttlebutt of former agents, the tip regarding Karpis’s whereabouts came from Grace Goldstein, a Hot Springs madam and occasional paramour of the fugitive, with whom one of the SAs had developed an especially close relationship while investigating white-slave cases.

  15

  The Man Who Came to Dinner

  There is some mystery as to when Hoover and Tolson first met.

  Born on a farm near Laredo, Missouri, on May 22, 1900, Clyde Anderson Tolson had moved to Iowa while still a youth; attended business college in Cedar Rapids for one year; then, in 1917, with the advent of the war, moved to Washington to accept a job as a clerk in the War Department. Energetic, hardworking, and exceptionally bright, he was within a year confidential secretary to the secretary of war, then Newton D. Baker, a post he held for the next eight years, through the terms of Baker and two of his successors, John Weeks and Dwight Davis. At the same time he also attended night school at Hoover’s alma mater, George Washington University, obtaining his B.A. degree in 1925 and his B.L. in 1927. In April 1928 he applied for, and immediately got, a position as a special agent of the Bureau of Investigation.

  According to Don Whitehead’s officially authorized account, Clyde Tolson was “the man who came to dinner.” On his application, Tolson supposedly stated that he intended to stay in the Bureau just long enough to get a little experience and enough money to start his own law practice in Cedar Rapids. This unusually frank admission was so novel that Hoover ordered, “Hire him, if he measures up after the examination and investigation. He will make us a good man.”1

  However, according to George Allen, who knew both men well, Hoover and Tolson had met long before this. It was Allen’s impression, from conversations with the pair, that the director had first encountered Tolson while the latter was still working for Baker and, having been impressed with his abilities, had later persuaded him to join the Bureau.

  It is also possible, as others have suggested, that Tolson was recommended to Hoover by one of his former law professors or by their mutual acquaintance General Ralph H. Van Deman.

  What followed was no mystery. Clyde Tolson’s rapid rise would go unmatched in the entire history of the Bureau. Named a special agent in April 1928, he was sent to Boston for his first (and only) field assignment; returned to Washington to become chief clerk of the Bureau that September; was promoted to inspector in 1930; was made assistant director in 1931; and, stuck with no place higher to go until Harold “Pop” Nathan retired, was finally rewarded for his patience with a position specially created for him, that of associate director, in 1947.

  From the start, they were nearly inseparable. Both confirmed bachelors (though Tolson often hinted at a romance with a chorus girl during his early years in the capital), they worked together, had most of their meals together, even spent their weekends together, often in New York, where the Bureau’s largest field office was located, occupying a complimentary suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Although the FBI maintained that the director never took a vacation, the pair also spent the Christmas season in Florida and the start of the Del Mar racing season in California.
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  For both Frank Baughman and Charles Appel, the arrival of Clyde Tolson came as something of a relief. It meant they could spend at least some of their evenings, and even an occasional weekend, with their families.

  More than bachelorhood drew Hoover and Tolson together. Both were former clerks, accustomed to Washington’s bureaucracy and its Byzantine byways. Each was a quick study. From years in government service, both had learned to “devour” memos, noting their key points, spotting discrepancies, and, often, catching their hidden meanings—the real reasons the memos had been written in the first place. Also forming a very special bond between them were the many secrets they shared. Having worked as confidential secretary to three secretaries of war, Tolson knew many of the top secrets of military intelligence. There is little doubt he shared this information with Hoover. For his part, Tolson was the only person, besides Helen Gandy, to whom Hoover granted access to all his files.

  In some ways they were much alike. Despite his public persona, “Hoover was a little retiring and bashful,” Charles Appel remembered, “and Tolson was too. That was one reason they hung together: they were kind of loners.”2

  Outside of the Bureau, neither had many interests. Hoover’s were two in number: going to horse races and collecting antiques. Although Tolson shared the director’s fondness for the ponies—most Saturdays they could be found at a nearby track—he was also interested in all kinds of sports, and especially baseball and tennis, while his one solitary passion seemed to be inventing things. He obtained patents—with the help of the FBI Laboratory—on several devices, including a replaceable bottle cap and a mechanism for raising and lowering windows automatically.